Black Roses Read online

  Black Roses

  By the same author

  The Weighing of the Heart

  Patrimony

  The Shell House

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Thynker Ltd 2013

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Jane Thynne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN: 978-1-84983-983-9

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-84983-984-6

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-84983-986-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  For Philip, with love

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Prologue

  Berlin, April 1933

  The first thing Clara noticed was that it was her own shoes the girl was wearing. They were red ankle straps from Bally, with shaped heels, almond cutouts and rhinestone buckles. That is, one of them was visible, a bright splash of scarlet against the grey, rain-mottled pavement outside the apartment block in Prenzlauer Berg. It protruded from a cluster of people – two men and a hausfrau – joined by the old woman who looked after the apartment block opposite, each displaying the demeanour that was increasingly common in the city then, torn between wanting to act and an unwillingness to get involved. Clara’s recognition of the shoes was followed a fraction of a second later by a feeling of dread, though she already knew what she was about to find, and a dark fear that spread in her like ink through water. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, as if all the oxygen had been squeezed out of the air, and then she pushed her way past the onlookers and stared down at the girl who lay on the street below.

  She had an oval face with fine features. Her eyes were wide open, as if in amazement, and her mouth, outlined in Tabu’s deep crimson, was a smudged bloom on the skin’s unnatural pallor. The lips were slightly parted, and dark strands of hair fell carelessly across her face. She wore a tea-dress scattered with pink and yellow flowers and the tops of her stockings could be seen where the material had ridden up. One leg was bent at an awkward angle and the arms were thrown wide. Someone had propped her up on a coat, which was rapidly blackening as blood pooled from the back of her head. She looked like a frail, exotic bird, fallen to the ground on its route to the sun.

  Clara felt a violent trembling start up within her. Though she tried to control it, her entire body was shaking.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She fell,’ said one man.

  ‘She jumped,’ said the other, gesturing towards the window of the tenement building that hung open five floors above them. Everyone followed his gaze. They had expressions of curiosity, rather than shock. Suicides, deaths, girls falling out of the sky, were not the rarity they used to be round here.

  Clara took another look at the face. The skin was milky, already turning to wax as the blood contracted deep into the veins. But it was unmarked. She must have landed on her back. The smashed part of the skull was underneath, where you couldn’t see, but her face was still perfect, still the same.

  Clara knelt down beside her.

  ‘She’s dead,’ one of the men said.

  ‘She’s breathing,’ said the old woman.

  With the tenderest of touches, Clara took the girl’s hand in hers and whispered, ‘Can you hear me?’

  There was the faintest pressure against her wrist.

  ‘You’ll be all right. We’re calling an ambulance.’

  ‘We called the police,’ said the second man.

  A tiny flicker. The girl’s eyes shifted, as though she was trying to focus. A line of blood slid from her ear.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Clara, stroking her hair, trying her hardest not to cry. Blood leaked onto the hem of her polka-dot dress. She brushed rain from her cheek. ‘Don’t worry.’

  There was a movement in the eyes.

  ‘I promise you.’

  A soft squeeze.

  ‘I promise. I’ll make sure he’s all right.’

  A tear rolled down the side of the girl’s face. Clara felt the infinitesimal pressure of the hand in hers, then nothing. The girl’s eyelids fluttered. Life slid from her face as softly as a petal falling to the ground.

  Standing up, Clara entered the apartment building, ran past the lift and up the dimly lit stone stairwell to the fifth floor. The door, which was sooty, with badly peeling paint, stood ajar. Breath ripping her lungs, her heart jolting with fear, she pushed it and entered.

  The apartment was empty, its atmosphere brooding and heavy, as though some recent, turbulent emotion was still imprinted on the air. Otherwise it was exactly as she remembered it. The wallpaper was patterned with muddy florals. It was furnished as cheaply as possible with just a few pieces of battered wooden furniture, a desk that doubled as a dining table, with a cane-bottomed chair, an old armchair with horsehair sticking through its arms, and a raddled wool rug in front of the gas fire.

  ‘Welcome to my penthouse! The most prestigious address in Prenzlauer Berg!’

  Despite the d
rabness, there had been a defiant attempt to add a bright, personal touch. A pink feather boa was draped over the mantle and photo-cards of film stars were fixed with drawing pins to the walls. Through the door she could see the bedroom, with a curtained-off bathroom, and a basin into which a tap dripped. The narrow little bed was made, and a fur-collared coat laid on it, as though ready for a night out. A bottle of Scandal by Lanvin, almost empty, stood on the dressing table.

