Hitler's Girls (16 page)

The dinner party in progress takes place in a room strangely reminiscent of one of those period dramas—Merchant and Ivory, possibly, or
Brideshead
—with chandelier, napiery, pale portraits on eau-de-Nil silk walls in imitation of thirties decor. The dining-table, maplewood, and the chairs, replica Chippendale, are all of a kind that an industrialist might have liked for his Provencal home.

The guests, inevitably, are clothed in white ties, also very dated in appearance, with the ladies in strapless ball gowns, crimped hair, and antiquated jewellery: Cartier, Duchess of Windsor tigers, sapphire-eyed parrots on diamond-encrusted mounts (I must add here that I dislike this era more than any and am far from surprised it took a second World War to put an end to such posturing and ugliness).

It is all a masquerade of the most unpleasant kind. Among the guests, there are those who, because of their age, are no doubt looking back nostalgically to their youth in the days of the undefeated Third Reich, and looking forward, no doubt, to its revival. But there are many younger faces present, set in lines of power and greed above the black ties and white shirtfronts.

Beside them are their consorts, almost all blonde, whether naturally or artificially, well coiffed, finely clad, bedecked in jewellery, women who do not know, or care, what the men do, so long as there are yachts and jewels aplenty. Black-clad
manservants circulate with champagne; there is a buzz of conversation and laughter. It might any party for the rich, anywhere, were it not for the fact that behind each man’s chair stands a thug in a black tee shirt and jeans, and at each door stands a guard in a black kevlar vest, holding the kind of gun seen on posters for Hollywood action films.

It is unusual, to say the least, for one such as myself, a conserver of ancient buildings and an expert on the arts and antiquities of my native land, to be found kneeling on dry grass in a landscape of execrable taste while looking in at a collection of monstrous fakes and forgeries. I recognise a prominent Russian politician. On either side of the Russian politician are two women: artificial hair, yellow as dead corn, flows over their shoulders in braids, like a picture of Rhine maidens in Germany, circa 1937.

At the head of the table are two empty chairs and I dread to think for whom they are intended.

To my horror, in comes Muller with Mel on his arm. He is in black, of course. She is in a red taffeta dress, low cut, with blood-red stones in her ears and at her throat. Her face is painted very white and to my inexpert eyes she seems drugged.

Muller pulls out one of the chairs at the head of the table and puts her in it. She hardly knows where she is or what she is doing. And then, horrors, a servant comes up to him with a message and Muller bends down and says something to her in a low
voice and walks away from the table, through the French doors, and past me. A second man joins him and they begin to speak.

The spotlight has begun to move—and I must move too. Even if I have to kneel on the flagstones, painfully hard when only a flimsy skirt separates them from a swollen knee joint sadly afflicted with arthritis, the unpleasant necessity forces me closer to the house. And now, before I have time to bemoan the loss of my protective Harris Tweed skirt, I find I am only inches from the glass door leading to the dining-room. Worse still. I am on hands and knees and see only the high polish of black shoes (Lobb of St James’s). Two men have opened the glass door and stepped out into the evening air.

They say the natural world can on occasion come to the rescue, in circumstances as unprecedented as mine. Or, in return for a kind deed performed in the past, the grateful member of another species will throw an obstacle in the enemy path. I saw a scorpion—black, unmistakable in form. We stayed there, not moving, as the shoes of Peter Müller and his Russian guest came up to us and paused.

I must confess here that Providence—or fate or destiny, whatever we may like to call those forces which sometimes side with us (though most often they do not)—gave magnificently with both hands. For, while thanking our Lord for the scorpion’s static pose (had it scuttled, as I believe may be the
term, into the ill-fitting skirt and thence to the brassière, a solid construction of wire and polyester from Jenner’s in Edinburgh, the outcome would have been dreadful indeed)—while giving thanks to God, as I say, Peter Müller bent down and removed his left shoe. He ran a finger round its interior, as if trying to dislodge a pebble. Then he gazed at the ground and his eyes swept sideways, and he saw me there.

