Death in Berlin (16 page)

Miranda closed the door, turned off the landing light that shone too strongly into Lottie’s half-open door, and more from habit than for any other reason, changed her grey suit for the dress of topaz-coloured wool that she had worn the previous day, before going downstairs.

The drawing-room curtains had not been drawn and the room was in darkness, but beyond the windows the garden was full of cold spring moonlight and black shadows. Somewhere in the house a door shut quietly and Miranda turned away and went into the hall.

Friedel came out of the kitchen and said that the soup was on the table and that she had put cold meat and salad on the sideboard. She had locked the back door, and would be back soon.

Miranda went into the diningroom and sat down to her solitary meal, and presently she heard light footsteps crossing the hall and

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the click of the front door as it closed. Friedel had gone, and she was alone in the house.

Alone in the house … Now why should that thought suddenly disturb her and bring with it a return of the vague, troubling feeling of apprehension that had been absent from her all that sunny afternoon and quiet evening?

Besides she was not alone; Lottie was asleep upstairs.

Miranda turned her attention resolutely to the cooling soup, and having finished it, carried the empty plate to the sideboard and helped herself to cold meat and salad, making as much noise about it as possible as a protection against the silence.

The clatter of plates and knives comforted her in some obscure fashion; they made a pleasant, ordinary, everyday sound. She mixed herself a french dressing from the ingredients that Friedel had left on the table, and was pouring them over her salad when she heard soft footsteps on the landing upstairs.

For a fleeting moment her heart seemed to leap into her throat; and then she realized who had caused them and was corres—

pondingly annoyed. She got up from the table, marched over to the door and called up to the top landing: ‘Get back to bed, Lottie! It’s quite time you were asleep. If I hear you out of bed again I’ll come up and spank you. That’s a promise!’

There was the sound of.a hurried, surreptitious movement and then silence.

Miranda waited for a moment or two and then returned to her interrupted meal.

The sound of her own voice and the realization that someone else was awake in the house, even though it was only a child of seven, had temporarily dispelled her feeling of disquiet. But it did not last.

The uneasiness crept back again, and grew and spread with the silence of the quiet house. The tick of the diningroom clock seemed absurdly loud, for the noise it made was the only sound in that silence; and once again, as in the corridor of the Berlin train, Miranda found herself fighting an impulse to look over her shoulder… !. san v; •!;;•.; - • ^^^.^•-

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She put down her knife and fork and was angrily aware that she had laid them down softly and with exaggerated care, and that she was holding her breath. Why should she suddenly feel that she must not make a sound - that any sound would seem frightening and overloud in that waiting silence? What was she listening for?

A board creaked overhead and Miranda’s teeth clenched on her lower lip.

The quiet house, despite the stillness - or perhaps because of it? - began to fill with noises. The ticking of the clock; the sudden inexplicable creak of floors and furniture that becomes audible only by night; a moth fluttering against a windowpane, and an occasional stealthy scrabbling that sounded as though someone or something was crawling up the gutters, but that came from the central-heating pipes.

But Miranda was listening for none of these things.

She turned quickly and looked behind her; but there was no one there, and beyond the open doorway of the diningroom the hall stretched emptily away to the shadowed alcove where the telephone stood.

Miranda picked up her knife and fork again, feeling ashamed of herself for having given way to that foolish impulse, but she could not force herself to eat, and after a moment or two she laid them down once more and stared around her.

The diningroom furniture seemed to stare back at her, remote and uninterested, its varnished immobility mocking her tense and quivering awareness. She could see herself reflected dimly in the smooth panels of the sideboard, the polished table-top and the gleaming surface of a silver salver: a white, heart-shaped face with wide, terrified eyes, red mouth and dark wings of hair. A frightened girl in a sleek topaz-coloured dress.

The hideous hanging lamp above the diningroom table filled the room with harsh light, and there was no possible hidingplace in it. Even the curtains reached only as far as the windowsill, and their thin cotton folds could not have concealed a kitten.

