MORNING SERIAL
SHE handed back the cello, relinquishing it with evident reluctance. Michael turned away and slipped out of the door, to avoid overhearing any further disparagement from his son; laying the sins of the world at his father’s door, the most convenient and least original place in the world to dump them.
Lake Eutin, wind whipped, was a bilious mass of peaks and crests. Michael walked out on to the jetty where he and Wolfi kept their boat. It slapped to and fro, slamming tight its twin lines, the bottom awash with bilge. It couldn’t ever be the same between himself and Wolfi. But that was natural, he reminded himself, and high time Wolfi set up for himself. He played out that rope in his mind, slackening its tension.
Above Malente the old men were gathering. That they should still have power to create a rough house in their wake in a local hostelry caused Michael no surprise. Everything he had seen that morning had raised to the surface tensions which were not so much alive as undead.
But what if Michael went to the authorities and told them all he had garnered over the years about the Blutehof, its personnel and purposes?
The water surged beneath the jetty, spewing itself on the sand, doubling over and sucking back.
He almost laughed aloud. The naivety of it. For what was secret about the Blutehof! There was no one to tell who didn’t already know. Schleswig-Holstein was a nest of rats, many of whom wore their badges facing out.
Who believed that the Blutehof was the innocent orphanage it claimed to be? Appeal beyond SchleswigHolstein then? But they were all in it together, it was common knowledge. Chancellery, Foreign Office, Economics, Transport, mayors and judges, presidents and civil servants ... arachnids presiding at the centre of a network of networks, angling a line here, a strand there. They watched with cynical amusement the desecration of Jewish graveyards; old comrades’ gatherings that turned into rallies with mass-murderers parading in field grey, thousand upon thousand, with banners, bands, songs and swastikas.
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW