‘Yes. Probably they tried to explain it to us, but none of us had much English. And to have grasped medical terms—’ He leaned forward, his thin graceful hands clasped together so tightly the knuckles showed white. ‘I knew – at least, I thought then – that part of the twins’ motive was to punish that woman,’ he said. ‘But I also thought there was more to it than that.’ He looked from one to the other of his listeners, as if to be sure they wanted him to continue. Michael said, ‘Please go on,’ and Nell nodded.
‘When we were smuggled out to this country,’ said Leo, ‘we were surrounded by an atmosphere of what I can only describe as extreme fear. We had spent the previous two years – perhaps longer than that – in the midst of terror and secrecy. Most of us hadn’t really known any other world. And the one thing we all knew about was what the adults called the ovens. We had heard – half heard – our parents whispering – and we knew fragments of the stories. We knew people had vanished into the ovens – almost every family we knew had a tragedy, a loss.’ His eyes narrowed in memory. ‘It’s difficult to convey to you now the absolute menace those words – the Ovens – held,’ he said. ‘For the children it was tangled up with the grisly old fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel, and the gingerbread house with the oven. Ogres who would grind men’s bones to make bread. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood what our parents had really feared.’
‘Not ovens at all,’ said Michael, softly, almost as if he was afraid to say the words too loudly. ‘The gas chambers.’
‘Yes. They sent us away to save us,’ said Leo. ‘It wasn’t until much later that I understood that. But in those years – 1941, 1942 – the Nazis were combing the towns and the villages for our people. The German High Command had given orders for what they called the “resettling of Jews in the East”. That was a euphemism, of course. What they were doing was interning hundreds of thousands of Jews in labour camps, and then exterminating most of them. So when we saw the old furnace in Deadlight Hall …’ He made a brief, expressive gesture with one hand. ‘We equated it with the nightmares from our home,’ he said.
‘I understand that,’ said Nell, torn with pity for the small boy he had been.
‘Go on,’ said Michael.
‘Sophie and Susannah thought someone was watching the house where they had been placed. Battersby, I think the name of the family was – odd how things like that come back to you, isn’t it? And on that night in Deadlight Hall, they thought they were going to be dragged into the ovens. When I saw – when I thought I saw them with that nursing sister, I assumed they were acting in self-defence. But in light of that journal,’ he said, ‘I’m no longer sure if what I saw was real.’
‘What happened to the twins?’ asked Nell. ‘To Sophie and Susannah?’
‘I never knew. They simply vanished that night. I suppose I could have tried to find out what happened, but I was very young, and I was in a foreign country with strangers.’
‘Did you ever return to your home?’
‘No. But I heard – at second or third hand – that the Nazis did march in,’ he said. ‘So I don’t think there’s much doubt about what happened to my family and the people I knew there.’ He said this with such humility and such acceptance that Nell’s heart twisted with pity.
‘Then, when I was eleven,’ he said, ‘I was taken to the Hall by Simeon Hurst, and I saw the twins again. I knew with my head and my brain that it wasn’t the real Sophie and Susannah I was seeing – of course I did, it was five years after they vanished – but my emotions kept telling me otherwise. Perhaps I wanted them to be still there.’ A pause. ‘And on that day I saw it all happen again,’ he said. ‘Only this time it was Simeon Hurst they killed. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t.’ Again there was the quick expressive gesture with his hands. ‘It sounds like the wildest flight of fantasy,’ he said, ‘but—’
‘You thought you were seeing the murder of the nursing sister replayed?’
‘Yes. I found I could believe that the … the hatred and the terror that Sophie and Susannah had felt that night had remained inside that house.’