The Sixth Lamentation fa-1

by William Brodrick

  She said, ‘Does it have a title?’

  “‘Sibyl’s Cave”.’

  Lucy surveyed the vibrant, tragic beauty, unable to detach herself from its activity.

  ‘Would you like it?’ asked Max.

  In her taut mind she clutched at a refusal, but she wanted it. Lucy nodded quickly, keeping her eyes on what she had seen.

  3

  Anselm rose at 5 a.m., having been unable to ‘sleep. He tried to say Lauds but a strong, invasive melancholy scattered his powers of concentration. And yet his mind was deeply attuned to the important task of the day He would neither eat nor drink nor rest until it was over.

  Conroy emerged cheerily for breakfast, eating everything that was brought forth from the kitchen. His irrepressible gathering in of all life’s moments — even eating — raised Anselm’s spirits. The Prior had been right all along. It was a good idea to show Conroy the North Country… for Anselm’s sake. He decided to bring his companion with him for the confrontation, as long as the great oaf didn’t tell any jokes.

  Shortly after ten, Anselm pushed open the gate to ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’. Conroy followed him to the stone porch. The door was ajar. Voices drifted warmly from an unseen room. Anselm immediately imagined a coffee pot, loaves of bread, jars and pots upon a table, mingled morning greetings, children opening the fridge. He knocked. A moment later the door swung back in the hands of a little girl with large, enquiring eyes. And then Robert Brownlow appeared.

  ‘Ah,’ he said lamely, the colour draining from his face. ‘You’ve made it for my wife’s birthday’

  Inside, they were introduced to Maggie, Robert’s wife; and then two of their five children, Francis and Jenny (with their respective spouses); and then the three grandchildren. But not Victor. He was not in the room. Anselm and Conroy were described as friends of Robert, who, throughout the entire charade, masked his anxiety with near complete success. Only Maggie, with her tight folded arms, betrayed a suspicion of insight. Then Robert led his guests to an upstairs room and knocked on the door.

  Is this what a major war criminal looks like? thought Anselm. He wore various shades of respectable green, with a tartan tie, the unmistakable appearance of good but ill-fitting finds from tatty high street charity shops. His shoes were well worn but neatly polished. Robert stood behind the armchair that swallowed up the runaway

  Now that he’d found him, Anselm had no idea what to say Whatever enquiry Cardinal Vincenzi expected Anselm to undertake, and whatever insinuated pressure Renaldi hoped he would exert, was not going to happen. The meeting had its own agenda. Anselm introduced himself and said:

  ‘Schwermann couldn’t hide for ever and neither can you. The police already know that you’re here. Even if you say nothing to them, and Schwermann’s convicted, he’ll begin an appeal. His legal representatives were looking for you and they’ll not let you go once they know that you’ve been found. So if you’re going to hide, it’s for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?’

  The gentle clunking of a trowel upon the rim of a plant pot rang from the garden. Anselm glanced out of the window Maggie was helping one of the children plant a flower.

  ‘Victor,’ said Anselm, ‘I don’t know what happened in 1942 or 1944. Nobody does, except Eduard Schwermann and you.’

  He was standing upon a worn rug, uncomfortably aware his calling in life transformed any public reflection into a sort of sermon. He stepped off the thread pedestal, saying, ‘There’s a jury empanelled in London to make a decision. They sit there, day in day out, hearing evidence, mostly from people who weren’t there. It’s a journey into memory with stumbling guides doing their best. But you, Victor, are different. You know the answers. Schwermann believes that if you enter the witness box, he’ll be acquitted. There are others who believe the opposite; that you, and only you, can prove he is guilty. Only one side can be right. I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a priest now, but the truth will out. Hasn’t the time come to give the past a proper burial?’

