Broken Homes

Sidorovna grinned and suddenly looked eighteen and fresh off the wheat fields. ‘I’ve never met anyone that fast with that much control before. No wonder the fascists put a price on his head.’
    It’s important when interviewing a suspect to stay focused on what’s broadly relevant to the investigation, but even so it took a great deal of self-control not to ask about that. I suspected that should we manage to bang her up in Holloway prison, Lieutenant Tamonina was going to have Professor Postmartin as a frequent visitor.
    Who would no doubt also ask for more detail about her training, her wartime operations and her capture near Brynsk in January 1943.
    ‘I didn’t tell them who I was,’ she said. ‘The fascists had orders to shoot us on sight, so I pretended to be a medic.’ Even then she barely survived the initial abuse at the hands of her captors – we didn’t ask for details and she didn’t volunteer any. She didn’t dare use magic to escape because by that point in the war the Germans had started to deploy their own practitioners to counter the Night Witches.
    ‘They had these men they called werewolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Who were said to be able to sniff out anyone using the craft.’
    ‘Were they really werewolves,’ I asked. ‘Shape-shifters?’
    ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We had intelligence reports that their capabilities were real. But I never encountered one, so I don’t know if they were truly men who became wolves or not.’
    She was drafted as slave labour as part of Organisation Todt and found herself, much to her own surprise, in the Channel Islands. ‘They said we were on British soil,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘For the first few days I thought Britain had been invaded, but one of the other prisoners explained that these were British islands that were closer to France than England.’ There were a couple of werewolves on the Island of Alderney, where the concentration camps were, but there were none on Guernsey where she was transferred in order to be worked to death building gun emplacements. But as soon as they were clear of the harbour, she knocked down one of the guards at the end of the marching column and escaped in the confusion.
    ‘It’s not like the Great Escape or Colditz,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t hang around setting up escape committees or any of that nonsense. Any moment of the day some pig-faced guard might just shoot you in the head for the joy of it – you took your opportunities as soon as you could.’
    Varvara Sidorovna cheerfully admitted that she’d been totally prepared to off some locals to make good her escape, but fortunately for everyone concerned, except the Germans, she was spotted by an old lady and guided into the arms of the resistance.
    ‘They called me Vivien,’ she said, after the actress, and provided her with false papers. ‘And taught me to speak English with my beautiful proper English accent.’
    After Liberation in 1945 she made her way to London with her new English name and identity and parlayed that into an official identity in the general post-war confusion. She said she got married in 1952 but refused to give any details about her husband.
    ‘But in any case he died in 1963,’ she said.
    They lived in a semi off the High Street in Wimbledon. There were no children.
    ‘You’re very well preserved for a woman in her mid-nineties,’ said Lesley.
    ‘You noticed,’ said Varvara Sidorovna turning her head and striking a pose.
    ‘Do you know why?’ asked Lesley.
    Varvara Sidorovna leant forward. ‘I discovered the elixir of youth,’ she said. ‘In an Oxfam shop in Twickenham.’
    ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Help the Aged?’ I asked, about a millisecond before Lesley could – she booted me under the table in revenge.
    Varvara Sidorovna waited patiently for us to behave ourselves.
    ‘Was it something you did to yourself?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘God, no,’ she said. ‘One day I was getting older and the next day I wasn’t.’
    So Nightingale wasn’t the only one, I thought.
    ‘Can you remember roughly what year it happened?’ I asked.
    ‘August Bank Holiday 1966,’ she said.
    ‘That’s a very precise date,’ said Lesley.
    ‘I have a very clear memory of it happening,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. She’d still been living in the house in Wimbledon and she’d been hanging up washing in her back garden.
    ‘It was as if someone had opened a door into summer,’ she said. ‘I felt suddenly