The Old Enemy Henry Porter (best black authors txt) 📖

soul and hollowed out their being over months and months – maybe years – of twelve-hour interrogations, sleep deprivation, isolation and physical abuse. They turned people’s loved ones and friends against them and spread false rumours about infidelities and their sexuality – sometimes even about paedophilia and bestiality, can you believe? Hundreds of thousands of human spirits were broken in that place, in Hohenschönhausen, and when they were let out, they were shunned.’ She reached for her cigarettes. ‘I will smoke in here, against my own rules!’ she said, breaking off the filter and shaking her head. She lit up, puffed without inhaling. ‘No one was punished for the assault on the psychology of an entire nation. They got away with it.

‘Mila Daus was the worst of them all. She was very beautiful – of an athletic build – and she was highly intelligent. Such blessings, but such profound evil! She could do what she wanted because she got around her bosses. They all wanted to sleep with her, you see. But she had no time for such frivolity. Her life was devoted to the destruction of men and women who defied the State by such crimes as applying for a travel visa, not joining the Party, making a joke about the Party leaders. She kept a close eye on every case and had an incredible memory for the detail of each person’s life. She had a taste for data, and they said that she kept her own files. When a person was broken, she would come to watch the wreckage of a human being in their final interrogations. Sometimes she would recommend another year of punishment to watch as it registered in their faces. She rejoiced in destroying people.’ Ulrike took a last drag and stubbed out the cigarette vehemently. ‘Mila Daus was the person Bobby saw in Berlin, on the thirtieth-anniversary weekend.’

‘What on earth was she doing there? It was surely the last place for a former Stasi officer?’

‘I have to give you some more background. Remember, I told you my husband Rudi was murdered when we returned from Spain.’ He nodded. ‘He was an art historian, a very good one, and we had been to the Prado to view all the paintings that he had studied but never seen. I was pregnant with my son – the handsome man you saw. They attacked our VW camper van as we drove through the Pyrenees. The van crashed and Rudi was killed instantly. I was injured and it looked like I might lose our baby, but I was saved by a farmer and his wife. We were in a deserted part of the mountains – I was lucky the woman knew what she was doing.’

‘Yes, you told me the story a while back.’

‘Did I go into the aftermath?’

‘You said Bobby created a new identity for you and found a place for you and your baby in Berlin.’

‘Bobby also tracked down the man who killed Rudi and, before that, his twin brother in Hohenschönhausen.’

‘I remember your phrase. You said he settled the account.’

‘Yes, Bobby and a man named Cuth Avocet found the three killers and made sure they wouldn’t come after me and Rudi’s baby. Zank died; the other two were incapacitated. I never asked what that meant, but there was never any trouble from them again. That is what settling the account meant.’

‘I met Avocet in London a few days ago.’

‘Bobby loved him, but of course he’s a very dangerous individual, as I expect you saw. They freed me from Hohenschönhausen and later they made sure me and my baby were safe. For that I was very grateful and, in due course, I fell in love with Bobby.’ She looked away, suddenly overcome with grief.

‘Please! If this upsets you . . .’

‘I must continue, because this business is not finished. Bobby is dead before his time.’ She clasped her hands in anguish. ‘I know he would have willed himself to live to see the exhibition, despite the cancer. He would have loved watching people look at the paintings he worked so hard on. He was so looking forward to it, though of course he never admitted that to me.’

‘And Mila Daus?’ prompted Samson gently.

‘Mila Daus organised and inspired the murder of my first husband, and now she has killed my second husband. That’s who Mila Daus is.’

‘Before he died, Bobby wrote “Berlin Blue” as well as his message of love for you on the sketchbook, so he knew it was her.’

‘Did he? I didn’t know her code name.’ She smiled. ‘But then we didn’t know her real name for a long time. Mila Daus was known only as der Teufel von Hohenschönhausen – the devil of Hohenschönhausen, or a much ruder word that you probably know, die Fotze.’ Samson nodded, he did – cunt. ‘But Bobby knew her face because for eighteen months he had searched for her and he’d got hold of several photographs of her from the Stasi archive, but these were group shots and she wasn’t identified on the back. As I say, she was strikingly beautiful, and people recognised her and he established her involvement in the planning of Rudi’s murder. And of course, anyone who had been in Hohenschönhausen knew who she was, but the name eluded him.’

‘Why didn’t you know her name?’

‘She was very clever – she altered the Stasi records so that Mila Daus was described as a social worker. Can you believe that? According to her file, her responsibilities were to help pregnant women who were held by the Stasi and liaise with families of prisoners, giving them psychological support. Investigators overlooked her for a time and, when they finally suspected that her role was much more important, she had vanished – to America, where she married a very, very wealthy man named Heini Muller, a third-generation German, owner of an engineering company. She dry-cleaned her backstory and created a whole new life for herself. But she didn’t sit back and live off Muller’s money. Not Mila Daus! She went to business school,