As the man – Alice thought it was the cameraman who had given Alraune a fruit drink – lifted her, someone said, ‘But what on earth happened here?’
‘I do not have time to speculate,’ said Ilena sharply. ‘But surely it is clear. The baroness killed a man who tortured her inside Auschwitz. I was in Auschwitz with her, and I know that for the truth. And then she tried to kill herself from remorse.’
‘We gave it out that I had died on the way to the hospital,’ said Alice to the listeners. ‘We walked an amazingly dangerous tightrope over the formalities, of course, but we had got over the first difficulty, which was to get away from Ashwood, and out of reach of the police.’
‘They would have insisted that the crime scene remained exactly as it was,’ said Liam.
‘Yes. And then the illusion would have been ruined, of course. As it was, we left Dreyer’s body in position for the police, and later Ilena issued a death certificate for me from her own hospital. She took appalling risks and she would have been struck off if any of it had ever come out, but it never did.’
‘But the police would need to see a body, wouldn’t they?’ asked Francesca.
‘Yes, but that was only another formality. They accepted Ilena’s death certificate unquestioningly. And Ilena simply gave me a hefty dose of veronal – that’s a sleeping drug that was fashionable in those days. Not a fatal amount, but enough to knock me out. The surgeon came in, took a cursory look, and bureaucracy was satisfied. Afterwards I got in a wheelchair and Ilena trundled it out of the hospital, and I drank several gallons of black coffee straight off to get rid of the veronal.’
‘What about a post-mortem? An inquest?’ said Lucy.
‘There never was a post-mortem. Ilena took over again – she could be astonishingly autocratic, and she staged a kind of Eastern European hysteria, and said after all I had been through in the camps, no one should touch my body except herself. She was a qualified doctor and quite well thought of, and the Ashwood police already had more than they could cope with. So they were more than happy to let her go ahead with that part of things. She provided a false report for the coroner – death from loss of blood was given as the cause of death. I forget the technical medical terms used.’
‘What about the funeral?’ asked Lucy.
‘Once the coroner released the body for burial, it was easy enough to say that the funeral was private – that it had “taken place at the baroness’s home”. No one knew where the baroness had come from – it might have been anywhere in the world. I spent those days in a small hotel just outside Ashwood. Without make-up and with a headscarf on if I went out, no one recognized me. “Alice Wilson” was coming back, you see. Quite soon, my hair dye grew out, and I was—’ A smile. ‘I was an insignificant grey-haired lady approaching middle age.’
Lucy had been listening intently to all this, but when Alice paused, she said, ‘Alice—’
‘Lucy?’
‘I know you’re probably absolutely exhausted by all this—’
‘Yes, but it’s a satisfying tiredness. Cleansing. I should think it’s how Catholics feel after confessing and being absolved. So if you’ve got any questions, ask away.’
‘Deborah knew the truth, didn’t she?’ said Lucy. ‘She knew you hadn’t died?’
Alice looked at Lucy thoughtfully. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, for one thing,’ said Lucy, hoping she was not stepping over any lines, ‘there were a number of occasions when Deb seemed to be on the brink of telling me something about the family. For another, I don’t believe you’d have let her go on thinking you were dead.’
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Alice. ‘Deborah did know. She was intelligent and she was independent – I had been in the concentration camps for six years, remember, and Deborah had had to develop self-reliance during those years. Ilena brought her out to where I was staying, and I told her everything.’ She smiled. ‘She was so good about it all. Dearest Deb.’