The Murderer in Ruins (28 page)

‘I’ll need to take this card,’ Stave told Brems, ‘it’s evidence.’

The researcher shrugged. ‘Nobody has ever asked about him, or we’d have had a note on the file. But let me make a copy, just to keep things in order.’

He took a second card from a box and began copying the details with a fountain pen, though it was so cold that the ink was almost freezing and there were blank lines left on the new card.

Nobody will ever be able to read that, the chief inspector thought, but it doesn’t matter any more.

Stave nodded in farewell, and was just about to open the door when Brems cleared his throat, and said: ‘I don’t want to give you any false hopes, by the way, but we are expecting a letter from the Red Cross today with a new list of prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union. I know that there is not much chance of finding names on it that we don’t already have. But we can’t rule it out.’

‘Just check names beginning with “St” for me,’ the chief inspector said, hoping that the tremor in his voice wasn’t too noticeable. Then he turned away quickly.

Don’t get your hopes up. No unrealistic hopes.

O
n the way back Stave dropped into a cafe that had survived the war almost intact, apart from the fact that the four-storey building’s façade had collapsed, as if some monster had ripped its face off. The front of the cafe had been boarded up and a couple of pieces of glass inserted with nails and putty to let light in. The chief inspector ordered a bowl of potato soup, which came with grey bread, butter and tea.

The soup was a pale yellow colour, but at least it was hot. The
bread crumbled beneath his fingers, and he had no idea what the paste on it was, except that it certainly wasn’t proper butter. The tea smelt of nettles. Supposed to be good for you, Stave told himself, and slurped at the bitter brew. He left the cafe feeling hungrier than ever.

When he got back to the office he was surprised to find MacDonald waiting for him.

‘I need to talk to you,’ the lieutenant said.

‘My lucky day,’ Stave answered, offering the officer a chair.

Erna Berg glanced through the outer door, seemingly calm, clearly with no idea what her lover had on his mind, Stave reckoned. So she wasn’t in on it. He closed the door.

‘You’ve been back to see Frau Hellinger,’ MacDonald said bluntly. It was a statement, not a question.

‘Are you having me watched?’

The Brit smiled apologetically. ‘Not you. We’re watching Frau Hellinger.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Have you come to tell it to me?’

‘I’m afraid there’s no alternative,’ MacDonald said with a sigh. Then he smiled again, one of those apologetic, charming Oxford smiles, and took a loose-leaf binder out of his briefcase.

It was the case files.

‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience, old boy. I thought I could get away with it. But you’re too good. I’m going to have to let you in on a secret.’

Stave looked down at the files, then at MacDonald, and then eventually said, ‘What is it that you have to “let me in” on?’

‘Operation Bottleneck,’ the Brit answered, smiling yet again. He shrugged and raised his hands, then let them fall to his side. ‘I should probably have done so earlier, at least when Hellinger’s name first came up.’

MacDonald glanced briefly at the closed door, then at the files.
‘The other story is actually a lot more complicated than Operation Bottleneck, but I think you’re already in the picture there.’

‘Is there something I can help you with?’

‘Yes, you could take your service issue revolver and put a neat round hole in Frau Hellinger’s husband’s head,’ the lieutenant replied, pulling a face. ‘Only joking. This is my problem and mine alone – unlike the other one.’

‘Operation Bottleneck. It was you there that morning that Martin Hellinger disappeared?’

‘I abducted him.’

Stave leant back. ‘Maybe you want to start at the beginning?’

‘I am an officer in His Majesty’s Army,’ MacDonald began, ‘but I also belong to another organisation, which recruited me back in my student days, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee. They used a good argument to convince me to sign up. They saw to it that the scandal surrounding my affair with a married lady from an aristocratic family just disappeared, like snuffing out a match.’

‘Must be a very specific sort of organisation.’

‘You could call it,’ the lieutenant hesitated, ‘a sort of secret service.’

‘Like the Gestapo?’

