The Mask of Troy

11

T he jeep accelerated past the gate and down the lane through the pine forest, the Red Cross lorry following close behind. Mayne braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. After about two hundred yards the trees ended abruptly at a clearing about the size of a football pitch. About eighty yards ahead of them was a row of single-storey wooden buildings like army barracks, and at right angles to that another line of huts extended along the far right side of the clearing, obscured in smoke and haze. The lane went across the clearing through the line of huts and disappeared to the right, towards the far buildings. Two British soldiers with rifles and white kerchiefs over their faces stood guard where the lane passed between the huts. Mayne saw other forms milling about, as if in slow motion. Smoke was rising from several points on the open ground beyond the buildings, the smoke he had seen outside forming a pall over the forest. In the still morning air it lingered like a miasma over the camp, cloaking it, blotting out the sky. There seemed to be no noise, as if that too had been stifled. They drove forward at walking pace through a bare landscape, denatured, all vibrancy gone, only pastel shades of green and blue and brown remaining: the colours of decay, colours that matched the smell. It was a landscape of death.

They passed a man sitting with his back to a tree stump, one arm extended, rested on his knee, as if begging. He was wearing the tattered remnants of a blue striped uniform, like a patient’s hospital garb, smeared brown. His hair was cut to stubble and his face was emaciated: his skin taut, yellowish-grey, his eyes sunk deep in hollow sockets. Mayne stared at him. There were no eyes in the sockets. The man was long dead. He realized what the other piles of rags lying all around were, little clumps of decay all over the clearing. He stared ahead. They drove past the guards between the huts and veered right, then drew to a halt behind a line of soldiers with their backs to them, holding rifles at the ready with fixed bayonets.

Lewes switched off the ignition. Mayne could hear no talking, only a dull thumping sound. Through the line of soldiers he saw other people, around an open-backed truck. To the left a large pit had been dug in the ground, the size of a swimming pool. The pit was half filled with a grotesque entanglement of bodies, most of them naked, some with rags still clinging to them, a mass of skeletal limbs and wizened heads, hundreds of them. Two men in jackets with SS insignia were flinging in the bodies, one holding the fleshless ankles and the other the wrists, with the shaven heads lolling in between. Another SS man was in the pit, and another was on the back of the lorry, pushing the bodies to the rear to be taken off. Beyond the truck was a group of well-dressed men, women and children, evidently local civilians brought in to watch. The adults stood with arms folded, impassive, or too shocked to respond. One little girl was crying. Mayne and Cameron got out of the jeep. Lewes took out his unfinished cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply. He caught the eye of the nearest soldier, jerked a thumb at the bayonet on his rifle, then gestured at the SS men. ‘Why don’t you fuckin’ pig-stick ’em, mate?’

The soldier turned. His eyes were dull, and his skin seemed to have taken on the hue of the place. ‘Later, mate. Don’t you worry about that. Later.’

Mayne cleared his throat, trying to control his nausea. He turned to Cameron. His voice sounded muffled, distant. ‘These SS men, the guards. How on earth have they survived?’

‘We were amazed they were still here to surrender. But they’re arrogant and defiant. They seem to have no idea of the crimes they’ve committed. Utterly indoctrinated. For them, the Jews, the Slavs are all animals, and they don’t understand how we don’t see that too. They’re even rather proud of some they’ve kept alive, rich Jews that Hitler wanted kept as ransom to their families in the West. Like all gangsters, the Nazis were perfectly able to put profit before ideology. We’ve even got the commandant, an SS – Untersturmfuhrer. He’ll stand trial. It’s important we don’t kill them all. But there are others hiding in the forest, being hunted by the more able-bodied of the inmates, those who only arrived here in the last days. It’s a kind of ghastly no-man’s-land out there, as if the hell of this place is seeping out like an infectious disease. They especially loathe the SS-Helferin, the female auxiliaries. One of the women still at large is the Lagerfuhrerin, the camp leader. She seems to have been a particularly vile bully. They think she’s hiding in the woods. They want to rip her to pieces.’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Mayne muttered, looking around.

