Chord of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  This was repeated at midday, this time with a small bowl of fruit and a jug of water. Christa tried to ask Fräulein Frank what was happening, but received no reply.

  It was late afternoon when she heard the sounds of arrival downstairs, and then footsteps on the stairs. He was here. He was coming to her room to ‘deal with her’. Was he going to kill her here in this room? His own private execution? Would they bury her body in the grounds of the Torhaus, so that no one would ever know what had happened to her? Her mind went to Stefan, innocent and unaware in Lindschoen. Please don’t let Stefan be told she had been murdered. But she knew, of course, that Brax intended something other than murder.

  The strange thing – the very worrying thing – was that when he opened the door and stood looking at her, it was no longer the cruel sly villain who had talked to Father last night. It was the velvet-voiced, gentle-eyed man who had come to The Music House – the man who knew and loved good music, and the man who had helped them to get away from Lindschoen. The man who had smiled at Christa in a way that had made her think he wanted to take her into some marvellous intimate world where there would only be the two of them.

  He said, ‘Christa,’ and there was the same sensation that he was caressing her name, ‘you must have wondered what was happening. I’ve come to reassure you.’

  ‘Where’s my father?’

  ‘He’s going to spend a bit of time somewhere else. He’ll be quite near this house, though.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could depend on several things.’ Brax sat on the bed, and his hand came out to her, touching her hair. Christa sat very still.

  ‘What kind of things?’ It was even possible, she discovered, to put a softness into her own voice. Would it fool him? Was he so incredibly vain, so arrogant, that he would believe she could still be under his spell? It was the darkest spell imaginable, but even so …

  He smiled, and it was a smile that sent shivers of fear over Christa.

  ‘I think we both know what kind of things, don’t we? And, in any case, I think we knew almost as soon as we met how it would one day be for us. You and me, Christa. Together. Here – tonight …’

  Somehow he had unfastened the buttons of her blouse, and his hands were inside, caressing her breasts, and it was dreadful; he was a cold, cruel murderer, a Nazi, and she had never hated anyone as much as she hated him.

  But if she let him do what he wanted to her, it might mean her father would come back. That was what he meant, wasn’t it?

  Christa said, ‘You’re saying that if I – if I let you do what you want to me, my father would come back here?’

  ‘Of course. You’re such a beautiful little innocent, and I won’t hurt you, Christa …’

  He was pushing her back on the bed, and he was lying alongside her. I can’t let this happen, thought Christa. But is there a choice? If I fight, won’t he force me anyway?

  ‘Oh, God, you’re so soft and young and sweet,’ he said, and now his voice was thick with emotion, and he was breathing as if he had been running. Christa could feel him thrusting against her – there was a hardness pushing against her thighs, and then her lower stomach. ‘I promise I won’t hurt you,’ he said, again. ‘It will be marvellous.’

  But it was not marvellous at all. It was painful and embarrassing. He thrust his hand between her legs, and jabbed at her with his fingers, making her cry out, because one of his fingernails was jagged, and it tore into her.

  Then suddenly and shockingly, the insistent masculine hardness was inside her, dreadful, agonizingly painful, and Brax was moving quickly and then even more quickly, clutching her shoulders, gasping and moving frenziedly in a horrid rhythm. This could not be the thing that people raved over and wrote poetry about, and died for. It was undignified and painful, and all of a sudden it was messy, with a wet stickiness that seemed to flood into her in jerky spasms.

  Brax half fell on her, his weight heavy and crushing, and then rolled off. Christa slowly turned her head to look at him. His eyes were half closed and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his face. If ever there was a moment when he was defenceless …

  She did not stop to think and she certainly did not stop to plan. She sat up, seized the jug that had held the water, and brought it crunching down on Brax’s head. He gave a surprised cry, flailed at the air with one hand, then fell back on the bed. His eyes were half closed, but he was still breathing. Sobbing with fear and panic, but still in the grip of the same resolve, Christa grabbed the belt he had flung off. It went around his neck easily, and she pulled hard, making it tighter, tighter … He was partly conscious now, sufficiently so for him to realize what was happening, and he clawed at the belt, trying to get it off, thrashing with his legs. Christa could hear herself sobbing, and she thought she might be sick in a moment, but she pulled the belt even tighter, seeing it bite into his flesh, seeing blood start to bubble out of the skin.

