Deadlight-Hall(37)

‘The police searched the house,’ I said, uneasily. ‘Mrs Battersby said so.’

‘Yes, but the police wouldn’t have been looking for the kind of clue we’re looking for.’

‘What kind of clue are we looking for?’

‘I don’t know until we find it,’ he said, which was exasperating, but Sch?nbrunn can be very exasperating sometimes.

‘But it was the depths of winter when they vanished. If they wanted to run away, wouldn’t they have waited for better weather?’

‘It would depend on why they ran,’ he said, then, with a note of near-violence, ‘I hope they did run away,’ he said. ‘Because if they didn’t, it means they were taken.’ Taken by Mengele’s people … Taken because he wanted Sophie and Susannah Reiss inside Auschwitz, and his agents had specific orders … The thought was in both our minds.

‘So,’ said Sch?nbrunn briskly, ‘it’s imperative that we pick up their trail. You marked what the Battersby woman said about people thinking there’d been a stranger hanging around – offering the schoolchildren sweets?’

‘Oh yes.’

Neither of us needed to say more. Both of us were aware of Dr Mengele’s behaviour inside Auschwitz; of how he played the part of a kindly uncle, securing the children’s trust by giving them sweets and sugar lumps, all the time luring them closer to the door of his laboratories.

Forcing the images away, I said, ‘Where shall we start?’

We surveyed the hall. I suppose we had expected to encounter a scene of dereliction, but although the plasterwork was peeling and the floorboards were dull and scarred, it was not as bad as we had expected. There was a stench of damp and mildew, but there was none of the miscellaneous, often squalid rubbish so frequently seen in abandoned buildings. You and I, my friend, have seen too many of those since our country was ravaged. I sometimes think I shall never wash away the clinging stench of bomb-damaged, smoke-blackened ruins.

Sch?nbrunn said, ‘They’d keep the children together, I think, so it’s likely they’d use the biggest rooms.’

‘Here on the ground floor.’

‘Yes. Let’s start here, at any rate.’

I don’t know what we expected to find, but what we did find, in an inner room, at least confirmed Mrs Battersby’s story. Carved on a wall, low down, at child height, was the Jewish symbol for S. I do not need to describe it to you, my friend, but to both of us, that mark was as clear as a curse. Sophie and Susannah Reiss had indeed been here – they had left their initial.

‘It’s reassuring on one level and terrifying on another,’ I said, straightening up from examining the mark. ‘And why would they leave their initial here?’

‘It needn’t be sinister,’ he said. ‘Did you never carve your initials on a schoolroom desk?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You must have been an inordinately well-behaved child. We’d better explore the upper floors.’

‘Still no footprints,’ I said, as we reached the first floor.

‘No. So the figure we saw didn’t come up here. But why hasn’t he – or she – come out to challenge us? We haven’t been particularly noisy, but we haven’t tiptoed around.’

‘He might be hiding,’ I said. ‘There could be all kinds of perfectly innocent reasons for that, though.’

We looked into all the first-floor rooms, then we went up to the second floor ones, which were smaller. All the rooms were empty – some had a few pieces of furniture, and some of them were draped in dust sheets, making strange ghostly outlines in the dimness. Sch?nbrunn pulled the dust sheets away, but nothing lurked or crouched beneath any of them.

‘There’s nothing,’ I said. ‘In fact—’ I broke off as Sch?nbrunn grabbed my arm. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, instinctively lowering my voice.

‘Listen,’ he said.

At first I could not hear anything, then, between one heartbeat and the next, came a soft voice.

‘Children, are you here?’

There was silence, and I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I was aware of Sch?nbrunn listening intently. The voice came again.

‘Children, where are you?’

It’s difficult to convey in a letter how extremely disturbing that soft voice and those words were. There was almost a fairy-tale quality – a grim echo of all those wicked stepmothers and witches in gingerbread cottages – all the hungering ogres who hunted little children, and carried them off to dark castles. I remembered again Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who stalked children and carried them off to his own dark castle: the fortress called Auschwitz, where he performed his experiments. Experiments that included amputations, chemicals injected into eyes to change their colour, the attempts to create conjoined twins by sewing sections of their bodies together … Twins.