‘I just want them to get it over and done with. My main job now is dealing with the typhus. We need to get the inmates all back in the camp for scrubbing and delousing. If typhus spreads among the local population and then gets into the advancing Allied troops, it could seriously impede the war effort.’ He gestured at the SS men. ‘And there’s another factor. Doing this job, helping us, is also their survival strategy. The more enthusiastically they help, the less likely we are to take revenge. That’s what they think. And they’re probably right. With each hour that passes, the horror will become part of our landscape, will become almost mundane. It’s a ghastly thing to say, but true. It’s our own survival strategy, mentally. The emotions switch off. We get numbed to it, just as they did. And they know it’s a relief for us to have them do this appalling job.’

Mayne stared at the scene, mesmerized, watching the SS men repeat the same odious task over and over again. It was like a medieval image of hell, like one of the punishments set in Hades to those condemned forever to repeat the same task, like Tantalus or Sisyphus. Only here the SS were not tormented by what they were doing. They almost seemed to be relishing it. He swallowed hard, and felt a cloying sensation at the back of his throat. He knew it must be the reek of this place, but he seemed no longer able to smell it, as if it had overwhelmed his senses. He suddenly felt tremulous all over, barely able to stand. He forced himself to concentrate on the scene, abstractly. He had tried his hand at painting before the war. He thought how he might frame the image, how he might capture his emotional response, refracted through his own experience. He watched a naked body sail through the air, a woman, her arms flung out before her, like a diver plunging into a swimming pool. But she was dead, and the swimming pool was a pit of rotting bodies. Mayne shook his head. Here, art as metaphor, art as suggestion, had no place. Here it could only be reality. Stark, unadorned reality. He turned to Cameron. ‘Is anyone photographing this?’

Cameron shook his head. ‘This place is top secret until you chaps give it the all-clear. Only essential army and medical personnel are allowed in. Bringing in those civilians to watch was understandable, but burdens us even more. I warned the CO but he’d made his mind up. With the typhus risk, they’ll have to be interned, probably until the war is over. But the horror’s on record, if that’s what you’re asking. The Army and Film Photographic Unit is at Belsen. Come on. I haven’t got much time. I need to supervise setting up those hospital tents.’

Mayne and Lewes followed him. Stein was still in the jeep, ashen-faced, wiping his mouth. Mayne could see that he had been sick. He climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle and followed them around the far side of the pit, towards the other line of barracks. On the open ground in front lay smouldering piles of rags, so impregnated with human grease that they burned like funeral pyres. They passed the entrance to the first of the barrack buildings, and Mayne stopped to peer in. It took him a moment to adjust to the gloom. All he could hear was the droning of flies. The air was fetid, humid. He had completely lost his sense of smell. He tried to look through the squalor, to remember what Cameron had said. They are human beings. The body nearest to him was naked, a man, the skin like parchment, discoloured with filth. He was lying on his back, his abdomen grotesquely hollow, as if he had been disembowelled, as if the life had been sucked out of him by that hurricane force that had blown the other man against the barbed-wire fence, the first body Mayne had seen in this place. His arms were outstretched, touching two other bodies that were curled up, facing away in opposite directions. Mayne saw no backdrop, only darkness, and as he stood aside to let the light in, the bodies seemed almost luminous, like a painting of Christ on the Cross and the two thieves. He swayed slightly, nearly retching. These were not images of atonement. These people did not die for the sins of mankind. They died horribly because the world had let it happen. He clenched his hands. This was reality. Stark reality.

He pushed away from the barrack entrance and went to where the others were waiting for him, further along the building. Lewes offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. Stein turned to Cameron. ‘Before we go on. We know you’ve got to get back to your job. Is there anything more you can tell us? About what was going on in this place?’

Cameron stared hard at the ground, then looked up. Mayne noticed how pale he was, his eyes bloodshot. Cameron pointed to a long, low mound on the other side of the clearing, against the line of the pine forest. ‘Just a few things. Over there, that’s where they buried the Soviet prisoners back in ’41. Hundreds of them, used as labour to build this place, then shot.’

