Denied to all but Ghosts (4 page)

He had to seek atonement for the killing of
the rapist Klauss.

Cavendish was shaken from his reverie by the
strident chime of the doorbell. He walked slowly across the wooden
floor of the lounge, having first hidden the documents, and carried
on into the hallway and descended the stairs to the apartment door.
His mind was clouded with conjecture; it was too early for Magda’s
arrival. He peered through the spy hole and relaxed when he
recognised the person standing impatiently on the doorstep. On
opening the door, he immediately turned his back on his guest and
bounded up the stairs two at a time whilst shouting over his
shoulder.

“Be sure to lock the door after you!”

Cavendish was leaning with an assumed
nonchalance against the doorframe that separated the lounge from
the small kitchen as his visitor finally made it into the living
room.

“I suppose you want coffee?” he asked with
mock distain.

“And it’s lovely to see you too, Marchel. I’m
well thank you,” said Christina Kretschmer, Cavendish’s twenty-five
year old half-sister. Cavendish smiled warmly at Tina’s
contemptuous reply.

Despite his denial to Steinbeck, Tina was the
beneficiary of his first phone call from the Laber summit after the
news of the tribunal’s decision. He had only known Tina since
Christmas yet there was little that she did not know about him or
his clandestine world.

“Well a coffee would be fine but how about a
hug first?” suggested Tina.

Cavendish leant forward and embraced her; she
was a good deal shorter than her half-brother and rested her cheek
against his chest as she wrapped her arms around him. He was tall
at six foot three inches but as Tina embraced him, she was reminded
of how much weight he had lost during the past few months.

Cavendish seemed reluctant to end the clinch;
she enjoyed his hand stroking her back through the thin material of
her summer dress, his other hand placed gently on the back of her
head. Her cropped brown hair still felt damp under the pressure of
his caressing hand.

It was Tina who spoke, her voice muffled by
his tight embrace.

“Christ, Marchel, if you get any thinner
you’ll get blown away. Even I might start kicking sand in your
face. You’ve got to start eating, no excuses now you know the
verdict.” She chided him softly as if he was one of her pupils in
her primary school class and broke the embrace.

“Make that coffee,” she ordered as she walked
towards his desk. “Was the Grieving Widow here last night?” she
added, using Dagmar Klum’s oft-used epithet. Cavendish looked at
her suspiciously, thinking of Steinbeck’s warning to him.

“Yea, she was, how do you know?” he asked
suspiciously.

“I’m a woman, Marchy. I can bloody smell her,
this place reeks of Dagmar Klum!”

“Really?”

“Jeez, you men are so stupid sometimes. Where
are your cigarettes?”

“On the desk,” declared Cavendish. Tina found
the packet of West, extracted two cigarettes and tossed one to
Cavendish.

“There, enjoy the illicit pleasure of smoking
indoors,” she said as she lit her own cigarette and wafted the
smoke around the room. “You can blame me when Magda gets here and
complains about the obnoxious cigarette stench.” Cavendish grinned
approvingly at Tina.

“Do you mind if I take a quick look around,”
she asked, “you know, do a proper ‘mummy’ look before Magda gets
here. God knows what you've left lying around for her to find.”

Tina disappeared into the hallway whilst
Cavendish made the coffee. He was just about to pour when he heard
Tina cross the wooden floor of the lounge. The inelegant clumping
stopped at the entrance to the kitchen and the ensuing silence
compelled him to look towards the doorway.

She leant provocatively against the
doorframe, much as he had done upon her arrival. Her left arm was
raised above her head, placed against the frame, supporting her
leaning torso. She raised her right arm level with her narrow
shoulders, drawing Cavendish’s attention to what was clutched
between forefinger and thumb.

“So you had a good tidy up, did you?” asked
Tina, as she too stared at the object she was holding with such
disdain. “So what do you call this?” she asked, nodding at the
item.

“I’d call it a bra, in a very fetching shade
of light blue,” replied Cavendish dispassionately.

“Yours is it, Big Brother. The rumours about
you true then?” Cavendish laughed generously and Tina smiled along
with him; it had been a long time since she had seen her
half-brother laugh so freely.

