The Templar Prophecy (22 page)

FIFTY-ONE

Frau Erlichmann had not answered Hart's call because she had been taking her afternoon nap. This was a daily ritual during which she unplugged the telephone and used both earplugs and an eyeshade to reinforce her desire for solitude. She was wide awake, though, when Hart arrived at the Alpenruh.

‘Thank you for your concern, Baron. But the police left two hours ago. Twenty minutes after that a female liaison officer turned up at my door. I sent her packing. I told her that I didn't need bereavement counselling, or social services, or meals-on-wheels. That a foreign guest I barely knew had fallen off one of my balconies while drunk, and that, whilst this was without doubt a tragedy for the person concerned, it wasn't a tragedy for me. I told her that I am still perfectly capable of looking after myself in this tragedy's aftermath in exactly the manner I have done for most of the past ninety years, during which I have had far worse disasters to face than the loss of my only paying guest.'

Hart sat opposite Frau Erlichmann at one of the
esszimmer
tables. He could tell, despite her nominally defiant words, that she was badly shaken up. ‘Please. Tell me what really happened.'

‘You will find a bottle of Niersteiner Pettenthal in the rear pantry. Will you fetch it please? With two glasses?'

Hart brought the wine. He poured Frau Erlichmann a glassful and watched her raise it to her mouth, using both hands to steady herself. The wine seemed to calm her, as if its familiar taste might be reminding her of the solid earth from which both she and it stemmed.

‘It was the SS who killed your friend.' Frau Erlichmann placed her glass carefully back onto the table. She stroked the nap of the tablecloth with her fingers. ‘I saw them. I heard a thump outside my bedroom window. So I put my dressing gown on and cracked open the door to my apartment. I saw the soldier passing. Even with my poor eyes, I saw the soldier passing on his way down to the cellar.'

Hart wondered for a moment if Frau Erlichmann wasn't beginning to suffer from the very same condition as his mother. But the old lady's gaze was clear, and bright with intelligence.

‘There are no SS any more, Frau Erlichmann. They've been extinct for nearly seventy years.'

‘This man was wearing an SS uniform. Please believe me when I tell you that. Sometimes my eyes work better in the semi-darkness. I could not tell his face. But the uniform, the boots, the hat, the swastika armband – they were all clear to
me in the glow thrown by the night-light. I have seen such things a thousand times in the Red Cross during the war. I was not mistaken.'

‘Did you tell this to the police?'

Frau Erlichmann stared at Hart as if he had taken leave of his senses. ‘
Quatsch
. Do you know what this word means in German? It means “total nonsense”. That is what the police would have said if I had told them of this. I am a very old woman. They would assume I was demented. They would have ordered me to be sectioned by a brace of their tame doctors and then transferred to a nursing home for my own good. There is no sign of a break-in. Nothing was stolen. As far as the
Landespolizei
are concerned, your friend simply fell off his balcony whilst drunk. The
Kripo
in charge of the investigation counted more than twenty empty beer bottles in his room. Not thirds – litres. Twenty litres. And all with his fingerprints on them – of this I have no doubt.' Frau Erlichmann cocked her head to one side. ‘Do you think I am suffering from dementia, John?'

‘No. My mother has this condition. I would recognize it straight away. You are not suffering from anything resembling it.'

‘Then come upstairs and visit Herr Wesker's room with me. The police are entirely satisfied that he fell off the balcony whilst under the influence of alcohol. Therefore the room is not a crime scene. They have requested that I have my maid collect up his belongings to be sent to Herr Wesker's family when they are able to contact them through the British
Embassy. You can help me with this, John. You knew him. Maybe we will learn something important?'

Wesker's belongings didn't amount to much. A few clothes, an old-fashioned nightshirt, a Kent washbag, and a beaten-up leather jacket. They fitted neatly inside his single suitcase. The only heavy objects were three bottles of Dimple Haig that Wesker must have bought at Munich Airport, if the duty-free bags were anything to go by. The bottles looked peculiarly forlorn, Hart thought, standing in line like promises of tomorrow.

Hart telephoned Amira from well inside Wesker's room. Amira had urged him not to go out onto the balcony just before they parted. It was at her insistence too that Hart had accessed the hotel via the rear woodland path, and not through the main entrance. It wouldn't do to underestimate Zirkeler, she had told him. The longer they could keep any connection between her, Wesker and Hart a secret, the better.

‘I've been through all of Wesker's stuff. There's nothing out of the ordinary there. But Frau Erlichmann tells me she saw the man who probably killed him leaving the house. Listen to this, Amira. He was wearing an SS uniform.'

There was a heavy silence at the other end of the telephone. ‘Zirkeler?'

‘She couldn't tell. But it has to be.'

