She threw the bag into the trees at the edge of the barley field, a few yards from the grave. If everything went according to plan, the badly decomposed and mutilated body would be found in a few months, along with the handbag. The police would believe the dead woman to be Christa Kunst, a Dutch tourist who entered the country in October 1938 and whose holiday came to an unfortunate and violent end.
Before leaving, she took a last look at the grave. She felt a pang of sadness for Beatrice Pymm. In death she had been robbed of her face and her name.
Something else: the killer had just lost her own identity. For six months she had lived in Holland, for Dutch was one of her languages. She had carefully constructed a past, voted in a local Amsterdam election, even permitted herself a young lover, a boy of nineteen with a huge appetite and a willingness to learn new things. Now Christa Kunst lay in a shallow grave on the edge of an English barley field.
The killer would assume a new identity in the morning.
But tonight she was no one.
She refueled the van and drove for twenty minutes. The village of Alderton, like Beatrice Pymm, had been carefully chosen--a place where a van burning at the roadside in the middle of the night would not be noticed immediately.
She pulled the motorbike out of the van along a heavy plank of wood, difficult work even for a strong man. She struggled with the bike and gave up when it was three feet from the road. It crashed down with a loud bang, the one mistake she had made all night.
She lifted the bike and rolled it, engine dead, fifty yards down the road. Then she returned to the van. One of the jerry cans still contained some petrol. She doused the inside of the van, dumping most of the fuel on Beatrice Pymm's blood-soaked clothing.
By the time the van went up in a fireball she had kicked the bike into life. She watched the van burn for a few seconds, the orange light dancing on the barren field and the line of trees beyond.
Then she turned the bike south and headed for London.
2
OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK: AUGUST 1939
Dorothy Lauterbach considered her stately fieldstone mansion the most beautiful on the North Shore. Most of her friends agreed, because she was richer and they wanted invitations to the two parties the Lauterbachs threw each summer--a raucous, drunken affair in June and a more reflective occasion in late August, when the summer season ground to a melancholy conclusion.
The back of the house looked out over the Sound. There was a pleasant beach of white sand brought by truck from Massachusetts. From the beach a well-fertilized lawn raced toward the back of the house, pausing now and again to skirt the exquisite gardens, the red clay tennis court, the royal blue swimming pool.
The servants had risen early to prepare for the family's well-deserved day of inactivity, erecting a croquet set and a badminton net that would never be touched, removing the canvas cover from a wooden motorboat that would never be untied from the dock. Once a servant courageously pointed out to Mrs. Lauterbach the folly of this daily ritual. Mrs. Lauterbach had snapped at him, and the practice was never again questioned. The toys were raised each and every morning, only to stand with the sadness of Christmas decorations in May until they were ceremoniously removed at sundown and put away for the night.
The bottom floor of the house sprawled along the water from sunroom to sitting room, to dining room, and finally to the Florida room, though none of the other Lauterbachs understood why Dorothy insisted on calling it a Florida room when the summer sun on the North Shore could be just as warm.
The house had been purchased thirty years earlier when the young Lauterbachs assumed they would produce a small army of offspring. Instead they had just two daughters who didn't care much for each other's company--Margaret, a beautiful and immensely popular socialite, and Jane. And so the house became a peaceful place of warm sunshine and soft colors, where most of the noise was made by white curtains snapping in watery breezes and Dorothy Lauterbach's restless pursuit of perfection in all things.
On that morning--the morning after the Lauterbachs' final party--the curtains hung still and straight in the open windows, waiting for a breeze that would never come. The sun blazed and a shimmering haze hung over the bay. The air was itchy and thick.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Margaret Lauterbach Jordan pulled off her nightgown and sat in front of her dressing table. She quickly brushed her hair. It was ash blond, streaked by the sun and unfashionably short. But it was comfortable and easy to manage. Besides, she liked the way it framed her face and showed off the long graceful line of her neck.