He scowled at himself. Perhaps the women were right.
He watched her, laughing easily now, extricating herself from that Andrew’s hand. She was going. He had lost. It was a loss he didn’t know how to repair.
‘It’s goodbye then, Adam,’ she was looking over his shoulder. ‘Thanks for all the help. No, don’t come to the door. I’ll see myself off.’ She waved at them both.
Helena sat very still for a moment before starting the engine. Her heart was beating too fast. She took a deep breath. She had escaped. And now she could focus on what needed to be done. She would find out the truth of Max’s death, even if she hadn’t been able to unearth the whole truth of his life. Adam Peters wouldn’t prevent her.
She glanced at her map, traced the route and drove away, her thoughts keeping pace with her speed.
Adam had held back from telling her that Max had been to the house again. They troubled her, these visits he had made, usually it seemed during Adam’s absence. Why? What could he have been looking for? She had never known him to show any particular interest in art before. Perhaps it had something to do with Adam’s father.
By the time she had reached her destination, her speculations had abutted on the necessity of a thorough search of the house. If she couldn’t carry it out, then the police would have to. James and she would talk to them tomorrow.
It took Helena some time to convince the bossy grey-haired woman behind the desk at the Schluss agency that she had both a perfect right and a familial responsibility to visit the Chalet in which Max had spent his last days. But at last, the woman handed over the key and traced the directions on the map.
‘The key must be back with us by two o’clock at the latest. I do not have anyone to send with you now, so you must leave me some identification. Ja?’
Helena searched through her purse, decided on her British Library card.’
The woman examined it dubiously. ‘A passport or a driving permit would be better.’
Helena plunked her passport on the desk.
‘So, that is good,’ her thin lips formed into a stiff smile for the first time. ‘Now I have some insurance. Till two o’clock then, Fraulein.’
Helena turned to go, found herself called back.
‘And Fraulein Latimer,’ she was leafing through the passport, ‘you will not speak of this to anyone. It is not good for business for one of our best chalets to be associated with a death.’
‘Not to anyone,’ Helena muttered.
The chalet was remote, perched half way up a steep incline. Around it, the tall firs cut out the sun. Behind, the ragged mountains loomed, granite hard, topped with snow. Helena walked, her boots crackling over a carpet of prickly cones. It was colder here, gloomy. She drew her coat more closely round her.
In the distance, she could hear the rush of a brook against stone. Closer to, a flurry of bird calls.
She opened the door with a sudden sense of apprehension.
The room was square in shape, utterly functional - a bare wooden floor, two chairs, a table, a small stove, and next to it a tiny paraffin cooker. A ladder led to the loft. She climbed it, saw two camp beds and a chest of drawers, nothing more. A hiker’s cabin, she thought, providing only the bare requisite.
She looked out the window through the ruddy bark of the trees. There was a glimmering on the horizon, a cold hard light. It took her a moment to realise it was the lake. She shuddered. She could feel Max, standing here, on this very spot looking out on that cold, glistening surface, staring through the trees into the light.
Quickly, she opened the drawers one after the other, knowing she would find nothing. She checked under the beds as well, then clambered downstairs and sat at the rough bare table.
She could imagine Max here, day in, day out, alone, meditating, writing. Or perhaps he had passed beyond writing, beyond the desire to communicate, to a sparer communion with the elements themselves. And then walked all those miles to sink himself within them. She stared out at the trees, wishing they could speak to her.
Suddenly she jumped up. Writing! Surely the officer in charge would have said something about a manuscript that had been found here, would have read through it to see if it contained an indication? But in English?
She was suddenly filled with excitement. She locked the door to the Chalet and with an acute sense that she was literally treading in Max’s footprints, she climbed down the hill some way, skidding between the trees on the wet ground. Then she came back doing a full circle round the cabin before returning to the car.
From the road, unless one knew it was there, it was easy to miss the cabin, its dark wood all but obliterated by the surrounding trees. It occurred to her that as well as a site for meditation, the cabin served as a perfect hideaway. The thought disturbed her. A hideaway from what?
When she examined her map, she realised she wasn’t far from the site of one of Max’s postcards to her: Sylvenstein-Speicher. She sped along the route, stopped in a little hamlet to ask about the place, was told by a talkative waiter that the Sylvenstein was a vast reservoir, a technological wonder. Roads and settlements had made way for eighty million cubic metres of water. He looked at her with pride in his face.
What could the dam have meant to Max, Helena wondered? That kind of information couldn’t be gleaned from a visit. It would take research, digging into files. That would have to come later.
She retraced her steps, headed back to the agency with the Chalet key, before moving on to find the little boy who had rented Max his boat.
The house with the designated address was on the side of the road which bordered the lake. As she should have known, the boy in question was at school. His mother, somewhat defensively, reiterated the story Helena already knew, only adding in a scolding tone that her son should have told them sooner about his missing boat.
‘He was afraid, of course.’
‘Poor child,’ Helena commiserated.
The woman accompanied her over the road and down the curving path which led to the lake. The boat was there, tied to a tree stump by a thick rope.
‘Could I go out in it,’ Helena asked the woman on impulse.
