Roots of Evil(131)

‘What will happen to Edmund?’ asked Francesca into the silence.

‘I should think some sort of long-term treatment will be necessary,’ said the inspector.

‘Not – prison?’

‘On the present showing, I think it’s unlikely that he’d be considered fit to stand trial.’

Edmund guilty of murder, but unfit to stand trial. Edmund shut away in some dreadful asylum. And if only one could get rid of an appalling image of Edmund, madness glaring from his eyes, stalking that poor wretched Trixie Smith, bringing the skewer down on her face, it might be possible to feel deeply sorry for him. To dispel this image, Lucy said, ‘Elsa – you said you recognized Edmund. Could you explain that, please?’ She was not yet quite sure who Elsa was, but presumably at some stage it would be possible to ask.

‘My mother had photographs dating back – oh, many years,’ said Elsa. ‘Some of them showed Crispin Fane. And Edmund is very like Crispin to look at.’

‘Crispin? Your mother knew Crispin?’

‘My mother was in a place of hell with the Baroness von Wolff,’ said Elsa. ‘It forged a bond between them – the kind of bond that never breaks, not even in death. I know a great deal about your family, Lucy.’

‘Elsa’s mother was called Ilena,’ said Michael. ‘She was Polish. After the war she became a doctor – a very good one.’


‘Medicine is a tradition in my family,’ said Elsa composedly. ‘Me, I am just a nurse, nothing any grander than that.’

Lucy looked at her. ‘You said – a place of hell?’

‘Yes. My mother and Lucretia von Wolff were in Auschwitz together.’

Auschwitz.

As if a signal had been given, Michael stood up. ‘Francesca, could you and Elsa stay in here for a little while?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you. Lucy, if you’re up to it, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. It won’t be very easy and it might be a shock. But since we’re in this house—Well, anyway, I think you’d better know about it.’

‘Who is it?’ Lucy could not keep the apprehension out of her voice. ‘Who am I going to meet?’

‘My father,’ said Michael. ‘Alraune.’



Alraune. The uneasy legend. The smear of darkness on the edge of consciousness. The ghost-child named for the half-mythical mandragora root.

As they entered the big room at the back of the house Lucy was glad of Michael’s presence. But her heart was pounding and she felt as if she had been running very fast and very hard. I’m about to see the legend, she thought. The fable, the semi-monster from my childhood. ‘A childhood so bizarre and so bitterly tragic that it’s best not repeated,’ Aunt Deb had once said. ‘Alraune, living or dead, is better left in peace…’

Living or dead…

It was not quite a room for the living, but it was not quite a room for the dead either, not yet. There was a hospital air about it, despite the comfortable furnishings and the large bowl of bronze chrysanthemums on a small table. But it’s death’s waiting-room for all that, thought Lucy, and then moved to the bed.

For a long time she did not speak. She was distantly aware of Michael nearby, and she thought there were sounds from beyond the room – homely ordinary sounds of crockery rattling and cupboard doors being opened. But the world had shrunk to this room, to this corner of the room, to this person in the bed…

And after all, the ghost-child was nothing but a dying man, barely conscious, the skin around the eyes ridged and puckered with old scars, the hair that might once have been dark like Michael’s grey and thin…Sad. So immeasurably sad.

Speaking almost in a whisper, as if afraid to break into the listening silence, she said, ‘So Alraune really does exist.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Those scars around his eyes—’

‘He’s blind,’ said Michael quietly. ‘My mother attacked him when I was a child, and he lost his sight because of it. He killed her that night, and I thought he was dead as well – I couldn’t imagine how he could survive being so badly wounded – but he did. He always was a survivor,’ said Michael.

‘I think,’ said Lucy, in the same low voice, ‘that I always knew at some level that Alraune was more than just a publicity stunt. But I thought Alraune was a girl. Everyone did. I found some news footage recently – you could see it if it wouldn’t be too upsetting – but I can see now that the shot could have been either a girl or a boy.’

‘If you read any of the newspaper articles, they seem to assume Alraune was a girl,’ said Michael. ‘He was born inside Auschwitz.’

‘How dreadful.’ Lucy hesitated, and then said, ‘And he really is Lucretia’s son?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled at her. ‘We’re cousins,’ he said. ‘Half cousins.’

‘I rather like that thought.’

‘So do I.’

Lucy looked back at the bed. ‘Michael, I’m so sorry about all of this.’

‘I know quite a lot of his history,’ said Michael. ‘And what I do know is a very bad history indeed. I suspect that Edmund Fane knows some of it as well. I think he found out that I was Alraune’s son, and he was afraid I had some kind of knowledge – something that Alraune had told me or passed on to me – about Ashwood and Crispin. That’s why he tried to kill me.’