‘That’s four years ago,’ Mayne murmured. ‘Yet you say most of the Jews here arrived from Auschwitz only in the last few months. What was going on here before then?’

Cameron took a deep breath. ‘All right. It may as well be me who briefs you. This should have come from the intelligence officer with the AA regiment, but I couldn’t see him anywhere when we came through and I haven’t got time to hunt for him. At any rate, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you any more than I can. When we arrived, he interrogated the camp commandant, the SS-Untersturmfuhrer. I was there, as a witness. The IO was a newly commissioned replacement, been out here about as long as I have, with a smattering of Italian and fluent French. Wrong theatre, wrong war. Typical army foresight. I was the only German-speaker. I said I could spare ten minutes, no more. People were dying as we spoke. I’m supposed to be a doctor. A doctor .’ Cameron rubbed his forehead, suddenly distressed.

‘All right. Go on,’ Mayne said.

‘The commandant said it had been an Arbeitslager, a labour camp, for forestry workers. There are tracks leading off from the compound into the forest, and he said they were used by work parties. He said the wood-cutting operations wound down last year and after that the camp was used to house rich Jews, the ones Hitler intended to use as bargaining chips with the Allies. According to this man, they seriously believed they could use Jews in this way as recently as a few months ago, only shelving the idea when the Allies crossed the Rhine. God know what other desperate schemes the Nazis had prepared.’

‘That’s what we’re interested in,’ Mayne said. ‘Anything you say might help.’

‘All right.’ Cameron nodded, more collected now. ‘The SS-Untersturmfuhrer said that for this reason the camp had only ever housed a relatively small number of healthy inmates: first the fit young men selected for forestry work, and then the members of wealthy Jewish families, who were well fed and looked after. He claimed he only arrived as a replacement commandant six weeks ago. His job was to remove the remaining inmates and shut the camp down.’

‘Remove?’ Mayne said.

‘Remove. You can guess what that means. But we didn’t have time to pursue that. We wanted him to talk, not clam up. That’ll doubtless come up at his trial.’

‘So then what?’

‘He said they were totally unprepared for the influx of Jews marched here from Poland, and had no way of dealing with them. But take that with a pinch of salt. He seems to have had a full team of seasoned SS guards, including the female camp leader. It wasn’t chaos in here until the final week or so. Before then, they seemed perfectly able to inflict a systematic regime of brutality and sadism.’

‘The story seems plausible,’ Mayne said slowly. ‘But it doesn’t account for the extreme secrecy of the place, those signs outside warning of epidemics.’

Cameron nodded. ‘There’s something else. I spoke to one inmate who claimed to be the only survivor from the earlier phase of the camp, a man the SS used as a cook. Evidently quite a good one, a trained chef. He’d been here since at least ’42. He was some kind of common criminal, a Frenchman from Marseille, not a Jew. I didn’t think he was a particularly savoury character. He said that when the new commandant arrived, the SS shot everyone still in the camp, stripping them naked and throwing them into a ditch over where the Russians are buried. He said that with the new commandant and guards, none of them would have known of his cooking skills and given him special status, so he survived by hiding in the barracks and then commingling with the new influx from Auschwitz when they arrived, disguising himself as a Jew. They were all supposed to be kept alive for the work gangs in the cities, but that never happened. He was one of the healthier inmates when we arrived, and he went straight to me, evidently trusting the idea of a doctor more than a soldier to talk to.’

‘Why was he keen to talk?’ Stein asked.

‘The other inmates knew he wasn’t Jewish,’ Cameron replied. ‘They were suspicious of him. He knew they’d finger him. He wanted to assure us that he wasn’t a former SS guard disguising himself. He also thought that by showing us he wasn’t Jewish, we’d give him preferential treatment. A bit of an anti-Semite. He had short shrift from me there, I’m afraid.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘After I put him at the back of the queue for treatment, he disappeared. Gone into the forest and then headed south, I imagine. He claimed he was from Marseille, arrested by the Vichy police and then handed over to the Gestapo. Probably some kind of small-time gangster. A pretty wily character. I doubt whether you’ll find him again.’

