The Eden Inheritance (25 page)

Not even the women in von Rheinhardt's life had the power to stir anything more than superficial emotions – occasional lust and the sense of satisfaction and pride that came from having a beauty on his arm – as Ingrid, the fiancée who adored him, would testify. She had his ring on her finger and waited for him in war-torn Germany, but she could never be sure of him, for even loving him as she did she was aware of his total detachment, though she would never have admitted to it or to the basic truth of the matter – where people were concerned von Rheinhardt was totally without care or compassion.

All his energy was reserved for the furtherance of his career and in this he had been outstandingly successful, gaining his promotions in the army of the Third Reich by his single-mindedness and a determination which even his superiors had found daunting. He was hard, he was cold, he was ruthless. He dealt with those who opposed him as he would have dealt with a fly that annoyed him, swatting it to the ground and crushing it underfoot with never a thought for human misery, and not caring, or so it seemed, for the fact that he was almost universally disliked. No, people did not matter to Otto von Rheinhardt. Only Aryan supremacy and his place in the order it created were important to him.

Yet for all his apparent heartlessness, beauty and culture and a sense of history touched him in a way nothing else could. His home he loved, not for its memories of the happy childhood he had spent there, but for its aesthetic value, and the Château de Savigny stirred him in much the same way. Its faded grandeur pleased him – the square-turreted building, the courtyard and well, the fountain, the moat which had repelled other invaders, but not him. And within its walls he was continually finding new things to pleasure his senses. Whenever he visited he hungrily devoured the treasures it housed with his eyes, feeling his spirits raised by the beauty of the glowing paintings and works of art, the silverware, gleaming dully in the soft lamplight, the delicately fashioned porcelains, the chunky whole-some bronzes. He looked at them and coveted them, promising himself that one day, when he was finished with soldiering and had a home of his own, he would fill it with just such treasures.

He seldom refused an invitation to the château and in fact actively sought excuses to visit this oasis of culture in an alien land. He had thought that tonight he might he unable to take up the Baron's offer of dinner – two of his men had been shot last night and as a result he had spent a trying day in an effort to discover who had perpetrated this outrage, which he looked upon more as a threat to his control of the area than a tragedy for the men concerned. But thanks to his efforts that matter now appeared to be well on the way to being satisfactorily resolved and he had felt able, after all, to keep the engagement.

A small cruel smile played around von Rheinhardt's mouth. He straightened his uniform jacket and walked towards the château.

As Guillaume ushered von Rheinhardt into the salon Kathryn found herself moving to Paul's side. Imperceptibly he squeezed her arm. Courage, that squeeze said. Stay calm and everything will be all right. She wished she could be so sure.

‘Can I get you a drink?' Guillaume was asking.

‘Yes. Thank you.' His tall courtly figure dominated the room. Each of them, for their own reasons, was looking at him, each asking their own silent question.

‘We weren't sure if you would be able to be here,' Guillaume said. ‘You have been very busy, I am sure.'

‘Busy, yes.' Von Rheinhardt took a deep sip of his drink. ‘But also, I am glad to say, successful. Thanks to some good work on the part of my officers we have apprehended an enemy agent who was, I believe, dropped into the area last night. He has been found at the house of a farmer, about twenty kilometres from here.'

Kathryn glanced at Paul. His face was expressionless and she could only guess at what he was thinking.

‘How do you know he is an enemy agent?' Guillaume asked.

Von Rheinhardt laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh, something between a derisive snort and a chuckle.

‘He was in possession of not one but two sets of papers – false, obviously. And hidden in his belongings was a radio transmitter. Fairly conclusive proof, wouldn't you say?'

‘What has happened to him?' Christian asked.

‘He has been arrested, naturally. And the farmer stupid enough to harbour him has been arrested too. They will pay the price for their folly – in full. But before we execute them we shall endeavour to find out if anyone else is involved in this criminal resistance. We need to know – I need to know – if they were working alone or whether there are others.'

‘Surely not,' Guillaume said. ‘I can't believe there can be many people who would act so irresponsibly.'

