his every move a type of empathy, something indefinable, that he held in common with her grandmother. She would have liked them to have met.
As was now common practice, the three of them sat in a row listening intently to the evidence presented before the court. For the next couple of days Mr Penshaw called a hotchpotch of witnesses to describe the nuts and bolts of organised murder. Mr Bartlett asked few questions, confining himself to small errors of detail.
‘In fact, the first deportation from Le Bourget-Drancy comprised standard third-class railway carriages, did it not?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. If it matters. ‘
‘Precision always matters,’ said Mr Bartlett kindly
Bartlett very occasionally gave a brief smile to the jury. After all, they’d been seeing each other every day, listening to the same witnesses. Lucy felt an atmosphere was developing between them. They were in this together, doing their level best. One or two had begun to smile back at him. Was it courtesy or empathy?
Lucy struggled to name a growing sensation. By some alchemy, Schwermann was almost detached from the proceedings. The link between the young SS officer and the elderly Defendant before them was peculiarly slender, the actions and attributes of fifty years ago having to be fixed on an older, much changed and hence different man. The passage of time itself had blurred not only the edges of responsibility but the consequences of the crime. Several newspapers had begun to question the propriety of the trial ‘so long after the events in question’, those being the fleshiness of killing, the smell of filth and the sound of fear. The younger man who’d been there was slipping out of reach; the older chap seemed crucially disconnected from his own past.
One radio programme debated ‘the age-old problem of Personal Identity’. If Schwermann at seventy-six was not the same man he had been at twenty-three could he be punished at all? Several newspapers explored the reach of ethics within the law, proper and improper. And many perfectly reasonable people from both sides of the fence appeared on Newsnight and within ten minutes were fairly evenly savaged for their trouble. The Defendant had become a ‘philosophico-legal’ problem, as well as an alleged killer. Lucy absorbed all the words, admiring the careful scrutiny of educated minds, but thinking all the time of leaves… thousands upon thousands of them, wafted helplessly into the air, no one knowing from where they had come or where they would go.
Watching Mr Bartlett at work, Lucy thought that someone had to bring the SS-Unterscharfuhrer back into the present, through the tangle of reasonable civilised arguments, and put him in the dock — someone who had known him at the time. And, apart from Agnes, there was only one person left.
2
Anselm and Conroy got back to Larkwood late on Saturday night. They spoke in snatches on the way down, each of them preoccupied by a vision of what would soon befall the Brownlow family No wonder the prophets were such a miserable lot, said Conroy Glimpsing the fulfilment of history, even a tiny flowering of righteousness; was not a pleasant sight. It wasn’t all slaked thirst, free corn, oil and new wine. And, unfortunately, getting the balance right between today’s children and the wrongs of their parents was a task that went well beyond the remit of the Crown Court.
Anselm retired to his room on Sunday afternoon to write a report for Cardinal Vincenzi. The text he produced was brief to the point of insolence. He set down the facts: Brionne had been found; he might give evidence; its substance had not been revealed. The whole was extended modestly with a few connecting phrases. With a flourish of respectful obedience, Anselm signed his name.
Anselm went down to the Bursar’s office, his report in hand. A fax machine and photocopier stood side by side. On an opposite wall was a grid of pigeonholes, one for each monk, a private depository for mail and handouts. Anselm faxed his letter directly to Cardinal Vincenzi in Rome and the Papal Nuncio in London. He had been instructed not to send a hard copy, so he placed the actual text in a folder addressed to Father Andrew — for eventual lodging in the Priory archives.
Turning to leave, Anselm checked his mail. There was one envelope. It must have been put there in the last hour or so for the pigeonhole had been empty after lunch. Opening it, Anselm withdrew the report from Father Chambray. An attached note from the author said he had gone to London en route to Paris that night. He urged Anselm to visit him the next time he was in France. That was a welcome gesture from a man on the boundary of things, a man who had once slammed a door in his face.
It was a flimsy text, a carbon copy on tracing paper. Anselm sat and read. It was all as Chambray had recounted. The last page, however, went rather further than their previous discussion.
Father Pleyon secured the passage of Schwermann and Brionne to England through personal diplomatic connections in Paris and London. Contact was made with a new monastic foundation in Suffolk that had been established by a French motherhouse shortly before the war. Schwermann would stay with the monks for a month while alternative arrangements were made by the British authorities.
Anselm put the report back in the envelope and glanced at the fax machine, thinking of his own brief letter to Rome. Its readers would already know that Eduard Schwermann first came to Larkwood Priory in 1945.
3
Reading other people’s letters without permission was the sort of thing that Freddie considered abhorrent. It was one of the many admonitions he had stressed when Lucy was a child and he was laying out the benchmarks for upright living. Which of course turned out to be ironic because he would dearly have loved to learn about his daughter if she would but tell him, and she wouldn’t, and that left peeping at her mail, which he never did, not even when Darren’s distinctive letters had fallen upon the doormat and Lucy had left them open in her unlocked room. She had done that on purpose, knowing he would want to look, and knowing that he would not.
So it was genuinely an accident when her father picked up a letter to Lucy from her college tutor referring her to Myriam Anderson, the counsellor, and giving her permission to miss lectures and tutorials for several weeks. It had fallen on the floor, out of a coat pocket, while she was visiting her parents, and Lucy had left for Brixton none the wiser. He gave it back to her, with an apology, a day or so later at Chiswick Mall. They were standing in the hallway, just as Lucy was about to leave. She took it, flushing, and answered the trapped question he would not ask:
‘I’ve not dropped out.’
Freddie studied her face for a long while. ‘But why, Lucy? What’s wrong?’ She’d expected anger, more of the old dashed expectations spilling forth like dirty water. But that didn’t happen. For once, he seemed lost, unsure of how to keep hold of the threads that linked him to his daughter. He raised his hands and Lucy felt the lightest of pulls towards him. She said, quickly, ‘I had a friend who died.’
The telling seemed to leave him winded. He didn’t even know about the friend, never mind the death. To her astonishment he came forward and put an arm around her, drawing her head into his neck. Lucy could not remember when that had last happened. She started crying, not for Pascal, not for Agnes, but for herself… and for her father.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said.
‘So am I.’
And they both knew that their words went far deeper than a reference to recent grief. They reached back, further than either of them could ever have intended or imagined, deep into the unlit past.
As Lucy pulled herself away, she met her father’s open gaze with dismay: how would it ever be possible to tell him about the trial, about Agnes’ notebook, and about his very self?
Lucy attended court the next morning and took her seat. She asked Max what he’d done the night before. Waiting on tables, he said. How awful, she replied. Pays the rent, he responded. Mr Lachaise polished his glasses reflectively, listening to their quick, simple exchange.
The barristers filed into court but, unusually, the jury were not summoned. Mr Justice Pollbrook came on to the bench. Mr Penshaw rose to his feet:
