He glanced at her again. She had put aside her handkerchief and was staring at him with a fragile defiance. He took his foot off the brake. Crossing the city was risky, no question, but what else were they to do? Lie behind a locked door waiting to be caught?
He swung the car round in a circle and headed towards the exit as headlights flashed in the gloom behind them.
They parked beside the Havel and walked to the shore. March pointed to the spot where Buhler’s body had been found. Her camera clicked as Spiedel’s had four days before, but there was little left to record. A few footprints were just visible in the mud. The grass was flattened slightly where the corpse had been dragged from the water. But in a day or two these signs would disappear. She turned away from the water and drew her coat around her, shivering.
It was too dangerous to drive to Buhler’s villa so he stopped at the end of the causeway with the engine running. She leaned out to take a picture of the road leading to the island. The red and white pole was down. No sign of the sentry.
“Is that it?” she asked. “Life won’t pay much for these.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps there is another place.”
NUMBERS fifty-six to fifty-eight Am grossen Wannsee turned out to be a large nineteenth-century mansion with a pillared facade. It no longer housed the German headquarters of Interpol. At some point in the years since the war it had become a girls” school. March looked this way and that, up and down the leafy street where the blossom was in full pink bloom, and tried the gate. It was unlocked. He gestured to Charlie to join him.
“We are Herr and Frau March,” he said, as he pushed open the gate. “We have a daughter…”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, of course, Heidi. She is seven. With plaits
“She is unhappy at her present school. This one was recommended. We wanted to look around…” They stepped into the grounds. March closed the gates behind them.
She said: “Naturally, if we are trespassing, we apologise…”
“But surely Frau March does not look old enough to have a sevenyear-old daughter?”
“She was seduced at an impressionable age by a handsome investigator…”
“A likely story.”
The gravel drive looped around a circular flower bed. March tried to picture it as it might have looked in January 1942. A dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps, or frost. Bare trees. A couple of guards shivering by the entrance. The government cars, one after the other, crunching over the icy gravel. An adjutant saluting and stepping forward to open the doors. Stuckart: handsome and elegant. Buhler: his lawyer’s notes carefully arranged in his briefcase. Luther: blinking behind his thick spectacles. Did their breath hang in the air after them? And Heydrich. Would he have arrived first, as host? Or last, to demonstrate his power? Did the cold impart colour even to those pale cheeks?
The house was barred and deserted. While Charlie took a picture of the entrance, March picked his way through a small shrubbery to peer through a window. Rows of dwarf-sized desks with dwarf-sized chairs up-ended and stacked on top. A pair of blackboards from which the pupils were being taught the Party’s special grace. On one:
On the other:
Childish paintings decorated the walls — blue meadows, green skies, clouds of sulphur-yellow. Children’s art was perilously close to degenerate art; such perversity would have to be knocked out of them …March could smell the school-smell even from here: the familiar compound of chalk dust, wooden floors and stale, institutional food. He turned away.
