by Philip Kerr
‘We suspect Thummel has been spying for the Czechos since as early as February 1936. For a long time he was using a radio transmitter to send messages here, to Prague. As you are aware we were intercepting some of that radio traffic; what we called the OTA intercepts. The Czechos called him A54. Don’t ask me why. Call sign probably. The radio messages were forwarded by courier to the Czech government in exile in London. That went on for quite a while. But then Thummel began to get scared. He stopped using the radio transmitter altogether. And to all intents and purposes it looked as if he had closed up shop, thus narrowing our chances of getting him.
‘We suspect that UVOD despaired of having lost their best agent. Not least because his material had put the exiled Benes government in London in very good odour with Winston Churchill. No more intelligence meant no more operational scraps from the top table. So the UVOD people set out to re-establish contact with him in Berlin, in person; and for a while that did the trick. But with the net closing in, he lost his nerve for that, too. Frankly I think he’s been expecting this for a while.’
‘But why? Why would an old Party comrade – a man with the confidence of Hitler – why would such a man spy for the Czechos? Why spy at all?’
‘That’s a good question. And I’m afraid I don’t yet know the answer. He’s still denying everything, of course. It’s likely to be several days before we have any idea of the reason behind his treason, or even the full extent of his treachery.’
Was it possible that Thummel had been Gustav? For a moment I pictured Thummel in the hands of the local Gestapo and wondered how long it might take them to beat ‘the full extent of his treachery’ out of the man.
‘Surely it won’t take your people that long.’
Heydrich shook his head. ‘Actually it will. As I said, Thummel has vitamin B. We shall have to question him quite carefully. Himmler would never forgive me if I had him tortured. In the short term at least we can but hope that close interrogation will find holes in his story.’
‘I understand.’
Heydrich nodded, silently.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good work, Gunther. As my personal detective you are off to a flying start, I think.’
He was heading back through the French windows when I spoke again.
‘What I don’t entirely understand, General, is why you murdered Captain Kuttner.’
Heydrich stopped and turned slowly on the heel of his shoe.
‘Hmm?’
‘It was you who killed your own adjutant. That I am certain of. I know how you did it. I just don’t know why you did it. I mean why bother to murder him when you had ample opportunity to have him court-martialled? No, I don’t understand that. Not entirely. And I certainly don’t understand exactly why you had me go to all the trouble of investigating a murder that you yourself had committed.’
Heydrich didn’t say anything. It seemed he was waiting for me to do some more talking before he said anything. So I did. It felt like I was talking my own neck into a noose, but it was hard to imagine it being any more painful than it was now.
‘Of course, I have a few ideas on that score. But first, if you’ll permit me, sir, let me deal with how you killed him.’
Heydrich nodded. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I see you haven’t denied it.’
‘To you?’ Heydrich laughed. ‘Gunther, there are about three people in the world to whom I ever need to justify myself, and you’re not one of them. Nevertheless, I should like to hear your explanation of the solution to the crime, as you see it.’
‘On the night before he was murdered, you gave Kuttner a dose of Veronal, which unwittingly he drank in a glass of beer. It was the only thing Kuttner drank that night, as he knew to avoid mixing the drug with alcohol. But I bet you persuaded him to have just the one. Everyone else was celebrating, after all. And what an honour to be served by you. I should have thought beer was perfect for your purposes. It wasn’t so alcoholic that he might refuse. And of course beer is bitter, so Kuttner wouldn’t ever have tasted the significant dose of the drug with which you’d doctored it.
‘But doctor it you certainly did. Kritzinger reports seeing Kuttner looking very tired at around two. So the drug was already working its effect. But Kuttner didn’t know that, so when he got back to his room he took his regular dose of Veronal and actually passed out with one of the pills still in his throat. Which accounts for how he only had one boot off. My guess is that you wanted him to sleep extra soundly, although why you didn’t just do him in with an overdose, I’m not sure. Possibly you wanted to make sure he was indeed dead and there is, as you must know, always something uncertain about an overdose. It’s amazing just how much people can swallow without dying. But a bullet is much more certain. Especially when it’s fired point-blank to the heart.
‘In the morning, you let Captain Pomme and Kritzinger try to rouse him before making sure that you were on the scene to authorize them to break down the door. And being a General, naturally you were first into the bedroom, which meant you were also the one who was able to take charge and examine Kuttner’s drugged body and pronounce him dead. Naturally, they took your word for it, General. You’re not an easy man to contradict, sir.
‘Judging by his appearance, of course, it hardly looked at all probable that he was still alive. He was half dressed from the night before, and there was an open bottle of Veronal on the bedside table, so everyone assumed that the obvious explanation was the correct one: Kuttner had taken an overdose, possibly intentionally – after all, most of his fellow officers were aware he’d had some sort of breakdown – and was dead. No one suspected that he had been shot because the fact is he hadn’t been shot. Not at that moment. At that moment he was only unconscious.
