Roots of Evil(146)

‘Why couldn’t you?’ said Lucy.

‘For one thing I had under-estimated the press interest. They were on to every scrap of information. They talked to neighbours, Deborah’s schoolfriends, people at Ilena’s hospital. They dug up every shred of information about Lucretia they could find. Today there’s the cult of the celebrity and a huge industry devoted to it, but believe me, for months on end my family had the most relentless press intrusion imaginable. For a time I was afraid they would discover the truth, but they didn’t.’ She looked at them all. ‘And so everyone believed I was a murderess,’ she said softly. ‘Perhaps also that I was mad. But certainly they all believed I had killed two men and then myself rather than face the consequences. That was the verdict.’

‘Two men?’ said Liam. ‘Conrad was the second victim, wasn’t he? It was Conrad you heard tapping on the wall?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and an infinite sadness showed in her eyes for a moment. ‘Later I knew that nothing I could have done would have saved him. He died from loss of blood and shock and Ilena promised me that it would have been very quick.’

‘And so,’ said Liam, ‘you got away with the illusion.’

‘Yes. We couldn’t have done it today, of course, with all the forensic investigations that go on, and the computer-linked emergency services and so on. But things were much less formal then, and Ashwood was a small village that hadn’t progressed much since the 1930s. The police had three bodies – all of them well-known people, all of them dead in bizarre circumstances, and they struggled to cope. The inquest decided that I had committed both murders, of course. It didn’t occur to anyone that there could have been two separate murderers inside Ashwood on the same day.’

‘But surely,’ said Francesca, ‘if Crispin had killed Conrad—? Didn’t you want to do something about that? To bring him to justice?’

‘Until Edmund told his story earlier today,’ said Alice, ‘and Michael told me about it, I didn’t know Crispin had killed Conrad. It simply didn’t occur to me that Crispin could have been capable of murder – he was just a rather charming, rather immature boy. Na?ve. A bit petulant on that last day. Until today I always thought Leo Dreyer had killed Conrad.’

‘And Alraune?’ said Lucy.

‘Deb and Mariana came back to England when Mariana was five,’ said Alice. ‘So that Mariana could go to an English school. By that time Alraune was at school in Poland, and he seemed content and settled, so he stayed – he lived with Ilena’s family. That’s why Mariana hardly knew him, of course. She may have dimly remembered a boy called Alan being part of the family for a time, but probably nothing more than that. And in those years, as far as anyone could tell, Alraune was perfectly normal. When he was seventeen he was accepted at one of the smaller Austrian universities. I arranged for him to live with friends from my Vienna days – a little village just outside the city.’

She paused, and Francesca glanced at Michael, and saw that both of them were remembering the photograph in Trixie’s things, and their idea that Trixie had found it while she was on holiday in the Vienna Woods.

‘He left the university after one term,’ said Alice, ‘and I lost sight of him for several years. But he came to England some time later, and we were in touch again. He would never come to visit me, but I used to send him money – that’s how Michael knew where I was. He found a letter with my address.’

‘Deb was always very cagey about Alraune,’ said Lucy thoughtfully. ‘She once said that there had been a great tragedy and it was better to let it all go.’

‘Details did get out, of course,’ said Alice. ‘The reporters never actually got the entire truth of Auschwitz, of what Alraune had been forced to witness in Mengele’s clinic, but they knew there was something – something macabre. I don’t know how much they knew about Reinard Stultz’s death. But what they didn’t know, they made up.’

‘And so,’ said Lucy thoughtfully, ‘a legend was created.’

‘Yes. And in a way, the more bizarre tales there were about Alraune – Alan as he was by then – the more it hid the truth. Everyone assumed he was a girl, of course, and that concealed his identity even more fully.’

‘And you?’ said Francesca. ‘What did you do?’


‘I became Alice Wilson once again. An ordinary lady from an ordinary background. There was money from the films, and also from Conrad’s estate – more from that than I had thought. Dear Conrad – he left it all to me. He had even had everything drawn up to cover “Alice” as well as “Lucretia”. He always loved the idea of the double identity,’ she said softly. ‘It was like a game to him. A masquerade. And so I was able to buy the house in Mowbray Fen and to make some careful investments so that the children would be provided for, and I became an unremarkable Englishwoman, active in village life, a pillar of the church, an indefatigable worker for a number of charities.’

‘Including CHARTH?’ asked Francesca.

‘Yes. I had known what it was to be homeless, and I never forgot it. I helped where I could.’

‘Deborah knew you, didn’t she?’ said Lucy, looking across at Michael. ‘That’s why she left the house to CHARTH.’