I was seen: but I was not seen. Like the women who crawl aboard the great jets as they come down in Karachi or Bangkok, I was no more than a cleaner who picks the discarded trifles of the West from the cabin floor. Muller hopped on one foot, caught shoeless by what was clearly a challenging question. And I? As he spoke and hopped, I placed the friendly scorpion deep in his waiting shoe. There it lay patiently. What had I done, what wasp or motorway frog had I saved, to deserve this extraordinary piece of fortune?

With the two men still muttering their questions and answers outside, inside the dining-room, the neo-Nazis all hold champagne glasses and raise them in a toast towards the dim figure in the garden, their host, Peter Müller. The glass door has been left open: I am still invisible, both in shadow and metaphorically; an Arab woman who sweeps the terraces of the rich and powerful. Inside, I see Mel. Her dress, with its chiffon sleeves and red organza bell shape, is less of a period creation than the dresses
worn by the other women. Her hands in elbow-length white gloves—these seem to be
de rigueur
with all the ladies—rise and flutter as she drains her glass and replaces it on the table. Something amuses her. The anthem swells out once more.

My eyes are on the woman they now all toast, the young woman, surely my goddaughter Mel, my poor misguided Mel. But as she turns, the expression on her face is suddenly desolate and desolating. Is it because she does not know what she is doing here, or is it because she does?

Clemency Wilsford, on the far side of the President, I recognise still from all the newspaper articles, the silly films “investigating” her love affair with Adolf Hitler, the rumours of St Ronan’s House occupied by her despite the most valiant efforts of the Trust.

Clemency Wilsford, with her sinister, drug-induced youth, her wig of golden curls, her blue eyes like drained pools, stares out at me.

Let boldness be my friend. I walk into the room and straight to the head of the table and I whisper into Mel’s ear, “I am Jean Hastie, your godmother. You are in danger. Come with me.” What she will do at that moment is uncertain. She is drugged and therefore in a condition where the rational mind is stilled. But whether she will come with me, or stand and denounce me, or simply lean back witlessly in her chair
hangs on what she feels at that moment about her situation. And, mercifully, I am correct in thinking her unhappy, for she rises, without any apparent reaction, and together we leave the room through the back, where the guard has temporarily moved aside to allow passage into the room to two servants, trays held high. After all, we have not been followed, there is no disturbance, the guests at the table have made no outcry, evidently unsurprised to see their totem, their figurehead, the drugged bride of the monster they are trying to create, leaving the room with an Arab woman, a servant perhaps, with pins, a jewelled haircomb, a pair of gloves.

But I am aware we have only moments. I draw Mel down a wide, tiled passageway where pale, cold statuary stands in niches. Using a full-sized marble statue of a muscular Greek or Roman hero as cover I push Mel into the gap in front of a bare torso, a knee and a large foot treading down some mythical beast, and, exposing myself to anyone who might come from the dining-room, tell her urgently: “It was the man you are with, Peter Müller, who killed your grandmother. He needs you and when he does not, he may kill you, too. Please believe me.” I spare her the knowledge of Chris’s death and there is too little time to explain the business of the numbers to that account containing gold wrenched from the hands of the dead.

One of Mel’s hands is on the wall beside the statue, supporting her. She looks at me with eyes in which understanding comes and goes like clouds scudding across a sky. Her response is agonisingly slow to come.

“He’s crazy. He hit on me when I was dressing for the party. He killed Monica?”

I fail to understand. “Hit you?”

“His hands were all over me. He kept mumbling and muttering about marrying me and making us emperors. I didn’t know what he was on.”

“He was on power, the most potent drug of all. Mel—we must get away.” I pull at her arm but she resists.

“What about my Gran? He killed her? Peter?” An aggressive light comes into her eyes. “I’ll kill him, the bastard,” and she begins to pull away from me, as if to rush back down the corridor, dart into a room full of enemies, find Muller and attack him.

I think of the scorpion in Muller’s shoe and wonder briefly what that scorpion thinks he’s doing—not, apparently, what scorpions are famous for—and then say to Mel, urgently, “That can wait. They will kill you, Mel, if you defy them. Me, too, if you care about that. Monica would not want you dead.”

