“Just get them in here, Highsmith. Do it now.”
“Tell ya what, we’ll sort it out down the way,” Highsmith said, gesturing to the hallway.
Fifteen minutes later, they met in what the detectives called the war room. The ambient noise was dampened because the windowless room was lined with tattered cork. Newspaper clippings, pictures, sketches, and scraps of paper littered the walls. There was so much flimsy paper hanging by brass tacks that any sudden movements would cause the nearest wall to undulate from the slight change in wind. It made it feel as if the room was alive and breathing.
The top lieutenant had just gone through all reported criminal activity, most of which Preston Lord had already heard, some of it ad nauseam. Highsmith sat across the table, reading from the reports and generally ignoring the exchange. Highsmith’s lieutenant opened a new folder.
“Henrietta Glancy, a known hooker in Somerstown, strangled.”
Lord rolled his eyes. “No.”
“Phillip Day, attorney from the city, missing several weeks now. A few people close to him think he swapped identities and has gone off to the United States, to Texas, in search of a wife.”
Lord shrugged irritably. “What does that have to do with my investigation?”
“William Hawkley, pub owner who broke up a knife fight in Southwark, bled to death from an abdominal wound.”
“No.”
The lieutenant sat up, enunciating clearly as he said, “Major Clayton Paige, an American Army pilot shot and, we strongly believe, killed elsewhere. He was found behind a pub near Dartford.”
All eyes stared at Lord.
“New ones,” Lord answered testily. “And why the hell do you repeat that one every time?”
Highsmith and the lieutenant shared a look before the lieutenant kept going. “Michael Forsythe, father-son dispute. Son dead, also from a knife wound, out in Barking.”
“No,” Lord breathed.
“Here’s a new one: Wilhelm Kruger, went by Willi, missing city farmer with a lengthy rap sheet, presumed dead. Wife reported him missing. The report’s old but just filtered through last night. Immigrants don’t get as much attention.” The lieutenant pulled out the next folder.
“Here’s another new one: Spencer Benjamin…a strongman type from—”
Lord was in the middle of lighting a cigarette. “Wait a minute,” he said, shaking out the match. “Wilhelm Kruger?”
“Yes.”
“German name,” Lord whispered, his eyes dancing.
“So?”
“Is there anything else with it?” Lord asked.
“I’ll have to go pull the file.”
“Do it,” Lord said, standing.
“While we wait, Mister Lord,” Gregory Highsmith said with a mocking grin, “you wanna hear some more about Clayton Paige, the American pilot who was shot in the face at close range before his body was moved?”
Preston Lord did not respond.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THOMAS LUNDREN, HIS HEAD THROBBING from the alien liquid he’d ingested the night before, chose to eat his breakfast in his truck. He had just come from the main police station, checking in to see if anything new had arrived—it hadn’t—and he was finishing his last bite of Limburger cheese as he pulled into the lot behind the two-story converted office that was the Roth police barracks. From the compartment next to his leg, Thomas produced a towel, wiping his mouth. He drank water from his canteen, more than usual, probably from the effects of the alcohol. Thomas wore a concerned expression as he stepped from his truck. The day was cool and gray, like the harbinger of the news he was going to have to break as soon as the canvassing crews finished their work.
He climbed the brick stairs to the police barracks and, just as Thomas stepped inside and was scraping his boots on the mat, he was nearly accosted by the watch officer.
“Herr Lundren!”
Thomas looked him up and down, frowning. The watch officer was an excitable type, as Thomas had learned over the past weeks. “What is it, son?”
“One of your men, Hammerschmidt, he called for you. His team found a lead. A strong one.”
Fighting to remain calm, Thomas put his hand on the officer’s shoulder. “Settle down and tell me what was said.”
The watch officer handed him a scrap of paper with five digits on it. “They’re standing by with a witness right now, awaiting your call.”
Thomas accepted the paper and moved behind the desk. He picked up the phone and jiggled the cradle for an operator. While he waited, he turned his head back to the watch officer. “Who is the witness?”