Von Rheinhardt drained his glass.

‘I hope not. So far I have been treating the people well. But if they are going to behave like rebellious children then I am afraid the kid gloves will have to come off.' He said it casually, but there was no mistaking the ruthless cruelty beneath the smooth exterior and Kathryn shivered violently.

‘At least this means though that you are satisfied you have found your murderer,' Guillaume said. ‘At least – I presume so? There will be no reprisals on innocent villagers?'

‘For the moment, no. If anything of the kind happens again, then I shall have to consider teaching them a lesson they won't forget. But we don't want to talk about this now, do we? Let us hope last night's incident was an isolated one. I don't want trouble. You know that.'

‘Of course,' Guillaume said with an ingratiating smile. ‘ Let's have dinner – such as it is.'

He steered von Rheinhardt towards, the table and the others followed, Kathryn and Paul bringing up the rear.

‘Better start praying,' Paul said softly in her ear.

She looked up at him questioningly.

‘That they are able to kill themselves before they can be persuaded to talk,' he whispered.

For Kathryn the evening passed in a haze of unreality. Uppermost in her mind was the terror inspired by Paul's whispered words. Supposing the farmer who had been captured did talk? What would happen to them all? What would happen to Guy? It was all she could do to stop herself from jumping up from the table and running upstairs to take him in her arms, holding him close and assuring herself of his safety. But she knew she must not. For his sake – for all their sakes – she must hide her dread and continue to act normally.

Later, however, lying in bed beside Charles, she found certain vignettes returning to her, illuminated in her mind's eye as clear and frozen as lantern slides. Von Rheinhardt was there, handsome, distinguished even, the candlelight making his close-cropped fair hair appear almost white, a gleam of self-satisfied triumph in his very blue eyes; Guillaume, the perfect host, almost jocular in his relief that disaster had been, as he thought, averted; Louise, flirting in a genteel but thoroughly sickening way with von Rheinhardt; Christian, putting on the act of his life as he strove to be his usual debonair self. And Paul – most of all Paul – ice-cool, parrying questions about his arm, hiding all his emotions beneath that inscrutable exterior. She could only guess at what he must be feeling – dismay that he had lost his new radio operator before so much as a single transmission had been sent, anxiety not only for the unknown agent's fate but also for his own, worries as to how he should proceed next. All these things must, she knew, have supplanted any thoughts he might otherwise have had about her and what had happened between them. Unlikely now that he would look at her and remember a kiss when he had so many other things of paramount importance on his mind. And crazy that, in spite of everything, it should matter so much to her that he should.

She had looked at him across the table and felt her heart melting. She had passed him the bread felt her hand brush his, and thought it was like the touch of bare electric wires. He did not love her yet, of course, it was too soon by far for that. What they felt for one another was most likely an attraction born of shared danger. Yet her heart was telling her otherwise – that it was far, far more than that.

‘When this is all over, Kathryn,' he had said, and though he had left it unfinished she felt she knew what he had been saying and hugged the words to her. ‘When this is all over …'

The unexplained promise was to her like a lantern sinning brightly in a dark world. And though it could not eclipse her fear of what might have to be lived through before that time came, what might happen to prevent the promise ever being kept, as well as lighting her world it warmed her and made her brave.

It was several days before they heard of the fate of the two men who had been captured several days of waiting in a state of unimaginable dread, wondering if they had talked. If they had, the cell, if not the entire circuit, would collapse, going down one by one like a set of ninepins, and at the end of the line Paul for certain and possibly Kathryn too. She was under no illusion now; all very well for Paul to say she could pretend to have been taken in by him but she did not think it would cut any ice with von Rheinhardt. He knew she was violently anti-Nazi – she had never troubled to conceal her hatred of him – and worse, she was English-born. Kathryn knew that the only reason she had escaped trouble before now was because she was Charles' wife and Guillaume's daughter-in-law. But if Paul was unmasked that would not save her. Nothing would.

