Prague Fatale
Page 19
‘Then I called Kuttner’s name,’ said Heydrich. ‘And hearing no reply I approached the bed. It was immediately clear to us all from his position that something was very wrong. He was still wearing his uniform and his sleep seemed abnormally sound to me. What with the sound of the door coming down and our voices, it didn’t seem right that he shouldn’t even stir. So I pressed my fingers on the side of his neck to look for a pulse and I noticed straight away that his skin was cold to the touch. Colder than it ought to have been. And then I noticed that there was no pulse. No pulse at all.’
‘Have you been trained to take a pulse like that?’ I asked.
Heydrich frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s a straightforward question, sir. You’d be amazed how many dead men turn up fit and well after someone has taken their pulse and pronounced them dead.’
‘Very well, yes, I have. During my Luftwaffe training at the Werneuchen Aerodrome, in 1939, I received basic training in first aid. And again in May 1940. That was in Stavanger.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no question about it, Gunther. The man was quite dead. That would have been at approximately ten minutes past seven.’
Kritzinger was nodding.
‘What happened next?’ I asked him.
‘The General ordered me to telephone for an ambulance.’
‘Where did you call?’
‘The Bulovka Hospital is the nearest,’ he said. ‘It’s on the north-east outskirts of Prague, about ten kilometres away.’
‘I drive past it every morning,’ said Heydrich.
‘A Czech doctor called Honek attended,’ said Kritzinger. ‘In fact he’s still downstairs.’
‘And what did you do?’ I asked Pomme.
‘General Heydrich told me to go and fetch General Jury right away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a doctor, too,’ said Pomme.
‘Yes, I remember now. He was a specialist in tuberculosis, I believe. Before he joined the SS.’ I nodded. ‘So, you went to fetch him. What happened then?’
‘I’m afraid he was feeling rather the worse for wear after last night. It was at least another fifteen minutes before he was dressed and on the scene.’
I looked at Heydrich. ‘Meanwhile, sir, you were still in the room with Kuttner, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do while you were waiting for Doctor Jury?’
‘Let’s see now. I opened the window, to get some air. I was feeling a little queasy for some reason. No, that’s not fair. He was a friend of mine. I lit a cigarette, to calm my nerves. But I tossed the end out of the window when I was finished. The crime scene is substantially uncontaminated.’ He shook his head and then ran a thin hand through his short hair. ‘I can’t think of anything else. After a while Doctor Jury turned up with Pomme. The doctor was, as Pomme says, very hung over. But not so hung over that he was incapable of pronouncing poor Kuttner dead. After that I had Ploetz call you and the local police right away. At approximately seven-thirty.’
‘Where’s Doctor Jury now?’ I asked.
‘In the library, sir,’ said Kritzinger. ‘With Doctor Honek. He asked for a pot of strong black coffee to be brought to him there.’
‘Has Doctor Honek examined the body?’
‘No,’ said Heydrich firmly. ‘I decided that there was no urgency about doing so. I thought it might be better if he waited until you had had a chance to examine the body yourself.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll do that now, if I may.’
‘Of course,’ said Heydrich.
‘Mister Kritzinger,’ I said. ‘Would you ask Doctor Jury to join us in Captain Kuttner’s room?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Captain Pomme? Perhaps you’d like to lead the way.’
I stood up and looked at Kahlo, the Criminal Assistant from Prague Kripo. ‘You’d better fetch the evidence kit that Zennaty brought,’ I said.
‘Right you are, sir.’
‘General? If you’d care to join us?’
Heydrich nodded. ‘Major Ploetz? You’d better inform the rest of my guests of what has happened. And that they will be required to answer the Commissar’s questions before anyone is allowed to leave. And that includes everyone at the Upper Castle.’
‘Yes sir.’
Kuttner’s room was on the same floor as mine, but it was in the south wing and overlooked a little glass winter garden. On the pink-papered walls were some pictures of English hunting scenes that made a welcome change from the Czech ones with which I was more familiar. The fox, who appeared to be smiling, must have believed he stood a good chance of escaping from the hounds, and that was all right with me. Lately I’m the kind of antisocial type who cheers when the fox makes a clean getaway.
Before I looked at the body I made my way around the room, noting a large pile of books by the bed and a bottle of Veronal beside a water carafe on the desk. The screw cap was still off the bottle. There were several pills on the floor but, oddly, the bottle was upright. Kuttner’s belts and the holster containing his Walther automatic were hanging on the back of his chair.
Heydrich saw me pick up the open bottle of Veronal. ‘Until I realized the true nature of his injuries I assumed that the Veronal was the culprit,’ he said. ‘It was only when Doctor Jury opened the tunic of his uniform to examine Captain Kuttner that we realized he’d suffered a lethal wound to his abdomen.’
‘Mmm hmm.’
Kuttner lay at an angle across the bed, as if he’d collapsed there. His eyes were closed. One of his arms lay neatly alongside his torso; the other was sticking straight out at right angles to the rest of his body, like a dead Christ. Well, half of a dead Christ anyway. But both hands were unscathed and empty. There were four buttons on his captain’s fart-catcher tunic with three of them unbuttoned from the top. He was wearing a white collarless shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and no tie. It was easy to see how anyone could have missed the fact he’d been shot. It was only when you lifted the flap of the tunic that you could see the blood covering the shirt. He was still wearing his riding breeches, and just one boot. The monkey-swing – his adjutant’s braided rope – was off his top button but still attached to the right epaulette. He looked like a man who had been shot while he was still undressing.
‘Has anyone been over the floor yet?’ I asked Heydrich. ‘To look for evidence?’
‘No,’ said Heydrich.
I nodded at Kahlo who, without complaint, dropped onto his hands and knees and began to look for a bullet-shell, or perhaps something as yet unimagined.
I collected the P38 from Kuttner’s holster, sniffed the barrel and then checked the magazine. The gun was dirty and not well maintained, but clearly it hadn’t been fired in a while.
‘Your conclusions?’ asked Heydrich.
‘Beyond the fact that he was shot in the torso and that it hardly looks like a suicide I don’t yet have any,’ I said.
‘Why do you think it doesn’t look like a suicide?’ asked Pomme.
‘It’s unusual to shoot yourself and then neatly replace the weapon in the holster,’ I said. ‘Especially when you weren’t being neat about so much else. If you were going to shoot yourself, you would take off both boots, or neither of them. Quite apart from that his own pistol has a full magazine and hasn’t been fired in a while.’
I shrugged.
‘Then again there is no other gun in the room. But all the same it’s hard to imagine that he was shot, returned to his room, locked the door, lay down on the bed, took off one boot, and then quietly died. Even if that’s what it looks like.’
‘What I can’t understand,’ said Heydrich, ‘is why nobody seems to have heard a shot.’
‘Well, we don’t know that until we ask everyone,’ I said.
‘I can ask around, if you like,’ offered Pomme.
‘What I mean,’ Heydrich said firmly, ‘is that the sound of a shot would surely have raised the alarm. Especially here, in a house full of policemen.’
I went to the open window and put my head outside.
‘Today I can’t hear anything,’ I said. ‘But yesterday when I arrived here, at around the same time, someone was out there shooting birds. Rather a lot of birds.’
‘That would have been General von Eberstein,’ said Captain Pomme. ‘He likes to shoot.’
‘But not this morning,’ I observed.
‘This morning, he has a hangover,’ said Pomme. ‘Like General Jury.’
Kahlo stood up. ‘Apart from all of these pills, there’s nothing on this floor, sir,’ he said. ‘Not so much as a bloodspot.’
‘What, nothing at all?’ I frowned.
‘No sir. I’ll organize a more thorough search, after the body’s gone. But this floor is clean, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a mystery. Maybe he shot himself, threw the gun out of the window, closed it again, and then collapsed on the bed and died.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Heydrich, sarcastically. ‘Or maybe Captain Kuttner was just shot by a man who could pass through solid walls.’
‘You’d better check outside, anyway,’ I told Kahlo.
He nodded and left the room.
Heydrich shook his head. ‘That man is an idiot.’
‘How well do you know this house, General?’
‘You mean, are there any false walls and secret passages?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve not been here for very long at all. Von Neurath had the house before I did. He knows this place much better than me, so you’d better ask him that.’
Absently I drew open Kuttner’s drawers and found several shirts, a toilet bag, some underwear, a shoe-cleaning kit, some Der Führer magazines, a clay pipe, a book of poems, and a framed picture of a woman.
‘Can I ask von Neurath something like that?’
‘As I told you already, Gunther, I expect everyone to cooperate. No matter who or what they are.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ I smiled. ‘Do I have to be polite? Or can I just be myself?’
‘Why change the habit of a lifetime? You’re the most insubordinate fellow I know, Gunther, but sometimes that yields results. It might however be a good idea if, while you were conducting your investigation, and practising your habitual impertinence, you wore civilian clothes. So that you can’t be accused of something that would get you court-martialled in a uniform. Yes. I think that might be best. Have you any civilian clothes with you?’
‘Yes sir. They’re in my room.’
‘Good. And that reminds me, Gunther. You’ll need a suitable space from which to conduct your investigations. You can use the Morning Room. See to it will you, Captain Pomme?’
‘Yes, Herr General.’
‘Pomme will be your liaison officer for the inquiry. For SD, SS, Gestapo or military matters, go through him. Anything else speak to Kritzinger. Come to think of it, he’s the real Lower Castle expert, not von Neurath.’
