The Book of Secrets

LXXVII

Oberwinter

A creak sounded from the stair. Nick and Emily froze. Outside, the wind blew snow off the rooftop and rattled the windows in their frames. They waited for the creak to come again, to grow into the tread of mounting footsteps.

Nothing came.

‘Let’s get out of here.’ Nick put the toilet roll back and headed out. He locked the door behind him and didn’t look back. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened in there.

They tiptoed down the stairs as quickly as they dared. On the first-floor landing, Nick heard the murmur of a voice from below.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he whispered. ‘They didn’t rip that room apart without the owner noticing.’

‘Agreed. But where can we go?’

‘Anywhere.’

The owner was in the lobby, leaning on the counter and muttering into the phone. He flapped his hand to wave them down, but between the cigarette in his mouth and the receiver in front of it he couldn’t manage more than a grunt.

Nick dropped the key on the counter and breezed through the front door.

‘We’re just going out to get some dinner. We’ll be back in about an hour.’

They found a weinstube in a house off the main square, overlooking the river and the railroad tracks. It was a cosy place, with bookshelves on the walls and old wine bottles on the windowsills. The waiter tried to sit them by the front window, but Nick insisted on a table at the back, tucked behind an antique wine press. He wasn’t sure who he thought he was hiding from. It was probably the only place in Oberwinter that was open.

He hadn’t planned to stay long, but the moment he saw the menu he realised he was starving. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. They ordered beef stew and spätzle noodles. When the waiter disappeared into the kitchen, Nick pulled the pieces of paper out of his pocket and smoothed them on the tablecloth.

‘Is that Gillian’s writing?’

Nick nodded. His tired mind tried to take in what was written on the creased sheets of notepaper. It was like a replay of his own recent past. Names that would have meant nothing a week ago leaped out at him, jarring memories that had barely had time to form. ‘Vandevelde – B42 ink??? Other MPC images in G. Bible? 08.32 Paris arr. Strasbourg 14.29. Call Simon. Is bear key? ’

The notes covered three sides of the paper, scrawled at various times and in different-coloured inks, crossed out and circled, connected by arrows that branched out into new questions. A palimpsest of the last three weeks of Gillian’s life.

On the fourth side they found something different. There was little writing; instead, a sketch that looked like the plan of a building. It was roughly pentagonal, with irregular sides and angular projections. A dotted line led to one of the corners, a red X inked heavily where it met the building. Gillian had written ‘Kloster Mariannenbad ’ in the margin beside it, and a brief list below:

rope

shovel

head lamp

bolt cutters

gun?

‘Kloster means monastery,’ said Nick.

‘That would fit with the picture Atheldene sent us.’

The waiter came out of the kitchen and laid two steaming plates of food on the table. Nick covered the paper with his sleeve.

‘Can I get you anything else?’

Emily tried a smile. Her face was drawn, her mouth tight with exhaustion. ‘We were just talking – we wondered if you knew – have you heard of a place called Kloster Marianenbad near here?’

‘In Oberwinter?’

‘A monastery.’

An apologetic shake of his head. ‘I do not know this place.’

‘What about castles?’

He laughed. ‘This is the romantic Rhine. We have here castles every five hundred metres.’

‘Any nearby? Any that aren’t on the tourist trail?’

The waiter thought for a moment. ‘We have the Castle Wolfsschlucht. But this is closed.’

‘You mean for the winter?’

‘For all of the time. Private. I think it is owned by an American.’

He put his hands on his hips and scanned the bookshelves over their heads. Nick and Emily waited. Eventually he reached down an old book with a frayed cloth cover and dog-eared pages. Beautiful Oberwinter, said the title.

‘If you want to know more, maybe this has something.’ Nick thumbed through the book while Emily wolfed down her food.

‘Here we are: “Castle Wolfsschlucht”.’

In medieval times, the building was a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Tradition says it was built on the site of a local shrine, though this has never been proved. The monastery was obedient to the Archdiocese of Mainz, with one of the most famous libraries in Germany. Most such foundations were dissolved during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, but the monastery petitioned the Emperor Charles V and was declared reichsfrei, independent of all local authority and answerable directly to the emperor himself. Residents of Oberwinter are still proud of the tradition that the pope himself interceded with the emperor on behalf of their monks, promising Charles support in his war against France in return.

The monastery was finally dissolved by the Secularisation Law of 1802. The title passed to the Counts of Schoenberg, who converted the buildings into a castle. In fact, the monastery was perfectly suited to this role. It is built on top of a steep rock overlooking the Rhine, surrounded on three sides by the Wolfsschlucht or ‘wolf’s gorge’. When the armies of Napoleon marched through the Rhineland, they did not even attempt to capture it.

In 1947 the castle was sold to an anonymous benefactor. It is closed to the public, but one can still glimpse it from the river and wonder what history lies behind those ancient walls.

‘The last sentence sounds rather plaintive,’ Emily said. ‘As if the author was almost as curious as we are.’

‘It is a bad place.’ The waiter had returned with another basket of bread. He lowered his voice, and looked around the empty restaurant for theatrical effect. ‘My grandfather has once told me that in the wartime, the Nazis are going there often. Always in the middle of the night. He said that even maybe the Reichsminister, Joseph Goebbels, has been there.’

Nick was about to ask him how Goebbels had got in, but at that moment a woman’s voice called the waiter into the kitchen. He excused himself. Nick looked back to the book.

‘There’s a picture.’

He spread the book flat on the table and turned it to face Emily. The image was dark and vivid: a lonely castle perched on an outcrop in a gorge between two mountains. Heavy lines scratched out a brooding sky, while a black river boiled in the foreground.

‘Is that where we have to go?’

‘If that’s where Gillian went.’ Nick laid the sketch map beside it. It was hard to see in the woodcut exactly how the castle was laid out, but there were two turrets that might correspond to the corners of Gillian’s pentagon, and a squat tower rising from the back that could be the keep. He rotated the drawing until it looked right.

‘Must be it.’

‘It certainly sounds as though the Pope went to a lot of trouble to keep it safe. There must be something in there he didn’t want the Protestant reformers finding.’

‘Or the Nazis.’

Emily studied the plan. ‘So how did she get in?’

‘This tower here’ – Nick indicated the X – ‘around the back. Gillian must have found an entrance there.’

Emily read over Gillian’s list in the margin. ‘Or tunnelled her way in with her spade and her head torch.’

‘Maybe we can improvise.’ Nick signalled for the bill. When the waiter came, he said, ‘Our car’s stuck in the snow just outside town. I don’t suppose you have a shovel and a piece of rope we could borrow to get ourselves out?’

The waiter looked surprised, but he was too polite to question Nick’s priorities. He went outside, and came back a few minutes later with a garden spade, a torch and a length of blue nylon rope.

‘Perfect.’

Nick paid the bill with the last of his euros. He felt bad that he couldn’t leave a better tip. He put on his coat and picked up the spade.

The waiter held open the door as they left. Snowflakes blew across the floor on a gust of wind; the glasses on the table rattled. The waiter peered out into the dark street.

‘Good luck.’