Lotti Franke’s parents lived in Schulzendorfer Strasse in Wedding, an industrial area of cavernous grey streets and barrack-style five-storey tenement blocks grouped around dank courtyards. The blocks were more than six apartments deep, accessed from the street by a grimy archway and cramming together individual apartments with workshops, shared kitchens and communal privies. All around, iron-framed chimneys belched smoke and men with cloth caps and collarless shirts trudged by, carrying bags holding Wurst and sandwiches for lunch.
As she climbed off the tram, Clara was immediately assailed by the yeasty stink of malted barley, wheat and fermenting hops. It seemed to permeate everything from the bricks of the buildings to the paving stones beneath her feet. It issued from the local Schulzendorf brewery that provided jobs for hundreds of local workers and barrels of cloudy, sour Weissbier for their relaxation afterwards. Consumption of the traditional Berlin brew had soared in the past few years and not even the new craze for Coca-Cola could begin to rival it.
Five floors up a stone stairwell reeking of urine and cooking, Marlene and Udo Franke’s apartment was three cramped and dingy rooms. Lotti’s father was moored on a sofa, his face devoid of animation and his eyes red-rimmed and pouchy from lack of sleep. A day’s growth of stubble shadowed his chin. Marlene Franke was, by contrast, seized by a frenetic activity, rushing in and out to fetch photographs of Lotti and asking repeatedly how Clara took her coffee. It was clear to see where the daughter’s good looks had come from, though Marlene’s blonde hair was tied in a lank bundle and her startling blue eyes were crazily bright.
Everything about the apartment testified to an ardent faith in the Führer. The regulation picture of Hitler hung above the stove in a cheap gilt frame, the lurid colouring giving him a somewhat consumptive air, and set out on a veneer table dressed with a lace doily was the Führer corner. These shrines were everywhere now – in shops and offices, cafés and restaurants, as well as family homes. People thought they brought good luck. Mostly they featured a picture of Hitler and a candle, but the Frankes’ shrine was an elaborate affair, with a copy of the Jubiläumsausgabe, the anniversary issue of Mein Kampf, in honour of Hitler’s birthday, and, flanking Hitler, headshots of Goebbels and Goering, like the two criminals at some devilish crucifixion.
Marlene Franke backed into the room with a tray of trembling crockery, set it down and sat next to her husband, rocking slightly.
‘Lotti was a wonderful daughter. I don’t know how we’re going to cope without her,’ she said, twisting a damp rag of handkerchief between her fingers. ‘She had such promise, didn’t she, Udo?’
With a twitch of shaggy eyebrows, Udo Franke assented.
‘She wanted to be a costume designer. She saw all the movies.’
‘I was impressed by how much she knew about film, when she came round the studio with me,’ said Clara. ‘She was very intelligent.’
‘And artistic,’ said her mother, with a nod at the wall. ‘She modelled all her own designs. She had even been photographed by the fashion photographer Yva. Have you heard of her?’
Everyone had. Yva was one of the most celebrated fashion photographers in Berlin. Her pictures were in all the glossy magazines – Die Dame, Elegante Welt, even Life magazine.
‘We kept them all.’
Every wall in the room was plastered with photographs of Lotti wearing dramatic, elongated costumes in shapes that were plainly inspired by Expressionist film.
‘My daughter said fashion was Art,’ said her mother, with a touch of defiance. ‘And Art couldn’t be categorized into acceptable and unacceptable. There’s only good and bad Art. I’m sure we’re not meant to think that – it’s not what the Führer says, is it? – but you couldn’t tell Lotti what to think. The most you could do was tell her not to say such things out loud. Now I’m tormenting myself thinking it was ideas like that which got her in trouble.’
‘I can’t imagine her views on Art could have led to her death,’ said Clara gently. ‘Have the police anything to say about the investigation?’
‘Nothing. They’ve just left. A Kriminal-Inspektor Herz and some other rank. They said everyone was out of town. The Führer’s birthday, you see. No one saw anything strange. They asked if our girl had a boyfriend, but I said there was no one.’
Her face darkened with misery. ‘So much for that Faith and Beauty Society,’ she said, savagely.
Clara couldn’t help but agree. When she had called at the Faith and Beauty community home earlier that day, the grimfaced principal, Frau Mann, had met Clara’s enquiries with a transparent lack of sympathy. It was as though Lotti had corrupted the whole idea of Faith and Beauty. If Faith and Beauty girls had to die, it should be gloriously for the Fatherland, not sordidly at the hands of an unknown murderer.
‘They’re supposed to look after the girls. Instead they filled her head with ideas about getting away. They took her to London, did you know?’
‘To London?’ Clara looked up, surprised.
‘A couple of months ago.’
‘What were they doing there?’
