Death in Berlin (21 page)

Harry Marson said: ‘Hullo, Miranda. This is a bloody business isn’t it - in more senses than one.’ He finished the contents of his glass at a gulp. ‘We’ve had the Polizei and the F.B.I, and the Gendarmerie and old Uncle Sherlock-Holmes-Cantrell and all swarming over us since early dawn. Or that’s what it feels like. The entire allied police force appears to be interested in the demise of your late parlourmaid, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we’re all lined up answering questions for a squad of comrades from the N.K.V.D. as well!’

Robert said quite pleasantly: ‘Shut up, Harry,’ and Harry Marson shot him a quick look and reddened under his tan. He cleared his throat uncomfortably and said: ‘Well I suppose we’d better be getting along. Give you a lift to the office after lunch fair exchange and all that.’

‘Make it about three,’ said Robert.

‘Okay. Come on, Eisa.’

They went out through the french window and took the short cut across the Leslies’ garden to their own house.

Stella came down to luncheon looking smooth and poised and soignée. It did not seem possible that this was the same woman who had crouched before her looking-glass, hysterical and terrified, so short a time ago. She had changed into a leaf-brown suit that brought out the copper tints in her blond hair, and had made up her face with care. But her hands still trembled slightly and the carefully applied mascara could not hide the redness about her eyes.

Robert went to the foot of the stairs to meet her. He took her into his arms and held her close to him for a moment, her head thrown back so that he could look into her eyes. Then he kissed her gently and released her.

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‘Well done, darling,’ said Robert approvingly. xi

A little flush of colour rose to Stella’s cheeks and the tension in her face and body seemed to relax. She smiled at him warmly and lovingly, and tucking her hand through his arm, turned towards the diningroom.

A little after three o’clock a horn sounded in the road. ‘That’ll be Harry,’ said Robert. ‘Darling, I’m going to be late again this evening. I’m sorry. It’s specially beastly just now, but there is a bit of an international flap on, and the C.O. is up to his eyes in work and worry. I’ll be back as soon as I can, but it may not be until around eight o’clock. Goodbye, my sweet. Try not to worry too much. Everything is going to be all right, and as soon as all this has blown over I shall see if I can’t scrounge a bit of leave and we’ll go down to Italy for ten days. Would you like that?’

‘No,’ said Stella with a crooked smile. ‘Frankly, darling, I’d prefer ten days in a boarding-house at Blackpool or a cosy chalet in some Butlin holiday camp. Bracing Britain is good enough for me, and I feel I never want to see another hysterical foreigner in my life!’

Robert laughed and stooped to kiss her. ‘Butlins it shall be! And if only I were a man of means instead of an impecunious chap who has still to qualify for a minimum pension, I’d hand in my papers and take to breeding pigs tomorrow! Never mind, my sweet, one day we shall retire to some nice, safe semidetached on a bus route, and keep hens in the back garden.’

‘It sounds heavenly,’ said Stella with a laugh. ‘But why the semidetached? Why not Mallow?’

‘My dear girl,’ said Robert, reaching for his hat, ‘by the time I can afford to retire or am heaved out - whichever cornes first the local housing committee will have grabbed it under some bylaw and converted it into Workers’ flats. And about time too! With the cost of living well over the roof, the place is a mark one white elephant.’

The car horn tooted again impatiently and Robert pulled Stella to him and kissed her again, holding her for a moment with his

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cheek against hers. He looked past her to Miranda, his eyes anxious, and said: ‘Look after her, ‘Randa.’

Stella released herself with a little laugh. ‘It’s Miranda who needs looking after darling, not me. ‘Randa was in the thick of it all.’

‘Well, look after each other then.’ He reached out and ruffled Miranda’s dark hair affectionately, kissed her cheek, and was gone.

Two men came to interview Stella during the course of the afternoon: one of them Colonel Cantrell, whom Miranda had first seen in the waitingroom of Charlottenburg station, and the other a German policeman. But they did not ask to see Miranda, and she returned to the garden and sat on the edge of Lottie’s sandpit with an anxious eye on the drawing-room windows.