  Brax’s face was turning deep red, and veins were showing in his cheeks. His eyes were beginning to bulge – they were threaded with tiny crimson veins – and his tongue was protruding. Spittle ran down his chin, and he was making dreadful choking sounds.

  I don’t care, thought Christa. You’re evil and cruel and I hope you’re dying really slowly and really painfully. This is for my father, and it’s for what you’ve just done to me. It’s for what you’ve done to all those other people, as well – all the people you’ve deceived and brought here … Daniel and Ben and Jacob – yes, dear, gentle Jacob. She gave one final vicious tug, and there was the feeling of something snapping. A terrible wet sound came from Brax’s throat, and then he was still. His head flopped to one side, the eyes wide and staring.

  The sickness overwhelmed Christa then, and she retched and vomited over the dead face. Dreadful. Appalling. I’ve killed him, I’m a murderer.

  She finally managed to clamber off the bed, and she was trying in a bewildered way to think what she should do, when the door was flung open, and two guards, their rifles pointing at her, stood in the doorway.

  Before she could do anything, they dragged her from the room that stank of Brax’s blood and her own vomit. They gave her no time to collect anything – not her bag with her comb and purse, or any clothes, not even the silver bracelet Jacob had given her. Absurdly, it hurt to leave that in the room. It felt as if she had repudiated Jacob’s gift.

  As they took her down the stairs, there was a swift glimpse of Jacob, and also of Daniel and Ben, standing together in the hall. Jacob put out a hand as if he wanted to clasp hers, but the guard knocked it away.

  Daniel did not try to touch her, but he said, ‘Christa – remember that one day I’m going to paint you properly. I promise it.’

  Pushed into the back of a jeep, Christa managed to say to the guards, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘You will be executed as the murderess you are,’ said the harsh voice of one of the guards who had brought her. ‘You killed Count von Braxen.’

  ‘He raped me,’ cried Christa.

  ‘You lie. Senior members of the Gestapo do not commit rape. You seduced him, then regretted it, so you killed him. You will face the firing squad. You will not escape.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Margot had thought that the prospect of seeing the Torhaus – of actually starting to track down whether it might be Lina’s house and therefore, possibly, hers and Marcus’s – would drive away the stupid suspicion that Marcus had realized the truth about the deaths of Lina and their mother. But it did not. As they drove across the country, she was still remembering that soft insinuation he had made on the night of Stefan Cain’s dinner party; of how brothers and sisters protected one another – except if it came to murder. She kept remembering, as well, how he had looked at her with shocked fear the night their mother died. He looked at her in the same way several times during the journey to Lindschoen – but if their eyes, met, Marcus at once looked away.

  But once they had found this gate
house place, and established it was theirs, all those feelings would go. Margot was sure it was the right house; she said so, several times.

  ‘I wish I’d been able to find out a bit more,’ said Marcus.

  ‘You found out an awful lot.’

  ‘I found out a bit about German land registration,’ he said. ‘It’s a similar system to our own, but it isn’t as easy to get information from it. You have to explain why you want to see a particular entry, and you have to apply to the correct district court. They check whether you’ve got a legitimate claim, and I’m not sure how good our claim would be. There’s only that letter sent to Lina, and it’s half a century ago, and the firm that sent it hasn’t existed for decades.’

  ‘Let’s find the house and go from there,’ said Margot. ‘That letter you found in Greymarsh House said it was empty – it sounded as if it had been empty for years – so there must be keys somewhere. Somebody must have responsibility for it – even if it’s only to make sure squatters don’t get in or the garden’s kept tidy.’

