‘He said there was splashing about, like a fight. That could have been her panicking to get out.’

Tibbot cleared his throat. ‘It’s possible.’ I could tell he wasn’t sold on the idea.

I came to the point. ‘Either way, we need to talk to him. Can you meet tomorrow afternoon?’

‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘Call me at the station in the morning. Eleven o’clock. Give your name as Mrs Stevens – I’ll leave a message for you if I’m out.’

‘Thank you.’

Back in the auditorium, Hazel looked at me curiously as I took my seat. The film had been resurrected after the power cut and Lorelei’s speech played again. Beautiful in the sunset, her face filled the screen. As you watched, you could see the whole future of our country reflected in her irises. They eventually faded to black.

When the film ended, the lights came up to reveal Hazel’s face awash with tears and her skin red. I hadn’t noticed in the dark, and kicked myself for not guessing that seeing her mother move and speak, then disappear, would sadden her so. Hazel had never had a chance to say goodbye, and this was the closest that she would ever get. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. An idiotic question, but one that we always ask at those moments, as if we don’t know the truth.

‘Mum was really beautiful, wasn’t she?’ she managed to get out, although her voice was strangled in her throat.

‘Yes. She was.’ And she was, really she was. Like a picture. But such beauty couldn’t go unpunished by the world. Like Cassandra, her gift was also her undoing.

Where had it taken her? When Nick and Lorelei had first watched this film, they couldn’t have known what the pictures would mean. They would mean Nick slowly watching the woman he had married slip away from him to become a part of the political world. And then the jealousy and pain as he learned of her affair with John Cairncross – an affair ended by a public trial and a confession of counter-revolution that would also cast Lorelei out of the spotlight. And the final image would be her lying under ripples of water.

35

Tibbot and I sat on a bench in Victoria Park as he threw bread to the birds on the pond. ‘Bloody ducks eat better than I do,’ he muttered.

‘Better than most people. Well, this side of the Wall.’

‘They had better be careful or they might just end up as a Sunday roast.’

‘Is that your plan?’ I said.

‘Not this week. I don’t have the mushroom sauce to do them justice.’ He stopped and nodded towards the path.