by Sarah Rayne
‘What kind of things? And why on earth would you bring them out here?’
He reached to the music stand, and from behind Giselle’s Music took a sheet of creased paper. ‘Read it. Read it.’
Margot took the papers unwillingly, and looked at the top one. At first the words did not seem to make sense, but gradually she sorted them out.
The paper was a birth certificate. It was in German, but the layout was simple to understand. But what she was seeing sent the room spinning into a whirling confusion. In the section for the name of the newborn child it said, Lina Mander.
Father: Count Karol von Braxen (deceased).
But alongside that, next to the section for the mother, was a name that seemed to rear up from the page.
Mother: Christa Klein.
Margot felt as if she had been pulled into a dark echoing tunnel. She waited for her mind to steady, then in a thread of a voice, she said, ‘Lina was … she was Christa’s daughter.’
‘Yes. But she gave her away. Had her adopted. She must have done. You see the place of birth?’
Margot had not looked beyond the name of Lina’s mother, but now she did look. In a voice she hardly recognized as her own, she said, ‘Sachsenhausen. Christa had a child – born inside a concentration camp?’
‘Yes. And the child was Lina.’
‘And Christa killed the child’s father.’ It squared with the story Lina had always told about Christa killing Lina’s father. Butchered by that harlot, Christa Klein, Lina used to say. What she had never said, was that Christa had been her mother, or that Lina herself had been born in a concentration camp. Only the hatred and the bitterness had come through. Margot, looking again at the names on the birth certificate thought, for the first time, that she could almost understand Lina’s feelings over those years. To know your mother had killed your father … That you had been given away … I’m sorry, Lina, she whispered in her mind. If you had told the whole story, perhaps it might have been different for us all.
Marcus remained silent, and when Margot handed the certificate back, he slotted it behind the music again.
‘Why did you bring those things with you?’ said Margot again. ‘The birth certificate and the music?’
‘I didn’t dare leave them behind. I didn’t want anyone to find them and make assumptions.’
‘Not to prove we’ve got a claim on Lina’s house?’
‘Lina’s house probably doesn’t exist,’ he said, impatiently. ‘That was a pipe dream, a castle in the air. Something hopeful to hold on to in those dreary years.’ He put out a hand to her. ‘And now, Margot, come upstairs with me.’
Come upstairs with me … His hand closed around hers. There was a time when his touch and those words would have sent shivers of fearful delight through Margot, but now they terrified her. She said, ‘Can’t we just go back – Marcus, I really don’t like this house. Even if it is Lina’s—’
‘Of course it isn’t Lina’s house,’ he said, at once. ‘If Lina’s house exists anywhere, it’ll long since have belonged to someone else quite legally. I realized that ages ago. You’d have realized it too, if you’d had any sense.’
‘But that letter you found in Mr Cain’s house … It talked about the Torhaus and how no one could find out who owned it, and you said it all fitted.’
‘That letter gave me the idea, that’s all,’ he said. ‘A lonely old house, empty for so many years – a place where no one ever goes, and that no one knows who it belongs to … It was the ideal lure to get you out here. To get you to a place where you could vanish.’
He studied her, then said, ‘I did tell you that I’d draw the line at protecting you if you’d committed a murder, didn’t I? I drew that line a long time ago, Margot. And there’s the question of self-preservation, as well. I don’t trust you, you see. I can’t risk you letting out what you did – or being found out. And if that were to happen … Well, I don’t want to be seen – to be known – as the brother of a murderess.’
Margot tried to pull her hand free, but he was holding it too tightly.
‘Don’t you know, Margot, that I’ve hardly dared let you out of my sight since that night – since I realized what you’d done? I’ve watched you and I’ve guarded you, but I can’t do it for ever. Also,’ he said, very deliberately, ‘I don’t trust you not to mark me down as your next victim if you suddenly thought it would be to your advantage. So that makes it a case of kill or be killed.’ He was pulling her along the hall. ‘I looked all over the house while you waited outside. I was still making the decision, even then. It hasn’t been an easy decision, I’d like you to know that.’
Those furtive glances, thought Margot. Those sideways looks. All the time he was making this decision. Oh God, what is he going to do to me?
They were at the wide stairway, and he was dragging her up. Margot struggled and fought to get free, but she could not.
‘Marcus, let me go – where are we going—?’
‘At the top of this house is a room with a lock and a key,’ he said. ‘The minute I saw that room, I knew it was the answer. I hadn’t dared hope that I’d find somewhere like it, but there it was. Exactly right.’ As they reached a small landing he twisted her arms behind her back, wrenching painfully at her shoulders as he did so, then forced her up a second, smaller flight. At the end of a small passage a door was open, and Marcus pushed Margot through it, then stood in the doorway, barring her way out.
‘This is where you’ll stay,’ he said. ‘You can’t get out – the window’s too small, and you’d break your neck if you tried to climb out anyway. There’s a lock on the door – if there hadn’t been, I’d have had to use physical violence or some kind of restraint. I didn’t want any real physical contact, if I could avoid it. You always did, though, didn’t you? All those times – did you think I didn’t know what you would have liked from me? And didn’t you realize I was repelled?’
