CHAPTER ONE

It took fifteen minutes exactly to walk from his apartment in the Avenida de Infanta to the corner of the Calle del Rey to buy the papers. In winter, even when the weather was bitterly cold and there was snow on the streets of Madrid, he came to the store at the same time, collected the English, French and German newspapers and went home to spend the afternoon reading them. He never bothered with the Italian Press. They had turned coward during the war and joined the Allies. He had never forgiven them. It was May and the sunshine gilded the city; in a few weeks the temperature would rise and the atmosphere would become stifling. By the end of June he went away to the Costa Del Sol for a two weeks’ holiday. He had been in Switzerland for ten years, living a miserable existence in near poverty, unable to work at any but the most menial jobs, supported by funds from the organisation which had helped him escape. Then he was found a job in Spain, and life improved gradually, as the risk of discovery diminished and he applied himself to the engineering work in which he was engaged. Now, twenty-five years after his flight from Germany, he was a well-paid executive with the original company, living in a flat in Madrid. In Spain he was known as Paul Weiss. He had few friends; one Spanish family whom he sometimes visited, and two German couples, both expatriate but much younger. He maintained no link with the past now except one. The apartment was on the third floor of a modern block; he disdained the elevator, and always used the stairs. All his life he had emphasised physical fitness. He never lost an opportunity to take exercise. Inside his flat he went into the kitchen and made himself coffee; this he brought into the small living room and settled down to read the papers during the four hours’ siesta which closed everything in Spain from two till six.

The idea of wasting an afternoon sleeping was too ridiculous to be considered. He began with the French papers first, reading every item; occasionally he exclaimed under his breath. Then the English papers followed. On the inside page of the Daily Express, he saw the photograph and the report of the divorce. He read it carefully the first and then the second time. He folded the paper back, and stared at the photograph. James Stanley’s Wife Wins Divorce. He would never have read the item, because scandals didn’t interest him, but the face in the photograph was large and clearly taken from a studio portrait. It was his own face, and the face of his mother and a sister who had been killed in a bombing raid during the war. He held the paper and his hands shook. Paula Stanley was granted a decree nisi on account of her husband’s adultery with a Mrs. Fiona Harper. Then the account of the proceedings followed, and a write-up about her husband and his career as a racing driver. He had the name that made news. James Stanley, the hero of the international circuits, wealthy amateur who challenged the world’s professionals at the world’s most dangerous sport. There was a photograph of him taken by a low-slung racing car, one arm flung across the bonnet, the other cradling a silver cup. The face was indistinct, and the caption mentioned some triumph at Le Mans. He picked up his coffee and tried to drink it. Then he read the story again, to make sure. The racing driver and his exploits occupied nine-tenths of the report. The few facts given about his wife were bald and vaguely unsympathetic. She was twenty-eight. He had a pencil out by now and was underlining sections. The age was right. There were no children of the marriage, and her address was given in full. She was formerly Paula Ridgeway, and the marriage had lasted five years. Ridgeway. That was the right name too. The name of the man his wife had married after the war. The organisation had kept him informed of his family’s situation immediately after Germany’s defeat. He had heard about the confiscation of his property and the occupation of his home by British staff officers. And then his wife’s re-marriage. To a Major Ridgeway. They had left Germany, taking his daughter with them, and until that afternoon twenty-five years later, he had never heard of them again. He went to the desk, where he kept his files and business correspondence for work at home, and cut out the article and the photograph. Inside his breast pocket he carried a wallet, and in the wallet a small yellow snapshot. Everything else which identified him had been destroyed. This one photograph he had kept. It had travelled through the nightmare of the Russian retreat with him; he had taken it out at night, with fingers so stiff with cold that they could hardly hold it, and kissed it. It showed a little girl, a leggy child of three years old, in a party dress with a lace collar, her brown hair tied back with a bow. It was frayed round the edges and a crack ran diagonally across it. He laid the snapshot beside the newspaper photograph; the resemblance was slight, probably only visible to someone who was looking for it; he recognised that. But the family likeness in the woman was unmistakable. It was a Bronsart face, high cheek-boned, light-eyed, with hair that grew back from a wide forehead, exactly as his own had done. He stood back from the desk. After twenty-five years. After resigning himself to a permanent loss, to taking out his treasured memory, faded and petrified like the little snapshot, and contenting himself with that, the impossible had happened. He had found his daughter again. And the dream he had dreamed for her in the last year before disaster overwhelmed his country could now become reality. Love, as he often said, died quickly enough between men and women. Marriage was a convenience and sentiment a trap. But the love of a father for his child transcended everything. That, and his love for his country, were what distinguished human emotion from the weak and the carnal. He had never loved Paula’s mother; he had adored his child with single-minded passion, with tenderness, with fanatical pride. She was his flesh, his blood, she had his eyes, so distinctively blue that they had hindered his escape; she aroused in him a protectiveness normally found in women towards their young. She was the only human being with whom his emotions had ever been involved. Because of her, he sat down again and made the first telephone call to Switzerland in five years. It was only to be used in emergency. He knew it still operated because any change would have been notified. He knew who would answer, because they had served together and fought together, and through the offices of this one man, he had escaped. He asked for the number and waited. When the call came through he said only one sentence. ‘This is the General. I am flying to Switzerland tomorrow; meet me at Zurich airport tomorrow between six and seven. I need your help.’