‘Having ordered Kritzinger to call an ambulance and Captain Pomme to fetch Doctor Jury, you were now alone in the room with the Captain’s unconscious body. Doctor Jury’s room is in the other wing of the house, so you knew Pomme would take several minutes to return with him. Apart from the telephone in your office, the nearest telephone is on the ground floor, so Kritzinger was far away, too. All the same, you probably waited a few minutes just to make sure that no one was around before closing the door as best you were able. There was now plenty of time for you to produce a gun from inside your fencing jerkin, pull aside his tunic and coolly fire two shots in rapid succession into Kuttner’s body at close range, killing him instantly. Because he was still wearing his tunic, the gunshot wounds were not immediately obvious to anyone who had already seen the body. Moreover these wounds didn’t bleed much either because Kuttner was lying on his back. Not to mention the convenient effect that the extra Veronal would have had on the dead man’s blood pressure.’
Heydrich listened patiently, still denying nothing. Folding his arms he placed a thoughtful finger across his thin lips. He might have been considering some plan for the evacuation of Prague’s Jews.
‘You put the gun back inside your jerkin. Then you opened the window, just to help ventilate the room a little more, just in case someone caught a whiff of the shots. When you opened the window, that’s when you saw the footman, Fendler, with the ladder; you told him that the ladder was no longer required; that poor Kuttner was dead of an overdose, because after all, you were obliged to pay lip service to what at that moment everyone else believed.
‘Then you did a quick search on the bed and the floor for the spent brass. You wanted to pick this up so that you could help to muddy the waters and add to the mystery that was bound to attach to a murder in a room locked from inside. That might have taken a while. They’re elusive things when you need to find them in a hurry. Of course, if someone had entered the room you would have given some excuse about looking for clues. After all, there were pills on the floor. You were just picking them up. You are a policeman, after all. Maybe it was you who chucked them there for effect. Set dressing, so to speak. But to me it never seemed right that the Veronal bottle remained upright on the table when there were pills o
n the floor.
‘Having found the two spent brass cartridges, you flung them along the corridor, lit a cigarette to help conceal the smell of the two shots – although, as I discovered for myself a little while ago, it isn’t particularly noticeable, and certainly no more noticeable than the noise of two shots. I fired my own pistol in Kuttner’s room while you were all eating lunch and, of course, no one noticed a thing. Most people assume a noise like that is something else, something a little less dramatic. A car backfiring. A vase of flowers knocked over. A door slammed by a careless footman. Of course you already know that. I’ll bet you even conducted a similar experiment yourself when you were planning this whole thing.
‘It was about then that Captain Pomme and Doctor Jury arrived in the room. Doctor Jury was a good choice. For one thing Jury was possibly still drunk, and at the very least badly hungover, and he probably didn’t even notice that the dead man was still bleeding, only that he’d been shot. Again no one was about to suspect your own first version of events. Besides, there was now an even bigger mystery in front of everyone’s eyes, which is how a man could be found shot dead in a room locked on the inside with no murder weapon on the scene. It’s a useful thing, mystery. Any stage conjurer knows the value of misdirection. You draw attention to what one hand is doing while the other hand does the dirty work.
‘People do love a good mystery, don’t they? You included, General. Perhaps you more than most. On your bookshelves I found a well-read copy of a detective novel by that writer you mentioned to me when I arrived here: Agatha Christie. It’s a novel called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And I only had to flick through it for a few minutes to see that the book contains certain similarities with this case. A body in a locked room. Only that person, Roger Ackroyd, isn’t dead at all; not in the beginning; and it’s the person who supposedly finds the body – Doctor Sheppard, isn’t it? – who turns out to be the murderer. As indeed you are. In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting that’s where you got the idea in the first place.
‘But my neck and my head hurt and I just can’t figure out why. Why would you murder your mother’s favourite piano pupil? It couldn’t be that, could it? Jealousy? No, not you. That would be much too human of you, General Heydrich, sir. No, there has to be some other reason. Something much more important than personal revenge.’
I paused and lit another cigarette.
‘Well, don’t stop there,’ said Heydrich. ‘You’re doing so well and I have to confess I’m actually quite impressed. This is more than I had expected of you, Gunther.’ He nodded firmly. ‘Keep going. I insist.’
‘For old time’s sake, you’d rescued Albert Kuttner’s career. That was oddly sentimental of you. And quite out of character, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir. Or perhaps you did it at someone else’s request. Kuttner’s father. Your mother, perhaps.’
‘You’d best leave my mother out of this, Gunther, if you don’t mind.’
