The Moscow Sleepers

29

Florence Girling stood in the kitchen of the cottage she had shared with her mother for many years and, since her mother’s death, now lived in alone. For the third time, she was reading the letter that had come in the post earlier that morning. It had been lying on the mat inside the front door when she came downstairs, along with the usual assortment of fliers for cheap pizza in Southwold, double glazing, bargain spectacles and a plastic bag to fill with old clothes for a charity. She noticed the letter at once. It was marked SUFFOLK POLICE.

She found this rather alarming as she had never had any dealings with the police. When she opened it her alarm was joined by confusion.

Although thoroughly upright – there had never been the faintest whiff of scandal in her life, not to mention any trouble with the law – Miss Girling was not unflappable. And now she found herself in what her mother had always called an absolute tizz. Standing in the kitchen with the letter in her hand, she wished her mother were still alive: the elderly Mrs Girling had been a rock in times of crisis. What would she have done now, Miss Girling wondered plaintively, then instinctively switched on the kettle.

As she sipped a cup of tea, Florence felt reason return. First things first, she decided, and found her purse. There she was relieved to see her licence, which had sat in more or less the same position, untouched, unused, for over thirty years. She pulled it out, put on her glasses and peered closely at it, carefully reading the line of tiny letters and figures. Yes. It was the same as in the letter. How had it been found in Oswestry when it was here in her hand?

Florence had passed her driving test years before, in a fleeting show of independence from her mother, but had never owned a car. When she had discovered the cost of buying and running a vehicle, she had thought better of it, and in any case she didn’t need one. A bus took her each morning from the stop at the end of the road right to the top of the lane that led to Bartholomew Manor, and a bus brought her home each evening. There was a small general store and post office in the village which answered most of her needs. She wasn’t much of a traveller. Once a year she went to London to have lunch with an old friend from schooldays, and for this she splurged on a taxi to Darsham station where she caught the train to Liverpool Street. A car would be a nuisance rather than a help, and an expensive one at that.

As good sense overcame her initial fears, Miss Girling found herself increasingly puzzled. Someone, somehow, must have found out the details of her unused driving licence and had been driving around pretending to be her.

She had read about identity theft in the paper and had heard them talking about it on Radio 4 but she had no idea how it was done. She thought it had something to do with internet banking but she didn’t do that; she used the branch of Barclays in Southwold. In fact, she didn’t use the internet at all. She used the telephone if she wanted to get in touch with anyone. So how could someone have stolen her identity? A mistake must have been made by someone – perhaps because she hadn’t used her licence, they’d issued her number twice? It wouldn’t have surprised her in the least. It was bound to be due to computers in some way or another, even if it wasn’t the internet.

She held a profound mistrust of computers. She knew that people younger than her, which meant virtually everyone at Bartholomew Manor, would dismiss her views, call her a dinosaur and point to the benefits computers were bringing to mankind. Name one, Florence Girling thought sourly. There was nothing they could supply that she wasn’t happy to do without. For her, the benefits of technology had ended with the invention of the wireless and the telephone.

It was not a view she thought it wise to share at work. Not since everything had changed at Bartholomew Manor. Once she had left home each morning full of enthusiasm for the day ahead. She had spent twenty entirely enjoyable years in what had been the most traditional private secondary school in this part of the country, helping to educate what she was certain would be the cream of the young men and women of their generation.

But over the last few months her job at Bartholomew Manor had become a nightmare. Once she had taught Geography and helped with the administration. Now she didn’t teach at all; indeed, there weren’t any pupils left to teach. Local families had all taken their children away.

Her job now was a sort of dogsbody role, and consisted mainly of showing prospective parents around. She was ashamed of the dilapidated state of the main school. The classrooms needed a thorough overhaul – painting, new furniture and general updating. Even she could see that. The only area where money had been spent was on the technology suite the new owners were so proud of. She had so far managed to mask her alarm at the computer-focused curriculum the school now offered, and tried to show to the prospective parents a pride she didn’t feel in the gleaming equipment. Not that there were many of them and none of them seemed to want to send their children there. She didn’t blame them. As far as she could understand it, the school seemed now to be relying on an intake of new students shortly to come from abroad.

The new owners remained a mystery to her, but she was certain they were foreigners, though she couldn’t have said where they were from. The Head was a strange man, much given to philosophising, with his assistant, the oddly named Cicero, whom she found sinister and frightening. She felt increasingly out of place and she sensed that they were just waiting for an opportunity to get rid of her. But she had decided to hang on as long as she could, since she knew they would have to pay her something to leave and she was also due her pension. Although she somehow sensed that if they moved against her first, she might be left with nothing at all.