1503954692 (41 page)
Authors: Steve Robinson
‘How are you? I’m sorry, I should have asked sooner.’
‘I’m fine. There was some internal swelling, but it’s okay. They wanted to run another scan to be sure. Anyway, when I couldn’t reach you I went to see Tobias. It was mid-afternoon by then and he said he’d been expecting us.’
‘I called him earlier in the day. I said we’d drop by and lend a hand with the tidying up. He was trying to find a report he wanted to show us.’
‘Well, he’d already found it by the time I got there. After we told him Langner had had a child with Trudi Strobel, and that he’d paid her off for the child, he’d had his government contacts look into Langner’s business accounts.’
‘Tobias said he was keen to follow just about any new lead that came along.’
Jean nodded. ‘And it proved worthwhile. They found that Langner was still making payments to Trudi and her daughter. He’d set up an account in the name of a bogus art restoration company, so that without further examination it wouldn’t be obvious who was getting the money. There were several business accounts, but this one stood out because the sums of money being paid into it seemed disproportionately high for the services being paid for.’
‘And on closer inspection,’ Tayte offered, ‘they found the company registered to Trudi Strobel and Ingrid Keller?’
‘I don’t think it was quite as straightforward as that, but that’s the crux of it, yes. They found that the money was ultimately being drawn by Trudi and Ingrid. It wasn’t a bad setup either. I doubt it was even illegal. It went unnoticed for so long because, until we connected Langner to Trudi Strobel through her daughter, Ingrid, no one had cause to investigate the reputable art dealer Volker Strobel was posing as.’
They were halfway along the expansive hall when Tayte paused beside a piece of illuminated statuary and gazed up at the colourful frescos on the ceiling, glad to see that not everything so beautiful had been destroyed by the war.
‘So, what did you do with this information?’ he asked.
‘I went back to see Trudi Strobel.’
‘You did? How did that go?’
‘It was quite confrontational to begin with.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Tayte said, recalling how cold Trudi had been towards both of them when they visited her together.
‘I stood my ground, though,’ Jean added. ‘A couple of hours had passed by now and I was worried sick about you. When I went to Trudi’s house and mentioned the bogus company she’d been drawing from the gates couldn’t have opened faster. I told her what I knew and I showed her the proof. Tobias had made a copy for me, the poor man. His own copier was broken, along with just about everything else in his office. He had to go to another business on a different floor to borrow theirs.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Tayte said. ‘I hope he and his father will find some peace now that Strobel’s in custody.’
Jean nodded and continued her explanation. ‘I came right out with it and asked Trudi why she’d lied to us about the money—why she’d told us Langner paid her off for the child all those years ago, when in truth he didn’t have that kind of money back then. She became very uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t be put off. For all I knew, your life was in danger.’
‘It was.’
‘Exactly, so I told her everything that had happened to us since we arrived in Munich, and that I was deeply concerned about you because you weren’t answering your phone. Then I came back to the large sums of money she was still receiving from Langner and I asked her why. Well, she seemed to break down in front of me. She became angry at first, but I kept asking her why Langner was still supporting her, and whether the payments were really just to keep her quiet about his daughter, Ingrid. It was then that she began to break down and she told me Langner wasn’t Ingrid’s father. She just came out with it. I still don’t know whether she meant to say it or not, but that was the moment the penny dropped. Trudi went very quiet after that, but she’d already said enough and I think she knew it. I realised that if Langner wasn’t Ingrid’s father, the money had to be coming from someone else—someone posing as Johann Langner.’
‘And who else could that be other than Trudi’s husband-in-hiding, Volker Strobel,’ Tayte said, smiling at Jean and wondering what he’d done to deserve her.
‘I went back to Rudi Langner after that,’ Jean continued. ‘When I told him what I knew about his father and his nurse, it must have come as such a shock. He was so upset. It was clear to see how much he looked up to his father. Imagine finding out that he was really the Demon of Dachau and that he’d been lied to all his life.’
‘I can see why he was so mad at Strobel when you both found me,’ Tayte said. ‘How did you know I was there? Rudi can’t have known what really went on at that place.’
‘We tried the house first,’ Jean said. ‘Langner wasn’t there, and neither was Keller, so we called the German Heart Centre to see if he’d been readmitted. They hadn’t seen him. Langner’s former Hitler Youth building was the only other place we could think to check, and we knew something was wrong as soon as we arrived. As I said when we found you, there was a strong smell of fuel in the air and we followed our noses to the basement. I almost bumped into Ingrid Keller.’
Tayte grinned. ‘And then she bumped into your fist.’
‘You’re not going to let that go, are you?’
‘Sure I will—eventually. Just remind me not to get on the wrong side of you.’
As they came to the end of the hall, Tayte held Jean close to him and gazed into her eyes. ‘I really thought I was going to die last night. I haven’t said it yet, but thank you, Jean. You saved my life. How can I ever repay you?’
‘Oh, I’m sure I can think of something,’ Jean said. A moment later she stood on her toes and kissed him, and her whole face lit up as she said, ‘Marry me?’
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Katie Green for helping to shape and structure this story, to Catja Pafort for copyediting the book and helping with my German, to Emilie Marneur and the team at Amazon Publishing for all the many things that go on behind the scenes, and my continued thanks to my wife, Karen, for her support and the invaluable input that goes into every Jefferson Tayte story. I would also very much like to thank you, the reader, for reading or listening to this book. I hope you enjoyed it.
About the Author
Photo © Karen Robinson
Steve Robinson drew upon his own family history for inspiration when he imagined the life and quest of his genealogist hero Jefferson Tayte. The talented London-based crime writer, who was first published at age sixteen, always wondered about his own maternal grandfather—‘He was an American GI billeted in England during the Second World War,’ Robinson says. ‘A few years after the war ended he went back to America, leaving a young family behind and, to my knowledge, no further contact was made. I traced him to Los Angeles through his 1943 enlistment record and discovered that he was born in Arkansas . . .’
Robinson cites crime writing and genealogy as ardent hobbies—a passion that is readily apparent in his work. He can be contacted via his website,
www.steve-robinson.me
, his blog at
www.ancestryauthor.blogspot.com
, and on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/SteveRobinsonAuthor
.
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