  She heard a sound and turned. From the street, cars were approaching and there was the screech of braking. She guessed she had thirty seconds, a minute at most. She needed to focus. On the table there was a key and a cup of coffee. She felt it; it was still warm. Beside it was a pile of papers. The window gaped open and for a split second the girl’s body floated in Clara’s mind, suspended in the warm wind, caressed in its twisting currents, until a draught sent the papers crashing to the floor and on the pavement outside she was dead.

  She reached down to pick up the papers and found a postcard, a black-and white portrait of Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel. Everyone knew that image. Leg crooked up on a chair, deep lids like seductive shutters over the dark eyes, exuding a haughty sexuality. It was the photograph you found everywhere, in kiosks, in shops, on any street corner. Clara scrutinized it carefully, then slipped it and the key into the pocket of her navy-blue Jaeger jacket. Outside a door slammed. For a second she was paralysed, prickling with sweaty fear, then she turned quickly and left the room.

  Her heels echoing like gunshots down the stairwell, she slowed to a walk as she exited the front door and headed up the street, steeling herself not to look back at the people gathering around the body, or the policemen who were climbing out of their car and marching officiously towards them. She made her way back up Rykestrasse, trying to focus on the tall apartments, their wedding-cake stucco decorated with scrolly, soot-blackened curlicues, the water tower looming above them at the end of the road like some old castle turret plucked up and dumped there, a medieval absurdity in a city that was getting a fresh taste for the medieval.

  Clara’s head swam and she made herself concentrate on her breathing. Her breaths were fast and shallow with shock. She tried clenching and unclenching her fists inside her pockets, a technique that had always worked before, but nothing could obliterate the picture from her mind. The dead girl, the blood like spilt ink, the frivolous scarlet shoes. Grief, anger and incomprehension struggled within her, but now was not the time to show her feelings. She walked quickly, with her head down, and if anyone saw the tears coursing down her face she would say it was the rain. It had been raining all day in Berlin, on the dour government blocks of Wilhelmstrasse, on the smoke-blackened hulk of the Reichstag, on the canals and churches, factories, breweries and graveyards. And further out, beyond the city, watering the deep forest of the Grunewald and rolling like smoke across the placid, grey waters of Krumme Lanke.

  A police car passed her in a blade of sound, and instinctively she turned her face to the newspaper kiosk at the entrance to the U-Bahn. This was a city that loved newspapers, even if it didn’t love the news they brought. They were bulging out of their racks, the Morgenpost, the Tageblatt, the B.Z.am Mittag. There were probably more titles here than any other city in the world. Next to them on the racks were postcards of devoted Germans, often alongside their devoted pets, staring doggedly up at the figure of their Leader.

  She found herself staring at the title directly in front of her. On the cover was the image of an intent, swarthy man, his face dramatically half-hidden in shadow. When she could get her eyes to focus, she realized it was a horoscope paper. The Hanussen Magazin. Everyone in Berlin read their horoscope now. Whenever you passed a newsstand you would see them stuffed with astrology titles: Germany’s Future; The Seer; New Germany. It was as if people couldn’t get enough of them. In the back pages were classified advertisements for palm readers who could tell your fortune for a few marks. If you wanted to take it further there was no end of little rooms and offices where an old woman would take your palm in her pudgy fingers or read your cards. The theatres were full of variety acts where people allowed themselves to be hypnotized and characters in Eastern dress would profess to read your mind. It seemed everyone in Berlin wanted to know what was coming, even if they guessed it was not going to be good news.

  But who could blame them? Who could have foreseen how quickly things would change? Even for Clara herself. When she arrived in Berlin she could never have imagined what would happen in such a short space of time. She could never have known how it would transform her. All that mattered now, though, was that no one else should know.

  Chapter One

  For a wedding, it would have made a good funeral. The bride wore black, a sweeping, lacy gown concealing, either by chance or design, the groom’s deformed foot. It was probably deliberate, given that this was a groom who liked to leave very little to chance. It was a picture of National Socialist joy, if your idea of happiness was ducking through an honour guard of stiff-armed storm troopers with faces like a firing squad. Scraps of winter snow dusted the country churchyard and behind the happy couple trailed a fair-haired boy of about eleven, the bride’s son by her first marriage, dressed in the uniform of the Hitler Jugend, with a look of dazed trepidation. Perhaps he was wondering what his new life would be like, under the steely wing of a stepfather with towering political ambitions, or perhaps he was dreading demotion to the second most important man in his mother’s life. A little further behind, wearing a trilby and an enigmatic smile, came the honoured guest.

