Roots of Evil(35)

But the greater irony was that if only those stored-away memories – those crammed-full boxes and those too-heavy-to-move tea-chests – had been available now, Lucy could have plundered them for clues to Alraune. She frowned and pushed this thought away, because the memory of when and how those brittle pages and those stacks of smudgy newsprint had been lost was one of the dangerous memories. One of the bits of the past that should be left to die.

And she thought that even if she had been able to find anything, she would not really have wanted to pass it on to Trixie Smith. She thought she would have wanted to keep Alraune secret. She felt all over again the ache of loss for Aunt Deb, who could have been consulted about this.

Still, whoever you were, said Lucy to Alraune’s uneasy legend, and whether you were real or not, you churned up a few nightmares for me, so now that you seem to have been resurrected, so to speak, I think I might like to know a bit more about you. I don’t really know very much at all, and I’m not even sure what your place would be in the family tree. And were you really born to Lucretia, or have I simply assumed that because you were named for her film?

So what actual information was there about the dark chimera that was Alraune? Well, Alraune was supposed to have been born at the start of World War II and smuggled into one of the neutral countries when little more than a baby, to lie low in safety until the war ended. The stories of the actual smuggling varied wildly, from quite reasonable, quite credible, accounts of unobtrusive journeys in plain cars across various enemy borders, and then escalated dramatically to French-Revolution-style escapes in baskets of cabbages or mad moonlight flits inside fake coffins with plague crosses on the lids. It was these last tales that made Alraune’s existence sound like the purest fantasy. But other than this, there was not a great deal to go on.

Everyone in the family had always shied away from discussing Alraune. Aunt Deb had once said that Alraune’s childhood had been bitterly tragic, but she had also said that Alraune was better forgotten. But ‘bitterly tragic’ could mean anything. If you related it to World War II it could mean an Ann-Frank-style incarceration in a sealed-off attic with Nazi stormtroopers searching the house, but if you took it in a more general sense it might mean an early death from some inexorable disease.

If one was going to look for Alraune, where would one start? Always accepting the old maxim about it being impossible to prove a negative, where could you start, when you were not sure if you had an accurate name, and when you were not even sure of the reality of the person you were trying to find?

As abruptly as a door being slammed back against a wall, the answer was there. What Lucy needed was a link back to that era, and Lucretia herself might provide that link. She had been a luminary of the silver screen – she had been famous and infamous and above all she had been news. What today was called a celebrity. Almost everything she had done from the late 1920s to the day of her death had been documented in one form or another. In newspapers, and in the glossy film-star magazines that had become fashionable after the war.

Scouring magazines would be time-consuming, and any accounts Lucy did find might be biased or exaggerated. But Lucretia’s life had not just been charted in print; a great deal of it had been captured on film. And Quondam Films had a section devoted entirely to old newsreel footage.



Once the search would have meant meanderings through imperfectly-kept card-indexes or basements crammed with badly-labelled boxes, climbing on to library-steps to reach the higher shelves or crawling on hands and knees to see what was pushed on to the bottom sections. In a way there was a rather faded romance about that kind of search, because it gave you the feeling of thrusting your hands back into the past, and of brushing the tips of your fingers against the cobwebby fragments of history.

But from a practical point of view it was much easier to be able to call up Quondam’s archive list on a computer screen, which was what Lucy was doing now, and type in a search request for newsreels between 1940 and 1950 containing anything on Lucretia von Wolff.

Lucy waited while the computer scanned its files – it took a few moments because there was quite a lot of stuff for it to scan. The film and TV news-makers had really got going in those years, and there had been so much going on in the world that they had wanted to record. Quondam had recently acquired some terrific footage of Dunkirk and VE Day and D-Day, and the marketing department were considering assembling the reels into chronological order, with the idea of trying to interest one of the major war museums in them. When Lucy had finished with the horror presentation she might be involved in that, which she would like very much.

The responses to the search request came up, and Lucy leaned forward eagerly. Most of them seemed to deal solely with Lucretia’s return to the screen after the war; she had made a couple of films in 1947 and 1948, one with the tempestuous Erich von Stroheim, which had apparently been an explosive pairing, but which had been regarded as a very fine example of film noir. There had been a good deal of advance publicity about both films, and from the entry it looked as if some of the footage showed Lucretia arriving at the premières. It would be interesting to see these some time, but at the moment they were not what Lucy was looking for. She scrolled down the screen to see what else there might be.

And there, towards the end, were three entries that sounded as if they focused more directly on Lucretia’s private life. Two were from Pathé News, and the other one bore a maker’s name that looked to be either German or Dutch. Lucy, aware of a sudden beat of anticipation, requested viewings of all three as soon as possible and sent the request along the inter-office email system.