Roots of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Baroness,’ said a hated voice from the jeep’s shadowy interior. ‘Or shall I dispense with the pretence you have spun for so long and simply call you Wilson?’

  Alice had been staring through the flap of the canvas, trying to see in which direction they were going, and she had barely registered that there was someone in the jeep. She turned sharply, but even before she had tensed her muscles to hit out, strong hard hands came out to snake around her wrists.

  ‘What a hellcat you are,’ said Leo Dreyer, keeping her hands tightly imprisoned in his. ‘Didn’t you expect to encounter me?’

  Alice had expected it at some stage but she still felt as if she had received a blow across the eyes. She glared at him. In the closeness of the jeep’s interior he was thinner and more severe than the young man she had known, and he was wearing a monocle with a thin black cord on it. It ought to have made him slightly ridiculous – foppish and effete – but it did not.

  She said in Lucretia’s disdainful voice, ‘So you know who I am?’

  ‘Of course. Ever since Alraune.’

  So it had been Alraune who had betrayed her and led to Conrad’s capture. Alice gestured to the motorbikes and the soldiers. ‘All this seems somewhat excessive. Have you really sent your soldiers scouring the streets for me, purely because Conrad preferred me to your sister all those years ago?’

  Dreyer’s eyes were still on her, the left monocled eye hugely distorted, and Alice tried to look away, but could not. He said softly, ‘My dear, I would have scoured far wider places than Vienna to find you for what you did that night.’

  The truck had gathered speed, and he loosened his tight grip on her wrists and leaned back against the vehicle’s sides. But Alice could feel the coiled tension within him, and she knew that if she made the smallest move to escape he would pounce.

  ‘After you left my father’s house that night…’

  ‘After you threw me out of your father’s house,’ said Alice at once.

  ‘…Nina became ill,’ said Dreyer, as if she had not spoken. ‘She cried for all of that night and all of the next day. She made herself sick with crying, and then she became hysterical. We began to fear for her sanity, and we called a doctor to her – he gave her bromide but for days she was overwrought to an impossible degree. She was always highly-strung, of course. She lived on her nerves.’

  Alice, who had always considered Nina Dreyer a spoiled, self-willed show-off, thought this sounded more like the tantrum of a child demanding attention, but did not say so.

  ‘At first she seemed to recover,’ said Dreyer. ‘But then we discovered that she was becoming reliant on the sedatives. She took more and more of them, and then, after a few months, she began to take cocaine – it was considered fashionable to do so in the set she moved in; it was considered modern and chic.’

  Alice, who knew about the fashion for cocaine among rich young things and about the so-called Snow Set, but who had never taken cocaine herself, remained silent. They were travelling very fast now, but several times she caught the glare of what looked to be bonfires in the streets, and the sounds of people crying or shouting, and of running feet. She would have liked to peer out through the canvas to see what was happening – certainly to see where the jeep was heading – but she would not give Dreyer even this small satisfaction.

  ‘Eventually, of course, the cocaine ruined her,’ said Dreyer, apparently oblivious to what was happening outside. ‘She began sleeping with men who would get the stuff for her; later she stole – jewellery from her friends, to start with. Twice she faced criminal charges – we thought that might pull her out of the habit, but it did not. After that she forged my father’s name on cheques. Little by little she turned into a desperate and haggard harpy.’ He glanced at her. ‘And the worse she became, the more I hated you,’ he said.

  There was a bad moment when Alice was back in the days of the Vienna household, remembering that this was the master’s son, and that she should remember her place and be respectful and obedient. But Lucretia, with imperious annoyance, said, Rubbish! This is a bully and a brute, and I owe him nothing and I refuse to be cowed by him.

  So when she finally spoke, it was the baroness who said, ‘This is all utter nonsense, Leo.’ Yes, call him Leo, remind him that you’re equals these days. ‘You’re behaving as if we’re living inside a Victorian melodrama,’ said Lucretia. ‘All this absurd talk about having your revenge on the woman who wronged your sister—It’s like something out of East Lynne.’ This sounded satisfyingly disdainful, but inside she was panic-stricken. I’m cooped up with a powerful man who hates me and who’s almost certainly taking me to some miserable prison camp, and I’m telling him he’s behaving like a Victorian villain! I wonder if I’m entirely sane at the moment?

  ‘I’m extremely sorry for what happened to Nina,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t my fault that she became a drug addict. I didn’t steal Conrad from her, in fact I had no idea your father had intended him to marry her.’ A pause. ‘I will admit that I behaved less than well that night, but plenty of girls lose a lover and survive. Nina had looks and money and position. And a doting family.’ She leaned back in the jeep and studied him. ‘Back then I told a roomful of people that you had tried to seduce me and that I refused to be seduced. Surely you aren’t still resentful of that, Leo? Such a small event, wasn’t it? Or perhaps it wasn’t a small event to you. Perhaps it was important to you.’

  His eyes snapped with anger, but he mastered it almost at once – it was rather frightening to see the iron self-control clamping down. In a tight, clipped voice he said, ‘I am entirely within my rights to take you to a labour camp. Himmler has ordered that all Jews be segregated.’

  ‘I’m not a Jew,’ said Lucretia at once.

  ‘Among so many, that will never be noticed. And you have the colouring.’ Incredibly, one hand came out to touch her hair. As she flinched, he smiled. ‘And,’ said Leo Dreyer, ‘if you try to protest against wrongful incarceration, among so many that will not be noticed either. In any case you have consorted with a Jew all these years. You gave birth to his bastard.’

  ‘One day, you will pay for that remark,’ said Lucretia, sounding bored. She peered through the jeep’s sides again, and in a sharper voice, said, ‘Something’s happening out there, isn’t it? All those people shouting – the soldiers everywhere—Whatever it is, you’ve used it as your cover to get at me—’

  ‘Yes, something is happening,’ he said. ‘Last night the German government unleashed a pogrom against the Jews—’ He stopped, watching her reaction. ‘I see you know what the word means.’

  ‘Mass killing,’ said Lucretia, a completely new horror crawling over her skin. ‘Organized mass murder.’

  ‘Yes. An interesting derivation – Russian, originally. Used, of course, when the Jews in Russia were massacred in the early years of the century.’ For a moment he leaned forward, moving the jeep’s canvas covering to peer out at the streets.

  ‘We are burning the synagogues,’ he said. ‘Throughout the cities of Germany and Austria we are destroying everything Jewish – all the Jew-owned shops and businesses, all the Torah scrolls we can find, all the prayer-books. Can you see how the sky is lit up with the flames? Over there to the west?’ He was looking out into the streets, his attention momentarily away from his prisoner. Was this the moment to make a lunge forward and jump out? No. The helmeted and visored soldiers were still riding level with the jeep. She would not get five yards.

  As Dreyer let fall the canvas flap, she said, ‘Where are you taking me?’ And please say Dachau, you evil bully, for at least that would mean Conrad and I would be together, and perhaps there would be a way to get out of Germany with him…

  ‘You are being taken to a place near to Weimar,’ said Dreyer. ‘It is a very charming part of Eastern Germany, fairly near to the Czechoslovakian border. Miniature castles overlooking the river, and pine forests and traces of the ancient Kingdom of Thuringia.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Lucret
ia, coldly polite. ‘Bavaria and Bohemia. Home of the cruellest of the fairytales. Woodcutters changing into prowling wolves when there’s a full moon, and princesses shut in doorless towers. Madmen slaughtering the innocents through an entire night and arrogantly attempting to destroy a religion.’

  Dreyer smiled slightly. ‘You always had a romantic side,’ he said. ‘But also, you always had claws just beneath the surface.’

  ‘If I had claws I would use them to scratch out your eyes, believe me, Leo.’

  ‘Would you, Alraune?’ he said, very softly. ‘Don’t stare at me like that. You know quite well what I mean. The final scene. Alraune stalking the man who made her. Gouging out his eyes and then offering him up as a sacrifice. You would like to play Alraune to my Professor, wouldn’t you? You would like to sink your talons into my eyes. You won’t get the chance, of course.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ said Lucretia acidly. ‘What is this place you’re taking me to? Wherever it is, I shan’t be there for ever.’

  ‘No. But you’ll like Weimar. And it has a good many cultural associations. Goethe lived there for a time; also Franz Liszt and Bach. Unfortunately, however, you won’t see much of the town.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting that I’m very well known in Vienna? People will search for me—’ But even as she said it, Alice knew that she had already burnt her boats on that score. If people had been going to search for Lucretia von Wolff they would have done it weeks ago. Even so, she said, ‘Questions will be asked. You really can’t expect to get away with this.’

  ‘I can get away with it,’ he said. ‘Tonight we are the masters. Tonight, baroness, I can do anything I wish.’

  They looked at one another, and as the silence stretched out between them, Alice was suddenly aware of a stir of emotion that no longer had anything to do with fear or hatred. It vanished almost as soon as it formed, but it left an indelible, shameful, print on her mind, and she knew she would not be able to forget it. This is the man who imprisoned Conrad and who threatened Deborah, and I felt that wrench of sexual attraction for him! Had he sensed it?

  She said, ‘You’re taking me to a labour camp?’

  ‘Yes. What did you expect? You are going,’ said Dreyer, ‘to the place of the beechwood forest.’

  And, as Alice stared at him, he said, ‘Konzentrationslager Buchenwald.’

  The journey to Buchenwald was the most appalling experience Alice had ever known.

  The SS truck drew up at a small station – Alice had long since lost all sense of direction, and she had no idea whether they were still in Vienna, or even whether they were still in Austria – and along with what seemed to be two or three hundred others, she was herded into a train.

  It was a long, jolting, sick-making ride. The carriages were sparse and uncomfortable; some were roofless, little better than cattle trucks, and the prisoners were packed in haphazardly, forty and fifty to a coach.

  Alice still had on the clothes she had been wearing when Leo Dreyer found her – the long dark raincoat and the plain dark skirt and jumper which she had hoped would render her unnoticeable – but many of the other prisoners had on loose shirt-like garments with the yellow Star of David either sewn or painted on the fronts. She had no idea if this was intended as a brand or simply as some kind of identification, because the prisoners all seemed to wear it in numb obedience. Some of the women were crying in a miserable, beaten way, but most of them seemed sunk in a dreadful patient acceptance. Most of them had lost their homes to the Nazis in what Alice had already heard called Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, named from the smashing of glass fronts of so many hundreds of Jewish shops. A great many of them had lost their families as well. The few women present held on to their children with frightened desperation, but other than that they seemed to be beyond caring what came next, and they did what they were told by the armed SS guards, cringing if the machine-guns were raised threateningly.

  Had Conrad been treated like this? Forced to wear the yellow insignia, beaten into this shambling, cringing servility? Agony squeezed round Alice’s heart at the thought of it.

  Somewhere during the nightmare train journey all the colour and all the light seemed to drain from the world. I’m back in one of my own films, Alice thought, drifting in and out of an uneasy half-slumber, occasionally waking to massage her cramped limbs. Everything’s gradually becoming black and gloomy and filled with shadows. And there certainly isn’t going to be a romantic rescue in the final frame, in fact I’m not at all sure if there’s even going to be a final frame. No, I won’t think that. There’ll be a way to escape. Perhaps when we get into a station…? Yes, I’ll wait until then.

  But when they reached Buchenwald’s small railway station the Schutzstaffeln were everywhere, and almost all of them were armed with sub-machine-guns, so that only a lunatic would have tried to run away.

  The exhausted prisoners were tumbled out of the hot, evil-smelling carriages, and into the waiting lorries. As they drove through the town a heavy dusk was starting to close down, but it was possible to see that Buchenwald was, as Leo Dreyer had so tauntingly said, a picturesque little place, with little doll’s houses for the people to live in, and a minuscule church and an inn.

  Wood-carving and violin-making, thought Alice. Wine festivals and toy-making and miniature castles overlooking the rivers. Yes, there was Ettersburg Castle on a ridge of the hillside, with its pepperpot turrets and toy drawbridge. This was a place where you might come for a holiday, just as Goethe had done, and just as Liszt and Schiller had done. You would enjoy the quaintness and the fairytale atmosphere of the place, and if you were so minded you might write your music or pen your luminous essays. But most fairytales had a dark side, and now that they had driven out of the little town, the road was already starting to feel lonely and sinister. Like the feeling you got in a dream where safe, familiar things became suddenly imbued with menace, so that the dream slid down into a nightmare.

