denying nor verifying his challenge, but the next day Leo had discovered his mother in bed, her body so badly beaten that Leo had insisted, against her frantic pleas not to do so, on sending for their doctor.
He had never raised the subject of the rumours with his father again.
He turned the pages of the notebook and then tensed.
There was a second set of equations here, together with notes in the margins and a doctor’s signature—a doctor who, Leo was sure, had been tried for his part in a certain camp’s medical atrocities.
He read through them once quickly, and then a second time slowly and carefully while his heart turned over inside his chest and his body became heavy and cold with the weight of the knowledge descending on him.
These further pages showed detailed study and a formula proposed for a heart drug—a heart drug like the one that the British company Carey Chemicals had produced.
Like a dealer with a pack of cards, Leo slowly and carefully fanned out in front of him the separate newspaper clippings, and then above them he placed the notebook, his eyes bleak.
Had his father died trying to carry the deed box, or had he tried to reach it only after he had had his first attack, knowing what it contained and what it betrayed, knowing that it must be destroyed? Leo looked at the newspaper cuttings and the references to Private Carey. Was the young man’s rise in the field of pharmacy after the war linked at all to his father’s notes? Why had his father kept them in the first place? Were they a form of insurance against Carey, the medical-orderly-turned-blackmailer who knew the truth about the German’s secret SS dealings and had been paid off with that second formula?
But the man Carey had died several years before his father. The relevant newspaper notice was here. Why had his father not destroyed the contents of the box then, if they were as incriminating as Leo suspected?
Had Carey confided what he knew to someone else before he died: passed on the secret? It stated that the business was now being run by his son-in-law. Had he handed on to him more than just control of the business?
Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it was all merely coincidence. Every instinct he possessed howled in derision at the thought.
He knew, he thought, knew in his bones, in his soul that what he had in front of him was evidence of the man his father had actually been; that he was now closer to the essence of him, the true nature of him, than he had ever been during his lifetime.
No need now to question the animosity that had always existed between them, nor his own awareness of and aversion to that darkness he had always sensed within his father.
As a child he had feared that darkness; as an adult he had been shudderingly grateful that it was a genetic inheritance which had passed him by, just as his father had always despised him for his lack of it.
And yet his father had left him control of the corporation.
‘My son … My son …’
Those had been his last words to him and they had been full of bitterness and hatred.
Surely he could not deliberately have left this grim evidence for him to find; a final act of cruelty, a final reminder of the blood he carried in his veins?
No … Because how could he have known that Leo would be the one to find him? No, he had been trying to destroy the evidence, Leo was sure of it.
The evidence …
He looked down at the papers on the desk. Odd to think that they had the power, the potential to damage the mightiness of Hessler Chemie; that they could potentially be more powerful than ever his father had been.
Was he right? Were his father, working as a translator, and Carey, the medical orderly, linked by mutual greed in a tangled skein of murder, theft and blackmail—and worse?
The man who had died, the man who had confided to Carey the names of those men secretly working for the SS … had one of those names been his father’s? Had Carey recognised it … approached his father, threatening to expose him? Had his father bought him off with that second formula?
The links were tenuous; frail and perhaps unprovable, but they were still strong enough to rock Hessler’s, and still strong enough to fill Leo with such revulsion, such anguished pain and reflected guilt that he knew somehow he had to at least try to discover the truth.
Had things been different … had Wilhelm been different, this was a burden he could have shared with him.
Another thought struck him. Had his mother known the truth? Was that why she had stayed with his father, despite his physical and emotional abuse of her—because she had been too afraid to leave? Because she knew she could never reveal the truth knowing what it would do to her sons … to him?
Wilhelm had never been as close to her as he had. Like their father, Wilhelm had treated her with contempt and cruelty.
Slowly Leo picked up the newspaper cuttings. He glanced towards the fire and then looked at the papers in his hand.
His mouth grim, he replaced them in the envelope along with the notebook. Perhaps he should destroy them, but he knew that he would not do so, could not do so until he had discovered the truth. Or as much of it as there was left to discover. And somehow he must find a way of discovering it without implicating Hessler’s, not for his own sake and certainly not for his father’s, but for the sake of all those who worked for the corporation, all those who depended on it for their livelihood.
No, this was a problem he must deal with himself. Quietly … discreetly … secretly. He grimaced over that last word. It reminded him too much of his father.
Secretly.
It left an acrid, sour taste in his mouth and shadowed his soul with bleakness.
‘I MUST say I’m a little surprised by your attitude, Saul.’
The voice, the smile were benign, almost avuncular. They were also, as Saul knew quite well, a complete deceit.
He said nothing, simply waiting.
‘Of course I realise that Dan Harper is a friend of yours,’ Sir Alex Davidson commented kindly, and then when Saul remained silent he added less kindly and very smoothly, ‘After all, weren’t you sleeping with his wife at one time?’
Saul hadn’t been, but he let the comment pass. He knew enough of his boss’s tactics by now to know how much Sir Alex enjoyed the feeling that he had touched a raw nerve; that he had succeeded in slipping his knife into an unprotected and vulnerable organ.
‘However, business is business, and it was your responsibility to me to see that the take-over of Harper and Sons went through smoothly and discreetly, and not instead to warn Harper that we intended to buy him out and then to strip his company of its assets, and to close it down after dismissing its entire staff. Which, unless I am mistaken, is exactly what you did do.’
Now Saul did speak, simply saying calmly, ‘A rather dramatic interpretation of events.’
His
