Legacy of War Page 15

  ‘Her George Medal, you mean. I was wondering, what did she do to get it?’

  ‘Manned an ack-ack gun on a sinking ship. The Luftwaffe were bombing the hell out of the ship, strafing it, God knows what. She stayed at her post, blasting away until the water was practically lapping around her ankles.’

  ‘Huh.’ Klammer gave an appreciative nod. ‘Brave woman.’

  ‘Absolutely, but that wasn’t why we were interested. It was what she did next.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Saffron Courtney had an uncle, Francis Courtney. He was the black sheep of the family, bitterly resented his brother Leon, Saffron’s father, for his wealth and success. Francis got his own back by getting in touch with the Abwehr and signing on the dotted line.’

  ‘He was a traitor?’

  ‘The worst kind. Luckily for us, it didn’t take long before Francis was blown. We were on to him. Difficult position for the Courtneys. They stood to have a family member exposed as a traitor. That sort of thing could have wrecked their business empire. Young Saffron took matters into her own hands.’

  The diplomat paused for dramatic effect. He took a long slow drag on his cigarette, stubbed it out, exhaled and then said, ‘Uncle Francis was shot dead – by his niece. The official line was self-defence. But that’s utter nonsense. Saffron Courtney shot him right between the eyes, cool as you like. She killed him to save her family’s reputation.’

  ‘Mein Gott . . .’ Klammer gasped. ‘Now I understand why she was such a valuable commodity.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else, too. In 1943, Miss Courtney was sent into the Low Countries to follow up reports that your chaps had compromised all SOE’s networks there. She established, beyond any doubt, that virtually every agent SOE sent into Holland or Belgium had been captured, and either executed or put back in the field as a double agent. She had to be extracted at very short notice—’

  ‘Because her information was so precious?’ Klammer asked.

  ‘No – because she’d bumped off an SS officer and was about to be arrested for his murder.’

  ‘Excuse my language, but she sounds like a bloodthirsty bitch.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with that assessment. But this time it really was self-defence. Apparently the SS chap had tried to rape her. She didn’t take kindly to it. Trust me, old boy, Saffron Courtney is not a woman one ever wants to cross.’

  ‘My God! Even our friends in Germany call me Schultz now!’ Konrad von Meerbach exploded, ripping off the headphones he wore when taking down the coded messages that were sent from the highest levels of the neo-Nazi apparatus in Germany and received on the powerful short-wave receiver/transmitter he kept in the basement beneath his home. ‘It is as if they’ve forgotten me – the real me.’

  ‘Hardly, my darling,’ Francesca said, handing him a cup of coffee. ‘They would not be calling you if they had.’

  Von Meerbach grunted non-committally, took out a notepad and began decrypting. The codes they used now were childishly simple, compared to the near-impenetrable sophistication of wartime communications. All the old encryption machines had long since been destroyed, besides which, there were no longer Allied listening stations capturing every dot and dash as it was sent.

  Half an hour later he was climbing the stairs back up to the house. Francesca was in the kitchen, preparing supper. She turned to greet him and was about to ask what the message said, when she saw the thunderous expression on her husband’s face. Silence was the only option when he was in that mood.

  Von Meerbach sat down at the kitchen table, took a second to compose himself and said, ‘My brother and the Courtney woman visited Schloss Meerbach and the Motor Works. They met with my mother and the Jew Solomons. There are rumours that they plan to sell everything. The castle, the factory . . . there will be nothing left of my legacy. All my work, my father’s, my grandfather’s . . . all gone. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing!’

  Francesca kept a bottle of schnapps in the kitchen, for those times when her husband’s behaviour towards her could not be borne without alcohol to dull the physical or emotional pain. She pulled it out of the larder, where she kept it tucked between bottles of vinegar and vegetable oil, poured out a glass and set it before her man.

  He grabbed the glass, downed it in one and then slammed it back on the table. Francesca refilled it. Still she had not said a word.

  ‘Apparently the two of them were nosing around the airfield.’ Konrad never used his brother’s name if he could possibly avoid it, nor Saffron’s, come to that, but Francesca knew who he meant. ‘They met some man called Posch. The name meant nothing to me but . . .’

  ‘Ferdi,’ Francesca said. ‘His name was Ferdi. He’d lost an arm in Russia, drank too much. But he was helpful enough.’ She paused as the enormity of what she was about to say hit her. ‘He loaded the plane when I left for the last time.’

  The red flush of rage drained from von Meerbach’s face to be replaced by chalk-white horror.

  ‘Then he might have been there . . .’ He shook his head, unable to finish.

  ‘They’re going to find us.’ Francesca looked around frantically, her eyes darting around the kitchen as though its walls were closing in on her as she wailed, ‘What are we going to do?’

  Von Meerbach was enough of a man to have risen from the table, taken his wife in his arms and told her not to worry. He would make everything all right. But for the next few days a single word echoed around his mind: How?

  A cornered animal has two basic choices: fight or flight. Von Meerbach was by nature an aggressor. He liked to take the fight to his enemy, but the days when he had the full resources of the SS at his beck and call were long gone. Nor could his old friends help him. Yes, they could gather intelligence on his behalf. They could even carry out the occasional small-scale beating or execution, close to home. But any attempt to kill his brother and sister-in-law would require the deployment of enough men to find them, keep them under surveillance and then eliminate them in potentially hostile circumstances.

  Von Meerbach’s decades-long hatred for the Courtney clan had begun with Leon, the man who had killed his father. He had even commissioned research into him, searching for any signs of weakness. The man lived in a private kingdom, defended by native warriors. If the traitor and his bitch retreated there, they would be virtually untouchable.

  Which left the ‘flight’ option. Well, it would not be the first time that Konrad and Francesca had moved from one bolthole to another. But that only provoked the inevitable follow-up: where next?

  This solitary house on the southern tip of Africa was as safe a hideaway as von Meerbach was likely to find. Moreover, he was a keen hunter, as his father before him had been. He knew that stillness is a hunted animal’s best friend. Movement is more likely to catch a predator’s eye. And a still, watchful, well-armed predator, who does not seek out their prey, but lets it come to them, can often be the deadliest of all.

  Von Meerbach imagined himself as a spider, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for the fly to land on his web, or the deadly snake who lies unseen by its prey, right up to the instant when its fangs sink deep into helpless flesh and inject their fatal poison. These images comforted von Meerbach, and enabled him to tell Francesca, with evident sincerity, ‘I have my plan. It will work. And we will win, my darling. We will win.’

  Now von Meerbach got to work, thankful that he and Francesca had at least taken a sufficient hoard of gold, dollars, bankers’ drafts, jewels and paintings with them on their flights from the dying Reich that money would never be any object.

  His immediate priority was their physical protection. A steel mesh fence, two metres high, was erected around their property and topped with razor wire. Within it stood a new gate, its posts reinforced to withstand anything short of a tank, that could only be opened by means of a code. A second exit from the property, undetectable to passers-by, was installed, to provide a getaway route by land. An
d a fast, ocean-going motor boat was purchased and tied up to his private jetty, so that if all else failed they could take to the sea.

  Von Meerbach now possessed the means of defence and of escape. If anyone asked, he told them he wasn’t letting any black man steal his property and rape his wife. Few people argued with that.

  Meanwhile, he instructed his men at the engineering works to reinforce the front bumpers and radiator of his car. He joked with them, ‘If I hit anyone, I want to know it’ll be them and not me that gets hurt.’

  Second, he looked to his local allies for their support. He contacted his government minister friend and passed on the information he had been given. Von Meerbach knew that the man had no love for the Courtneys. The response was immediate.

  ‘If that damned woman ever sets foot in this country, believe me, you will be the first to know.’

  Von Meerbach was relieved. Once again he could feel the comfort of having men of power on his side.

  Even so, his aggressive instincts were not so easily smothered. As much as he told himself to be patient and wait, another voice was telling him, ‘Do something!’

  It struck von Meerbach that if he could in some way upset his two enemies, get inside their heads and goad them into rash, precipitate action, well, then he would assert some measure of control over them. Then both their attack and his defence could be conducted on his terms.

  But what would it take to knock his enemies off balance? Von Meerbach was not in the habit of asking his wife’s advice, but on this occasion he made an exception.

  ‘You know the bitch,’ he said. ‘What are her weaknesses?’

  ‘The same as any other mother’s,’ Francesca replied. ‘Her children.’

  ‘You think I should kill them?’

  ‘Could you do that without being killed yourself? All the time we were at school she would go on and on about her home, how much land her father had, how devoted the Maasai warriors were to him. If she still lives on that estate, then her children are there also. Could you kill them and get out alive?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  The question was a trap. If Francesca answered, ‘Yes, you could,’ then von Meerbach would know that she was lying, and would punish her for it. If she said, ‘No, you couldn’t,’ then she would have doubted him and again, he would be obliged to chastise her for her disloyalty. Either way, the scrap of power he had ceded to her, by letting her express her view about what he should do, would be ripped away and she would be put back in her place.

  From the way Francesca looked at him, head high, eyes raised to his, exuding the haughty dignity that was her birthright as the precious daughter of a noble family, von Meerbach knew that she understood, and was daring him to do his worst. But then she surprised him, for her answer was neither of the obvious alternatives.

  ‘I think that you do not have to kill them. You simply have to let her know that you have the power to do so. You need to get inside her family estate, their kingdom, within striking distance of her children. Make her feel that nowhere is beyond your reach. Nowhere is safe. Then, believe me, your presence will be like a worm inside her brain, and the only way for her to make it go away will be to kill you before you kill them. If you want to provoke her, that is how to do it.’

  Von Meerbach considered what Francesca had said. He could see no fault in her reasoning. He might even act upon her suggestion. But that would come uncomfortably close to doing her bidding; it might set an unwelcome precedent. All the more reason to make his retribution even more severe.

  And so the game began . . .

  In the final months of the war, seeing very clearly that the Reich was doomed, Konrad von Meerbach had commissioned some of the Jewish prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp who were employed forging high-value British and American banknotes to create a number of false passports for Francesca and himself. He chose three nations he knew to harbour strong sympathies for the Nazi cause. For all three, the forgers produced two identities each for the von Meerbachs: one to get them in, and another if they had to leave in a hurry.

  Now von Meerbach took out one of those passports. It showed him with a moustache, whereas he was currently clean-shaven, but Konrad felt sure that his virility was sufficient to produce the necessary amount of facial hair in the time available.

  His plan now fully formed, he sent a radio message to Germany, explaining the sort of thing he had in mind, ending with a phrase he had picked up from his counterparts in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, during that period at the start of the war when Hitler and Stalin had been allies.

  ‘Find me a useful idiot.’

  Saffron and Gerhard spent three days in Athens exploring the city’s sights, waiting for word from Joshua Solomons. A decade earlier they had both been in the city within a month of one another: Saffron with the British forces mounting a futile attempt to defend Greece against German invasion, Gerhard as one of the invaders. Now they were together, having their photograph taken arm-in-arm in front of the Acropolis, just as they had done in pre-war days beneath the Eiffel Tower.

  One evening, as they were returning from the day’s exploring, Saffron found a week-old edition of The Times in a kiosk outside their hotel. She bathed, changed for dinner, then sat down to read the paper over a cocktail in the bar, occasionally passing interesting titbits of news on to Gerhard, who was engrossed in James Jones’s novel From Here to Eternity.

  ‘Oh look, there’s a story here about Kenya,’ she said.

  ‘What does it say?’ Gerhard asked, glancing up from his book.

  ‘Hang on,’ Saffron replied, scanning the paper. ‘I’ll just . . .’

  She stopped in her tracks, put the paper down. The blood had drained from her face. She was fighting the urge to scream.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

  Saffron swallowed and breathed deeply. A wave of maternal guilt swept over her. She said, ‘We need to send a telegram to Lusima right now, this minute. I have to know that Zander and Kika are safe.’

