Etzler was concerned for his wife and that concern had already prompted him to contact Dr Reinhardt, who advised psychiatric treatment, but it was out of the question. Etzler earned a good salary, but he could not afford the services of a psychiatrist.
Instead, he ordered Heidi to follow Anna wherever she went.
Satisfied that he had covered the problems at home, he arrived at the office, and at eleven o’clock, proudly joined his colleagues in the Controller’s office, where Major Helmut Schneider of the Gestapo would read out the oath for them to repeat. Amongst the recalcitrant, murmured voices echoing the words, Etzler’s was the loudest.
When the task was done, Etzler approached Major Schneider.
“Sir,” he said with great respect, “for some time now, I have been seeking a man who poses as a doctor. I believe he is a Jew. He has been defrauding my wife of large sums of money and I remain unhappy with his treatments, and yet, no one seems to know where he practices, or where he lives.”
Schneider gave a fat smile. “Not even your wife?”
“Attempts to follow Anna have led nowhere, since she always evades such efforts, and so, too, does this Dr Bergen.”
“And why should this be a matter for the Gestapo? You should go to the Criminal Police.”
“I did, sir, but the Criminal Police have made no progress in the matter, and I thought, as a faithful party member for the last twelve years, and because this man is obviously a Jew, that I might enlist the help of your own investigative services.”
Schneider thought the matter over. “Today, young man, I am too busy with delivering the oath throughout Heidelberg’s various departments, but if you come to my office at the end of the week, by which time I will be able to concentrate on more routine matters, I will see if I can be of assistance.”
“Thank you, Herr Schneider.”
As the Gestapo major wobbled out of the office, so a minor clerk approached.
“Forgive me, Herr Etzler, but there has been a telephone call. Your maid, Heidi. She says you are need urgently at home. There is some problem with your wife.”
Still lost in thoughts of the grand future for the newly founded Third Reich, Etzler took a few moments to register his subordinate’s words.
“What? My wife? What do you mean, there is some problem?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but it seems she tried to throw herself off the Karl-Theodor-Brücke into the river.”
***
“I have to admit, Julius, I’m worried.”
Julius, too, was concerned. He had never seen Walter fret like this.
Over the last year, Walter had made several attempts to have Anna murder her husband. He had given Anna a white powder and instructed her to feed it to Herr Etzler, which she did, but instead of dying, he merely developed an unpleasant gastric problem. Then Walter had ordered her to take Heinrich’s pistol and shoot her husband. By some miracle, the man, obviously considering his wife to be suicidal, had removed the bullets only days earlier.
Twice the master had ordered Anna to loosen the brakes on her husband’s motorcycle, twice she had done so, and yet twice, Herr Etzler had survived. The first time, out drinking at night, he was returning home with a friend on the pillion, he braked for a railway crossing where the barrier was lowered. The front cable snapped, he jammed his foot on the rear brake and it failed. The motorcycle crashed into the barrier, but its speed was so low that Etzler and his passenger suffered only minor injuries.
Julius was ordered to keep watch on the Etzler’s home for the return of the motorcycle, and when it was brought back, fully repaired, Walter gave the same instruction to Anna again, this time stressing the urgency of the situation.
Having ordered her to forget that she had already adjusted the brakes, he warned her, “Your husband’s actions are a direct result of Jewish terrorism, Anna, and you must take steps to protect him.”
Once again Herr Etzler crashed his motorcycle, once again good fortune was with him. He injured his arm and scraped his knee, but he lived.
Much worse than that, local gossip had it that he had been seen talking to the local officer in charge of the recently formed Gestapo in order to track down the mysterious Dr Bergen. It was at that point that Walter decided Anna had to die, but not at his hands, nor Julius’s.
“We just convince her, my friend, that she should take her own life.”
The first attempt was doomed to failure through its own naivety. Walter simply advised her to obtain sleeping pills from her doctor and take three times the advised dose, but when she visited the doctor, she was so agitated that he refused to give her the prescription and instead contacted her husband.
With Anna in a deep trance state, Julius suggested, “Perhaps, master, the experts are right and you cannot convince a hypnotised person to end their own life.”
“Nonsense, Julius. The skill in hypnosis is all about altering a person’s perception of reality. For example, what would it take to get you to commit suicide?”
