Devil's in a Different Dress

by Chris Barraclough

  “But they were killed,” I said, my voice hoarse. “They were all taken away and killed!”

  “You don’t know that,” Arndt shot back, fiddling with his glasses again.

  “My parents were taken away, they never came back! If they weren’t dead, they’d have come back! Did you tell the Nazis about them? Did you let them murder my parents?”

  “Hush,” he said with a frown. “Hush, now. I don’t know, I honestly don’t.”

  I couldn’t hold back any longer. Tears flooded down my cheeks and I cried out, writhing and kicking across the floor. How could one man be so cruel? He was a hundred times worse than any Nazi, giving up his own people to those monsters. Killing them when they found out his filthy secret. First Herr Schmidt and then Loriett. And now me. God, I had to escape and warn everyone.

  Arndt watched me for a while, that same frown stuck on his face, until a door slammed downstairs. Then he rose and dusted himself off again.

  “That will be Pieter back,” he said. “Don’t make any more noise, please, child. Don’t make this any harder.” With that, he stepped out of the room and I listened to his footsteps retreat back down the staircase. I kept on fighting against the ropes, until they sliced so deep into my skin that they started to cut off my circulation. Then I just lay there, weeping into the dust and praying for the end to come quickly.

  Twenty Five (Adam)

  I found Shaw back at the barracks. He’d wandered there after seeing the empty cell to find out what had happened and Moss had told him all about Turner’s fate. In a melancholic mood, he’d then picked up his post, which consisted of a single letter. The thing was clutched in one hand and a cigarette in the other when I came across him, slumped against a wall in the yard.

  “Hey,” I said and he nodded gently, without even looking at me. I ran my tongue across my lips and sighed. “Take it you heard the news.”

  “Looks like our job here’s done, eh,” he replied with a grim smile. I shook my head.

  “Not just yet. If Turner didn’t kill Loriett, then someone else did. I’m going back to Schmidt’s house to look around again. I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve missed something.” I waited for some kind of reaction, but Shaw just slipped the fag in his mouth and took a long, hard drag, sucking up so much bloody smoke I thought it would come whistling out of his ears. I folded my arms and tilted my head. “You coming along?”

  “I guess so,” he said, folding the letter in two and slipping it into his jacket pocket.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “News from home?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered, finishing off the cigarette and crushing it under his boot. “From my friend, the one I got to spy on Mary.” A weight popped into my gut.

  “Bad news?”

  “You could say that.” We started to stride back across the yard, heading for the arched entrance. “I guess she must have noticed him checking up on her or something. Apparently they got talking and he took her out for afternoon tea and now they’re madly in love.”

  “What?” I glanced at him, brow furrowed. “So the man you sent to spy on her is now…they’re a thing?”

  “Fucking irony,” Shaw said, followed immediately by a throaty chuckle, although his eyes had misted over and he sounded more likely to break down and start sobbing. I shuffled my feet and released a drawn-out breath.

  “I’m sorry, Mike. That’s…a really shitty thing to happen.”

  “It’s okay,” he said with a sniff. “In a strange, fucked up kind of way, I’m actually glad I know. Now she doesn’t have to keep me awake, night after endless bloody night.” It was a sound philosophy, I guess. Get the pain over with in one swift, sudden burst, rather than dragging it out with endless, rotten hope.

  We soon arrived at Schmidt’s house and let ourselves in; I’d already picked up the key from the office before leaving. Inside the old guy’s place it was strangely cold. I automatically rubbed my hands together as we stepped into the hallway, before turning left into the kitchen. The room had been left almost untouched since the murder, so the sight of spilled blood greeted us, along with a pungent stench. A small band of flies, disturbed by our sudden arrival, took off from the blood-drenched surfaces and lazily circled the kitchen. I waved them off and swept my gaze across the room. A sudden, sickening thought crossed my mind. Loriett had come here and seen this, shortly before her own untimely death. She’d seen her grandfather’s brains smeared across the floor, smelled the reek of his demise. Christ, the things she’d gone through on that final day.

  “What are we looking for?” Shaw asked, shuffling up next to me. I breathed out.

  “If I’m right, then it wasn’t Jurgen who killed Schmidt. He just stumbled into this nightmare and took the opportunity to swipe some goods. We didn’t bother to search around here when we found the body because we thought we already had our man, so maybe a little detective work will throw some new light on what happened, with Schmidt and with Loriett.”

  “Sounds good,” Shaw said with a glimmer of a smile. “I’m actually starting to feel like a proper detective here. Maybe we can do this for real when we get back to merry old England, eh?”

  “Let’s not get crazy,” I replied. “I’ll take the kitchen, you have a look upstairs. If you see anything you think might be important, give me a shout.”

  I had to tread lightly to make sure I didn’t disturb anything, or for that matter smear gore all over my clothes, which wasn’t easy considering how much of the stuff had gushed around the place (it’s amazing how just a pint’s worth can look like a gallon when it’s sprayed about). A number of footprints had already dried in the blood covering the floor tiles, no doubt caused by the body removal. They definitely hadn’t been there when we first came by. I was about to glance away when I noticed that a couple of them were significantly different. Rather than a full, flat boot print, they were formed of two circular patterns, one large and one small. They looked like the kind of prints you might get from a woman’s shoe, one with a rounded heel.