Paula Stanley was in the bath when the telephone rang. Since she had left her husband, she lived alone; she waited, hoping the caller would ring off, but the bell persisted. She got out of the hot water, wrapped a towel around herself and went through to the bedroom. Her feet left wet marks on the carpet; she looked down and grimaced. James, her husband, had always been untidy. He threw his clothes on the floor, dropped his ash indiscriminately, flung his papers into the corner when he had finished reading them, and refused to submit to any kind of domestic routine. All his concentration and discipline had gone into his racing career. Perhaps it was the very carelessness with which he approached ordinary life which had attracted her when they first met. He hadn’t given a damn about anything. He was deliberately unconventional. He spent money on nonsense, and forgot about mundane demands like electricity bills; he would stay up all night going from one night club to the next, picking up friends and strangers, surrounded by admiring spongers, dragging Paula, bewildered and impressed along with him. Her own life had always been rigid; it was governed by routine since her childhood, by a strict boarding school and a mother whose principal dislike was being asked for, or expected to do, anything connected with her daughter. Paula had lived within narrow confines. Meeting a man like James Stanley was like being permanently drunk. The inhibitions vanished, the obligations of normality disintegrated, and there was a frightening sense of liberation. It hadn’t lasted. The euphoria was temporary, the liberty became, after marriage, a worse constriction of freedom than she had ever known. He declined all responsibilities; he picked up the details of their married life and dropped them into her lap, with the injunction to take care of it because he couldn’t be distracted when he was racing. The fact that girls and drink and disorder weren’t considered distractions made no impression as an argument. When Paula remonstrated he simply disappeared. His cars were his life; the excitement, the concentration, the publicity and adulation were all that mattered. She had often wondered why he married her at all. She had refused to go to bed with him when they first met; she was too ashamed to admit that at twenty-three she was still a virgin, and the existence of such a freak never suggested itself to him. He had wanted her and been unable to get her. So, typically impulsive and without responsibility, he had asked her to marry him, and in a blaze of flashbulbs and screaming fans, they had rushed to the register office and out again. Sexually, it had not been a success. Paula didn’t know exactly when he had begun his infidelities, but an instinctive fear of being hurt dictated that she ask no questions and investigate nothing, however flimsy his excuses. And so for five years they had lived, James projecting his unattractive free-wheeling image for the imitation of his fans, both on and off the racing track, and Paula waiting uncertainly for something to happen. When it did it was typical of her husband. He had begun a publicised affair with one woman and confessed in a burst of boyish candour, that he was in love with another. One was a close friend of Paula’s, who had twice accompanied them on holiday, but the object of his immediate affections was unknown, one of the crowd of speed-mad girls who surrounded the racing heroes. Paula had packed her suitcase the same day and moved out. Their divorce had been granted only a month ago.

She put the receiver to her ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Mrs. Stanley?’ It was a man’s voice, with a foreign accent.

‘Yes, speaking. Who is that?’

‘My name is Black. But you don’t know me. I would like to come and see you.’

Paula hesitated. It was five-thirty and she was getting ready to go down to her mother for the weekend.

‘Why do you want to see me?’ she asked. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I just want to come and talk to you,’ the voice said. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Mrs. Stanley. I am not a crank. I have something very important to tell you. Something which is to your advantage.’

‘What do you mean? Are you a solicitor?’

Which she realised at once was immaterial because there was no one to die and leave her money. Her mother was her only relative.

‘No, Mrs. Stanley. I am not a solicitor. I am a friend of your father’s. When can I come?’

‘What do you mean, a friend of my father’s – my father is dead.’

‘I know that; does the name Poellenberg mean anything to you?’

‘Not a thing. I’ve never heard of it.’ For a moment she was tempted to hang up. The towel was slipping and she was cold.

‘Let me come and see you and I will explain,’ the voice said. ‘But don’t mention it to anyone. Don’t mention Poellenberg. Can I come tomorrow morning?’

‘No,’ Paula said. ‘I’m going away for the weekend. Why mustn’t I mention this to anyone – what’s all the mystery about, Mr. Black?’

‘I will explain when I see you,’ he said. ‘I will explain everything then, but you will have to trust me. On Monday morning, at ten o’clock.’