“I presume it belongs to Dagmar,” she
commented disparagingly, “it um, looks a little too generous even
for the voluptuous Magda.”

The smile slowly faded from Cavendish’s face
as he stared with his piercing pale blue eyes at Tina. She
involuntarily flinched; it was with such an expression that she
could see the professional Cavendish, not the mummy’s boy, which
she and the world all too often saw. What he said stunned her.

“Tina, I have to go to England. Come with me,
I don’t want to go alone. I hate the place; it’s a shithole full of
assholes. Please, come with me.”

“Marchy, I can’t. I’ve lessons to prepare.
Take ...” Her words trailed off before she mentioned his fiancée’s
name and she repressed the compelling compulsion to agree to his
request. “You know I can’t come, Marchel. How are you getting to
England?” asked Tina.

“By the Adenauer,” he stated
unenthusiastically.

“Wow, travel in style, don’t we. Tell you
what, why don’t I give you a lift to the airfield?”

The parish church of Oberammergau had just
finished tolling the fourth hour of the afternoon when Cavendish
returned to his apartment and heaved a huge sigh of relief as he
closed the door behind him.

He had endured lunch at his mother’s house
with Magda and Tina as stoically as he could. His father had made
his excuses not to be there, no doubt visiting his latest
acquisition, by all accounts a blonde Russian administrator who
worked at the NATO school where he lectured. Magda had remained
with his mother and was not unduly surprised or upset when he
announced his imminent departure for England to procure antiques
and artefacts on behalf of Horst Steinbeck.

The majority of Untersuchers, the firm’s
colloquial name for investigators, were German and certainly, there
were no British Untersuchers. That came as no surprise, for Great
Britain was believed to be a cultural backwater by the firm.

It was widely held that most of the treasures
that Britain possessed had been stolen from other countries during
their days of empire and that the majority of their great
ecclesiastical buildings had been destroyed, gutted or plundered
during their heretical periods of the Reformation and the Civil
War. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler had desecrated their countries
like Henry VIII or Cromwell. Like many of his peers, Cavendish was
no anglophile despite his English father and family
connections.

He was of the misguided opinion that he spoke
English fluently. His vocabulary was better than most of the
indigenous English population, but as he had failed to learn from
his experiences in Bavaria, it is one thing to be acquainted with
the words and another to speak the language. To the casual listener
he was undoubtedly not a native of the British Isles for he had an
odd accent that betrayed his German mother tongue. He would
generally leave the English listener with the impression that he
was not one of them, that he was a foreigner.

Cavendish brewed a coffee and set his mind to
the task ahead. This was going to be an important case for the
Untersucher medius. Anymore perceived foul ups would end of his
career and he could not contemplate any other way of life. Being an
Untersucher brought him power and prestige. Without the title, his
life was meaningless.

The plan was to drive to Friedrichshafen in
the late afternoon on Easter Monday and stay in an hotel overnight.
He was delighted to accept Tina’s offer to drive him and he had
subsequently booked her a room. He took little pleasure in driving,
even in Germany, which possessed possibly the finest road system in
the world (in his biased opinion). The thought of driving in
England filled him with dread.

Cavendish heard Tina open the front door with
his spare key and she skipped into the small kitchen where he
awaited her arrival. He considered she possessed an uncompromising
optimism that he found perplexing and beguiling in equal
measure.

She wore the same summer dress that she had
sported the previous Friday, which accentuated her narrow boyish
hips, with the addition of a cardigan and a lightweight jacket
carried over her arm in acknowledgement of the cool evening
ahead.

“Ready for the big adventure, Herr
Untersucher?” she asked brightly with an excitement that he wished
he shared. He made no reply but studied her open generous face,
feeling curiously jealous of the kids she taught at the school in
Steingaden. She was nothing like the teachers he had endured at his
German boarding school.

In truth, he felt anything but an Untersucher
wearing his old white tee shirt and jeans. His mother had
reproached him for not dressing up for Holy day lunch and he chose
to display the petulant indifference of the spoilt single child
that he was as his contemptuous response.