  The wedding photograph had pride of place in the bookshop window, wrapped in a riot of ribbons, black, white and scarlet, with little twin flags bearing swastikas on each side. But no passers-by stopped to share the nuptial joy. The crowd surged on, intent on business or shopping, hats clamped on their heads and collars raised against a sharp March wind. Their faces were as sober as the grey Prussian façades of the buildings around them. They didn’t give the bookshop a second glance, any more than they did the displays of Messmer Tee and Machwitz Kaffee in the delicatessen, the cakes in the bakery, or the tall blue jars in the apothecary. Two women passed, complaining about their office manager. A woman loudly upbraided her son, ‘Your father will have something to say about that!’ The ground shuddered as a tram thundered past, sending a shower of blue sparks from the cables above it. Standing on the street, Clara Vine wondered if the febrile atmosphere that everyone in London had talked about really was swirling around this city. Because if so, these stolid citizens were doing their best to ignore it.

  It had taken her twenty-four hours to reach Berlin. From London she had caught the boat train to the Hook of Holland, toasting her own daring with a glass of Liebfraumilch in the Pullman car as she tried to accept the enormity of what she had just done. Standing on the deck of the ferry from Harwich, staring down at the churning sea, which made her feel slightly sick, tasting the flecks of salt foam on her face, she wondered if anyone was missing her yet. She checked again the scrap of paper in her crocodile-leather purse.

  Max Townsend

  Film producer

  From Holland Clara had changed to the Berlin Express train and watched the low, flat expanse of the Netherlands and Belgium pass through a haze of steam. Children going to school, cows waiting at a gate, villages passing like postcards. She rationed herself to one small square at a time from the bar of Cadbury’s chocolate that she had bought on the platform at Liverpool Street and tried to read the copy of Dusty Answer she had brought, but bubbling excitement made it impossible for her to concentrate for long. She kept looking up and losing her place and staring out at the endless, corrugated fields bisected by poplars spiking the immense sky. Everything was coming into leaf, draping the landscape in luminous green. In the end she gave up and focused on an old childhood game, analysing every member of the carriage around her as surreptitiously as possible, committing each detail to memory and constructing a story for them. By dint of peering into the little re
ctangular mirror above the seat, she fixed on the elderly man opposite in a Loden overcoat. His clothes were quietly expensive and his face was intelligent. Surely he must be a tycoon art dealer off to snap up a Titian. The woman on the seat opposite in hairy purple tweed with a badly mended hare lip, became a governess for some exiled Russian royals. The young man with the greased slick of hair falling forward into his eyes, who kept trying to meet her glance, was clearly, from his sketchbook and metal ruler, an architecture student, off to study in Berlin.

  Finally, late afternoon, with the couplings screeching and the whistle sounding up into the cavernous glass vault, they reached the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. In a cloud of steam and banging doors Clara passed along the platform, through the mêlée of porters in green jackets unloading the bags. Her papers were checked at the gate by a policeman in a high hat with a tight chin strap and a gleaming brass badge. Then she stepped onto the street outside.

  Friedrichstrasse was busy with big cream buses and the iron clanking of braking trams. Dingy buildings crowded out the sky and the air was full of the noise of construction workers hammering at the façade of a block opposite, punctuated by the shouts of a man with a pretzel cart.

  Consulting the pocket map in her Baedeker, Clara searched for the spot where Friedrichstrasse intersected with Unter den Linden. A jolt of anxiety assailed her as she realised she was, really, alone in a foreign city. What would her father say when he discovered her note? “I’ve been offered a part in Berlin . . .” Berlin! A city she knew absolutely nothing about. Almost her entire image of Berlin came from Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in Grand Hotel.

  But even as she thought this, another feeling came to her. A strange exhilaration that she had travelled beyond the map of her old world, the safe confines of London squares and streets, of English houses and cups of tea, guttering gas fires and red buses, of telephone boxes and holidays on chilly Cornish beaches. Of pinched faces and pursed lips. She had stepped into a place where she was free to reinvent herself and her entire identity. Here she needn’t any longer be Clara Vine, from 39 Ponsonby Terrace, London SW1, the daughter of Sir Ronald, the sister of Angela and Kenneth, connected by that intricate web of relations and background that meant people could classify you instantly, like an insect or a stamp. The world had widened before her and it was both frightening and intoxicating, like the moment swimming in the sea when the sand shelves beneath your feet and you strike out into fresh, uncharted waters.