‘And – my mother?’
Alice hesitated for much longer this time. ‘Mariana was a different pair of shoes entirely,’ she said. ‘She was only three at the time of the murders, and she certainly wouldn’t have understood. So we made a plan, Deborah and Ilena and I, that Ilena would take all three children – Deb, Mariana and Alraune – to Poland to stay with her family for a time. Later, we were going to explain it all to Mariana – when we thought she was old enough.’
‘But you never did,’ said Lucy.
‘No. Mariana was never like Deborah. She grew up to be frivolous, a chatterbox. And,’ said Alice, ‘she couldn’t have understood, as Deb could, the – the things Alraune had known in Auschwitz. Deb made allowances for Alraune; Mariana could never have done. I was trying to protect all three of them, you see. And Deb insisted that what I had done at Ashwood – taking the rap for the two murders – mustn’t be wasted. At one time we had a plan that I would emerge as Lucretia’s elder sister. It was not so wild an idea as it might sound; people were still turning up after years inside the concentration camps. I thought I might be able to step back into the lives of the children.’
‘Why couldn’t you?’ said Lucy.
‘For one thing I had under-estimated the press interest. They were on to every scrap of information. They talked to neighbours, Deborah’s schoolfriends, people at Ilena’s hospital. They dug up every shred of information about Lucretia they could find. Today there’s the cult of the celebrity and a huge industry devoted to it, but believe me, for months on end my family had the most relentless press intrusion imaginable. For a time I was afraid they would discover the truth, but they didn’t.’ She looked at them all. ‘And so everyone believed I was a murderess,’ she said softly. ‘Perhaps also that I was mad. But certainly they all believed I had killed two men and then myself rather than face the consequences. That was the verdict.’
‘Two men?’ said Liam. ‘Conrad was the second victim, wasn’t he? It was Conrad you heard tapping on the wall?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and an infinite sadness showed in her eyes for a moment. ‘Later I knew that nothing I could have done would have saved him. He died from loss of blood and shock and Ilena promised me that it would have been very quick.’
‘And so,’ said Liam, ‘you got away with the illusion.’
‘Yes. We couldn’t have done it today, of course, with all the forensic investigations that go on, and the computer-linked emergency services and so on. But things were much less formal then, and Ashwood was a small village that hadn’t progressed much since the 1930s. The police had three bodies – all of them well-known people, all of them dead in bizarre circumstances, and they struggled to cope. The inquest decided that I had committed both murders, of course. It didn’t occur to anyone that there could have been two separate murderers inside Ashwood on the same day.’
‘But surely,’ said Francesca, ‘if Crispin had killed Conrad—? Didn’t you want to do something about that? To bring him to justice?’
‘Until Edmund told his story earlier today,’ said Alice, ‘and Michael told me about it, I didn’t know Crispin had killed Conrad. It simply didn’t occur to me that Crispin could have been capable of murder – he was just a rather charming, rather immature boy. Na?ve. A bit petulant on that last day. Until today I always thought Leo Dreyer had killed Conrad.’