by Wilbur Smith
‘Can I get you something to eat or drink?’ he asked.
‘I would die for a cup of coffee.’
‘Dying is not called for,’ he told her, and went to the Nespresso coffee machine that was concealed behind an antique Chinese screen in the corner.
‘I don’t like to let anybody else brew for me,’ he explained. ‘Not even Cynthia, my chef.’
At last she took the seat he had offered her, and he placed the porcelain on the table beside her. He went to his own chair behind the desk.
‘How secure are we here? We have some highly sensitive issues to discuss,’ she asked quietly.
‘You don’t have to worry, Jo. I had a thorough check run on the entire building by somebody I trust implicitly.’
‘Sorry I had to ask. I know you are a pro, Hector.’ He inclined his head to acknowledge the apology, and she went on. ‘The whole way across the Atlantic I have been pondering how best to explain this all to you. I decided the only way was to start at the beginning.’
‘That sounds logical to me,’ he agreed.
‘That’s why I am going to start at the end.’
‘When I think about it, that also sounds very logical, but only if you are a woman, of course.’ She ignored the sarcasm. Her expression began to change. The animation and flippancy faded away. Her lovely eyes filled with shadows.
He wanted desperately to help her, but he realized that the best way to do that was to remain silent and listen. She spoke at last.
‘Ronald Bunter is a fine lawyer and an honest and noble man but, as the head trustee of the Henry Bannock Family Trust, he has been faced with a soul-destroying decision. He has had to decide which he must betray: his professional honour or the lives of innocents that have been given into his keeping.’
She broke off and he knew with an intuitive flash that she had been faced with the same dreadful choice.
Then she sighed and it was a harrowing sound. She laid her hand on her briefcase and said, ‘In here I have a digital copy of the Henry Bannock Family Trust Deed. I stole it from the law firm to which I had sworn my fealty. Ronald Bunter gave me the duplicate keys and the codes so that I was able to enter the strongroom while the building was deserted and he shielded me from discovery. He was my accomplice. We did not commit this act without long and deep discussion and soul searching. But in the end we decided that justice must take precedence over the strict letter of the law. That is something almost impossible for a lawyer to accept. Nevertheless, when I had finished what I had set out to do I felt it was my duty to my God and my own self-esteem to resign from the firm whose trust I had so woefully betrayed.’
Hector realized that he had been holding his breath as he listened to her. Now he let it out in a long soft sigh, and then he said, ‘If you did this for me, I cannot let you do it. The sacrifice is too great.’
‘I have done it,’ she said. ‘I cannot go back on it now. It’s too late. Besides which it is the right decision. I know that it’s the right thing. Please don’t argue. This is my gift to you and Catherine Cayla.’
‘When you explain it that way I have no choice. I must accept it. Thank you, Jo. You will not find us ungrateful.’
‘I know that.’ She dropped her eyes and looked at her hands, which she was holding in her lap. When she looked up at him again she had regained complete control of her emotions.
‘The Trust Deed that Henry Bannock put together is a three-hundred-page monstrosity. It would take you an age to wade through it, because you would drop off to sleep every two or three pages.’
She opened her briefcase and took out two small USB flash drives. She balanced them in the palm of her hand, as though she was reluctant to hand them over.
‘So, what I have done for you is to prepare a digital copy of the actual Trust Deed.’ She placed one of the flash drives on his desk in front of him. ‘Then on this second drive I have set out the background and history that led up to the formation of the trust that Henry Bannock created; then to the chain reaction that this set in motion. With Ronnie Bunter’s full cooperation I think that I have been able to put the facts into some sort of logical and cohesive order, which is also readable. I suppose I must have always had a deep-rooted ambition to be an author, because I found myself deeply involved in the writing of it.’ She smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘For what it’s worth, I offer to you my first attempt at narrative literature. It is not a novel or even a novelette, because everything it contains is factual.’
She stood up and placed the second flash drive beside the first on the desk in front of him. Hector picked it up and examined it curiously. Jo returned to her seat and watched him. He leaned across his desk and plugged the USB drive into his desktop computer.
‘It’s formatted in Microsoft Word,’ she said.
‘It’s opening without any hassle,’ he told her. ‘But now it’s asking for a password.’
‘It’s poisonseed7805,’ she told him. ‘All lower case. All one word.’
‘That’s done it. Here we go. It’s opening. “Karl Pieter Kurtmeyer: The Poisoned Seed”.’ He read aloud the title from the heading of the document.
‘I hope you find the contents of more interest than the title suggests,’ Jo said.
‘I am going to start reading it immediately, but it looks as though it will take me a good few hours, maybe even days. Is there something you can do for your own entertainment? Would you like to read a book or watch TV, or go out sightseeing or shopping? London is a fun town.’
‘I am shattered by jetlag.’ She hid her yawn behind her fingers. ‘It was a horrendous red-eye flight in tourist class. What with the turbulence and my obese neighbour snoring like a rampaging lioness and overflowing from her seat into mine, I slept hardly a wink.’
