As the jeep lurched and jolted over potholes and craters, past abandoned trucks, overturned tanks and burnt-out cannon, along a road jammed with lorries, carts and barrows that May morning, Judith felt as if every bone in her body was being dislocated. After a time, she gave up trying to brush off the grit or smooth down her hair. She had wanted to make a good impression but resigned herself to arriving bedraggled, dusty and windswept.
The driver turned off the main road into a region of sturdy farmhouses and neat fields. Occasionally the clouds parted to allow shafts of sunlight to slant over the countryside of Lower Saxony with its picture-book villages and baroque churches.
The light shining on the mullioned windows of an imposing mansion above the road caught Judith’s eye and she pointed to the stone turrets.
‘That’s Schaffenburg Castle,’ the driver said. ‘They say the owner’s a bit of a recluse.’
Birds twittered and whistled from the branches of beech, spruce and birch trees and the air had the bracing scent of pine trees. The war in this part of Germany was over and, as they drove on, Judith’s thoughts turned to Adam. It was four months since they’d seen each other. Determined not to consider the possibility that something had happened to him, she assumed he had dropped her, to use Nancy’s blunt phrase. She wasn’t surprised. Often when they had been out together, she had seen him eye attractive women, and marvelled that he’d been interested in her at all. But it made her angry to think that he had used her when it suited him and now he’d probably found someone else. Nancy had been right all along. What she had been naïve enough to interpret as deep affection had probably been no more than lust.
Shortly after their last meeting, she had received a brief letter from Stewart, with a German postmark. She was relieved to know that although he was in a POW camp, he was being well treated. But where was Adam? She reread the letter, searching for some clue, something hinted at or concealed, but found nothing. She supposed their plane had crashed but why hadn’t Adam written? She made desperate calls to the RAF but courteous voices told her that they had no information.
Uncertainty and dread gnawed at her. The only man she had ever wanted, the only one who had ever cared about her, had disappeared without a trace. She often dreamed about him and woke in despair when she realised that the warm caress she had felt on her skin had been created by her hungry mind.
She was too restless to stay in London, and, when she read a notice that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was looking for nurses to work in the hospital that had been set up in a death camp recently liberated by the British army, she applied at once.
She spent hours at the UNRRA office in Portman Square attending interviews and undergoing a barrage of tests, but when she hadn’t heard back from them for weeks, she had come to the conclusion that her qualifications and personality must be deficient. Then, out of the blue, she received a call from the director. She had been appointed matron of the hospital.
That night she had dreamed about Adam again. She was walking through a wintry landscape, past trees pillowed with snow, when she looked up and to her astonishment saw him sitting on a branch high in a tree. When she asked what he was doing there, he gave her that crooked smile and said, ‘Waiting for you.’ Judith had no time for psychics, clairvoyants, theosophists or Madame Blavatsky’s pseudo-mystics, but, for the first time since his disappearance, she woke feeling comforted.
The jeep passed forests that were solid and impenetrable, so different from the pale, airy Australian bushland she knew, and, as they drove along, she imagined shadowy shapes slipping among the dark trees. These were the menacing forests of the Brothers Grimm where wolves preyed on small girls and witches lay in wait for innocent children.
Don’t let your imagination run away with you, she chided herself. It’s just a forest.
But knowing what had taken place nearby made it difficult to shake off a sense of evil.
Past the forest, they bumped over the cobblestones of a little Saxon town whose houses had half-timbered façades and flower boxes filled with bright geraniums. These villagers must have watered their geraniums, tended their fields and prayed in their baroque churches while only three kilometres away, trainloads of men, women and children were being starved, tortured and killed.
As they approached the camp, a strange odour, sweet and putrid, hung in the air. She pulled a face. ‘What on earth is that?’
The driver took a few moments to reply. He had been part of the British anti-tank regiment that had liberated the camp four weeks before, and knew that what he had seen would haunt him for the rest of his life. He looked at the woman beside him. She had no idea what she was letting herself in for.
That was also Judith’s reaction when they reached the camp and she saw the burnt-out huts, the mountains of boots and shoes, and the pyramid of ashes beside the tall chimney. The visions they conjured up were all the more powerful for being imagined. She felt she should offer a prayer for those who had died here in such filth and inhumanity, but the words stuck in her throat. It made no sense to pray to a God who had looked down on these atrocities and been powerless or unwilling to prevent them. She straightened her shoulders. God was derelict in his duty but she wouldn’t be. Her job was to look after the living and there were thousands of walking skeletons too weak to move or feed themselves. The sooner she got going, the better.