Death in Focus

by Anne Perry

  Elena went into the hall and telephoned her parents, assuring them she was well. She would decide how much to tell them later, perhaps tomorrow. Her father asked her several questions, but she pleaded exhaustion and promised to tell him the details when she saw him. That was a promise she did not intend to keep. It would worry him far more than necessary, and she did not want to relive it.

  In the drawing room, she found Lucas and Walter deep in conversation. They were talking about something during the war. She had been nine when it started. She could quite clearly recall the golden summer just before. The end of history and the beginning of modern times, Josephine had called it. Walter was about her own age. His memory must be like hers, all the emotions of war, the fear and the loss, but he was too young to have fought. Mike, five years older than Elena, was only just old enough for it to be required of him, although she knew there had been boys as young as twelve who had lied about their age and volunteered by 1918.

  Both men looked around as she came in, closing the door behind her. Walter stood up. He moved awkwardly, as if his body was so tight that he was almost locked into position, and his face was flushed with some kind of emotion that he could barely control. He kept his right hand by his side.

  Lucas watched, his face tense also. “Perhaps you should go and help your grandmother in the kitchen?” he suggested to Elena, looking very directly at her, his eyes clear blue, light as the sky.

  What was wrong?

  “Grandpa…” she began.

  Then Walter was half behind her, and suddenly his left arm was around her, just above the waist. “No, I think you should stay here,” he said quietly, his voice utterly changed. “It’s been many years in coming—since 1917, in fact—but now it is time.”

  Lucas started to rise to his feet.

  Walter’s arm tightened around Elena, and his right hand was near her neck.

  She felt the very slight prick of a knife blade at her throat. She fought against believing it, but now her body was drenched with fear. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice cracking. He had changed utterly! The friend who had helped her in the worst times had vanished, leaving a stranger behind.

  “Walter Mann! I told you! Well, Walter Mannheim, actually. Ask your grandfather. See if he remembers Richard Mannheim, my father!” He said the last words so choked with emotion they were almost indistinguishable.

  Silence filled the room. One second, two seconds.

  “Better still,” Walter continued, “ask your grandfather who he is! If he doesn’t tell you, I will!”

  “Walter…” Lucas started, then stopped as Walter’s hand tightened on the knife handle, and Elena winced as the blade pricked her again, and a slight trickle of warm blood slid down her neck.

  “Be quiet!” Walter snapped. “I’ll tell her. Your grandfather was head of MI6 during the last part of the war. Spymaster general. A man whose power was secret, complete, and unanswerable to anyone. He could order a man executed, and it was done.” His voice was growing thicker with emotion, and higher in pitch. “Someone made a mistake and my father, Richard Mannheim, one of your grandfather’s men who risked his life over and over again, on Lucas Standish’s orders, was blamed for that mistake. And Lucas Standish accused him of being a traitor and had him hanged! Hanged…by the neck…jerking and twitching on the end of a rope…until he was dead. Because he could! He didn’t have to justify himself to anyone.”

  Elena could feel Walter’s hand shaking, the knife moving fractionally, cutting a little deeper, the blood running.

  Walter was so knotted with fury and grief that his whole body was rigid. His voice was unnaturally thin and high. “Do you know what that’s like? Do you? Have you any idea at all what he suffered? The betrayal by the one man he trusted?”

  “Walter,” Lucas began. “Let Elena go. It’s not her fault.”

  “Shut up! Was it my fault? You killed my father in the most hideous disgrace imaginable. A traitor! You hanged him like a criminal! My father! Do you know what that was like for me? It’s not Elena’s fault…of course it isn’t! She didn’t even know. You committed all your acts anonymously, where no one could find you. You didn’t care what you did to my father’s family, to my mother, to me! Yet you expect me to care what this does to Elena, or your wife? Why?”

  “Kill me, if you think it will make you feel better, but leave Elena—” Lucas began.

  Walter laughed, a harsh, raucous sound, ugly in its pain. “Idiot! I’m going to kill all of you! Elena first, so you can watch her fear, watch all that beautiful, passionate life slip out of her…watch her struggle…and lose it…knowing it was you who took it. And you will be blamed. I prefer to see you suffer for it, see you try to explain how it wasn’t you, and be condemned anyway, and then hanged. But that isn’t possible, because you might talk your way out of it. I expect you’ve still got friends. You could still be part of MI6, for all I know, although they didn’t rescue Elena in Germany! I did! I did—after I killed Newton.”

  Elena was stunned. That was one thing she had not even thought of, but now that she heard it, the pieces all came together in her mind with a sharp, cutting reality.

  “I sent him on a wild-goose chase, all the way from Amalfi to Berlin, to stop them from killing Scharnhorst. He thought it was your orders. I killed his contact there, so he couldn’t check. But then I met Elena—sweet, trusting Elena—at the hotel, and I heard she was your granddaughter. So, I killed Newton, because I knew she’d be all quixotic and take over his task—and she did.”

  Elena tensed, trying to struggle, but he held her too tightly.

  Lucas’s eyes darted around the room, as if trying to see any way of distracting Walter.