‘I go to my office at ten,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute, let me think – why don’t you come there? About eleven-thirty?’

‘Will we be able to speak in private?’

‘Certainly. Nobody will disturb me. One moment, tell me one thing – you say you’re a friend of my father’s …’

‘I will come to your office on Monday at half past eleven,’ the voice cut in. ‘I know the address. Goodbye, Mrs. Stanley. I look forward to meeting you.’

The line clicked. He had rung off. Paula put the phone down and stood shivering, holding the towel round her. Of course she wasn’t afraid. That was what James always said about her, ‘Nothing would scare you, sweetheart, you’re a real tough little Hun.’ It was a remark that wounded, assuming, as it did, that she was able to take care of herself and consequently he was free of obligation. Even if he were right, that epithet, Hun, always rubbed raw. It was not as if she had been to Germany since her childhood or even spoke the language. James had made the accident of blood into a genetic crime. She had been born in Germany, but she left it as a child, and the Englishman her mother married had adopted her legally and given her his name. Paula went back and let the tepid water out of the bath. She dried herself and stood for a moment before the mirror, examining the naked body for defects. There were none visible; she was young, firm, slenderly built, with an attractive face framed in smooth brown hair. Only the eyes were different. They were blue, but of an extraordinary colour. She went back into her bedroom and dressed in trousers, sweater and jacket. Her weekend case was packed. She looked at the telephone again. What an extraordinary call. A complete stranger ringing out of the unknown, claiming to have news of great importance for her, claiming to have known the dead father she could not remember. It was odd, but Paula realised suddenly that this was what had made her agree to a meeting. He had known her father. Who was he, this Mr. Black, with an accent that came from her unknown homeland across the Rhine? The voice was that of an old man, and if he had known her father the General, then he must be well into his sixties. She locked the flat door behind her and went into her car. As it started up, her thoughts were far from the traffic that choked her route out through the City of London, through the East End and on to the Newmarket road. She knew the route by heart; she had travelled down to her stepfather’s house in Essex for the last eight years, since she had left home at twenty to live and work in London alone. Alone. It was the operative word to describe the best part of her life. Five years of that dismal marriage, after a childhood which was spent playing gooseberry to two adults who only wanted to be left alone with each other. Now that she was truly independent, free of family ties and without James to nag about neglecting them so he could go off on his own, Paula paid infrequent visits to the house in Essex. They didn’t miss her when she stayed away. They were pleased to see her in a distant way, and kind, prepared to let her share their warmth and smugness in each other’s company. The result was to drive her out of the house as quickly as good manners would permit.

But her mother was sixty, although she didn’t look it, and sometimes Paula’s conscience jabbed. On those occasions she gave up her weekend with friends in London or declined another invitation to go away, and invited herself down to the farm.

It was a handsome lath and plaster Essex house, sixteenth-century in the most part, with an eighteenth-century wing, which her stepfather’s ancestor had built.

Brigadier Gerald Ridgeway, D.S.O., M.C. She could remember that rosy complexioned face, with the brisk gingery moustache and the hearty voice, bending over her from what seemed a gigantic height. He used to smell of leather and cologne. He had always been kind, but it was a stiff relationship, with bouts of false bonhomie which embarrassed Paula even when she was very young. Children have an instinct for what is assumed, and she knew that her stepfather didn’t really love her, that he was only making an effort.

So there was no relationship; she didn’t hate him as she might have done if his attitude towards her had been more positive. She accepted him as part of her life, and accepted also that she had lost her mother to him as inevitably as if she had died, like the General. She didn’t remember the General. She knew he was dead, and her mother had answered her questions about him with obvious resentment at being expected to explain. Paula hadn’t pursued the subject. Her mother indicated her displeasure and Paula, even though nearly grown up, withdrew from the contest.

The man called Black knew her father. She was clear of the traffic and beyond the bottleneck at Epping; Paula pressed down on the accelerator and the little car gathered speed. He had insisted upon secrecy; what was the name he had mentioned? – Poellenberg. Paula shrugged as she drove. It meant nothing to her. What was it, a name, a place – what was its significance. In an hour and a half she had turned into the drive and pulled up at the entrance. It was June, and the front of the low-built house was covered with yellow climbing roses. The Brigadier was a keen gardener; he had interested her mother in the art, and Paula remembered her astonishment at seeing that elegant figure down on its knees with a garden trowel, grubbing in a flower bed.

Two black labradors came bounding out of the door, barking and leaping up to welcome her. Dogs, roses, the Women’s Institute, a distinguished retired soldier as her adoring husband – this was the role in which her mother had elected to live the rest of her life. She came through the door after the labradors, a tall, thin woman in muted tweeds, old but still beautiful with the agelessness of fine aristocratic bone structure, the blue eyes filled with vitality.