‘So he likes dressing up when he conducts his murders? This gets weirder and weirder. Did she inform the police?'

‘No. She was afraid they would certify her. But we can rectify that omission later on if need be. It won't take much to convince them that she was scared to death.'

‘Then keep it under your own hat for a while, John. And please ask Frau Erlichmann to continue playing
stumm
as well. If she's game, that is? If Zirkeler thinks you bought the drunken fall story, he'll be that much further off his guard. Thank God he doesn't know about me yet.'

‘What else do you want me to do?'

‘Have you got Wesker's passport and wallet?'

‘The police have taken it. Next of kin and all that.'

‘What about his phone?'

‘There's no phone here. Maybe the police have taken that too? That would make sense, because they'll need some way to contact his family.'

‘It's encrypted. All our phones are. If it really was the police that took it, it won't do them any good. And if it was Zirkeler, it won't do him any good either. What else is there in his room?'

Hart listed Wesker's possessions.

‘And the Swarovski?'

‘What Swarovski?'

‘Wesker was using an NC2 image intensifier to see across the valley at night.'

Hart made a final tour of the room with the phone in his hand. Then he dropped to his knees and cracked open the balcony door. He peered out at ground level, making sure that the wooden balustrade blocked any possible view from Haus Walküre.

‘There's no intensifier here.'

‘Then it was stolen. Along with his phone, I'm willing to bet.'

‘That strikes me as incredibly dumb. Why cover your tracks, and then mess it up by stealing something you know will be missed?'

‘These people aren't rocket scientists, John. Look at Breivik in Norway. They think they're smart, but they're all missing a few screws.'

‘What if taking it was meant as a warning? A private warning to me?'

‘That's giving Zirkeler way too much credit, in my opinion.'

‘So where do we go from here?'

‘You go back to your Effi Rache, and you say nothing. What happened here has nothing to do with you, at least as far as she is concerned. Learn about Zirkeler. Find out where he lives. What exactly he does for the Lanzen Brüderschaft.'

‘And what are you going to do, Amira?'

‘I'm going to pay a visit to Fräulein Rache's chemical factory.'

FIFTY-TWO

‘Did you hear about the man who fell off Frau Erlichmann's balcony last night?' Effi was looking at Hart over her glass of wine. Her eyes were wide with excitement.

Hart glanced up from his Rindersteak. He met Effi's eyes. And then his gaze drifted down to her neckline, just as she had intended. She was wearing a gold lamé Marc Jacobs dress with a deep décolleté, more suited to a formal dinner party in a French chateau than to an intimate dinner à
deux
in a Mies van der Rohe dining room. The dress showed off the blonde lights in Effi's hair to their best advantage. It also emphasized the immaculate set of her shoulders, her alabaster skin, and the Venus indentations at her collarbone. When she stood up to fetch them a second bottle of wine from the kitchen, the dress hugged the contours of Effi's hips like a second skin.

‘No. I hadn't heard. What man was that?'

‘Oh, just some Englishman. He had been drinking heavily, I was told. The police found dozens of empty bottles in his
room. He walked out onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air and simply carried on walking. What a pathetic way to go. I suppose it was suicide.'

‘Where did you hear this?'

‘Everyone's heard about it, Johnny. Bad Wiessee is a large village. Not the medium-sized town it thinks it is. Under five thousand of us live here all year round, so everyone knows everyone else's business. My friend Margrit phoned and told me about it. She got it from a friend of hers whose father plays golf with the
Land
chief. You remember Margrit, don't you? You met her and Alena the day I was attacked by that boy at the Gasthof zur Hirschtal. She's decided to throw a party for us so she can really get to know you. She and Alena are green with envy. She thinks you look like… now, who was it?'

Hart forced a smile onto his face. ‘Brad Pitt? George Clooney? Ben Affleck? Johnny Depp?'

‘No. Now that I come to think of it, it was that comedian. The one in
Dumb and Dumber
. What is his name? Jim Carrey.'

Hart pretended to draw back his fist. ‘Very funny. Very funny indeed.' He watched Effi carefully as she sat opposite him, laughing. But there was no sign of duplicity on her face. She had brought the subject of Wesker's death up by herself, quite naturally, and with no prompting from him. It was the sort of event anybody might mention over the dinner table. It had happened in a neighbouring house, after all. And sudden death is always a subject worthy of comment, especially if the victim doesn't happen to be you. He decided to stir up the water a little.

‘Did you ever get a chance to talk to Zirkeler, Effi?'

‘Zirkeler? What about?'

‘Him lurking around the house the other night.'

