Half a Crown by Jo Walton

were communist saboteurs, so you can write them down that way when you send them off to the camps.”
    “Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, and left. He stood in the corridor for a moment waiting for his heart to stop racing, and only too glad to be out of the room. Normanby needed him, he thought. It was why he was alive, how he could get away with what he did get away with—Jack, the Inner Watch, all of it. He won what he could by being useful to Normanby. If it suited Normanby to torment him, it was a small price, really. He was sure Normanby knew how much he hated him, knew it and relished it. He shook his head and walked back to his car.

5
     
    “Farthing! Normanby!”
    I wasn’t down for long, a few moments only, but it felt like a century. I was terrified that I’d be trampled. I put one arm over my head and tried to struggle back to my feet. It was like those dreams of walking through treacle. The crowd pushed against me, and someone did tread on my leg. Then somebody helped me up, a complete stranger, a burly middle-aged man in a cloth cap. “Thank you!” I said, and heard myself saying it in my old voice, my Cockney voice.
    “You’re welcome, love. This is no place for a lass,” he said, and turned back to pummeling his neighbor.
    I took a step away from him and tried to run, realizing immediately that it was impossible because when I’d fallen, I’d lost a shoe. Absurdly, I thought of Sir Alan calling me Cinderella. The pressure of the crowd was holding me up, but if I tried to run I’d fall. The sensible thing would have been to take the other one off, but I didn’t want to bend down, either. Being under the level of the surface of the crowd had scared me too much to risk it again. I looked around for Sir Alan and Betsy but couldn’t see them anywhere. I did see the young guitar player, who was abruptly next to me as the crowd swayed. He gave me a lovely smile as he passed, singing out, “Power, power, British power!”
    Then I thought I was saved. On the edge of the crowd I could see a policeman—not a Watchman, but an ordinary London bobby. I staggered as best I could in his direction, ducking blows.
    He was the edge of a big police operation. There were police cars and big black vans. I was comforted by the sight of them. I thought they’d help me. It’s hard to believe I was that naïve. I’d known as a child not to trust the rozzers, even though my father was Scotland Yard, and as proud of it as a dog with two tails. In the last ten years I’d got used to seeing the police as a kind of servants.
    “Police!” someone more sensible shouted, and the crowd started to move away from them. It was hard for the crowd to go anywhere, because they were so tightly packed and because there was more crowd beyond, people who had been listening to the bands and the other speakers, who had also begun to fight now. The police were grabbing everyone they could, quite indiscriminately. I still thought they’d help me, right up to the point where they grabbed me and threw me into the Black Maria.
    I landed on my stomach with all the wind knocked out of me. By the time I struggled onto my knees, the van was almost full and had started to move. It was very dark, lit only by whatever light came in from streetlights through the cracks around the door. “What’s happening?” I asked. “Where are we going?”
    “Little trip to the cells,” someone said, a man with a Northern accent, perhaps the one who had helped me up before. “Don’t worry, they’ll check us over and let us go. Like old times, this is.”
    Someone put an arm around me, which I welcomed for the comfort until he started groping my breast, whereupon I poked him in the ribs, hard. This had always worked with men at parties and in Switzerland, and it worked now, though perhaps only because the van stopped abruptly at that point, knocking me off balance again and jerking my would-be assailant forwards.
    The van doors opened. Three policemen