They were not the same colour as Paula’s; that astonishing blue was the General’s legacy.

‘Paula, dear …’ She gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. ‘You’re early; did you have a good journey down?’

‘Rather a lot of traffic,’ Paula said. ‘How are you, Mother? You’re looking very well.’

‘I am, dear. But your poor father’s got a cold. Come inside, and push those naughty dogs down, they’ll ruin your clothes.’

She always referred to the Brigadier as ‘your father’. It was quite unselfconscious; Paula was sure her mother would have been horrified to know how deeply she resented it.

Inside, the house was furnished with comfort and elegance; they spent their time in a small panelled study filled with her stepfather’s collection of military books; the pictures and furniture were exactly in character with the owner. Very English, slightly shabby, valuable but understated. There was nothing in this country gentleman’s home to remind Paula of the dimly remembered gilt and stucco palace where she had lived until the age of four years. That was a confused and fading memory, unaided by photographs or any of the normal souvenirs of another life. It was as if her mother had decided to erase the first thirty years before she had met and married Gerald Ridgeway.

She had succeeded in what she set out to do, as indeed she succeeded in everything. A German-born baroness, widow of a man who had risen to the rank of general fighting the Allies, she now played a leading part in the village life, looked up to and respected in the area. She had succeeded as an army officer’s wife under the most difficult post-war conditions. Even her husband’s ultra-conservative military family had ended by accepting the beautiful young German into their circle. Paula was offered a drink and she sat down; one of the labradors had settled beside her and was pressed against her knee. It should have made her feel at home, relaxed and at ease, her mother sitting opposite, talking about the latest village news, the dusk deepening outside. Instead, its effect upon Paula was to make her feel strange and isolated. It was not part of her, however much it had been superimposed upon her. Unlike her mother, she had not adopted the protective colouring of an alien country and an alien culture.

As a result she had no country and no affiliations, but it was not possible to miss what one had never known. Or at least it was difficult to blame the sense of restlessness and vacuity upon that deprivation. If Paula was unhappy, she did not know whom to blame or how to define what she needed. She was merely aware of a condition within herself, which had always existed. This she accepted.

‘If you don’t mind, dear,’ Mrs. Ridgeway said, ‘I’ve made your father stay in bed; I don’t want him to take any risks with that cold. The last one was on his chest. It made him quite ill.’

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Paula said. ‘I’ll go up and say hello to him later. By the way, Mother, I’m glad we’re on our own tonight. I want to talk to you.’

‘Oh? What about?’ There was the same guarded look on her mother’s face, an instant letting down of shutters, whenever Paula attempted any intimacy.

‘I hope there’s no more trouble with James.’

‘It’s nothing to do with James,’ Paula said.

‘You know we were very upset about that,’ her mother said. ‘It’s such a final step, breaking up a marriage.’

‘Sleeping with my best friend was a pretty final step,’ Paula said. ‘Not to mention the little bird he wanted to marry. I suppose I might have taken one of them but I’m sorry, Mother, both was just too much. Besides, we weren’t in love with each other. It was bound to come sooner or later.’

‘I could never imagine leaving my husband,’ Mrs. Ridgeway said. ‘Whatever he did.’

‘But he didn’t do anything, did he?’ Paula countered. ‘He’s adored you all your married life, so how would you know what you’d do if you had a rotten husband, for instance.’

The beautiful, ageing face was like a mask. The coldness struck at Paula suddenly and made her angry. How would her mother know anything about the problems of being married to a man who neglected you, avoided responsibility, and only made love when he felt like it? She had been loved and spoiled by one man with an obsessive passion for her. All they had ever wanted was to be alone together, to share their bed and their life without the encumbrances of a child, who seemed always standing in the shadows, looking on.

‘Anyway, I don’t want to talk about James. I had a very curious telephone call tonight. A man rang up and said his name was Black and he was a friend of my father. He asked to see me.’

Now there was a faint colour in the face opposite; it tinged the fine white skin, as if her mother were blushing. Paula saw the change from impassive disapproval to outright alarm. The mouth opened for a second; she thought her mother was going to say something. But the moment passed. Now it really was a mask, the colour was fading, leaving a grey pallor, the eyes were bright with wariness watching her daughter like an intruding stranger.

‘I don’t understand.’ The voice was cold, angry. ‘I know no one connected with us called Black. It sounds like a practical joke.’

‘It wasn’t,’ Paula insisted. ‘I’m quite sure it was perfectly genuine. Mr. Black. He sounded German. Mother, please don’t go out of the room, I want to ask you about this!’

‘There is nothing to ask.’ Mrs. Ridgeway was standing, poised to walk out. ‘I advise you to have nothing to do with this man, whoever he is. I know your father would say the same.’