Why were they worrying Stella again? Was it because she could produce no alibi for the previous night? But Stella of all people would not kill someone in mistake for herself. Unless Simon was

wrong and there was no question of a mistake? Or did they perhaps think that for some reason of her own Stella might have killed Friedel and had the brilliant idea of dressing her in her own coat in order to create the impression that she herself had been the intended victim - thereby providing herself in some sort with an alibi, to compensate for the fact that she could produce no evidence to prove where she had been during that short margin of time in which Friedel must have met her death? They might reason like that; but then they had not seen her, as Miranda had, in her bedroom that morning. Stella was afraid. Afraid for her life. Genuinely and terribly afraid. And despite her subsequent denial, it was quite obvious that she had a special and secret reason for that fear.

Mrs Marson … ? Had it been Eisa Marson who had spoken to Friedel on the landing in the hostel that first morning in Berlin? Where had she been last night, and what had she been doing in the Soviet Garden of Remembrance? Miranda sighed and abandoned the problem in favour of wishing herself back once more in the tiny, comfortable flat off Sloane Street, x ,y •ť ,,-*-, w$ <-

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Colonel Cantrell and the German policeman left after half an hour, and towards five o’clock Stella suggested a visit to the swimming-pool at the Stadium, where Lottie and the Lawrence children were to have a swimming lesson. She had not referred to the afternoon’s interview, but her eyes were over-bright and there was a hectic flush of colour in her cheeks that made Miranda feel anxious. Stella was making an obvious effort to appear her normal self, and was gay and talkative and had confined her conversation to an amusingly malicious account of the Wives’ Meeting at the Lawrence house.

‘I wonder if we need any petrol?’ said Stella, starting the car and backing it out cautiously. ‘I think there’s a spare gallon somewhere.’

Miranda leant forward and peered at the gauge: ‘No. You’ve got two gallons in the tank. It isn’t far, is it?’

‘Only a couple of miles, I think. If that.’ Stella sighed and said: ‘Do you remember when we bought this car? It was in 1950, for Robert’s leave. We went to Dorset. Oh, those peaceful English lanes and hedges! And here I am, driving it down an autobahn in Berlin. It seems all wrong, somehow.’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ comforted Miranda. ‘You’ll drive it down a lot more English lanes one day. It’s done a nice, comfortable wodge of British mileage - 17,332 miles no less - so I see no reason why it should not tot up a few on autobahns before getting back to hedges again.’

‘It won’t be hedges,’ said Stella gloomily. ‘It will be some beastly bamboo forest or a rubber plantation, and I expect we’ll be made to paint it a dreary shade of jungle green.’

The eastern entrance to the Stadium area, where Hitler’s Youth Rallies and the Olympic Games of the Nazi era had been held, led into a road that skirted a vast amphitheatre and passed between green playing fields to a large block of buildings, one of which housed the big indoor swimming-pool.

Stella parked the car, and they walked between tall gates and along a wide path, and turned down a short flight of stone steps

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and past a large outdoor pool which was three parts full of dark, stagnant water and flanked by a bronze bull and his mate, wading knee-deep in rigid bronze ripples, and eventually reached the huge indoor pool.

After the sharp evening air outside the atmosphere seemed to them intolerably steamy and stifling, for the pool was a heated one. But they endured it for an hour, after which Mrs Lawrence, who had also been watching her offspring having a swimming lesson in the pool reserved for children and beginners, invited them back to her house for a drink so that Stella could say goodnight to Lottie.

The house lay not more than half a mile from the west entrance of the Stadium area in a quiet, tree-lined road, and it was after halfpast six by the time they reached it and were ushered into the drawing-room by Katy Lawrence, who hunted the children off to supper in charge of Mademoiselle and apologized for the absence of the Colonel.

‘He’s having a foul time, poor pet,’ said his wife, dispensing sherry. ‘There’s some terrific flap on. George thinks I don’t know a thing about it, but of course I do. They’re all getting a lecture, or a “briefing”, or whatever they call it, this evening by someone from the Headquarters - Toddy Pilcher. Rather a pompous little man, I always thought. And then there’s this talk by the C-in-C tomorrow night. George says Toddy insisted on a projector in the lecture room. Lantern slides - I ask you! Sounds madly Women’s Institute to me. Was that the doorbell? Let’s hope it’s Monica Bradley with that stuff for the Thrift Shop at last!’

