“It’s an Immigration matter.”
“You are lying to me, Mr. Jones.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. My brother is not coming here. And if he wished to, he would not have problems with British Immigration. He is a West German citizen. You are a policeman?”
“No, Mrs. Farquarson. But I am a friend of Bruno. Over many years. We go back a long way together. I ask you to believe that because that is true.”
“He is in trouble, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m trying to help him, if I can. It’s not easy.”
“What has he done?”
“It looks as if he has killed his mistress in Cologne. And he has run away. He got a message to me. He said he didn’t mean to do it. Then he disappeared.”
She rose and walked to the window, staring out at the late summer foliage of Primrose Hill Park.
“Oh, Bruno. You fool. Poor, frightened Bruno.”
She turned and faced him.
“There was a man from the German Embassy here yesterday morning. He had called before, on Wednesday evening while I was out. He did not tell me what you have—just asked if Bruno had been in touch. He hasn’t. I can’t help you, either, Mr. Jones. You probably know more than I do, if he got a message to you. Do you know where he has gone?”
“That’s the problem. I think he has crossed the border. Gone into East Germany. Somewhere in the Weimar area. Perhaps to stay with friends. But so far as I know, he’s never been near Weimar in his life.”
She looked puzzled. “What do you mean? He lived there for two years.”
McCready kept a straight face, but he was stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He never told me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He hated it there. They were the unhappiest two years of his life. He never talked about it.”
“I thought your family was Hamburg, born and raised.”
“We were, until 1943. That was when Hamburg was destroyed by the RAF. The great Fire Storm bombing. You have heard of it?”
McCready nodded. The Royal Air Force had bombed the center of Hamburg with such intensity that raging fires started. The fires had sucked oxygen in from the outer suburbs until a raging inferno was created in which temperatures rose so high that steel ran like water and concrete exploded like bombs. The inferno had swept through the city, vaporizing everything in its path.
“Bruno and I were orphaned that night.” She paused and stared, not at McCready but past him, seeing again the flames raging through the city where she had been born, consuming to cinders her parents, her friends, her schoolmates, the landmarks of her life. After several seconds she snapped out of her reverie and resumed talking in that quiet voice with the remaining hint of an original German accent.
“When it was over, the authorities took charge of us and we were evacuated. I was fifteen, Bruno was ten. We were split up. I was billeted with a family outside Göttingen. Bruno was sent to stay with a farmer near Weimar. After the war, I searched for him, and the Red Cross helped to reunite us. We returned to Hamburg. I looked
after him. But he hardly ever talked about Weimar. I began to work in the British NAAFI canteen, to keep Bruno. Times were very hard, you know.”
McCready nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was the war. Anyway, in 1947 I met a British sergeant. Robert Farquarson. We married and came to live here. He died eight years ago. When Robert and I left Hamburg in 1948, Bruno secured a residential apprenticeship with a firm of optical lens makers. I have only seen him three or four times since then, and not in the past ten years.”
“You told that to the man from the embassy?”
“Herr Fietzau? No, he did not ask about Bruno’s childhood. But I told the lady.”
“The lady?”
“She left only an hour ago. The one from the Pensions Department.”
“Pensions?”