‘It was a deputation.’ Marlene Franke began to scrabble in a drawer. ‘I kept the invitation. It was so beautiful.’ She handed Clara a piece of card – precisely the same kind of stiff, high-quality invitation with embossed black italics as rested on the mantelpiece at Ursula’s house.
The British Women’s League of Health and Beauty
At Home
Claridge’s Hotel
Clara had heard of the British Women’s League of Health and Beauty. It was an organization dedicated to improving the well-being of Britain’s young women and it regularly held outdoor galas where groups of trim girls in navy gym shorts performed synchronized athletics. Photographs of these events frequently appeared in the press, not always for the reasons the organizers imagined.
‘Do you know Claridge’s Hotel?’ asked Udo Franke. ‘It’s very grand. As big as the Paris Ritz and almost the equal of the Adlon. Marble everywhere, Lotti said. And beautiful food, much better than you expect English food to be.’
‘The people were charming,’ added Marlene. ‘The dinner was given by something called the Anglo-German Fellowship. That sounds like a nice group of people.’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
Clara had more than heard of it. Her father, Sir Ronald Vine, and her elder sister, Angela, were two of its most trenchant supporters. It was the last outpost in England of sympathy for the Nazi regime. With a jolt she realized that if the Fellowship had organized the dinner, there was every chance that Angela would have been there. Angela might even have met Lotti, without knowing that her own sister knew her too. Clara felt the tectonic plates of her life shifting beneath her, the two parts of her life clashing unawares.
‘They said a visit to London would be valuable for her education. She would meet civilised people, and converse with them about high-minded subjects. London!’ The way Marlene spat the word out, the city might have been a sink of unimaginable depravity. ‘It must be a dreadful place. I wouldn’t be surprised if she met the madman there.’
She burst into a torrent of sobs and buried her face in the sodden handkerchief.
‘Now then, Marlene.’ Udo Franke roused himself from his trance and placed a hand on his wife’s juddering arm. ‘You’re imagining things. Nothing happened in London. Lotti loved that trip. It was a big opportunity for her. How many girls get to visit London?’
‘So much promise, and a few months later she’s dead.’
Udo Franke trained his weary gaze on Clara.
‘Fräulein Vine. My wife and I are touched by your visit. It’s a great comfort to hear how talented our daughter was and we would like to hear more. But I implore you, if you hear anything which could help us find the monster who killed her – anything, no matter how small – you will come back and let us know.’
Clara took his large, moist hand. She knew there was no possibility that she would be privy to any information that could help catch Lotti’s killer, yet she also knew how unbearable she would find the grief if anything befell her godson Erich, and he was not even her flesh and blood. Could people ever be truly happy again after the death of a child?
‘I promise I will.’
On the way to the door, her attention was caught by a small, framed photograph of Lotti.
‘It’s special, that one,’ said Udo Franke. ‘It’s from the dinner in London. It’s only a snap, but it’s the last one we have of our little girl, which is why we put it by the door.’
The picture was entirely different from the artfully posed and backlit studio portraits on the other walls. In it, Lotti sat beaming at the camera across a snowy tabletop, a picture of composure between the crystal decanters and silver bread baskets, surrounded by a gaggle of Faith and Beauty girls. Although it was a group photograph, the eye was instantly drawn to Lotti, the candlelight forming a dazzling halo that accentuated her flawless complexion and the perfect proportions of her face. Next to her, leaning into the picture, was a much plainer girl, with a ruddy-cheeked round face and unbecoming plaits.
‘Who’s that next to Lotti?’
‘That’s her best friend, Hedwig. They knew each other since they were tiny,’ said Marlene Franke. ‘Hedwig looked up to our daughter because Lotti was so good at everything, and so much prettier, of course. But Hedwig’s a nice girl. Very upset too.’
Clara stared at the picture for some minutes, far longer than she needed. It was full of the terrible poignancy that freights photographs of the past. Those smiling faces, so joyful in the present, so optimistic for the future, and so innocent of what was to come. A sadness washed over her as she realized she was really searching for another image – the face of her own sister, Angela.
She didn’t find it.
Opposite the tram stop outside the Frankes’ block, as if in direct mockery of the commuters shuffling their aching feet, was a poster featuring a gleaming new Volkswagen people’s car with the slogan: ‘Save five marks a week and you will drive your own car.’ Most people in the queue looked as likely to buy a rocket to the stars as a Volkswagen. Erich’s grandmother, Frau Schmidt, a nurse at Berlin’s biggest hospital, the Charité, was saving from her meagre salary and had worked out it would take her five years before she could afford one. After another few minutes shuffling alongside the others in the queue, Clara decided to walk.
