He nodded. His unblinking gaze never left her.
Trudi’s mind was racing now, devouring in huge strides what might have taken an age of painful plodding not long before.
She said, ‘Trent.’
‘Yes?’
‘I know I’m telling the truth even if you don’t. If I discount coincidence, which I must, that leaves just one link. Trent. In the sixties it was, when he gave up flying. We left Zürich and went to Brussels where he started to work for Schiller-Reise proper.’
‘Proper?’
‘I mean, he’d worked for them before, or rather the Swiss charter company had. I can remember meeting Herr Schiller early on in Zürich. I remember how he looked at me … Could it be he realized then who I was? I was still young. I still looked like my mother’s photo. Could that be why he gave Trent the job?’
‘To keep tabs on you? Perhaps,’ said Jünger.
He looked as if he might be about to say something else, then shook his head as a climber might do who has experienced an unaccustomed giddiness on a steep traverse.
Trudi thought she could guess the reason why.
‘I think you know a lot more than you tell me, Herr Jünger,’ she accused.
‘Why do you say that?’ he enquired mildly.
‘Because whenever we talk, I feel that it’s like … well, like a fencing match. We exchange blows, not information.’
He nodded as if he liked the idea – or its expression.
‘If it is a fencing match, Frau Adamson,’ he said, ‘that implies both sides have a weapon.’
She laughed and said uneasily, ‘I’m just a defenceless woman, anyone can see that.’
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps you too know a lot more than you tell.’
For the first time it came fully home to Trudi that Jünger really considered her a possible danger, or a threat, or an opponent of some kind. A life of self-effacement had left her with so little self to efface that to be taken so seriously was like stepping out of your shower on to a floodlit stage.
She opened her mouth to protest, closed it again as she recalled all the things she did know but had not passed on to Jünger.
Especially about his brother, deep-frozen in that Plague village cottage.
He smiled at her humourlessly, as though interpreting her silence as the admission of guilt it was. But her recognition of how seriously he took her had forced another revelation into her mind. She voiced it instinctively as it formulated itself.
‘Nothing that happens here happens accidentally, does it, Herr Jünger?’ she burst out. ‘That business when I came yesterday, those awful women, that assault! That was no administrative error, was it? That was done according to your express order!’
He stood up and buttoned up the few buttons of his old-fashioned Austrian jacket. So constrained, he should have looked rather absurd, like a man in a corset, but he managed instead to look more like a weary knight strapping on his breastplate for yet another foray.
He held out his hand and said, ‘I must go now, Frau Adamson. Leb’ wohl.’
‘Not Wiedersehen?’ said Trudi.
‘I don’t care to tempt fate. Not too often.’
They shook hands.
The meeting had only taken half an hour. Obscurely Trudi felt that the initiative she had thought to grasp by insisting on seeing Jünger himself had been wrested from her.
‘What about Astrid?’ she asked. ‘Why was she murdered?’
‘That is a good question to ask yourself, Frau Adamson,’ he replied.
The door opened and Fräulein Weigel appeared. Jünger turned away. This was her dismissal and though Trudi resented it, she did not know yet how to resist it.
As she followed the young woman to the lift, she felt her inward agitation growing, an as yet unchannelled urge to action. Something must happen, was going to happen, and she wanted to be for once an initiator, not a passive object. Perhaps this was how Samson had felt on his way to the Philistine games.
And look what happened to him! she thought ruefully, and chuckled aloud. Chuckling was not a common activity of hers and possibly the sound came out odd, or perhaps it wasn’t a sound the po-faced Fräulein Weigel was used to hearing in this building, but she shot Trudi a sternly reproving look as she summoned the lift.
As they descended, Trudi said conversationally, ‘So, it turns out you were only following orders after all, Fräulein?’
Weigel stared ahead indifferently which irritated Trudi into adding, ‘Like Eichmann and the rest.’
This got through.
Weigel glanced at her contemptuously and as the lift stopped, said, ‘You may be right, gnädige Frau. It is after all perhaps still a version of the Jewish problem.’
As the doors opened, Trudi hit her. She did not plan it. And it happened so quickly that she was already feeling the amazement that followed the blow before she truly experienced the anger that launched it. Nor was it a slap but a full-blooded punch, the first she could recollect ever having thrown. It caught the woman on the side of the mouth. And Trudi’s last image before she marched across the marble floor and out of the double door, which the commissionaire had difficulty in getting open in time, was of Weigel’s lips parted in pain and shock, with a smear of blood across the porcelain perfection of her left upper incisors.
Part Seven
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain …
BURNS: To a Mouse
1
She told James Dacre everything. Any cautious reticence she may have intended was swept away in a flash-flood of horrified amazement as she re-ran that moment in the lift. Of all the self-revelations she had experienced since Trent’s death, this one affected her the most.
Like Doubting Thomas, James inspected her hands as if needing the ocular proof of her story. There was a brown smudge on her right knuckles. She dabbed at it with a moistened handkerchief and discovered a cut in the skin and was relieved to think it was her own blood, not Weigel’s.
‘So,’ said James Dacre, regarding her quizzically. ‘Always something new about you, Trudi. This is not at all what Mrs Fielding led me to expect.’
‘You’d better ask for a rebate,’ she retorted.
Then she burst into tears. When Dacre reached forward to comfort her, she pushed him away, as angry at her own emotionalism as she had been shocked by her violence. He accepted the rebuff with the tranquillity which characterized his actions and which proved probably more calming than an embrace.
‘James,’ she said, wiping her eyes with the bloodstained handkerchief, ‘would you mind, before anything else, let’s find out the earliest flight home.’
‘Home,’ he said, as if the word intrigued him. ‘All right.’
He went to the telephone. Trudi noticed for the first time that he spoke German fluently, though with an unmistakably English accent.
‘Nothing direct to Manchester,’ he said. ‘But there’s a flight to Heathrow tonight at five with seats available. Shall I book?’
She nodded. He made the booking then, turning to her with a smile, said, ‘Now what about some lunch?’
By an unspoken agreement, they dropped all reference to the problems and puzzles of Schiller-Reise and spent their few remaining hours in Vienna like tourists. James Dacre proved to have a genuine gift for enjoyment and when his curiosity outstripped Trudi’s expertise – as it did frequently – this was the occasion of mirth and a springboard for a game in which Trudi mixed her own fantasy with historic and architectural fact and Dacre tried to catch her out.
They arrived late for check-in, a sin underlined by the desk-girl’s pointed look at her watch before feeding them into her computer. Giggling, they went through into the departure lounge and waited for their flight to be called.
‘You know something, James,’ said Trudi. ‘Of all the time I’ve spent in Vienna, the happiest part has been these last couple of hours.’
‘That includes the night before last?’ queried D
acre mockingly.
‘Beds don’t count. Beds can be anywhere,’ retorted Trudi.
He was observing her quizzically, but she sensed an underlying genuine puzzlement.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Like I said earlier, you’ve changed a lot. Or …’
‘Or?’ she prompted.
‘Or perhaps you haven’t. Listen, that’s our plane, isn’t it?’
On the journey home the euphoria slowly evaporated. Dacre seemed to be tired, and dozed – or pretended to doze. Trudi studied his face, calm and assured even in repose, and felt a barrier between them. Her father had once tried to explain about this barrier. He had been a little drunk at the time. ‘It shuts us off from each other, each man from each other,’ he had said. ‘Sometimes it is as broad and unbridgeable as the Atlantic and you can sit and look at another man’s face – eyes, nose, teeth and smiling mouth; the same as yours, the same as all men’s – and yet between you is a gap to sink a regiment, or a race in. Sometimes it is almost not there. Like between me and your mother, Trudi. Like between you and me. But it still exists, in every case it still exists. That you learn. That you cannot forget.’
The plane landed at Heathrow. The airport building had blossomed glass and concrete during the past twenty-five years, yet enough remained to bring back memories. Interestingly they brought no pain, though the images of Trent and Jan flickered prominently among them. It was curious – them she recognized almost unchanged; the big barrier seemed to be between herself and the little office mouse who avoided where possible crossing the middle of a room but always stuck to the wall.
‘You look tired,’ said James Dacre.
‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ he said firmly.
Outside the terminal, he hailed a taxi.
‘St Pancras,’ he said.
‘James,’ she enquired during the long ride. ‘Who’s paying for this?’
He laughed and said, ‘We’ll find a way of putting it on Herr Jünger’s tab, shall we?’
They spoke little on the train. Now she really was tired. At Sheffield, as they waited for another taxi, she said, ‘James, your car must still be at Manchester. I’m sorry. This has all been a terrible inconvenience for you.’
He said, ‘Is that how I’m to regard it? A terrible inconvenience?’
‘I didn’t mean …’
‘No. I know you didn’t.’ He smiled and went on. ‘But it is a nuisance not having the car. I noticed on the departure board that there’s a train to Manchester in ten minutes. I could be across there and back with the car in a couple of hours. Would you mind doing the last stage home by yourself?’
‘I’m not entirely helpless,’ she retorted.
‘I didn’t think you were. But that’s not why I worry about you.’
‘Why then?’
A taxi drew up. He opened the door but she did not move.
He said, ‘Trudi, what’s between us, well, it’s gone further than I … thought possible. I’d like to think it could last, become permanent. Think about it.’
She said with an effort at lightness, ‘Is this a proposal? If so, of what?’
He did not answer but kissed her fiercely. She broke loose, got into the taxi and wound down the window. He looked at her more grimly than a man should who had just made such a declaration.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, and banged the cab roof.
She looked back as the taxi nosed its way into the main road, but already he had vanished.
What am I going to say? she asked herself. And found she had no answer.
The streets glistened with a fine cold rain and the traffic moved along in a hissing haze. There were few pedestrians and by the time they turned into the gloomy corridor of Linden Lane, there were no other vehicles in sight except for a few parked cars, and the cracks of light through curtained windows were as exclusive here as she had felt them that night in the Plague village of Eyam.
