A Stranger in the Family

by Robert Barnard

  There was silence in the bare room as Kit digested this.

  ‘I think I can understand my father’s succumbing to the offer. There was no question of abduction, and there was apparently a genuine and close connection with the donor. But why on earth did you make the offer to him? What was in it for you?’

  ‘Power. It amused me to have a son who was part of the liberal, high-thinking class, albeit in a little, powerless country like Scotland. I knew that if he took the child he would be in my power. I would be magnanimous, I would not involve him in any of the sordid and bloody little crimes I was often party to. But I also knew he was mine.’

  ‘But you never used that power.’

  ‘No, I never used it,’ said Greenspan, almost as if he was ashamed. ‘Perhaps I liked him too much. Perhaps he was just too good for me to get pleasure from manipulating him, forcing him to stain that purity he had. I had always got pleasure from power, but I enjoyed exercising it on those who were twisted creatures like me, people who would gladly stoop to anything. I proved myself of the same kind as them, but cleverer, more ruthless, more inhuman and inhumane. That I got great pleasure from. But a good man, one who never stooped, one who examined every step he made morally – I thought about it, and concluded it would not suit me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kit. ‘Jürgen sometimes had the effect of making people better than they seemed.’

  ‘I think Hilde had something of that quality too. As I told you, I met her once in Vienna, but I put her off me – I could not pretend to her. Where her quality – their quality – came from I don’t know.’

  ‘Their mother?’ put in Kit softly.

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Greenspan, surprisingly. ‘Maybe I stayed my hand in Jürgen’s case because the watch on me by the Italian state was by then too close for comfort. And the nearer you came to coming of age the less power I had.’

  ‘Did you know he was told I was abducted?’

  The old man perked up immediately.

  ‘No. Who told him? It must have been Frank.’

  ‘Yes, it was Frank.’

  ‘And why did he do it? Power, like me?’

  ‘Not exactly. He did it six or seven years ago. I think he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. It may have been some sort of revenge. Frank may have thought my father got on his high moral horse too readily. Who can say what thought processes are going through the mind of an Alzheimer’s sufferer?’

  ‘True,’ said Greenspan, with some kind of relish in his voice. Then he sank for a moment into thought. ‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘you were really very lucky.’

  ‘Lucky? To be abducted?’

  ‘Yes. You had an ideal childhood, in the care of people who were loving and very conscientious. You may have felt stifled by their goodness, but you were safe.’

  ‘Perhaps … Yes, looking back it feels like a very good childhood. Perhaps a lot better than I would have had with the Novellos, in spite of Isla’s love and care.’

  The old man again had a look of relish in his eyes as he asked: ‘Have you ever wondered whether she was party to the abduction?’

  ‘Not until now. Everybody has always said she was devoted to me.’

  ‘Everyone seems to have been devoted to you. She was also, people say, devoted to Frank, at least in the early stages of the marriage. Were her devotions altogether a good thing, do you think?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Your great philosopher Oscar Wilde – what was it he said? She loved him “with a love that made his life a burden”. He tests that love to the absolute limit, and still she says “yes” and remains devoted. What is he to do? All he can do is throw her away. All she can do is hold out for the biggest pay she can get.’

  ‘You don’t know this,’ said Kit.

  ‘I read it in his eyes, his squirms, his anger every time I talked to him in Glasgow. What happened after the abduction makes me convinced I was right. She remained quiet. And why should you complain?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘You had a good childhood. Will your adulthood conceivably live up to it? Adult challenges are much more difficult to survive than childish ones.’

  ‘Many people would say the opposite was closer to the truth.’

  ‘Would they? I had a nasty, restrictive childhood. My parents wanted to push me into the civil service, make me a government stooge like themselves. Imagine what harm I could have done in that kind of job after the government of Germany took control of Austria. Instead I made my own way, my own career, my own lifestyle. And my own moral code. Remember, I did a great deal of good as well as some harm. The good always included a sweetener for me – of course it did. How else could I have lived, enjoyed a few of the good things of life? But good came out of it to the people who used me as well.’

