listened to your revelations patiently, and I don’t mind admitting I’m deeply shocked. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a lot to take in all at once.’ Bright spots danced at the corner of Kathryn’s eyes, and she was vaguely aware of a dull ache in her left temple.
When her aunt did not answer, Kathryn added, ‘Listen, I can easily find out the truth by researching the archives in Washington or Germany, so don’t lie to me, Ingrid.’
Screwing her eyes tightly shut, Ingrid dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘I refuse to discuss my father further. Klaus Von Trellenberg is dead; let him rest in peace.’
The hot sun streaming through the car window was very warm, heating her bare arms, but it couldn’t penetrate the cold numbing horror inside. The letters ‘SS’ and all the horror they conveyed kept leaping into her head, accompanied by a multitude of images from films: jackbooted Nazis, with merciless eyes and arrogant poise, wretched hordes of men, women and children herded on to trains for their journey to genocide.
Holding the wheel very tight, her knuckles bone white, she forced herself to erase the picture of a Jewish child in a red coat. It was a scene from Schindler’s List; the child’s face had remained with her for weeks after she had seen the film, and now it returned to haunt her once more.
Turning left off the main road, she drove up a narrow dirt track stopping at Northfields Farm. Kathryn read the name on the gate several times in an attempt to calm her nerves; then, letting her head drop on to the back of the driver’s seat, she began to shake, an uncontrollable quaking that terrified her. She stumbled out of her car, walked up to the gate and, leaning against it, gazed across a deep meadow where cows were grazing. From a clump of trees to the left she could hear the faint gurgle of a stream, the grass smelt fresh from a shower earlier and the sun was sparkling on new puddles. A large cow, the biggest of the herd, ambled slowly towards the gate, stopping a few feet from where Kathryn stood. Out of eyes the colour of dark chocolate, the animal surveyed her with mild curiosity. The intense pounding in her head started to abate, and with it the panic she had experienced earlier gradually subsided.
Kathryn stood very still for several minutes. The dull drone of insects in the hedgerows and the muted rumble of a tractor in the far distance were the only sounds breaking the stillness of the hot afternoon. She lifted her eyes to a cloudless blue sky and watched a lone wood pigeon swoop low to peck in the long grass behind the cow, who flicked her long tail angrily several times until the bird took flight.
Kathryn felt a comforting return to normality. She had no idea how long she had been there, and was surprised when she returned to her car, to see that it was ten past two. She had been standing by the gate for over half an hour and was going to be late for a two-thirty appointment in Westerham.
As she turned the key in the ignition and drove off, she thought about Ingrid’s insistence at her mother’s funeral, and during three subsequent telephone calls, that it was of the utmost importance they should meet. Kathryn wished she had listened to her first impulse, which was to refuse. She had never liked her Aunt Ingrid, and knew that the feeling was mutual. Ingrid is probably content, thought Kathryn with a smile, now that she’s off-loaded fifty years of repressed emotions on to me.
Kathryn imagined her aunt standing in the same place she had left her, next to the shabby sofa, surrounded by tired furniture, and faded fabric. Alone, except for Sasha, in her dark cottage; alone with her memories, and echoes from the past.
‘Von Trellenberg,’ Kathryn muttered the name under her breath, then elaborated, ‘Klaus Von Trellenberg, aristocrat, Nazi SS officer. Shit,’ she swore, then again louder, ‘Shit! This is like something out of a bad movie.’ She swerved to overtake a lorry, slamming on her brakes to avoid colliding with an oncoming car. With the sound of its horn blaring in her ears, she slowed down, forcing herself to concentrate on her driving.
Over and over, Kathryn told herself that her grandfather was dead, or so Ingrid had said. It all happened long before she was born, she reminded herself, and there was no evidence that Klaus Von Trellenberg had committed any crime, well none that she knew of; yet the grim reality that he had been a high-ranking SS officer remained, and with it an isolated fragment of fear.
Why had Ingrid wanted to put her in the picture, Kathryn wondered. Was there some good reason apart from the fact that she was a bitter old woman with a twisted sense of duty, who simply thought her niece should know the truth? Or was it a final act of revenge on the sister Ingrid had always detested? Kathryn toyed with the hope that Ingrid had lost her mind and that the entire revelation suggested the ramblings of senility.
She clung so hard to this hope that she almost missed the turning to Fallowfields, the house where she had been born, and had lived for the first eighteen years of her life. Her thoughts drifted back down the winding pathway to her childhood, cosseted in rural English country life with Freda, the mother who had baked cakes for church fêtes, taken her to the pony club, and watched her compete in local gymkhanas. Freda, who had grown prize-winning flowers, and had been a pillar of Kent society. With a short laugh Kathryn imagined the face of Mrs June Burrows, her late mother’s closest friend and chairman of the local townswomen’s guild, if she told her at the next committee meeting that Freda de Moubray’s father had been an SS officer.
When Kathryn pulled up in front of the house, she saw a young man poised in the act of ringing the doorbell. Stepping out of her car, she walked towards him, fixing a bright, determined smile on her face, recalling something her ex-husband Tony had said to her the first night they’d met. ‘If you’re smiling, the whole world will think you’re winning.’ The thought made her smile widen, as she held out her hand in greeting.
‘You must be Mr Grant, the estate agent?’ Kathryn stood in front of him. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
The man nodded, coal-black eyes peering from behind the half-moon spectacles decorating his thin, white face.
It hadn’t been a particularly good morning for Oliver Grant. In fact it had not started well, and had got progressively worse. His car had broken down, the train had been late, he had lost an important sale an hour earlier, and now he had been standing in the hot sun for the last fifteen minutes positive the next client was not at home. His voice, when he eventually found it, was deliberately clipped.
‘Are you—’
‘Kathryn de Moubray,’ she supplied, walking smartly past him. ‘Please come in.’
Oliver rejoined her in the hall, where he held out a long thin hand, the parchment colour of its skin broken by a clump of densely black hair. ‘Oliver Grant of Brinkforth and Sons.’
Kathryn smiled politely again, her unusual dark, almost charcoal-grey, eyes shining.
Bloody attractive girl, Oliver thought, and about to come into some money. He decided to be nice, Turn on the charm, old boy, he told himself, you never know your luck. ‘OK, Miss de Moubray, to work. First I need the dimensions of all the rooms.’
‘Follow me,’ Kathryn invited, leading the way down the gloomy hall.
Their feet made little sound on the carpeted floor, dark brown and threadbare in several places. The walls were decorated in a sombre beige-and-tan striped wallpaper, with a faded floral border at the skirting and a dado. Grant scribbled notes, muttering encouraging comments under his breath, as they entered the dining room.
‘We always ate in here before my father left,’ Kathryn explained. ‘Of course after that, my mother ate less and less.’
She stopped speaking abruptly, her attention diverted