All hinged now on Mel’s decision which, almost like an ordinary teenager in an ordinary situation, she did not impart
to me. Instead she wrenches away, plucks up her long red skirt, and runs off down the corridor, fleet as a hare, with me in effortful pursuit. She passes the open door of the dining-room, glimpsing the guests.

Mel is by now through another door and out into the garden but I know Muller was there less than ten minutes earlier, and may still be. If he sees her, we are both lost, and it will not be long, anyway, before the guests understand Mel is running, and know she must be caught.

Muller is still there, on the terrace, and he and his companion have been joined by a third man. They are concluding their conversation. Muller is putting his foot into his shoe when Mel flashes past in her red dress, hair flying. Muller shouts—and at that moment I trip and fall, winded—trapped.

I get to my knees, slowly, knowing it doesn’t matter any more. We are defeated. I can already hear guests coming from the dining-room, alarmed. I am about to be caught here, and Mel will be captured by the guards at the gate. I have failed; my struggle is over.

The patch of deep shadow where I kneel moves and trembles as a sudden wind blows a branch of an umbrella pine across the relentless white beam of a spotlight.

Then comes the scream. It rises, high and desperate, and ends with a choking, throttled sound that brings Peter Müller
to his knees (and I could swear his wild, bloodshot eyes, distended in the agony of the scorpion’s sting, looked straight out at me). Everyone jumps to their feet. A security guard pulls a gun and shoots, shattering the glass door.

I rise. I go as slowly as I can, and with the steps of a woman wanted only for the menial tasks she will perform. I find Mel at the edge of the lawn, looking back on the chaotic scene behind us. I take her hand and lead her out over the broken glass and to the back of the villa. Here, a row of parked cars, a sleeping chauffeur…

I, Jean Hastie, would prefer not to remember my drive in the stolen Citroen to Nice airport, on a corniche that seems nowadays to be all motorway and not to resemble in the slightest the dashing drives taken by Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s
To Catch a Thief
.

But then again, Jim Graham is no Cary Grant.

There is a lot of time to make up, with Mel. On the plane to Heathrow I had to tell her about Chris’s death. She was greatly upset. It was a sober couple who found Jennifer Devant’s placard with “Hastie” held high in Arrivals.

One day, when Mel is cleared of the crime I am convinced she did not commit, we can go into the past together. I can teach the child some of the history she so sadly lacks.

Jim Graham said he had put a stop to matters by calling the French and then International Police several times. “It would have helped, Jean, if you could have found the time to do this,” he said, and had the impertinence to sound aggrieved.

I give him credit for having made alarmist calls to the authorities, but initially the authorities took little interest in the supposed abduction in London of a fifteen-year-old girl, never reported to the British police. However, Jim’s garbled and near-incredible tale of the abduction and the massing of far-right forces at the chateau (and he claims, the very mention of his name) did have some effect. The house was raided by the police on the following morning but by then—perhaps tipped off by sympathisers—the guests, no strangers to trouble, one assumes, had quickly packed their bags and gone, with the speed of ants when the anthill is kicked over. Jim was at the window as they left before dawn, sweeping through the village in a convoy of limousines; the motorcade, he said, would have put the President of the United States to shame. Presumably the body of Muller went with them, for it was not found at the chateau, and must now lie in whatever unmarked grave, in whatever country, his associates could find for him.

By the time we had arrived in the city centre, Jennifer had taken pity on my state of exhaustion. She assured me I was at liberty to stay at the Avondale Club for the night and, even
better, borrow her second-best suit. “Tweed. I had it made in Peebles,” Jennifer Devant, QC announced, as Mel simply giggled, and, worryingly, I thought, asked “Uncle Jim” if she could go to his house in Banesbury Road. However, I have decided to leave well alone. By now the villa in the Luberon mountains will have been surrounded by police and armed forces, and Peter Miller of Miller, Brown & Co. will no longer be known in North West London—or anywhere else—as a friendly neighbourhood estate agent. This at least was worth accomplishing, in the search for the killer of Monica Stirling.

And as for Hitler’s gold: Jennifer advises me strongly that until some better plan is made for it, I had better not mention that I alone have the secret of the numbers which will release it.