Authors: Anna Funder
I watched the back of Ruth’s head. It occurred to me that perhaps the benches up the front had been reserved for witnesses. But surely I would be called, because I had been there to discover them, because I knew Dora so well, and because, well, I had so much to say.
Constable Hall was the first witness in the box. He had his helmet off; his pale-brown hair had been trimmed since Thursday and his ears were newly prominent, pinkish. I felt I’d had some intimate experience with the man as in a war, though I knew him not at all. PC Hall described forcing the door of the flat, and then the locked door of the bedroom. He said the women were lying on the bed, facing one another and holding hands. The covers were drawn up over them and they were ‘no longer alive’. He had taken a cup with a dark liquid in it from the bedside table as evidence, and called an ambulance. There was no disorder in the room, the constable said, though two cases lay half packed next to the wardrobe. The key to the room, he said, was placed ‘neatly’ on a shelf beside the inside of the door. I hated that he allowed himself the flourish of an adverb.
‘Thank you, Constable,’ the coroner said.
A tightness fizzed and curled in my sternum. Everything Dora had been trying to do could happen in this room. In this room–as much as in the newspapers or in parliament–the public could be warned of the danger and the vicious reach of the Hitlerites. She would have proved it with her life. When I closed my eyes I saw her on the park bench, her neck stretched back and her eyes blinking away the fear. Now that fine body I knew so well lay in a box in the cemetery mortuary at East Ham, waiting to go into the ground this afternoon. I looked at the coroner, this representative of world-famous British justice. He cleared his throat.
‘You say, Constable, that all the inside doors were fitted with Yale locks.’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘And the room in which the women died was locked from the inside.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you formed a view as to why there were locks on every door?’
‘Refugees, sir, I would say.’ Hall moved his weight from one leg to the other, the light catching the double row of buttons on his uniform. ‘Sharing a house. Perhaps they let the rooms singly–’
‘Not so!’ someone cried. The room rustled. Ruth raised herself in the front row, clutching her bag. The coroner remained steady as a surgeon, looking down from the bench.
‘Your name, madam?’
‘Ruth,’ she said. Then more softly, ‘Wesemann, sir.’
He trailed a pencil over the paper in front of him. ‘You are named as a witness, Dr Wesemann. I would ask you to hold your contribution until that time.’
Ruth’s hand searched the air behind her for the bench’s edge and I saw in its fumbling what it had cost her to speak out. I hoped I was on that list.
The next witness was Dr Taylor, a pathologist with a soft voice and a spray of acne scars. He had conducted the autopsy and he gave the cause of death as respiratory failure due to Veronal poisoning. The drug had been mixed with coffee, he said. The difference between a lethal and a non-lethal dose was a matter of some twenty grains, which was not very many.
‘And in this case, Doctor?’ the coroner asked.
‘The concentration in the cup was very high. I would venture the opinion, Your Honour, that it was an intentionally fatal dosage.’
The coroner put down his pencil and inclined his head slightly towards the witness. ‘And in your view, Doctor, would this Veronal be evident by taste?’
‘Oh yes, Your Honour. At such a concentration the coffee would be very bitter, granular. Not mistakable for coffee in any event.’
‘Do you have the cup here, in evidence?’
‘No, Your Honour.’ The coroner waited. ‘Inadvertently destroyed, I’m afraid.’ The pathologist looked down at his hands. ‘Cleaners, sir.’
‘I see.’ The coroner made a note.
The doctor then told the court that the women had, in his view, been dead since the Sunday evening or the Monday before they were discovered.
You feel things before you can think them. A narrative was being drawn here from selected facts–the easy story. And I was in a waking dream of drowning, a puppy in a tin bucket, silent bubbles coming out of my mouth, floating uselessly to the surface. Every time I want to protest I take in water.
Mrs Allworth the charwoman climbed into the witness box. She wore a pale grey suit I’d seen before on Ruth. It hung from her shoulders. Her knuckles moved like jackbones under the skin of her hands, gripping the wood. Her words had a second-hand quality, as if she had been practising them.
