Lucy took ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ home with her and placed it over the mantelpiece. For the rest of the weekend she kept re-entering the room to look at it. In that hint of a face drawn by the sweeping paint she saw Agnes, young and old, transcendent, aloft her disappointment.
When Lucy met Max and Mr Lachaise at court on Monday morning they all shook hands. Something like ease was growing between them. This was all the more remarkable because she (and presumably Max) had no idea as to who Mr Lachaise, their convener, might be. There was a disarming quality to his simplicity, like dealing with a child. Only he was nothing of the kind. He seemed older than anyone Lucy had ever known. And she recognised in his every move a type of empathy, something indefinable, that he held in common with her grandmother. She would have liked them to have met.
As was now common practice, the three of them sat in a row listening intently to the evidence presented before the court. For the next couple of days Mr Penshaw called a hotchpotch of witnesses to describe the nuts and bolts of organised murder. Mr Bartlett asked few questions, confining himself to small errors of detail.
‘In fact, the first deportation from Le Bourget-Drancy comprised standard third-class railway carriages, did it not?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. If it matters. ‘
‘Precision always matters,’ said Mr Bartlett kindly
Bartlett very occasionally gave a brief smile to the jury. After all, they’d been seeing each other every day, listening to the same witnesses. Lucy felt an atmosphere was developing between them. They were in this together, doing their level best. One or two had begun to smile back at him. Was it courtesy or empathy?
Lucy struggled to name a growing sensation. By some alchemy, Schwermann was almost detached from the proceedings. The link between the young SS officer and the elderly Defendant before them was peculiarly slender, the actions and attributes of fifty years ago having to be fixed on an older, much changed and hence different man. The passage of time itself had blurred not only the edges of responsibility but the consequences of the crime. Several newspapers had begun to question the propriety of the trial ‘so long after the events in question’, those being the fleshiness of killing, the smell of filth and the sound of fear. The younger man who’d been there was slipping out of reach; the older chap seemed crucially disconnected from his own past.
One radio programme debated ‘the age-old problem of Personal Identity’. If Schwermann at seventy-six was not the same man he had been at twenty-three could he be punished at all? Several newspapers explored the reach of ethics within the law, proper and improper. And many perfectly reasonable people from both sides of the fence appeared on Newsnight and within ten minutes were fairly evenly savaged for their trouble. The Defendant had become a ‘philosophico-legal’ problem, as well as an alleged killer. Lucy absorbed all the words, admiring the careful scrutiny of educated minds, but thinking all the time of leaves… thousands upon thousands of them, wafted helplessly into the air, no one knowing from where they had come or where they would go.
Watching Mr Bartlett at work, Lucy thought that someone had to bring the SS-Unterscharfuhrer back into the present, through the tangle of reasonable civilised arguments, and put him in the dock – someone who had known him at the time. And, apart from Agnes, there was only one person left.