Hope House was in total darkness. Would she have felt more reassured to see it ablaze with light? Dark or light, it didn’t feel like home. Though with James by her side … she felt herself slipping towards a decision.
The taxi driver dropped her case on the pavement without leaving his cab.
‘Night, luv,’ he said.
She thought of asking him to accompany her to the front door but even as she balanced new fortitude against old fears, the cab moved away.
Slowly she began to walk up the drive. The moment she passed through the gate, she had a sense of being watched. But who wouldn’t? It would take a stronger nerve than hers not to be affected by walking up a dark driveway to an empty house on such a wet and windy night! So confounding her particular fears in a general susceptibility, she pressed on towards the front door. One thing being frightened of the darkness of the garden did was to turn the house from a cold unwelcoming hulk to a haven of light and warmth.
Something moved. Away to her left. It was surely nothing. The wind in the shrubbery. Rain spattering on the waxy pallor of evergreen leaves. Nothing.
It was almost completely dark. Ahead the hulk of the house, no detail visible except the outline of the dreadful garden gnomes which guarded the front porch and whose pale grey stone seemed to possess its own ghostly fluorescence.
Definitely a movement now! Mind multiplying natural explanations – wind, rain, a cat, a dog – and feet racing also as she ran the last few yards, knowing she was pursued, and thrust her key like a talisman at the outer porch door.
Incredibly she found the lock first time, twisted the key, turned the handle, and stumbled into the porch. Dragging the key out, she twisted the ring to find the key to the inner door. In her panic, the bunch slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Stooping, she began to search for it, her breath coming in those short, uncontrollable gasps produced by the mind’s certainty that there is not enough oxygen in the world to fuel the blood raging through a tumultuous heart.
The key … the key … she had to find the key … but what need of a key when the door was open?
Slowly she looked up. The open door; a pair of feet – brown shoes, slip-ons, slightly scuffed; dark grey slacks, a black sweater; and so on and up until she found herself looking into the face of Stanley Usher.
‘Welcome home, Mrs Adamson,’ he said.
He reached his left hand down towards her as if offering assistance. But in his right was a snub-nosed automatic and so it was little surprise when the outstretched fingers seized her hair and began to drag her into the entrance hall by force.
‘Playtime’s over, Trudi,’ he said.
Behind him was another figure. Vague as yet, but more menacing somehow than her physical assailant. She had to stop herself being dragged into the house. Resistance brought unbearable pain, yet perhaps the pain of having her hair ripped from her scalp would turn out to be preferable to what lay inside. She was sobbing and moaning, her very terror acting like a gag. At least she must scream!
She drew in a long ragged breath and screamed with all her might.
The effect was devastating. The porch seemed to dissolve around her in a huge explosion of glass. She had heard of such effects but thought they only happened to vast divas in old comedy films. The grip on her hair was released and she could look up. Usher was falling backwards, his arms raised to ward off the ferocious attack of one of the garden gnomes. Simultaneously Trudi felt her hand seized from behind and a voice screamed, ‘Run, Trudi! Run!’
She turned and ran. Hand in hand with her rescuer, she ran down the drive and into the street, turning left with the certainty of a good dancer responding to the gentlest pressure of an expert lead.
A car stood at the kerbside. It was the car she recognized before acknowledging the identity of her partner. The door was unlocked. She fell into the passenger seat and almost before she could pull the door shut behind her, the engine was growling cruelly and they were accelerating like a pair of teenage joy-riders down the quiet suburban street.
Breathing was all her concern for a while. She had not realized till now that breathing could kill you, tear you apart with overdemand, lungs inadequate as a topsail in a hurricane. Slowly she tacked with it, directed it, controlled it. Soon her breath was fast and deep but regular. Soon it would reach a level where speech would be possible, where questions could be asked and answers demanded.
But here she was pre-empted. Here the questions which were burning on her tongue came flaming forth from her rescuer.
‘For Christ’s sake, girl, what’s going on?’ cried Janet. ‘Trudi, what the fuck have you been up to?’
2
They sat at a corner table in the lounge bar of a big city centre hotel. Janet had scattered their coats across the other seats, but twice already they had been approached by what she called ‘toad-faces’, middle-aged reps with lust-young eyes glittering through their wrinkles, asking if the chairs were taken.
‘Yes, boyo. By my husband, the wrestler. He needs at least two of them,’ retorted Janet.
What Trudi had really wanted to do was go and find James Dacre and collapse into the safety of his strong arms and tell him yes, yes, yes, she would marry him instantly, here, now! Even though she knew he would still be en route for Manchester, she had gone to a phone booth while Janet was getting the drinks and dialled his number. Perhaps he had missed the train, perhaps … her heart leapt as she heard his voice! But it was only an answering machine. She told it where she was, begged him to come and fetch her as soon as he got the message.
This vicarious contact was some comfort, and as light, warmth, drink and even the single-minded interest of the toad-faces further soothed her panicking spirits, she found herself not totally distressed that James could not be with her straightaway. Not that she did not want him, close and permanent, but there were serious matters to be sorted out privately between herself and Janet.
Death of a Dormouse Page 21