  Victor Brionne’s face became mobile but his lips did not part. Deep down, thought Anselm, he’s holding tightly on to something. Anselm wrote down DI Armstrong’s name and number and placed it upon a sideboard. As he reached the door he turned instinctively and said:

  ‘You knew Jacques Fougeres?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was the only word he had spoken. His voice, in that one brief sound, disclosed a grave, enduring ache.

  ‘You know he had a blood relative, Pascal Fougeres?’

  He nodded.

  ‘A young man who did everything possible to bring Schwermann to trial. Do you know he wanted. to find you?’

  There was no response. Robert looked down upon Victor.

  ‘Do you know why?’ Anselm pleaded. ‘Not to expose you, or blame you. But because he had faith in the love of old friends. He believed that you would tell the truth.’

  Victor closed his eyes, averting his head from Anselm’s unrelenting words.

  ‘He died on the very night he met some friends to discuss your importance. Not for himself, not for his own family, but for all those whose memories are being scattered to the wind.’ Anselm opened the door, his voice suddenly raised, indignant and accusing: ‘Did Pascal die for nothing… absolutely nothing at all?’

  The house was empty when they got downstairs. Walking down the path they could see the family way ahead, ambling towards Lindisfarne Castle. Robert joined Anselm and Conroy at the gate. He said, trembling, ‘Father, I meant what I said when we first met. Victor Brionne died in 1945 as far as I’m concerned. Is it right to dismantle their world?’ He nodded over the wall, anxiously, at three generations becoming specks in the distance.

  ‘Is it right to leave other lives in pieces?’ replied Anselm. ‘I don’t pretend to have the answer, Robert. I doubt whether your father knows. But he’s the one who has to choose.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  1

  Lucy took ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ home with her and placed it over the mantelpiece. For the rest of the weekend she kept re-entering the room to look at it. In that hint of a face drawn by the sweeping paint she saw Agnes, young and old, transcendent, aloft her disappointment.

  When Lucy met Max and Mr Lachaise at court on Monday morning they all shook hands. Something like ease was growing between them. This was all the more remarkable because she (and presumably Max) had no idea as to who Mr Lachaise, their convener, might be. There was a disarming quality to his simplicity, like dealing with a child. Only he was nothing of the kind. He seemed older than anyone Lucy had ever known. And she recognised in his every move a type of empathy, something indefinable, that he held in common with her grandmother. She would have liked them to have met.

  As was now common practice, the three of them sat in a row listening intently to the evidence presented before the court. For the next couple of days Mr Penshaw called a hotchpotch of witnesses to describe the nuts and bolts of organised murder. Mr Bartlett asked few questions, confining himself to small errors of detail.

  ‘In fact, the first deportation from Le Bourget-Drancy comprised standard third-class railway carriages, did it not?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. If it matters. ‘

  ‘Precision always matters,’ said Mr Bartlett kindly

  Bartlett very occasionally gave a brief smile to the jury. After all, they’d been seeing each other every day, listening to the same witnesses. Lucy felt an atmosphere was developing between them. They were in this together, doing their level best. One or two had begun to smile back at him. Was it courtesy or empathy?

  Lucy struggled to name a growing sensation. By some alchemy, Schwermann was almost detached from the proceedings. The link between the young SS officer and the elderly Defendant before them was peculiarly slender, the actions and attributes of fifty years ago having to be fixed on an older, much changed and hence different man. The passage of time itself had blurred not only the edges of responsibility but the consequences of the crime. Several newspap
ers had begun to question the propriety of the trial ‘so long after the events in question’, those being the fleshiness of killing, the smell of filth and the sound of fear. The younger man who’d been there was slipping out of reach; the older chap seemed crucially disconnected from his own past.

  One radio programme debated ‘the age-old problem of Personal Identity’. If Schwermann at seventy-six was not the same man he had been at twenty-three could he be punished at all? Several newspapers explored the reach of ethics within the law, proper and improper. And many perfectly reasonable people from both sides of the fence appeared on Newsnight and within ten minutes were fairly evenly savaged for their trouble. The Defendant had become a ‘philosophico-legal’ problem, as well as an alleged killer. Lucy absorbed all the words, admiring the careful scrutiny of educated minds, but thinking all the time of leaves… thousands upon thousands of them, wafted helplessly into the air, no one knowing from where they had come or where they would go.