Now Paula was standing too. ‘He’s not my father. He’s your husband, but he’s nothing to me. Let’s leave him out of it for once. I want to talk about my real father. Don’t walk out on me, Mother. What are you afraid of?’

‘I refuse to be bullied,’ her mother said. ‘I have nothing to discuss with you about your father. He was killed in Russia, and you never even knew him. I suspect you’ve been building up some fiction about him in your mind. My advice to you is not to make a fool of yourself. As for Mr. Black, it’s probably a hoax or else some unpleasant creature with a kink about telephoning women living alone. I think you’d be extremely foolish to have anything to do with it. That’s all I have to say.’

‘He mentioned something,’ Paula said. ‘Poellenberg. That was what he said. He asked me if I knew what it meant. By the look on your face, Mother, it seems to mean something to you.’

‘I’m going upstairs,’ her mother said. ‘I’m going to your father.’

‘Stop calling him my father.’ Paula burst out with it, the suppressed anger of a lifetime exploding in that angry cry. ‘He’s my bloody stepfather and I didn’t choose him! Go up to him and leave me. That’s what you’ve always done!’

She dropped back into the chair and began to cry. Immediately the labrador leaned its black muzzle on her knee. She heard the door close as her mother left the room.

There was a long silence. One of the dogs moved round the room and then resumed its place by its mistress’s empty chair. Paula cried for some time. It was a luxury in which she had refused to indulge, even when her marriage disintegrated. She had been unable to feel pain in such clear definition as she did at that moment, sitting alone in the study where she had grown up and always felt a stranger. After a time she became calm. She looked round her, and fought down a sudden impulse to run out of the room and the house and drive straight back to her flat. In the quiet she could hear sounds above; boards were creaking as if someone were walking up and down, but the house was built with the solidity of centuries and no voices could be heard. They must be talking up there, her mother and the Brigadier. He would be in their double bed, nursing his cold; Paula could imagine him in a dressing-gown with a silk handkerchief tucked into the neck. She had never hated him. At that moment it was her mother she hated with all the bitterness of a rejected child. She had dismissed Paula all her life, turning aside her quest for affection as she had done her questions. She had dismissed her father as if Paula had no right to think of him at all, as if his death were a reason for complete oblivion. It was as if he had never existed.

Damn her. Damn them both. She heard herself say the words aloud. She had an identity of her own, and her father was part of that identity. They had no right to deny him to her. But the expression on her mother’s face was frigid with resistance. It was as if Paula had brought up some forbidden subject, something which was under an unspoken ban. She had denied knowing Black, and Paula had believed her. But the peculiar name, Poellenberg, that had meant something. It was as if her daughter had suddenly struck her in the face. It was useless to go upstairs and demand to be answered. If she faced her mother and stepfather, they would combine together as they always had, and she would retire from them in defeat.

They didn’t want to discuss her father. The General, Paul Bronsart, dead and buried in the Russian wastes around Stalingrad; they had laid his ghost and enjoyed their association without any sense of guilt, so long as he and what he represented were effaced from memory. It was such a pity she had been born, Paula thought angrily. That must have made it difficult for her mother to forget that she was the widow of a distinguished German soldier. She had fraternised with the invader within months of his death. They had been living in their old house in the Platzburg outside Munich when the Allied forces entered the city and the company commander billeted himself and six of his officers in their home. Paula had heard the story from her mother in snatches over the years, a sentence here and there and once a sentimental recital of how the Brigadier, then a young major, had discovered the mistress of the mansion living in the freezing attics with a sick little girl. It had all been very touching, and Paula remembered how they had reached across and held hands while they talked about it. Her mother had married him, and fled the ruins of Germany to make a new life for herself, cocooned by the adoration of her English husband. They were inseparable, smug, completely wrapped up in each other. The inference was very plain to Paula. Whatever her father was like, his wife couldn’t have cared for him at all.

Paula got up and lit a cigarette. She felt tired and angry, trapped in the house at least for that evening, a criminal waiting in the room below while her mother stayed upstairs to be comforted. The clock in the hall outside struck eight o’clock, and at the last chime the door opened and her mother stood there.

‘Aren’t you coming for dinner? We’re waiting.’

He must have got up and come down to support her.

Two against one again.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Paula said. ‘I’ve got a headache, I think I’ll just go to bed, if you don’t mind.’

Mrs. Ridgeway came into the room. Her daughter noticed that she had changed out of her tweeds into a long black skirt and blouse. She looked very pale and handsome.

‘Paula, you’ve been crying! I haven’t seen you cry since you were a child. Do come and have some dinner with us. Do let us forget this stupid quarrel.’ She came and put a hand on Paula’s arm. She looked concerned.

‘I don’t want to quarrel,’ Paula said. ‘I’m sorry I swore at you, Mother.’

