There was a telephone box in Southampton Row. She opened the door, waited while the stench of piss and cigarettes billowed out, took out the four pennies that she kept for emergency phone calls, and the number from Dee which she’d slipped into her wallet for safekeeping.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

London: September 1958

Of all the young women he could have met in Berlin, and London, for them to have been sisters beat all odds. Did Anatoly know they were sisters? If he did, that made it more urgent than ever. He couldn’t see now how he could win her trust. She’d rushed away so fast, he hadn’t time to think. He had lost her forever.

The cigarettes were on the floor. Not quite Judas money, but tainted nonetheless. One had snapped as she’d pulled it out of the packet and lay with its tobacco in flecks around it, golden pollen on his shabby brown linoleum. He scooped it up with his hand, threw it in the fireplace.

Was there a likeness between the two, something that had drawn him to both? They didn’t look like sisters – different builds, different complexions. Beyond that? He hadn’t had time to know Lieselotte but he’d thought of her as light-headed, a dreamer, a fantasist, perhaps. Betty was serious, committed, ambitious. He knew so little about her, too. Why hadn’t she told him who she was? Why hadn’t she said at the outset, I am German? But then, even now, so many years after the war, emotions ran high. People took a long time to forget, or to forgive. Krauts. Nazis. Hun. Bosche. If he had been in her place, he’d have probably kept quiet too so no one could point a finger, would have done his utmost to speak English without an accent. Not easy for a German to do that, though she’d been a child when she learned. That helped. Besides, who was open at the end of the war, or honest? Whose voices were muffled because there was no vocabulary for horror, whose muted out of guilt or self-protection? All of history was masked, a mass lying. Lying in wait. Hoist up the biggest guns in Nuremberg and let them swing for their sins, but leave the everyday man with no accounting.

He had nothing to report. Anatoly could whistle in the wind. But John’s job had got a whole lot harder.

The doorbell clanged, echoing through the hall and stairwell. Perhaps Betty had changed her mind, come back for more information. Bob usually got the outside door, but he must be out. The bell rang again. John went down the stairs, strode across the hall, pulled the lock.