  Watching Mr Bartlett at work, Lucy thought that someone had to bring the SS-Unterscharfuhrer back into the present, through the tangle of reasonable civilised arguments, and put him in the dock — someone who had known him at the time. And, apart from Agnes, there was only one person left.

  2

  Anselm and Conroy got back to Larkwood late on Saturday night. They spoke in snatches on the way down, each of them preoccupied by a vision of what would soon befall the Brownlow family No wonder the prophets were such a miserable lot, said Conroy Glimpsing the fulfilment of history, even a tiny flowering of righteousness; was not a pleasant sight. It wasn’t all slaked thirst, free corn, oil and new wine. And, unfortunately, getting the balance right between today’s children and the wrongs of their parents was a task that went well beyond the remit of the Crown Court.

  Anselm retired to his room on Sunday afternoon to write a report for Cardinal Vincenzi. The text he produced was brief to the point of insolence. He set down the facts: Brionne had been found; he might give evidence; its substance had not been revealed. The whole was extended modestly with a few connecting phrases. With a flourish of respectful obedience, Anselm signed his name.

  Anselm went down to the Bursar’s office, his report in hand. A fax machine and photocopier stood side by side. On an opposite wall was a grid of pigeonholes, one for each monk, a private depository for mail and handouts. Anselm faxed his letter directly to Cardinal Vincenzi in Rome and the Papal Nuncio in London. He had been instructed not to send a hard copy, so he placed the actual text in a folder addressed to Father Andrew — for eventual lodging in the Priory archives.

  Turning to leave, Anselm checked his mail. There was one envelope. It must have been put there in the last hour or so for the pigeonhole had been empty after lunch. Opening it, Anselm withdrew the report from Father Chambray. An attached note from the author said he had gone to London en route to Paris that night. He urged Anselm to visit him the next time he was in France. That was a welcome gesture from a man on the boundary of things, a man who had once slammed a door in his face.

  It was a flimsy text, a carbon copy on tracing paper. Anselm sat and read. It was all as Chambray had recounted. The last page, however, went rather further than their previous discussion.

  Father Pleyon secured the passage of Schwermann and Brionne to England through personal diplomatic connections in Paris and London. Contact was made with a new monastic foundation in Suffolk that had been established by a French motherhouse shortly before the war. Schwermann would stay with the monks for a month while alternative arrangements were made by the British authorities.

  Anselm put the report back in the envelope and glanced at the fax machine, thinking of his own brief letter to Rome. Its readers would already know that Eduard Schwermann first came to Larkwood Priory in 1945.

  3

  Reading other people’s letters without permission was the sort of thing that Freddie considered abhorrent. It was one of the many admonitions he had stressed when Lucy was a child and he was laying out the benchmarks for upright living. Which of course turned out to be ironic because he would dearly have loved to learn about his daughter if she would but tell him, and she wouldn’t, and that left peeping at her mail, which he never did, not even when Darren’s distinctive letters had fallen upon the doormat and Lucy had left them open in her unlocked room. She had done that on purpose, knowing he would want to look, and knowing that he would not.

  So it was genuinely an accident when her father picked up a letter to Lucy from her college tutor referring her to Myriam Anderson, the counsellor, and giving her permission to miss lectures and tutorials for several weeks. It had fallen on the floor, out of a coat pocket, while she was visiting her parents, and Lucy had left for Brixton none the wiser. He gave it back to her, with an apology, a day or so later at Chiswick Mall. They were standing in the hallway, just as Lucy was about to leave. She took it, flushing, and answered the trapped question he would not ask:

  ‘I’ve not dropped out.’