‘Oh, that was all my fault.' Effi's face wore the wide-eyed look of a fallen angel who expects to be restored to heaven at any given moment. ‘I'd forgotten I'd asked him to do the rounds of all my properties. He has quite a few people working under him. He and his colleagues specialize in personal security. I asked him to make sure someone checked out the house and the factory every hour on the hour throughout the night.' Effi touched the Caresse d'orchidées necklace her father had bought her from Cartier for her twenty-first birthday. Hart's eyes followed the movement. She smiled at him. ‘That episode you witnessed in the Gasthof shook me up more than I thought. Udo Zirkeler may look like a Neanderthal, but he's actually a very responsible person. I think the night you saw him in the garden one of his people was off sick, so he decided to do the job himself. It's as simple as that. Nothing suspicious about it at all.'

‘Do you really think someone would target your factory? A place that makes swimming pool chemicals and herbal bath foam? Is that why you're having it watched? It seems unlikely to me.'

‘These crackbrained left-wing groups will target anything that may fetch them a little free publicity, Johnny. I've learnt this to my cost. It's always better to err on the side of caution. I've ordered Zirkeler to leave the house off his list now that I have you here with me, and to concentrate his attention on the factory and my farm at Schliersee. Does that satisfy
you?' Effi cocked her head to one side as if she were weighing Hart up for auction. ‘You'll protect me, won't you, Big Boy?'

Hart felt the look somewhere in the region of his hip pocket. It was Effi's intense femininity, he decided, that always wrong-footed him. There was something about the shape of her face, the swell of her brow, the configuration of her chin, which filled him with a baffling sense of wonder. Hart wasn't a fey man. He didn't believe in ghosts, fairies, guardian angels or spirit guides – and New Age blarney bored him rigid. So did people who wore their faith on their sleeves, or who claimed to believe in parallel universes. But when he looked at Effi, he knew, with an unshakeable certainty, that the two of them had been linked in a previous life. That they had once, long ago, been married. Or been brother and sister. Or father and daughter. Maybe she had been the man and he the woman? Who knew? But the feeling was total. Unassailable. And it coloured everything he did with her. Every response he made to her. Every suspicion he had of her. At this particular moment, discussing Wesker's murder with a detachment he didn't feel, he felt like a mother who hears that her son has been accused of a particularly grotesque crime, but who will not wear it, even though, in her heart of hearts, she knows it might be true.

When Effi left the table once more and walked into the open-plan kitchen to make them coffee, Hart excused himself and hurried down to the bathroom, ostensibly to wash his hands and freshen up. Once inside, he took out his phone and hit redial.

‘Amira Eisenberger. Who is this?'

Hart made a face. He knew Amira had number recognition on her phone. She was giving him the cold shoulder on purpose. ‘It's Colonel Gaddafi returned from the dead. Who do you think it is? Where are you?'

There was a brief hesitation on the line, as though Amira was wondering whether to take him into her confidence at all. ‘I'm on my way to Gmund.'

‘You're going to Effi's factory?'

‘Yes. It's high time I did what I'm good at, John. I'm sick to my stomach of letting other people carry the load for me. I can cut my own cake.'

Hart knew all about Amira's mood swings. He'd suffered under them for years. It was pointless putting his head beneath the chopper when he didn't have to. ‘But you need to be able to eat your cake, too. Don't forget that.'

There was an ironical snort on the other end of the line. ‘I suppose you haven't learnt anything new about Zirkeler?'

Hart opened the bathroom door and glanced up the stairs. He shut the door again and put the phone back to his ear. ‘Only that he has people patrolling Effi's house, her farm in Schliersee, and the factory in Gmund, every hour on the hour throughout the night. Is that of interest to you perhaps?'

‘Why would they do that? They can't know about us yet. And there's no way they'll have cracked Wesker's phone. I'm sure of it. The newspaper employs encryption experts to protect our sources.'

‘Left-wing groups are always looking for publicity, or so Effi tells me. And she makes a tempting target. So it's an ongoing problem for the LB. Nothing new, according to her.' Hart caught sight of his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He didn't like what he saw. He appeared to be betraying both the significant women in his life – Amira by commission, and Effi by omission. It wasn't a pretty picture. ‘Who knows what to believe? Effi's not exactly a shrinking violet. She admits as much herself. And she does put people's backs up.'

‘She's put mine up.'

‘Then you'd better watch it, hadn't you? You're not thinking of breaking into the factory or anything stupid like that? You're just going to take a look at the place from the outside?'

‘What do you care, John?' Amira almost spat the words out. ‘Both of you are probably busy winding up for beddybyes. I wouldn't want to put you off your stroke. I know how energetic you can be when you put your mind to it. Do you remember that hammock we shared on Lamu? Or has fucking Bianca Castafiore given you retrospective amnesia?'

Hart rolled his eyes.

When Amira spoke again, her voice came out as a hiss. ‘Good night, then. Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.'

When Hart tried to call her back, she'd switched off the phone and disabled her answering service.