1989, page 33
Now tears were spilling from her eyes. ‘And that’s why the Nazis burned the whole village and slaughtered so many of us. If they hadn’t known about the Jews hidden in the barn, they’d just have done what they usually did, they’d have gone through the village killing the Jews, and that would have been bad enough, but they’d have spared the others and not burned every house in the village. So what Michnik did wasn’t simply to betray the Jews in hiding. He destroyed so many other lives. Anna was with a few of the villagers who got away, they knew the forest better than the Germans. But Anna lost people that day. Her brother. The boy she was going to marry. Her two best friends.
‘And the young man, he told her Michnik is a rich man who owns newspapers and magazines and sits at dinner with politicians and movie stars.’ Anna wiped her eyes roughly and blew her nose as Olga spoke. ‘And he’s a hero, they say.’
‘What did the young man say about this?’
Anna sighed. She took a long drink of her cooling tea. ‘He was shocked,’ Olga said. ‘He said he’d only wanted to find out about his parents. That was why he’d tried so hard to see the man who had called himself Chaim Barak. He’d thought the reason Barak didn’t want to speak to him was that he’s a greedy man who only does things to benefit himself. He never dreamed that he was the man who had betrayed his entire family to the Nazis. Anna asked him what he could do about it. Could he expose the truth about him? He said he didn’t know. He didn’t have that sort of power. But he swore that he would find a way to make him pay.’
This was gold, Allie thought. ‘Can you ask her to repeat that, just to be sure?’
Olga spoke and Anna nodded vigorously. ‘She says he promised he would find a way to make Michnik pay the price for his betrayal.’
There was only one more question Allie needed an answer for. ‘Does she have a surname for Thomas? Does she have contact details?’
Olga asked the question. And Allie held her breath.
‘I knew it was all going too well,’ Allie sighed as they set off back down the road to Białystok. ‘How the hell do we find an Englishman called Thomas?’
‘It’s easy,’ Olga said. ‘Trust me. We have his first name. We know he is English and we know when he was here. And we know where he was staying in Białystok. He will have had to hand over his passport, they will have a record.’
Allie scoffed. ‘We think we know where he was staying.’ She relived the tense moments when Olga ran through the names of all the hotels she could think of in Białystok. Finally, Anna had lit up at the mention of the Hotel Branicki. She was almost certain that’s where he said he was staying, when they were making small talk at the start of their conversation. She remembered it because it was in the old town and she’d thought her husband was going to take her there for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but he didn’t. Instead, they’d gone to a hunting lodge.’
‘It’s interesting to me that he was willing to give her some personal details early in that conversation,’ Allie mused. ‘And then, after she’d told him the truth about Chaim Barak and Szeloma Michnik, he got very canny about what he let slip. I wonder whether he was already making a plan in his head about the price he was going to exact from Michnik.’
‘Don’t you mean Wallace Lockhart? The man who was your boss until he supposedly committed suicide?’
‘I’m glad you said “supposedly”. When his daughter told me she was convinced he’d been murdered, I told her she was crazy. That he couldn’t face the shame of his empire crashing round his ears and everyone knowing what a crook he was. Turns out, maybe she was right.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘God, I hate being wrong.’
Olga chuckled. ‘But being wrong is a better story, no?’
‘Just for once, it might be.’
As they reached the outskirts of the city, Olga took pity on her. ‘Why don’t I drop you at our hotel? There’s nothing you can do at the Branicki and going in two-handed might make it harder for me to get the information we need.’ She gave a little smile. ‘It’s never good to have a witness to bribery and corruption.’
56
It felt to Allie as if the piece of paper with Thomas Raventhorpe’s address was burning a hole in her heart, never mind her pocket. Throughout her flight back to the UK from Warsaw, she kept taking it out of her pocket and staring at Olga’s neat handwriting, as if this time it would give her a clear answer to the question of what to do next.
She’d already decided to sneak back into Manchester by the back door of a commercial flight into Heathrow then a train, rather than discuss her travel arrangements with Genevieve. She wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. Rona was driving down that evening; they’d have the weekend to talk through what Allie should do next.
On the tube between airport and station, Allie briefly considered simply rising to the surface of the city and taking a cab to Thomas Raventhorpe’s address south of the river. But she wasn’t ready for that conversation – or confrontation – either. She needed to find some clarity.
It was a relief to be back in her own home, after a week of hotels and unpredictable coffee. Allie brewed an espresso and walked out into the garden, taking stock of the changes since she’d been gone. The pieris was showing off in its full glory of reds and cream and green, the magnolia stellata was still waving the last of its slender petals in the light breeze, the rhubarb and the sage were both burgeoning, and everywhere needed weeding. She sat on the bench at the bottom of the garden and tried to distract herself with thoughts of whether she should plant for the autumn, given the estate agent had left a message saying they had a potential buyer.
It didn’t work. Anna’s testimony rumbled round her head, and still she couldn’t make her mind up what to do with it. Every time she thought she’d arrived at the most just conclusion, a voice in her head said, ‘Yes, but . . .’ Whatever route she chose meant casting herself in the role of judge, jury and lord high executioner, one way or another. None of that made her feel comfortable.
