whored with him, shot with him, ridden with him, got drunk with him, I heard all this from Castleford — was genuine or a trap. He served the purpose of a trap, anyway.'
'And so it went on?'
'For almost a year. Long before I got to Berlin. I didn't know why Castleford disliked me so much from the outset. I think now he was afraid of me. Clara — our involvement with her — was a blind-alley. She explains nothing, except perhaps the chance Castleford saw of winning her over and using her to keep a check on me. It never reached that stage.'
'What happened — at the end?' Massinger breathed. He saw Margaret become immediately alert. The room was already becoming dark beneath the late afternoon's leaden sky. The windows rattled slightly in the gusts of wind. Yet he could quite clearly see her shoulders tense, her head become more upright.
'A struggle for the gun. I had listened to him for what seemed like hours. I had come to charge him, arrest him. Even when I saw the gun, I imagined his suicide, so desperate and tormented did he seem. Instead, he intended to kill me. We struggled, and he was killed. He died almost at once. It took me many hours, almost until daylight, to hide the body in a cellar and bring about the collapse of enough remaining masonry to effectively bury him. That is what happened. I have, if you wish to see it, a fuller written record which Clara has kept for me for almost forty years. I came here, desperate to destroy it.' He looked directly at Margaret. She was watching him like a creature prepared to spring. 'Now, you may have it, if you wish. It is yours by right, I almost think…'
Margaret lunged out of her chair, her loose shoe almost tripping her. She stood in front of Aubrey, fists clenched, her whole body quivering, shoulders hunched towards him. Her small frame threatened him. Aubrey sat very still, his face tired but still wearing the sadly-wise, apologetic expression it had worn during much of his narrative. It seemed to defeat any physical intention on her part. Instead, she scrabbled her missing shoe onto her foot and immediately plunged towards the doors as if escaping a fire.
Massinger stood up. 'Margaret—!'
She slammed the doors violently behind her. Massinger made as if to follow her, limping suddenly from the renewed ache in his hip.
'Paul!' Aubrey warned. 'Paul — not yet. Let her have a little time to herself.'
Massinger was halfway to the doors, alert for the noises of Margaret's retreat, then his shoulders slumped and he turned towards Aubrey.
'You're right,' he admitted. 'I wouldn't know what to say to her. You're right…'
'The Elsenreith woman's gone out — there's only a maid in the place, apart from our friends.'
'We can't involve the maid or her mistress, Wilkes — not at this stage. They're Austrian citizens. You're certain all three of them are there? Aubrey himself is there?'
'All three.'
'Then you'd better get on with it. Take them to the house. Keep them there until I arrive.'
'Very good.'
'Be careful with the maid. And with your cover story. For the moment, the Massingers are only being detained in connection with their attempts to aid and abet Aubrey. Nothing more than that. Whatever they think or say to the contrary, that's your story.'
'Understood. When will you be here?'
'Tomorrow — I have a number of important committees and appointments. Just hold them until I arrive.'
'Very good.'
She was dazed by her misery and by the betrayal she felt taking place within herself; parts of her mind — memory, thought, feeling, intuition, guilt — were already siding with Aubrey, accepting the terrible, haunted figure her father had become at the end. She had begun accepting the struggle with the gun, the intention to murder that Aubrey had recognised almost too late…
She struggled into her coat, dropped her handbag in the hall, gathered it up and clutched it against her, fumbling with her buttons. She pushed against the door, then remembered to pull the latch. The darkening air outside was chilly, empty. She went out into the courtyard. The fountain sprayed out almost horizontally in a gust of wind, the green plants looked dead as their leaves moved stiffly. The cold wind buffeted her, as if attempting to force her back into the house. She had seen the bodies rolled into the mass grave filled with lime on the grainy newsreel as Aubrey was speaking, the bulldozer's blade shovelling at the white, stick-like limbs and the lolling skull-like faces. The awful striped pyjamas and the Stars of David…
Now, the image would not leave her. She had seen it first as a child, part of a documentary history of the war on television. Now, it had become personal, attached to her like a leech or a disease. She could not rid herself of it. Her father did not deserve the image, not now that she knew the whole and exact truth, but everything to do with him was horrible, awful, foul…
She scuttled beneath the archway into the Stephansplatz. The cathedral's bulk was grim and sooty in the dark air, its darkness heightened by the street-lamps. Horrible. A soul in torment. Even the man who had gone to arrest him, who had killed him, had said that. Everything lost — he had lost everything — helping them — !
The voices of relatives pursued her across the Stephansplatz. Aunts and uncles, grandparents — even her grandmother on her mother's side — especially her, because her father had been anti-Semitic, that much she knew. He had admired the Nazis, befriended them — yes, she knew that, too. In the 'thirties, he had not been like many other brilliant young men — he had eschewed Communism from the beginning of his student days.
The voices clashed and reiterated in her head, and her shoulders and head ducked as if to avoid the missile- voices in the dark windy air just above her. Hurrying across the square in the beginnings of the rush-hour, she looked old, weak, and pursued by an invisible cloud of stinging insects.
The hardest knowledge of all was to know that he had been destroyed long before he was killed. That knowledge erased, cancelled out, expunged all other images of him, all his earlier manifestations. He was no longer the man she remembered, the man her mother.had gone mad through loss of… the man smiling into the camera and the sun or coming through the dappled light beneath the apple trees towards her childish swing…
Up, up — further, further — push harder, harder…
Their joined laughter on the summer air. Her dress flying up in the breeze of her upswing, obscuring the view of the Downs, his hands catching at the seat of the swing lightly, then pushing strongly — catching the ropes of the swing at last, when she was giddy and almost frightened — catching her in his arms…
He was gone, that father. It was darker here, and musty rather than fresh. The air was still… All those fathers were gone.
Destroyed. Robert Castleford had disintegrated.
Still, musty air. The reflected glow of street-lamps through high windows. Patterned windows. High, unearthly voices, as from the distant end of a tall tunnel.
She shook her head. More images of distress. She went on shaking her head, twisting her body as if she were held powerfully from behind. She was trying to escape the truth, deny it—
Because she believed!
She believed Aubrey. He had confessed to her father's murder. The rest of it, too, was the truth. Truth from an old man. She knew it was true. Just as she knew her father had been to Cliveden, had travelled and stayed with influential friends in Germany in 1937 — she had seen the snapshots; dead boars, wooden hunting lodges, feathered green hats and leather shorts or green plus-fours — black uniforms, too… her father had been laughing in almost every picture… her maternal grandmother had been half-Jewish and now she understood the old, old woman's suspicions of her son-in-law.
She believed it all.
She recognised her surroundings for the first time, as if she had only that moment opened her eyes. The cathedral — the Stephansdom. The great roof, the slender nave, the chancel — the musty, cold, still air, the boy trebles whose voices floated just below the roof.
It was something she did not believe. There was no comfort for her here, except that it was out of that apartment and out of the wind and she was almost alone. She sat wearily, perching herself on the edge of a chair, as if about to kneel on the hassock at her feet. She listened to the anthem, and the organ quietly decorating it. Dusty lights glowed faintly, running down towards the high altar. Gold gleamed dully, paint obtruded shapeless
