Devil's in a Different Dress

by Chris Barraclough

  I started towards the door, but stopped when I heard footsteps coming up the staircase. They were already almost at the top and I pictured Pieter’s father clutching a gun, coming to finish me off. I still didn’t know why there had been gunshots in the first place. My eyes watered as I thought about them shooting Katz while he stood there, helpless, and then I felt a burning rage inside and I squeezed the knife handle tight.

  “Bastards,” I muttered, crushing myself up against the wall, between Pieter and the door. I’d wait for the old man to come in and then I’d get him, take him by surprise. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face, the same look that Pieter had when he glanced down and saw the knife in his belly. He was coming slowly down the hallway now, just a few paces away. Pieter was still groaning down beside me and I wanted to press my hand over his mouth, or just slip the blade into his throat to shut him up for good, but there was no time. The footsteps were right outside the door now. I raised the knife up over my shoulder and waited until I saw a shadow creep across the floorboards, then I pushed away from the wall and yelled as I stabbed at the figure stood in the doorway.

  But I was too slow. A strong arm caught me across the jaw and knocked me to the side, where I crashed to the ground. My elbow smashed into the hard floor and the sudden agony made me drop the knife, which went skidding off across the floorboards. I whimpered and rolled onto my back, expecting to see Pieter’s father glaring down at me. Instead, I was shocked to see Captain King. He looked confused, his gun clutched in his right hand.

  “Katherine?” he said and the burning feeling deep inside died down. Clutching my elbow, I picked myself off the floor and stared up at him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked and he shook his head.

  “What are you doing here? Where’s that boy gone to?”

  “They were keeping me prisoner,” I told him. “Pieter’s in there.” I pointed a finger back into the room and Captain King peered around the corner, then he turned back with both eyebrows raised.

  “Jesus. You really did a number on him.”

  “What happened to Katz?” I asked, already pushing past him and hurrying to the staircase. My head throbbed with every step but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him again.

  “Hey, Katherine, wait!” Captain King called out. He caught up to me at the top of the steps and followed me down. “That kid, he…he hurt your dog pretty bad. I don’t even know if…”

  “No,” I whispered, almost stumbling over my own feet again. At the bottom of the staircase I leapt down the final two steps and ran down the hallway, sprinting through the kitchen. I barely noticed Pieter’s father, lying there on the kitchen floor, groaning to himself. I bounded past him and out into the garden, where I caught myself and stopped dead, a hand pressed to my mouth. Katz was lying perfectly still with his back to me. Before I even shuffled over to him, my shoes dragging through the grass and dirt, I knew that I was too late. I moved to his side and peered down into those enormous, lifeless eyes, stuck wide open, and then I knelt down and placed a hand on his flank, running my fingers through his thick fur. He was still warm. “Katz. I’m sorry, boy. It’s all my fault.” For the second time, I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. They washed down my cheeks and fell onto Katz’s chest, where they seeped away into his fur.

  Behind me, Captain King was tending to another soldier. Slowly I turned and watched them, the other soldier wincing and swearing while Captain King fussed over him. Then King rose and headed back inside. Back to where Arndt was writhing in pain. I bent down and kissed Katz once on the top of his head, then I carefully got back to my feet and followed him inside the house.

  When I walked up and joined Captain King’s side, Arndt was confessing to the murders. He glared at me, his mouth all twisted.

  “Just ask her,” he growled in English, “I told her everything. Now where’s my son? I want to see my son!” He broke into a coughing fit, his chest shaking and oozing blood.

  “He’s upstairs,” Captain King told him. “Did he have anything to do with these killings?”

  “No!” Arndt rolled his head back and forth, wheezing loudly. “No, he’s a good boy. He’s just a little mixed up.”

  “Did he rape Loriett?”Captain King asked and Arndt stared up at him, his chin trembling.

  “No,” he whispered. “No, he just…he wanted to see what it was like. That’s what he told me. He loved her, he loved that girl.”

  “Wait, hang on, I’m confused.” Captain King crouched at Arndt’s side. “Did he rape the girl or not?”

  “It’s not rape,” Pieter’s father said, “if she’s already dead.”

  We watched him wheeze and cough for a moment, while those words sunk in. Finally Captain King turned away and gazed out through the open door.

  “That explains it, then,” he muttered. “Why she was covered in dirt, but left out in the open beside a shallow pit. Why all her clothes had been pulled off right there in the woods. Jesus Christ. He went back for her.” He rubbed his temples with both hands. “What about another English soldier? Did you see a soldier that night, when you buried her?”

  “A soldier,” Arndt repeated, breaking into another coughing fit. He paused to lift a trembling hand to his lips and wipe away the dark spit that trickled down to his chin. “Yes, the madman in the car. I thought he was going to crash into my cart, he was going so fast. We hid in the woods while he stopped to take a look. He could barely even stand, the drunken fool. He saw her body and he started screaming and waving his arms. Mad, completely mad. Somehow he managed to get back into his car and drive away.”

  “Stupid, shitty luck,” Captain King said. “That soldier died because of you.”

