Legacy of War Read online

  Gerhard and Saffron outlined everything that they had discovered, while Joshua listened carefully, stopping them from time to time to clarify particular points. When they had finished he said, ‘My father has agreed to make discreet inquiries about Countess von Meerbach’s possible presence in Switzerland at the end of the war. Now we need to know whether Konrad von Meerbach had any connections with Nazi sympathisers in Spain or Portugal. Did he mention anything of that kind to you, Gerhard?’

  ‘No, but he never trusted me enough to share information like that. The only reason he would offer confidences was either as a boast or a threat, or both.’

  ‘How about your mother?’

  ‘The same – he despised her. He would only ever want to hurt her.’

  ‘In that case, he might just have said something to her, to cause her pain, that gave some kind of clue away. People forget themselves when they’re attacking another person. They’re so busy thinking about their desire to hurt, they get careless.’

  ‘Very true,’ Gerhard agreed. ‘I’ll send my mother a telegram to ask her.’

  Joshua grimaced. ‘That could be risky—’

  ‘Do you seriously think that the telegram operators are all Nazi sympathisers?’

  ‘It’s possible. Unlikely, but—’

  ‘I’ll phone her, then.’

  ‘You’ll have to book a call first,’ Saffron said. ‘International calls to and from Egypt are a nightmare. Not enough lines.’

  ‘In that case, let us reconvene in twenty-four hours,’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Same procedure as this evening,’ Saffron said. ‘But I’ll select a different café for the pick-up.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Excellent. Now, let’s have something to eat. Grandma’s cook is far too good to let his work go to waste.’

  Quentin De Lancey received the best news of his life one evening in the bar of the Muthaiga Hotel. A civil servant from Government House called Ronnie McLaurin had taken the glass of gin and tonic that De Lancey had just bought him, given a quick little nod of thanks, and taken a hefty swig.

  ‘Well?’ De Lancey asked, once the drink had been swallowed.

  ‘Good news, old boy,’ McLaurin said, reaching inside his jacket for his cigarette case.

  He was a thin stick of a man, his skin tanned tobacco-brown by thirty years of service in various tropical outposts of empire, his body as tough and dessicated as a stick of biltong. While De Lancey did his best to restrain the rising tide of impatience coursing through his body, McLaurin took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, then patted his various jacket and trouser pockets, searching for his lighter.

  ‘Here,’ said De Lancey. ‘Let me.’

  He struck his own lighter under McLaurin’s cigarette. McLaurin inhaled and then, finally, he said, ‘The job’s yours, old boy. Absolutely in the bag. But don’t say a dicky-bird until it’s confirmed, there’s a good man.’

  ‘Quite understood . . . my lips are sealed. Not a dicky-bird to anyone.’

  McLaurin nodded, paused for a moment as he exhaled a long, contemplative stream of smoke and then said, ‘D’you mind if I ask you a question? Nothing remotely official, you understand, purely my own curiosity.’

  De Lancey was feeling a rare sense of bonhomie. ‘Not at all,’ he said, agreeably. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Well . . .’ McLaurin was wondering how best to phrase it, for De Lancey was considerably larger than him and he did not wish to anger him. ‘The thing is . . . Well, I’ve been running the recruitment drive for officer level entries into the Special Constabulary, and sundry other new units, for the past few months. And we’ve had no shortage of chaps who want to command constabulary units. They’re all tremendously excited by the idea of running round the bush, gun in hand, taking potshots at rebellious Kukes.’

  ‘Not my thing, running around,’ said De Lancey, dryly.

  ‘No, quite so . . . absolutely.’ McLaurin seemed unsure whether De Lancey was making a joke at his own, very overweight expense, for the tone of his voice had actually conveyed more of an air of menace than amusement. ‘But in any event,’ he went on, ‘comparable posts in the screening centres have been much harder to fill. Everyone can see the very real need to round up any Kikuyu who may have terrorist sympathies and establish whether or not they pose a danger to public safety.’

  ‘They all do, you mark my words.’

