Death in Berlin: A Mystery Read online

  ‘In that case,’ said Miranda briskly, ‘I can’t see why you don’t stay home.’

  ‘And be separated from Robert? I couldn’t bear it! That’s the awful part of it. I swore I’d never marry another soldier. But I couldn’t help it. You don’t mean to fall in love with people. You just do, and then it’s too late and you find yourself being pulled in two between loving someone and hating the untidy, nomadic life you will have to live if you want to be with them. Oh well____! I suppose I shall just go on living the sort of life I don’t like, in places I loathe, until I’m an old hag and Robert retires with a tummy and a pension! Never marry a soldier, Miranda.’

  ‘Moral, never marry anyone,’ said Miranda, hugging her. ‘It sounds much safer and far more comfortable to remain a resolute spinster—like me!’

  Stella gave a dreary little laugh and turned away from the window: ‘What a mess I must look! I’m sorry, ’Randa. I’ve been behaving like a hysterical lunatic. I suppose it’s seeing it all start again; and being older this time, and—oh forget it darling! I’m tired and I feel as if we’d been travelling for weeks instead of less than two days.’ She turned on both washbasin taps and peered disconsolately at herself in the inadequate square of looking-glass above them. ‘Do you suppose if I slosh my face with cold water it will do any good? I can’t go down to the dining-room looking like this.’

  ‘Would you like to have your supper sent up here?’ suggested Miranda.

  ‘No. I must go down. Robert has asked that Control Commission man to have dinner with us. You know—the elderly man we met on the train. Brigadier something or other.’

  ‘Brindley,’ supplied Miranda.

  ‘That’s it. I don’t think the poor man realized that he’d have to eat his meal with Lottie and Mademoiselle as well, or he’d probably have refused. He doesn’t look the type who likes children. Those gossipy old bachelors seldom do. What time is this train supposed to leave for Berlin?’

  ‘Well there’s an extremely military notice downstairs which says it “departs 22.55 hrs”, but I haven’t taken time off to work that one out yet. You’d think they’d run a through-train from the Hook, wouldn’t you?—instead of throwing us all off and dumping us in a hostel for hours on end.’

  ‘Russians,’ said Stella splashing her face with cold water.

  ‘What do you mean, “Russians”?’

  ‘Apparently they won’t let us run trains through their zone except by night. I suppose they’re afraid we’d hang out of the carriage windows clicking our Kodaks. Do I look any better?’

  ‘You look marvellous,’ said Miranda lightly, and turned quickly away, thinking, with a sudden sense of shock, that Stella looked more than middle-aged; she looked old.

  * * *

  Stella Carrell, who had then been Stella Radley and was now Stella Melville, had been a grown woman of twenty-seven when Miranda, a leggy and frightened six-year-old, had first seen her. Then, and for many years afterwards, she had seemed old to Miranda. It was only during the last two or three years that Miranda had begun to think of Stella as an attractive woman in her thirties, and to admire her looks and copy her taste in clothes and hats. Stella had seemed to grow younger as Miranda grew older, for there was a curious touch of immaturity about her character and outlook that somehow made Miranda feel protective and as though she were the elder of the two. Yet now, in the space of a few minutes, although the spoilt child had been apparent in her recent outburst, she had suddenly seemed to age ten years in appearance.

  Looking back, Miranda could not remember ever having seen Stella look anything but immaculately neat and beautifully dressed. There was a term for Stella that the glossier women’s magazines were inordinately fond of, although Miranda had always considered it more suitable for horses: Stella was ‘well-groomed’. Now, however, her blond hair hung about her face in damp disorder and Miranda noticed for the first time that its yellow fairness was touched with silver and that without benefit of powder and rouge her skin appeared faded and almost sallow, with a network of fine lines and spreading crowsfeet marking it about the eyes and mouth.

  Miranda was suddenly reminded of the roses in the garden at Mallow: one day so beautiful in their velvety perfection, and the next, overblown and fading. Stella was like the roses, she thought; and like them, she would fade quickly. Her looks were not of the kind that will outlast youth, and soon there would be nothing left of that bright prettiness, and little to show that it had ever existed.

