“Inspector, what am I supposed to tell Shyla, Ruthie, Eleanor, and Ida? And Adin? Adin’s family?” she demanded, keeping her voice lower this time.
Cooper reached out and placed his hand gently on hers. Billie looked down at it and, surprising herself, decided not to pull hersaway. The large male hand dwarfed the scratched and more delicate one she’d been leaning on the table, his fingers so much larger than hers. She raised her eyes from his hand to his face and waited, eyes unflinchingly on his.
“Please call me Hank,” he said to her again in the face of her terrific glare, and though he moved his hand away, that unreadable formality he so often seemed to slip into was dissolving, she could see. His hands slipped into his pockets. “I cannot...” he began. “Billie, I cannot begin to convey the disappointment I feel. I believe there is more to this than meets the eye. Hessmann had help; that much is certain. Suffice it to say it is my top priority to locate him and his associates and investigate each of the men listed in that book. You have to believe me. I give you my word.”
Billie waited for more.
“He can’t get far,” Cooper went on. “He’ll try to flee to another state, probably another country. South America, perhaps. He may have connections, but we won’t let him get far. We’re looking for him at every port.”
How hard would it be to hide a face like his? It seemed he hadn’t even tried. He must have thought Australia was safe for the likes of him. And it certainly had been, until Ruthie and Shyla and Adin.
Billie contemplated the sad certainty that Adin’s great-aunt had perished at Ravensbrück under unspeakably inhumane conditions, one of the majority of the women who did not survive the camp. And her necklace had ended up coming to Australia with the camp commandant to be auctioned off to help pay for his life on the run from the war crimes tribunal. Margarethe was the connection, the reason her great-nephew had searched for those associated with the auction house selling the necklace he recognized and remembered.She might have perished, but she and her great-nephew had helped to lift the lid on a fleeing war criminal. They’d come close, so close, to being the cause of his capture.
“The constable at Richmond has voluntarily resigned from his position,” Cooper said. “The sergeant wants to apologize to you personally.”
“What good will that do?” Billie replied, folding her arms. “And it’s not me he ought to apologize to,” she added. “Does the constable have any connection to this Hessmann? Is that possible? What about the man who helped set him free? The solicitor?”
The inspector shook his head, his mouth turned down. “We can’t be confident he even was a solicitor. The details he gave were false. I have an alert out at every port,” he repeated. He lowered his voice and locked his eyes with hers. “We don’t think Hessmann was acting alone—I mean in addition to the auction house, and the solicitor. There has been some investigation into the possibility of Nazi activity in Australia since the war, but it wasn’t...”
“Taken very seriously?”
“Yes.”
“And now you have a singed house full of evidence.”
“Exactly. What’s left of it, anyway.”
“Have you checked the names in the book for whoever might have helped him at Richmond?” she asked.
“We’re working on it. Hessmann appears to have used that book for blackmail, writing the details of those who...” He stopped.
“I know what they did,” she said, sparing him. Hessmann had shipped his stolen goods to Australia, where he thought he could get away with it, and was selling them off one by one. He was living on the final pieces of the broken lives of the women and children he’dhelped to murder. And he’d used the girls at his homestead to cement Boucher’s loyalty and the loyalty of whoever else was in that book. His dirty little black book was a record of blackmail and assault and it would not reflect well on the wealthy clients who’d purchased the goods Hessmann had to sell. It ensured their silence.
“Hessmann was apparently known for that sort of thing. That kind of blackmail and depravity. It had worked for him in Berlin. One of the ways he kept loyalty was to promise... access to certain prisoners, and then he would keep evidence. The men involved wouldn’t want their wives knowing. He also kept other paperwork and a diary. Fragments survived the flames. It’s being translated now, which will take some time, but it already seems that his diary will provide some leads and...” Again the inspector hesitated. “Detail,” he finally said.
“That must make some pretty bedside reading,” Billie said darkly. “Surely your superiors can’t doubt his identity.”
“The official line is that his identity is yet to be established.”
Billie licked her lips. Her mouth had become dry, and inside her was an unhealthy anger, a simmering rage she thought she’d left in Europe. “Have you a cigarette?” she asked, shaking a little.
Cooper took her request in his stride, pulling a pack of tobacco and some paper from his coat pocket. He assembled a cigarette with the quick precision of a soldier who’d performed the same ritual in countless trenches and in the windows of abandoned, bombed-out buildings on late-night watches. “I didn’t think you smoked,” he said finally, and handed it to her. Billie placed it between her red lips, and he leaned close and lit the tip with a battered Ronson lighter. She caught sight of something scratched into the side but wasn’t able to make it out before he pocketed it again.
“It’s a smoking day,” Billie replied simply, and took a deep drag. She stifled a cough, her lungs still sore from the smoke of the fire. “Let me get this straight, just so we are absolutely clear. Your superiors don’t want it to look like they let a Nazi go. One who was high up in command. Is that it?”
“Without his blackmail book and without those treasures, he won’t have so much power now,” Cooper said, sidestepping the question.
But that didn’t necessarily mean Hessmann was on his own, if there was a network of some kind he could draw support from. And that seemed to be the suggestion. Did he have access to funds to get him out of the country? On one of the ships leaving soon, perhaps? That must have been how he’d got his Nazi loot to Australia to begin with—some amenable connections at the docks. Someone, or a few someones, happy to look the other way. He could stow away if he didn’t want to risk more official passage. He would disappear back into the woodwork, to emerge again—where? South America? Hong Kong? Canada? He’d lost a great deal of his war loot in the Australian bush, but it was impossible to know how much more he might have access to.
“I want you to know that we have Vincenzo Moretti in for questioning, right now,” Cooper went on. “Though we haven’t any evidence against him at this stage, and he claims to know nothing about any of this.”
“Of course he’d say that,” Billie retorted. A bitter laugh escaped her throat. “I could have told you that for free.” She took another drag of the cigarette, felt the burn, the smoke in her lungs. “Moretti is involved. I haven’t a shred of doubt.” But there would be time enough for Moretti. He was deep in this, and there was no way shewas going to let him walk away from it after all that had happened. His men had tried to mess her up, they’d assaulted her assistant as well as her client’s boy, and they’d made a fair effort of shooting her off the road. “If you want any help interrogating him, I’ll have a word or two to say,” she added darkly.
“Just one more thing,” Cooper said.
“Do go on.”
“There were remains found at the Colo homestead. From a motorcar found at the scene, it seems the body may be that of Georges Boucher, originally hailing from Vichy, France.”