‘You’re going to lock me in?’ Margot focused on what was happening, because she could not bear to hear that Marcus had been repelled by her.
‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll stay downstairs for a while, though,’ he said. ‘Partly to make sure I’m not going to change my mind. I know I won’t, though. I know I’m going to leave you here. No one will know where you are, Margot, and if anyone at home asks, I’ll just say you’ve travelled to stay with friends. But you don’t know many people, do you? No one in Thornchurch, and no one anywhere else. So no one’s very likely to ask.’
Before Margot could get to the door, he had slipped through it, slammed it, and turned the key.
It would be useless to try the door, but Margot tried it anyway. It was locked of course. How about the window? But, as Marcus had said, it would be impossible to get through it, and in any case there was a sheer drop to the ground below.
The room smelled of damp and dirt. There were patches of mould on the ceiling where rain must have got in, and around the window, discolouring the plaster. Once there had been wallpaper on the walls – in places it was still possible to see the pattern very faintly: small bunches of cornflowers tied with lavender ribbon.
Beneath the smell of damp and mould there was somehow another smell – something deeper and older – something that might almost have printed itself on this room a long, long time ago …
There was nothing in the room except a chair and a small dressing table. When Margot opened one of the drawers there was a comb that somebody must have forgotten about, and a silver bracelet, made up of thin, glossy links.
She sat down on the narrow window-seat, and tried not to give way to fear. Marcus would not do this to her. It would be some sick joke – or she might have fallen asleep and be having a nightmare … Or she might have been given a drug and be hallucinating.
He had said he would not go away immediately. Probably he would come back soon. But the minutes went along, and there was no sound of his step on the stairs.
He had left her here in the dark old house.
He had left her here to die and there was no way to escape.
TWENTY-SIX
Sachsenhausen, 1940
Giselle had never lost sight of the possibility of escape. Even inside Sachsenhausen she had clung to that hope. She had clung, as well, to the thought that she might find Silke or Silke’s family. But it soon became apparent that there were several thousand prisoners in the camp – she might be here for months or even years without seeing Silke or knowing what was happening to her.
She had not been able to forget how they had forced her to write the letter to Felix, telling him she loved Reinhardt – that she was going to be with Reinhardt. She had written it, because Reinhardt’s masters would have executed her if she had not done so, but she had dared to add the ghost note, hoping Felix would understand that it signalled the letter’s contents were not true. Lying in the hut every night, she tried to reach out to Felix. Please don’t believe what I wrote, my love, she thought. Please don’t think I ran away from you or that I ever ceased loving you.
There was a kind of grapevine network in Sachsenhausen. Whispers were passed to and fro, usually at the Appellplatz, where prisoners had to line up for morning and evening roll calls. Sometimes fragments of news could be exchanged during work. The rigorous work regime had come as a shock to Giselle, and the work itself had surprised her very much. Forged British and American currency was produced here, so that Nazi spies could introduce it into those countries as part of a plan to undermine the economies. Aircraft parts were made here, as well, although it was believed that some of the people put to work there had dared to deliberately sabotage the parts, so that the German planes would crash.
The work was gruelling and long, but it was infinitely better, the others told Giselle, than being taken to one of the laboratories for medical experiments. When she heard this, Giselle’s mind went instantly to Stefan’s nightmares. The scissor man, he had sobbed. The people who pulled bones from bodies.
Each morning, when the inmates of her hut were marched to their work, they went past a section of the infamous death strip. Was it the section where Andreas had been tortured? Andreas, whom dear, irresponsible Silke had loved, and who had written music to her. Was that music still inside Wewelsburg Castle? Would anyone ever find it? Would Felix ever see it?
She waited for signs that the night with Reinhardt had resulted in pregnancy, but within the first three weeks it became apparent it had not. Curiously, it was a blow; Sachsenhausen would be a terrible place in which to bring new life into the world, but Giselle thought she might have got slightly better treatment if she had been pregnant. But it was not to be.
She lost real track of the time; the women she was with said this happened very quickly. Days blurred into one another. There were no landmarks – no weekends, no ordinary family things such as birthdays.
Throughout, Giselle ached to see Felix and to hear his dear voice again. Just one last time. Half an hour would be enough. About Christa and Stefan she did not dare think.
And then one night, as she was being marched back to her hut after the day’s work, the gates were opened, the security lights came on, and a jeep came screeching through the gates and pulled up.
Two Gestapo dragged a young girl out of the jeep, and half carried her to one of the isolation cells.
Giselle felt as if the entire world had been wrenched apart and torn up, and the pieces flung down. Because the girl was Christa.
Somehow Giselle got back to her hut – she thought some of the women had to almost carry her – and she lay on the narrow pallet, trying to make sense of what she had seen.
At first she questioned whether it had really been Christa she had seen – whether it had just been a similarity of features and colouring. Because, watching the girl as she was taken across the courtyard, Giselle had felt as if the past had snatched at her, and as if she might be watching her own seventeen-year-old self.