  ‘Well, yes, quite possibly, but the thing is, it’s much harder finding chaps who are willing to bear the burden of interrogating endless insolent natives. But it’s essential to find out where their loyalty lies, and work out which we should stick in an internment camp, and which we can safely send back home. So I’m both tremendously grateful to you for taking up that burden, but also curious to know why you’d want to do it.’

  ‘Well, let me see . . .’ said De Lancey. ‘Part of it, naturally, is a matter of one’s patriotic sense of duty. We must all do our bit in the defence of the Empire.’

  ‘Oh yes, quite so.’

  ‘But also it’s a matter of one’s natural aptitudes. I’m no Dead-Eye Dick with a rifle, and I’ve never known the first thing about bushcraft. But I flatter myself that I do know the black man.’

  Entirely indifferent to the presence of the native barman, standing barely three feet away and able to hear every word he was saying, De Lancey added, ‘And I dare say he knows me. We have something in common, you see. We’re not sentimental. Blacks aren’t frightened of inflicting or receiving harsh punishment, and nor am I.

  ‘The Kukes won’t dare lie to me, because they’ll know I’ll thrash the skin from their bones if they play dumb, or tell lies. Believe you me, McLaurin, I may not be much use fighting Johnny Mau Mau in the field. But in the interrogation chamber, I will be in my element.’

  ‘I very much hope that proves to be the case,’ McLaurin said. ‘And if you can get results, believe me, your efforts will not go unnoticed at Government House.’

  De Lancey could not believe his luck. He was about to be paid to bully and abuse people who could not strike back.

  Then another benefit of his new position struck him. His wife was always whining at him with one complaint or another. One of her favourite moans, year after year, was that they were never invited to the annual garden party that the governor held for prominent members of Kenya’s white community.

  I’ll have a word with McLaurin, De Lancey thought. See if he can get me an invitation. Might buy me a moment’s peace.

  He glowed with smug satisfaction at his good fortune, and there was more to come.

  Just a few nights after his conversation with McLaurin, De Lancey was back at the Muthaiga, when he was approached at the bar by an Austrian businessman called Innerhofer, who said he was in town to buy Kenyan tobacco, for export back to his homeland. He named some mutual acquaintances, said they had spoken highly of De Lancey and asked him if he could do a small favour for ‘some friends of mine back home’. It was little more than babysitting, but he would be well rewarded for his time, and if all went well, there could more, equally light, but remunerative jobs to follow.

  De Lancey was happy to oblige, which was why he was standing in the arrivals area of the Nairobi Aerodrome, in his Special Constabulary uniform, holding a piece of white cardboard on which the name ‘PIETERS’ was written in black capital letters.

  A man emerged from the customs check, wearing a lightweight grey suit and a black snap-brim fedora hat. He was taller than De Lancey, moustachioed, and although not so obviously overweight, still very heavily built. He took off his hat to wipe his perspiring forehead to reveal a head of bright ginger hair, lightly salted with grey.

  The man caught sight of De Lancey’s sign, put his hat back on and walked towards him with a strong, determined stride.

  ‘De Lancey?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ De Lancey said, trying to sound equally assertive, but failing. With the bully’s feral instinct for power and weakness, he knew at once that
Schultz was not a man to be trifled with.

  ‘I’ve arranged everything for tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I trust it will be to your satisfaction.’

  Pieters gave a wordless grunt that signalled that he had heard what De Lancey had said, but was waiting to be convinced.

  ‘Take me to my hotel.’

  ‘Absolutely, Mr . . .’ De Lancey said. ‘Please . . . follow me.’

  Twenty-four hours after his first visit to the Courtney mansion in Cairo, Joshua came back again. This time, Saffron suggested that they should take their drinks and walk down the garden to the banks of the Nile. It was a hot, still night and the full moon reflected off the drowsy waters of the great river. A pleasure boat went steaming by.

  ‘We must go on a dinner cruise before we leave,’ Saffron said, taking Gerhard’s arm.