Berlin was changing. It still looked like Berlin, but every day it was a little different, as subtle as fashion that shifts from one season to the next, raising hemlines, adjusting shoulder pads and tightening waists. It even smelt different. People used to talk about the famous Berliner Luft, the fresh air that blew into the city from the Grunewald, but now the city reeked of sour breath, bitter cigarettes and stale, unwashed bodies. The only soap available was gritty and impossible to lather because there was no fat in it. People had taken to carrying their own soap around with them, if they had any, because to leave it lying unattended risked finding it missing.
Clara’s mind went back to the photograph of Lotti Franke, and the certainty that Angela would have been at the same event. Yet again she regretted the estrangement from her sister. She thought of the last time they were truly close, when she was sixteen and their mother had died. Standing in a ragged group around the graveside, and Angela’s hissed reminder: Dig your nails into your hands to stop yourself crying. Repressing emotion was an article of faith for Angela. Concealment was more than courtesy, it was a way of life.
Behaving properly. Being properly British. That was Angela’s code. Yet surely the quick, intelligent sister she knew was still there – buried beneath the visits to Harrods and bridge nights and society teas. Angela’s letters tended to focus on the interminable round of charity events that she conducted, the death of relations and the relentless progress of her husband’s political career. Gerald is in line for a big promotion. Chamberlain is so impressed with him. Clara responded with a dutiful list of parties, premieres and work reports. Nothing intimate. Nothing political. Nothing real.
Right then she resolved that she would write to Angela very soon, and attempt something they had not managed for ten years. Communication.
Clara passed a loudspeaker lashed to the side of a building, blaring out ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and obliging everyone to give a perfunctory right-armed salute. She generally avoided giving the Führergruss by ensuring she was carrying something in both hands, but that day, distracted by thoughts of Lotti, she failed to comply.
A hand on her shoulder made her jump like a coiled spring. A man was standing in her path.
‘Documents please.’
He had a complexion the colour of concrete and an expression that epitomized the Berliner Schnauze, the direct, graceless, sceptical manner so many of the city’s inhabitants had perfected. He flicked the lapel of his jacket to reveal the aluminium disc marking him out as Gestapo.
Clara handed over her ID and watched the stupidity and aggression warring in his face as he scrutinized it. Although the small piece of card was beginning to fray at the edges, she never had any doubts about the quality of her identity documents; such was the skill of their forgery. All the same, even if papers were in order, a policeman or Gestapo official could still confiscate them if he didn’t like you. Clara wondered what this man saw in her. The usual Berliner, cowed in the face of authority and determined to keep a low profile? How much did her face give away? Into her head floated the remark of Conrad Adler.
Like fire behind ice.
‘Alles in Ordnung.’
Gracelessly, the man returned her identity card and she stuffed it back in her bag.
She carried on, remembering Mary Harker’s warning. They’re intensifying their surveillance. Goebbels has assigned a minder to each of us. Might that apply not only to foreign journalists but actresses too? She thought again of the man in the lobby of her apartment block; the lean, expressionless face, the trench coat belted loosely, the way he avoided her eye.
In the fortnight before he had disappeared, Leo had talked a lot about the techniques of espionage. One afternoon he had told her about a list that all agents were being trained to memorize, if they believed they were being followed.
Number One: look out for the unobtrusive. A shadow could be anyone. The young woman who clicked her painted fingernails on the counter beside you in a shop. The newspaper seller who slipped you a friendly remark each day with your change. The runner at the studio, or the car park attendant who joked about how he would always save the best space for you. Or a headscarfed Frau, like the one a few steps behind, grey-skinned and footsore, weighed down by a kilo of potatoes in her shopping basket.
Number Two: watch for anyone walking at a steady pace. A shadow would neither be nonchalant, nor too purposeful, though as far as vehicles went, the opposite applied.
Number Three: listen for a car that moves either too fast or too slow.
If surveillance was suspected, there was Number Four: change your appearance. Find a fresh coat, ditch your jacket, remove a hat. The slightest change could help to evade detection.
But whereas it was easy to put on a headscarf or abandon a briefcase, it was far harder to shave off a moustache or disguise hair colour in the course of pursuit. Thus Number Five: check for distinguishing features. A shadow rarely had time to change their shoes. There was also Number Six: listen for what you don’t hear. And if surveillance was certain, there was Number Seven: stick to public places. In case of arrest or capture there was Number Eight: stay calm. Don’t react instinctively.
There were a couple of other points on the list and Leo had made Clara commit them to memory and recite it back to him.
‘That list will keep you safe, Clara. It’ll be more use to you than any creed.’
That was one relief about the trip she was to make the next day. In London, there was no chance of being followed. And it would not be the Gestapo she had to worry about, but Captain Miles Fitzalan, whoever he might turn out to be.