  “Not just him,” I said. Captain King hadn’t noticed when I slipped my hand into his pocket and pulled out the gun that was sticking out. He didn’t try and stop me either, when I stepped forwards and took the safety off, just like he’d shown me. “He killed a lot of people. He probably killed my parents.”

  “I told you,” Arndt spluttered, “I don’t know anything about that.” His eyes were full of fear when I pointed the gun at his head and slipped my finger over the trigger. I was glad of that. I thought he might welcome death after all the things he’d done, maybe the guilt was too much to bear. But he wasn’t ready yet. He wanted to cling onto life and I stared at him long and hard, eating up his fear, before I pulled the trigger.

  The gun kicked in my hand and the noise was sharp enough to make me flinch, but I got him right where I was aiming, right between his eyes. The grunting and the wheezing came to an end and his head rolled to the side. Then the only sound in the kitchen was the echo of the gunshot, and then silence. I stood there, staring down at him until Captain King rested a hand on my shoulder and took the gun from my hand. That was when I heard the trucks pulling up outside.

  “They’re going to ask you what happened,” Captain King told me, his voice soft. “Tell them everything except for this. I shot him and he died and then I came upstairs and found you, alright?” I just nodded in reply, before the front door was kicked in and soldiers flooded into the hallway.

  Twenty Nine (Adam)

  The Major took it all better than I thought he would, to be honest. He sat there in silence, smoking his cigar and drinking port until I’d finished recounting the whole sorry bloody tale and then he took a dramatic puff, possibly to gather his thoughts on the whole matter, before unleashing the smoke as a huge sigh.

  “So,” he said, fixing his glare on me, “even though I said that the investigation was over, you decided to stick with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now both of your men are laid up in the infirmary with serious injuries and we’ve got three more bodies in the morgue.”

  “And we found the real killers, sir,” I said, trying to keep my calm. “Before they murdered an innocent girl.” The Major took another drag and leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, smoke trailing from his nostrils.

>   “Christ on a bike,” he muttered. He glanced down at his glass of port and then turned back to me with a frown. “So Lieutenant Turner had nothing to do with it.” I shook my head and cleared my throat.

  “He stumbled across the body disposal by accident. He was driving down back from Kungsbrucken and almost hit the cart they were using to drag the girl to the woods. He probably got out, pulled back whatever they were hiding her under and saw her lying there underneath…unfortunately, he was so out of it that the shock of seeing the girl’s face was all he remembered.”

  “Shit,” the Major said, eyes glazing over. “He bloody confessed. He looked me right in the eye and said he was sorry.”

  “Well, he didn’t murder Loriett, but he probably did kill Theodor Lemann. Or at the very least, he helped Theodor’s wife hide the body.” The Major stared at me for a moment, then he waved his hand at me.

  “I need to think all this through,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to report all this back to the bigwigs. They’ll think I’ve gone stark raving bloody mad.”

  “I think we all have, sir,” I said as I got to my feet. Then I saluted and strode from the office.

  Katherine was waiting for me outside, staring off into the distance with her hands wedged into her jacket pockets. I had to call her name before she even realised I was standing there, then she blinked twice and pushed away from the wall.

  “Next stop, the infirmary,” I said. She just nodded and joined my side and we started the short walk in silence. I tried to think of something to say, but she was lost in her own little world and had been ever since I found her in that house. I couldn’t blame her. The things she’d been through, the things she’d had to do, were enough to mess anyone up for life. And of course, Katz’s absence was all too obvious. “You holding yourself together?” I asked her. She peered up at me and sniffed, dragging her sleeve across her brow and tugging back the stray strands of hair.

  “I…think so.” She sniffed again. “Do you think they’ll be following me now, just like your ghosts?”

  “Who, the librarian and his son?” I shook my head. “No. I’m pretty sure Katz’s ghost would chase them right off. You know how jealous that dog was. He’d never let another spirit get near you.” I was relieved as anything when a slight smile trembled on her lips.

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “I can’t feel them there.”

  “Aye, you’re safe enough.”

  When we walked into the infirmary, the doc was sat in the front office with his feet up on his desk and his face stuck in a book as usual. He looked up long enough to wave us on and then got back to reading. We left him to it and wandered into the ward, currently occupied by just two patients. Mick Oliver had been taken back to the barracks to rest up before his court martial, where a rotating guard made sure he didn’t think about doing a runner. That left Corporals Terry Wightman and Michael Shaw, who were laid up in beds just a few feet apart. Wightman was awake and he looked utterly fed up, greeting me with a depressed little frown.

  “Corporal,” I said and he let out a groan.

  “Why do I have to be stuck in a room with this bastard?” Wightman rolled his head on his pillow and glared at Shaw, who was still passed out, probably from the sedatives the doc pumped into him. I smiled.

  “I heard what happened from the Major. So it was Oliver who started the fire?”

  “Little twat shot me an’ all,” Wightman growled. “After everything I’ve done for ‘im. I’ll rip his fucking nuts off with my bare hands and shove ‘em in his ears.”

  “I think he’ll be executed long before you get the chance,” I told him, following with a shrug. “How you feeling?”

