The Eden Inheritance (38 page)

‘Guy!' She was shocked now. ‘How could you think such a thing?'

‘I'm sorry, but that's the way it looks to me. In any case, nothing you've told me changes the way I feel. I hate the Nazis and I hate von Rheinhardt in particular. I'd bring every last one of them to justice if I could. I can't do that but I can go after this one.'

‘I hate them too, Guy,' she said. ‘I have more reason for hating them than you know.'

His eyes narrowed.

‘What do you mean?'

She shook her head. It was something else she had decided a long while ago never to tell him – or anyone. Like so much else it was her closely guarded secret. She had her reasons and though those reasons had rebounded on her now it made no difference.

‘I just think that sometimes it is best to leave the past where it belongs,' she said lamely.

‘That is where we shall have to agree to differ,' Guy said. ‘Look, Mum, I suggest we forget all about this now and try to enjoy the rest of the holiday. It's Christmas Day, for goodness' sake.'

‘Is it?' Kathryn glanced at the clock, the hands of which now showed ten past midnight. Christmas Day had arrived whilst they were talking and she had not even noticed it!

She opened her arms to him pleadingly.

‘Happy Christmas, darling.'

‘Happy Christmas.'

But there was something less than his usual warmth in his embrace and Kathryn's heart sank. She had tried her best and failed. Now there was a barrier between them which might never be broken down.

I have lost him, Kathryn thought wretchedly. I have lost him as surely as I lost Paul, and to no avail.

Suddenly she wanted to weep.

Guy left on Boxing Day afternoon. The holiday had been a less than comfortable one and now his thoughts raced as he drove home towards Bristol.

He had known, of course, that things were not right between his mother and his French family but, fool that he was, he had never guessed the real reason. No wonder she didn't ever want to talk about the war, no wonder she had tried to stop him exhuming the past.

He should have guessed, of course. The small clues had been there, half buried in his childhood memories, impressions, perhaps, more than clear pictures, but none the less telling now that he came to think about them.

Was she being entirely truthful, he wondered, when she said she had never seen the man he had known as Monsieur Paul after the night they had flown out of France? It seemed reasonable to suppose that he had indeed been killed if things had happened the way she had told it. And yet …

She had been absent for a long time during his early childhood, he remembered. For several years he had lived with his English grandparents whilst she was, supposedly, working for the Ministry of Defence in the wilds of Scotland. Now he found himself doubting even that. If she could have concealed her affair from him all these years could she also have concealed something else? He had the unmistakable feeling that there was something she was not telling him. Could it be that Paul had actually escaped too and she had … gone off with him? As recently as two days ago he would never have believed such a thing of his mother, now he was no longer sure of anything. She had become an enigma to him and he realised that in spite of having lived with her for so many years he really did not know her at all.

And there was something else, too, tugging at the edges of his memory – something that was, for the moment, eluding him.

Still, he wasn't going to worry about that now. Better to give his full attention to trying to find out once and for all if the German on the Caribbean island was, in fact, von Rheinhardt, and if it was, to bring him to justice and recover his family's stolen treasures.

He owed it to his father's memory. Kathryn might have been unfaithful to Charles; Guy at least was going to ensure that he did not let him down.

He pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator again and headed for Bristol

T
HE LETTER BEARING
the exotic Caribbean island stamp was the first one Lilli Brandt noticed when she picked up her mail, and immediately she experienced a pang of homesickness.

She had been in New York for almost four years now, but her longing for the island paradise where she had been born and raised was as sharp as ever, particularly on days like this one when the streets of Manhattan were cold and windswept and the thick blanket of grey cloud that hid the tops of the skyscrapers threatened snow. Simply holding the envelope in her hands conjured up a vision of palm-fringed beaches and sea as blue as sapphires, the balmy warmth of the sun on bare skin and the scent of nutmeg and frangipani, and made her ache with longing. That her departure for New York had been in a haze of emotional pain made no difference, nor the fact that as she had looked down through the window of the little twin-engined plane at the speck of land in that sapphire-blue sea growing smaller and smaller she had promised herself that she would never go back. If anything it made it worse, for the pain was superimposed on memories of a childhood idyll and beneath it the nostaligia for those lost years of innocence ached and throbbed all the more poignantly.

