‘What was she hiding?’ I made her look at me. ‘It’s important.’

She glanced nervously at the backs of the Spartacist couple as they disappeared into the smog. ‘I’m not sure. It was boxes, white boxes made out of card. This big.’ She held her palms about thirty centimetres apart.

Card boxes that size, well, that could be anything. ‘Do you know what was in them?’

‘I never looked. I thought Mum might catch me.’

‘I’ll get them,’ I said.

I had no idea if Lorelei’s house had been searched. If it had been, the police or the Secs might have found whatever it was she had been storing. They might have thought Nick was involved and that was why they had taken him. On the other hand, if the house hadn’t yet been searched, I felt that I had to get there before it was, or that evidence could be held against Nick and he might never be released. Perhaps if I hadn’t felt so guilty for suspecting him earlier, and desperately needed to make penance for it, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It just wasn’t the sort of reckless thing I would do.

‘Will you?’

I pulled together as much resolve as I could find in myself. ‘Yes.’

We talk of love as such a powerful driver of what we say and do, but sometimes guilt is just as strong.

It took me half an hour to walk back to Lorelei’s house over Blackfriars Bridge, past the bombed-out shops and even an old Victorian doss house where the destitute once slept in coffin-like boxes for a few pence per night.

I had lived through the hunger of the Depression and the sheer brutality of the War, and I would never shake those memories; yet from that massed rubble we would create something to be proud of. I was certain of that. Ending the slum poverty was the first step, and all those new tower blocks were proof of our intention. No, our new nation wasn’t spotless – people talked quietly of NatSec’s visits during the night; and it felt low after five hundred years of parliaments to have a government choose itself – but the free hospitals and schools we were promised had to count for something. Soon there would be no more private healthcare; it would all be provided by the state, with the same for everyone; and education for the sons of bricklayers would be as good as for the sons of dukes. Sometimes to get out of the wood you have to pass through the brambles. That’s what I told myself any time I began to doubt.