Half a Crown by Jo Walton Page A

stood there, one with atorch and two with leashed dogs, big beautiful German shepherds with smooth well-cared-for fur.
    “You’re in Paddington Nick,” one of the policemen said. “Come out quietly one at a time and let’s have no trouble, or Betsy here will have to have a word with you.” His dog growled. How strange it was that she should be called Betsy. I wondered where my Betsy was, if she had got away or if she and Sir Alan were in another such police station. I hoped they had made it back to the car.
    I came out when the torch shone on me. I limped quietly into the station on my one shoe. When I stooped to try to take it off, the bobby hurried me on. The station seemed very bright inside. It smelled strongly of disinfectant. “Papers,” the man inside the door demanded.
    I took my card from my bag, very grateful that it had remained on my arm through all of that. He glanced at it, and then back at me, checking the photograph. He hesitated for a moment, looking back at the photograph, where my hair was neat, not draggled around my face, and I wore no makeup. My features must have reassured him, because he nodded. “Bag,” he said. I held out my bag, and he rummaged through it, pausing twice, at what I guessed were Betsy’s pearls and my purse. Nothing else seemed to disturb him. He stuck a numbered label on it, and another on my papers, and put them both on wire racks, with stacks of other cards and assorted possessions.
    “Stand up,” he said.
    I stood, and he patted me down in a bored and professional way, finding nothing.
    “Go through, you’ll be called when it’s time to be booked,” he said, clearly his routine speech.
    “Can I have my things back, please?” I asked, as politely as I could, and quite deliberately in my best Arlinghurst accent.
    “You’ll have them back when you’re released, miss,” he said. “Purse too. We don’t allow papers or money in the cells.”
    I went in. I’d surprised a “miss” out of him, but if my modulated voice wasn’t good for more than that, I could see that it would be better to use my childhood voice in the station, as I instinctively had with the crowd. I’d had more than enough of being picked on for my accent.
    I went through, as the policeman had indicated, into a room with three walls with benches along them, and bars separating it from a corridor. This room, I was relieved to see, contained women only—about a dozen of them. Most of them were respectably dressed, but one or two wore men’s raincoats over underclothes, the uniform of the London streetwalker. “Was you in the riot up Marble Arch?” one of these asked me.
    “Yes,” I said, back in the voice of my childhood. It was strange how unnatural it seemed to use it deliberately. “I got separated from my boyfriend and dragged off by the rozzers. I hadn’t done nothing, they can’t book me, can they?”
    “Don’t worry,” said a middle-aged woman in a headscarf and a wool coat. “They always used to do this when there was fighting, in the old days, when the communists would come out and provoke us. They scoop everyone up, then they sort through and let the Ironsides go. They didn’t used to charge us or nothing. We’ll only be here an hour or so, I should think, love. Come and sit down.”
    I walked over to where she was sitting and sat on the hard bench beside her, my back against the wall. I took off my useless shoe. My stockings were ruined, the feet shredded and huge ladders running up my legs. I pulled them off and balled them up and stuck them in my coat pocket.
    “But there weren’t any communists,” said a thin-faced woman pacing by the bars. “How will they sort us out?”
    “Oh, they’re sure to let us all go,” the first one said, comfortably.
    “If they bring in a lot of politicals, they might let us go to make room,” said one of the streetwalkers to the other. “That’s happened before.”
    “What’ll happen to you otherwise?” I asked, turning my