But it was Sally Page who was ushered in by a whitecoated batman. Sally wearing that same look of strain and weariness that Miranda had seen on Stella’s face; and Mrs Marson’s. And on her own as it looked back at her from a mirror. Yet on Sally it was neither ugly nor ageing: she merely looked fragile, childlike and pathetic, and the faint smudges of sleeplessness under the forgetme-not blue eyes only served to enhance their size and colour.

Sally had only called to say that she could not, after all, help in

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the Thrift Shop the following week, but that she had swopped weeks with Esmé Carroll and did Mrs Lawrence mind? She stayed to drink a glass of sherry and press Stella and Miranda to go back with her to her flat that evening.

‘Do say you’ll come!’ begged Sally prettily. ‘I do so want you to see my flat. And Andy would simply love to see you: he wants to show you some photographs he’s taken of me. And besides I want your advice about what colour to have the drawing-room painted. I hear that your drawing-room is lovely, Mrs Melville. You will come, won’t you?’

Miranda saw Stella’s face pale and her mouth tighten, and noticed that her voice was distinctly metallic as she said crisply: ‘I know Miranda would love to go, but I’m afraid I can’t manage it this evening.’

Left with no option - since she could hardly refuse in face of Stella’s positive statement that she would love to go - Miranda accepted, and Sally smiled disarmingly at her, and having got her way, turned to the subject of Friedel’s murder. Whereupon Stella stood up abruptly saying that she would run up and say goodnight to Lottie, and left the room. Miranda endeavoured to change the subject, but without success, since her hostess was far too interested in the whole affair to discourage such an entertaining topic of conversation.

‘We* had the police round this morning,’ said Sally, ending a long and enthusiastic dissertation on the latest murder. ‘Well, not really the police I suppose, but that nice Lang man, and another creature who just sat there and never uttered - rather goodlooking, with dark hair. They wanted to know what we were doing last night. I mean to say - honestly\ As if any of us were likely to go round hitting German housemaids on the head with pokers! Not that I haven’t thought it mightn’t be a good thing, because you’ve no idea what a clueless creature the Labour Exchange people have foisted on us …

‘She says her name’s Sonya, and I’m quite sure she’s a Russian spy. I mean, she wears Russian boots and stumps about in them

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all day and simply never washes. She’s supposed to be a cook, but she can’t even boil a potato, and when I complained she said she didn’t understand English cooking - only German. So of course I said, “Let’s have some German cooking,” because I’m all for fancy foreign dishes. But it seems that German cooking is just the same as English cooking, only worse: I mean all you do is to pour masses of grease over everything and that’s it.’

She paused for breath and Miranda, fearful of the conversation returning to the subject of Friedel, said: ‘Well, personally, I think you’re very lucky to have cooks and housemaids at all. If there is one thing I do detest, it’s peeling potatoes and washing up greasy dishes.’

Mrs Lawrence, however, was not to be drawn into a discussion of the servant problem. She said: ‘But why were you questioned about last night, Sally? Did they explain?’

‘Oh yes. But it wasn’t very exciting, really. It was just in case either of us had seen anyone lurking about, or noticed anything like a car standing at the end of the road. Things like that. And alibis of course. Simon Lang said it would help to clear up things if we could each produce an alibi.’

‘Why “each”?’ inquired Mrs Lawrence, puzzled. ‘Surely Andy was dining in the American sector?’

‘Well, he was,’ said Sally, ‘but it was too stupid - I can’t think how he could have made such a silly mistake - but it seems it was the wrong night, so he came back and went to bed.’

‘Does that mean he hasn’t got an alibi?’

‘Oh no; I’m afraid that as suspects we’re both out of the running,’ said Sally regretfully.

Miranda, noting the tone, thought with some irritation that Sally, whose reading seemed to be entirely of the escapist variety, would rather have enjoyed appearing as a witness in a murder trial: she probably saw herself as the frail and sensitive heroine of this type of fiction, and would have found it pleasurably exciting to be a suspect.

‘Andy couldn’t get the lift to work,’ explained Sally, ‘so he routed out the caretaker, who is rather an old sweetie, and the old

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boy fixed it for him. Andy asked him in for a beer, and very fortunately noticed that the time was just eight o’clock by that diningroom clock of ours; because he told Herr Hiibbe that he could only have missed me by about a quarter of an hour or so and now he would have to cook his own supper.’