Blood Relative (8 page)

12

The home we’d found for my mother when she could no longer fend for herself was meant to be a good one. It charged accordingly. But that didn’t make it any less depressing. There were jaunty little posters on the notice-board in the front hall, announcing days out and special events; blaring televisions, volume turned up to penetrate deaf ears; a day room filled with shrivelled, snowy-haired figures, staring blankly into space. It was enough to make me want to kill myself, rather than end up anywhere like it. But this was where I’d put my own mother.

The shaming thought struck me that I’d been trying to get my own back. Mum might have lost her mind, but she hadn’t lost the ability to make me feel inadequate. It wasn’t really about me. I understood that as an adult, even if I hadn’t as a child. To my mother, my existence was a reminder of something and someone she would much rather have forgotten: the man who got her pregnant, then left her to raise a child alone, at a time when single motherhood was still a long, shame-filled way from the acceptable, state-subsidized lifestyle choice it had since become.

You see, Andy was actually my half-brother: the child of John Crookham, the man who had married Mum, given me his name and been the only real father-figure in my life. From the moment he was born he’d been the apple of Mum’s eye, the symbol of everything that was good, and after Dad’s death he became the living memory of the one man she’d truly loved. I’d tried frantically to earn her approval, but my best had never been enough. My A grades would be trumped by Andy’s latest poem. If I won a long-distance race, she’d say, ‘But of course your brother swims like a fish.’

‘You’ll never be handsome, but you’ve got a funny face,’ she said to me once, when I was fifteen, covered in spots and paralysed with self-consciousness. ‘Andrew’s got all the looks in this family, bless him.’

The bias was so blatant that Andy and I were able to treat it as a joke. I think that’s what kept us from falling out. We just drifted into a sort of lazy, affectionate, somewhat distant acceptance of each other. We were never going to be bosom buddies. He was seven years younger than me, living at the opposite end of the country and no better at keeping in touch than I was. There didn’t seem to be any need to make any big effort to be any closer. We weren’t in any hurry.

And now it was too late.

As for Mum, her attitude towards us had never changed. She’d never liked Mariana, either. Just after we got engaged we invited Mum to Sunday lunch. Mariana pulled out all the stops, cooking up a storm, dressing like the perfect demure bride-to-be and doing everything she could to charm her future mother-in-law. But Mum didn’t bother to disguise her instant, visceral dislike.

I called her the next day and asked her what the problem was. ‘There’s no problem,’ she snapped. ‘I just didn’t take to her. She’s German. That’s probably what it is. I never liked Germans.’

Mariana was upset for a couple of days, but we were both so caught up with the excitement of falling in love that other people’s disapproval simply drew us even closer together. Over the next couple of years, as my mother’s behaviour became progressively more erratic and the rages that seem to be an inescapable part of dementia became more frequent, we looked back on that disastrous lunch as an early symptom of her problems. It seemed to demonstrate what I sincerely believed: you actually had to be mad to dislike Mariana.

But mad people can be extraordinarily perceptive, perhaps because they say what they really think, without any self-control or inhibition. And so, as I walked down the nursing home corridor towards my mother’s room, I thought back to that lunch and wondered whether there was something my mother had sensed about Mariana, some intuition that had told her I’d picked a wrong’un.

I shook my head. That was ridiculous. The truth was, I’d found a beautiful wife, while her favourite son was still working his way through a random assortment of short-lived relationships and drunken one-night stands. The contrast had been more than her disintegrating brain could handle.

Mum was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out, apparently unaware that it was already dark. She didn’t recognize me, of course, but that at least was nothing personal.

I got down on my haunches, took one of her bony, mottled, old-woman hands and as gently as I could I told her that her son, my brother, was dead.

She heard the news without a flicker of emotion or comprehension. I wasn’t even sure whether it was worth keeping going. It felt as though I was talking to myself as I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. It happened at our house. I came home and Andy was lying there and there was nothing I could do. I’m so, so sorry …’

One of the nurses passing by must have heard me because she came into the room. I could see the fight going on behind her eyes as she tried not to ask all the questions that must have been flashing across her mind.

