‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Ilena, and whisked from the room.
An illusion, Alice’s mind was saying. You’re going to create an illusion, and part of that illusion is that you turned a little crazy at being confronted with Leo Dreyer – the man who condemned you to four years of living hell, who arranged that mass rape. That’s enough to send anyone temporarily mad, surely.
There was an old property chair in the corner: an elaborate thing – high-backed and ornate, with a glossy green satin covering. Alice pulled it forward and, setting her teeth, hooked her hands under Leo Dreyer’s arms and half-dragged, half carried him to the chair. It was more difficult than she had expected to get him up on to the chair and prop him in a sitting position, but eventually she managed it. His head lolled to one side, and blood was still oozing from his eyes, so that Alice had to quench a spasm of revulsion. Don’t think about what you’re doing, just get on with it. She glanced at her wristwatch and saw with panic that six of the fifteen minutes had already ticked away.
Working swiftly, she lit two candles from the emergency box kept for power-cuts, and when the wax had softened a little she set them on the mirror-shelf, so that they were on each side of the chair. The tiny flames burned up, reflecting in the mirror and casting eerie shadows so that for a moment Dreyer’s dead face had life and movement. Dreadful. But it added the final touch of Grand Guignol, and when people broke in they would see Leo Dreyer seated upright in the chair, candles positioned as if for a religious ritual, his eyes torn out. And the baroness sprawled at his feet, the evidence of her suicide clear for them all to see.
There was another thing they would see, if they had the knowledge or the memories: the reproduction of the closing scene from an old film that had flickered shockingly and darkly across the silver screen all those years ago…A film that had made Lucretia von Wolff famous.
Alraune, catlike and soulless, tearing out the eyes of a man she hated, and then arranging his body in a macabre sacrificial pose.
There were eight minutes left. She had better concentrate on her own death. She would have preferred to use fake blood – there was probably some in the wardrobe room next door, but there was no time to get it and she dare not be seen. There were, however, two bottles of nail varnish in her make-up drawer, both of them the deep blood-red that were the baroness’s trademark. Once out of the bottle the stuff would dry a bit too quickly and the smell would be dangerously distinctive, but the room already stank overpoweringly of Dreyer’s blood and there was an acrid tang from the candles as well. She unscrewed the top of each bottle and put them ready.
Six minutes left. She could hear Ilena’s voice now, telling people she was worried; Ilena’s voice was strident, but it was tinged with panic. Exactly right.
A quarrel, Ilena was saying. A dreadful quarrel between the baroness and Herr Dreyer – no, Ilena did not know the details. But they had locked the door, and certainly Herr Dreyer had been a camp commandant at Auschwitz, and there would be enmity between the two as a result.
Good! thought Alice. And perfectly true. She looked quickly round the room. Was there anything else to be done? Yes. The signs of a fight, of a fierce quarrel. She flung a table lamp hard against the long glass, shattering it, and breaking most of the smaller bulb-lights around its edges, which instantly made the room darker. What else? She swept brushes, make-up boxes – everything – to the ground, and for good measure overturned a small side table. From beyond the door, Ilena let out a screech.
‘We must stop them!’ shrieked Ilena. ‘They are fighting – they will kill each other—’
People were gathering outside the door; someone was calling for a key, but someone else was saying, Oh, leave them to it; von Wolff’s famous for her tantrums.