Scholz listened gravely, taking pinches of tobacco and pressing each gently into the pipe with his thumb, then sucking noisily to make sure it wasn't too tight. "I think I remember seeing her. She got it in the back of the neck. With neck wounds you can't tell, it could be nothing or everything. Her husband, Rainer, he wasn't hit but he went in with them. He spoke the best English. Then he came back the next day – I think it was the next day – and told us who'd died. Then hecame again a couple of days after and took the baby. "
"He just took it away?" Maxim was surprised. "It was only five months, wasn't it?"
Scholz lit his pipe and puffed quickly. "What else should he do? We couldn't look after it forever. He said he was going off to find his sister. It wasn't easy, travelling, in those days, but it wasn't as if he belonged here anyway."
"Who arranged things like the death certificates?"
Brenner said: "How should we remember who arranged them? I was in bed the whole week. You may say the Americans were wonderful with their ambulances but they didn't pay for the dairy and half the animals were dead already or had to be slaughtered. It was an American bomber. But the English would have been worse."
"It was Rainerwho did that," Scholz said unperturbed, as if Brenner had never spoken. "I remember him going about the village, collecting the details, the birth certificates and things. He was good with forms, dealing with the bureaucrats. "
"He was a scholar," Brenner said, banging his hand on the stick again.
"And you never saw him after that?"
"Why should we?" Brenner wanted to know. "He wasn't one of the village."
Scholz was wearing that wise, reflective look that pipe-smokers get or act on the few occasions their pipes are working well. "There was somebody else asking about him, or her. A few weeks ago. "
"I didn't meet them. " Brenner sounded offended.
"Neither did 1.1 forget who told me; probably somebody in town. Would you know who it was?"
Maxim tried for an expression of indifference – tried desperately. Of course Mrs Howard must have been asking around. You know, the one whose driving-licence picture was in the paper, she'd been shot, wasn't she asking about the Schickerts? And now there's this Englishman asking about them: will you ring the police or shall I?
He should have thought of that risk; he wondered if Simshad thought of it.
"I haven't heard of anybody," he said casually, "but if thelawyers asked me they might have asked somebody else before… You said a few weeks ago?"
"About a month, I think it was."
"I've got to get back to town," Maxim said, "but can I get you another drink?"
Brenner was willing; Scholz had to go into town himself. Maxim waited nervously while the woman brought one more Dunkeland Korn. Trying to change the subject, he asked: "And nobody did anything about the church? I mean rebuild it."
"It's still church land," Scholz said. "Nobody's stopping them building it up. But the pastor only came for one service every two weeks even then, in the war."
"It wasn't much good as a sanctuary, either," Brenner said with an odd cackle.
"It was a Sunday," Scholz explained. "April 15. The Bomber came down in the middle of morning service."
Outside, the sun lashed him across the forehead with a warning of another headache to come, and he wished he hadn't had a drink with lunch at Paderborn. No wonder plainclothes coppers ended up able to conduct surveillances from behind the cover of their own stomachs.
The easiest way to turn the car was to drive on up to the hardstand by the church, and as he swung about he realised it was in fact the old foundations of small cottages, completely gone with The Bomber. He, paused, working out that a shallow dent in the pasture was the remnant of a huge crater, and then got out to take another look at the marble. Seventeen names. Seven or eight had died in hospital, yes, and some of those would have lingered for a day or two; fair enough or evenblondgenug, as the Army usually put it. But the death certificates had shown thirteen people dying in Dornhausen itself. Thirteen plus seven or eight…
The woman came out of the inn and saw him, hesitated, then walked up. He waited.
"Did they tell you what you wanted to know?" she asked.
"I think so. Did you know Frau Schickert?"
"Yes. I was young at the time, a little girl. Sometimes I'd goin and she'd let me give the baby his bottle." A smile rippled across her wrinkled face and was gone. "A hussy from the city who peroxided her hair to look like a good Aryan."
"Did she?"
"I suppose so. It was something my mother said. To me, she just seemed kind. But sad. "
"What about?"
"Nobody was happy, that winter. The Americans were coming. I thought that must be a good thing. I didn't understand."
"Were you here when The Bomber came down?"
"Down in the cellar, getting some vegetables for lunch. The whole earth wentschunk and all the dust and bits fell out of the ceiling. I thought I was going to be buried. "
"Did you see her?-after she was hurt?"
She folded her arms and frowned briefly at the memory. "There was blood all over her shoulders. He -Herr Schick-ert – was holding a towel to her neck. Why do you want to know?"
"Some lawyer wanted to know where she was buried. I don't know why. But now I've got a photograph…"
She gave a little snort of laughter. "She isn't buried here. "
Maxim looked from her to the marble and back. "Not? -not there?"
"Not all the ones named are buried here, and some are here who aren't named. It's just a memorial, really."
"Some are buried here who aren't named?"
"Three Belgians, labourers. They were in the cottages." She nodded at the hardstand. "By the time they put this up, nobody could remember their names, and they didn't belong here, of course."
Death, the great leveller. Except in Dornhausen. But it explained the numbers that didn't add up – though not why Brigitte Schickertwas shown on her-certificate as having diedm Dornhausen when everybody seemed to know she had been taken to hospital.
"Do you know where sheis buried?"
"No. It isn't in the Evangelical cemetery, with the others who died in hospital. None of them came back, you see: the Americans couldn't spare the trucks and the farms weren't allowed to use their petrol for anything but getting food to market. Later, months later when I was taken into town for the first time since The Bomber, I wanted to put some flowers on her grave. I couldn't find it. Nobody seemed to know. They just said she didn't belong here really. "
For strangers, death in Dornhausen seemed to be oblivion of a peculiarly total sort.
Chapter 21
He had half an hour left before meeting Sims, so he took a cup of coffee at thecaféwhere Mrs Howard had set up her last rendezvous, then walked her route along the great Gradierwerkin the park outside. He had never seen it or anything like it before: a solid wall of blackthorn twigs a good forty feet high, smeared in long rusty streaks by the gypsum and salt in the trickling water that had changed the wood into coral branches. The spa season was at its height and the park was full of elderly couples strolling or filling the benches, thecafétables and the chairs in front of the bandstand and staring down at their paunches from grey faces. It made Maxim feel not just young but uncomfortably young, and to walk at his usual pace would have been hooliganism. But the trimmed grass, the bright flowerbeds and the constant whisper of water from the wall and the many fountains gave, the park a sedate gaiety – and made it a very odd place to get shot. Two murders must have been the talk of the sanatorium for… well, it still would be. He began to feel too conspicuous and walked without pausing through the archway where Hochhauserand Mrs Howard had died.