  I paused, staring at the prints. Surely Loriett didn’t walk through this patch? To do something like that, she’d have to have a pretty bloody good reason. The marks seemed to lead to nowhere, though. They just stopped next to the wall and then returned, overlapping the old set. My eyes drifted up the wall and at first I didn’t see anything, but then I noticed something glinting, just above head height. Some tiny little thing was embedded in the paint. I leaned in closer, trying not to step in the blood myself, and realised that it was a slightly bent nail. Something had been hanging there.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered, thinking back to the morning we found the body. It was a sickening blur now. The shakes had started the moment I walked into the grisly scene and then things got a little fuzzy after popping the magic pill. But I did remember seeing some kind of painting on that wall, a picture of…Christ, what the hell was it again? Slowly the images came back to me. There had been more, dotted around the place. I hurried from the kitchen and checked in the hallway. Same thing. I swore that a painting had been hanging just beside the toilet door. I’d almost knocked the bloody thing off the wall myself, brushing past it on my way to sink that pill.

  “Wilheim,” I said to myself. “That’s what it was. World War One, pictures of Wilheim.” Loriett must have taken them down for some reason. I obviously didn’t know the girl, but she would have been born well after the end of the Great War, so I doubted she would have taken them to hang in her own house. Not unless she wanted some kind of memento of her grandfather, perhaps.

  I kept on searching but turned up nothing else, not even a slight clue that might help us. I was just finishing off when I heard Shaw stomping back down the stairs and he appeared a moment later, that misty look in his eyes again. The sticky sheen of freshly smeared tears glistened on his cheeks. He stood in the doorway and swayed slightly and I gently rose and stepped over to him.

  “Any luck?” I asked, my voice soft. He looked up at me and shook his head.

&n
bsp; “Nothing, really. At least nothing I thought might help. He’s got lots of war mementos, but not much else. Did you fare any better?”

  “Only thing I noticed was that some of the paintings have been taken down, all World War One junk. Looks like Loriett might have carried them off somewhere.”

  “Probably took them home,” Shaw said with a nod.

  “I can’t remember seeing them there,” I muttered, thinking back to my quick inspection. Truth be told, my head was in a bad place when I looked around. All I really remembered was the scattering of clothes on her bed. “But anyway, doesn’t it seem a little strange?” I asked. “This girl just found out that her grandfather was dead, so what does she do? She takes down some of his paintings and carries them off.”

  “People do strange things when grief hits,” Shaw said, massaging his own neck with his two remaining fingers. “Back at school, this kid called Jack Wilmott was playing in the old quarry when a landslide started, buried him so deep they couldn’t dig out his body for two whole days. His mother was traumatised. As soon as they pulled him out, she tried to drag him away. Kept saying he wasn’t dead, he was just asleep. Half his ribs were poking out, but he was just resting.”

  “Aye, that’s just denial,” I said. “I’ve seen that loads of times, even from the lads.”

  “Right, but it’s what she did afterwards that was so strange,” Shaw replied. “She started calling the family dog Jack and treating him like he was a boy. She’d feed him normal food and try and dress him in the dead lad’s clothes. I swear, it was the funniest thing in the world when we were kids, but looking back now.” He shook his head and grimaced. “It’s probably the saddest thing I can think of.”

  “Still doesn’t explain where these paintings wandered off to,” I said. “Let’s go take a look at her house, see if she took them back there.”

  We had to swing by the barracks to pick up Loriett’s house key and then we made our way to that alleyway and its delicious dead fish aroma. Of course, the house was still in the same state, completely untouched, and I noted the bare walls both downstairs and up. We searched through her single closet and the cupboards downstairs and came up empty. No paintings, that much was obvious.

  “So, she took them somewhere else,” I muttered to Shaw and he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

  “Surely someone saw her lugging those things about town.”

  “They weren’t big,” I said. “Maybe she had them covered too, for protection. People are carrying things up and down these streets all day, to and from market. She seemed to do a pretty good job of blending into the background anyway.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Shaw said. “So what now?”

  “I think we’re basically buggered,” I replied. “Unless we find those paintings. It’s sod all, really, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  The moment we stepped outside, I reached into my jacket for a cigarette. I hadn’t needed any of my pills so far today, which was a blessed relief, but I’d more than made up for it by chain-smoking my way through a whole packet of fags. I’d just lit up when I heard a door creak open and when I glanced to my left, I saw a skinny woman struggling from the house next door with a sack slung over one shoulder. She shot us a cautious look, freezing for a moment before dropping her gaze.

  “Hallo,” I said and she briefly peered at me again and threw me a quick nod. Normally I would have just let her go, but times were desperate. We needed something, anything, to get us back on the trail. So I stepped towards her and tried my best “entschuldigung sie bitte, sprechen sie Englisch?” At first she just stared back and I thought I was out of luck, but then she gave another hesitant nod.

  “Little,” she mumbled.

  “Loriett,” I said, pointing to the house we’d just stepped from. “Did you see her, three days ago?”

