Krysalis: Krysalis (30 page)
She will stay with me, Gerhard thought. She already loves me, deep down. I can make her forget David. I am growing old; there is a woman in this world for me to love.
You’re jumping ahead, he reminded himself. First you have to make Barzel swallow it. And that won’t be easy. But—
“Perhaps you have a point,” the other man said slowly, making Gerhard’s heart miss another beat. “It would be difficult to move her, though. So many observers, on the lookout … there could be no question of doing it openly. A boat, maybe. Submarine, even …”
Gerhard studied his colleague’s face and read indecision. He’s frightened.
Why!
Ah yes, of course, a basic human reaction:
he’s frightened of making a mistake.
In that instant he knew that, whatever might happen in the future, Barzel did not carry orders to execute either of them immediately, and his spirits soared.
“I need to report back,” Barzel said at last. “Then we’ll see.”
Gerhard scarcely dared to believe what he heard.
It was going to work!
“What do you want me to do in the meanwhile?” he asked quickly.
“Stay put, protect your ‘art dealer’ in there. Above all, maintain control.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. I’ll live here, in this house. Back-up will come from Berlin as soon as I can arrange it. From now on, you’ll be watched, all the time. Don’t try to be clever again. Before, I told you you were dead. Maybe
I was a little too pessimistic. But there’ll be no second chance. Do you understand?”
The light was behind Barzel, rendering his expression a dark mask. Only when Gerhard stood up could he read his eyes. They were not cruel, they were not even particularly cold, just
uninterested;
and Gerhard the psychologist knew this man could do any necessary killing.
“Don’t get carried away,” Barzel warned, as he too rose. “The risks of transferring Anna Lescombe to Berlin may yet outweigh the advantages. Got that?”
Gerhard nodded, afraid to betray his emotion by speaking.
Barzel said, “I’m still worried about the woman. What if she tries to escape again?”
“I intend to hypnotize her. I’ll use drugs, too.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“A mixture of sodium pentothal and Desoxyn. That will totally eliminate any remaining resistance to hypnosis.”
“Inject her now.”
“If you insist. But I warn you, she’s much more likely to put up a fight with you around.”
“Don’t worry about that, Kleist.” A dreamy smile played about the corners of Barzel’s mouth. “I believe I’m big enough to take care of Mrs. Lescombe. Just about,
ja?”
23
The front door opened and there it was, that smell, that overpowering, all-pervasive scented air bottled up like incense inside an Eastern temple, only David knew it wasn’t incense because Anna’s parents would not have countenanced such a thing. Old cooking … and something more than that. Old age.
“So nice to see you again, David.” Anna’s mother took him into the living room. “Would you like a cup of coffee, to refresh you after your journey?”
In her mouth the drive to the south coast became a Himalayan trek.
“Yes, thank you.”
When Mrs. Elwell went out to the kitchen he looked around him, reabsorbing the stage set upon which the Elwells lived out their lives. The house was substantial and detached, too large to be kept up by a couple in their seventies, but there was such a thing as pride. As long as you had your own property, you were not old.
David understood that without quite being able to admire it.
Mr. Elwell had made a little money out of supplying the needs of amateur painters and decorators at a time when the breed had begun to sprout, but not yet proliferate. On his fiftieth birthday he received, out of the blue, an offer that looked too good to be true. It was. The newly formed chain that took over his four shops employed him as a regional manager; that came with the deal. But before long Mr. Elwell, “Chappy” Elwell people called him, David couldn’t remember why, realized he had been shunted into one of life’s duller backwaters. He found out what it was like to live on a salary, the whole salary and nothing but the salary; no longer were there “good” months from which to finance a holiday, and “bad” months, rainy days against which you saved. Now there were just months. The months began to pile up. In the end, they buried Mr. Elwell under a mountain of dead time.
His wife survived.
“Do you take it black?”
“Mm?” David, lost in a mixture of memories and contemplation of the shiny, renovated horseshoes that flanked the brick fireplace, was nonplused. “Uh, a little milk, please.”
As usual, he did not know what was expected of him. Where he came from, where he worked, you did not have coffee served from a silver pot into bone china, accompanied by an ivory-handled spoon for brown sugar that was free of congealed, crunchy lumps.
He remembered Anna’s face as she told him of the summer evenings when she had been forced to lie upstairs in her room, watching the light through the
shade, because it was after seven and seven was bedtime for little girls….
He had never liked Mrs. Elwell, but today he needed her help. He was not relishing the prospect.
“Is Chappy well?”
Mrs. Elwell picked up her knitting and for a moment did not reply. She had a Madame Defarge style with the needles, shoving them through the wool with the same vigorous determination that she had used to shove Anna through life.
“Very
well, thank you, David. He’s sorry to have missed you. Thursday is his bowls morning.”
“Not to worry.”
“He’s become a little set in his ways, I’m afraid.”
“Do give him my best.”
“I will.” Mrs. Elwell paused in her knitting for long enough to push her spectacles onto the bridge of her nose. She puffed a sharp sigh out through her nostrils and said, “We only ever see you here when there’s trouble, I was saying to Chappy over breakfast.”
We, I … Chappy drifted in and out of the house like old smoke from one of his Player’s, intangible but somehow real.
“Yes. I’m sorry. We just don’t seem to have a lot of time for visits and entertaining.”
“I’m sure. Two busy professional people.” She resumed knitting, flashing him a receptionist’s smile. “Time for a straight talk, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I hoped.”
“Anna never used to be like this.”
“Like …?”
