That afternoon, I passed Leicester Square’s bronze statue of Kim Philby. His figure, poring over the lists of suspected Fascist sympathizers that he had personally handed to Beria, was dull in the lacklustre morning light. The pub opposite was named the Archangel and, as I walked under its sign showing the battleship floating on a serene Thames, I noticed a tin hoarding nearby covered with posters. One was an old bill for Victory 1945, but it was only half the poster, ripped off in the middle. Although the head and shoulders of Lorelei’s on-screen boyfriend were still wrestling with a Gestapo officer, she was gone from it, no longer inciting a crowd to stand up to the Nazi occupiers. It seemed that when she had been dropped from the pages of the Morning Star four years ago, she had also been torn from the walls. Nick had once told me that the reason we had to hand in our newspapers at the end of the month was not only to reuse the paper; it was also to ensure that the only records of the past were in Somerset House. Can you rewrite history? Well, it seemed that we were trying.

Now I was in a district that I didn’t know well and didn’t want to. Shabby doorways were hung with strips of beads or gaped like broken mouths, and the tiles leading into them were broken and dirty. Some had small handwritten signs beside the doorbells. ‘Jenny’. ‘Roseanna’. I checked the street name against the address stamped on the slip of paper I was clutching and turned reluctantly down what looked like little more than a dead end. There I saw the shop. Citylight Prints was a dingy place in a dingy little street. The glass of the windows was covered with brown paper so that you couldn’t see in, which didn’t bode well, and the flaking shop sign had once been blue but now had hardly any colour at all.

‘You all right, love?’

I turned to see a striking-looking woman with strawberry-blonde hair twisted up in the French style, standing in a shop doorway on the other side of the thin lane, tapping ash from a cigarette in a long holder, the sort they used before the War. ‘You going in there?’

‘I think so.’

She took a drag. ‘You don’t look the type. You do know what it is?’ I gazed at the painted sign. ‘You don’t, do you?’

‘A printer’s?’

She hooted. ‘That’s what they call it. They do print stuff, there, love. Photos. Special type of photos.’ I could tell what she was getting at. But why would Lorelei want to get that strange negative developed there? ‘Sure you want to go in?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘If you say so.’ She pointed towards the shop with her cigarette. ‘But if he gives you any gyp, you come out to see me.’