  “Don’t!” Walter said between his teeth. “It will take one movement to cut her throat.”

  Elena froze.

  “She went to the British Embassy in Berlin,” Walter continued, “to tell them there would be an attempt on Scharnhorst’s life, but they did nothing about it. Did you know that?” He was talking rapidly now, almost stumbling over his own words. “They betrayed you! Your own man in Berlin betrayed you. I killed Scharnhorst and put the rifle in Elena’s hotel room. She went along like a good little English girl and did all I wanted her to.”

  He tightened his grip until she flinched. “Pity. I quite like her, but she’s your granddaughter, the one you love the most. Perhaps you love her as much as I loved my father? What do you think, eh?” His hand tightened. “There’s a symmetry to it, you know. She was an obedient little puppet, except that I lost her for a while, after the assassination. She went to ground in Berlin, but I found her again. She couldn’t resist coming out for the book-burning, with her Jewish friend.”

  Elena tried once more to alter her weight so he would have to change his grip. He yanked her hard, closer to him. “Enough talking! I needed you to know, because there’s no justice if you have no idea why your family’s going to be killed before your very eyes, and you are going to be blamed for it.” He moved the knife a little higher and cut across Elena’s cheek.

  Lucas’s face was ashen. “Do anything you want with me…” he began.

  Elena had always loved Lucas more than anyone else, for no reason that she knew of. It was simply so, and she would protect him at any cost. Without giving it any thought, she put her right hand forward, then jerked her elbow back as hard as she could, straight into the soft spot beneath Walter’s ribs. As his grip on her eased for an instant, she pulled away and swung around, lifting her knee into his groin. She lost her balance and fell to the floor on her hands and knees, as Walter lifted his foot to kick her. It could have pounded into her face, except that there was a crack of gunfire from somewhere near the door and Walter fell on top of her, with blood gushing everywhere.

  Lucas lunged forward, dropped to his knees, and grasped her, pulling her free.

  She wiped her hands across her
face and they came away covered in blood. She stared toward the doorway where her grandmother was standing, very still and very pale, with a heavy Luger pistol in her hands, now pointed at the floor. Elena looked at Walter. His head was almost unrecognizable. It was hideous, a mass of blood and bone.

  Lucas’s arms tightened around her. “Don’t look,” he said quietly. “He’s not there anymore. That’s just what’s left of who he used to be.” He turned toward Josephine.

  She was beginning to tremble, and very slowly she let the gun slide to the floor.

  “How did you know?” Lucas asked.

  “I came to see if you’d like tea straightaway,” she replied, “and I heard him talking. I knew where your gun was.”

  “Did you? I never told you I even had it!” His voice dropped. “Are you all right?”

  She was shaking visibly now. “Lucas, I don’t need to be spoon-fed. I fought in the war, too, and some of it was nasty.” She left the gun where it had fallen and walked over toward Elena. She looked at her anxiously. “I’m proud of you, sweetheart,” she said quietly. “We’ve got to bandage that cheek and clear all this up. I don’t think any of this is something we want to report to the police.” She held out her hand.

  Elena took it and got to her feet rather clumsily. She looked at the red silk dress that she had been so proud of. She wasn’t ever going to be able to wear it again, nor would she want to anyway. She felt a little dizzy. Her whole world, the safety she’d trusted for as long as she could remember, had changed. Her grandmother had just shot Walter, who had intended to kill them all. She turned to face Lucas.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said quietly. “Very sorry indeed. Now come upstairs and take that dress off. We’ll get you into something clean and attend to those cuts. Come on.”

  She was battling tears and losing. She felt them slide down her cheeks. “It’s just…” She looked at him and shook her head. He seemed exactly the same, the blue eyes, the gray hair thinning now, the gentleness that went back to her very first memories. “Nothing is what I thought it was.” She could barely form the words. “In Germany, or anywhere, not…not even here.”

  The grief was intense in his face, and she realized with amazement that he feared she would reject him. She stepped over Walter and put her arms around her grandfather. He had square shoulders, but he was always thinner than she expected. She held on to him as tightly as she could and felt his arms reach completely around her.

  It was Josephine who broke the moment. “What are we going to do about this, Lucas? Shall I call that nice young man you speak to so often?”

  “What?” Lucas was startled.

  “We need help,” Josephine said more clearly. “Shall I call Peter Howard?”

  “Do you—”

  “I know where his number is,” Josephine reminded him. “He gave it to me if ever I were in real trouble and you were not here. And I think this is about to become real trouble.”

  “Yes, please.” Lucas pulled away from Elena. “You need to change out of that dress.”

  “Get rid of it,” Josephine interrupted from the door. “Go upstairs and change into something of your own, now! We aren’t expecting anyone, but don’t waste time. I’m going to tell Mr. Howard what happened and request that he come over immediately, with whatever equipment is necessary. I hope we can save the Turkish carpet.” She went out of the room after picking up the gun from where it lay on the floor.

  Lucas took Elena upstairs to the bathroom and very gently, and surprisingly efficiently, cleaned the slight mark on her throat and the deeper one on her cheek. She could not see what he was doing, but it eased the pain quite a lot and it stopped the bleeding. Then she went into her bedroom and took off the red dress and put on a far less glamourous one of her own.