‘On Tuesday,’ she told the room, ‘I went to the flat as usual, to clean. I was surprised to find, when I let myself in, that the ladies were gone away. They always left me a note when they went away, telling me how long for, and asking me to drop by on the days I didn’t clean to feed Nepo. They paid me for that, of course,’ she added, unscripted. ‘The ladies were very fair.’ A red blush started from behind an ear, leaking its hot way across her face. ‘Nepo is the cat–sorry.’ She took a deep breath. She’d lost her place.
‘Take all the time you need, madam,’ the coroner said.
It was most unusual, Mrs Allworth said again, that the ladies did not leave a note. But she decided they must have gone away. ‘I could see no other explanation, sir.’ So she had started to clean. She cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, Mrs Wurm’s room and the spare room. ‘I did not go into Dr Fabian’s room as I found it was locked,’ she said. ‘This was a most unusual thing also, as she’d never locked the bedroom before. However, after I done my work I left the flat, at about twelve-thirty p.m.’
The coroner nodded.
‘Oh,’ she added, ‘and I fed Nepo. Of course.’ Her face crumpled like a paper in fire. ‘And all that time the ladies, the ladies—’
‘Thank you, thank you…’ He glanced down at his paper. ‘Mrs Allworth. I have only one question.’ He waited while she silently blew her nose. ‘Apart from the door of Dr Fabian’s bedroom being locked, you say you saw nothing unusual, no disorder of any kind, in the flat?’
The woman’s face and neck were glowing puce. ‘No, sir. No disorder. Sir.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Allworth.’ The coroner looked at Mathilde’s counsel. ‘Your witness.’
The man asked Mrs Allworth a few questions I do not remember. Then she stood down.
The clerk stood. ‘The court calls Professor Wolfram Wolf,’ he announced.
Wolf stood from the front row. Why on earth had
he
been called? What could he possibly know that I might not? The turkey wore a three-piece suit, his neck angling forward out of a trim white collar, as if to duck whatever was coming. The idea that a man so relentlessly trivial, so nasal and pernickety, could stand up there and speak of Dora while I sat mute sent my blood roiling. I was furious at her for dying, but probably more so for having ever been with him.
The coroner asked Wolf to describe his relationship with Dora. The professor’s voice was adenoidal, barely audible.
‘We were close friends.’
‘I see. Professor Wolf, can you tell us whether you spent any of the days or nights last week or the week before at the flat on Great Ormond Street?’
Wolf’s answer was muffled, his eyes to the floor. The coroner watched him a moment, and then seemed to understand something.
‘Are you a married man, Professor?’
‘Yes.’ There was a slight stirring, a human breeze in the court.
‘Very well, I won’t press you,’ the coroner said, ‘but I was wondering whether you had spent a night at 12 Great Ormond Street in the last fortnight.’
Wolf started to speak in long, disarticulated sentences. If I were casting him in a play he’d be a comic character, a ridiculous wordy Polonius, an i-dotting and t-crossing windbag rival. But there he was, talking, and I was not. He was saying that sometimes it was the case that he and Dora talked into the evening, that she was frightfully busy always, that she was forever working through the night as well as the day, and that, occasionally, he did end up, when it was late, staying over. He couldn’t say exactly when had been the last time this happened.
The coroner waited until Wolf had exhausted all possible circumlocution. ‘I have no wish to embarrass you, Professor Wolf,’ he said. ‘I desire only to lay before the jury the reason why it was you, as I take it, who received the deceased’s suicide note.’
The hairs on my arms stood up. The air in the room went static.
‘Can you tell us when you received it?’ the coroner asked.
Wolf looked down at his hands. ‘Monday morning. By the Monday morning post.’
‘And would you be so kind as to read it for the court?’
The jurors’ heads were all turned to look at him. Wolf took from his suit pocket a folded piece of paper. He coughed into his fist and started to read:
I have failed too much, caused too much pain to you. I don’t find any way back, neither to you, to myself nor to life. Do not think that my death is the consequence of the last days, even if you had come back I would not have continued to live. I have been too fond of you. I am sorry. Goodbye. I take with me the only person for whom my life meant anything.
The silence deepened. We paused, collectively, to take this in, the words of the dead woman, the last words one might choose. Then racking, solitary sobs from the front bench.
My heart had stopped but my mind was clear. The falsity of the note was patent.
‘That cannot be!’ I found myself standing, shouting. ‘It’s a lie!’
