A Season of Secrets (68 page)

‘But if there’s been no definite confirmation, those are only opinions, Max!’ There was desperation in Gilbert’s voice. ‘Without confirmation, how can anyone know
for a certainty that Violet is dead? She could well be still alive!’

Max said as levelly as he could manage, ‘The briefcase Violet took the carbon from had been left by Goebbels in Violet’s dressing room at Babelsberg. No one but Violet could have
taken it. The contents of the memo were as top secret as it is possible to imagine, and the sender was Hitler. Taking all those things into account, it’s impossible to think Violet is still
alive. I’m sorry, Gilbert. More sorry than I am capable of saying.’

Gilbert sank down onto a sofa and buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. When at last he could speak, he said thickly, ‘Olivia and Dieter are back in Ireland. I’ll have
to break the news by phone. Thea and Carrie are at Gorton. I can’t tell them on the phone. I must be with them when I tell them. You’ll come with me?’

‘Of course.’ Max blew his nose heavily in an effort to regain his self-control. ‘Roz is at Claridge’s. I wanted to be on my own when I spoke to you.’

Gilbert nodded, made a despairing motion with his hands and then rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘We’ll leave for Yorkshire now – immediately. We’ll pick up Roz on the
way’ He stopped, unable to go on, and then, after a colossal inner struggle, said, ‘No mention in front of Thea and Carrie as to the basements in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and of how
death-sentences are carried out in Hitler’s Reich. They won’t know, and they don’t need to know.’

Then, every line of his face etched with suffering, his broad shoulders bowed, he stumbled from the room as if he were a man of seventy, not a man in his fifties.

All three of them spent the four-hour car journey from London to Gorton in almost total silence. As Gilbert’s chauffeured Bentley ate up the miles, the only thing Roz
said was, ‘When I was at Claridge’s I telephoned Kyle. I thought you would prefer that I did so, Uncle Gilbert, rather than having to break the news to him yourself.’

‘Thank you, Roz.’ There was gratitude in his voice. Unlike Roz, Kyle wasn’t a blood relation, but being Roz’s stepbrother made him extended family and he was someone
Gilbert would have had to tell. That Roz had taken on the burden of doing so had been sensitive of her.

As they left the A
i
and headed into the Dales, the narrow roadsides were peppered with primroses. In Outhwaite, thanks to a very mild spring, pale-lemon winter jasmine tumbled up and over
the side of Hester Calvert’s front door. There was a bush of golden-yellow forsythia at the war memorial corner and daffodils in every carefully tended front garden.

The approach to Gorton was thick with daffodils. Because they were wild, they were smaller and paler than the ones in Outhwaite’s gardens, but they were beautiful, nonetheless.

Their beauty didn’t comfort Roz. It only signalled that soon – within ten minutes – Gilbert would be breaking the news of Violet’s arrest and certain fate to Thea, Carrie
and Judith.

He did so as succinctly and as gently as he could, but it was beyond all possibility for him to break the news in a way that could be bearable.

‘She can’t be dead!’ Thea had been sitting on the arm of a sofa and jumped to her feet, her eyes blazing, her face chalk-white. ‘She can’t be dead, Papa! It’s
impossible! No one is more alive than Violet!’

Gilbert tried to speak and, seeing that it was beyond him, Max said quietly, ‘Under the circumstances, Thea, no alternative seems possible.’

Thea gave a cry of anguish, and Judith, tears streaming down her face, put an arm around her shoulders.

Barely able to comprehend the hideous enormity of what Gilbert had just told them, Carrie’s immediate instinct was not to give vent to her own shock and grief, but to give Gilbert what
comfort she could.

Crossing swiftly to his side, she slid her hand through his arm and hugged it tight. ‘Maybe it isn’t true,’ she said fiercely. ‘Until we know for definite, or until more
time has passed, surely there’s still hope?’

She’d known, as his hand had lovingly covered hers, that grateful as he was for the comfort she was trying to give, he didn’t believe there was any hope – and she sensed that
no one else in the room did, either.

There came the sound of a car coming down the quarter-mile-long drive. Sending gravel flying, it swerved to a halt in front of the house.

Roz crossed to one of the room’s long windows. ‘It’s Kyle,’ she said. ‘He must have only been twenty miles or so behind us all the way from London.’

‘Kyle? Oh, thank God!’ The gratitude in Thea’s voice was naked.

Breaking away from Judith, she rushed from the room, and moments later all that could be heard from the circular hall were her choked sobs and Kyle’s voice, low and tender as he tried to
soothe her.

When she re-entered the room his arm was around her waist and her head was on his shoulder, her face ravaged, but her sobs under control.

Still with his arm around her as if he was never, ever again going to let her go, Kyle said to Gilbert. ‘What’s the latest news? Roz told me the arrest was six weeks ago, but not the
circumstances surrounding it.’

‘The whole thing is a long story.’ Gilbert looked towards Max. ‘Would you fix brandies for everyone, Max? I’ve never in my life been more in need of one.’

Carrie had no need for brandy. What she needed was fresh air. ‘I’m going outside, Gilbert,’ she said. ‘I’d like to be on my own for a little while.’

He patted her hand to show he understood, his throat so tight with grief that he didn’t trust himself to speak.

