The bald man spoke. ‘My name is Grest. I’m an officer of the National Security Police. Mrs Cawson, you’ll be free to go soon.’ I had never come face to face with a NatSec officer before. If I had started feeling less tense, less taut about where I was and what had happened, his presence reversed that.

‘I’ll go now,’ I said, feeling a seed of fear in my stomach.

‘No. Not yet, I’m afraid.’ His tone was smoother than the other officer’s, yet the message underneath it was far harsher and he made me nervous. I went for the door but he moved more quickly than I could and jammed his arm against it, stopping me in my tracks. There was something frighteningly mechanical and practised about the way he plucked me away and pushed me back into the centre of the room to sit on the bed. It made no sense because I had explained all I knew and I just wanted to leave with Nick.

‘Please let me go,’ I said.

‘Soon.’

I sank a little into the bed and stared around. Lorelei’s face gazed out from posters on every wall. The theatre bills were the more sedate, with just the name of the show, an inked image or two and the performance dates, but the garish film posters seemed crass, her presence in those films a mockery of a life that was now consigned to the past. The Whole Deal; A Month in the Country; Daisy Daisy; Victory 1945. Her image would still laugh and move and dance in them, but the human being was gone.

I stared blankly at Victory 1945. Lorelei’s finest hour. It was a film we had all seen many times, its poster dominated by the image of her character’s boyfriend wrestling a Gestapo officer to the ground. At the side she stood on a plinth, rousing the crowd to rise up against the Nazis and welcome our Red Army liberators arriving on the Archangel.

Below it, her cosmetics and hairbrush lay on the dresser still, objects as strangely lifeless now as her images on the posters. I touched the brush; it was made of fine bristles, with an ebony handle and silver detailing. A few of her hairs were entwined on it, long and shining. I put it to my own hair. Then in a moment I caught myself and dropped it, remembering where she was now.