‘So did he tell you? About this place?’

‘Before I went cold on him and he clammed up, he was eager to please. He said the Soviet prisoners in ’41 hadn’t just been used to make this clearing and build the camp. They’d also built something deep in the forest, involving a lot of concrete. It became a feared place. By the time our Frenchman arrived, rumour was that nobody who went there came out alive. He said that every few weeks a truck with a Gestapo motorcycle escort would appear at night at the camp entrance and disappear down a track into the forest. Once he watched the truck become enmired in mud and saw the people inside taken out. He said they were fit, healthy-looking young men and women, some with the Star of David on their sleeves, but of all different races and types – Slavs and Mongolians who were probably Soviet prisoners, fair-haired Nordic types, maybe from occupied Norway and Denmark, darker Mediterranean people, and North Africans like he grew up with in Marseille, perhaps French colonial prisoners of war.’

‘Almost as if they’d been chosen to represent every race the Nazis came across,’ Mayne murmured.

Cameron nodded. ‘The trucks would disappear into the forest, and a few days later there’d be activity at a deep pit beyond the mound where the Soviets had been shot. Our Frenchman said he knew there were fresh burials because of the lime, which was trucked into the camp in large quantities and taken over there. Huge amounts of lime, apparently, far more than you’d need unless the bodies were really contaminated, I thought.’

‘Contaminated with what?’ Mayne asked.

Cameron stared at him. ‘I don’t know. I dread to think. I’ll come to that. Our man also said an SS servant he’d befriended in the kitchen told him a story, about an SS guard who’d lost his temper with the Jews who were used to carry the lime. The guard had said that unless they worked harder, he’d send them to the Geherer in the forest and they’d suffer the fate of all the others who had gone in there. The Gestapo who were apparently always lurking around this camp got wind of his threat and took the guard away the next day, never to be seen again. Whatever was going on was clearly very top secret.’

‘ Geherer,’ Stein murmured. ‘That means bunker, storage room.’

Mayne started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly. His sense of smell had returned. The stench suddenly seemed to fill his stomach, and he nearly threw up. He swallowed hard. ‘ Geherer. A bunker. That sounds like a place for storing stolen art. What you suspected, Stein? That’s what we’re after. But it’s hard to tally with this man’s story, if it’s true. Perhaps the people he saw going in were just more construction labour, fit young men.’

‘And women,’ Cameron said.

Stein turned to them. ‘Two weeks ago, the US 8th Infantry Division stumbled on a sealed-up copper mine at Siegen, near Aachen. Inside they found a huge cache of art treasures, old masters by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, as well as priceless artefacts, including the crown of Charlemagne. Some were local cathedral treasures there for safekeeping during the war, but there was also art looted by the Nazis. It was just what the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section had been looking for. It was our breakthrough. That’s why I was rushed here. We believe there will be many more such places, dozens, hundreds, some of them in mines and other makeshift hiding places, others in purpose-built bunkers.’

‘What could hiding art conceivably have to do with this place? With all this horror?’ Cameron asked, gesturing around them, then letting his hand drop.

‘The all-encompassing ideology,’ Stein said grimly. ‘The looting of art, the destruction of art, is all part of the same ideology, the Nazi programme of hate. In 1907, Hitler was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. He was a competent artist, but lacked imagination. Two of the academicians were Jewish. Hitler never forgot that, nor the modernist art he never had the flair to create. When he came to power, he ridiculed it, destroyed it or had it sold out of Germany. Art was to be cleansed, just as race was to be cleansed. This – what we see around us, the horror this represents – was Hitler’s ultimate canvas. Absolute ideology. Absolute realism.’

Mayne looked at Stein. ‘And stolen antiquities?’