  “Pretty stupid, mostly.” He sighed, long and loud. “Oh well, if you’re gonna get shot, might as well get shot in an infirmary, right? Hey, Cap, you got a spare fag? I’ve been dying for a smoke for ages.”

  “Course.” I slipped him the leftovers in my pack, about five sticks, and he grinned from ear to ear.

  “Cheers, guv.” He snatched one between his teeth and lit it with my lighter, doing us the courtesy of turning his head to blow out the smoke. “By the way, I talked to that Lemann bird. Wasn’t her who offed her husband, it was Turner alright.”

  “You know that for sure?” I asked and he nodded.

  “She was pretty put out when she heard the news. Then she told me that she teased her husband before he stormed on out, rubbing it in that she was jumping into the sack with some other guy. But she didn’t tell him who.” He paused as if it was some grand revelation, and all I could do was stare back and eventually shake my head.

  “So?”

  “So, what if the husband, furious as fuck, got it into his head that Turner was the guy she was fucking? The lad already stepped in to break up their fight and walked her home, right?”

  “Jesus,” I whispered, stroking my forehead. “So he could’ve gone looking for Turner for some revenge, but came out considerably worse off.”

  “Then Turner shoved the body away, pretended nothing happened.” Wightman took another drag and shrugged. “Just a theory. Obviously going to be a little hard to say what really happened, no witnesses and all.”

  “Aye,” I said, suppressing a smile. “Good work there. Looks like you’re settling into the job nicely.”

  “Oh, please,” Wightman said with a roll of his eyes. “You’re making me fucking blush. How about you, any luck with your little murder theory? And who’s the runt?” He nodded at Katherine and she wrinkled her nose.

  “What’s a runt?” she asked. Wightman laughed.

  “She speaks English, eh? Better than half ah those useless fuckers in town.”

  I was wondering whether to plunge into the events of the past few hours for the fourth or fifth time so far today, but just the thought of it completely drained my soul. Luckily I didn’t have to worry, as the doc pushed his way inside at that exact moment with a harangued look on his face. He came straight up to us and grabbed Shaw’s arm, pinching his wrist to take a pulse.

  “What’s the diagnosis?” I asked him. “They both going to pull through okay?”

  “This one’s got a ruptured spleen. Surgeon sorted him out, he’ll be alright with some rest.” The doc glanced over at Wightman and shook his head. “That one, I don’t know. The bullet’s still somewhere inside of him. To be honest, I’m amazed he’s not already dead.”

  “Fuck that for a laugh,” Wightman said, stubbing the fag out on the wall. “I feel fine. I’ll be doing cartwheels this time tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see,” the doc said. “Anyway, reason I came in is, you have a visitor.”

  “Who has a visitor?” Wightman asked. “I have a visitor?”

  “Yes, you. You wanna see her?”

  “Her?” His face creased. “Who is it?”

  “The girl who was holding you together when I found you lying in my bloody hallway.” The doc sighed. “Well? Yay or nay?”

  “Sure,” Wightman said, resting his head back against the wall. “Show her in.”

  “Should we leave you two in peace?” I asked him as the doc stepped out of the room. Wightman snorted.

  “What, are you joking? Chances are she’ll try and smother me with my pillow. She’s a fucking psycho, that one.” He shut up as soon as the door swung open again and Emily Hanna shuffled in, looking for all the world like she had no idea what she was doing here. She joined us, fidgeting with a corner of her sleeve.

  “I came to see how you were,” she said to Wightman and his smile widened by about an inch.

  “I knew you liked me really,” he said and she narrowed her eyes.

  “No, I just….” She shook her head and huffed out a breath. “You really are a…”

  “Massive bastard?” I offered and Wightman snorted again. Emily glanced at me and Katherine and then back to the injured Corporal.

  “I should go,” she said and she turned to leave, but Wightman called out her name after just two steps
and she turned back.

  “Thanks for not just running out on me before,” he told her. She stared at him like she was searching for something to say, then she shrugged.

  “I heard you talking with him, before he shot you. You went there for the same reason I did.”

  “Well, I went there to kick his arse.” Wightman scratched his neck. “But I guess you did a better job.”

  I almost jumped out of my skin when Shaw launched into a coughing fit behind me and I spun around, watching him claw back the sheets and wearily open his eyes. He peered at me and then each of the others, ending on Wightman. As soon as he saw his ward buddy, Shaw’s face collapsed.

  “Oh, bollocks,” he muttered, “not him. Not that fucking arsehole.”

  Thirty (Emily)

  When I left the infirmary, the sky was almost dark and the few working streetlights had flickered on, bathing the town in orange light. I pulled my collar up and glanced to my left at the sound of voices. Captain King was leaning against the wall, a cigarette making his face glow just like the pavements beneath the streetlights. The girl I’d seen with Arndt’s boy Pieter was still at his side, kicking the toe of her shoe against the wall. She returned my stare, her face mostly hidden in the shadows. For a moment I hesitated, then I headed over, my hands buried deep inside my jacket pockets. Captain King turned towards me and took the cigarette from his mouth, clutching it between his fingers.