Faith and Beauty (6 page)

‘I can’t imagine her views on Art could have led to her death,’ said Clara gently. ‘Have the police anything to say about the investigation?’

‘Nothing. They’ve just left. A Kriminal-Inspektor Herz and some other rank. They said everyone was out of town. The Führer’s birthday, you see. No one saw anything strange. They asked if our girl had a boyfriend, but I said there was no one.’

Her face darkened with misery. ‘So much for that Faith and Beauty Society,’ she said, savagely.

Clara couldn’t help but agree. When she had called at the Faith and Beauty community home earlier that day, the grimfaced principal, Frau Mann, had met Clara’s enquiries with a transparent lack of sympathy. It was as though Lotti had corrupted the whole idea of Faith and Beauty. If Faith and Beauty girls had to die, it should be gloriously for the Fatherland, not sordidly at the hands of an unknown murderer.

‘They’re supposed to look after the girls. Instead they filled her head with ideas about getting away. They took her to London, did you know?’

‘To London?’ Clara looked up, surprised.

‘A couple of months ago.’

‘What were they doing there?’

‘It was a deputation.’ Marlene Franke began to scrabble in a drawer. ‘I kept the invitation. It was so beautiful.’ She handed Clara a piece of card – precisely the same kind of stiff, high-quality invitation with embossed black italics as rested on the mantelpiece at Ursula’s house.

Clara had heard of the British Women’s League of Health and Beauty. It was an organization dedicated to improving the well-being of Britain’s young women and it regularly held outdoor galas where groups of trim girls in navy gym shorts performed synchronized athletics. Photographs of these events frequently appeared in the press, not always for the reasons the organizers imagined.

‘Do you know Claridge’s Hotel?’ asked Udo Franke. ‘It’s very grand. As big as the Paris Ritz and almost the equal of the Adlon. Marble everywhere, Lotti said. And beautiful food, much better than you expect English food to be.’

‘The people were charming,’ added Marlene. ‘The dinner was given by something called the Anglo-German Fellowship. That sounds like a nice group of people.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

Clara had more than heard of it. Her father, Sir Ronald Vine, and her elder sister, Angela, were two of its most trenchant supporters. It was the last outpost in England of sympathy for the Nazi regime. With a jolt she realized that if the Fellowship had organized the dinner, there was every chance that Angela would have been there. Angela might even have met Lotti, without knowing that her own sister knew her too. Clara felt the tectonic plates of her life shifting beneath her, the two parts of her life clashing unawares.

‘They said a visit to London would be valuable for her education. She would meet civilised people, and converse with them about high-minded subjects. London!’ The way Marlene spat the word out, the city might have been a sink of unimaginable depravity. ‘It must be a dreadful place. I wouldn’t be surprised if she met the madman there.’

She burst into a torrent of sobs and buried her face in the sodden handkerchief.

‘Now then, Marlene.’ Udo Franke roused himself from his trance and placed a hand on his wife’s juddering arm. ‘You’re imagining things. Nothing happened in London. Lotti loved that trip. It was a big opportunity for her. How many girls get to visit London?’

‘So much promise, and a few months later she’s dead.’

Udo Franke trained his weary gaze on Clara.

‘Fräulein Vine. My wife and I are touched by your visit. It’s a great comfort to hear how talented our daughter was and we would like to hear more. But I implore you, if you hear anything which could help us find the monster who killed her – anything, no matter how small – you will come back and let us know.’

Clara took his large, moist hand. She knew there was no possibility that she would be privy to any information that could help catch Lotti’s killer, yet she also knew how unbearable she would find the grief if anything befell her godson Erich, and he was not even her flesh and blood. Could people ever be truly happy again after the death of a child?

‘I promise I will.’

On the way to the door, her attention was caught by a small, framed photograph of Lotti.

‘It’s special, that one,’ said Udo Franke. ‘It’s from the dinner in London. It’s only a snap, but it’s the last one we have of our little girl, which is why we put it by the door.’

