It was the ‘man to man’ that tipped the scales, as Conrad had probably known it would. Crispin squared his shoulders and flung back his head – at one level of her mind Alice noted the gesture as rather a good one – and then marched out, head high.
Alice, deeply grateful for Conrad’s tact, got into her outfit for the scene, checked her make-up and her hair, slipped on her shoes, and went out into the main part of the studio. The working lights had been quenched and the heavy spotlights were angled to shine directly on to the small set; they were bright and strong to depict the sunlight of a summer afternoon, and the working areas were swathed in darkness. For a moment Alice had a brief shutter-flash of déjà vu: a darting vision of the compound inside Auschwitz when searchlights had lit parts of the camp with just that harsh brilliance, and when it had been necessary to avoid the unblinking stare if you did not want to be caught…
The image vanished as quickly as it had come, but Alice glanced uneasily across to where Alraune was sitting. Would the spotlights and the surrounding darkness have sparked a similar flare of memory for him? No, surely he had been too young to remember it. She was about to go across to him, to say something light and frivolous, when she was beckoned across to a group of men standing near the door.
Clearly these were the visitors for whom those preparations had been made earlier, and equally clearly they wanted to meet the infamous Lucretia von Wolff. Bother, thought Alice crossly, now I’m a tourist attraction, but she began to pick her way across the lit set to the far side.
She had reached the edge of the set and was about to step into the dark area outside it, when the tallest of the men turned to face her. Alice stopped dead, half in and half out of the light, because the memories were swooping down again. The hut in Auschwitz, lit by the glow from an iron stove. The sofa in the corner of the room, the men watching her with furtive lechery, and the dreadful awareness of sexual excitement filling up the hut. And all the while a tall man standing behind the stove, so that the firelight turned his eyeglass to a burning disc of flame…
The man watching her walk across Studio Twelve was Leo Dreyer.
‘It wasn’t until a long time afterwards,’ said Alice, sipping her coffee, and looking at the absorbed faces of her listeners, ‘that I understood that Leo Dreyer was one of the financiers of the film.’
‘You knew him?’ Lucy could not think why this should surprise her.
‘I knew him in Auschwitz and also in Buchenwald,’ said Alice. ‘He was a vicious man with the greatest ability for hatred I ever encountered. He and I had a – what today you would call a “history”.’
‘Is that why he came to England?’ said Liam. ‘To find you?’
‘He didn’t come for me,’ said Alice. ‘He considered matters settled between us. Leo Dreyer came to England for Conrad.’
Alice was never able to remember shooting the scheduled scene that day and returning to her dressing-room afterwards. She had no idea what kind of performance she had given for the cameras or whether the scene might have to be reshot; her mind had been jerked back into the memories again, to the night when she had endured Leo Dreyer’s brutal rape – the hammer blows inside her body, on and on…
When the door was pushed quietly open, and he slipped into the room, she was not in the least surprised. If you try to touch me this time, I’ll shout rape, and see you gaoled, she thought.
But he was perfectly courteous; he was murmuring an apology for disturbing her, and saying something about wanting a few private moments with an old friend.
‘We were never friends, and I have no wish to be private with you,’ Alice said, glaring at him. ‘What do you want? Why are you here?’
‘I’m here entirely legitimately,’ said Dreyer, leaning back against the closed door and studying her. ‘I have a number of investments these days – finance is very rewarding, I find – and a few months ago I added Ashwood Studios to their number.’
‘You have invested in Ashwood?’