The woman looked at her with fear in her eyes. ‘I think it is better not,’ she murmured, turned away.
‘No, no, of course.’ She didn’t try to persuade her. The woman’s anxiety was too palpable.
Helena would have liked to be left here on her own, but she had missed her chance. The woman hovered around her nervously.
She paused nonetheless to gaze out to the centre of the lake. There was no wind and the waters were glassy, an aquamarine stillness. To her side, around the bend, she suddenly noticed the unmistakeable contour of the grounds at Seehafen and beyond the trees, half-hidden, the domed roof of the house. Why the house, again? It was uncanny.
‘Thank you for letting me look,’ she turned to the woman, who was visibly relieved to see her back to her car.
The police station in Murnau offered no joy, however hard she pressed. Officer Weiss was not in. They told her to come to the inquest. She drove to Munich, checked in at the hotel where she had stayed those two months ago, and walked: walked past the stately buildings of the Residenz, past the blondly elegant university, through a small stretch of the English Gardens and then up into the busy narrow streets of Schwabing. She thought for some reason of Johannes and Anna and Bettina, and then of Adam.
He had told her that he had seen her that first night she had come here. That night of Carnival. Adam the fool. What had he said to her then? She couldn’t remember now. She had been too upset. But he had guided her. And now he had led her astray.
Useless thoughts, she scolded herself. She stopped in front of a bookshop, went in on impulse and asked whether they had anything on the construction of the Sylvenstein-Speicher reservoir, was handed a thick glossy book. She paid for it, walked on, backtracked, towards the Marienplatz and into the market square.
From somewhere music echoed. A crowd had gathered. In its cen
tre stood a young tow-haired man with a girl’s face and a pure skin-tingling tenor. He was singing to a backing tape: Cavaradossi’s last aria from Tosca. Emily’s favourite. She stopped to listen, felt the tears biting at her eyes.
Svani per sempre il sogno mio d’amore
Vanished forever is that dream of love
Fled is that hour
And desperately I die
And never before have I loved life so much!
The music followed her across the square. She fled into a stuberl to escape its longing, sat at a long narrow table, ordered a sandwich, a glass of wine.
The cover of the menu showed a thin gangling figure, bent like a question mark. The comic, Karl Valentin. A sophisticated clown. His sayings littered the menu. ‘Die Zukunft war früher auch besser.’ ‘The future was better before too.’
Helena smiled, thought of Adam’s lecture. Adam.
With sudden determination, she took a notepad from her bag and started to make three lists: Suicide Accident Other.
She showed the list to James Whitaker the next day. His plane had been only a little late. He had had time for a kip and a shower and they were lunching together in the Hofgarten Cafe. Through the windows she could see the bright ochre facade of the colossal Theatinerkirche where the Wittelsbach kings lay buried. Helena shook herself. Death, she was finding death everywhere.
‘Well?’ she turned to James.
He handed her list back to her. ‘Have you gone crazy, Helena? I know you’re a brilliant investigative journalist, but this time you’ve gone mad,’ his voice was hushed. ‘Tear it up. Put it away,’ he looked covertly over his shoulder and then turned his scrubbed face to her. His eyes beneath the spectacles were red-rimmed like a rabbit’s. ‘You’re not really imagining that Max was murdered?’ he wiped his mouth carefully as if to remove an obscenity.
‘It’s possible,’ Helena put more certainty in her voice than she felt. In the quiet formality of this room, the basis for her suspicions seemed strangely inchoate, out-of-place.
‘Well, put it out of your mind. If the police haven’t suggested it, have no evidence, there isn’t any. And can you imagine the scandal of a murder, what it would do to our reputation, to endowments?’
‘Since when have we been on the same side as the police?’ Helena muttered.
‘That’s not the point. If any of your suspicions get out to the public, we’re sunk. You know very well that murder rebounds on the victim. The press would have a field day. And you have proof of nothing. Only doubts. That house Max wrote to you about, a fragment of a letter. A couple of pictures he sent you. A reservoir. This man you keep harping on about who you say has shadowed all your movements here. And Max’s. But it’s just coincidence. None of it adds up. None of it.’
‘Did you check him out?’
‘I put the call through. Despite my better judgement.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. I’m here, aren’t I, not by my computer.’
Helena pushed the food around on the large white plate.
‘So despite all I’ve said, you think Max’s death was an accident?’
‘I prefer to think that. Jerome and Charlie would prefer to think that.’ He evoked the eminent figures who had provided the burden to their entire conversation. At Helena’s scowl, he went over it all again, as if for a child,
‘Look, Max obviously wanted to be alone, away from us all. Like a monk in need of solitude. So he went off. That’s altogether in keeping with his character. There’s nothing suspicious about it.’
‘That’s not what you said back in January.’
‘That was early days and there’s been no buzz of any kind from the activists since then, no rumours. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot, rereading him. It makes sense to me now. A lot more sense than what you’re suggesting. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that the Stasi were after him or the CIA, that the redoubtable Max Bergmann was about to blow up some nuclear installation or put a hole in some dam.’ He flushed as he realised his voice had risen, quickly gulped his mineral water, steadied himself, ‘I know it’s hard coming to terms with the death of someone we loved and admired, perhaps even worshipped, but there’s no point engaging in paranoid fantasies, Helena.’ He met her gaze earnestly.