The picture was entirely different from the artfully posed and backlit studio portraits on the other walls. In it, Lotti sat beaming at the camera across a snowy tabletop, a picture of composure between the crystal decanters and silver bread baskets, surrounded by a gaggle of Faith and Beauty girls. Although it was a group photograph, the eye was instantly drawn to Lotti, the candlelight forming a dazzling halo that accentuated her flawless complexion and the perfect proportions of her face. Next to her, leaning into the picture, was a much plainer girl, with a ruddy-cheeked round face and unbecoming plaits.

‘Who’s that next to Lotti?’

‘That’s her best friend, Hedwig. They knew each other since they were tiny,’ said Marlene Franke. ‘Hedwig looked up to our daughter because Lotti was so good at everything, and so much prettier, of course. But Hedwig’s a nice girl. Very upset too.’

Clara stared at the picture for some minutes, far longer than she needed. It was full of the terrible poignancy that freights photographs of the past. Those smiling faces, so joyful in the present, so optimistic for the future, and so innocent of what was to come. A sadness washed over her as she realized she was really searching for another image – the face of her own sister, Angela.

She didn’t find it.

Opposite the tram stop outside the Frankes’ block, as if in direct mockery of the commuters shuffling their aching feet, was a poster featuring a gleaming new Volkswagen people’s car with the slogan: ‘
Save five marks a week and you will drive your own car.
’ Most people in the queue looked as likely to buy a rocket to the stars as a Volkswagen. Erich’s grandmother, Frau Schmidt, a nurse at Berlin’s biggest hospital, the Charité, was saving from her meagre salary and had worked out it would take her five years before she could afford one. After another few minutes shuffling alongside the others in the queue, Clara decided to walk.

Berlin was changing. It still looked like Berlin, but every day it was a little different, as subtle as fashion that shifts from one season to the next, raising hemlines, adjusting shoulder pads and tightening waists. It even smelt different. People used to talk about the famous Berliner Luft, the fresh air that blew into the city from the Grunewald, but now the city reeked of sour breath, bitter cigarettes and stale, unwashed bodies. The only soap available was gritty and impossible to lather because there was no fat in it. People had taken to carrying their own soap around with them, if they had any, because to leave it lying unattended risked finding it missing.

Clara’s mind went back to the photograph of Lotti Franke, and the certainty that Angela would have been at the same event. Yet again she regretted the estrangement from her sister. She thought of the last time they were truly close, when she was sixteen and their mother had died. Standing in a ragged group around the graveside, and Angela’s hissed reminder:
Dig your nails into your hands to stop yourself crying
. Repressing emotion was an article of faith for Angela. Concealment was more than courtesy, it was a way of life.

Behaving properly. Being properly British. That was Angela’s code. Yet surely the quick, intelligent sister she knew was still there – buried beneath the visits to Harrods and bridge nights and society teas. Angela’s letters tended to focus on the interminable round of charity events that she conducted, the death of relations and the relentless progress of her husband’s political career.
Gerald is in line for a big promotion. Chamberlain is so impressed with him.
Clara responded with a dutiful list of parties, premieres and work reports. Nothing intimate. Nothing political. Nothing real.

Right then she resolved that she would write to Angela very soon, and attempt something they had not managed for ten years. Communication.

Clara passed a loudspeaker lashed to the side of a building, blaring out ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and obliging everyone to give a perfunctory right-armed salute. She generally avoided giving the Führergruss by ensuring she was carrying something in both hands, but that day, distracted by thoughts of Lotti, she failed to comply.

A hand on her shoulder made her jump like a coiled spring. A man was standing in her path.

‘Documents please.’

He had a complexion the colour of concrete and an expression that epitomized the
Berliner Schnauze
, the direct, graceless, sceptical manner so many of the city’s inhabitants had perfected. He flicked the lapel of his jacket to reveal the aluminium disc marking him out as Gestapo.

Clara handed over her ID and watched the stupidity and aggression warring in his face as he scrutinized it. Although the small piece of card was beginning to fray at the edges, she never had any doubts about the quality of her identity documents; such was the skill of their forgery. All the same, even if papers were in order, a policeman or Gestapo official could still confiscate them if he didn’t like you. Clara wondered what this man saw in her. The usual Berliner, cowed in the face of authority and determined to keep a low profile? How much did her face give away? Into her head floated the remark of Conrad Adler.