For the first time, MacDonald seemed to lose control of himself, gave Stave a look of disgust and said, ‘I hardly think so. We are a few dozen men, officers of His Majesty and a few officials in a couple of ministries in London, scientists and academics in universities and a few specially chosen companies. We answer directly to the government. Our task is to seek out scientists and technicians in occupied Germany who worked for the Nazi regime.’

‘To punish them?’

‘Personally that would be my preference. But no. Our job is not to punish these gentlemen. We are after men with all kinds of technical knowledge, aircraft engine manufacturers, physicists who developed bombs, U-boat developers. But also specialists who could be useful to our badly damaged economy: chemists who researched using excrement as fertiliser, steel industry and mining engineers,
technicians who might have plans for new cars or better radios lying in their desk drawers.’

‘Or precision timepieces?’

‘And trigonometric calculators. Calculating machines are going to be big business in the future, and Dr Hellinger recognised that sooner than most people.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘We abduct the gentlemen concerned,’ MacDonald replied, as if it was some student prank. ‘We knock on their doors and take them away. A trip in a jeep to the nearest military airfield where a plane is already waiting, engines running – and before the gentlemen concerned know what’s hit them, they are guests of His Majesty in a castle in the Scottish Highlands. Or in a laboratory outside London. Or a shipyard in Liverpool. They get milked; we drag all the knowledge we can out of these specialists, let them do their calculations, experiments, screw things together, until we know everything they know. Then we use what we’ve got out of them for our own research, either civilian or military.’

‘And these gentlemen don’t mind being milked? Is there no such thing as patent law?’

MacDonald laughed. ‘Patent law, after a war which killed 20 million. What good is it winning the war? In the old days the temples would have been plundered, today it’s knowledge we’re stealing. Not an altogether unfair price for what your country inflicted on the world.’

‘And these specialists are happy enough just to give away their knowledge?’

‘The sooner they tell us all they know, the sooner they get to go home again. We’re not monsters. We don’t need to use Gestapo methods. We just wait for them to agree. Usually they’re like show-off children, so proud of their inventions, they tell us everything we want to know on day one. Even if they’re murderous weapons. In fact particularly so.’

‘So does that mean Dr Hellinger is going to turn up again one day soon?’

‘Of course. He’s not exactly one of the most reluctant. Unfortunately this damn cold has hit my homeland too, and we have hardly any aircraft fuel. Many of our harbours too are frozen in. We simply have no way of getting Hellinger back at the moment, either by ship or plane. But as soon as the thaw sets in, he’ll be on his way home. He’ll make up some story to tell his wife to explain his absence. We’ll help him with that and from now on he and his family will get heavy industrial worker ration cards in return for their silence. That is Operation Bottleneck. It’s gone well up until now. Hellinger would have turned up again. His wife would have withdrawn the “missing person” report. And that would have been it. No questions and nobody would have noticed.

‘But then the cold set in, and the murderer appeared on the scene. The Hellinger case has nothing to do with the rubble murderer. Pure coincidence. But then his name is listed in a murder file and who knows who might read it there? And the damn note Hellinger left. I had told him about the operation when I picked him up so that he wouldn’t kick up a fuss. But then he does the dirty on me by leaving this note. No idea how he managed to write it in time. I had him out of the house in two minutes flat.’

‘And then you simply stole the files?’

‘I removed them. You would suddenly have come across them again, as soon as Hellinger was back. You would have taken Hellinger off the list of victims and that would have been that.’

‘Stupid thing to do.’

MacDonald was taken aback for a minute, then he laughed. ‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought it through. I just happened to be here to see Erna and spotted them lying there.’

‘The two of you were in my office?’

‘Don’t blame Frau Berg. I persuaded her. We were alone and less likely to be disturbed than in the outer office, if you know what I mean.’

‘You and my secretary … here in my office?’ Stave didn’t quite know how to complete the accusation.

‘Good grief, old boy, were you never in love? We just suddenly found ourselves on our own together once again. It was a perfect opportunity.’

‘A perfect opportunity for you to take my files at the same time. Opportunistic indeed.’

‘Don’t take offence. I swear it was purely amorous intentions that brought us into your office. And afterwards my head was possibly not as clear as it should have been.’