Her professionalism won. She leaned over my mother.

‘This is your son, Muriel,’ she said. ‘Your son …’

She looked at me questioningly.

‘Peter,’ I said.

‘Your son Peter,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s got news for you.’

My mother frowned: the first expression that had crossed her face since I’d come into her room. Then she looked at me with a depth of bafflement and confusion that I’d never encountered before, even at the darkest moments of her dementia.

‘Oh no, this isn’t my son. I’m sure it isn’t,’ she said. She seemed to be wracking her brain for information that would not come. Finally she said, ‘My son is Andrew. This man isn’t Andrew. This is not my son.’

Five minutes later, I was sitting in the car, in the dark, trying to tell myself that my mother didn’t really mean it. Just for distraction, I switched my phone back on. It was time to face the clients and their people. But as I looked down the list of text messages, one name kept coming up in a repetitive, intensifying pattern that told its own desperate, grief-stricken story. It was Vickie Price, Andrew’s girlfriend for the past couple of years.

How could I have been so stupid?

She must have been going crazy, and it had never even occurred to me to call her. But then, I hardly knew her, either. We’d met once or twice, but only in passing. We never had family get-togethers. It wasn’t our style. But what sort of excuse was that?

I made the call. And put my foot in it, right from the off.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get your messages. I had my phone off all day.’

‘Did you really need a reminder to call me?’ Vickie’s voice sounded exhausted, tearful and just a little bit drunk. ‘I’ve been living with your brother for the past two years. Didn’t you think of me at all?’

‘You’re right. I should have called. It’s just, the last twenty-four hours … well … it’s not been easy.’

‘No, well, it hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park for me, either. Do you know what it’s like, opening up the newspaper and discovering your boyfriend’s been murdered?’

I don’t know what it was that did it: maybe the acidic tone of her voice, or just the accumulated stress of the past twenty-four hours, but I snapped right back: ‘No … do you know what it’s like, walking into your own house and finding your brother dead on the floor?’

For the next several seconds the only sound was the faint, static crackle of interference on the line.

‘I apologize, that was out of order,’ I said.

‘No, well … it’s not easy for any of us, is it?’ Vickie replied, sighing with the effort of trying to be reasonable. ‘We were going to get married, you know. That’s what Andy wanted to tell you … the good news …’

‘Oh, I’m sorry …’ I repeated as she started crying again. ‘That’s … that’s …’

What was it, exactly? What word could possibly suffice?

‘And now … and now …’ Vickie went on, squeezing her words out between the tears, ‘the church where we were going to get married … well that’s where I’ll have to bury him … Oh God, it’s so unfair! What did he ever do to you, or to Mariana? What did he do to deserve being … being cut up like that … it’s just wrong!’

‘Yes … yes it is … for everyone. But I just want you to know that I’ll take care of everything … all Andy’s things. And we’ll have to work out what to do about his body …’

‘Oh please …’ she gasped.

‘Look, I know, it’s horrible, and this probably isn’t a good time. But there’s never going to be a good time, is there? We just have to deal with all this … Try to get through it as best we can.’

It suddenly struck me that I was doing precisely the same thing as Nick had done at the office: evading the heart of the issue by reducing it to sensible, unemotional practicalities. I kept doing it, too: ‘So, I’ll find out at this end what the deal is in terms of collecting him from the police, and what the best way is of getting him down to you. And when you feel ready, just give me the name of an undertaker and we’ll take it from there.’

‘How do you do that?’ Vickie asked.

‘Do what?’

‘How do you … how can you just talk to me about collecting the body and arranging an undertaker just like you were, I don’t know, ordering floor-tiles or something. Don’t you feel anything?’

Good question. One best evaded: ‘Yes of course I do. But I don’t exactly have a choice, do I? There’s no one else to do any of this. And I owe it to Andy and …’

‘And who?’

‘Well …’

‘You were going to say, “and Mariana”, weren’t you? Weren’t you …?’

‘Yes … yes I was.’

‘You’ve got a bloody nerve, you know that? You’ve got a bloody nerve thinking about that woman, when she’s the reason your brother, my fiancé, is lying in a sodding fridge.’