“He’s a veterinarian.”
~~~
The two police cars raced up Mare Street in the dilapidated Shoreditch neighborhood, north of central London. Both carloads of men exited, slamming doors as the residents of the largely Germanic neighborhood leaned out of their windows in anticipation of who was about to be arrested. Nellie Kruger was on her hands and knees, working a row of black earth in a section of her missing husband’s peculiar city farm. Preston Lord pressed past the rest of the men, spewing his rough German as he trampled into the rows of the vegetables. Nellie stood, smearing her face with the back of her gloved hand as she tried to stave off a droplet of perspiration.
“Police, are ya? We can speak German if ya like,” she said in her Irish accent. “But it sounds like ya speak it better than I do, so we might wanna jost stay in the so-called Queen’s English.”
Lord considered her. She was almost certainly younger than she appeared, aged by a hard life and a personal vice or two. He gave her his most disarming smile and asked if he could speak to her in private. She dropped her gloves onto the ground and led him into the same room where Neil had first met with Willi, a converted kitchen that doubled as an office. Highsmith and the others lit cigarettes and milled about the inner city farm while the American went to work.
“Miss Kruger, tell—”
“Missus.”
Lord cleared his throat. “Missus Kruger, tell me about your Wilhelm. Where do you think he could be?”
She tilted her head. “A yank?”
“Yes.”
Nellie Kruger shrugged before reaching into her apron and coming out with a lumpy, hand-rolled cigarette. Without offering him one, she lit it with a kitchen match and exhaled the rancid smoke in Preston Lord’s face. “I assume Willi’s dead. Couldn’t keep his pecker outta any woman with half-open legs, and it wouldn’t be the first time an angry husband tried to do him some harm.”
“Are you aware of a specific affair he had in which you think the husband may have tried to kill him?”
“Not recently.”
Lord frowned. “When did you report him missing?” This was a question he’d already been told the answer to—Scotland Yard claimed four days ago—and he didn’t believe it for a second.
Nellie crossed the kitchen and retrieved a calendar, marked by the advertisement of a local insurance debit man. She smacked it on the table and clamped the cigarette between her lips. Lord studied her as she ran her finger over the days. She didn’t appear to be grieving at all. But if her husband was a habitual cheater, then that could explain it.
She stabbed a date with her finger. “He left here over three weeks ago. I expected him back two or three days after that and reported him missing around that time at the station down the way.”
Preston Lord balled one of his hands into a fist as his other hand pulled downward on his face. “More than two weeks ago?”
“That’s wot I said,” she answered, straightening and blowing smoke at Lord again. “It usually would depend on wot he claimed he had to do, but probably actually depended on whether or not he could find some young German tart to go to bed with him.”
Lord narrowed his eyes, struggling to digest all she was telling him. “Wait a minute. One thing at a time. You said he left here? What do you mean, ‘left here’? To go buy a bottle of liquor, or actually left, as in, left the area?”
&n
bsp; She opened her hands, seemingly confused. “I told the man at the King’s Cross station all’a this.”
“All’a what?” he demanded.
She licked the tip of the cigarette, making it hiss. “Ya really don’t know, do ya?”
“Know what?”
“That Willi flew his airplane to Germany once every coupla weeks.”
Lord was thunderstruck. He blinked several times, finally licking his dry lips. “Tell me about it…all about it, please.”
Two minutes later, after hearing the remainder of her revelations, Preston Lord burst from the back of the house. He stalked directly to Highsmith, grabbing his lapels and jamming him up against the wall of the building on the far side of the alley. As the other policemen yelled their protests, Lord put his face inches from Highsmith’s, growling his accusations.
“You withheld information from me. You hid it all. He was a war defector and flies to Germany all the damned time, you lying sonofabitch.” With each accusation, Lord shook the older policeman, making his head hit the ancient stone wall. “You knew it all along!” he shouted over and over.