Like fire behind ice.

‘Alles in Ordnung.’

Gracelessly, the man returned her identity card and she stuffed it back in her bag.

She carried on, remembering Mary Harker’s warning.
They’re intensifying their surveillance. Goebbels has assigned a minder to each of us.
Might that apply not only to foreign journalists but actresses too? She thought again of the man in the lobby of her apartment block; the lean, expressionless face, the trench coat belted loosely, the way he avoided her eye.

In the fortnight before he had disappeared, Leo had talked a lot about the techniques of espionage. One afternoon he had told her about a list that all agents were being trained to memorize, if they believed they were being followed.

Number One: look out for the unobtrusive
. A shadow could be anyone. The young woman who clicked her painted fingernails on the counter beside you in a shop. The newspaper seller who slipped you a friendly remark each day with your change. The runner at the studio, or the car park attendant who joked about how he would always save the best space for you. Or a headscarfed Frau, like the one a few steps behind, grey-skinned and footsore, weighed down by a kilo of potatoes in her shopping basket.

Number Two: watch for anyone walking at a steady pace
. A shadow would neither be nonchalant, nor too purposeful, though as far as vehicles went, the opposite applied.

Number Three: listen for a car that moves either too fast or too slow
.

If surveillance was suspected, there was
Number Four: change your appearance.
Find a fresh coat, ditch your jacket, remove a hat. The slightest change could help to evade detection.

But whereas it was easy to put on a headscarf or abandon a briefcase, it was far harder to shave off a moustache or disguise hair colour in the course of pursuit.
Thus Number Five: check for distinguishing features
. A shadow rarely had time to change their shoes. There was also
Number Six: listen for what you don’t hear.
And if surveillance was certain, there was
Number Seven: stick to public places
. In case of arrest or capture there was
Number Eight: stay calm. Don’t react instinctively
.

There were a couple of other points on the list and Leo had made Clara commit them to memory and recite it back to him.

‘That list will keep you safe, Clara. It’ll be more use to you than any creed.’

That was one relief about the trip she was to make the next day. In London, there was no chance of being followed. And it would not be the Gestapo she had to worry about, but Captain Miles Fitzalan, whoever he might turn out to be.

Chapter Five

Of all the beautiful places in Berlin, could there be any lovelier than the sunlit drawing room of the Faith and Beauty community building, with its marzipan-yellow walls, charming meringues of plaster on the cornices and tall windows propped open to allow a freshening waft of pine from the woods beyond? Outside, a flock of hens pecked in the shade of the orchard and horses were being saddled up for riding lessons. A group of rowers were preparing for an outing to the lake, and on the lawn, two girls in face masks were taking instruction from the fencing master, their bodies as quick and flexible as the sleek silver foils they wielded. The quiet of the morning was punctuated by the solid, comforting clunk of the grandfather clock, and the faint scrape of a violin issued from the music room on the other side of the house. It was impossible to imagine that near this idyllic place just a few days earlier, a crumpled body had been found beneath a heap of leaves.

When Hedwig Holz first saw the Faith and Beauty home she was open-mouthed with amazement. She had grown up in a drab apartment, with nothing but a window box to tend and a dank cobblestone courtyard below. Even though their apartment was slightly better than their neighbours’ on account of her father’s managerial job, it had still taken weeks to accustom herself to such refinement. When she told her parents about the classes in Art, home décor, fashion design, needlework, flower arranging and conversation, her mother could barely contain her amazement.
Conversation!
Who needed classes in that?

Hedwig felt much the same about Art. Sitting in front of her easel she sighed, squinted at the life model, made some further experimental cross-hatching, then rubbed out the face she had drawn. Already a murky patch testified to the number of times the sketch had been erased – the model was beginning to look like something from one of those old horror films,
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
, starring Conrad Veidt, with nothing but a shadowy void where her features should be. Hedwig dreaded the moment Herr Fritzl, the art master, turned up to linger at her easel, twirling his moustache while he tried to think of something constructive to say. Their portraits were supposed to mirror the correct proportions of the Nordic form – every figure must have broad shoulders, a long body, and slender hands – but Hedwig’s sketch could have been straight out of Grimm’s fairy tales.