Among all the joy I was itching to leave, and as soon as I felt I could do so without turning up too early and worrying Kenneth, I pushed my way through the crowd and down a street leading in the direction of the Thames. The road turned out to hold a picture house that, like all the cinemas that day, was showing Lorelei’s crowning glory, Victory 1945. It was one of a triple bill with Charlie Chaplin’s old anti-capitalist satire Modern Times and the new one he had produced since moving back to the Republic from Hollywood, The Old Soldier, in which a thinly disguised Churchill rants all day at his peaceful and bemused neighbours and ends up shovelling himself into a hole that he can’t get out of.

There was something queer about the street, though. It was filled not with the normal mix of damp people and dirty vehicles, but with a hundred former army motorbikes, all painted black. Their riders sported old-fashioned clothes and greased-up hair: Teddy Boys, many with girls perched behind them on the machines. They swarmed like bees around the entrance to the cinema and there was a constant buzz of engines as more arrived or departed.

I should have expected to see Lorelei’s image that day, of course, but still it was a shock suddenly to come across it on the film’s poster outside the cinema. I had seen it in her house after her death but out in public like this it seemed almost to bring her back to life.

I hadn’t watched the film since meeting Nick, because seeing her light up the screen would only have made me more envious of all that she had, and left me wondering again what Nick could possibly see in me. But, as I stared at the poster, her character rousing her resistance cell to rise up against the Nazis, something fell into place like a tumbler in a lock. Tibbot had said there would be a key to decipher the book code. Well, there it was, I was sure, right in front of me. Lorelei’s face was whispering it: whispering the name of the film. Victory 1945. Victory Nineteen Forty-Five.

‘I think you’re lost,’ a voice close to me said. It was an oily-haired boy, little older than the ones I had tried, with mixed success, to interest in Romeo and Juliet. ‘This is our street. Not yours.’

‘Not now,’ I said. I couldn’t tear my eyes from Lorelei’s.

He seemed taken aback. ‘Yes, now.’

‘Come on, Alfie,’ called one of the girls. ‘Just tell her to piss off.’

I looked at her. ‘I used to teach little girls like you,’ I said. ‘I used to rap them across the knuckles with a ruler.’