‘You poor girl!’ He stood up. ‘Never mind. Your problem is easily solved. Follow me.’ He led her up to the guest suite. When she saw the bed she smiled. ‘I have seen polo fields smaller than this.’
She was equally impressed with the bathroom. He led her back into the main bedroom and told her, ‘The dressing gowns are in the wardrobe. Take your pick, then lock the door and say farewell to this cruel world for as long as it takes.’
He left her to it and returned to his study. He settled down in front of his computer, and started on the first page of ‘The Poisoned Seed’.
*
Karl Pieter Kurtmeyer was born in Düsseldorf in the Rhine-Ruhr region of western Germany.
His father was Heinrich Eberhard Kurtmeyer. During World War II Heinrich had been a junior officer in the Nazi Gestapo. In the final days of hostilities he was captured by the British forces liberating the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Heinrich was sentenced by a war crimes court to four years imprisonment for his part in the atrocities committed in the death camp.
On his release from prison he returned to his home town of Düsseldorf and found work in a nightclub called Die Lustige Witwe or The Merry Widow. He was a good-looking young man with cultivated manners. He was also a shrewd businessman and hard worker. He bought the nightclub on the death of the original owner from the widow. From these meagre beginnings he had built up a chain of clubs across Germany, and he was soon a wealthy man.
He employed a young dancer in the original Düsseldorf club. Her name was Marlene Imelda Kleinschmidt. She was bright, vivacious and beautiful. She was nineteen years of age when Heinrich Kurtmeyer married her. The following year she gave birth to a boy who they named Karl Pieter. Eighteen months after the birth of his son, Heinrich Eberhard Kurtmeyer succumbed to cancer of the colon. It was a demise almost as unpleasant as the ones he had meted out to the Jewish men, women and children in the death camp.
Marlene Imelda found herself widowed at the ripe old age of twenty-one years.
When the assessors came in to evaluate Heinrich’s estate for tax purposes they discovered that he had another secret vice, quite apart from that of slaughtering defenceless Jews: he had been a compulsive gambler. Contrary to what most people i
n Düsseldorf believed, Heinrich was not a wealthy man. He had frittered away his substance. Marlene Imelda and her infant son were left almost destitute.
However she was young, beautiful and resourceful. She knew where the money was. She emigrated to the United States of America and within months of her arrival she had found employment as a secretarial assistant with a fledgling oil exploration company based in Houston.
The founder and owner of the company was a man named Henry Bannock. He was a handsome, rumbustious and larger-than-life character. In appearance he resembled John Wayne with a touch of Burt Lancaster. In his youth he had flown F-86 Sabre Jets in Korea and was officially credited with six kills. Later in Alaska he had run his own charter company which he named Bannock Air. He had flown a great deal for the big oil exploration companies and in the course of business he met many of the top executives. They taught him the ropes and gave him entrée to the oil world. Soon he had acquired several drilling concessions of his own. Shortly before Marlene Imelda came to work for Bannock Oil he had brought in his first field on the Alaskan North Slope, so he was already a multimillionaire.
Marlene was in her twenties and even more beautiful than she had been at age nineteen when she met Heinrich. She knew how to please a man both in bed and out. She pleased Henry Bannock inordinately. The fact that she had a young son made her even more desirable to him.
Karl Pieter Kurtmeyer took after his mother. If anything he was even better-looking than she was. He had thick blond hair, a strong jawline and a slight epicanthic fold to his eyelids, which gave him a mysterious and thoughtful air. This minor imperfection seemed to emphasize the perfection of his other features.
Karl was intelligent and articulate. Even at this tender age he already spoke Spanish, French, German and English. His school grades were consistently A level. Henry was impressed by good-looking people who were also clever and compliant. Like his own mother, Karl was all those things.
When Henry Bannock married Marlene Imelda he formally adopted Karl and changed his name to Carl Peter Bannock, dropping the Teutonic spelling of his given names. Henry called in several markers to get Carl a place in St Michael’s Elementary, one of the most prestigious prep schools in the state of Texas. There Carl flourished. He was always one of the top three scholars in his class, and he played football and basketball for the school teams.
At home, Marlene Imelda proved that Henry was not infertile, as was rumoured by his many enemies. Within a short time of the wedding she gave birth to a seven-pound daughter. Like her mother, Sacha Jean was an exceptional beauty. She was also a gentle and sensitive child, and musically gifted. She started learning the piano at the age of three and by the age of seven she could play even the most technically challenging compositions in the standard classical repertoire, including Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.
She doted on her big brother, Carl.
Sacha was almost nine years of age when Carl forced fully penetrative sex on her. He had been grooming her for this over the previous six months by inducing her to fondle his genitals when they were alone. Carl was thirteen years old and precociously sexually developed. He taught Sacha how to manipulate his penis, holding her hand onto his organ and moving it back and forth until he ejaculated. He was patient and kind to her, telling her how much he loved her and what a clever and pretty girl his sister was and how much she pleased him. In her innocence Sacha looked upon these games as a delightful secret between the two of them, and she dearly loved secrets.