“Secretive. She used to confide in Chappy and me. Particularly me, I don’t think she and her father ever quite shared the same wavelength.”
Straight talking? Should he tell her, then, that Anna had of necessity been lying about things to her parents since she was old enough to understand that she had a secret, inner self? Or remind Mrs. Elwell of how she had always criticized Anna for
not
confiding, when she was a teenager, long before he, David “Wrecker” Lescombe, had come on the scene? Or Anna’s confessing to Juliet’s imminent birth only when she became too “fat” for Lydia to go on ignoring her daughter’s condition any longer…. Shall we have some “straight talking” about these and other matters that your daughter revealed to me quite early in our marriage, madam?
No. He repressed the anger seething inside him and molded his face into the expression of polite deference that represented his only hope of obtaining results.
“Lydia, look, I am really awfully sorry about what’s happened, but… Anna’s vanished into thin air, taking one of my files with her.” He paused. “You’d better know that there are some very unpleasant accusations flying around.”
“I’m sure. When a file is missing …”
“The accusations are utterly without foundation. Baseless as well as base. Anna’s not a traitor and no one’s ever going to convince me of the contrary.”
“Well, at least we can agree on that. Have you heard nothing from her since she disappeared?”
“Not a word. You?”
Lydia Elwell shook her immaculately permed head. “We find we don’t have as much contact as we used to.”
“Before she married me, you mean.”
“I suppose you could say that. She was such a lovely child, so obedient…” The woman’s eyes lighted on a framed photograph of Anna that adorned the mantelpiece.
It showed a tense, bespectacled face, with black gown just visible and mortarboard held self-consciously where the studio photographer had instructed her to hold it. “So obedient… and so
fresh.
Her eyes used to light up whenever you did something for her. Childlike. Innocent …”
“You did a lot for her, didn’t you?”
“Only what any parents would have done for their daughter. It was a drain, I don’t mind admitting. When Juliet was still a baby and Anna kept on working … everything was spend, spend, spend, in those days. Nannies. Train fares up to London for Chappy and me. We didn’t begrudge any of it, although when I
think
of what we had to go without …”
“Where do you think she is?” David asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“What do you think she’s up to?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, she lived with you all those years, you might have some idea what goes on inside…. Sorry. I’m extremely sorry, that was unforgivable.”
Click, click, click went the needles. David looked at her, realizing that this was a crisis for Anna’s mother, too, and he envied Mrs. Elwell her composure.
“It’s just that I’m under strain.”
“If your nerves are bad, David, perhaps you ought to visit the doctor.”
It was clear from the way she spoke, that “nerves” and “doctors” alike were due to be relegated to one of Dante’s less-pleasant outer circles.”
“Did Anna ever see a doctor when she was young?”
“She had the usual coughs and colds.”
“No, I mean a mind doctor. A psychiatrist.”
Lydia Elwell’s hands fell into her lap again, still
clutching the needles, and she stared at him speechlessly, as if he had just said something obscene.
“She didn’t?” he prompted.
“Anna had a brilliant career at school and after that at Oxford. She is a very successful barrister. People like that don’t require the services of a psychiatrist.”
David realized that she had avoided giving him a direct answer. “Juliet said her mother did see one,” he persisted.
“Juliet is artistic. Children like that frequently have overheated imaginations. I shouldn’t pay
too
much attention to that quarter.”
“You certainly had no reason to suspect she was seeing a psychiatrist, anyway?”
“Anna was happy and well adjusted and lacked for nothing. As an only child she had all the love Chappy and I had to give.” She colored a little, the broken veins in the dry skin of her cheeks becoming raw. “You know we couldn’t …”
Conceive, is what she meant to say, but David, who had met Chappy Elwell any number of times and still had trouble remembering his face, wondered if there was a hint of some deeper, darker meaning.
“We gave her a model childhood. Except for that business at St. Mary’s, which I still believe Anna brought on herself, there was never the slightest need for her to be counseled, or consoled, or whatever it is people call it.”
Somehow David knew she was lying. But Lydia El-well’s evasions weren’t in the forefront of his mind.
That business at St. Mary’s …
although he had no idea what she was referring to, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Lydia that. “Oh, the St. Mary’s thing,” he said casually. “She got over it, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but we had to move her. The
expense …”
“Ah, that’s right, she changed schools….” David, in the dark, was running out of improvisations. “Let me see, she’d have been … how old?”
“Seven.”
“I thought it was eight … no, silly of me, seven, of course it was. I never quite knew what to make of all that.”
“Really? Isn’t it notorious that convent schools can be difficult? Anna didn’t know she’d been adopted, of course, so when those dreadful Catholic girls started to call her illegitimate …” She raised her needles and let them fall again, staring at David with something approaching appeal in her eyes. “How could she have borne that for a year without telling us, her own parents?”
David avoided meeting her gaze. “Perhaps she was … afraid.”
“Afraid?
Of
us?”
“How did you find out what had been going on?”
“Anna never told you?”
“Not that particular detail, actually, no.”
“She started crying in games one day and couldn’t stop. She cried for four hours. The doctor had to give her an injection. At the hospital … they called us to the hospital. That’s when we first found out….” Lydia suddenly covered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said after a pause. “Children can be such vicious animals.”
“Yes.”
“Before that day, we never knew, Chappy and I. She didn’t tell us. She thought she was being brave.”
“I see.”
“They expelled three girls. The ringleaders, the mother superior called them.”
“Did Anna know that they were expelled?”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Elwell drew in a deep breath. “We received these foul letters, from the parents of one of the girls who had to go. If that’s what religion … Anna found the letters.”