Roots of Evil(141)

The image vanished as quickly as it had come, but Alice glanced uneasily across to where Alraune was sitting. Would the spotlights and the surrounding darkness have sparked a similar flare of memory for him? No, surely he had been too young to remember it. She was about to go across to him, to say something light and frivolous, when she was beckoned across to a group of men standing near the door.

Clearly these were the visitors for whom those preparations had been made earlier, and equally clearly they wanted to meet the infamous Lucretia von Wolff. Bother, thought Alice crossly, now I’m a tourist attraction, but she began to pick her way across the lit set to the far side.

She had reached the edge of the set and was about to step into the dark area outside it, when the tallest of the men turned to face her. Alice stopped dead, half in and half out of the light, because the memories were swooping down again. The hut in Auschwitz, lit by the glow from an iron stove. The sofa in the corner of the room, the men watching her with furtive lechery, and the dreadful awareness of sexual excitement filling up the hut. And all the while a tall man standing behind the stove, so that the firelight turned his eyeglass to a burning disc of flame…

The man watching her walk across Studio Twelve was Leo Dreyer.



‘It wasn’t until a long time afterwards,’ said Alice, sipping her coffee, and looking at the absorbed faces of her listeners, ‘that I understood that Leo Dreyer was one of the financiers of the film.’

‘You knew him?’ Lucy could not think why this should surprise her.

‘I knew him in Auschwitz and also in Buchenwald,’ said Alice. ‘He was a vicious man with the greatest ability for hatred I ever encountered. He and I had a – what today you would call a “history”.’

‘Is that why he came to England?’ said Liam. ‘To find you?’

‘He didn’t come for me,’ said Alice. ‘He considered matters settled between us. Leo Dreyer came to England for Conrad.’



Alice was never able to remember shooting the scheduled scene that day and returning to her dressing-room afterwards. She had no idea what kind of performance she had given for the cameras or whether the scene might have to be reshot; her mind had been jerked back into the memories again, to the night when she had endured Leo Dreyer’s brutal rape – the hammer blows inside her body, on and on…

When the door was pushed quietly open, and he slipped into the room, she was not in the least surprised. If you try to touch me this time, I’ll shout rape, and see you gaoled, she thought.

But he was perfectly courteous; he was murmuring an apology for disturbing her, and saying something about wanting a few private moments with an old friend.

‘We were never friends, and I have no wish to be private with you,’ Alice said, glaring at him. ‘What do you want? Why are you here?’

‘I’m here entirely legitimately,’ said Dreyer, leaning back against the closed door and studying her. ‘I have a number of investments these days – finance is very rewarding, I find – and a few months ago I added Ashwood Studios to their number.’

‘You have invested in Ashwood?’

‘Very substantially. I am probably paying your salary, my dear,’ he said.

There’s something here that I’m missing, thought Alice, and said, ‘Why would you invest in a film studio? It’s a risky business at the best of times.’

‘I was curious about you,’ said Leo Dreyer, and Alice thought, nonsense. You never possessed such an emotion as curiosity in your life!

After a moment, she said, politely, ‘Weren’t you content with merely spreading rumours that I spied for the Nazis?’ and saw him smile slightly.

‘What a hell-cat you are,’ he said softly.

‘You did spread them though, didn’t you? Those stories?’

‘Things have a way of getting out,’ he said, off handedly. ‘Did you know that Nina died last year?’

‘I didn’t know. I’m very sorry,’ said Alice after a moment.

‘She committed suicide.’

‘That’s extremely sad. A very great waste of a life.’

‘You were the one who caused the waste,’ he said. ‘You began it – you and Conrad.’ The smile was suddenly and eerily the one from Auschwitz and from Kristallnacht, and Alice stared at him in dawning horror. Leo Dreyer had not come to England – to Ashwood – for her; he considered that he had redressed the balance with her in the camps. And although he had sent Conrad – the faithless lover, the betrayer – into Dachau, Conrad had spent the years with his beloved music, and Dreyer had known that. And now Conrad was out in the world again, and looking set to become successful all over again. Dreyer must have felt cheated; he must have felt that Conrad had in some way eluded the punishment he had intended. A tiny part of Alice’s mind wondered why Dreyer had not taken the opportunity to deal with Conrad while he was held in Dachau, but the Nazis had worked on the closed-cell principle – each camp had been a unit unto itself, and unless Dreyer had had friends in Dachau as he had had in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he might have found it difficult to penetrate the bureaucratic regime.

Had Dreyer known Conrad would be here today? Had he fixed the date of this visit deliberately? But whatever the truth, the two of them must not be allowed to meet, and Dreyer must be got out of Ashwood as quickly as possible. Alice began to say that they could not talk here where anyone might burst in unannounced, when, as if in response to this, the door was pushed open. Alice and Leo Dreyer turned to see Alraune standing in the doorway.