‘Yes, that’s right, he’s in a fridge. And our dad is dead too. And our mother’s so out of it she no longer even acknowledges me as her own flesh and blood. Don’t you get it? All I have left is my wife. If I lose my faith in her, I’ve got nothing.’

No sooner had I said those words than I realized two things. First, that they must have sounded appallingly insensitive to Vickie. And second that they were, nevertheless, absolutely true.

EAST BERLIN: 1978

At the tail-end of the sixties, when an eighteen-year-old Hans-Peter Tretow had been growing his hair and protesting against the Vietnam War, his outraged father tried to persuade him that he was deluded. The real criminals, the old man maintained, were not in the White House or Pentagon, but in Hanoi, Peking, Moscow and all the other outposts of what he always described as the global communist conspiracy.

‘Just look at what is happening in the East, in your own fatherland,’ Tretow senior growled. ‘The Stasi are animals. They torture people – proper Germans, just like you and me – in ways that make the old Gestapo lads look like a bunch of nursemaids.’

‘Don’t get all nostalgic with me, Dad,’ Hans-Peter had replied. ‘If you feel so fond about the old days, just go off and polish your old Waffen-SS dagger. Make sure it’s nice and bright for your next reunion.’

‘Don’t you talk to me like that, boy. We fought a war to keep this country free from communism. You should show a little gratitude sometimes.’

Hans-Peter laughed at his father’s political tirades. He was a child of postwar prosperity, part of a generation that saw no contradiction between pinning Che Guevara posters on the wall one moment and lusting after the latest Porsche the next. His childhood had been scarred by the verbal and physical abuse he had suffered at his embittered, defeat-ridden father’s hands, but once he’d grown big enough to retaliate, the balance of power within the family had shifted decisively in his favour. Still, as much as he felt sure that his father exaggerated the evils of the Soviet bloc, he’d seen enough spy movies to know that the KGB and their allies weren’t exactly gentle with their enemies, real or imagined.

And yet now he was choosing to come to the East and place himself at the mercy of the Stasi.

This was a puzzle that intrigued Tretow’s first interrogator, too. He was dressed in a field-grey military uniform, but looked bland and inoffensive, with mouse-brown hair cut into a rough crewcut that seemed more suggestive of a prisoner or a lowly conscript than a commissioned officer. His unlined face was oddly boyish and his eyes were a pale, watery blue. Now the interrogator asked himself, why had Tretow left the West? He gave no sign of any ideological commitment to the cause of socialism and its defence against Western imperialism. One look at his soft, manicured hands was enough to establish that he was not the workman that his clothes suggested. So what, then, was his game?

‘We found the package in your car,’ the interrogator said.

‘Good,’ Tretow replied. ‘You were meant to.’

The interrogator frowned. The prisoner’s confidence was another unexpected anomaly. The man should have been nervous, even terrified. Either he was a simpleton, or he believed he had something that would guarantee his safety.

‘We examined the contents,’ the interrogator continued. ‘Are you aware that they provide evidence of criminal activities that would carry a minimum twenty-five year sentence at a forced labour camp?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you deny that you are guilty of these crimes?’

‘No.’

‘Is there any good reason, then, why I should not have you committed to trial immediately, found guilty and sentenced?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you care to share it with me?’

‘If it is all the same to you, I would prefer to share it with someone more important.’

*

Markus Wolf was Director of the
Hauptverwaltung Aufkläerung
, or HVA, the foreign intelligence directorate of the Ministry of State Security. He was the Stasi’s spymaster, the second most powerful man in the entire organization, subordinate only to the Security Minister himself, Erich Mielke.

At fifty-five Wolf had the worldly, patrician face of a banker: a Rothschild of espionage. His proud, fleshy nose bisected narrowed, analytical eyes. The downturned corners of his mouth suggested a certain detached scepticism: a gentle, ironic amusement at life’s rampant absurdities. He would never normally have troubled himself with anyone as insignificant as a low-level asylum seeker. But when word was brought to him of Tretow’s particular circumstances, he decided to make an exception.