Then she wondered whether her own constant longing for both her children had conjured up a chimera. But she knew it was not that. There was more to a person than just a set of features; recognition – acceptance of an identity – happened at a deeper level. And at that level, Giselle knew it was her daughter she had seen.
And the isolation cells of Sachsenhausen were only ever used for one purpose.
Execution.
There did not seem to be any definite reasons for executions in Sachsenhausen, although often they were people who had tried to escape or had been found plotting against the Gestapo. There were a number of what were called political prisoners here, and there were also criminals, as well. Murderers, rapists. Whatever the story might be, the condemned were marched out, made to stand in a trench, and shot. Occasionally they were hanged and the hanging was usually public. But, as the prisoners said, if the Gestapo wanted to be rid of someone, they did not need a reason. They just shot you.
And now Christa was facing that. Giselle knew she would not be able to bear seeing her bright, lovely girl led out to the firing squad or the hangman’s rope. But the memory of the darkness she had sometimes sensed deep within her daughter was strongly with her. Was it the menace of Sachsenhausen that she had sensed? Had it always been ordained that Christa would die in this way?
Images from her daughter’s childhood danced agonizingly across her mind, and with them came the memory of Felix saying, with such love in his voice, that Christa was the image of what Giselle had been as a very young girl. An exact copy, he had said. A duplicate.
A duplicate. The idea slid into Giselle’s mind with the word.
She could not organize an escape for Christa – in any case, there were hardly ever successful escapes from Sachsenhausen. The picture of Silke’s Andreas writhing in agony on the night he had attempted to break out was still sickeningly with her.
She could not help Christa to escape, not without risking both their lives. But there might be a way in which she could save her from the firing squad or the hangman’s noose.
The more she thought about it, the more possible it began to seem. The more she listened to the whispers among the other inmates about the planned execution, the stronger her resolve grew. It could be done. If ever an execution in Sachsenhausen could be manipulated, this was that one.
But the longer she thought about it, the more it horrified and terrified her.
The days had blurred for Christa. She thought this might be because there was so little light inside the small room where they had put her that it was difficult to know when it was day and when it was night. Guards came and went. There was food of a kind – just about enough to keep her alive. Once they brought water so she could wash. After that she was left alone. She hated the smell of the airless room, and she hated the smell of her own body. Several times she was sick, which was disgusting, but after the first time she managed to reach the tin bucket in the corner, crouching over it, retching miserably.
She had thought, in a frightened, distant way that there would be a trial because she had certainly committed murder. She would speak out for herself, though; she would describe how Brax had raped her, how he had forced himself on her, hitting her across the face when she struggled against him. She had killed him in her own defence, she would say. But even as this thought formed, she was remembering how she had knocked him out, and then had strangled him while he was virtually unconscious. I could have escaped while he was stunned, thought Christa. I could have tried to get free – found Jacob and the others, and somehow we might have got out and got away. I didn’t have to kill Brax.
The next time one of the guards brought the food, she asked what was going to happen. Was she to be tried for murder? She was pleased that the question came out firmly and without wavering.
‘Tried?’ he said, scornfully. He had a coarse skin, like porridge that had not been properly stirred. ‘You won’t be tried, Madam Bitch. They’re saving you for the next firing squad.’
‘When—?’
‘One week from now,’ he said, and went out, turning th
e lock.
And now night really did leach into day, and time became something that distorted and mocked. One week. Seven days. At first Christa tried to keep count of the days, but she lost track, and each morning when the guards came in, she expected it to be the day they would take her out to be shot.
She could not find the courage to ask about her father, who must also be in this grim place, because she was afraid of the answer. She thought about her mother every day, and when she remembered how her father had found that familiar ghost note on the music inside the piano – when she thought her mother might still be alive – she was aware of a faint, far-off comfort.
Giselle knew it was absurd to try to send out love and reassurance to Christa lying in that cell, but she could not help it.
She had to leave her plan until the day before the firing squad was to assemble. This was leaving it dreadfully, dangerously close, but she could not see any other way.
It was general knowledge, now, that the forthcoming execution was to be on a more ceremonious scale than the customary squalid trench deaths, or the casual hangings of escaping prisoners.
This was the execution of a woman who had murdered a very high-ranking officer of the Third Reich – a man who was not only a confidante of and advisor to the Führer himself, but who was also the scion of a noble house. The Weimar Constitution of 1919 declared all Germans to be equal, of course, but the man that Christa Klein had brutally killed was a member of an ancient house of the Prussian nobility. A Freiherr. A baron. And for such a one there must be a public display of the punishment of his killer.
Gradually, it became known that Christa Klein was insisting the baron had raped her. She was pleading self-defence for her crime. None of the prisoners dared comment on this, even among themselves, but Giselle saw that most of them believed Christa was speaking the truth.
It also became known that on the day before her execution, Christa would be brought out to the Appellplatz, where she would stand before a carefully chosen group of prisoners and the commandant and all the officers. A description of her crime would be read out. She would then be returned to her cell to await her execution the following morning.
