Fall From Grace (7 page)

‘What happened to Ruth?’

‘She was executed,’ Naumann answered coldly. ‘I didn’t waste any sympathy on her. She’d betrayed the Reich and made it impossible for me to go home. Because of her I would probably have been arrested and executed too if I’d gone back to Germany. They would not have believed that I didn’t know about her treachery. So I persuaded the British authorities to let me stay. It was in their interests too, seeing as I was privy to much secret information. They made a deal with me. I would remain under house arrest at Gatley Hall until the end of the war and then I would be given a new identity and a chance to start again.’

‘And at the end of the war they gave you the new identity of Gerald Edwards?’ said Joe.

‘Yes,’ said Naumann. ‘When the end of the war came I completed my medical studies and graduated in 1949. Not long after that I met Joan, the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my children and was able to put the past behind me, at least on the outside. On the inside I never stopped being Dieter Naumann and I never stopped loving Eleanor. Our affair has lasted seventy years.’

‘And your wife didn’t know?’

‘No, she didn’t,’ said Dieter. ‘When my wife died I didn’t marry Eleanor for the sake of my children. I wanted to protect them from the reality of my existence.’

‘But Lady Harding was a widower too by then,’ said Sara. ‘Why would your children have needed to know the truth? You could’ve come together as Lady Harding and Gerald Edwards? Why didn’t you do that?’

‘My children loved their mother very much,’ said Dieter, ‘I don’t think they’d have accepted someone else in my life.’

‘And why didn’t Lady Eleanor divorce her husband back in the forties and marry you then?’

‘Because Eleanor and Ronald had an arrangement that Ronald insisted that she kept to,’ said Naumann. ‘He was a homosexual who wanted the cover of marriage. You might imagine that he and I were never the best of friends after that.’

‘Do you think you should face justice now for your alleged war crimes, Mr. Naumann?’ asked Joe.

‘Justice?’ scoffed Dieter. ‘We were at war. I knew that the present Polish government would have to bow under the pressure they’d be under from various Jewish organisations and their sycophants around the world. But I’m not overly concerned. They can do what they like to me now. I’m too old to care.’

‘Nearly a hundred men were hung in that Polish village on a bitterly cold winter’s day at the end of 1939,’ Joe went on.

‘What village might that be?’

‘The village that you were in charge of,’ Said Sara. ‘Your presence there is well documented and will form the basis of any war crimes case against you.’

‘Would it not be the honourable thing at this stage in your life, Mr. Naumann, to admit your complicity in the massacre?’ said Joe. ‘Don’t you think you owe it to the dead if not the living?’

Naumann smirked, ‘I don’t owe anything to anybody. As for these so-called charges, well, just you try and prove it.’

‘The men were hung in front of their wives and then you made the women dig a mass grave and when they were done burying their own husbands you killed each and every one of them with a bullet in the back of their heads.’

‘I say again, detective,’ said Naumann who hadn’t flinched or even blinked his eye. ‘Just try and prove it. Your accusations are fanciful and irrelevant.’

‘How would it look in the press?’ Dieter demanded angrily. ‘Me being such an old man with little left of the strength I once had? If there’s one thing you can count on the British for it’s their sentimentality about their old folk.’

‘You didn’t even tell your children about your past, Mr. Naumann,’ said Sara. ‘How do you think they feel about you having betrayed them? How do you think they feel about you having betrayed their mother for all those years?’

‘I don’t think I’ll need to, Mr. Naumann,’ declared Sara confidently. ‘Badly disguised admissions of guilt are flying out of you like bats out of hell.’

‘An amusing analogy,’ said Naumann, ‘but it won’t get me into court.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Sara. ‘In the meantime, don’t make yourself too comfortable here. If I’ve got anything to do with it you won’t be staying long. I’m sure the Polish authorities have got a very nice cell waiting for you.’

Naumann was livid. ‘You won’t get through to me unless I allow you to. I’ve lived this life for seventy years and someone of your clearly limited capabilities isn’t going to make the slightest dent in my armour.’

‘Oh well, that’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Naumann’ said Sara, ‘because you will face justice. I’ll see to that.’

*

The art of deer stalking was one that was lost to most of the Cheshire-set neighbours of Martin Southern. But he was a colonial boy. His father had worked for a mining company and Martin and his siblings had grown up in Zambia when they weren’t at boarding school back in the UK. Martin was now an airline pilot, a Captain on Boeing 747 jumbo jets, an upper middle class professional in his early forties with a stay-at-home wife and two teenage kids in local private schools. Life was good on the whole but he needed this time out in the hills between Macclesfield and the Derbyshire spa town of Buxton. His wife let him have one day in each set of time off between working trips to do whatever he wanted to do. The rest of the time she had him fitting a new kitchen, or a new bathroom, or an extension to the extension. Or she’d made plans for them with the Armstrong’s or the Hamilton’s, or her parents. The only time he got to be in control of anything was when he was at work or when he was out here on his own.