  She did not much care for Lindschoen, although Marcus said it was charming and full of interesting little pockets. If Margot had not known better, she would almost have thought he was putting off finding the Torhaus and tracing its ownership. Perhaps he did not want to admit that he did not know where to start.

  But on their second day, he suddenly said they would try the civic office. He was a bit abrupt about it, but they found the office, which was on the outskirts of Lindschoen and which was a bit like a council office at home

  Marcus talked to several people while Margot waited. She heard the words Torhaus several times, and then she thought Marcus asked about a key – Schlüssel? he said, several times. The man at the desk laughed, and said something to a colleague, who laughed as well.

  ‘What did they say?’ asked Margot once they were outside.

  ‘That there haven’t been any keys to the place for years,’ said Marcus. ‘They were lost decades ago, apparently, and nobody’s ever bothered to have new ones cut, because nobody ever goes there. It’s been empty ever since anyone can remember.’

  ‘Did you ask who’s supposed to own it? Or if anyone looks after it? Are there neighbours for instance?’

  ‘Yes, I did, but they just shrugged. They said no one knew who had any responsibility, and that they don’t think there are any neighbours. It probably stands in the middle of a field or halfway up a mountain or in the centre of an aerodrome or something,’ said Marcus. ‘Still, they found a map – bit like our Ordnance Survey map – and they’ve marked the route out.’

  ‘Good. Shall we have some lunch and drive out there?’

  And again there was the curious hesitancy, almost as if he might be trying to make up his mind. He darted that strange, almost-furtive look towards her again. Then he said, ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘We might be able to get in,’ said Margot. ‘Even without keys, I mean. It sounds as if it’s pretty ramshackle. And it’s what we’ve come to see.’

  They had their lunch, and Marcus followed the directions on the map. There was only one occasion when he swore at her, stopped the car, and snatched the map from her to see the route for himself. Then he apologized. He was tired from the driving, he said, and it was a bit of a strain, still, to keep on the right.

  The journey took longer than they had thought, and by the time they came in sight of the gatehouse, it was starting to grow dark.

  And as soon as she saw it, Margot knew it would have been better to have stayed away.

  They had to drive up a winding, deeply rutted track to reach the house and Marcus swore because if the suspension went or a tyre punctured or the exhaust was wrenched off out here, he had no idea what they would do.

  Thick, overgrown hedges thrust against the car, and once Margot had to get out to push some aside before they could drive on. Halfway up the track was a rickety gate which, when she got out to open it, fell off one of its hinges, so they had to carry it to the side of the path and prop it up. Marcus swore again because he had stepped in a patch of thick mud.

  ‘If it is mud,’ he said. ‘It smells as if it might be from a cow. God, this is frightful. I don’t want to stay here.’

  The Torhaus was almost entirely enclosed by a stone wall, which Margot had not expected.

  ‘And gates as well,’ said Marcus. ‘Can you see them? They’re quite high. I bet they’re locked. Even if they aren’t, they’ll be rusted up and we’ll never get them open. They’re too high to climb over, as well.’

  He almost sounded relieved, and Margot looked at him in surprise. ‘Let’s try, though,’ she said. ‘And there’s a bit of wall over there where the stones have fallen away. Can you see? We could climb through.’

  ‘I suppose we could. Yes, all right. Having come this far …’ The odd thing – the vaguely worrying thing – was that when he said this, Margot had the impression he was not talking about the house. But he reached in the glove compartment for the torch, and they went across the uneven ground to the fallen-away part of the wall. It was easy enough to dislodge a few more bits and squeeze through the crumbling stonework. And there, in front of them, was the Torhaus.

  It was ugly and bleak and lonely, and it looked as if it had been quietly decaying for the last fifty years. Margot’s heart sank, and she said, ‘If this really is the place, it would cost a fortune to prove it. And it would cost another fortune to put it right. Because we’d never sell it as it is.’