Madrepora, my island paradise, thought Lilli, shivering in the biting cold of a New York winter. Madrepora, where the shutters at the window are to keep out the blazing sun, not the icy wind. Madrepora, where I lay on the beach with the gentle surf breaking over my sun-warmed limbs, where I snorkeled in water so clear I could see right down to the stony coral that gave the island its name. Madrepora in the days when my father was my hero, indestructible, and master of all he surveyed, and my mother was a beautiful memory, a hybrid of saint and movie star, a beautiful dark-skinned princess with scarlet lips and nails, enveloped in a haunting perfume as exotic as the islands, who had died, as all the best heroines should, before the years could fade her beauty and humble her with the ordinariness of old age. Madrepora in those blissful days before my father married Ingrid, the days when it seemed childhood would never end. Before I was forced, so brutally fast, to grow up. Before Jorge. Yes, most of all, before Jorge.

The memory of him hurt her even more than the wave of homesickness for the island had done and impatiently Lilli pushed it away. She wouldn't think of him. She dared not. He had lied to her, deceived her, broken her heart. Worse, he had sullied every aspect of everything she had loved. No – that was not quite true. The imperfections had been there all the time – Jorge had merely opened her eyes to them. He had been the catalyst. She couldn't forgive him – she couldn't forgive any of them – and yet she loved them still. That was her cross, weighing heavily upon her slim shoulders. That was what made it so hard to bear.

Lilli took off her coat, a thick warm duffel in ochre wool, and hung it carefully in the closet. Her reflection in the mirrored door met her head-on, throwing back the image of a tall slender girl with thick dark hair tumbling over the polo-neck of a black cashmere sweater and eyes of so dark a brown they were almost black. Lilli had inherited her looks from her Venezuelan mother; there was about her nothing of the fairness of her Aryan father. She had long legs and a slim, almost boyish figure that would have looked totally at home on the thoroughbred horses her mother's family had bred on their sweeping estate in the Andes. She had all their grace coupled with their toughness and their air of compelling mystique. Even in cosmopolitan New York her exotic beauty was remarkable and she was shrewd enough to realise that it was an asset in her job as a PR girl for a small publishing house. Those who met her did not forget her easily and her charm and good looks opened doors which might otherwise have remained closed.

In the tiny kitchen of her apartment Lilli turned up the central heating and poured herself a glass of wine. It would have been sensible, perhaps, to make a pot of scalding coffee, but Lilli enjoyed the ritual of a glass of Chablis at the end of a working day. She sipped it appreciatively, topped up the glass and carried it over to the peninsula counter, sliding herself up easily into a tall high-backed stool.

The letter with the Caribbean postage stamp lay on the counter where she had put it down. The writing on the envelope, round and childish, was instantly recognisable.

Josie, her lifelong – if, in her father's eyes at least, totally unsuitable – friend Josie, whose mother had been one of the maids at her father's villa, had become to Lilli the sister she never had. No matter that at times her father had put his foot down and forbidden them to play together, they had found ways. No matter that Lilli was spoiled and petted and wanted for nothing whilst Josie's family was unashamedly poor. The bond had been forged between them and had never been broken. Lilli had been sent away to be educated in Venezuela whilst Josie had attended the little island school which was run for the benefit of the local children, but whenever Lilli returned home they had picked up their friendship exactly where it had been left off.

Josie was married now, to one of the gardeners on Lilli's father's estate, and she had a baby son – born not on Madrepora but on St Vincent, since Josie, like all the locals, had been sent away from the island for her confinement. Lilli's father did not want the complication of native-born Madreporans staking claims of birthright to his island if such a thing could be avoided. But though Lilli was no longer living on Madrepora Josie had written to ask her to be godmother, and though she knew her father would be furious Lilli had been delighted to agree, making her vows by proxy.

