Read The Hanging Garden for Free Online

a duplicate set for him. There was only Lintz’s word that these new papers were anything but an official record of lies he’d told and which had been believed. Lintz’s story – birth in Alsace; parents and relatives all dead; forced enlistment in the SS. Rebus liked the touch about joining the SS. It was the sort of admission that would make officials decide: he’s been honest about his involvement with that, so he’s probably being honest about the other details. There was no actual record of a Joseph Lintz serving with any SS regiment, but then the SS had destroyed a lot of their own records once they’d seen the way the war was headed. Lintz’s war record was vague, too. He mentioned shell-shock to explain the gaps in his memory. But he was vehement that he had never been called Linzstek and had never served in the Corrèze region of France.
    ‘I was in the east,’ he would say. ‘That’s where the Allies found me, in the east.’
    The problem was that there was no convincing explanation as to how Lintz had found himself in the United Kingdom. He said he’d asked if he could go there and start a new life. He didn’t want to return to Alsace, wanted to be as far away from the Germans as possible. He wanted water between him and them. Again, there was no documentation to back this up, and meantime the Holocaust investigators had come up with their own ‘evidence’, which pointed to Lintz’s involvement in the ‘Rat Line’.
    ‘Have you ever heard of something called the Rat Line?’ Rebus had asked at their first meeting.
    ‘Of course,’ Joseph Lintz had said. ‘But I never had anything to do with it.’
    Lintz: in the drawing-room of his Heriot Row home. An elegant four-storey Georgian edifice. A huge house for aman who’d never married. Rebus had said as much. Lintz had merely shrugged, as was his privilege. Where had the money come from?
    ‘I’ve worked hard, Inspector.’
    Maybe so, but Lintz had purchased the house in the late-1950s on a lecturer’s salary. A colleague from the time had told Rebus everyone in the department suspected Lintz of having a private income. Lintz denied this.
    ‘Houses were cheaper back then, Inspector. The fashion was for country properties and bungalows.’
    Joseph Lintz: barely five foot tall, bespectacled. Parchment hands with liver spots. One wrist sported a prewar Ingersoll watch. Glass-fronted bookcases lining his drawing-room. Charcoal-coloured suits. An elegant way about him, almost feminine: the way he lifted a cup to his lips; the way he flicked specks from his trousers.
    ‘I don’t blame the Jews,’ he’d said. ‘They’d implicate everyone if they could. They want the whole world feeling guilty. Maybe they’re right.’
    ‘In what way, sir?’
    ‘Don’t we all have little secrets, things we’re ashamed of?’ Lintz had smiled. ‘You’re playing their game, and you don’t even know it.’
    Rebus had pressed on. ‘The two names are very similar, aren’t they? Lintz, Linzstek.’
    ‘Naturally, or they’d have absolutely no grounds for their accusations. Think, Inspector: wouldn’t I have changed my name more radically? Do you credit me with a modicum of intelligence?’
    ‘More than a modicum.’ Framed diplomas on the walls, honorary degrees, photos taken with university chancellors, politicians. When the Farmer had learned a little more about Joseph Lintz, he’d cautioned Rebus to ‘ca’ canny’. Lintz was a patron of the arts – opera, museums, galleries – and a great giver to charities. He was a man with
friends
.But also a solitary man, someone who was happiest when tending graves in Warriston Cemetery. Dark bags under his eyes, pushing down upon the angular cheeks. Did he sleep well?
    ‘Like a lamb, Inspector.’ Another smile. ‘Of the sacrificial kind. You know, I don’t blame you, you’re only doing your job.’
    ‘You seem to have no end of forgiveness, Mr Lintz.’
    A careful shrug. ‘Do you know Blake’s words,