  ‘No one would come within a mile of it.’ Marcus had not taken his eyes from the house, and there was an expression in his face that Margot could not interpret.

  ‘What a disappointment,’ she said. ‘What now? Shall we go back? It’ll start getting dark soon.’

  ‘No, let’s at least try to get in.’

  He walked towards the house, shining the torch to see the way, Margot, hardly believing this was happening, stumbled along at his side. The house loomed over them, as if staring down at the two intruders, and she looked up at the upper windows. Had something moved behind one of them? No, it had just been the reflection of the scudding clouds across the sky. But just for a second or two it had seemed as if a figure walked to a window just under the eaves, and as if a pallid face pressed against the glass.

  Marcus did not seem aware of it. He was peering into the ground-floor windows, shining the torch. ‘There’s still furniture in there,’ he said, turning to call back to where Margot was waiting. ‘It looks as if someone simply walked out of it one day and didn’t come back. You’d have thought it would have been long since plundered, wouldn’t you? Although, it’s so far off the road, maybe no one realizes it’s even here. It’s a lonely place, isn’t it? It’s a place where anything could happen and no one would know about it for a very long time.’

  Again there was the strangeness in his voice and the almost-frightening look had come into his eyes again. Margot shivered, hating the house more with every minute. But if this really was Lina’s house, they should find out as much as they could about it. And perhaps it could be renovated after all – made into a small guesthouse, even.

  Marcus was reaching for the iron ring-handle of the house’s main door. It would be locked, of course, even with the house in this battered state, because no one, not even a madman, would leave a house unlocked, unsecured, out here.

  But the door was not locked, or, if it had been, the lock had rotted away. Marcus pushed it inwards, shone the torch.

  ‘Stay here while I look,’ he said, and there was a moment when he was silhouetted in the doorway, then he went inside and the darkness closed down again.

  Margot stayed where she was for what felt like a long time. It was getting very dark now, and once she saw the flicker of his torch behind one of the ground-floor windows. She thought the movement from the upstairs room came again.

  The old trees surrounding the Torhaus were whispering and dipping their branches. It was uncomfortably easy to imagine they were watching her, and murmuring to one another.
The wind stirring the branches and the leaves could almost be voices. Margot thought she would step through the partly open door and call out to Marcus to hurry up. When she did so, he was there, as if he had been waiting for her, standing at the foot of a wide staircase.

  ‘Come inside and take a look,’ he said.

  It was not pitch dark inside the Torhaus because there was some overspill from the fading daylight outside, and there was also the light from Marcus’s torch. But the house felt horrid; there was a smell of damp and age and old vegetation. Margot repressed a shudder.

  Marcus’s face was lit from below by the torch; it created hollows and pits where his eyes were. It was unnerving; it was almost as if it was no longer Marcus who was standing there.

  ‘In here,’ he said, taking her hand.

  It was a small room, thick with dust, and with a lingering sadness, and there was a piano, set against the wall. It was small and old, the elaborate wood figuring on the front dull and slightly rotting on one side.

  Margot said, ‘How odd—’

  ‘Isn’t it? And a piano can be a murder weapon, can’t it, Margot?’

  A murder weapon. Margot shivered, and her head began to feel as if something was wrenching it apart.

  ‘Look,’ said Marcus, shining the torch onto the stand. ‘You recognize it, do you?’ he said.

  Margot would have recognized it after a hundred years. A handwritten score, with Giselle’s Music written across the top. It had been there when she had whispered through the shadows to Lina – when Lina had clutched at her heart in fear, then fallen.

  She said, ‘Did you bring it with you, that music?’

  ‘Yes. And a few other things from Lina’s desk. Things I didn’t want to leave for anyone else to find.’ Again the smile that made him look like a different person. ‘You thought we found everything there was to find, didn’t you? But I found other things, Margot – things you didn’t know about. Things that told me a great deal about Lina. And about Christa.’