‘Gladly. You’d rescued Albert Kuttner’s career only to discover that, as you told me yourself, he was a disappointment. More than just a disappointment, he’d become something of a nuisance, even an embarrassment. Kuttner was insubordinate. For example, there was that scene at the Officers’ Training School with Colonel Jacobi. And what was worse, you had found out he was quite possibly homosexual, too. After what happened to Ernst Röhm and some of his warmer friends in the SA, that was too much. Did you worry that you might be tainted with an association like that? I wonder. In Germany it’s one thing to be suspected of being a Jew, as you are, and quite another to be suspected of being soft on homosexuals. Even then, however, you could have sent Kuttner quietly back to Berlin. To one of those nice private clinics in Wannsee where top Nazis go to dry out or be weaned off drugs. Some of them even claim they can cure you of homosexuality. So you must have had an important reason to murder him in cold blood like that. There must have been some sort of gain in it for you. But what?’
‘Excellent. You’re almost there.’
Heydrich lit a cigarette and looked very amused, as if I was telling him a very funny story. It made me suspect that he had a better punch-line than the one I had written myself. But I was in too far now to stop.
‘Everything you do has a reason, doesn’t it, General? Whether it’s murdering Jews or murdering your own adjutant.’
Heydrich shook his head. ‘Don’t get sidetracked,’ he said. ‘Keep to the point.’
‘But why have me investigate the murder? At first I assumed it was because you thought I wasn’t up to the job; that you wanted me to screw up; but that was too obvious. You could have picked anyone for the job. Willy Abendschoen from the local Kripo is a good man, I hear. Clever. Efficient. Or you could have picked someone more pliable than either of us. Unless of course that was exactly what you wanted. Someone who doesn’t care about his future in the SD. Someone who is just pig-headed enough to ask the difficult questions that the cauliflowers might not care to answer. Someone for whom advancement and promotion is not an issue. Me. Yes, that must be it. You picked me to handle the investigation of Kuttner’s murder because you really wanted me to search for your spy. You used the murder of Kuttner as a pretext for a secret spy hunt.’
‘Now you’re on to it,’ said Heydrich.
‘You couldn’t risk some flat-footed idiot questioning all of your spy suspects about being the traitor X, or A54, or whatever he’s called; not without putting them on their guard. But if I questioned them all about something else, something serious that necessitated their being detained here, then all of them might relax, more or less, since each knew he was innocent of murder. And of course my conversations with them were being recorded, transcribed, picked over by your own SD analysts for something small, an inconsistency, perhaps. A clue. Real evidence. You didn’t know exactly what it was, but you thought you would recognize it when you saw it. And you’re right. That’s all a clue really is. I have to hand it you, sir; it’s clever. Utterly ruthless, but clever.’
Heydrich clapped his hands three times. To me it sounded almost ironic, but there was it seemed some genuine appreciation in his congratulations.
‘Well done. I underestimated you, Gunther. I’ve always assumed that as a policeman you were the more muscular type. Tough, resourceful, and irritatingly dogged, but hardly intellectual. It seems I was wrong about that. You have a much better brain than I gave you credit for. I had hoped you might uncover the spy, it’s true. But I did not expect you would also solve the murder. That has been a real bonus. But now I really am intrigued. I want to know. I must have made a mistake. Exactly how did you conclude that it was me who shot Captain Kuttner?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you. It wasn’t anything clever, at all.’
‘Oh, come on. You’re being unnecessarily modest.’
‘Actually you told me yourself. Just a few minutes ago. Only I and the doctor who carried out the autopsy knew that Kuttner had been shot twice. Even Jury didn’t notice that. And I kept it secret in the hope that eventually the real killer would mention two shots when everyone else believes that it was just the one shot that killed him.’
Heydrich frowned. ‘Is that all?’
To my delight he sounded disappointed.
‘What else is there? I’m not one for crossword puzzles, General. Or detective novels. Actually I really can’t stand them. Me, I’m just a plain, old-fashioned cop. And you described me rather well a moment ago when you said I was irritatingly dogged. I don’t have the better brain you gave me credit for. These days I wouldn’t know what to do with it. You see, sir, most murders aren’t complicated. People just think they are. The same goes for the detection process. There are no great scenes of revelation. There’s just the small stuff. And that’s where I come in. Really, if detective work was as difficult as it seems in the books, then they wouldn’t let cops do it.’
‘Yes, I take your point.’ Heydrich sighed. ‘But now I have another question. And perhaps you should answer this one more carefully.’
I nodd
ed.
‘What do you think you’re going to do about it?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. What could I do against a man of Heydrich’s standing and authority?
‘What I mean is: are you intending to try to arrest me, perhaps? To make a scene.’
‘You murdered someone, General.’
‘You’re right, of course. And I did regret having rescued Kuttner’s career. I could have lived with his behaviour in and after Latvia. What happened to him there is by no means unusual – which is of course why Reichsmarshal Göring has charged me with finding a better solution to this problem. I could even have lived with his behaviour to Colonel Jacobi. The two of them have some history, it seems; however, Jacobi is a prick and frankly anyone who gets the better of that man is to be admired rather than condemned.