‘On the way in, you asked about Schliemann’s treasure,’ Stein replied, eyeing him shrewdly. ‘I said nothing. But now I think I owe you an explanation. Heinrich Himmler ran a department known as the Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. Before the war they went all round the world searching for evidence of Aryan roots, for the origins of the master race. In Europe they excavated sites they thought would reveal Germany’s heroic past. They became fixated on kings, on rulers who seemed to display the characteristics the Nazis most admired, absolute power, absolute ruthlessness. The emperors of Rome were a huge inspiration. But they also looked further back, to the semi-mythical kings of prehistory. Any artefacts associated with those kings had huge lustre in the eyes of the Nazis, and they would do anything to get hold of them, to glorify their heroes.’

‘So you’re saying that anything of that treasure from Schliemann would have huge cachet in Nazi eyes.’

Stein nodded. ‘Huge.’

‘It’s time we showed Cameron that drawing.’ Mayne took out a sheet of notepaper from his tunic pocket, unfolded it and held it for the others to see. The sheet had been torn from a German order book, with Gothic typeface at the top, and was thin, almost diaphanous, so the grey sky seemed to suffuse the drawing with depth, with dimensionality. The lines were precise, in crayon. In the centre were simple sketches of a man in a dark suit and a woman, gaily coloured. Between them was a little girl, holding hands with them. Below the adults were two words, Mama and Papa. But it was the object drawn above the child’s head that was so extraordinary. It was golden, luminous, with a silvery interior, and the child was looking up at it.

‘ Good God,’ Cameron whispered. ‘It’s a swastika. But a reverse swastika. And those colours.’ He looked up. ‘Why would a Jewish child draw that?’

Mayne looked at Stein, then at Cameron. ‘We assume it’s something she’s seen. What you were saying earlier. Somehow associated with trauma. But we’re putting two and two together and thinking it’s here, somehow associated with that bunker.’

Cameron looked at them. ‘Have you seen this before? This symbol?’

Stein spoke quickly. ‘We don’t know what it means. Not yet. But we’ve had it described to us, very exactly. The interrogation of a top Nazi official. The details are top secret. That official is no longer alive. That’s how deadly serious this is.’

Mayne stared at Stein, his mind in a whirl. It had been seen somewhere before. When should he tell Stein? About the treasure the old foreman had seen under the Mask of Agamemnon? A treasure that had become a dread symbol in Nazi Germany? Stein had spoken of the Nazi fervour for ancient mythical kings, for Aryan roots, and everyone knew their fetish for symbols and secrecy, for codes and decrees. Was that what had happened? Somehow, someone had found this treasure, symbol of Agamemnon, symbol of Troy, secreted away in Germany by Schliemann, and made it instead into a symbol of hate, of some hidden horror that Stein could not bring himself to tell, or did not even yet know. It was suddenly imperative that they find out more. Mayne turned to Cameron. ‘Where is the girl who drew this likely to be found, if she’s still alive?’

Cameron pointed. ‘That hut ahead. That’s where the children are, the Kinderbaracke. A Red Cross nurse is looking after them. Come on.’ He led them around the hut to a line of stretchers in the shade, facing away from the camp, away from the bodies and the horror. Each stretcher held a small form, beneath a blanket. Two British soldiers with Sten guns slung over their backs crouched among the children, offering cups of water. A woman got up from beside one stretcher, gently raised the blanket to cover the head of the still form beneath, then bowed her own head for a moment. She was wearing dungarees, gaiters and rubber boots like Cameron’s, with her hair tied in a scarf. She looked up as they approached. ‘Helen,’ Cameron said quietly, gesturing back at the two officers and Lewes. ‘Just a few questions. We won’t take up any of your time.’