  ‘Of course they’re safe,’ Gerhard said, baffled by the sudden change in Saffron’s mood.

  ‘No, they aren’t,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t understand. Our babies aren’t safe at all.’

  Gerhard got up from his chair and crouched beside Saffron. Her shoulders were slumped and her head hung in an attitude of despair.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, stroking her face and pulling back the strands of hair that had fallen across her cheeks. Saffron turned her head and looked at Gerhard. Her expression, usually so fearless and self-confident, was filled with dread.

  ‘It’s the Mau Mau,’ she said, pushing the paper towards him. ‘They’ve started killing our children.’

  Tom Ruddock was a farmer who treated his Kikuyu workers well. His wife Annette was a doctor, who ran a dispensary near their property where local Africans could be prescribed medicines and receive basic everyday care. She was heavily pregnant with their second child, a sibling to their six-year-old son Jamie. The little boy was adored by the family’s servants. When he fell off his pony while learning to ride, badly spraining his ankle, the Ruddocks’ stable lad, Matu, picked him up and carried him back to the house so that Annette could bandage her boy, give him an aspirin and tuck him up in bed.

  Matu’s feelings for the Ruddocks were sincere. He loved that little boy. But he had sworn the oath. A short while after Jamie’s accident, Matu was spending a day off at a local drinking den that was popular with Kikuyu farmworkers when the menacing form of Wilson Gitiri appeared by his side.

  ‘General Kabaya has need of your services,’ he said. ‘The Ruddock family are marked for death. You will help us kill them. If you do not, if you break your oath, we will kill you first.’

  It was all Matu could do to control his bowels in the face of such a terrifying presence.

  ‘Please, sir, I beg you . . . do not kill them. Bwana Tom is a kind man. Memsahib Annette gives the people good medicine to keep us well. And they have a l
ittle boy who has never hurt anyone.’

  Gitiri said nothing.

  Desperately, Matu tried to offer up alternative sacrifices. ‘There are white people round here who deserve to die, many of them. I will lead you to them. Bwana Butcher beats his people all the time. Bwana Henderson takes everything his people try to grow, all of it, so that they have to pay him for every scrap of food. Bwana Jones—’

  ‘Silence,’ Gitiri growled.

  Matu went from desperate jabbering to total silence as instantly as a switched-off radio.

  ‘Your words only condemn your masters even more,’ Gitiri said. ‘It is because they are good that they must die. Thus the whites will know that none of them are safe, no matter how they act towards us. And men like you will learn that no white man, or woman, or child can ever be loved. They are all our enemies and our oppressors. We cannot be free until there is no white skin in our land.’

  Matu did as he was told. He provided Gitiri with detailed descriptions of the Ruddocks’ farm, both the land and the farmhouse itself, and also provided the family’s typical daily schedule.

  Thanks to the help Matu gave him, and the terrible power of the oath, which made Kikuyu blind and deaf to Mau Mau activities and dumb when asked to give evidence, Kabaya was able to lead thirty men up to the Ruddocks’ farmhouse early one evening. They hid among nearby trees and undergrowth and waited for Tom and Annette to come outside for their regular evening stroll in the garden.

  When the couple appeared, Kabaya and his men charged. They were not carrying guns on this mission. There was no need. They knew that the Ruddocks were not armed. Pangas were more than sufficient.

  The Ruddocks saw the intruders as they emerged from their hiding places. They turned and ran for the shelter of their house. But Annette was slowed by her condition and Tom had no thought of leaving her behind.

  The Mau Mau caught them on the verandah. The panga blades glinted in shades of orange and gold as their steel was caught by the last rays of the setting sun. Then they were drenched in crimson and scarlet as they cut into the Ruddocks’ limbs and torsos. The couple were butchered, dismembered. Annette’s baby was cut from her womb, killed and retained for further use. So were Tom’s genitalia. Oathing ceremonies had descended to new levels of depravity and the eating of European flesh was one part of the ritual.