And so she waited the tension mounting with every passing day. That first night the intoxication of what had passed between her and Paul had blinded her to it; now, as the first exhilaration faded no matter how she tried to cling to it, the fear began to creep in, cold and debilitating.

Yet if they had talked reason told her, Paul would have been picked up by now, or at least some of the members of the cell would have been.

Three days later Christian risked taking Paul to Périgueux again for a check-up on his wounded arm, and the doctor was able to provide them with some details. Someone in the village, when questioned, had reported seeing the fanner's truck pass by his cottage soon after the aircraft had been heard overhead; a search of the farm had uncovered the presence of the agent with his incriminating papers, and the discovery of the radio set had turned suspicion into cast-iron certainty. The agent and the fanner had been taken away; nothing had been heard of them since.

‘Can't we do something for them?' Kathryn had asked when Paul told her, anguished at the thought of the torture the two men were, in all probability, enduring.

‘There is nothing we can do,' Paul replied. ‘They are beyond our help. Von Rheinhardt's HQ is as secure as Fort Knox. All we can hope for is that they have an opportunity to take their own lives before they suffer too much. Anything else would put the rest of the circuit at risk.'

‘Surely it is at risk if we don't help them?'

‘There's nothing we can do,' Paul repeated his voice hard. ‘As for ourselves – we can only sweat it out.'

And so the waiting went on, debilitating and seemingly endless.

The news, when it came, was from von Rheinhardt himself.

He visited the château on the Sunday morning, driving up in his big black staff car. The family had been to church as was their custom and Kathryn, never the most religious of women, though she had converted to Catholicism when she married Charles, had prayed as she had never prayed before.

Von Rheinhardt came into the salon where they were gathered, picking up Guy and swinging him round while he screamed with laughter, and Kathryn longed only to snatch him from the arms of the man she thought of as a monster.

‘Oh, by the way,' he said casually, putting Guy down at last, ‘ I think we can say the episode of the enemy agent is over.'

‘Why? What has happened?' Guillaume asked.

‘He killed himself the same night we took him. He must have had a death pill concealed on his person.'

‘And the farmer?' Christian asked.

‘Unfortunately the guards treated him too roughly. He died before they could persuade him to talk.'

‘So you couldn't discover if anyone else was involved?'

‘No. Sadly. But if there
was
anyone else involved I think they will have learned their lesson,' von Rheinhardt said smoothly. ‘ I don't think we will have any recurrence of trouble, do you?'

Kathryn's rush of relief was tempered by a chill of fear. It seemed to her that as he spoke von Rheinhardt was looking directly at her.

S
PRING CAME SUDDENLY
to Charente. Almost overnight it seemed the small green shoots burgeoned into full growth, the fields were lush and the trees a mass of blossom beneath a sky that was clear and blue. The rivers ran full and deep from the winter rains between banks heavy with bulrushes, and the air began to feel softer and warmer, even after the sun had gone down.

With the passage of the weeks some sort of normality had returned to the château. There had been no more alerts and no more incidents in the village, except for the sudden appearance of anti-Nazi slogans painted overnight on the walls of the bakery. Guillaume had called the youth of the village together and pointed out, with some severity, the error of their ways, the slogans had been painted over and there was only a block of fresh whitewash to show they had ever been there at all.

Unobtrusively Paul had continued to build up his circuit. Known to him and to London by the code name ‘Mariner' it consisted of five quite separate cells, the leaders of which reported directly to him through Christian, who acted as courier, and who was able to move about the district freely without arousing suspicion.

London had sent a new agent to replace the one captured so disastrously soon after his arrival, and though Paul still blamed himself for the débâcle he tried to put it behind him. In time of war, working in a country occupied by the enemy, these things happened. It was futile to waste time and energy worrying about it. The best one could do was learn from one's mistakes and move on, and the new agent was a good man, quick, intelligent and slippery as an eel. In peacetime he had been a musician and the fingers that had once deftly plucked guitar strings now transmitted messages to London with the same effortless grace. His code name was Alain; Paul did not actually like him very much but that was neither here nor there. He was good at his job – that was all that mattered.