  ‘You’re not on trial in my mind,’ said Kit.

  ‘Maybe not. But I don’t think you have any idea of what living in a murderous dictatorship is like. All moral guidelines have been thrown out the window. You have to live each day as though it’s your last. You have to make your own moral code, yes, but you also have to be ready to tear it up if following it is going to endanger your life.’

  ‘Morally you were an improviser,’ suggested Kit.

  ‘I had to be. Also I rather enjoyed it. I was one of those smart boys who enjoy a gamble, enjoy using people because it enlarges their understanding of human types, enjoy being in control.’

  ‘Nobody could doubt that,’ said Kit. ‘But couldn’t you have used your talents with more kindness and mercy? I’m thinking of my grandmother.’

  Greenspan gave his usual shrug.

  ‘Maybe I could. I did not try. You can’t imagine the wicked pleasure of having a woman entirely at my beck and call – a good woman, too, though not very bright, to put it mildly. She loved me after every first night we had together – because this was an occasional relationship, you understand, a matter of visits now and then. I would have got her out of Germany if I could have, just so I could wash my hands of her for ever. No such luck. But I never went to her after she saw her children off to London. War broke out, every difficult thing became ten times more difficult; my skills were tested every day of my life and before long I began planning for Italy, and a new life there.’

  ‘Where you became involved with the Mafia.’

  ‘Inevitably. You could say they were waiting for me.’

  ‘And eventually you planned an abduction, to provide your son, her son, with a child.’

  ‘I did. That was in 1990. I did it gladly, had a well-oiled machine, and everything went according to plan.’

  ‘Yes, it did. I never suspected I was being abducted.’

  Greenspan laughed.

  ‘You were only three. A few years more and you would have understood. You are a bright boy, like I said. Is that all? Can I return to my life on the edge of the law?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Kit, after a moment’s thought.

  ‘You are sure there is nothing more you want to ask me? Ask now because there will be no second opportunity.’

  There was silence in the room.

  ‘Did Frank openly ask you to abduct me, his child?’

  Greenspan shook his head at Kit’s naivety.

  ‘Openly? What is openly? After I had met Jürgen I met again with Frank. He spoke to me about his doubts about your paternity, the impossibility of his accepting you, the mistrust of his wife that was always in his mind. He looked at me. I looked at him. Then we got down to planning it.’

  Kit thought.

  ‘That was real wickedness,’ he said. ‘Apparently he cared nothing about who I was given to, whether I would live or die – cared about nothing but himself.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. You’re seeing that there is greater wickedness than mine. And remember that Frank had always lived in safe, fair old England, under the rule of law. He had never known the sort of place where yesterday’s acceptable behaviour becomes tomorrow’s cap
ital offence. He had never known the madness of the modern state that embraces the extreme and the insane and makes them the norm. I reacted to my circumstances in my way, but I was not born evil. I just chose it as the only way I could survive. Good morning, Mr Philipson.’

  Kit waited to say something, but he didn’t know what. A man entered the room and he felt a touch on his arm. He was cuffed and blindfolded and led out to the car.

  On the way back to Palermo he wondered about the new angle he had acquired on Isla. Was she victim or collaborator? Had she chosen Frank over her three-year-old child? Was it her knowledge of Frank’s part in the abduction that enabled her to gain a lavish settlement when the divorce was finalised?

  And did he care now?