Two guards disengaged themselves from the wall. The coroner held up a hand to halt them.
‘Sir,’ he addressed me calmly, ‘I understand that some of the evidence presented here is of a distressing nature. But I would ask you to refrain from interrupting the proceedings or you will be ejected.’
‘I want to give evidence!’
‘Your name?’
‘Ernst Toller.’
He nodded, then examined his list. ‘I’m afraid, Herr Toller, that your name does not appear on my list. You will understand, I’m sure, that we have had to restrict witnesses to those directly connected with the deceased.’
‘But I am… We were…’ Christiane was in Hull at a repertory theatre, but the room was full of press and I couldn’t do it to her. ‘Old friends.’
‘I’m sorry, Herr Toller, but we will be hearing from close associates of the deceased women only.’ He looked again at his list. ‘From, ah, Dr Wesemann, I believe.’ As he shuffled his papers I looked at Ruth. She had turned to look at me, along with everyone else.
‘You gave a statement to the police,’ the coroner continued, holding a document he’d found, ‘and on that basis it has been decided whose evidence to put before the jury. You can be assured, Herr Toller, that your evidence has received due consideration. I would ask you, now, to resume your seat.’
The guards retreated to the wall. I sat. The coroner pulled his half-glasses down his nose and turned his attention back to Wolf, whose face was a picture of relief. I could have strangled the bastard.
‘When Dr Fabian writes of “the consequence of the last days”,’ the coroner said, ‘what do you take that to mean?’
Wolf coughed again. ‘We had had an argument, Your Honour. Dor—Dr Fabian wished…’ He pulled his suit jacket down. ‘I had decided, sir, to break off my relations with Dr Fabian. She was distraught about it. She was frightened. She feared her political activity would bring her to the attention of the authorities here. She had wished for me to move into the spare room of the flat. She was, I have to say, quite hysterical when I told her that I would not do so.’
‘Not true!’ It came out of me like a cry of pain.
The coroner’s tone was quiet, practised. ‘I must warn you, Herr Toller. For the last time.’ He turned back to Wolf. ‘And were you surprised to receive this note?’
‘Sir, I have to say that Dora had threatened to commit suicide before. If I left her. Sometimes I believe that all the work, and not sleeping, and the morphine took their toll—’
A ripple of understanding went through the crowd, as if she’d been a fiend, as if something were being explained here. I was drowning in air, trying to catch Ruth’s eye, willing her to turn around to me again.
‘And what did you do when you received this note on Monday morning?’
‘I telephoned the flat. When there was no answer I went around there. No one answered the bell either. I walked about for half an hour and came back again, but there was still no answer.’
‘Why, given you had received this note, a suicide note as you took it, did you not then call the police?’
Wolf looked a little green, fingered his tie. But he was prepared for the question. ‘I was almost sure that she had gone from London either to Sussex or somewhere else, and I did not want to interfere and show the police her residence and everything in it, and perhaps cause some harm to her.’
‘Indeed,’ the coroner said. ‘I wish now to return to the suicide note. May I see it?’
The note was passed from Wolf to the clerk, who handed it up to the coroner.
And then things started to move in slow motion.
‘This is in English.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where is the original?’
Wolf looked at the ground. ‘I believe it is no longer available, sir. It was given by Scotland Yard to the German embassy for translation. I am told it was inadvertently destroyed by embassy staff after the translation was made.’
There were murmurs in the court.
‘I see. Well, from memory then, Professor Wolf, did you recognise Dr Fabian’s handwriting in the note to you?’
‘The note was in shorthand. Sir.’
Another, louder rustle of shock went through the courtroom. Wolf spoke of his own accord to quell it. ‘We usually corresponded in shorthand.’
This was too much even for the coroner. ‘For something so brief, so important, as her suicide note, do you not think she would have used words?’
‘No, sir. It was our habit.’
‘And the envelope, did it show her handwriting?’
‘It was typed. As I recollect.’
‘So,’ the coroner spoke slowly, ‘she had no time to write a three-line suicide note in longhand, but time to put an envelope in the typewriter for the address?’
Wolf was quiet, one hand clasping the other in front of him. ‘I’m not sure, sir. Perhaps it was habit–she was always so busy.’