‘Oh Lord … us, and then you … he must know everything.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Anselm uncertainly ‘He told me he was the son of the Sixth Lamentation.’
‘After the Five of Jeremiah?’
‘Yes… I think he meant the Holocaust.’
They walked in silence until the Prior said, ‘I hope you find Victor Brionne, for the sake of my community and for the sake of Larkwood: He stopped, surveying the treetops with shaded eyes. ‘I think you should talk to Mère Hermance,’ he said. ‘She was here at the time. But be warned. She’ll make you buy a box of biscuits.’
2
Cathy Glenton had persuaded Lucy to have a Turkish bath after a particularly tedious lecture on the demise of the novel.
‘It’s an awful place,’ she said, ‘run by two former wrestlers from Lancashire. A husband and wife team.’
‘What do you do?’ asked Lucy horrified.
‘There are three rooms, each getting hotter than the one before, and when you’ve sweated yourself silly you lie on a table and one of the wrestlers washes you down. Then you dive into a pool of freezing water. ‘‘It sounds like hell.’
‘It is … but then comes paradise. You wrap yourself in a massive warm towel and lie on a couch for as long as you like eating bacon sandwiches and sipping hot, sweet tea. There’s nothing like it this side of the grave.’
They were just about to leave Cathy’s flat when Lucy’s mobile rang. It was Pascal Fougères.
‘Would you be interested in having a minor role in the preparation of the trial?’
‘Pardon?’ she replied, incredulous.
He went on, ‘It’s not much, believe me. I’m a sort of liaison officer between the lawyers here and those with an interest in the case back in France. It means I have small practical jobs to do for the prosecution. I’m sure you could help… with a stapler, or something. Look,’ he hesitated, ‘are you free now?’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy with muffled joy She lowered the mobile and said, ‘I’m really sorry, Cathy, but I’ll have to cry off.’
Cathy nodded through her disappointment while Lucy sorted out a time and place with Pascal. When she’d finished, Cathy said, ‘I hear the heavy tread of a man.
‘Not quite,’ replied Lucy, acutely self—conscious.
‘Name?’
‘Pascal.’
‘French?’
‘Yes… but it’s not like that.’
‘I know It never is.’
‘Truly’
‘Does he have a spare friend interested in a beautiful mind?’
‘I’ll ask.’
An hour later Lucy met Pascal outside the National Portrait Gallery. Traffic swept behind them in surges, down into Trafalgar Square. Crowds, maddened by maps and itineraries, jostled on the pavement, looking for the next sight. Pascal took Lucy’s hand and they stepped out of the bustle into the mute halls of captured faces. They walked from room to room watched by Audrey Hepburn, Paul McCartney and lots more. Talking in long snatches, they leaned towards each other, looking around.
‘Are you still a journalist?’ asked Lucy
‘Sort of. After I found that memo I gave up my job on Le Monde. They give me lots of freelance work so I survive. And you?’
‘Student … second time round.’
‘Pushy parents first time?’
‘Sort of.’ She thought of Darren, who’d made that specific judgement with hostility, noticing how from Pascal’s mouth the question carried the promise of understanding. Without doubt the time would come when she would explain, but not now She continued, ‘Pascal, I’ve been thinking about our last conversation. I don’t understand why you want Brionne so much for the trial. What about all the other evidence?’
Pascal said, ominously, ‘This trial is going to be about what the victims remember as much as what Schwermann did.’
They left the gallery and joined the crowds walking round to Nelson’s Column. The naval commander towered above them, safe, as they walked through a sea of fat, scratching pigeons.
‘Do you ever wonder how Schwermann and Brionne got out of Paris in the first place?’ asked Lucy
‘Frequently’
‘I mean, where did they go, and who would want to put them on the road with new names?’
‘No one knows. One minute they’re both at Avenue Foch, then four months later they’re in the hands of British Intelligence with new identities and a story that got them into England. Sometimes I think of the Touvier case.
‘What’s that?’
‘Basically he was an old-school Catholic hidden for years after the war by his own kind.’
‘A collaborator?’
‘Yes. He was head of the Milice Intelligence Network for Savoy’
‘Protected by the Church?’
‘It’s more involved than that, but he was hidden in a monastery. So I do wonder in my wilder moments if the Church could have been involved … but it’s so unlikely Hiding a Frenchman, maybe, but an SS officer? That stretches even my imagination.’
He looked down at the demented scavenging of the birds and said, ‘Are you hungry?’
Half and hour later they were eating at a small table in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
‘Funny place for a restaurant,’ said Pascal.
3
The convent was situated half a kilometre from the Priory. The orphanage had long since closed and the school buildings were now a diocesan youth centre. Anselm had seen it all before. Hordes of champing, over-sexed youths arriving in transit vans, closely supervised by impossibly confident chaplains and teachers, all of whom deserved the Croix de Guerre.
Mère Hermance had worked in the laundry during the war. She was lodged upon a wicker chair in the convent gift shop, recalling the good old days when religious life was hard. Anselm had to drag her towards the subject of his visit.
‘Oh, yes, Father, it was a terrible time, terrible. I saw poor Prior Morel fall like a rag doll. I waited for him to get up. There were three children hiding in the orphanage.’ She smiled, as only the very old can; intimating an acceptance of things that once could not be accepted.
‘Do you remember the two men who stayed at the Abbey in 1944?’ asked Anselm gently
‘I do, yes, but not much. In those days religious life was lived as it should be. You didn’t talk to men unless you had to.’
Anselm nodded in firm agreement.
‘I never spoke to either of them,’ she said. ‘We were told it was as secret as the confessional. We were used to that sort of thing. But I do remember one thing, Father—’
Mère Hermance broke off to answer the phone. The shop was open from three to five… the biscuits were handmade … by the young ones with nothing better to do … fifty francs … very well worth it … goodbye. She put the phone down arid carried on as if no interruption had occurred: ‘When I came here as a novice in 1937 there were thirty-nine sisters. The Prioress at the time was a dragon. Her father had been in the army and …’
Anselm listened patiently for ten minutes or so before he cracked and reminded her of what she had been about to say .
‘Oh yes, that’s right. He came to the orphanage almost every day’
‘Who did?’ pressed Anselm.
‘One of the young men we were hiding. He talked and played with four or five little German boys and girls. Those were the last Jewish children to come here. Their parents had fled Germany to France, only to be hunted all over again. They saved their children and then perished. He was a good fellow to visit those poor dears. One of them never spoke and had the deepest brown eyes you have ever seen.
‘Do you remember which one came?’
The phone rang again. The nun listened distractedly, once more delivering pat lines on the quality of biscuits and the weakness of the young. She put the receiver down. ‘As I was saying, the Prioress was a dragon—’
‘Mère Hermance, the young man, do you recall which one?’
She looked darkly into the past, into the presence of a banished fear. ‘I think it was the German.’