  “Maybe.” The woman shrugged and sat the sack down by her feet with a grunt. “Just pass by, in street.”

  “Did you notice anything strange, unusual? Was she carrying anything?”

  “No,” was the short and simple response. She was wearing the usual beleaguered look I was more than used to from the locals, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was encroaching on her time. Shaw brushed past me and took a half-step closer.

  “Look,” he said, his own impatience obvious. “We need some help. Do you know if she had any friends, anyone we can speak with?”

  “She was quiet girl,” the woman said. “Only family is opa, he dead too. And they…” She paused, although her lips kept moving. “They not close.”

  “Not close?” I said with a frown. “They didn’t get on?” The woman shook her head.

  “Not seeing her often. No friends, no family, just books.”

  “Books?” I was already confused and now I was flat-out bewildered. I made a gesture like a book opening. “Books that you read?” The woman nodded.

  “Books. All she do, books.”

  “But we didn’t see any books in there,” Shaw said, turning to me. He was right. I hadn’t spotted any at all, not even tucked away in the cupboards. I was wondering if we’d misunderstood, but then I remembered the grey building with the tall stained glass windows just north of the square, the one that looked like an old church.

  “The library,” I said. “She got her books from the library?”

  “Yes, library.” The woman tutted and scratched her chin. “Always at library. I think her, old Mikelson, they have something. She there late.”

  “There late?” Shaw said, one eyebrow raised. “You can’t mean they were going together?”

  “Sounds that way,” I said and the woman just picked up the sack and threw it over her shoulder again.

  “I go,” she said, hurrying around us and down the street. I watched her scurry away, trying to force together this new information with what we already knew.

  “So Loriett might have had a thing for this librarian, Mikelson,” I said, rubbing my brow. Shaw snorted.

  “I don’t know, he’s at least three times her age, probably more. And before you start wondering if he’s the murderer, I’ve seen the chap. He isn’t the kind to be raping women and burying them in the woods. He’s meek as hell, and he’d probably have a heart attack first.”

  “Maybe he didn’t rape her. Maybe they had consensual sex and then something bad happened.”

  “Sounds like a slim chance at best,” Shaw said with a grimace. “And the kind of image I could do without.”

  “Aye, true. But if this fella is older, I’m assuming he fought in the first war. Maybe he was even friends with Loriett’s grandfather. And if Loriett had a thing for him, that could explain where those paintings went.”

  “Shit.” Shaw smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Okay then, Sherlock. Let’s get ourselves to the library.”

  Twenty Six (Katherine)

  I lay there on the bedroom floor and listened to Pieter and his father arguing downstairs, but even though I could hear their voices raised high, I couldn’t make out anything that they were saying. My heart was still pounding and my head ached so bad and I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. I’d tried to move, tried to wriggle out of the chair, but the rope was tied too tight. I was stuck in place, helpless.

  “Help me,” I whispered, to no one at all. Suddenly I felt exhausted, my eyelids drooping. The floor was wet and warm beneath my cheek, my shoulder numb from lying in an awkward position for too long, but I started to drift away until I felt soft vibrations beneath me and I realised that someone was walking across the room towards me. My eyes snapped open again and I tried to twist my head around to see who it was. Pieter was staring down at me with an irritated expression. He wasn’t the same person I knew, the boy I’d grown up with. He was a stranger, the way he stared at me with such hate.

  “Idiot,” he said, reaching down and grabbing me by the arm. I cringed away, but he heaved me upwards with enough force to pop my arm from its socket before setting the chair straight again. My shoulder was burning b
ut I didn’t cry out or whimper. My face was already a mask of tears and I didn’t want him to see me blubbing more. He stood over me, scratching his chest like he had a rash there. “My leg hurts like a bastard,” he muttered. “I should cut you open too, see how you like that.”

  “Fuck you,” I spat, immediately regretting it. I thought he was going to thump me good, but after a while he just smiled and shook his head.

  “You’re such a brat,” he said. “You know, the only reason I was friends with you was because Thomas felt sorry for you. Just a sad little orphan girl.”

  “I’d rather be a sad little orphan than a crazy freak.”

  “Freak?” Pieter said, his mouth twisting. He leaned into me, grabbing and squeezing the arm rests and pushing his face up to mine. “I’m not a freak, you little shit.”

  “Carving all those figures,” I said, shaking against the chair. “Pretending Loriett liked you. You’re mad.”

  “She did like me!” he roared, blasting spit into my eyes. “She wanted me! And I had her, I fucked her! She would have been my girlfriend if father hadn’t killed her!” He pulled away again and I watched, horrified, as he started to pound his fist into the wall beside me, over and over. He was screaming and cursing but I could still hear the crack of his knuckles against the plaster. He didn’t stop for a dozen or more punches and when his arm finally dropped to his side and he turned back to me, panting and muttering, his hand had split open and there was blood dripping down his fingers. I could only stare back at him, my mouth gaping wide. Pieter glanced down at his torn knuckles and then across at the blood smear on the wall and he a sinister kind of smile settled on his lips. I honestly thought I was going to be sick and I didn’t even realise that Arndt had come into the room until I heard his voice booming out.