Carl’s favourite place to be intimate with her was in the changing rooms of the swimming pool in the ten-acre gardens of the family home. The best time was when their father was away on business in Alaska and their mother was resting after lunch. Marlene had fallen into the habit of taking three or more gin-and-lime cocktails at lunchtime, and her gait was unsteady when she stood up from the table and headed for the bedroom. That was when Carl took Sacha for a swim.
The first time that Carl ejaculated into her mouth Sacha was taken fully aback. She was disgusted by the taste of it and she cried and told him she was not going to play any more. He kissed her and said that if she didn’t love him it was all right, but he still loved her. However, he didn’t act as if he still loved her. For weeks thereafter he was very distant and he said spiteful and hateful things to her. In the end she was the one who suggested they should have a swim together after lunch. Soon enough she became accustomed to the taste. But then sometimes he pushed it too far down her throat and she cried herself to sleep at night. The only thing that mattered was that her brother loved her again.
Then one afternoon he made her take off her panties. He sat on the bench in front of her and he touched her down there. She closed her eyes and tried not to wince and pull away when he put his finger inside her. In the end he stood up and squirted onto her tummy. Afterwards he told her she was disgusting and she must wipe herself clean and not tell anyone. Then he left her without another word.
She refused her dinner that evening and her mother gave her two tablespoons of castor oil and kept her back from school the next day.
Three weeks before her ninth birthday party Carl came to Sacha’s bedroom when the house was quiet. He took off his pyjamas pants and climbed into bed with her. When he pushed his thing inside her it was so painful that she screamed, but nobody heard her.
After he had gone back to his own room she found that she was bleeding. She sat on the toilet and listened to her blood dripping into the pan. She was too ashamed of herself to call her mother. In any event she knew that her mother was locked in her bedroom and would never answer her knocking or pleading.
After a while the bleeding stopped and she wadded her nightdress up between her legs. She hobbled down to the end of the passage and found a clean sheet in the linen cupboard to replace the bloody one. Then she crept down to the deserted kitchen and stuffed her soiled pyjamas and the bloody sheet into a garbage bag and put it into the dustbin.
The next day in school she knew everybody was staring at her. She was usually one of the stars of the mathematics class but now she could not work out the answers to any of the questions. Her teacher called her after the class ended and berated her for her poor attempt.
‘What is wrong with you, Sacha?’ She threw the paper down on the desk in front of her. ‘This isn’t like you at all.’
Sacha could not reply. She went home and stole a razor blade from her father’s bathroom. Then she went to her own bathroom and slit both her wrists. One of the housemaids saw the blood coming from under the door and she ran screaming to the kitchen.
The servants broke open the door and found her. They called an ambulance. The cuts she had inflicted on her wrists were not deep enough to be life threatening.
Marlene kept her out of school for three weeks. When she returned Sacha told her music teacher that she was not going to play the piano ever again. She refused to attend the musical evening that was scheduled for the following Friday. A few days later she hacked off all her hair with a pair of scissors and clawed her face until it bled, convinced she was breaking out in acne pustules. Her features grew haggard and her manner furtive and nervous. Her eyes were haunted. She was no longer beautiful. Carl told her she was ugly and he didn’t want to play with her any more.
A month later she ran away from home. The police picked her up eight days later in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and took her home. A few months later she ran away again. This time she made it as far as California before the police caught up with her.
When she was sent back to school she set fire to the music rooms. The fire destroyed the entire music wing, with damage amounting to several millions of dollars.
After a prolonged and thorough medical examination Sacha was sent to the Nine Elms Psychiatric Hospital in Pasadena, where she began a long and difficult treatment and rehabilitation programme. Never once did anyone suspect that she had suffered abuse of any kind. It seemed that Sacha herself had completely expunged the memory of it from her mind.
When the family were allowed to visit her for the first time Sacha was sullen and withdrawn. She replied to questions from her parents with animal-like grunts and mumbled monosyllables. She did not recognize her once-beloved brother.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello to Carl Peter, darling?’ her mother chided her gently. Sacha averted her eyes.
‘But he is your own brother, darling Sacha,’ Marlene insisted. Sacha showed a small spark of animation.
‘I don’t have a brother,’ she said, using full sentences for the first time but still without raising her eyes from the floor. ‘I don’t want a brother.’
Henry Bannock stood up at this, and he said to his wife, ‘I think that Carl and I are doing more harm than good by being here. We will wait for you in the car park.’ He jerked his head at Carl. ‘Come on, my boy. Let’s get out of here.’
Henry abhorred being presented with misery and suffering in any form, particularly if it was related to him personally. He simply closed his mind to it, disassociated himself from it and walked away. Neither he nor Carl Peter ever returned to Nine Elms.
On the other hand, Marlene never missed a visit to her daughter. Every Sunday morning the chauffeur drove her a hundred miles to Pasadena and she spent the rest of the day chattering to her silent and withdrawn child. On one visit she took along a cassette of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos to play to Sacha on her portable tape recorder, hoping that it might reawaken Sacha’s musical talents.