He was lying on the ground, just on the edge of the woods, looking out across the field to where the deer stood underneath a couple of large overhanging trees. This was the area of hills that really were rolling and if he lost the deer over the edge it would take it too close to the farm about three hundred metres ahead. He didn’t want some angry farmer coming after him for having scared or even killed one of his livestock by mistake.

The blood was pumping through his veins. He’d spent the last hour and a half stalking his prey. His neighbours didn’t understand any of it because they were the usual English hypocrites when it came to eating meat. A cow, a pig, a lamb, a fowl bird were all okay as long as they didn’t know how they’d ended up on their plate. But the thought of consuming any other being always spilled over into squeamish territory that made him wish he’d been born French. They didn’t bother over there. They just hunted it and then they created great cuisine out of it. They had the right idea. Hunting didn’t carry the same class war baggage as it did in Britain either. Everybody did it from the very bottom to the very top. He’d once mooted the idea with his wife of moving to France but she wouldn’t hear a bar of it. Not because she had any objection in principle to living there. After all, she believed everything she read in the Daily Mail about Britain going down the pan, even though her own personal position was sound and secure because of Martin’s job and the lifestyle it gave her. But the problem was that she wouldn’t leave her Mum. She wasn’t ill or even that old but Martin’s wife never did anything without consulting her Mum first and Martin sometimes wondered which of the two women he’d married. The one who wore the ring he’d bought for her or the one who would never live anywhere ‘foreign’. His mother-in-law was always saying that you could never beat anything that was ‘English.’

He rolled over to get into the right position with his rifle and aimed at the part of the animal where he would cause it the least pain during the death process. But Martin didn’t get the opportunity to close the deal. His right foot fell onto what felt like something’s head. By instinct he looked down and received the shock of his life. He sat up and dropped his rifle. He pushed himself away with the palms of his hands and the heels of his boots scraping across the ground. He gasped in horror at what his eyes were telling him. The head was attached to the body of what looked like a young teenage girl, her eyes open, her clothes torn and her skin covered in scratches. She looked as if she was about the same age as his daughter.

FIVE

Whenever Helen Norris didn’t have to get up for the early shift and switch herself on immediately, she slipped into the other half of her Gemini twin and gradually came to, going through the motions of normal early morning activity. That was the only problem with shift work. Even when you didn’t have to get up at some obscene hour your body clock was so used to it that it woke you up anyway. But still, if it was a working day for Tim then she didn’t mind because it allowed her to get up and make his breakfast whilst he was in the shower. She knew she was lucky to have a husband like Tim who didn’t expect her to iron his shirts or do all the cooking. But there was a part of her that liked to take the opportunity from time to time to play the traditional wife and she would make no apology to any feminist over it. She liked to do it. It was her choice and try as she may her traditional Southern European roots of the woman looking after her man still shone through.

‘You smell all fresh and clean,’ said Helen as Tim held her, newly dressed in his suit and open-necked shirt. He’d even had a shave today which was a good job because the growth on his face had been starting to turn into a beard.

He picked up a piece of toast with one hand and with the other he brushed Helen’s hair away from her face. He loved the way she looked first thing in the morning with all the sleep in her eyes. She was so cute.

‘You’re still a little sleepy head,’ he teased.

Helen rubbed her eyes. ‘I’ll go back to bed when you’ve gone,’ she said. ‘I probably won’t sleep anymore but the rest will do me good.’

‘Tim, I’m not going to turn into one of those women whose world caves in if I don’t get pregnant,’ said Helen. ‘I’ve seen enough of them at work and they completely lose perspective. I’m not going to get like that.’

Tim took hold of her hand. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know what you’re like. But we haven’t really talked about what we’d do if you don’t get pregnant.’

‘We can adopt,’ said Helen, simply. She didn’t know if it was her nurses training but she tended to look at these things in a very practical matter-of-fact way. ‘There are loads of kids out there in need and we don’t need to create our own baby in order to be good parents.’

‘Well you know, not good, I didn’t mean that,’ said Helen, ‘but it’s early and I’m tired. It might be useful to know, that’s all. Don’t you think?’

Tim smiled. It would break her heart if she knew that a test on him would be pointless because he already knew that there was nothing wrong with him. Sara had made that clear.

‘Of course,’ said Tim as he gathered her into his arms. She was wearing a red and white striped robe over the long t-shirt she wore in bed for sleeping. ‘You’re the medic in the family. I bow to your better judgement.’