Читать книгу The Black Sun - James Twining - Страница 28

3.16 p.m.

They sat there in embarrassed silence as she rocked gently in her seat, hands covering her face, shoulders shaking. Tom gently laid his hand on her arm.

‘Miss Weissman, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, her voice muffled by her fingers. ‘I’ve almost been expecting something like this.’

‘What do you mean?’ Turnbull leant forward, his brow creased in curiosity.

She lowered her hands and they could see now that, far from the tears they’d been expecting, her face shone with a dark and terrifying anger. With rage.

‘There’s something I have to show you –’

She got up and led them out into the hall, her heels clip-clipping on the tiles.

‘I haven’t touched anything since I found it.’ Her voice was strangled as she paused outside the next door down. ‘I think part of me was hoping that one day I would come in and it would all just be gone as if it had never been here.’

She opened the door and led them inside. Compared to the rest of the house, it was dark and smelt of pipe smoke and dust and dogs. Boxes of books were stacked in one corner of the room, their sides compressing and collapsing under the weight. At the other end, in front of the window, stood a desk, its empty drawers half-open and forming a small wooden staircase up to its stained and scratched surface.

She walked over to the window and pulled the curtain open. A thick cloud of dust billowed out from the heavy material and danced through the beams of sunlight that were forcing their way through the filthy panes.

‘Miss Weissman…’ Turnbull began. She ignored him.

‘I found it by accident.’

As she approached the bookcase, Tom saw that it was empty apart from one book. She pushed against the book’s spine. With a click, the middle section of the bookcase edged forward slightly.

Tom sensed Archie stiffen next to him.

She tugged on the bookcase and it swung open to reveal a flaking green door set into the wall. She stepped forward and then paused, her hand on the door handle, flashing them a weak smile over her shoulder.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? You love someone all your life. You think you know them. And then you find out it’s all been a lie.’ Her voice was flat and unfeeling. ‘You never knew them at all. And it makes you wonder about yourself. About who you really are. About whether all this –’ she waved her arm around her – ‘is just some big joke.’

Tom had to stop himself from nodding in agreement, for she had described, far more coherently than he’d ever managed, the way he’d felt when he unmasked Renwick. It wasn’t just that he’d lost a friend and a mentor that day. He’d lost a good part of himself.

The door swung open and Tom gave a start as a featureless white face suddenly loomed out of the darkness. It took a moment for him to realise that it was a mannequin in full SS dress uniform. Behind it, on the far wall of what appeared to be a small chamber, a vast swastika flag had been pinned, the excess material fanning out across the floor like a sinister bridal train. The right-hand wall, meanwhile, was lined with metal shelving that groaned under the weight of a vast collection of guns, photographs, daggers, swords, identity cards, books, badges, leaflets and armbands.

Turnbull gave a low whistle and Tom immediately wished he hadn’t. The sound seemed strangely inappropriate.

‘You never knew about this?’ Tom asked.

She shook her head.

‘He would lock himself in his office for hours. I thought he was reading. But all the time he must have been in here.’

‘It’s possible this was some sort of post-traumatic reaction,’ Tom suggested. ‘A morbid fascination brought about by what happened to him. Stress, shock…they make people do strange things.’

‘That’s what I hoped and prayed too,’ she said. ‘Until I saw this –’

She reached past them and removed a photograph from the top shelf, then took it across to the window. Tom and Turnbull followed her. As she angled it to the light, the photo revealed three young men in SS uniform standing stiffly in front of a bookcase. They looked rather serious, even a little aloof.

‘I’ve no idea who the other two are, but the man in the middle…the man in the middle is…is my father.’ Her voice was completely expressionless now.

‘Your father? But he’s wearing…’ Tom tailed off at the pained expression on her face. ‘When was this taken?’

‘In 1944, I think. There’s something else written on the back, but I can’t read it. I think it’s Cyrillic.’

‘December – that’s Russian for December,’ said Turnbull, peering over Tom’s shoulder.

‘Tom, we should take this –’ Archie’s voice came, slightly muffled, from inside the chamber. He appeared a moment later, carrying the mannequin’s jacket and peaked hat.

‘Why?’ Turnbull asked.

‘You ever seen anything like this before?’ He pointed at the circular cap badge, which appeared to show a swastika with twelve arms rather than the usual four, each shaped like an SS lightning flash. ‘I know I haven’t.’

‘You think Lasche can help?’ Tom asked.

‘If he’ll see us,’ said Archie, sounding unhopeful.

‘Who?’ Turnbull butted in.

‘Wolfgang Lasche,’ Tom explained. ‘He used to be one of the biggest dealers in military memorabilia. Uniforms, guns, swords, flags, medals, planes, even whole ships.’

‘Used to be?’

‘He’s been a semi-recluse for years. Lives on the top floor of the Drei Könige Hotel in Zurich. He trained as a lawyer originally. Eventually made a name for himself pursuing German, Swiss and even American companies for alleged involvement in war crimes.’

‘What sort of war crimes?’

‘The usual – facilitating the Holocaust; helping finance the Nazi war effort; taking advantage of slave labour to turn a profit.’

‘And he was successful?’

‘Very. He won hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation payments for Holocaust survivors. Then, rumour has it, he hit the jackpot. He uncovered a scam by one of the big Swiss banks to slowly appropriate unclaimed funds deposited by Holocaust victims and shred the evidence. It ran to tens of billions of dollars and went all the way to the top. So they bought him off. The Drei Könige Hotel belongs to the bank he investigated. He gets to live on the top floor and they pay him just to keep quiet.’

‘So his antiques dealership…?’

‘Part of the deal was that he got out of the Nazi blame game. With his contacts and backing, it was an easy switch. He’s a major collector in his own right now. Nobody knows that market better than him.’

‘And he never goes out?’

‘He’s sick. Confined to a wheelchair with twenty-four seven nursing care.’

‘And you think he might be able to identify that?’ Turnbull indicated the jacket and cap.

‘If anyone can, he can,’ said Tom.

‘I could have forgiven him, you know…’ While they had been talking, Elena Weissman had disappeared into the chamber. ‘I loved him so much. I could have forgiven him anything if he’d told me…’ she sobbed as she re-emerged.

Tom saw that she was clutching a Luger pistol in her right hand.

‘Even this,’ she continued, her strained voice rising to a hysterical scream as she raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘You could have told me.’

She lifted the gun to her mouth, the black barrel slipping between her lips, bright red lipstick smearing along it.

‘No!’ Tom leapt to knock the gun out of her hand before she could pull the trigger.

But he was too late. The back of her head exploded across the room, a fine mist of blood spraying in short bursts from the severed blood vessels as her body slumped to the floor.