  It was dark inside the truck, but she could see that they had left the town and that the road was fringed with the characteristic pine trees. Was it dark enough to jump from the back of the truck and trust to luck that she could reach the forest’s shelter before the soldiers opened fire on her? She was just trying to decide this when the truck rumbled around a curve in the road, and there ahead of them were immense iron gates – massive heavy structures, like the gates guarding a giant’s castle.

  Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. The darkness at the heart of the nightmare.

  At the sight of it the men and women in the lorry drew instinctively closer to one another for comfort, and even from the lorry, Alice could see the high fences surrounding the entire compound, with, beyond them, serried rows of barrack-like buildings. Guard towers jutted up from the fences at intervals, with massive black-snouted machine-guns mounted in each one. A terrible bleak loneliness closed around her. No one knows where I am. Conrad doesn’t know, and Deborah doesn’t know. There’s absolutely no means of anyone reaching me here.

  The gates swung slowly and silently open, as if some invisible machinery were being operated, and the lorries drove through. Alice glanced back and saw the gates close. Shutting her into the nightmare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Lucy had almost finished the horror-film presentation for the satellite TV companies, and she was quite pleased with it. Her idea of setting it all in a tongue-in-cheek horror framework seemed to have worked quite well. Quondam’s technical department had dubbed part of Tartini’s The Devil’s Trill to use as background for The Devil’s Sonata, and although there had been a bit of a royalties tussle with the record company who had included it in a recent compilation of semi-and quasi-religious string music, Lucy thought the tussle had been worth it because the music gave terrific atmosphere to the film.

  She was putting together a final set of visual and audio effects – she had unearthed some beautifully menacing out-takes from an ancient Tod Slaughter version of Dracula, which could be blown up and
possibly tinted with suitably blood-hued crimson or even back-projected on to a screen – and she had spent two hilarious afternoons in the sound department, helping them to fake creepy footsteps and creaking doors.

  But since finding the old newsreel of Lucretia on Howard Hughes’ Stratoliner, the unreadable face of the dark-eyed child who had been at Lucretia’s side kept coming between Lucy and the grainy black-and-white images she was working on. With it came the familiar nagging curiosity from her own childhood: the need to know the truth about Alraune and to know whether Alraune had really existed. Who were you? said Lucy to the ghost-child on the film. And what were you? Did you exist, and if you did, what happened to you? But I daresay that even if I could trace you, I’d find that you were only on that newsreel because you were the son or daughter of one of the cabin crew, or a friend’s child that Lucretia was chaperoning to or from some Swiss resort.

  If Aunt Deb had still been alive Lucy would have let her see the newsreel; Aunt Deb would have loved it, and she would probably have known the exact circumstances of Lucretia’s journey to or from Switzerland – she might have recalled some tantalizing fragment of scandal about Lucretia and Howard Hughes, and she might even have been persuaded to say whether the child in the newsreel could actually have been Alraune. Lucy felt all over again the ache of loss for Aunt Deb who had spun all those stories, and she remembered how she had always believed that Deb had known far more about Alraune than she had ever told.

  Was there was anyone else she could talk to about the newsreel? How about Edmund? Edmund, finicky and pedantic as he was, disapproving of Lucretia as he always had been, had always been deeply interested in Deborah Fane’s side of the family. And he did not have to have Alraune explained to him, because he had more or less grown up with all the stories and the rumours and the speculation, just as Lucy had. He was, in fact, the obvious person, but Lucy hesitated. ‘Oh, Lucy, you’re such a romantic under that tough façade,’ Edmund had said that evening, and there had been the sudden urgent thrust of his body against hers as they made the coffee. Or is my memory making it a bit more sexually charged than it actually was? thought Lucy. Even so, she felt awkward about phoning Edmund at the moment, although he would certainly like to know about this fragment of the past that she had uncovered. She was just trying to decide whether to ring him when a call came in from a Detective Inspector Jennie Fletcher.