‘Obviously.’

Stave closed his eyes and thought. ‘I’ll believe you, Lieutenant, if only because your story is so distasteful and your motive so badly thought through. I also believe that there’s no connection between the Hellinger case and the rubble murderer. But his name was in the file, and I am going to have to explain why his disappearance is no longer relevant.’

‘Who’s likely to ask?’

‘Nobody, probably. But I take pride in my investigations being thorough and properly documented.’

‘Make an exception this time.’

‘What if I choose not to?’

‘One mention of Operation Bottleneck and you’ll find yourself the next guest of His Majesty. We have just about enough aircraft fuel to see to that.’

‘I thought as much,’ Stave replied. ‘There again I’ve always wanted to see a Scottish castle.’

‘Not when it’s minus 20 Celsius.’

‘I suppose there is that argument.’ Stave said nothing for a few moments, thinking the matter over. ‘You have my word that I’ll make no mention of Operation Bottleneck,’ he eventually promised. ‘There’ll be nothing more about Hellinger in the files. Nor about the way the files went missing.’

MacDonald took a deep breath. ‘Thank you for that. I would have found it deeply disagreeable to have to do something as unpleasant as kidnapping you. But I am obliged to do everything I can to keep this operation secret.’

‘Do you find it equally unpleasant kidnapping people like Hellinger?’

‘No,’ the lieutenant replied without hesitation. ‘The Nazis had their butchers to do their dirty work, in the Gestapo, in the concentration camps. I’m sure you know the type I mean. Brutal men, with no conscience, but not bright enough to do too much harm on their own. Hitler needed cleverer men for that. Like our good Dr Hellinger with his trigonometric calculators. They worked brilliantly, as 10,000 sailors’ widows from Liverpool to Halifax will testify. No, he doesn’t get my sympathy.’

‘We have something in common there.’

‘That’s why I enjoy working with you so much, Chief Inspector.’

‘Would you say the same for my colleague, Maschke?’

Suddenly MacDonald was cautious. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘How much do you know about him?’

The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. ‘When I was seconded to this investigation, obviously I read through the personnel files of those I would be working with.’

‘Very thorough of you.’

‘Just being professional. But I didn’t see anything particularly interesting in Maschke’s file. That’s all I know about him.’

‘Would you get the personnel files for me to look at?’

‘Gladly, as thanks for your cooperation in the Operation Bottleneck business. But why were you asking about Maschke in particular?’

‘Now I have a secret from you, Lieutenant. But I promise you I’ll let you in on it before long. When the time is right.’

MacDonald nodded and got to his feet. ‘Fair enough. Just let me know.’

When the lieutenant already had his hand on the door handle to leave, Stave cleared his throat. ‘Just promise me you won’t ask me to be godfather to your child,’ he said. ‘even if it might have been conceived in my office.’

‘Touché
,’ said MacDonald, touching his cap to Stave as he left.

S
tave stared out of the window for a long time after the lieutenant had left. He was relieved to have his files back again. I’m such an old stickler for doing things by the book, he thought to himself. Margarethe would have laughed. She would have told me not to make such a fuss.

But things were getting clearer. He could trust MacDonald after all, and, it seemed, Erna Berg too, even if he was still shocked at the idea that, despite being a married woman, she had offered herself to an officer of the army of occupation here in his office. On
this
desk.

The disappearance of the files had been cleared up. Hellinger was no longer part of the investigation. He was not a suspect, and, thank God, not another victim.

Stave now had enough witnesses and statements to take Maschke to court and charge him with being a former SS man involved in the Oradour massacre. He wondered if it might not be wiser to have Maschke arrested straight away. Or should he leave his former colleague in the dark, play him until he somehow gave himself away? I’m going to have to talk to Ehrlich again, he thought. The public prosecutor must have some idea that Maschke had a Nazi past. Why else had he bumped into him that night in Maschke’s office? He was snooping after something. But he almost certainly had no idea that Maschke had been at Oradour. The Nazi-hunter would be grateful when Stave presented him with the evidence. He would have a new trial, maybe back in the Curio House.