  Seized by a disturbing thought Miranda turned quickly to stare at her own face in the looking-glass. It gazed reassuringly back at her with eyes the colour of a winter sky: wide of cheekbone, pointed of chin, framed in curling dark hair and set on a long slender throat the colour of warm ivory. A face startlingly like Thompson’s portrait of Charlotte Brontë, that in Charlotte’s day had been dismissed as ‘plain’ but which, allied to a slimmer-than-slim figure, had earned Miranda Brand a very comfortable income during the past two years as a fashion model.

  I shall wear well, decided Miranda dispassionately. When I am seventy, people will say: ‘Who is that distinguished-looking old lady?’

  She laughed suddenly: being young enough to enjoy picturing herself in old age without believing in its possibility.

  ‘What are you giggling about?’ demanded Stella, completing her make-up with an expert hand before the mirror above the wash-basin. She looked, once more, serene and poised, and as completely out of place in the dull setting of the hostel bedroom as an expensive orchid worn on the ample bosom of an elderly German hausfrau.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Miranda hastily. ‘If you’re ready let’s go down and see if this caravanserai can produce some drinkable sherry.’

  CHAPTER 2

  The dining-room of the Families’ Hostel was large, long and high-ceilinged, and smelt strongly of past meals, floor polish and overheated radiators. Miranda, seated at one of the larger tables between her cousin Robert Melville and a retired brigadier in the Control Commission, looked about it with interest.

  The room was overfull of empty tables, but either the travellers who had been on the boat-train tended to huddle together, or else the German waiters, anxious to economize in time and labour, had shepherded them to conveniently adjacent ones.

  The Melvilles’ table was between one occupied by a Colonel and Mrs Leslie, and another shared by two of Robert’s brother officers and their wives—Major and Mrs Marson and Lieutenant and Mrs Page.

  Beyond the Leslies sat Mrs Wilkin and her five children. Mrs Wilkin, a small and sparrow-like woman on her way out to join her husband, a sergeant whose unit was stationed in Berlin, looked anxious and exhausted: and with good reason, since her offspring, who had been noisy and unmanageable for the past twenty-four hours, were now completely out of hand. The eldest Wilkin, addressed by his mother as ‘Wally’, was throwing bread. A demon-child, thought Miranda with a grin. Wally, intercepting the grin, paused in his bread-throwing and returned it. It split his plain, freckled face in an engaging though gap-toothed manner, and temporarily dispelled his striking resemblance to the Don Camillo imp. Conscious of an audience he threw an even larger piece of bread, and Miranda’s gaze moved hurriedly on.

  None of the other tables was occupied, and noting the fact, she felt childishly disappointed. And unreasonably annoyed with herself for feeling so. She had hoped to see someone else in that dining-room. Someone she had seen for the first time only the day before. But he was not there.

  Miranda turned her attention to the soup, but as the meal progressed she became aware once more of that odd, indefinable prickling of apprehension. She wondered if perhaps she, like Stella, was overtired? Perhaps everyone in that echoing, ugly room with its depressing sea of empty tables was equally tired, and it was the accumulative effect of their weariness and taut nerves that created this inexplicable feeling of unease? Could tiredness, too, be the explanation of Mrs Leslie’s odd behaviour? Miranda crumbled her bread and looked thoughtfully at the occupants of the table
on her immediate left.

  Colonel Leslie commanded one of the British regiments on duty in Berlin, and he and his wife Norah were returning there from three weeks’ leave in England. Norah Leslie might well have stood for a model of the ‘Army wife’, for she was typed just as surely as though she had a placard about her neck proclaiming her status and occupation. One knew instinctively that she referred to her husband’s regiment as ‘My regiment’, to the regimental wives as ‘My wives’, did her duty as to Welfare, and all that concerned the good of the battalion, played an excellent game of bridge, an adequate game of tennis and golf, read all the best-sellers, and was sincerely convinced that there was only one regiment in the British Army that counted.