‘That’s all right, dear. Just promise me you’ll forget all about that telephone call. Have nothing to do with it. It will be better for all of us.’

‘Why? Can you just answer me that? Why will it be better?’

‘Because there’s nothing to be gained by bringing up the past.’ The look was firm, determined to overcome resistance. She had made her gesture and now she was demanding her price. Surrender. Now do what I want and forget the whole thing.

Paula shrugged and stubbed out the cigarette. Her stepfather detested anyone smoking during meals. ‘That’s not much of an answer, Mother. But I can see it’s the only one you’re going to give me, so don’t let’s argue. I’ll have dinner and then I will go to bed early.’ She opened the door and her mother went ahead without answering. Paula heard her stepfather coughing in the dining room.

Nothing was mentioned the next day. Paula slept late, and drove her mother to the village for some shopping. Everything seemed normal and peaceful. The Brigadier had been friendly and in good spirits the night before, but Paula was not deceived. All was not what it appeared. In spite of the people invited to drinks, the determined bonhomie of her stepfather, who was thick and spluttering with his cold, and the grim dignity of her mother, Paula knew that their calm was a façade. Their glances at each other were apprehensive; their attitude tense and worried. The telephone call was never mentioned again. It was tacitly understood that she would do as her mother wanted and ignore the caller. But they weren’t sure of this, and that disturbed them. Paula spun out the day and a half till she could leave with decency. At the door they came out to say goodbye, accompanied by the dogs. It occurred to Paula that only the animals were sorry to see her go.

‘Goodbye, dear.’ Her mother brushed her cold lips against her face.’

‘Goodbye, Paula.’ Gerald Ridgeway had his arm linked with his wife’s; he smiled at her and waved. There was a strained, unhappy look about his mouth under the ginger moustache. He looked miserable and unwell. She got into the car, wound down the window and waved to them. ‘Goodbye, thanks for the weekend; it was a lovely rest. Take care of yourself, Gerald, don’t stay out in the cold.’

All the clichés of departure, the trite little phrases of farewell expected from a stranger. It was the coldest leavetaking she could remember, and it suddenly hurt so much she couldn’t wait to start the car and drive away.

And then it didn’t seem to matter. The next day was Monday and her appointment with Black was only a few hours away. For the first time she would be able to discover about the other half of herself. She had forgotten that the caller had something important to tell her; she had forgotten about Poellenberg, that mysterious word which had drained the blood from her mother’s face till she looked like a corpse. Paula wasn’t thinking of anything but the excitement of discovery and the hunger to know, so that if Providence were merciful, she would be able to love, even if it were a memory passed on to her at second hand.

Eric Fisher’s plane landed at Munich airport at three-thirty. It was a warm afternoon, and the sun beat down upon the tarmac, making him sweat. Fisher was used to flying; he regarded it as a good opportunity to sleep. He was bored by the routine, the pre-lunch snacks, the rattling drinks trolley, the bland hostesses who looked so unreal he was tempted to put it to the test by pinching a round bottom in a tight skirt.

So he settled into his seat, even for a short trip like the flight from London to Munich and went straight to sleep till they landed.

He knew Munich slightly, and was looking forward to spending a day and a night there, revisiting old places known from the early days of the Cold War, when he had been a journalist. He supposed that his business could be accomplished within a couple of hours and he would have the rest of the time free. The clients were paying all expenses and he had booked himself into the Hoffburger, which was the city’s best hotel. Outside Customs, he paused. He was expecting to be met. A man in a dark brown chauffeur’s livery came towards him and gave a military salute. Fisher noticed with surprise that he wore old-fashioned leather boots and polished leggings.

‘Herr Fisher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Her Highness’s car is just outside. Your bag, if you please. Follow me this way, sir.’

With pleasure, Fisher thought, threading a way through the crowd. Nothing so crumby as a common taxi. Her Highness’s very own awaited. He grinned, enjoying himself. This was the sort of client he preferred. The car was an enormous Mercedes, shining black with silver-grey upholstery and a large coat-of-arms painted on the doors. He got into the back seat; he felt tempted to give a regal wave to the porters left outside on the pavement.

The drive took thirty-five minutes; Fisher timed it just for something to do. Scenery didn’t interest him. He took a case of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. The glass screen separating his compartment from the front slid down; without turning his head the chauffeur spoke.

‘Excuse me, Herr Fisher, but her Highness dislikes cigarette smoke in the car. Would you mind not smoking? I am very sorry but her orders are strict.’

‘Anything you say.’ Fisher stubbed it out. Her Highness sounded as if she might be hell on wheels. But then money, rank and power seldom improved human nature. Especially when they were inherited along with an armament empire in a country where feudality was deeply ingrained in the people. The Germans had a passion for rank and authority. He could tell that the chauffeur despised him because he was casually dressed and his attitude was like his clothes.

