Bernard Cornwell - Stormchild

Jackie was unwilling to endorse the implication of murder, but she thought it more than probable that some members of Genesis were being held against their will. “I never got beyond the pier when I visited British Columbia,” she said, “but I got this really bad feeling. I mean like von Rellsteb was into control? Like heavy discipline? I spoke to this professor at Berkeley, and he told me that a lot of Utopian groups finish up by substituting control systems for consensus because their leaders aren’t really into agreement and compromise, but have this blueprint which they insist will only work if it’s followed exactly, and they somehow manage to impose it on the group, then enforce it with rewards and punishments. Do you know what I mean?”

I was nodding eagerly, because Jackie was reinforcing my own theory that von Rellsteb had some kind of sinister mastery over his followers, and Jackie’s revelation offered an explanation of my daughter’s silence. Nicole had ignored me because she had no choice. Nicole was not a convert, but a convict, and I told Jackie about the unsettling image of the three girls wearing von Rellsteb’s strange green uniform on the day Nicole had sailed away.

“It’s not just uniforms,” Jackie said. “This guy at Berkeley says these groups make really weird hierarchies for themselves. Some groups degrade into slaves and owners, and in others the underlings have to work their way up the hierarchy by pleasing the guys at the top.”

“It makes sense!” I spoke enthusiastically, for how else could my Nicole’s vivid spirit have been broken except by some brutal methodology? Nicole, I suddenly knew, was a prisoner, and my suspicion that von Rellsteb used his disciples to make himself wealthy seemed overwhelmingly confirmed by Jackie’s description of how Utopian ideals deteriorated into fascist regimes.

Jackie suddenly looked very troubled. “Aren’t you going to eat your salad?”

“Of course not. I’m not a rabbit.”

“It’s good for you.” She waited to see if that encouragement would make me relent, then took the salad for herself when it was obvious I was not going to eat it.

I watched as she picked at the lettuce. “Why doesn’t your editor want you to write about Genesis?” I asked her.

“Because he doesn’t really believe Genesis is as bad as I say, and the paper can’t afford to send me all over the world to find out if I’m right, and I haven’t got enough proof or experience to persuade a bigger newspaper to let me do it. If I took the story to a Chicago paper they’d just put one of their own staffers on it, which means I’d be passing up my best chance of a Pulitzer, so I’m chasing the story in my own time. And with Molly’s help, of course.”

“So you can get a Pulitzer?”

“Sure, why not?” She responded as though that achievement was well within her grasp, and I decided there was more to Ms. Jackie Potten than her unprepossessing exterior promised. “It depends on the story, of course,” she explained. “I mean if von Rellsteb really is holding people against their will, then it will be a Pulitzer story, but if he’s running just another survivalist commune, then it’s page thirty-two beneath the fold.”

“It’s no story at all,” I said, “if you can’t find him.”

“What I’d like to do is track down where he gets his money. Of course I’d like to find where they’re all living, but I guess that would be difficult because the coast of Alaska is really huge! And it’s got lots of inlets and islands. They could be anywhere, and maybe they’re not even in Alaska!” She sounded rather despairing at the difficulty of the task she had set herself, then she cheered up. “But there might be another way of finding them. The paper trail.”

“Paper trail?” I asked in bemusement.

“People can’t just disappear,” Jackie said with renewed enthusiasm. “There are always records! How does the Genesis community get their money? They must use a bank somewhere, and if they use a bank, then the Internal Revenue Service has to know about them, so maybe I should go that route.”

“I know where they get their money,” I said with some satisfaction.

“Where?” She was immediately interested.

So I told Jackie about my suspicions that von Rellsteb was raising funds by forcing inheritances onto his cowed followers who, in turn, would pass the money to von Rellsteb. After all, if Joanna and I had both died in the English channel then Nicole would have inherited our expensive house that overlooked the sea, our investments, and our boatyard with its healthy cashflow, and if Nicole was indeed a brainwashed prisoner of the Genesis community, as I now believed her to be, then von Rellsteb would have become the effective owner of that plump legacy. And I had no doubt that von Rellsteb was still interested in that legacy. Why else, I asked, would he have raised the matter of Nicole’s inheritance?

“He did what?”

I told Jackie about von Rellsteb’s odd concern that perhaps Nicole might have been disinherited. “Isn’t it obvious why he raised the subject?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.” Jackie was clearly unconvinced by my theory. “I haven’t heard of any other Genesis parents just disappearing, and why would von Rellsteb go all the way to Europe to find a victim? A lot of his followers come from Canada or the States, so why not pick on them?”

“Because,” I suggested, “a murder in Europe is far less likely to be traced back to a commune in Alaska.”

Jackie was still unconvinced. “It would be a messy way of making money. Think of all the other family members he’d have to deal with, let alone the lawyers. Mind you”—she was clearly worried that I might be upset by her abrupt dismissal of my theory, so she tried to soften it—“we know so little about what makes von Rellsteb tick. I still haven’t discovered why he went to Europe four years ago, and it was clearly important, because it was after that trip that the whole commune disappeared.”

Jackie was referring to the journey during which he had met Nicole, and I suggested that perhaps von Rellsteb had been on a recruiting trip.

“Maybe,” Jackie said, but without enthusiam.

“Perhaps he was going back to Germany,” I said. “He must have relatives there.”

Jackie stared at me, then, very slowly, laid down her fork. “I bet that’s why he went to Europe!” she said in the tone of voice that betrayed the dawning of an idea.

“Why?”

“Oh, boy! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“What?”

“Jeez!” She was mad at herself. “Wow! I’ve been dumb! You know that? Really dumb! His father!”

“Father?”

“Only his mother emigrated to Canada. There’s no record of a father, but I’ll bet that’s it!” Then, being Jackie, she told me the story from its very beginning, from the time that Caspar von Rellsteb had been born in Hamburg in the very last months of the Second World War, which, I realized with a pang, made him almost my exact contemporary. Jackie confessed that she had discovered nothing about von Rellsteb’s real father, but had instead concentrated her research on his mother who had been a German national called Eva Fellnagel. In 1949 Eva Fellnagel had married a Canadian army sergeant called Skinner, and afterward had gone to live with him in Vancouver. Caspar, Eva’s son, had traveled with the couple, and, though the marriage to Sergeant Skinner had not lasted long, it had been sufficient to secure both Eva and her son Canadian citizenship. Jackie said she had always assumed Caspar’s aristocratic surname had been an affectation wished on him by his mother. “But perhaps there really was a von Rellsteb!” Jackie said excitedly, “and maybe that’s why Caspar went to Europe! To find his real father!”