The early evening chill drove her back inside and she walked up to the shops on Beech Road to stock up on fresh vegetables, cheeses and smoked chicken from the deli. Even so short a walk shook something loose in her head, and when she returned, she sat at the typewriter and started writing the story as it made most sense to her. She knew even as her fingers moved automatically over the keys that this was provisional. But it was a way of ordering events that let her understand which elements were most important and how to transition between them.
By the time Rona arrived just after eight, Allie was feeling calmer, though no less uncertain about the way forward. When Rona walked in, they clung to each other wordlessly. Inhaling Rona’s familiar distinctive smell, Allie finally felt she was home. When they moved apart at last, Rona said, ‘Let me get Germaine. She’s in the car. I wanted you to myself for a minute.’
Eventually they settled on the big sofa, each with a glass of wine, Germaine between them. ‘Tell me all about it,’ Rona said.
So Allie did. ‘And I don’t know what to do about it,’ she concluded.
Rona reached across and stroked the back of her neck. ‘Let’s run through the possibilities,’ she said.
‘There’s the very basic story that I can easily tell – the truth about Ace Lockhart and what he did in Poladski. Leaving Thomas Raventhorpe out of it altogether. It’ll leave Genevieve incandescent with rage.’
Rona gave a little laugh. ‘So there’s an upside. She’s driving everybody mad, storming round the place pretending to be Ace, acting like there’s not this massive financial fraud at the heart of everything. I’m amazed the Fraud Squad haven’t been crawling all over the pension fund offices, never mind the rest of the business.’
‘Aye, but I’m not sure I want to be the distraction from all that.’
‘True. OK, next option.’
Allie refilled their glasses. ‘I think Thomas Raventhorpe possibly murdered Ace Lockhart.’
‘That’s a big claim. How?’
‘Somehow he put a poisoned capsule in among Lockhart’s vitamins and just waited it out. He doesn’t even have to have gone to Ranaig, he could have sneaked into one of his offices. Though there’s probably more security in Ace Media than there is on Ranaig. And if that is what he did, it means he’ll have a perfect alibi for when Lockhart actually died. And he wouldn’t have cared when it happened as long as it did happen.’
‘Would that work?’
‘Sure. Stomach acid dissolves the gelatine casing, the cyanide is absorbed by the stomach lining. It would kill him very quickly. Certainly within an hour. I checked with that nice forensic chemist at Strathclyde Uni.’
‘Wow. That’s cold, though. But how would he manage it?’
‘He’s a PE teacher, Rona. If he didn’t know before how to use a boat, he’d have no problem getting someone to teach him. The good bit about Ranaig is that somewhere there’s going to be a record of him chartering a boat between the date he got back from Poland and the date Lockhart died.’
‘How would he get into the house? Lockhart was paranoid, he’ll have had security cameras and alarms, surely?’
‘Probably. Or maybe he thought Ranaig was secure enough in itself, stuck out there on the edge of the Atlantic. If I was going down that road, I’d need to speak to the husband-and-wife team that look after the island.’
‘And where would he get the cyanide?’
Allie shrugged. ‘There are ways. Cyanide salts are used in gold mining and other industrial processes. You can distil it from the kernels of peach or apricot stones, or laurel leaves, apparently. It’s not easy to get your hands on but it’s not impossible. And maybe he wanted to use the poison the Nazis used to murder millions of Jews? A kind of poetic justice.’
‘It’s going to be bloody hard to prove.’
‘That’s not the issue, Rona. The issue is whether that’s the right thing to do. Ace Lockhart was a terrible man.’
‘He did rescue you from the Stasi,’ Rona said mildly.
‘Only because it suited him. He didn’t want to lose you. Rona, what we know now is he betrayed friends and family to save his own skin. He was a ruthless bully, an exploitative employer who destroyed people’s lives in less obvious ways than Nazi death camps. The latest crime that we know about is stealing people’s pensions, leaving them penniless. I’m not sure I want to set the law on the man who rid the world of Ace Lockhart.’
‘Not to mention the wrath of Genevieve. She’ll take his life apart in a bid to exonerate her father. And Anna Mikolaska. Genevieve will throw the full weight of Ace Media at her, accusing her of all sorts of lies and deceptions. She’s desperate right now. There’s no way she’s going to have her father painted as a villain who deserved to die.’ Rona pushed Germaine to the floor and pulled Allie into a hug. ‘The key question is, who does it serve to accuse Thomas Raventhorpe? Who benefits?’
‘I’m not sure that’s the right question. Surely we’re not saying murder is OK? Who are we to decide that some killers shouldn’t pay?’
‘Allie, step back a minute. We don’t even know for sure that he’s a murderer. Maybe it really was suicide. Or maybe it was murder but it was nothing to do with Thomas Raventhorpe. Maybe whoever sent those messages to Lockhart was just another nutter trying to upset him.’
