Recovering myself, I crawled to the hole and righted the lamp. Very carefully this time, I placed my face back to the breach. With the light I could see a bit more. There was a nest made from twigs and rubbish that sat on one of the floorboards, and beside it a pale and misshapen thing that I couldn’t quite make out. It was about the same size as the nest, but not twisted together by a bird. Something man-made. I reached through, took hold of it and brought it back into the room.

On the floor in front of me, crumpled and empty, was a cardboard box similar to the one I had found in Lorelei’s hiding place. It was a little larger but otherwise the same: divided into small compartments just like the ones that had held rifle rounds during my basic training. I unfolded it and shook it out. The compartments were empty – or so I thought, until I noticed, wedged in at the bottom of one, a circular piece of thin glass with jagged edges reaching upwards. It had clearly been broken off a larger item. Stuck to it was a tiny slip of paper with a single typed word, the letters stretching right to the rough edge. I held it in my fingertips and read it out loud to myself, rolling it on my tongue to try to make sense of it: ‘Jacob’.

For a minute I remained still, hearing nothing. And then, with a rush of blood through my mind, I understood what I had missed.

I grabbed the stack of intimate letters from Lorelei that Nick had kept in his desk drawer. There was something in one that I needed to read again. I hunted through the lines about parties and acerbic comments about social climbers and fusty old men; declarations of love and laughing rejections of Nick’s ‘slushy’ replies; and finally I found the letter in which she mentioned the American wartime colonel who had asked her about the Reds embedding themselves in British society. I pulled it out and scanned it. The name I was looking for was there in blue ink, as dark as when she had written it.

I looked hard at the box – I had seen others like it far more recently than during my Compulsory Basic. Maybe this letter could save Nick. If I were right, he was guilty of a crime, but it was nothing like what the Secs thought.

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