Kritzinger bowed his head in Heydrich’s direction.
General Jury appeared in the doorway, breathing heavily. He was perspiring and looked pale, as if he really did have a severe hangover. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a sigh.
‘Ah, Jury, you’re here.’
Heydrich was trying to keep the smirk out of his voice but without success; it was obvious that he was enjoying the other general’s hangover as another man might have taken pleasure at watching someone slip on a banana skin.
‘What else would you like to know about the Captain?’ Jury asked biliously. ‘Beyond the fact that he’s dead and that there appears to be a gunshot wound in his abdomen, I can tell you very little, without examining his body in the morgue. And it’s been many years since I did that kind of thing.’
‘What made you think it was a gunshot wound?’ I asked. ‘Rather than a knife wound?’
‘There’s what looks like a neat bullet hole in his shirt,’ explained Jury. ‘Not to mention a neat hole on his body. And yet there’s very little blood on the Captain’s torso. Or for that matter, elsewhere. It’s rare in my experience that a man who is stabbed doesn’t bleed more. I saw no blood on the floor or the bed. But it was only an educated guess. And I could yet turn out to be wrong.’
‘No, I think you’re right,’ I said. ‘He was shot all right.’
‘Well then, Commissar,’ he said stiffly. ‘I fail to see the need for the question. Indeed, I’m inclined to consider it impertinent. I am a doctor, after all.’
I decided to let Jury have it between his oyster eyes. In his present, crapulous state – assuming it was for real – he was weak and vulnerable and it might take a while to find him like that again. Besides, I thought it important that I make a very early test of Heydrich’s declaration that I enjoyed his full confidence and that he didn’t care what I asked or indeed who I upset, just as long as I solved the case. If Heydrich stood by and let me bully General Jury then it would surely send out an early message to other senior officers in the Lower Castle that I was to be taken seriously.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’re a doctor. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t kill him. Did you kill him?’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘You heard me, Doctor Jury. Was it you who shot Captain Kuttner?’
‘If that’s your idea of a joke, Commissar Gunther, then kindly take note of the fact that no one in this room is laughing. Including myself.’
This wasn’t quite true. Heydrich was smiling, almost as if he approved of me putting Jury on the spot in this way, which at least told me he was serious about my investigating the murder.
‘I can assure you it’s no joke, sir. Yesterday afternoon, when we talked on the road up to the Upper Castle, you told me that you hated Captain Kuttner.’
‘Nonsense,’ spluttered Jury.
‘You told me you thought he was a cunt. And that you detested him. That was before you went on to describe Captain Kuttner as General Heydrich’s golem.’
Jury coloured with embarrassment.
‘Golem,’ said Heydrich. ‘That’s an interesting choice of words. Remind me, Gunther. What exactly is a golem?’
‘A sort of creature created long ago by a local Jewish mystic called Rabbi Loew, sir. To do his bidding on behalf of Prague’s Jews.’
Jury was still protesting his innocence, but, for the moment, Heydrich ignored him.
‘If Captain Kuttner was the golem, then I suppose that makes me comparable to this Jewish mystic. Rabbi Loew.’
‘That was certainly my impression, sir.’
‘General Heydrich, sir,’ said Jury. ‘I can assure you that I meant nothing of the sort. Commissar Gunther is entirely mistaken. In no way did I mean to compare you to – that person.’
‘Leaving that aside for a moment,’ I said, roughly. ‘Why did you detest Captain Kuttner?’
Jury advanced on Heydrich. Though I was the one asking the questions, all of his answers were directed, a little desperately, at the Reichsprotector.
‘It was an entirely private matter,’ he insisted. ‘And nothing at all to do with the Captain’s death. It’s true I did dislike the man. However, if the Commissar is suggesting that it was a reason for killing him then I really must protest.’
‘A man has been murdered,’ I said. ‘An officer of the SS, in circumstances that compel investigation, regardless of personal feelings. I’m afraid there is no such thing as a private matter in a situation like this, General Jury. You know that as well as anyone else. This is now a criminal investigation and I’ll decide if your reason was sufficient reason to kill him.’
‘And who made you judge and jury, Captain?’ demanded the doctor.
‘I did,’ said Heydrich. ‘Commissar Gunther is one of the most competent detectives in Kripo, with an admirable forensic record. He is only doing the job that I have asked him t
o do. And doing it rather bravely, I think.’
‘Can I see your gun, Doctor Jury?’
‘What?’
‘Your pistol, sir. I notice you’re wearing it, this morning. May I examine it, sir?’
Jury glanced at Heydrich, who nodded firmly.
‘I’m not sure why I put on my belts this morning,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose it was because I was suddenly roused from sleep by Captain Pomme. I mean, I wouldn’t normally—’