AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes.” She stared straight back at him.
“They are excellent. You are professional, yes? It shows in the composition. How many did you take of Scharnhorst’s death?”
“Only one of the exact moment. A few around it. If you have seen the photograph I took you must know that I cannot possibly have shot Herr Scharnhorst.”
“Did you know it was going to happen?” He was looking at her very closely. Would he see a lie? This was his job, interrogation.
Should she tell him the truth? That she had warned Cordell, and he had done nothing? Better not to bring MI6 into it at all. It was too hard to explain. And if he questioned Cordell, even graciously, as a foreign diplomat, he would say that he was embarrassed for His Majesty’s Government, and yes, she could be guilty.
“No.”
“And yet you very carefully photographed him, just at the right instant. Are you always so…fortunate?” His expression was unreadable.
“I took several. I always do. I was lucky enough to have caught the exact moment in one of them. All the rest did not.”
He smiled. It was a warm, easy gesture. Was he actually quite a decent man, in other circumstances? Did most of these men have a side to them that was as human as anyone else?
And did not even the nicest people have a dark, hidden side that their friends had no idea existed? She forced the idea away. She was overthinking it.
“It takes a lot of work, and luck, to get just the right one, doesn’t it?” he said casually.
Had he taken that picture of his wife and child? Without deliberately doing so, she glanced at it, then away again. Was it there precisely to lull whomever he was questioning into thinking of him as a human being, a man gentle with those he loved? What a hideous use of that most beautiful thing.
He saw her eyes hover on his family’s portrait. “It’s not hard to photograph babies like that.”
“Your wife and daughter?”
“Yes. What do you know of Scharnhorst, Miss Standish? Why did you go to the rally? Is he someone you admire?” There was a shadow in his face as he said that. Was it clever acting, or did the dip in his voice, the instant of harshness, give him away?
How much should she lie? How ugly would it be if she said she admired Scharnhorst, or agreed with anything he said? Could she make herself do that? “I heard him,” she said simply. “He wants to exterminate the Jews, the Gypsies, the trade unionists, and all homosexuals. He said it would cleanse Germany and be the beginning of a new age, a kingdom that would last forever.” She had intended to keep her voice neutral, but her loathing, and perhaps her fear, too, came through all too clearly in her words. The edge of sarcasm was razor sharp.
“It shocked you?” he asked, his own voice carefully neutral.
What should she say? Did her life depend on it? Or was she going to be blamed for killing Scharnhorst regardless of what she said? Would they be any gentler with her? That was an idiotic thought to play with. Mike would be ashamed of her. She thought of him because thinking of Lucas was too much. She would end up weeping in front of the commandant.
“Yes, it shocked me,” she admitted, meeting his clear eyes. They were not blue, as she had thought, but gray. “He spoke of them as if they were an infestation in the house, termites, or dry rot in the walls.”
“I think that was how he saw them,” Beimler replied. A flush of color spread up his cheeks. “Where did the rifle come from, Miss Standish?”
“I’ve no idea. It was there in the room when I got back.”
“How long after Scharnhorst was shot? Be careful what you say. The rifle still smelled of gunpowder.”
“I don’t know. The crowds were pretty hysterical. It wasn’t easy to get through them. And…and I waited long enough to get a pretty good picture of them…carrying him away.”
Was that ghoulish? Would he think of that as a terrible intrusion into death?
He appeared not to have heard her. “Ten minutes? More? Say…fifteen?”
“Yes, I think so. Time is different when something shocking happens.”
“The hotel receptionist doesn’t recall anyone else going up to your floor,” he observed.
“Well, he wouldn’t, would he?”
“Not if he has any sense, no,” he agreed. He looked at her, and for an instant she saw the bitter humor in him, and the pity; and something deeper, a grief for things that were lost. Did he know what was happening to his country, and hate it? And yet what could he do?
There were a hundred answers to that, all of them terrible. Was it absurd to sit in this office while he interrogated her about them? The murder of Scharnhorst, whom both of them despised, and both knew she had not killed.