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Nevertheless, from somewhere someone was watching her. She did not know why she knew it. She only knew that she did know it; and with an absolute certainty that left no room for doubt.

Miranda stood up suddenly, pushing her chair back so violently that it fell with a crash to the floor. The noise, with its suggestion of uncontrolled hysteria, steadied her and made her realize that she was behaving in a panic-stricken and unadult manner, and that if she were not careful, would presently be rushing out of the house screaming. The house was locked up and no one could enter it except by the front door into the hall, which was clearly visible from the diningroom.

She forced herself to pick up the fallen chair and replace it, and feeling unaccountably fortified by the act, walked firmly across the room and out into the hall.

There was no one there. The staircase leading up to the shadowed landing was empty and nothing moved on or above it. Miranda turned towards the darkened drawing-room.

After the brightly lit hall and diningroom, the moonlight beyond the drawing-room windows appeared faint and wan, but as Miranda’s fingers groped for the switch she thought she saw a flicker of movement outside the french window.

The switch clicked under her fingers, and as light flooded the room the windows were once again dark. But in that fraction of a second she had ceased to be frightened: ‘Wally!’ said Miranda, speaking aloud in the silence. ‘I bet it’s Wally!’ Her curving mouth set itself in a determined line that boded no good for Master Wilkin, and switching off the light she tiptoed to the french window, unlocked it and slipped out into the garden.

The night was cold and very still. No breath of wind stirred the branches of the fir trees and not a leaf rustled, and Miranda too stood motionless; waiting until her eyes were accustomed to the uncertain light and listening for sounds of stealthy movement that would betray the whereabouts of that fervent embryo detective, Master Wallace Wilkin. And this time, vowed Miranda, I shall tell

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his father, and I only hope that Wally will have to take his meals off the mantelpiece for the next week as a result!

She held her breath to listen, but the garden was quiet and nothing moved. Perhaps Wally - if it had been Wally - had run for it as soon as he saw the drawing-room light go on. Or had that faint flicker of movement been only an owl or a bat? One thing at least was certain; she could not stand here indefinitely. She would walk once round the garden and then, if she found no one, would go in and lock the front door and turn on the wireless and every light in the house until Friedel or Robert and Stella returned.

Miranda walked down the sandy path that led past the diningroom windows and turned right-handed to skirt the lawn, but when she reached the cherry trees at the far end of the garden she paused, and on an impulse sat down on the wooden seat that encircled a tree near the path.

The windless night was full of stars and lights: stars in the sky and the red stars that warned aircraft away from the tall steel radio pylons. Twin stars, green and red, that moved across the sky and were the wing lights of an aircraft heading for Tempelhof airfield. A spangle of coloured lights that outlined the distant Funkturm…

The path was a tangle of moonlight and tree-shadows, and the garden was fragrant with the faint, elusive scent of spring. The silent night was not frightening and hostile as the silent house had been, for the Leslies’ drawing-room windows made friendly squares of soft, orange light against the blue of the moonlight, and Miranda could hear voices and laughter and the sound of a radio playing dance music.

She leant back against the rough bark of the cherry tree, and a few pale petals, dislodged by the slight movement, drifted down like snowflakes into her lap.

For no reason at all she found herself thinking of Simon Lang, and the discovery gave her the same feeling of resentment that Simon Lang himself seemed to produce in her. She had not meant to think of him, but it was as though he had walked across the

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garden and stood in front of her, blocking out the moonlight and the white ghosts of the cherry trees, and refused to go away.

Miranda shut her eyes, and found that she could not picture him clearly. She could make a list of features, but none of them added up to the same Simon. He was, as he had told her, an unobtrusive person. He was certainly a singularly quiet one; his voice and manner and movements providing a gentle and pleasant façade that concealed the real Simon Lang.