  The Melvilles’ party had shared a carriage with the Leslies from London to Harwich, and it appeared that Norah Leslie had been a near neighbour of Robert’s during their childhood and adolescence. But although Colonel Leslie had made polite conversation, Mrs Leslie had been curt to the point of rudeness. When, at Harwich, they had found the Harwich-to-Hook boat to be crowded and Stella, Miranda, Mademoiselle and seven-year-old Charlotte had been directed to a six-berth cabin, the other two occupants of which were Mrs Leslie and Elsa Marson, wife of Major Harry Marson of Robert’s regiment, Mrs Leslie had complained to the stewardess. She insisted that there had been a mistake, since her husband had expressly asked that a two-berth cabin should be reserved for them. The stewardess had been patient but unhelpful. She said that the boat was very full, and intimated that Mrs Leslie would have to make the best of it. Mrs Leslie had announced her intention of complaining to the authorities, taken several pills as a precautionary measure against seasickness, and retired to her bunk.

  She was gracious to Miranda next morning as they waited in the Customs shed at the Hook, and inquired as to her reasons for coming to Germany. ‘Oh, you’re only coming for a holiday? A month? But what a very odd place to choose for a holiday! Now before the war____! But frankly, there’s nothing worth looking at nowadays. Unless you are interested in mangled ruins, and even then, once you’ve seen the wreck of the Reichstag and a mass of rubble where the Chancellery and Hitler’s bunker used to be, you’ve seen everything. Are the Melvilles relations of yours, or just friends?… You are Robert’s cousin? I used to know Robert very well. His family lived almost next door to us for a great many years. I hadn’t met his wife before. I didn’t realize____’ But at that point Robert and Stella had joined them, and Mrs Leslie had turned abruptly on her heel and walked away.

  Robert had looked slightly surprised, and Stella hurt; she was unused to rudeness, and for a moment her blue eyes had widened and her mouth turned down at the corners like a snubbed child’s. Miranda had felt both angry and curious: angry on her cousin’s behalf, and curious to know what was behind Mrs Leslie’s odd behaviour. Whatever the reason, it was patently clear that neither Robert nor Stella was aware of it.

  Yes, mused Miranda, observing Mrs Leslie with a desultory interest from her place at the table in the Families’ Hostel: there is something there. I wonder what? Norah Leslie was looking at her husband, but Miranda was sure in her own mind that her attention was not concentrated upon what he was saying, but on the conversation at the Melvilles’ table, and she was trying to decide why she should be so sure of this, when Mrs Leslie turned her head. It was not possible to tell whether she looked at Robert’s squarely turned back, or his wife’s face as she sat opposite him listening to Brigadier Brindley’s views on growing sweetpeas. But the look itself did not require any interpretation. It is never possible to mistake naked hate.

  Miranda turned away quickly; uncomfortable and more than a little startled. But no one else seemed to have noticed that smouldering stare. Brigadier Brindley had abandoned sweetpeas in favour of the ballet, and Robert and the elderly Swiss governess, Mademoiselle Marie Beljame, were occupied with Charlotte— Robert in answering his daughter’s questions and Mademoiselle Beljame in fussily supervising her table-manners.

  Charlotte, renamed ‘Lottie-the-Devil-Cat’ by Miranda, was a remarkably plain child who appeared to have inherited nothing of Robert’s charm and outstanding good looks. Her mother, Robert’s first wife, had been a beauty; but she had died giving birth to this plain little girl, and a year later Robert had married Stella Radley. Robert was younger than Stella by several years, though until now Miranda had never found it noticeable. But tonight, sitting in that unkindly lighted dining-room, it was suddenly apparent. Perhaps Stella’s recent tears had something to do with it; or perhaps it was the contrast between Stella’s carefully made-up face and the fresh, glowing prettiness of the girl who sat so near to her at the next table …

  Sally Page had married a junior officer in Robert’s regiment when she was barely eighteen, and despite four years of matrimony she still looked and behaved like a charming and giddy teenager. Andy and she had been stationed in Fayid during the two and a half years that Robert had been in the Suez Canal Zone, and now they too were rejoining the regiment.

  If Stella looked like a florist’s rose, thought Miranda, Sally Page looked like a wild rose: sweet and fresh, heartbreakingly young and essentially English. And from behind Stella’s shoulder she was smiling now at Stella’s husband. It was a revealing smile, as revealing as Mrs Leslie’s look had been; and Miranda, observing it, was aware of a swift little jab of anxiety. No; perhaps it had not been such a good idea after all, this holiday in Berlin …

  * * *

  ‘Number twenty-eight, did you say?’ said Brigadier Brindley. ‘Why, of course I know the house. And I can assure you that you will find it most comfortable. Quite one of the pleasantest houses in Charlottenburg. You have been fortunate.’