Mayne saw that the nurse’s eyes were tired and grey like Cameron’s. She nodded, but remained where she was, turning away from the dead child to the one on the stretcher on the other side, holding the emaciated head in one hand and a cup in the other, dripping water into the open mouth. She put down the cup and gently raised the child’s left arm, showing a black smudge below the elbow. ‘That’s the Auschwitz tattoo,’ she said. ‘They all have it. Their parents are gone, murdered by the Nazis, in the Polish ghettos, in Krakow, Warsaw, in the death camps. According to the adult inmates we’ve spoken to, almost all of the children who arrived at Auschwitz were gassed immediately. These are the ones who survived selection. Some are Dutch children of Jewish families in the diamond trade, kept alive by the Nazis for ransom. Others are children who had arrived in Auschwitz before the gas chambers were built, and had made themselves useful in the camp. They somehow survived the march from Auschwitz a few months ago. We brought them here, away from the barracks, to get them away from the typhus.’

Mayne showed her the drawing. ‘Do you know who did this?’

She glanced at it. ‘Several of them have done drawings like that. It’s the first thing they draw when we give them crayons. Images of their parents. Sometimes on the railhead at Auschwitz, where the Nazi doctors separated parents and children. It’s as if…’ She paused, just as Cameron had done, at a loss for words. ‘It’s as if that moment lives with them for ever, frozen in time, as if all that’s happened afterwards is a nightmare. They want to wake up and go back. So they draw it, the last image of their parents. It’s as if liberation has allowed them to see an image of happiness that the survival instinct has denied them for so long, and they become fixated on it, see nothing else. It’s heartbreaking.’ She glanced at the picture. ‘Yes. That was the girl with the harp. She’s over there.’

They followed her gaze. About fifty yards away they saw a figure seated on a chair, with her back to them, in the middle of open ground. Mayne could see her shorn head and thin neck, but not her face. She was wearing an outsized army shirt and trousers, evidently given to her by the soldiers, but she was barefoot. Her hands lay on her knees, and she seemed motionless, staring ahead. ‘She’s about seventeen,’ the nurse said. ‘According to the others, she survived Auschwitz because she worked in a place called Block Twelve. She was a sex slave, used by the SS guards and privileged inmates. Shortly before we arrived here, the female camp leader, the Lagerfuherin, found out what the girl had been at Auschwitz, and took her into the forest one night along with several of the guards. I can’t bear to tell you what they did to her. After the camp’s surrender, several inmates who went after the guards found her in the forest and brought her here. She hasn’t spoken a word, but she did do that drawing. She’s done many like it, almost identical, but that’s the only one I’ve seen with the swastika above her parents. Odd. It’s reversed. But they have seen that hated thing so much, it must be burned into their minds. Who knows why she drew it there.’

‘The drawing was taken from her by an SAS patrol who were in here yesterday,’ Mayne said. ‘Their officer took it to VIII Corps HQ.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I gave it to him. A Captain Frazer, Hugh Frazer. They’d shot some of the guards, and a German officer who fired at them. Captain Frazer stayed with me for a while afterwards, and tried to help with the children. He was pretty frayed. Spent a long time here, on the edge of this bed, just sitting and looking at the girl with the harp. It was strange. It was almost as if… as if he’d found peace, just sitting here, looking at her. Funny how it takes men like that, killers one moment, and then just sitting there, broken by it all. I only wish you chaps could cry a bit more easily. God knows, I’m close to it myself after having been here for twenty-four hours.’

Mayne swallowed hard. Hugh. ‘Frazer’s a friend of mine, actually. Saw him back at HQ. Thought he needed a rest.’

She nodded. ‘I thought it was malaria. I was in India before this. So many of them coming out of Burma had it. You get pretty good at spotting the signs.’

‘We both picked it up in Egypt. Long time ago now.’

‘What’s she doing now, sitting out there all alone?’ Stein asked.

‘The others said that before she was used as a prostitute, she survived selection at Auschwitz because her parents told the SS she could play the harp. Her parents were taken away to be gassed. The Nazis ran a camp orchestra, the Lagerkapelle. Many of the Jews were accomplished musicians, and the Nazis had them play the music the Jews had loved, the classics, folk songs, especially modern jazz, songs like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”, you know? Used to be one of my favourites too. It was meant to calm the arrivals during selection. Some of the people here hum snatches of it, or words from the Shabbat, in Yiddish. But so much of what they sing is anguished, despairing. I wish there was music here. There aren’t even any birds any more, with those awful fires we lit to get rid of the clothes. It’s all death, like the entrance to hell.’ She paused, swallowing hard, then nodded towards the girl. ‘You saw the local German people the soldiers brought in to see all this? I asked if anyone had a harp, and a schoolteacher brought one, a child’s harp. She’s sitting in front of it now.’