With a different breed of passenger he wouldn’t have mentioned the no smoking rule. He’d have cleaned and aired the car and never said a word. Fisher knew his Germans. They were the only race in the world he really disliked. He spoke the language fluently, as he did French and Italian. He liked to think of himself as completely unacademic, but he despised the English attitude which refused to learn any language on the assumption that if you shouted, foreigners understood. He had worked as correspondent for a major Midlands newspaper for five years, and then he had met Dunston, who was working for Interpol on a smuggling ring who were spiriting gold out of Western Europe into the East in return for a supply of pure opium. It had been a nasty case, with several murders and an abduction thrown in; Fisher joined the hunt on behalf of his newspaper, and by the time it was over and the ring dispersed, he and the man from Interpol had become good friends. It was Dunston who contacted him a year later and put a proposition to him over drinks in London. Dunston had left Interpol and set up on his own as a private detective. He had the skill and the police contacts, but he needed a partner. Fisher had impressed him. He was, Dunston said, a natural bloodhound. And one of the best sources of information in the world was the Press, to which he had the entrée. To start with the money wouldn’t amount to much, but if they were successful, the sky could be the limit.

Fisher had no dependents; both his parents were dead and he had no intention of getting married. He could take the chance and see what happened. Within six years the Dunston Fisher Agency was the biggest private investigating service in Europe, with offices in every capital and a staff of a hundred operators. Now Dunston sat in the head office in London, and Fisher only undertook the biggest assignments, where the fees ran into thousands. The letter from the Princess Margaret Von Hessel had been addressed to Dunston, but Dunston was on holiday in Portugal. A cheque for a thousand pounds had been enclosed with the letter, as an inducement to take the case without delaying. Fisher had cabled back immediately, saying he was coming in his partner’s place, and before he left for Germany, he had investigated the family. The name was famous enough. Steel, coal, armaments, property; millions and millions before both wars and a new fortune made since the end of the last. Blood which could be traced to the Bavarian kings, and to several European royal families, now dispossessed or extinct. A title granted by Frederick the Great. Castles in Germany, a vast property in East Prussia which the Communists had overrun, a villa at Cap Ferrat which had not been used for twenty years. A passion for the vicious concentration camp dog, the dobermann pinscher. And at its head the princess, aged seventy-six, the mother of two sons. Widowed in the last war when her husband died of a heart attack. Even before he arrived at the house itself, Fisher was expecting something formidable.

The car turned in through wrought-iron gates, surmounted by the heraldic boar of the Von Hessel crest. The house was enormous, a square stuccoed building, painted washed pink. Flowers were growing in ornamental tubs round a paved courtyard big enough to have taken half a dozen of the Mercedes. Trees enclosed the garden, but he glimpsed vast lawns and formal beds; the whole place gave an illusion of being in the depth of the countryside instead of within five miles of Munich’s centre.

He got out, the chauffeur preceding him. A butler in uniform, brass buttoned tail-coat, white cotton gloves, opened the front door, took his hat away, and made a small bow, asking him to follow. The main hall of the house was like a church. It was dominated by a huge, hideous Victorian stained-glass window at one end; the ceiling disappeared upward in painted clouds and bibulous fauns pursuing naked nymphs. The scent of flowers was overpowering; there were huge bowls and urns filled with them, and it gave the hall a funereal smell. The furniture was heavy mahogany, massively carved, upholstered in velvet. A ten-foot gilt mirror gave Fisher a sudden glimpse of himself, standing dwarfed and uncertain in the ugly, overpowering surroundings with the light from the stained-glass window making bloody patterns over him.

‘This way, please,’ the butler said. He opened a door and Fisher stepped through. It was like walking into the sunlight. The room was large and painted white. The colours were yellow and green and the sunshine poured into it from three floor-length windows. Three people waited for him like figures in a stage set; the centre one was sitting, very upright, her back to the light, holding a cane in one hand. Behind her two other figures were silhouetted, standing sentinel either side of the sofa.

‘Your Highnesses, Herr Fisher.’ He heard the butler’s voice and then the click of the door closing. He walked forward into the room, across an Aubusson carpet covered in green and golden flowers woven in garlands from the centre, and stopped in front of the sofa. The Princess Von Hessel held out her hand, palm downwards. Fisher looked her in the eye and shook it firmly.

‘How do you do, Mr. Fisher. Let me present my sons.’

Seventy-six. She looked about fifty; there wasn’t a white hair on her head, and the face was like a predator bird’s, beaked nose, taut skin, dark eyes bright and unblinking, with a yellow circle round the iris. Formidable wasn’t the word. But he hadn’t kissed her hand. He felt comforted by that.