By the time he had shaken Highsmith five times, the other policemen yanked Lord away, one of them pressing a pistol into his neck. Once Highsmith had stepped away, they shoved Lord to the filthy ground and held him down by his arms and legs. Captain Highsmith straightened his overcoat and smoothed his hair, reassuring his men he was fine and completely undamaged by the “skinnymalink Yank”.
Highsmith moved over Lord, his voice low and calm as he rested his muddy shoe on the American’s chest.
“Mister Lord, I was simply following m’orders. My instructions weren’t to withhold anything, but to purposefully slow you down.”
“Why?” Lord asked, wriggling himself to a standing position as the other detectives maintained grips on his arms.
“Because if your man, and we believe his name is Reuter, wants to kill that madman Adolf Hitler, then Godspeed to him.” He licked his hand, combing his hair into a neat part. “I was told to give him a good week’s head start, but that quickly expanded once we realized what a little wanker you really are.”
Lord couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “Who told you the bullshit theory about Hitler?”
“Maybe that bomber pilot you murdered told us. Maybe it was his ghost.” Highsmith gestured to the west. “You and your government over there want to sit back and watch that maniac Hitler ransack Europe, you go ahead. But that doesn’t mean we will, you fockin’ tosser.”
The detectives released Lord. He removed his overcoat and shook the dirt off as he walked back to the door where Nellie Kruger stood. She handed him a scrap of paper with an address on it. Lord stuffed it into his pocket and walked back to Highsmith, keeping his distance.
“Whatever the SIS told you, they’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
“You can leave whenever you like,” Highsmith said. “From here on, you’re on your own.”
Lord brushed past the wall of detectives, turning east.
“And do not break any more of our laws, Mister Lord,” Highsmith yelled out. “Because from this point on, you no longer have Her Majesty’s backing. It’d do me great pleasure to throw your arse in the clink.”
There was a Tube station in Hackney. It took ten minutes for Lord to walk there, fuming the entire way.
~~~
The Janzens sat on the opposite side of the table. The wife was shivering. The husband’s eyelids appeared leaden, as if being roughed up at gunpoint wasn’t enough to excite him. The gash above his eye would have gotten most people’s undivided attention. Now that he’d forced his way into the farmhouse, Preston Lord stared at the bound couple, thinking about that prick Highsmith and his policemen. Could they have followed him here? After all, it would have been Lord’s opposite number in England’s Secret Intelligence Service who would have told them to create the delay. No, Lord decided, they’d washed their hands of him. The roadblock had been lifted and, as long as he didn’t burn London to the ground, he should be fine.
“You and Wilhelm Kruger were partners in a smuggling operation?” Lord asked Henry Janzen.
“Yeah.” The man didn’t look up at all. Simply stared at a spot on the table, as if life had ended years before.
“And he did the flying, and you performed the maintenance on the airplane?”
“Yeah.”
Lord questioned him for five minutes, learning nothing of substance.
“What was your part in all of this?” Lord asked the wife. She was pushing fifty, quite attractive with her Nordic features and streaks of gray in her blonde hair.
“I had no part in it,” she answered. But Lord saw the flicker. It was the same unconcealed spark one might see in a weak poker player’s eyes.
“That’s not what I heard,” Lord said offhandedly, attempting to smoke out her information.
Her eyes widened.
She’s very attractive, Lord thought to himself, studying her further. Then he remembered what Nellie Kruger had said about her husband and his affinity for women. Lord glanced at Mr. Janzen, a stick-in-the-mud if there ever was one. Lord cleared his throat, deciding to take a wild stab as he motioned his thumb at her husband.
“C’mon now, Missus Janzen. You know what’s been going on…and I know what’s been going on…but does Mister Janzen know what’s been going on?”
Her blue eyes were perfectly round with trepidation when her husband turned to her. “What did you do?” he whispered.
She answered him in rapid-fire Danish, shaking her head as she spoke. It was a denial of some sort. Mr. Janzen twisted his lips with the sour expression of an oft-cuckolded husband who has learned that his wife has betrayed him, yet again. Okay, Lord thought, congratulating himself. Score one for Preston.
