AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I will be,” she replied to the far deeper question. “I’ve got a burn on the back of my hand and a few bruises, but otherwise I’m not hurt, just tired…” She left all the rest of the fear and pain unsaid. She would tell him about it later. “It’s…bad in Berlin. The books…” She gave a little shrug. “Later.”
“I know about the books,” he said. “And I got your photographs. We’ll talk after Walter’s gone.”
When Walter returned, Elena went upstairs to find the ointment and a clean bandage to put on her hand. The burn looked angry and sore, as indeed it was. Tomorrow, she might see the doctor, but for tonight anything was bearable. She was home. Safe.
At least the photographs were here, and in a way that was all that mattered.
Downstairs again, she went into the kitchen and began to take cutlery out of the drawer.
“You don’t need to do that, my dear,” Josephine said briskly. “It’ll be a little while yet. I have to heat the pie slowly or it will burn. Go and be pleasant to Mr. Mann. I dare say it’s your gratitude he would rather have than Lucas’s.” She frowned. “And you look exhausted. It’s good to know you’re home. You’ve been rather a long time and we’ve been concerned. You should telephone your parents and let them know you’re back. Margot sent a telegram to your parents to say she’s on her way back to London, too, with interesting news.” She looked at the bread, butter, beef, and mustard sitting on the kitchen table. “I think I’ll start the sandwiches now.”
Elena went into the hall and telephoned her parents, assuring them she was well. She would decide how much to tell them later, perhaps tomorrow. Her father asked her several questions, but she pleaded exhaustion and promised to tell him the details when she saw him. That was a promise she did not intend to keep. It would worry him far more than necessary, and she did not want to relive it.
In the drawing room, she found Lucas and Walter deep in conversation. They were talking about something during the war. She had been nine when it started. She could quite clearly recall the golden summer just before. The end of history and the beginning of modern times, Josephine had called it. Walter was about her own age. His memory must be like hers, all the emotions of war, the fear and the loss, but he was too young to have fought. Mike, five years older than Elena, was only just old enough for it to be required of him, although she knew there had been boys as young as twelve who had lied about their age and volunteered by 1918.
Both men looked around as she came in, closing the door behind her. Walter stood up. He moved awkwardly, as if his body was so tight that he was almost locked into position, and his face was flushed with some kind of emotion that he could barely control. He kept his right hand by his side.
Lucas watched, his face tense also. “Perhaps you should go and help your grandmother in the kitchen?” he suggested to Elena, looking very directly at her, his eyes clear blue, light as the sky.
What was wrong?
“Grandpa…” she began.
Then Walter was half behind her, and suddenly his left arm was around her, just above the waist. “No, I think you should stay here,” he said quietly, his voice utterly changed. “It’s been many years in coming—since 1917, in fact—but now it is time.”
Lucas started to rise to his feet.
Walter’s arm tightened around Elena, and his right hand was near her neck.
She felt the very slight prick of a knife blade at her throat. She fought against believing it, but now her body was drenched with fear. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice cracking. He had changed utterly! The friend who had helped her in the worst times had vanished, leaving a stranger behind.
“Walter Mann! I told you! Well, Walter Mannheim, actually. Ask your grandfather. See if he remembers Richard Mannheim, my father!” He said the last words so choked with emotion they were almost indistinguishable.
Silence filled the room. One second, two seconds.
“Better still,” Walter continued, “ask your grandfather who he is! If he doesn’t tell you, I will!”
“Walter…” Lucas started, then stopped as Walter’s hand tightened on the knife handle, and Elena winced as the blade pricked her again, and a slight trickle of warm blood slid down her neck.
“Be quiet!” Walter snapped. “I’ll tell her. Your grandfather was head of MI6 during the last part of the war. Spymaster general. A man whose power was secret, complete, and unanswerable to anyone. He could order a man executed, and it was done.” His voice was growing thicker with emotion, and higher in pitch. “Someone made a mistake and my father, Richard Mannheim, one of your grandfather’s men who risked his life over and over again, on Lucas Standish’s orders, was blamed for that mistake. And Lucas Standish accused him of being a traitor and had him hanged! Hanged…by the neck…jerking and twitching on the end of a rope…until he was dead. Because he could! He didn’t have to justify himself to anyone.”
Elena could feel Walter’s hand shaking, the knife moving fractionally, cutting a little deeper, the blood running.
Walter was so knotted with fury and grief that his whole body was rigid. His voice was unnaturally thin and high. “Do you know what that’s like? Do you? Have you any idea at all what he suffered? The betrayal by the one man he trusted?”
“Walter,” Lucas began. “Let Elena go. It’s not her fault.”
“Shut up! Was it my fault? You killed my father in the most hideous disgrace imaginable. A traitor! You hanged him like a criminal! My father! Do you know what that was like for me? It’s not Elena’s fault…of course it isn’t! She didn’t even know. You committed all your acts anonymously, where no one could find you. You didn’t care what you did to my father’s family, to my mother, to me! Yet you expect me to care what this does to Elena, or your wife? Why?”
“Kill me, if you think it will make you feel better, but leave Elena—” Lucas began.
Walter laughed, a harsh, raucous sound, ugly in its pain. “Idiot! I’m going to kill all of you! Elena first, so you can watch her fear, watch all that beautiful, passionate life slip out of her…watch her struggle…and lose it…knowing it was you who took it. And you will be blamed. I prefer to see you suffer for it, see you try to explain how it wasn’t you, and be condemned anyway, and then hanged. But that isn’t possible, because you might talk your way out of it. I expect you’ve still got friends. You could still be part of MI6, for all I know, although they didn’t rescue Elena in Germany! I did! I did—after I killed Newton.”
Elena was stunned. That was one thing she had not even thought of, but now that she heard it, the pieces all came together in her mind with a sharp, cutting reality.
“I sent him on a wild-goose chase, all the way from Amalfi to Berlin, to stop them from killing Scharnhorst. He thought it was your orders. I killed his contact there, so he couldn’t check. But then I met Elena—sweet, trusting Elena—at the hotel, and I heard she was your granddaughter. So, I killed Newton, because I knew she’d be all quixotic and take over his task—and she did.”
Elena tensed, trying to struggle, but he held her too tightly.