‘My eldest son Prince Heinrich. My second son Prince Philip. Please sit down.’

He took his eyes off the woman and examined the sons. The younger attracted his attention first because he was extremely handsome, in his late thirties, and very blond. He looked out of place beside the South German darkness of his mother and his elder brother. The elder was very like the Princess. He had the same birdlike face, but the sharp lines of character and pride were blurred, the contours sagged and the dark eyes were sunk in puffs of flesh. He stood very upright, shoulders well back and one hand, with a big gold crested ring on the last finger, rested on the back of the sofa.

‘Did you have a good journey?’ That was the younger son, Philip.

‘Fine, thanks.’ They were all speaking English. Fisher would have preferred to converse in German but there seemed no way of changing over. He decided to take the initiative before the old woman did. He suspected that the sons were not expected to contribute much.

‘You didn’t say very much about this investigation in your letter, Princess.’ He had no intention of calling her Your Highness, like a bloody footman. His hostility was rising with every minute. He resented the imperious stare, the arrogance which was quite unselfconscious. ‘You mentioned the recovery of some property, but that’s all.’

‘I thought it best to wait until you were here and we could discuss the details privately. I believe one should keep these things out of correspondence, Mr. Fisher. As a family, we have learned to be cautious.’

‘Would you like to give me the details now?’ Fisher suggested. He was in need of a cigarette, but he remembered the chauffeur’s warning. The inhibition made him even more irritable than the deprivation. Who the hell did she think she was, that he couldn’t have a cigarette when he wanted one …

‘As you know.’ The Princess began what he suspected was a prepared speech. She had folded her hands and settled in her seat. He recognised the symptoms of rehearsal. ‘As you know, the Nazis conducted a systematic policy of looting art treasures during the war. They confiscated pictures, jewellery, objets d’art and every kind of valuable; I had the misfortune to go to Goering’s house and see the result of this disgraceful pillage for myself. The houses of all the high-ranking Nazi officials were stocked with other people’s property. They stole from some of my dearest friends in France, for example. The property was recovered after the war and returned to them in a deplorable state. It was in Berlin and the house was shelled by the Russians. There was a magnificent Titian which was ripped to pieces by shrapnel. It was very sad.’

Fisher sat still. It was going to be a long speech. Her eldest son shifted his position behind the sofa. Fisher noticed that he gripped the back of it so hard that his knuckles were taut against the skin. Unrelaxed, that was Prince Heinrich. Finding it a strain standing at attention like a dutiful soldier behind the general’s chair …

‘All this you know, Mr. Fisher, as I said before. What you probably don’t know is that these creatures stole equally from their fellow Germans. There are many old families in this country who were looted as if they were enemies. A lorry with S.S. troopers just pulled up outside the door, and loaded everything from a list which had probably been made when some senior official was a guest in the house. It was infamous, and I could quote you several cases.’

‘And is that what happened to you?’ Fisher interrupted. He wasn’t interested in the vicissitudes suffered by those who wined and dined the members of the Nazi hierarchy. The woes of the aristocracy seldom moved him to compassion.

‘No, it was not,’ she answered. ‘We were too important to be treated in that way. My husband had a certain amount of influence with people like Goering, for instance. He was a dreadful gangster but he had come from a gentle family and it was possible to trust his word. We were not harmed in any way.’

‘But something was stolen from you.’

‘Yes. Stolen. Taken out of Schloss Würtzen, our house in the Rhineland. I must tell you, Mr. Fisher, I had given up any hope of recovering it until I read this in the newspaper. Philip, get the cutting of the Allgemeine Zeitung, will you? It is in the second drawer of my bureau, on the left.’

Fisher watched the son move across the room. By contrast with the rigid figure of his elder brother he was pleasant to watch. He walked like a human being. He even looked across at Fisher and smiled as he handed his mother a newspaper cutting. She held it out and Fisher took it. He read it quickly; he showed no sign of surprise. Impassivity was part of the job. But if this tied in with the Princess’s desire to recover her stolen property, that thousand-pound cheque was just confetti. He gave the cutting back to her.

‘It’s only a report,’ he said. ‘There’ve been a lot like it.’

‘Not for this man,’ she said. ‘He’s been accounted dead since 1945. Believe me, Mr. Fisher, we made our own enquiries after the war, and they all said the same. Dead. Positively identified and buried. Now this report says he was seen in Paris, walking down a street in broad daylight.’

‘I presume this means he’s the thief,’ Fisher said.

‘It does.’ She nodded. The eyes reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what. Some kind of bird. And certainly no domestic pet. It was the circle of yellow round the dark-brown iris. ‘He stole the Poellenberg Salt from us, Mr. Fisher. It’s never been found, and if he’s alive he’s the only person who knows where it is hidden. That is why I’ve sent for you. I want you to find him.’