Mayne stared again at the girl, and saw the harp. He felt dizzy and swayed slightly, the ringing he had heard since Cassino going from one side of his head to the other. Lewes came silently up. ‘Sir,’ he said quietly, holding his arm. Mayne shut his eyes, opened them again, then nodded. ‘I’m all right, Jock,’ he said quietly, squeezing Lewes’ arm. ‘Good man.’ Lewes moved back, still watching. Mayne tried to focus on the girl, as if he were at sea and she was a fixed point on the horizon. He blinked hard, then remembered what he had done at the death pit. He made himself think as a painter again, framing the scene, trying to imagine how he would distil it. There was no need. Absolute realism. Girl with a harp.

Stein stepped forward. ‘We need to question her.’

‘Not if she won’t talk,’ Mayne said.

‘What is it you want from her?’ the nurse asked.

Mayne pointed at the drawing. ‘That object: the reverse swastika.’

‘I tried talking to her about her drawings. There are sometimes other objects in that place, flowers. She kept pointing at the forest. I think it could be something she saw there, where she was taken. Or maybe it’s something she imagined, while she was in the hands of those SS monsters. I don’t know.’

‘She won’t talk?’ Mayne said.

‘Not a word. None of them have heard her speak, even at Auschwitz. She probably has no family left in the world, nobody who knew her before. We don’t even know her name.’

‘All right.’ Mayne looked at Stein. ‘We leave her alone.’

Stein nodded. ‘Time for a little recce in those woods.’

Mayne turned to Lewes, who had lit up and was smoking a few feet behind them. He folded up the drawing and handed it to the corporal. ‘Take this back to VIII Corps HQ. Tell Colonel Woolley in Intelligence that I want the back-up team here as soon as possible. We want a tracker dog, Sergeant Parker and his demolition chaps for blowing open doors, the usual. And some MPs.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘See you back at that first sentry post outside the barracks in, say, four hours, at seventeen thirty. Got that?’

‘Sir.’ Lewes dropped his cigarette butt, ground it into the earth, took the drawing and buttoned it into his tunic breast pocket. Then he stood to attention and saluted. Mayne returned the salute, but Lewes remained in place, ramrod straight. Mayne gave him a tired smile, and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be all right, Jock. No need to worry. I’ve got Stein here to look after me. You get on, and look after yourself, all right? Dismissed.’

‘Sir.’ Lewes swivelled round and walked swiftly off in the direction they had come. Mayne nodded to the nurse. ‘Thanks, Helen. And… thanks for letting Hugh, Captain Frazer… help you.’ He was suddenly at a loss for words. She gave him a tired smile. ‘I know,’ she said quietly, touching his arm. ‘I know how you chaps who’ve been through so much look out for each other.’ She turned back to the stretchers.

Mayne looked at Cameron. ‘We’d better let you get on too.’

‘I’ll show you the track into the forest.’ Cameron led them towards the treeline, and stopped on a dirt road that led to a cut in the trees, evidently an old bridleway. They could see the barbed-wire compound fence, with an open gate. ‘Anyone who’s going to try to leave the camp will have done so already. We leave that gate open to let in the former inmates who want to return, who’ve got exhausted and realize the SS really have gone.’ Cameron shook his head. ‘But it’s a wild place. SS still out there, I’m sure. Rather you than me.’

Mayne knelt down. The track was well-trodden, but there were no wheel ruts. ‘If there’s some sort of installation out there, this can’t have been the main route in.’