The two girls corresponded regularly if a little infrequently and Josie's letters were always full of news of her family, of little Winston's progress, and, in her last letter a few months ago, the announcement that she was pregnant again. But she rarely mentioned Lilli's father or Ingrid, whom she knew Lilli disliked, and she never mentioned Jorge.

Lilli tore open the envelope and extracted the two sheets of paper covered in Josie's meticulous childlike hand. She sipped her wine as she perused details of Winston's latest mischief, Josie's advancing pregnancy and the fact that Abel, her husband, had been promoted to chief groundsman in charge of the island's one and only hotel as well as general estate duties. As she read, Lilli's feeling of homesickness deepened and she saw again in her mind's eye the manicured lawns, the flowering shrubs, neatly pruned yet riotous with colour, and the tennis courts rolled to the smooth emerald velvet of a bowling green.

A small wistful smile lifted the corners of her mouth as she remembered the afternoons when she and Josie had gone to the hotel and hidden in the shrubs which surrounded the large open-air swimming pool, spying on the guests as they exposed their pale flabby bodies to the sun on the loungers beside the pool or executed flat belly-flop dives into the azure water, and giggling together at the men's ineptitude. The guests had always been a source of amusement to the girls. They were the very epitome of middle-aged sobriety, talking to one another in German, a language Lilli did not understand although it was her father's native tongue, and almost paranoid about their privacy. Lilli had known that her father would be furious if he knew she and Josie were spying on them, though the hotel itself was not forbidden to her as certain parts of the island were. It was simply that he would have disapproved of her having fun at their expense and encouraging Josie to do the same – Josie, the local, who should have known her place.

Now Abel, Josie's husband, was tending those very shrubs, supervising the cleaning of that very pool, while the same guests, or some very like them, allowed their fair-skinned bodies to turn salmon pink under the hot Madrepora sun like pigs roasting on a spit. The irony of it made Lilli smile again and she read on, hungry for the words that evoked so vividly her memories of the island.

A few paragraphs on, however, and the tone of the letter changed. Even before she read what Josie had to say Lilli sensed it, as if her friend had become awkward suddenly, wondering how to proceed, and her anxiety had transferred itself to the page in a way that was more mystic, more nebulous, than mere stilted words.

‘There is something Lilli, which I think you ought to know. Your father has not been at all well. He has become very thin, very drawn, most unlike himself, and the maids at the villa say he needs to rest a lot. I did not mention it before because I did not want to worry you, but a week or so ago he flew to the mainland and Abel heard he was going to a hospital for tests. When he returned he looked worse than ever. I tried to find out what is wrong – not easy, your father is a very private man. But Abel's brother, Noah, who has been working at the villa, thinks the doctor your father went to see is a cancer specialist. He may have been in touch with you himself, of course, but knowing the situation I somehow doubt it. Besides, your father hates to be ill, doesn't he? Anyway, I thought you should know.'

Her serious news imparted, Josie returned with obvious relief to other lighter topics, but Lilli scarcely bothered to read them.

The cold of the early evening seemed to have got right inside her suddenly, chill fingers touching her spine and sending shivers of dread through her veins to dispel the initial reaction of utter disbelief.

Her father ill – perhaps very ill – he couldn't be! It was unimaginable. In all her life Lilli did not think she could ever remember him having so much as a headache. He had, to her, epitomised power and strength. As a child she had been a little afraid of him, respectful of his sudden changes of mood and the flashes of temper that erupted if she misbehaved or displeased him, always in awe of his indisputable air of authority. Even later, when she had discovered that he had not been as much in control of everything in his life as she had believed, he had still remained a towering personality, flawed a little, perhaps, but still a force to be reckoned with. She had seen him grow older, watched his fair hair turn white, seen the lines each themselves more deeply on his face and the veins become more prominent in his hands, but it simply never occurred to her that the years would take their toll on his body as on everyone else's. Time, it had seemed to her, had passed her father by. He was still tall and straight, his voice still firm and unwavering, his will as indomitable as ever. Sickness and death were misfortunes that befell other mere mortals, weaknesses with which he would have no dealing. He defied them, and it had seemed to her that he would go on defying them to time immemorial.