The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones

Author:Stephen Lloyd Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Thriller
ISBN: 9781472204691
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Paris

1979

Sitting opposite Charles at the small cafe table, Nicole Dubois stirred a sugar lump into her espresso. They were sitting beneath the beige awning of the Café de Flore, on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue Saint-Benoit.

Traffic flowed along the boulevard. Charles watched as a battered Citroën swerved, but did not brake, to avoid a group of tourists negotiating the junction. The car veered around the corner in a black cough of exhaust fumes, its driver holding the wheel with one hand and gesticulating out of the window with the other.

Nicole looked up at him, her expression grim. ‘Later that morning,’ she said, ‘half mad with grief, Hans Fischer buries his wife in a makeshift grave by the side of Lake Balaton.’

‘Erna Novák,’ Charles replied.

Before Nicole had left England, she had given him a translation of the earliest diaries, written by Hans. It had taken him two evenings to read them. He had seen enough of the originals to know that the copies were accurate reproductions. They had left him feeling far more disturbed than he had expected.

Nicole nodded. ‘My great-great-grandmother. It was 1879. She was twenty-seven years old. She’d been married to Hans for just three years. She died because she tried to protect Jakab from the people who were hunting him. After burying Erna, Hans walks back into Keszthely, packs a bag of belongings, says goodbye to his parents and leaves with his son Carl the same morning. That boy, my great-grandfather, is less than two years old. They never go back.’

Whether it was pure fabrication or the result of a single shocking incident twisted by superstition, Charles did not know, but hearing the tale from Nicole’s lips lifted it straight out of the past and into the present. While neither of them could know the complete truth of what had happened in Keszthely in 1879, something terrible had happened to Erna Novák. It had taken Charles some effort to research it, but Gerold Novák, Erna’s father, had reported his daughter missing to the authorities in the spring of 1879. Two months later her corpse was discovered when a local farmer’s pigs uprooted it. She had been shot in the head.

Had Hans Fischer murdered her? Or had she been killed much as the diaries described? Perhaps the trauma of seeing his wife’s murder, coupled with an upbringing couched in superstition, had driven Hans to believe that hosszú életek were responsible. But even if that were true, it didn’t explain the continuation of the family’s beliefs long after he was dead.

Nicole paused as a waiter skirted their table and unloaded a tray of coffee and croissants on to two Frenchwomen sitting nearby. When he retreated, she continued. ‘Hans and Carl eventually settle in the city of Sopron, near the Austrian border. He changes their surname from Fischer to Richter.’

‘When the diaries begin.’

‘Hans writes the first. He starts it partly to come to terms with everything that has happened, and partly to capture all his memories of Erna, so he can pass them on to Carl when the boy is old enough.

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