The Dark Lady (21 page)

As with the question on girlfriends, this seemed to disconcert the old man, and once again he didn't seem to know how to reply.

“Gerhard had a cousin – Johann – who came from Karlsbruch,” he said falteringly. “It was while he was visiting Johann that Gerhard met Max. At that time, Johann and Max were the best of friends, though later they were to quarrel and . . . but that's not important.”

Wasn't it? Rutter wondered. Then why did the old man seem so reluctant to talk about it?

He contemplated pushing Schultz further on the point, and would have done if he hadn't heard Woodend's voice in his head, telling him that the time to push was later, when he'd found out the things the old man was willing to tell him.

“Does this Max Ebert still live in Karlsbruch?” the sergeant asked Herr Schultz.

“I don't know. I don't even know if he returned home in 1945. Many of those who were sent away didn't.”

There was still a reluctance there, Rutter thought. It was almost as if every question he asked skirted around the edges of a guilty secret which the old man was trying desperately to protect.

Try a fresh tack an' see where that leads you, lad
, Woodend's voice said in his head

“When did your son join the Luftwaffe?” Rutter asked.

“It was in 1938. He could see that a war was coming – we all could.” The old man looked down at his gnarled hands. “As a loyal German he felt it was his duty to play his part, but it had to be the right part. He did not want to follow the path his cousin Johann had chosen.”

Johann, again, Rutter noted. He thought he was beginning to understand what was going on. The old man
was
trying to hide a guilty secret, he was sure of that now. But at the same time he had an urge to confess it – to seek absolution by an open declaration. And so he had reached a compromise with himself – he would drop the clues, and it was up to the English policeman either to ignore them or to gather them up.

“Do you have any recent letters from your son I might have a look at?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “While he was in the prisoner-of-war camp, he wrote as often as he was allowed. There were a few letters which came after the war, too. Then they stopped. We have not heard from our youngest son for a long, long time.”

There was a great bitterness in the old man's words, Rutter thought, but he didn't get the impression that the bitterness was directed towards Gerhard.

“Did he tell you in the last letter you received why he was going to stop writing to you?”

“No, but it is easy enough to guess the reason. I think it was because he had a new life in England and he wanted to put the past behind him.” The old man's voice cracked. “I . . . I also think it was because he had grown ashamed of us – ashamed of what we did under Hitler.”

“What
did
you do under Hitler?” Rutter asked, and even as he spoke he was dreading the answer.

“Nothing!” the old man replied, with sudden fierceness and fire. “We did
nothing
! We tell ourselves now that we had no idea what was going behind the barbed wire of the extermination camps, but deep inside we know that we are lying. We did have an idea. More than an idea. But we were too afraid for our own skins to do anything about it.”

“I don't think you should blame yourselves,” Bob Rutter said sympathetically. “I've no real idea what it was like living in the Third Reich, but I'm sure that it can't have been easy—”

“Doing what is right is never easy,” the old man interrupted. “But that does not mean that it should not be done. Gerhard stood up for what he believed in. And so did Max.”

“Was he in the Luftwaffe, too?”

“No. Max would not fight, even for the country he loved. He did not believe in violence of any kind.”

“Tell him about Max,” muttered the old lady, speaking for the first time. “Tell him about what happened in the church.”

“Max belonged to a small group which was helping Jews to get out of Germany,” Herr Schultz explained. “But it was not an easy thing to do, and they had to wait for the right opportunity. And while they were waiting, they hid the Jews in the vault of the parish church. Somehow the SS found out what was going on. They raided the church, and took the Jews away. They took Max away, too. We heard he had been sent to a concentration camp.”

“Gerhard found out what had happened when he came home on leave,” Frau Schultz said, picking up the story. “He turned black with rage. We didn't want him to do it, but he drove over to Karlsbruch to confront the officer who had had Max arrested. I think he would have killed the man if he'd found him – but by that time he wasn't there any more.”

“Do you happen to have a picture of your son?” Rutter asked. “And possibly a picture of his friend Max.”

“Yes, we have a picture,” said the old woman, rising slowly to her feet. “They are both in it.”

She hobbled across to the sideboard, picked up a photograph in a silver frame, and handed it over to Rutter. There were two young men in the photograph. They were standing at what looked like the edge of a forest. The one on the left was tall and handsome, and was staring confidently at the camera. Rutter remembered the dead man he had seen in the morgue at Maltham – with the left-hand side of his face battered to a bloody pulp – and forced himself to suppress a shudder.

“That is Max,” said the old woman, pointing at the other figure in the photograph.

Rutter studied him. Max was much shorter and plumper than his friend. There was none of Gerhard's confidence in his expression. He seemed, if anything, mild and unassuming. Yet behind his diffidence there must have been great strength, Ruuter thought – because this man had been willing to pay the price of taking on Hitler's Reich.

“When was this taken?” he asked.

Schultz and his wife exchanged glances. “I think it was in the spring of 1936,” the old man said. “It couldn't have been any later than that, because otherwise Johann—”

He'd come to an abrupt halt again, but Rutter's mind was already off on an entirely different track. There was something wrong with the photograph. The composition seemed slightly wrong, the whole view just a little skewed. Then he noticed that the left-hand edge was not quite straight, and understood why it looked wrong.

“This picture used to bigger, didn't it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“There was a third person standing next to Max and Gerhard, wasn't there? And you've cut him out of it?”

“Yes, again.”

“Who was that third person?”

Herr Schultz sighed, as if the time for evasion was finally over – as if the English policeman had collected the clues as he'd been supposed to, and now the moment had come to bring the skeleton out of the cupboard.

“Can't you guess who he was?” he asked.

Of course he could guess! And now he knew what their secret was, too. The Schultzes had done nothing to oppose Hitler, and they were ashamed of it, but they were even more ashamed that a member of their family – their own flesh and blood – had been one of Hitler's monsters.

“The man you cut out was Gerhard's cousin, Johann,” Rutter said.

“Yes.”

“And the reason he and Max Ebert quarrelled was because Johann had joined the SS in summer of 1936? That's how you know the photograph couldn't have been taken later than the spring of 1936. Because Max would never have posed with Johann after that.”

“Again, yes.”

“And the officer who raided the church and sent Max away to the camp – that was Johann as well?”

“That is why I cut him out of the photograph,” the old woman said. “He did not belong in the same picture as two fine young men like Gerhard and Max.”

“Where is Johann now?”

“Who knows?” Herr Schultz said. “By the end of the war he was a full colonel in the SS. Like many others of his kind, he went into hiding when the Allies invaded. He was tried
in absentia
by the Nuremberg Tribunal for his war crimes, and was sentenced to death. But since they couldn't find him, the sentence was never carried out.”

“So no one knows what happened to him?”

The old man shrugged. “We know nothing for certain, but sometimes we hear rumours.”

“What kinds of rumour?”

“That he drowned himself in the Rhine to avoid the humiliation of being executed. That he had plastic surgery on his face, and is now living quite openly in Frankfurt . . .”

“That he escaped to some other country,” Frau Schultz said.

“Ah yes,” the old man agreed. “It is possible he was spotted in Bremerhaven in November 1946. Your soldiers searched for him, but he was nowhere to be found. There are those who believed that he stowed away on a ship and escaped to United States.”

Or to England! Rutter thought. Or to bloody England!

T
he clouds which had been hanging threateningly over the park all day had finally opened, and heavy rain lashed against the elegant windows of the Westbury Social Club.

Woodend stood at the bar, watching the raindrops slithering their erratic paths down the glass. Unless the weather cleared up very soon, there would be no appearances by the Dark Lady that night, he thought, because people would stay indoors – and there was little point in being a ghost if there was nobody about to see you.

The door swung open, and Simon Hailsham marched into the room. He was carrying a black umbrella. When he saw Woodend, he came to an abrupt halt, pointed the umbrella in the chief inspector's direction, and shook it vigorously. Drops of moisture fell on to the carpet, staining it, temporarily, a darker shade.

I bet he wishes it was a rifle he was pointin' at me, instead of a brolly, Woodend thought.

Hailsham furled his umbrella and hooked it on to the bar. “I suppose that you think you were very smart, Chief Inspector, getting those Poles arrested for moonshining,” he growled.

Woodend took a sip of his pint. “Aye, it wasn't a bad stroke to pull,” he said complacently.

“Well, I personally don't see why them being involved in one thing necessarily rules them out from being involved in the other. Say Gerhard had found out about the still and was threatening to expose them?”

“Why would he have waited?” Woodend asked. “It would have been the simplest thing in the world to pick up the telephone an' call the local cop shop. Besides, if he'd known he was a threat to the Poles, do you really think he'd have gone wanderin' off in the woods on his own?”

“It seems unlikely,” Hailsham conceded reluctantly. “But even if that wasn't the case, they still had motive enough. You can't deny the fact that they probably hated him just for being German.”

“Yes, they probably did,” Woodend agreed. “In fact, Zbigniew Rozpedek told me that he
should
have killed Schultz. But you don't dump shit in your own back yard.”

“I beg your pardon!” Hailsham exclaimed, as if he were outraged that a policeman should use such language.

“If they'd been behind the murder, we'd have found the body miles away from their still.” Woodend explained. He lit up a Capstan Full Strength. “I'm glad you came in tonight,” he continued, “because I really think it's about time that you an' me had a serious talk, Mr Hailsham.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” the personnel officer asked aggressively. “And if I
don't
think we should?”

Woodend grinned. “You don't have to talk to me, but I think you'd be making a serious mistake not to.”

Something in Woodend's tone seemed to set off alarm bells in Hailsham's head. He stood there indecisively for a few seconds, then glanced at Tony the bar steward – who was pretending not to listen – and said, “Let's go over to one of the tables, shall we?”

He led the chief inspector to the table furthest from the bar. “What's this all about?” he asked when they'd sat down.

“I've been thinkin' back to the night Gerhard Schultz was killed,” Woodend said. “You an' him were standin' at the bar, talkin'.”

“I know all that.”

“You talked about the situation at work, an' you talked about the appearance of the Dark Lady, but – an' this has been botherin' me for quite a time – you didn't talk about flyin'.”

“Why should we have?” Hailsham asked defensively.

“I go to the Old Comrades' reunions now an' again,” Woodend told him. “A lot's happened to all of us since we were demobbed. We should have plenty to tell each other about how our lives have gone, an' we all start with that – but somehow we always seem to end up yatterin' on about the war. Yet you get two fliers together for the evenin', with the drink flowin' free, an' they never even mention it. Did the pair of you
ever
discuss your wars, Mr Hailsham?”

“No, not much,” Hailsham mumbled in reply. “Gerhard didn't seem to want to.”

“Well, that must certainly have been a relief for you,” Woodend said, “but I wonder why
he
was so reticent. I suppose real heroes are like that. You know – naturally modest. An' he was a
real
hero, wasn't he?
He
won an Iron Cross for his bravery.”

“Where's all this leading?” Hailsham demanded, with an edge of panic creeping into his voice.

“I thought at first that you'd really got somethin' against the Poles,” Woodend said. “But you hadn't, had you? It's true you wouldn't have minded seein' them arrested for the murder of Gerhard Schultz, but then you wouldn't have minded anybody else bein' arrested, either – as long as it brought a swift end to the investigation.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Of course you do. You've been terrified for days that I'd get around to investigatin' you.”