  When she came down Lucas was waiting. “Are you up to this?” he asked grimly. “Would you rather stay in your room while we deal with Walter Mann?”

  “Yes, of course I am! I’ll help. I was interrogated by the Gestapo, I escaped from them, and I didn’t tell them anything about who helped me in Berlin. Of course I’m up to it!”

  Lucas looked at her steadily for a moment, then accepted what she said.

  She peered down at Walter. He seemed smaller, now that he was lying crumpled up, with no person inside his body anymore. “The people in the photographs I sent, they look half human, half something unreachable. They were dancing and laughing. What can you say to people like that?” She stared up at Lucas intently, needing to hear his answer.

  “Your photographs are superb…and terrible,” he said softly. “I wish I could tell you it’s going to get better, and there won’t be another war, but I don’t think that’s true. I also can’t tell you that I won’t fight against this new madness in every way I can. That wouldn’t be true either.”

  She nodded very slightly. “I know. I’m going to fight, too. I’m scared stiff of them. But I know it’s real. I’ll tell you about Jacob, the Jewish friend Walter referred to. He’s still in Berlin.” She searched his face, his eyes. “I can do something, can’t I?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “You already are.” He moved toward the door. “Now come on, we can’t leave all of this to your grandmother. Right now, we need to start clearing this up. See how bad the damage is to the carpet.”

  “People are being murdered in Berlin.” Her voice was suddenly out of control. “Old people, women, and children! What the hell does one bloody carpet matter?”

  “It matters that we remove all trace of what happened here,” Lucas said firmly. “Spies operate in secret, Elena. Once everybody knows who they are, they’re useless. We’d better be busy doing what we can until Peter gets here. He’ll remove the body and probably my gun. No one should be able to find it here. I’ll have to get a different one.”

  She said nothing, but drew a long, shaky breath, crushing down her feelings until she was in control again.

  Josephine came back with a bucket of water. First, they rolled Walter’s body in an old picnic blanket, and then they worked for a hard twenty minutes to wash all the blood they could out of the Turkish carpet, which was fortunately a dark red and blue pattern.

  Josephine took the bucket away to empty and brought back a tray of tea and insisted they each have a cup. “We’ll eat later,” she told them. “Need to keep our strength up,” she said calmly. “And you do know that you will tell your parents nothing of this, don’t you?”

  Elena stared at her.

  “They know now of your grandfather’s position during the war, but less of mine. It is totally necessary that we keep this from them, do you understand? It’s not fair or sensible to bother them with it. We each have our own load to carry, and our own secrets.” She reached across and pushed a stray strand of hair off Elena’s forehead. “You are now one of us, my dear, no longer one of them.”

  Elena knew it was true. Perhaps she had known it since the night of the book-burning, but it was different hearing someone else say it, someone who had known her all her life. But she was prevented from replying to this immense statement by a ring on the front doorbell.

  She froze.

  Lucas climbed to his feet and went out into the hall to answer it. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed that there was a dead man lying in a blanket on the drawing-room floor, nor that his granddaughter had adhesive bandages on her cheek and throat where that dead man had intended to cut her.

  Josephine sat motionless, her body strained with tension.

  There were voices in the hall, Lucas’s and another man’s. Then the drawing-room door opened and the man came in, fair-haired, his face unremarkable. He moved with a certain grace.

  Elena felt a wave of horror engulf her. It was the man from the Reibekuchen stall outside the embassy in Berlin. The man she had left slumped unconscious at the base of the tree. She tried to speak, but the words stuck in her thro
at.

  “Elena,” Lucas said, “this is Peter Howard. I sent him to Berlin to get you out, but you rather got the better of him.”

  The man looked at her with faint, rueful humor. “How do you do, Miss Standish?” he said, extending his hand.

  Slowly, still shaking, Elena put her hand out and took his. It was firm and strong. “How do you do, Mr. Howard?”

  To Anna Maria Palombi, who first introduced me to Naples

  BY ANNE PERRY

  FEATURING ELENA STANDISH

  Death in Focus

  FEATURING WILLIAM MONK

  The Face of a Stranger

  A Dangerous Mourning

  Defend and Betray

  A Sudden, Fearful Death

  The Sins of the Wolf

  Cain His Brother

  Weighed in the Balance

  The Silent Cry

  A Breach of Promise

  The Twisted Root

  Slaves of Obsession

  Funeral in Blue

  Death of a Stranger

  The Shifting Tide

  Dark Assassin

  Execution Dock

  Acceptable Loss

  A Sunless Sea

  Blind Justice

  Blood on the Water

  Corridors of the Night

  Revenge in a Cold River

  An Echo of Murder

  Dark Tide Rising

  FEATURING CHARLOTTE AND THOMAS PITT

  The Cater Street Hangman

  Callander Square

  Paragon Walk

  Resurrection Row

  Rutland Place

  Bluegate Fields

  Death in the Devil’s Acre

  Cardington Crescent

  Silence in Hanover Close