  ‘That’s what Robert says,’ said Stella. ‘But you know what army husbands are like. They tend to overdo the selling angle just to cheer you up.’

  ‘Well, in this instance he is perfectly correct. A charming house, and quite undamaged. Interesting too: though only by association.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Robert leant forward and joined in the conversation: ‘Did it belong to some spectacular Nazi?’

  ‘No, but it belonged to the mother of Herr Ridder—Willi Ridder. And I suppose one could almost call him a spectacular character. Or if not spectacular, at least mysterious and intriguing.’

  ‘Do tell us,’ begged Stella. ‘I adore being mystified and intrigued.’

  The Brigadier had a reputation as a raconteur, and was not at all averse to holding forth to an interested audience. He cleared his throat and took a small sip of wine.

  ‘Willi Ridder,’ began Brigadier Brindley, ‘was a prominent member of the Nazi Secret Service. He was not one of those who took the spotlight at the front of the stage, but rather one of the puppet-masters who stayed in the background and pulled the strings. As far as outward appearances were concerned, he was merely a wealthy Berliner in high favour with the Nazi hierarchy.’

  ‘And he lived in our house? It sounds as if it ought to be very Park Laneish,’ said Stella.

  ‘No, it was only his mother who lived in your house. He and his wife lived in another house not so very far from yours, which is a ruin now: it stopped a stray bomb fairly early in the war, I believe. In spite of his wealth he lived comparatively simply. No large staff, just a married couple who lived in; one of them the cook-housekeeper and the other a sort of valet-cum-major-domo. There were the usual “dailies”, I suppose, and reliable extra help who were called in only when required, for special occasions.’

  The Brigadier paused as though he had made a point, and took another sip of Niersteiner, and Robert said; ‘I don’t suppose big shots in any Secret Service like having a lot of hangers-on around the house. Two dyed-in-the-wool trusties are probably preferable to a platoon of doubtfuls, even if it does mean that the soup is sometimes lukewarm and there is the odd spot of dust on the drawing-room chimneypiece.’

  ‘Quite,’ agreed the Brigadier. ‘But in the light of after-events I am inclined to put a less obvious and more sin
ister interpretation upon it. In my opinion it was part of a plan.’

  ‘What plan?’ said Stella. ‘How exciting you make it sound! Did you know this man Ridder?’

  ‘I did,’ said the Brigadier impressively. ‘I met Herr Ridder in 1937 when he was over in England visiting the Gore-Houstons. Lady Gore-Houston was a cousin of mine, and she was, unfortunately—like some others I could name—inclined to be somewhat pro-fascist in those days. In the following year I happened to be in Berlin for a short spell, and Herr Ridder invited me to stay with him. I spent only one night in his house, but my memory of that visit is most distinct—probably because I have thought of it so often since then …

  ‘In the ordinary course of events I do not suppose I should have had occasion to recall it, and so the details would, in time, inevitably have become blurred in my mind. But owing to what happened afterwards I have frequently thought back over that brief visit with great interest.’

  ‘What did happen?’ begged Miranda, still young enough to wish to leap to the point of a story, and impatient of frills.

  ‘All in good time, my dear,’ said Brigadier Brindley, who disliked being hurried towards his dénouement and preferred to extract the full flavour of suspense from his story. He refreshed himself with another sip of wine before continuing.

  ‘Perhaps you will remember—those of us who are not too young,’ (here he made a courtly little bow in the direction of Miranda) ‘that in the late spring of 1940 Germany made a savage and unprovoked attack upon Holland. Well, at that time there happened to be, in Rotterdam, a fortune in cut diamonds ready for transhipment to Britain and the United States. The Nazis were aware of this and their capture was an important part of the surprise attack. They knew exactly where they were, and they dropped special paratroops to surround the house. Only one of the men who was concerned in that operation knew what they were after, and that man was Herr Ridder, who was entrusted with the task of taking over the diamonds and bringing them back to Berlin. The plan worked admirably, and Ridder took possession of several million pounds worth of diamonds.’