“So, the weekly flights to Germany had tailed off and your relationship with Wilhelm was strained, especially since you suspected he’d been sleeping with your wife?” Lord said to the husband.
After the husband glared at his wife for nearly half a minute, he turned his attention to Lord. “Piss on you,” he said in a calm voice. “Kill us both right here and right now. Please.”
The wife was the key. Lord watched her as the husband attempted to bait Lord into action, and who could blame him? The poor bastard wasn’t much to look at, and just learned that his business partner had been servicing his wife. But Lord had a strong inclination that she had something to tell, and judging by the strain on her face, it wouldn’t take much to get it out of her.
Sliding his pistol under his belt, Lord reached into his pocket and retrieved his jack knife. He flicked the three-inch blade open, twisting it in the light for both of them to see. He eased out of his chair and walked behind Henry, pressing the blade to his neck and yanking his head back.
“On the last night when Wilhelm left here, who was his passenger and where were they going?” Lord growled.
Henry Janzen pushed his own head further backward, giving Lord full access to his neck. Lord pressed the tip of the blade in just under the ear, nicking Henry Janzen. The man grunted but didn’t move.
“Who?” Lord bellowed.
“Do it,” the man yelled. “Just kill me!”
“No!” screamed his wife. “Leave him alone…please.”
“Who was it?” Lord asked, holding the blade firmly to the husband’s neck while he stared at the wife.
The only sounds were her sobs.
“Who?” Lord yelled, nicking the husband again.
“An American,” cried the wife. “I don’t know his name, but Willi bragged that the man had lots of money and wanted to go to the south of Germany, into Austria.”
“What else?” Lord demanded, inflamed that he was now actually onto Reuter’s scent. “What else did Willi tell you?”
“Nothing,” she yelled. “Please don’t hurt him.”
“Why didn’t he tell you more?”
Her face twisted and her head shook back and forth.
“Wa
s it because you were too busy in bed together?”
Mrs. Janzen’s face said it all.
Lord pulled the knife away, continuing to hold a clump of Henry Janzen’s hair. “When did they leave, Missus Janzen? On what date?”
She dipped her head as tears fell from her face, darkening her apron. “I don’t know. Two weeks ago? Three weeks?”
Preston Lord snapped the knife shut with a solid click. He used a napkin from the table to dab the small cuts before he smacked Henry’s face affectionately. “Henry, I have but one question, and then I will leave you to your wife, because I know you have a lot to talk about.”
Henry swiveled his eyes upward.
“Could Willi’s airplane make it all the way from here to Austria?”
Henry rotated his menacing glare to his wife, and then back to Lord. He said nothing.
Lord jerked his pistol from his waist and circled the table. He grabbed the woman under the chin and pressed his Beretta to the side of her head. “Speak!”
Mrs. Janzen began to shriek.
Mr. Janzen, however, barely reacted. He waited without expression until his wife’s screams subsided. When they did, he spoke barely above a whisper, saying, “The airplane couldn’t make it that far. Willi would have refueled.”
“Where?”
“If the man had lots of money, like my wife says,” Mr. Janzen said, glowering at her, “Willi probably planned to rob him, and he would have done that when he refueled at the airfield in Velden.”
“Rob him?” Lord made a clucking sound as he shook his head, a sideways grin emerging. “So that was what did him in.”
“What?” Frau Janzen demanded.
“Robbing my acquaintance would have been old Wilhelm’s final mistake, you can bet on that. My acquaintance would’ve killed him dead for trying that.”
Mrs. Janzen cried out, opening her mouth as more tears erupted. “Willi isn’t dead. He just hasn’t come back yet.”
Preston Lord took one of Henry Janzen’s cigarettes and lit it. As he exhaled smoke, he said, “We all meet our match someday, Missus Janzen. And I’m almost positive Willi met his.”
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