“I’d better go and change,” he said
sharply.

“Into what?” she asked with an inquiring
smile.

“A butterfly,” he replied charmingly, almost
as if she had put the words in his mouth. She side stepped to allow
him to vacate the kitchen and swiped him playfully on his backside
with her hand as he passed by.

He preferred to travel light; a holdall would
contain all he needed. The bulkiest object was a smart light blue
formal jacket to which he added a few plain white shirts, underwear
and toiletries. His ‘uniform’ of the Untersucher was a pair of
slate grey turn-up trousers, open neck white shirt and a pair of
black Oxford-style leather shoes. A knee length black woollen
overcoat completed the ensemble. Cavendish was tall but possessed a
narrow sinewy frame and the coat added necessary bulk and gravitas
to his appearance.

Once dressed, he returned to the lounge where
Tina was sitting curled up on the sofa cradling her coffee mug in
both hands.

“My my, Herr Cavendish, what a difference a
few clothes make to a man,” noted Tina, amazed by the
transformation which transcended the sartorial.

Cavendish walked to the Manet portrait
featuring the girl serving at the bar of the Folies Bergere and
swung it back to reveal a wall safe. He twisted the combination
lock eagerly; keen to remove the contents within. The safe
contained various documents required for the assignment and finally
he extracted what he considered the last item to complete his
assumed identity of Untersucher.

It was a brown leather shoulder holster that
would not have looked out of place in a thirties gangster movie.
The holster housed his 1955 model Colt Python, which was one of
Cavendish’s few concessions to the theatrical. A modern lightweight
automatic would have been a far more suitable firearm but he
adhered to the adopted conceit of his profession by adopting a
weapon of character as opposed to practicality.

Tina frowned as she watched him place the
weapon in his holdall.

“Do you have to take that wretched thing?
They don’t have guns in England, you won’t need it.”

“Company policy, it is the physicality of my
authority,” quoted the investigator. Tina scowled; she hated guns
and knew all too well the trouble they had caused him in
Prague.

It was a beautiful afternoon for a drive
through the stunning scenery of southern Germany; the first golden
flowers were emerging in the Bavarian meadows. Their route took
them north to Landsberg before sweeping southwest to head for Lake
Constance and Friedrichshafen, a drive of two hundred-kilometres.
Friedrichshafen was in holiday mood as Tina parked the Golf in the
hotel car park by the Lake. That evening they dined in the quiet
hotel restaurant.

“Tonight I’m going to have a drink,”
announced Cavendish defiantly as they sat in a secluded corner
overlooking the lake.

“Are you sure, Marchy? You’re not a drinker,”
replied Tina, aware of his low tolerance to alcohol.

“I kept off it because of the hearing, but
tonight, sod it! It’s my last evening in Germany. As my French
relations would say, ‘beware perfidious Albion’!” Cavendish
attracted the attention of a waiter and ordered a bottle of
Sauvignon Blanc, his preferred grape.

“Why do you hate England so much, Marchy?
You’re half English for goodness sake!” enquired Tina as she sipped
the expensive wine.

Cavendish exaggeratedly shrugged his
shoulders and peered outside to the water’s edge where his eyes
became entranced by the reflected light from the hotel as it danced
and shimmered on the lake’s tranquil surface.

“The truth is I don’t hate England. I have
many happy memories as a boy visiting my Grandparents. It was
always like going home, despite what my mother said. But you grow
up; I went to school and University in Germany and been here ever
since. When you are not born German, you have to work twice as hard
to prove that you are. Yes?”

“I really couldn’t say, Marchy. You seem very
much German to me.”

Cavendish eagerly swallowed his wine and
poured them both another generous measure. Already he could feel
the effects of the alcohol blurring his mind.

“Okay, if you once liked England, why don’t
you try you embrace it again? Remember those good days. Don’t go
there with your ‘Germanic superiority’,” Tina rolled her head
sarcastically, “become one of them, they’ll like you for it. You
must know someone over there, you were only there last year, so who
do you know?”