More than anything in the world he wanted to leave the room with her. He didn’t want to have to say again the words Tom Kirby had used to Max. Where Kyle was concerned, though, he had no
choice. And Kyle was a diplomat. He knew as much as – if not more about Nazi Germany than – Max or Gilbert did. He would know that Violet would have either died under torture or on a
scaffold, her head severed from her neck by a headsman wearing impeccable evening dress. The knowledge would be there in Kyle’s eyes – and Gilbert didn’t know how he was going to
survive seeing it there.

Carrie went to the cloakroom for her jacket and then walked out of the house. For a long moment she stood beneath the pillared portico and then, slowly, she walked down the
wide flight of steps. As she did so, the day in 1917 when Violet had been seven and she had been ten, and she’d walked down the steps on the way to post the officers’ mail and had found
Violet seated glumly on them, was as vivid in her memory as if it had happened yesterday.

She remembered the way they had bicycled into Outhwaite and how Violet had sung ‘Tipperary’ at the top of her lungs, and the way her torrent of fiery hair and the patriotic ribbons
tied to her handlebars had streamed in the wind.

That she would never see her again was a monstrosity beyond all imagining – and so she refused to imagine it. Sinking down onto an ice-cold step, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap,
knowing that she was the only person who still had hope – and, with typical Yorkshire stubbornness, refusing to relinquish it.

In Sachsenhausen concentration camp August Groebler prepared for his day’s work. He took pride in being an executioner and dressed carefully. A stiff-fronted white
shirt. Black trousers with a broad stripe of braid down the side, the trousers shiny from daily usage. Black socks – wool because the temperature in the vast room where executions took place
was frequently freezing cold.

He hooked a pair of braces over his shoulders, wondering how long a day lay ahead of him. Sometimes he had only three or four decapitations to carry out. Other days he worked until even his
strong-muscled arms ached.

He fastened a celluloid wing-collar to his shirt. A short working day meant he would be able to meet his grandchildren from school, a task that his daughter appreciated.

With great care and peering close to the mirror, he fastened his white bow-tie, wondering about the age and sex of those he was about to behead. Strangely the young, who had so much more to
lose, often behaved with more dignity than the old. Even more strangely, it was usually the women who showed the most courage.

He slid his arms into his low-cut white piqué waistcoat, fastening mother-of-pearl buttons over his gigantic girth.

There had been a time when executing a woman had been something of a rarity for him. Now it had become commonplace.

He put on his shoes, tying the laces in a double bow. A man’s feet had to be firmly planted when wielding an axe, and the last thing he could risk was a shoelace coming undone. To trip
over when bringing the axe down on someone’s neck would be a very messy business.

As he shrugged himself into his tailcoat he had a strong feeling that his first beheading of the day was going to be a woman. Hopefully she wouldn’t be too much trouble. Whatever the day
ahead held, at the end of it he would be eighty marks and an extra ration of cigarettes better off.

He put his top hat on his head and picked up his regulation white gloves.

His axe, which he’d personalized by having a white lily engraved on it, was waiting for him.

And so was his first victim.

Violet lifted her head high as she started on the walk she had always known she would one day take. Nothing mattered any more but the scene around her. The lane leading down
from Outhwaite was edged with flowering blackthorn and the meadows leading down to the river were starred with celandines. Soon she would come to the curve in the lane that led to the bridge and
then, beyond the bridge, would be Gorton Hall.

It was a mild day for March – she had decided a long time ago that it would be a mild, gentle day when she made this walk. The breeze was soft against her face and in the branches of an
alder a blackbird was singing.

In her mind’s eye she peopled Gorton with the people she wanted to find there when she arrived. Her father, of course, and Carrie. Thea, Olivia, Roz and Judith. If Olivia and Roz were
there, then Max and Dieter would be there too, and if it was to be a complete family gathering, then Kyle would be there as well.

It would be quite a crowd, and in the evening the crowd would be even bigger, for there would be a party – she was determined there would be a party – and at a party would be Jim and
his wife, and Charlie and Hermione, Charlie junior and Miss Calvert.

When she reached the bridge she came to a halt, knowing that her journey was almost at an end and wanting it to last just a little bit longer.

Resting her arms on the stone parapet, she gazed down into the limpid depths of the slow-moving river, remembering all the other times she had stood in exactly the same place, doing exactly the
same thing. Sometimes she had been alone, as she was today. Sometimes Carrie had been with her. Often it had been her father who had been with her and, when she had been a little girl, her mother.
She could remember the feel of her mother’s hand holding hers: the sense of safety it had given her.

With all the force of her vivid imagination she imagined she was holding her mother’s hand now as, turning away from the parapet, she continued the walk towards the people she loved.

Carrie had no idea how long she had been sitting on the steps, but what she did know was that, if she stayed where she was much longer, someone would come and try to persuade
her to return indoors.

And she didn’t want to do so. Not yet.

Plunging her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket, she walked down the remaining steps and then across the gravel to the drive. At the end of the drive, where it ran into the lane and the
bridge came into view, she came to a halt.

A woman was walking from the bridge in the direction of the house. She was too far away for Carrie to see her clearly, but she could see that although the woman’s hair was dark, not fiery,
there was something familiar about her; so familiar that the breath stopped short in her chest.

Then she sucked air back into her lungs and began to run.