  In the plane from Palermo to Heathrow Kit meditated on the three mothers whose lives and values had figured so largely in his own and his father’s lives. In the centre, Genevieve, loving, self-sacrificing, warm. On one side of her, Elisabeth, whom many of the actors in the story thought of as stupid beyond measuring. Could not she be seen as a kind of holy fool, always sacrificing herself for others, up to the final hideous sacrifice of her own beloved children? And on the other side was Isla – the sort of mother, Kit now saw, who was so preoccupied with her own wishes and needs that she could be seen as conniving in her own child’s abduction in a final desperate attempt to hold on to her husband’s love. Perhaps there was no villainy in this story, but if there was, it was surely Isla. Kit let his thoughts stray to the man he had just met for the first and last time. He was cunning, ruthless, mendacious – all sorts of undeniable qualities at his command when necessary, and in more terrifying forms than the softer versions shown by men and women in liberal, democratic regimes.

  When it came to judging, Kit felt he had to ask himself: what would you have done if you had lived in a world gone mad? Greenspan had cut himself off from family, class and religion, and no sooner had he done so than the world of Central Europe had gone crazy. The more Kit learnt about the decade from the mid-Thirties to the end of the war, the more he saw it as the product of demented sadists. If your world had been taken over by mass killers, torturers, slave-drivers, what could you do? Hide? Escape? Accept?

  There was something about Greenspan’s career in Fascist Europe that was … not glorious, no, but that showed energy, a refusal to capitulate, a determination to win through, survive the general butchery. It was, in fact, the survival instinct seen in its most energetic, if least commendable, form.

  Kit had bought an English newspaper at the bookstall in the airport. Death of Edward Upward at the age of 105. Friend of Auden and Isherwood, and lifelong member of the Communist party … So, a contemporary of his grandfather. A man who had lived in a stable, slightly sleepy democracy, and devoted his life to being an apologist for a murderous political extremism. Which would Kit prefer as a member of his family: the apologist for mass slaughter, or the jaunty, inventive, unscrupulous survivor, the man who was never going to be done down, never going to submit?

  The latter, of course.

  When he changed planes at Heathrow and caught the plane to Manchester he asked himself: what am I going to do? Here he was in possession of a house in a starchy area, a modest fortune in safe investments, a life ahead of him that could be conventional – research scholarships, academic jobs, even going into politics on a Lib Dem ticket? Would he insert the Novello family into the place in his life that had previously been filled by the Philipsons?

  No, he would not. What was he to them? A stranger in the family, an intrusion, a none-too-welcome surprise. Was he any more than that even to Isla? Had she initially welcomed him as she did because she loved him as a mother, or because that was the reaction that he and other people would expect? Or because of her guilt at being a party to his abduction? No doubt in the future he would pay her occasional visits, which he certainly would not do to his father. Otherwise the Novellos had their world, their interests, and he had his.

  What were those interests? That was what he had to find out. ‘The world is all before you’ – Genevieve had adapted Milton’s phrase and applied it to him only days before she died. What would that world consist of? The answer would be for him to find and live up to. He thought that he would in the end try to make of himself something that the Philipsons would have recognised, something that they would have approved of.

  When the plane landed at Manchester he turned away from the overhead corridor that would take him to the railway and to Leeds and went to buy himself a ticket on the next plane to Glasgow. The world was all before him indeed. An interlude in his life was over.

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  About the Author

  ROBERT BARNARD was born in Essex. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and after completing his degree he taught English at universities in Australia and Norway, where he completed his doctorate on Dickens. He returned to England to become a full-time writer and now lives in Leeds with his wife Louise, cat Durdles and dog Peggotty. He has been awarded both the prestigious CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in crime writing, as well as the CWA prize for the best short story of the year.

  By Robert Barnard

  Sheer Torture

  The Mistress of Alderley

  A Cry from the Dark

  The Graveyard Position

  Dying Flames

  A Fall from Grace

  Last Post

  The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

  A Stranger in the Family

  A Mansion and its Murder

  Rogues’ Gallery (short story collection)

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  13 Charlotte Mews

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  www.allisonandbusby.com

  Hardback published in Great Britain in 2010.

  Paperback edition published in 2011.

  This ebook edition first published in 2011.

  Copyright © 2010 by ROBERT BARNARD

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication

  other than those clearly in the public domain

  are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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  any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

  nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1156–7