Woman in the Shadows by Jane Thynne

Author:Jane Thynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

21

This time when Clara got back to her apartment on Winterfeldtstrasse there was no need to examine the powder on the doorknob to see if she’d had intruders. An entire crater of splintered wood had been punched around the lock, and the door gaped open.

Clara fumbled for the light and gasped. The place had been ransacked. The kitchen shelves had been clumsily rifled and each cupboard door opened. In the sitting room, books had been flung from the shelves, and her desk was open, papers scattered. In the bedroom the chest had been pulled away from the wall, and its drawers hung out drunkenly, trailing clothing. The mattress was askew where someone had searched beneath it, and the painting by Bruno Weiss tilted on the wall. In the bathroom, the tops of the jars were open, and lavender bath salts carelessly spilled. It was as though some giant child had had a tantrum and flung everything around like toys.

She moved towards the opened desk and gave the front of one of the ornate legs a sharp tap with the side of her hand. It snapped outward, revealing a hollowed space inside. When she pushed her fingers down into the narrow space, her fingertips brushed the cold metal of a gun barrel. Her Beretta. A present from a friend.

At that moment she heard the heavy tread of Rudi, who had wheezed up the stairs and stood goggling at the door. He had seen no intruders, he protested, pasting a lank strip of hair back across his skull in bewilderment. He had been up the previous evening, just to put some letters through the door, and seen nothing amiss, so this must have happened earlier today. A Sunday!

“I’ll call the police,” he fretted. “They’ll be here in no time.”

That was the sole advantage of living in a Nazi state. The police were never far away.

“No. Don’t do that.”

“Why not, Fräulein?”

“I don’t want police tramping around before I’ve checked what’s missing.”

“But we’ll need to get this door fixed!”

“It looks worse than it is. The lock still functions. No need to call a workman out on a Sunday.”

“If you’re sure…” He said it distrustfully.

“Let’s deal with it later, when I’ve cleared up,” she said firmly, as he edged reluctantly away.

Clara’s first thought was of the men who had been repairing the lift. Might they have been watching for residents who had left their apartments empty? Or had someone known already that she would be away? The intruders had picked the one time of the week when Rudi could be guaranteed not to notice them. Sunday morning was when he slept off the hangover of Saturday night with his storm trooper friends.

Moving from room to room, she made a rapid inventory of her possessions. The strange thing was, despite the scale of the devastation, nothing appeared to be missing. Though her pearls were flung across the bedroom floor, her brooches scattered, and her diamond clips emptied out on the dressing table, her jewelry was all there.

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