  Aboard the boat, couples were dining beneath an awning, lit by strings of glowing light, while a jazz band played an old Cole Porter song.

  ‘Aah . . . Anything Goes,’ Saffron sighed, quietly singing along to the music and thinking back to all the times she’d danced to that tune at debutante balls before the war, and later in cellar nightclubs in London, while bombers flew overhead.

  ‘Did you manage to speak to your mother, Gerhard?’ Joshua asked, impatient to get on with their business.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘She told me that my brother visited Portugal in 1942. It was either March or April. She couldn’t remember the exact month, but she did recall Konrad being pleased with himself for spending several days in Lisbon, where the weather was sunny and warm, while it was still chilly for her at home. It was even colder for me on the Russian Front, of course. Konrad made quite a point of that.’

  ‘Did he tell her what he was doing in Lisbon?’

  ‘Not exactly . . . Being Konrad, he couldn’t resist telling my mother that he had gone on Himmler’s personal orders. It was some kind of an official visit, on behalf of the Reich. But Konrad wouldn’t say exactly what the purpose was. He said it was all top secret—’

  ‘Which would have made him feel even more superior,’ Joshua pointed out.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is useful information. There has been a thriving Jewish community in Lisbon for well over a century. And more of us fled there during the war. Of course, Portugal was neutral, so the Reich had a presence there, too, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘I certainly do,’ Saffron said. ‘I was interrogated by them.’

  Both men looked at her quizzically.

  ‘That was how I got into Occupied Europe. I had references from Nazi sympathisers in South Africa, recommending me to their counterparts in Holland and Belgium. I took those references to the Reich consulate in Lisbon, and they gave me the travel permits I needed to get from there to the Low Countries.’

  ‘Hold on.’ Joshua raised a hand. ‘Talk me through that. Tell me how you put that chain together – I presume you must have sailed to South Africa from England.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Saffron told the full story of how she became Marlize Marais, the fascist daughter of an embittered father, who had blamed the collapse of his business on grasping Jewish bankers. She recounted how Marlize had wormed her way into the Ossewa Brandwag, the organisation that was the fascist heart of Afrikaner politics. She described the night she came within a whisker of being unmasked before she had even left South Africa for Europe. Having landed in Lisbon, she talked her way past the German Deputy Consul General.

  ‘He wasn’t a consular official, of course,’ Saffron said. ‘I could see at once that he was a secret intelligence officer of some kind.’

  ‘How fortunate that he could not see the same about you,’ Joshua remarked.

  ‘I’ll say . . . Anyway, after that I went by train from Lisbon to Ghent and signed on as a party worker for a ghastly bunch of Belgian blackshirts called the VNV. Now, tell me, why did you want to know all this?’

  ‘Well, from what I know about your two family histories, your fathers were great enemies, am I right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘They had met in Kenya, before the First War.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And Gerhard, your father died on an expedition to Africa?’

  ‘That’s also true,’ he agreed.

  ‘So we have a connection between the von Meerbach family and Africa . . . and also a strong connection, over two generations, between your two families.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Saffron. ‘Of course – I see where you’re going with this.’

  Joshua smiled. ‘Then please – as the Americans say, “connect the dots”.’

  ‘Well, if I could go from Africa to Europe, via Lisbon, why couldn’t Konrad make the same journey in the opposite direction?’

  ‘That was what I was asking myself.’

  ‘And that makes even more sense, because some of the Ossewa Brandwag men that I knew during the war are now high up in the South African government, so they might want to help a man like Konrad. I mean, not officially . . . but they’d certainly turn a blind eye.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s one more element you should consider. It is true that old Nazis have friends in the government in South Africa. But they do in Argentina, and Brazil, and Chile too. And of course, if Konrad was in Portugal, he could probably have stayed there. The Salazar regime is a right-wing dictatorship, after all. So why go to Africa?’

  ‘Because there was something there for him?’ Gerhard suggested.

  ‘Such as . . .?’

  ‘Us,’ Saffron said. ‘The reason Konrad von Meerbach would go to Africa would be because we are there, and so is my father.’

