Roots of Evil(82)

But since finding the old newsreel of Lucretia on Howard Hughes’ Stratoliner, the unreadable face of the dark-eyed child who had been at Lucretia’s side kept coming between Lucy and the grainy black-and-white images she was working on. With it came the familiar nagging curiosity from her own childhood: the need to know the truth about Alraune and to know whether Alraune had really existed. Who were you? said Lucy to the ghost-child on the film. And what were you? Did you exist, and if you did, what happened to you? But I daresay that even if I could trace you, I’d find that you were only on that newsreel because you were the son or daughter of one of the cabin crew, or a friend’s child that Lucretia was chaperoning to or from some Swiss resort.

If Aunt Deb had still been alive Lucy would have let her see the newsreel; Aunt Deb would have loved it, and she would probably have known the exact circumstances of Lucretia’s journey to or from Switzerland – she might have recalled some tantalizing fragment of scandal about Lucretia and Howard Hughes, and she might even have been persuaded to say whether the child in the newsreel could actually have been Alraune. Lucy felt all over again the ache of loss for Aunt Deb who had spun all those stories, and she remembered how she had always believed that Deb had known far more about Alraune than she had ever told.

Was there was anyone else she could talk to about the newsreel? How about Edmund? Edmund, finicky and pedantic as he was, disapproving of Lucretia as he always had been, had always been deeply interested in Deborah Fane’s side of the family. And he did not have to have Alraune explained to him, because he had more or less grown up with all the stories and the rumours and the speculation, just as Lucy had. He was, in fact, the obvious person, but Lucy hesitated. ‘Oh, Lucy, you’re such a romantic under that tough fa?ade,’ Edmund had said that evening, and there had been the sudden urgent thrust of his body against hers as they made the coffee. Or is my memory making it a bit more sexually charged than it actually was? thought Lucy. Even so, she felt awkward about phoning Edmund at the moment, although he would certainly like to know about this fragment of the past that she had uncovered. She was just trying to decide whether to ring him when a call came in from a Detective Inspector Jennie Fletcher.

‘We haven’t met,’ said DI Fletcher, brusquely polite. ‘But I know who you are, of course, and I expect you know that I’m heading the investigation into Trixie Smith’s murder.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Lucy, assuming the inspector wanted to know about that original meeting with Trixie.

‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ said DI Fletcher.

‘A favour?’ This was unexpected. ‘What kind of favour?’

‘I want to know about Alraune.’

‘Oh,’ said Lucy a bit blankly. ‘The film or the child?’

‘The film. What exactly is it? I mean – what’s it about?’

Lucy had the feeling that DI Fletcher knew quite a lot about Alraune already – the fictional one and also the real one – but the mental exercise of rolling up the plot into a couple of sentences was unexpectedly calming. She said, ‘Well, I’ve never read the original story, but I do know it’s a pretty freaky one.’

‘So I understand.’

‘It’s sort of Frankenstein re-told, only the “creature” is female: a girl who’s conceived in the shadow of a gallows-tree as an experiment, and named Alraune after the mandrake root that’s supposed to grow beneath the gibbet, due to – well, perhaps you know the hoary old myth about hanging, do you?’

‘Spontaneous ejaculation because of the spasming? Yes, I do know.’

Lucy thought that on balance this was a nicely polite and suitably clinical way of putting it. She said, ‘Alraune’s conceived from the mandrake’s – um – potency, I suppose is the term. She’s beautiful but evil and she ends up destroying both herself and the tormented genius who created her. Maybe it’s Frankenstein meets Svengali.’

‘Silent films used to evoke a remarkable atmosphere, didn’t they?’ said Inspector Fletcher. ‘As much because of the silence I’ve always thought.’

‘That’s true. The film versions of Alraune are all based to a lesser or greater extent on a book written around 1910 or 1912 by a German author called Hanns Heinz Ewers. At least three or four films were made of it – some silent, some with sound, all mostly in the 1920s and early 1930s, although Eric von Stroheim did a rather cheesy re-make in 1951 or 1952.’ Lucy thought it was not necessary to mention that von Stroheim was credited with having been one of Lucretia’s lovers.

Inspector Fletcher appeared to be making notes of all this. After a moment, she said, ‘What else?’


‘The early versions were considered rather shockingly erotic for their day,’ said Lucy, hoping she did not sound as if she was giving a lecture. ‘But the film my grandmother made is generally accepted as the darkest and most dramatic version of them all – in fact before the Ashwood murders it was regarded as one of the great examples of early film noir.’

‘But not any longer?’

‘After Lucretia died the cranks and the weirdos latched on to it,’ said Lucy. ‘And it achieved a sort of underground near-cult status. Unfortunately it’s got all tangled up with the legend – Conrad Kline and Leo Dreyer butchered at Ashwood, and Lucretia committing that spectacular suicide – so nobody’s very objective about it any more. That’s a great shame, because it really was a remarkable film. Very innovative and quite daring in parts. And the director achieved some terrific effects.’