Victor Brionne’s face became mobile but his lips did not part. Deep down, thought Anselm, he’s holding tightly on to something. Anselm wrote down DI Armstrong’s name and number and placed it upon a sideboard. As he reached the door he turned instinctively and said:
‘You knew Jacques Fougères?’
‘Yes.’ It was the only word he had spoken. His voice, in that one brief sound, disclosed a grave, enduring ache.
‘You know he had a blood relative, Pascal Fougères?’
He nodded.
‘A young man who did everything possible to bring Schwermann to trial. Do you know he wanted .to find you?’
There was no response. Robert looked down upon Victor.
‘Do you know why?’ Anselm pleaded. ‘Not to expose you, or blame you. But because he had faith in the love of old friends. He believed that you would tell the truth.’
Victor closed his eyes, averting his head from Anselm’s unrelenting words.
‘He died on the very night he met some friends to discuss your importance. Not for himself, not for his own family, but for all those whose memories are being scattered to the wind.’ Anselm opened the door, his voice suddenly raised, indignant and accusing: ‘Did Pascal die for nothing … absolutely nothing at all?’
The house was empty when they got downstairs. Walking down the path they could see the family way ahead, ambling towards Lindisfarne Castle. Robert joined Anselm and Conroy at the gate. He said, trembling, ‘Father, I meant what I said when we first met. Victor Brionne died in 1945 as far as I’m concerned. Is it right to dismantle their world?’ He nodded over the wall, anxiously, at three generations becoming specks in the distance.
‘Is it right to leave other lives in pieces?’ replied Anselm. ‘I don’t pretend to have the answer, Robert. I doubt whether your father knows. But he’s the one who has to choose.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
1
Lucy took ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ home with her and placed it over the mantelpiece. For the rest of the weekend she kept re—entering the room to look at it. In that hint of a face drawn by the sweeping paint she saw Agnes, young and old, transcendent, aloft her disappointment.
When Lucy met Max and Mr Lachaise at court on Monday morning they all shook hands. Something like ease was growing between them. This was all the more remarkable because she (and presumably Max) had no idea as to who Mr Lachaise, their convener, might be. There was a disarming quality to his simplicity, like dealing with a child. Only he was nothing of the kind. He seemed older than anyone Lucy had ever known. And she recognised in his every move a type of empathy, something indefinable, that he held in common with her grandmother. She would have liked them to have met.
As was now common practice, the three of them sat in a row listening intently to the evidence presented before the court. For the next couple of days Mr Penshaw called a hotchpotch of witnesses to describe the nuts and bolts of organised murder. Mr Bartlett asked few questions, confining himself to small errors of detail.
‘In fact, the first deportation from Le Bourget-Drancy comprised standard third—class railway carriages, did it not?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. If it matters. ‘
‘Precision always matters,’ said Mr Bartlett kindly
Bartlett very occasionally gave a brief smile to the jury. After all, they’d been seeing each other every day, listening to the same witnesses. Lucy felt an atmosphere was developing between them. They were in this together, doing their level best. One or two had begun to smile back at him. Was it courtesy or empathy?
Lucy struggled to name a growing sensation. By some alchemy, Schwermann was almost detached from the proceedings. The link between the young SS officer and the elderly Defendant before them was peculiarly slender, the actions and attributes of fifty years ago having to be fixed on an older, much changed and hence different man. The passage of time itself had blurred not only the edges of responsibility but the consequences of the crime. Several newspapers had begun to question the propriety of the trial ‘so long after the events in question’, those being the fleshiness of killing, the smell of filth and the sound of fear. The younger man who’d been there was slipping out of reach; the older chap seemed crucially disconnected from his own past.
One radio programme debated ‘the age-old problem of Personal Identity’. If Schwermann at seventy-six was not the same man he had been at twenty-three could he be punished at all? Several newspapers explored the reach of ethics within the law, proper and improper. And many perfectly reasonable people from both sides of the fence appeared on Newsnight and within ten minutes were fairly evenly savaged for their trouble. The Defendant had become a ‘philosophico-legal’ problem, as well as an alleged killer. Lucy absorbed all the words, admiring the careful scrutiny of educated minds, but thinking all the time of leaves … thousands upon thousands of them, wafted helplessly into the air, no one knowing from where they had come or where they would go.
Watching Mr Bartlett at work, Lucy thought that someone had to bring the SS-Unterscharführer back into the present, through the tangle of reasonable civilised arguments, and put him in the dock — someone who had known him at the time. And, apart from Agnes, there was only one person left.
2
Anselm and Conroy got back to Larkwood late on Saturday night. They spoke in snatches on the way down, each of them preoccupied by a vision of what would soon befall the Brownlow family No wonder the prophets were such a miserable lot, said Conroy Glimpsing the fulfilment of history, even a tiny flowering of righteousness; was not a pleasant sight. It wasn’t all slaked thirst, free corn, oil and new wine. And, unfortunately, getting the balance right between today’s children and the wrongs of their parents was a task that went well beyond the remit of the Crown Court.
Anselm retired to his room on Sunday afternoon to write a report for Cardinal Vincenzi. The text he produced was brief to the point of insolence. He set down the facts: Brionne had been found; he might give evidence; its substance had not been revealed. The whole was extended modestly with a few connecting phrases. With a flourish of respectful obedience, Anselm signed his name.
Anselm went down to the Bursar’s office, his report in hand. A fax machine and photocopier stood side by side. On an opposite wall was a grid of pigeonholes, one for each monk, a private depository for mail and handouts. Anselm faxed his letter directly to Cardinal Vincenzi in Rome and the Papal Nuncio in London. He had been instructed not to send a hard copy, so he placed the actual text in a folder addressed to Father Andrew — for eventual lodging in the Priory archives.
Turning to leave, Anselm checked his mail. There was one envelope. It must have been put there in the last hour or so for the pigeonhole had been empty after lunch. Opening it, Anselm withdrew the report from Father Chambray. An attached note from the author said he had gone to London en route to Paris that night. He urged Anselm to visit him the next time he was in France. That was a welcome gesture from a man on the boundary of things, a man who had once slammed a door in his face.