I walked silently down the steps and entered a tunnel tall enough to stand upright in, well built and properly drained, with flagstones on the floor and a ventilation shaft built into the roof. The air was fresh and sweet.
The thin beam of my flashlight shone ahead and, before it was swallowed by the blackness, I could see that the tunnel was hewn out of solid rock. Somewhere ahead – through the cliff and far below the sweeping lawns – I was certain it would connect to the mansion.
I moved forward, and my weak finger of light caught a glint of bronze on the wall. As I got closer, I realized it was a plaque set into the rock. My German was rusty but it was good enough for the purpose. With sinking heart, I read: ‘By the Grace of Almighty God, between the years 1946 and 1949, the following men – proud soldiers of the Reich – designed, engineered and built this house.’
It then listed their names, military rank and the job they had undertaken during the construction. I saw that most of them were members of the Waffen SS – the black-shirted, armed wing of the Nazi Party – and as I stood a million miles from safety the photo of the mother and her kids on their way to the gas chamber rose before me. It was a section of the SS that had operated the death camps.
At the bottom of the plaque was the name of the group that had funded and organized the construction of the house. It was called Stille Hilfe – Silent Help – and it confirmed what I had suspected ever since I had seen the swastikas on the wall of the library.
Stille Hilfe was an organization – ODESSA was reputedly another – that had helped fugitive Nazis, primarily senior members of the SS, to escape from Europe. It was one of the best clandestine networks ever established and you couldn’t have worked as an intelligence agent in Berlin and not have heard of it. My memory was that they had provided money, fake passports and transport along secret routes that were known as ‘ratlines’. I was certain the mansion had been built as the terminus to one of those lines, an embarkation point to take the fugitives and their families to Egypt, America, Australia and, mostly, South America.
I took a breath and thought how wrong I had been: despite the ventilation system, the air wasn’t fresh and sweet at all. It was rank and foul, and I hurried forward, wanting to be done with the place and the terrible memory of the men who had once escaped down the tunnel.
Up ahead, the beam from the flashlight showed that I was approaching the end of the tunnel. I was expecting flights of steep stairs, so it took me a moment to realize I had underestimated the German soldiers’ engineering skills: it was an elevator.
Chapter Fifty-one
THE SMALL ELEVATOR car rose up the shaft fast and silent. I was on edge – I had no idea where inside the house it would stop and if anyone would be at home.
It jerked to a halt and I heard the sound of an electric motor. When the door finally opened I saw what it operated; the sheet-rock wall of a large linen closet concealing the elevator had slid aside. I stepped into the gloom, moved fast between shelves of neatly pressed sheets and quietly cracked open a door.
I looked out into a corridor. I was on the second floor, a part of the house I had never seen before. I could have left then – I had found the secret way into the mansion – but I heard a voice, muffled and unrecognizable because of the distance, and slipped into the long hallway.
The sound stopped, but I kept creeping forward until I found myself facing the grand staircase. On the far side, a door into the master bedroom suite was partly open.
From inside, I heard the voice again: it was Cameron, and it occurred to me that she might be talking quietly to herself, spending time in the bedroom with the memory of her husband. I remembered how she had said that if she laid on the bed she could smell him and imagine that he would still be there. Then I heard a second voice.
It was a woman’s – a young American from the Midwest by the sound of it. She was saying something about a restaurant when she stopped abruptly.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Cameron replied.
‘No, not a sound – there’s a draught.’
She was right – the wind was coming along the tunnel, up the elevator shaft and seeping out of the linen closet.
‘Did you leave the door in the boat shed open?’ Cameron asked.
‘Of course not,’ the other woman said.
They both knew about the tunnel – so much for Cameron’s Oscar-winning performance about loving her husband.
‘Maybe the wind’s blown open one of the doors downstairs,’ Cameron said. ‘There’s a storm coming in.’
‘I don’t know, I’m just gonna have a look around.’