‘So now you’re telling me I’m deluded.’
‘No. Only that you have an active imagination. Mine is very prosaic. Max tripped, slipped off the boat, somehow. There was no one around to shout for. Or maybe he decided to go for a swim and the water was too cold for him to bear. He used to do that you know, go for dips in the early spring, when the pond had just melted. Ritual purification I used to think of it as.’
‘With all his clothes on?’ Helena intervened caustically.
‘No, perhaps not.’ James looked a little sheepish. Suddenly he leaned towards her and a different expression came over his face, a look of reverent awe which sat oddly on his thin features. ‘In my heart of hearts, Helena, what I really think is that it was suicide. A grand gesture. The retreat, the isolated chalet you told me about, Max had reached the end of his tether and decided to merge into the elements before there were no more elements to merge into. But the money men don’t want that. It’s too extreme, kooky. And as I see it, my job is to keep the farm alive, to keep Max’s work going.’
‘At the expense of the truth.’
He nodded, wiped his spectacles again.
‘So after all I’ve told you, you won’t ask the police to search the house.’
He gestured at her impatiently, ‘Let’s wait for the inquest, shall we.’
The small courtroom had been recently refurbished, a conference hall rather than a palace of justice, with red padded seats and solid tawny furniture. The giant of a public prosecutor presided with brisk efficiency. Helena had trouble following the list of precise questions and expert answers. She reminded herself that this was not so much a problem of German as of legal language as a whole.
On the other side of the room, amongst a cluster of people she suddenly thought might be reporters, she could see the straight-backed woman from the Schluss Agency and the small boy’s fearful mother. Seated amongst a row of policemen was Officer Weiss who refused her glance as assiduously as she refused Adam’s.
He had arrived shortly after them. Somehow, she hadn’t expected to see him here. There was no real reason for him to come, unless the apprehensions she harboured and James had so derided had some basis. Helena stared resolutely in front of her, declining to acknowledge him, though she was all too palpably aware of his presence.
Officer Weiss’s testimony followed the lines she already knew, but she learned that other people in the vicinity had been questioned, that no one had been seen on the lake apart from Max.
To Helena’s surprise, the name of Adam Peters was the next but one on the clerk’s lips. So that explained his presence. She listened intently watching that mobile face for any sign it might give. But Adam was terse, answering questions briefly and exactly, explaining how the deceased had come to his house on three occasions to look at the work of Johannes Bahr; how he had suspected the deceased might be Bergmann because of a contact in London who had come to search for him; how he had got in touch with the person in question when he had heard of the death.
So she was now a contact in London. Helen grimaced at the designation, almost missing the sound of her name in the process. She walked awkwardly to the stand, confirmed she was a journalist, heard herself being asked whether the man who had identified himself to the Schluss Agency as Max Hillman was to the best of her knowledge Max Bergmann. She nodded, was asked to speak up, and clipped out her ‘yes’.
Did she have any knowledge as to why Herr Bergmann might have used a false name?
Helena shrugged, found herself mumbling something as to Max wishing to be alone, untroubled by acquaintances or press. Or perhaps he was evading hostile forces. He was a well known figure in the Green Movement in America.
The prosecutor l
ooked at her sternly. What kind of hostile forces did she have in mind?
Helena felt James scowling at her, though he could only have guessed at her words. She shrugged. ‘It’s only an intuition,’ she murmured.
Contempt settled on the prosecutor’s features. ‘Thank you, Fraulein Latimer.’
She thought he was about to gesture her off the stand, but he continued. Had Herr Bergmann suffered from depression? Had there been any intimation that he might want to take his own life?
Helena shook her head abruptly in response to both questions.
Had he to her knowledge latterly suffered from fainting spells, moments of unconsciousness?
‘I don’t think so. I don’t know.’ There was so much, she thought, she didn’t know.
‘That will be all Fraulein Latimer.’
It was as she returned, a little shamefaced, to her seat that Helena met Adam’s eyes. They were warm on her, too intimate. She stiffened her shoulders and saw his lips curl into that ironical smile. He was laughing at her, a laugh of triumph, she suddenly thought, as suspicion gripped her again and with it something like rancour. She slid hastily into her place.
The interrogation of the pathologist lasted longest. The intricate technical terms, the impersonal tone of voice, left Max utterly to one side. What was under investigation was a pulmonary condition, a fibrosis of conductant tissue. In the midst of it all, Helena heard the word cardiac arrest.
‘Which could in a man of Herr Bergmann’s years whose conductant tissue was fibrosed be caused by the shock of icy water?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘Certainly.’
The verdict, though it came some time later and after the question of suicide was raised and discounted, was clear for her from that moment on: Max had suffered an accidental death.
She had only had a moment’s time to relay this to James when amidst the general hubbub of the court rising, she heard her name called again.
A clerk gave her a slip of paper. She could go and pick up Herr Bergmann’s effects now and leave instructions about transport of the body.
Dreams of Innocence Page 67