  Freddie studied her face for a long while. ‘But why, Lucy? What’s wrong?’ She’d expected anger, more of the old dashed expectations spilling forth like dirty water. But that didn’t happen. For once, he seemed lost, unsure of how to keep hold of the threads that linked him to his daughter. He raised his hands and Lucy felt the lightest of pulls towards him. She said, quickly, ‘I had a friend who died.’

  The telling seemed to leave him winded. He didn’t even know about the friend, never mind the death. To her astonishment he came forward and put an arm around her, drawing her head into his neck. Lucy could not remember when that had last happened. She started crying, not for Pascal, not for Agnes, but for herself… and for her father.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’

  And they both knew that their words went far deeper than a reference to recent grief. They reached back, further than either of them could ever have intended or imagined, deep into the unlit past.

  As Lucy pulled herself away, she met her father’s open gaze with dismay: how would it ever be possible to tell him about the trial, about Agnes’ notebook, and about his very self?

  Lucy attended court the next morning and took her seat. She asked Max what he’d done the night before. Waiting on tables, he said. How awful, she replied. Pays the rent, he responded. Mr Lachaise polished his glasses reflectively, listening to their quick, simple exchange.

  The barristers filed into court but, unusually, the jury were not summoned. Mr Justice Pollbrook came on to the bench. Mr Penshaw rose to his feet:

  ‘My Lord, owing to a rather surprising development in this case, I fear it may be necessary to have a substantial adjournment so that-’

  ‘How long, Mr Penshaw?’

  ‘At least the rest of the day’

  ‘You can have this morning.’

  ‘My Lord, the development is significant, and I anticipate the need to serve additional evidence upon my Learned Friend. He will need to consider it most carefully’

  There was a pause. Mr Penshaw had spoken in Bar-code. The judge quickly scanned the lawyers below

  ‘Very well. You can have until two-thirty tomorrow That’s a day and a half. Mr Bartlett, any objections?’

  ‘No, my Lord, I’ve always enjoyed little surprises.’

  ‘Court rise.’

  Lucy thought, faster than she could order her mind: it’s Victor Brionne. He must have decided to speak out. Why else would he have come out of hiding? Why else would the Crown so enjoy expressing their concern for Mr Bartlett? He comes to strike down his former master.

  Suffused with exultation, Lucy turned on Schwermann in the dock, but was stunned to see his relief and the slight trembling of repressed emotion: the look of one who has heard the soft approach of his saviour.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  1

  Lucy returned to court unable to forget the look of hope that had smoothed the anxious face of Eduard Schwermann. But now, sitting in the dock, he looked to the pu
blic gallery with growing agitation, directly towards the empty seat of Max Nightingale.

  Mr Lachaise was uncharacteristically wearied, like the front-runner who unexpectedly limps to one side, unable to continue with the race. Another man, roughly the same age as Mr Lachaise, caught Lucy’s attention, being a new observer among what had become a familiar throng. He stood out not through that difference but through the imprint of tension. His short silvered hair, neatly cut and parted, suggested the boy as much as the man. She suspected that he was here with Victor Brionne, who was about to give evidence on behalf of the Prosecution.

  When Counsel were all assembled, the judge came on to the bench in the absence of the jury

  ‘My Lord,’ said Mr Penshaw, rising to his feet, ‘the adjournment has been of considerable assistance. If I may briefly explain-’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘An individual came forward from whom it was thought a contemporaneous account of events involving Mr Schwermann might be forthcoming. A statement was taken by the police which your Lordship has no doubt seen.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘There is nothing deposed therein which adds anything of significance to the Prosecution case. I do not propose to call the witness.’

  The judge languidly raised an eyebrow ‘Has Mr Bartlett seen the statement?’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘My Lord,’ said Mr Penshaw ‘That completes the evidence for the Crown.’

  ‘Mr Bartlett, are you ready to proceed?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Call the jury please,’ said Mr Justice Pollbrook, turning a fresh page in his notebook.