  ‘And I can tell you for absolute certain,’ said Gerhard, ‘that he wants to kill us all.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Joshua, ‘I will put my contacts in Lisbon to work at once. Even if Konrad hasn’t made a move yet, you can bet that he has something in mind. We have to find him and take him. Your lives depend upon it.’

  If there was one man in the world that Leon Courtney did not want to see turning up outside his front door, it was Quentin De Lancey. It was not just that the man was loathsome and his political views repellent; he also reminded Leon all too painfully of the worst day in his life.

  A quarter of a century ago, De Lancey had expounded a series of ill-informed, prejudiced remarks about Kenya’s native population, whom he had referred to as ‘bone-idle savages’ at a dinner party they both attended. Infuriated, Leon challenged him to a wager to demonstrate how wrong he was. He told De Lancey he would pay him five thousand pounds if any three white contenders he selected, going one after the other, could outrun a single Maasai. If De Lancey lost, he would have to run one lap of the track stark naked.

  The race was run around the old Wanjohi Country Club polo field. The Maasai won. But De Lancey never had to pay his forfeit because, by then, Leon’s first wife Eva was already in her death throes, stricken by eclampsia and bleeding her life away on the dining table in the club’s pavilion.

  And now, here De Lancey was, following one of the Estate House staff into Leon’s office, his grossly corpulent body garbed in khaki shorts, with a matching shirt and peaked cap, holding a clipboard in his right hand. Beside him walked another sizeable individual in a suit and tie, his head covered by a grey snap-brim hat, his eyes concealed behind a pair of metal-framed dark glasses.

  ‘Mr Courtney?’ De Lancey enquired, glancing at his clipboard as if he needed to be reminded who he was talking to.

  ‘You know damn well that I am,’ Leon replied. ‘What are you doing on my property, dressed up like Billy Bunter on a Boy Scouts’ outing?’

  A flash of anger crossed De Lancey’s face. The two constables behind him did their best to suppress their grins. De Lancey did not so much see as sense his men’s amusement. He turned his head to glare at them and snapped, ‘Outside! Wait
by the vehicles!’

  When they were gone, his self-importance now somewhat restored, De Lancey introduced the man in the suit, who was removing his sunglasses and tucking them into the breast pocket of his jacket. From the side pocket he was now extracting a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil.

  ‘This is Mr Pieters, from the Reuters press agency,’ De Lancey said. ‘He is writing an article for global syndication about our response to native insurrection. Naturally, the governor is keen to show the world that we have the whole matter well in hand.’

  ‘Good day, Mr Courtney,’ Pieters said. ‘Thank you for allowing us on your property.’

  ‘Good day to you too, Mr Pieters,’ Leon replied.

  Something about the man troubled him. Those beady, porcine eyes reminded him of someone, but before he could work out who, De Lancey was announcing, ‘I am here in my role as an officer in the Special Constabulary.’

  Leon’s loathing of De Lancey drove all other thoughts from his mind.

  ‘Are you now?’ he said. ‘Well, I have no need of your services. If any man, woman or child living on my estate had done wrong, I’d already know about it and I’d deal with it myself.’ He did not try to hide his contempt when he added, ‘And not with a horsewhip.’

  ‘That is not the purpose of my visit,’ De Lancey added, and the look he gave Leon made it clear that the loathing was mutual. He cleared his throat and began what was clearly a prepared speech. ‘As you know, there has been growing unrest within the Kikuyu population, provoked and encouraged by the so-called Mau Mau terrorists—’

  ‘Of course I damn well know,’ Leon interrupted him. ‘What of it?’

  ‘As you’re no doubt aware,’ De Lancey continued, ‘this unrest is no longer confined to oath-taking ceremonies and actions undertaken by the Mau Mau to enforce their power within their own tribe. We must be ready for the Mau Mau turning their attention to the European population. We have reason to believe that oath-takers are required to swear that they will kill white people. The fate of the poor Ruddock family is a tragedy we do not wish to befall on you or your dependants. For that reason—’