‘They wouldn’t have put the main route through the camp,’ Stein said. ‘There’ll be another way in, probably on the other side of the forest, for trucking in building materials and whatever they might have been storing there. The aerial photographs don’t show anything clearly, but tracks in forests are easy to conceal. It’s all consistent with something top secret.’

Cameron turned to them. ‘Good luck. I won’t shake hands.’ He checked his watch. ‘I may not see you again. I’m sure you know that the plan is to bomb the forest, to deny it to the Germans as a defensive position once the ceasefire is over. That’s what I was talking about to those officers outside on the roadblock when I met you.’

Mayne nodded. ‘Thirty-six hours, a little less.’

‘It shouldn’t affect your activities, but what you don’t know is that we may be moving the camp after all. The CO of the AA unit has been into Bremen and seen what a night raid by a thousand Lancaster bombers does. Obliterates everything, not necessarily very high-precision. The weather report’s changed too, could be nasty for a few days, so the bomber pathfinders will have their job cut out to pinpoint the western edge of the forest. It’s just too risky for us to stay here. In a way it’s a relief. The sooner this place is blotted out, the better. By tomorrow, typhus will have killed half the inmates still alive here now anyway. It seems callous, but we’re waiting before moving them, until those who are going to die do so, to free up the transport for those with some hope. They’ll be trucked to the field hospital being built at Belsen. The bodies left here will all be buried and the trench bulldozed by this evening, then we’ll torch the buildings. After that, the RAF can rain a thousand bombs on the place for my money. It’d be as if this place never existed.’

‘What about these people?’ Stein said, gesturing back. ‘I mean those who recover, physically?’

Cameron started to say something, then stopped. He took a deep breath. His voice was quavering. ‘Yesterday, just after we arrived, one of the British officers gave his revolver to an inmate, to shoot one of the guards. The man immediately shot himself. He’d been talking about his little son, asking for him, a child taken from him at the Auschwitz railhead to be gassed. The man knew what had happened, he had seen it with his own eyes, but had been unable to comprehend it. That’s the true horror. The horror of what happens when they start to remember. It’s as if they wake up from a ghastly nightmare, but then realize it was real. I don’t know what good I’m doing here. If we nurse them back to physical health and they can’t live with it, how can that be right?’

They watched as Cameron hurried away, his form framed by the pastel wasteland behind him, the sun’s rays diffused by the opaque miasma above. Then they turned towards the forest. They passed the bloated body of a German officer, his uniform torn open, his boots gone. He was Luftwaffe, air force, not SS. He must have been the officer who had shot at Hugh’s men. Mayne remembered what Cameron had said about SS guards having escaped into the woods, about marauding inmates searching for them, living wild. He undid the flap of his holster. Stein saw him do it, and removed his own Colt automatic pistol. He clicked out the magazine, checked that it was full, slammed it back in again and pulled back the slide, seeing that a round was chambered. Mayne watched him, saying nothing, and they both moved forward cautiously along the dirt track under the trees. The pines along the edge gave way to old-growth deciduous forest, with huge oaks forming a canopy that would have concealed the track from aerial reconnaissance. ‘The RAF photos show about three kilometres of dense wood in this direction,’ Stein murmured. ‘If the bunker’s concealed in the middle, we’re looking for something twenty minutes’ walk, maybe half an hour ahead.’

‘Are you comfortable with this?’ Mayne said. ‘We could wait for reinforcements.’

‘No. Now or never. I have a gut feeling about this. There could be more at stake here than lost treasures. Much more.’

‘And you should know we’re both here on the same ticket. My unit, 30 AU, are more than just a tactical recon outfit. I hadn’t heard about the interrogation of the Nazi official you mentioned, but my colonel at Corps HQ took me straight off our planned op and put me on this one as soon as that drawing appeared. That’s why we were rushed out here without the usual back-up. And our job isn’t just to prevent material falling into the hands of the wrong people. It’s to prevent this war ending the way Hitler wants it to. ’

‘Okay. We do this as a team. Clean slate from now on?’

‘Agreed.’ Mayne raised his revolver and edged forward. ‘Let’s do it.’