It was persuasive, Allie thought. Especially since she’d had time to wonder what she’d have done in Thomas Raventhorpe’s shoes. Finding out the hidden truth of his family history, only to discover that the man responsible for his parents’ death was a decorated war hero and a man who wielded immense power in the daily life of his country . . . what would that do to anyone? She knew she’d have felt murderous, held back not by morality but by practicality. Every day, seeing Ace Media publications on the news stands, seeing Ace Lockhart strutting through British public life, a walking illustration of Faulkner’s comment that ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
How could she condemn him for what would have been her own instinctive response? In spite of the gulf between her and her parents, she’d want revenge on anyone who killed them in cold blood. How much worse would she feel if Ace Lockhart had wiped out her entire family line?
The only time she’d previously been involved in a murder, it had been straightforward. Even though unveiling the killer had damaged other lives, there was no possible mitigation of circumstance that gave Allie a moment’s hesitation. This was different.
Allie heaved a sigh. ‘All I can do is fall back on what I know. I need to talk to him. I won’t know what I need to do until I’ve sat down with him and let him have his say. And pushed him on all the points I don’t trust.’
‘It is what you do best, my love. And you’ve got great instincts. Hell, you chose me,’ Rona said, trying to lighten the moment.
Allie chuckled. ‘I don’t remember doing much in the way of choosing. It was more like you happened to me, in the way weather does. No point in fighting it.’ She sighed again. ‘Let’s have the weekend together. Sleep on it, let it lie.’ She sat up abruptly, almost spilling both of their wine glasses. ‘Let’s go dancing. The city’ll just be waking up, we can be the oldest swingers in town!’
Rona stood up and hauled Allie to our feet. ‘We’ll dance like we don’t give a fuck,’ she shouted. The dog fled to the kitchen and they fell into each other’s arms, laughing. ‘Not one single fuck,’ Rona whispered in Allie’s ear. ‘We’ll be the queens of the world.’
Allie hugged her tightly. ‘For one night, at least.’
57
Thomas Raventhorpe lived in the middle floor of a converted Edwardian semi-detached house in Streatham. The house looked solid and well cared for. The front garden had been abolished in favour of a tarmacked parking area, big enough for two small cars. Late on Monday afternoon, she was perched on a wall by a bus stop on the other side of the road. She had an idea of what Raventhorpe looked like, but no details. She didn’t know when he’d get home from school but at least a PE teacher wouldn’t have homework to mark in the staffroom at the end of play.
The buses came and went, her refusal to board earning her a couple of odd looks. She’d spent the weekend with Rona doing exactly what they used to do – clubbing, walking in the Derbyshire hills, gardening, eating well, getting slightly drunk and enjoying each other’s presence – and it had been the best possible antidote to Allie’s fretful state. Being reminded of what she valued was what she’d needed.
A few minutes after six, a man walked up the street from the High Road, a sports holdall slung over his shoulder. He fitted the broad description she had of Raventhorpe, but then, so did approximately one in six of the men who had walked past in the previous hour. The difference was that this one turned off the street and walked up to the front door of the house where Thomas Raventhorpe lived.
Allie jumped off the wall and dodged the traffic to make it to the other side as the man was closing the door behind him. She ran up the steps, giving her best smile and said, ‘Thomas? Thomas Raventhorpe?’
He turned, a quizzical look on his face. He was good-looking – regular features, deep-set eyes, a thick mop of dark hair. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t—’
‘We’ve not met. My name’s Allie Burns. I’ve spent the last few days talking with Anna Mikolaska, and she suggested I should talk to you.’ Get Anna’s name in there, build a bridge.
‘I don’t understand. Talk to me about what?’
‘Sorry, I should have said. I’m a journalist. I’m writing a piece about the massacre at Poladski. And Anna said I should talk to you about the loss of your family.’ Walk across the bridge, keep the reassuring smile plastered on.
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘If it’s a bad time, I can come back. I just think that it’s important that we name the guilty. And that we remember how thin the veneer of civilisation is. If we forget the past, it’s all too easy to repeat it. And nobody wants another Poladski. Or all the other massacres like it.’ A dash of guilt and obligation, always a good seasoning.
‘I suppose . . .’
‘You can help me make the story touch people. Won’t take long, I promise.’ A lie, but who was going to call her on it. ‘Nobody should ever have to endure what your family did.’
He capitulated. ‘OK, you’d better come in.’ He led the way upstairs and unlocked a door on the landing. There was no hallway; they walked straight into his living room. A sofa, a dining table and four chairs, a stereo system with speakers the size of small fridges, and sports equipment stacked in the corner: a hockey stick; racquets for tennis, badminton and squash; a long lacrosse stick; and a surfboard. A framed England rugby jersey hung on the wall with an indecipherable signature. A pair of sweatpants had been tossed over one chair, and a line of trainers sat next to the door. But it was clean, and had none of the detritus of most of the young men she’d known. No beer cans or pizza boxes, no overflowing ashtrays or takeaway tinfoils. He flashed her a quick apologetic smile. ‘Sorry, it’s not very inviting, I know.’
‘It’s fine. You should see my place if I’m not expecting company. Or rather, you shouldn’t.’