The real Simon Lang, Miranda suspected, was a person who knew exactly what he wanted and invariably got it; and who, as a general rule, simply did not find it necessary, and could not be bothered, to use force or noise in any form in order to achieve it. He had interested her from the first moment she had set eyes on him, though she had not paused to discover the reason for this. And at the present time there was a more important question: why was he interested in her?

Had he been almost anyone else, Miranda would have instantly supplied an obvious answer. But in the case of Simon Lang she was regretfully compelled to reject that simple solution, since she did not in the least believe that Simon was attracted by her personal charms. Did he, then, believe that she knew more about the murder of Brigadier Brindley than she had admitted? Or was he, as Robert suggested, using that as a blind? - allowing someone else to suppose that he suspected her, in order to put that someone off their guard?

It was a possible solution, and an unpleasant one. But why should she, Miranda, be interested in Simon Lang?

Miranda frowned at the shadows of the cherry trees and was unable to find an acceptable answer.

Someone turned off the radio in the Leslies’ house, and a few minutes later their lights went out, leaving the house in darkness. Presently Miranda heard the sound of cars being started up and realized that the Leslies must have decided to take their party on to the Club or to some Berlin nightspot. Three cars, one after another, purred down the road on the far side of the house. And

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as the sounds faded and dwindled away into silence, Miranda shivered and awoke to the fact that she was wearing a thin woollen frock and the night was cold.

A chill breath of wind sighed across the garden, bringing down a shower of white petals and bearing with it the threat of a stronger wind to follow, and she stood up to brush the fallen petals from her lap and resume her interrupted tour of the garden.

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Once or twice Miranda stopped to peer left and right into the shadows, but the gesture was a purely perfunctory one.

If Wally had been there, he had gone, for the garden was so still that she would have caught the slightest rustle of movement. But all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing and the faint, faraway purr of traffic from the distant Herr Strasse.

Overhead the white pencils of Russian searchlights, paled by the clear moonlight, swept across the sky and picked out scattered, drifting shreds of cloud, as Miranda walked quickly along the path by the hedge that formed a boundary between the two gardens. She was cold, and anxious to get indoors once more to the comfort of the friendly lamplight, for now that the Leslies’ house was in darkness, the moonlit garden seemed darker and somehow daunting.

The sandy path was bone white in the moonlight except where an oddly shaped shadow blotted it near a clump of lilacs by the gap in the hedge. A shadow that, when she reached it, was not a shadow at all … but the body of a woman who lay face downwards with her feet towards the house and her head hidden by the darkness of the gap

For a long moment that seemed to have no beginning or end, Miranda stood staring down at the sprawling, silk-clad legs and the blur of silverygrey fur; numb with horror, and caught once more in the web of a waking nightmare. Then all at once she was on her knees beside it, tugging at it, trying to lift it, her voice a harsh scream. . :

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‘Stella! Stella! What’s happened? … Oh no!… Oh God, no!… Stella … !’

The limp arms were outstretched, fingers clawed in the damp earth, and the body was slack and unbelievably heavy as Miranda put her arms about it and dragged it, panting, up and away from the black shadow of the hedge.

The head lolled back against her shoulder and the moonlight bathed it in white light. And it was not Stella. It was Friedel…

Miranda’s immediate reaction was one of violent relief. It wasn’t Stella! That, for the moment, was all that mattered, and she let the heavy head drop back onto the grass, and laughing a cracked, hysterical laugh of relief, fell on her knees again beside it.

A thin wet trickle, black in the moonlight, crept across the white face from some wound concealed by the woman’s hair, and ‘reached and darkened one staring eye. But the eye did not blink or close, and it was only then that Miranda realized that she was looking at a dead body. She had known it when she had first laid a hand upon it, but she had not really believed it until now.

A sudden, shuddering horror brought her to her feet: and then all at once she was running. Running desperately across the lawn and to the shelter of the house.

She had no clear recollection afterwards of entering the house or of fastening the french window behind her, but she had done so, and reached the telephone and had somehow managed to dial a number.