The twenty-five-year-old Julius shrugged. “The threat of NSDAP punishment for Munich ten years ago. Or, I suppose, the prospect of a slow death from a serious illness may tempt me to take the quick way out.”
“Excellent. You read my mind. The terrible prospect of a long, slow, lingering death. I think with the correct prompting, Anna may very well be convinced of that.” He moved to the bed where Anna lay inert and insensate. “Let us see shall we, Julius.”
He touched Anna on the wrist. “Listen to me, Anna, the news, I am afraid, is not good. You have severe toxaemia. This is a disorder of the blood. Over the coming week or more, your blood will run slower and slower in your veins, congealing, clogging up the arteries, leaving you short of breath and in a progressively weaker and weaker state. In the final days of this terrible illness, your blood will turn to pus, and poison your heart and respiratory system. This knowledge fills you with such terrible despair, such a feeling of hopelessness that there is only one way to avoid the pain and suffering. You must take your own life, Anna. As you wait on the station for the train back to Heidelberg, you will know that the only way to avoid the agony of the coming days is to grant yourself a quick release, and throw yourself under the train as it draws into the station. Wake up now.”
Again, he failed. When they next saw and hypnotised Anna, she recalled that she had got into a conversation with a woman on the station platform, and the idea left her head.
In desperation, Walter ordered her to drown herself, but now there was a full scale manhunt on for Dr Bergen, and Etzler had ordered the maid, Heidi, to follow his wife wherever she went. The stupid maid prevented Anna from throwing herself into the River Neckar.
If Walter was concerned, Julius lived in terror of their eventual, and as far as he could see, inevitable discovery, but Walter was not to be dissuaded.
“I have lived here all my life, boy, and I will not be deterred by a few silly policeman, or an ineffectual National Socialist working for the town hall. Trust me, we will think of something else.”
***
Irritation consumed Walter.
He disliked having to do his own shopping and banking. Julius had been a good and loyal apprentice, but what was the point of keeping a manservant if he, Walter, had to do everything for himself?
Julius, however, was ill. He had a nasty bout of a stomach complaint currently doing the rounds: the kind of thing that usually found its way round the population of a river town like Heidelberg during the hot summer and autumn months. Julius could not move further than a few yards from the lavatory and so Walter had to fend for himself. It was too bad.
He had bought bread and cheese, a couple of bottles of wine, and now queued in the bank, waiting to withdraw his weekly allowance and Julius’s meagre wages.
Across the tiled floor, in another queue, a middle-aged blonde woman was looking in his direction. She wore the puzzled frown of someone who recognises a face, but cannot place it. By the door, an armed security guard paced patiently
to and fro.
Walter knew who she was. One of his ‘patients’. He was not concerned. There was no possibility that she would ever recognise him.
To his dismay, the woman’s look turned to one of horror followed almost immediately by absolute fury.
“That’s him,” she shouted and all heads in the crowded establishment turned to follow her accusing finger, pointing in Walter’s direction. “That’s the man who pretends to be a doctor, the man who stole my savings.” She appealed to the security man. “Arrest him. Call the police.”
Walter dropped his purchases and ran. The security guard blocked his way, Walter shouldered him aside. He dashed out in the hot streets, ran hurriedly down Ladenburger Strasse, forcing his way through the crowds, the voice of the security man ringing in his ears. Passing the furniture store on the corner of Lutherstrasse, he decided if he could make it round the corner, and up the hill, he could lose himself in the maze of residential streets behind the town.
He turned the corner and ran into two police officers. Taken aback, they almost stood to one side, but at that same moment, the security guard turned the corner and shouted to them.
“Arrest that man.”
Walter ran, but made only two paces before the police were upon him, wrestling him to the cobbles, twisting his arms sharply up his back, bringing out the handcuffs.
12
Billy noticed that, while he was screwing her, Iris Bridge had closed her eyes.
She’s probably enjoying it, he thought.
The woman’s husband, Charlie, lay dead downstairs, clubbed to death when answering the door to Billy the previous night. Billy had found the place quite by accident. It lay in comparative seclusion, half a mile off the main Nantwich to Audlem road.
After disposing of Charlie and shooting their ageing Labrador hound, Billy had tied Iris’s hands, and dragged her to the back bedroom where he stripped and took her. She was middle-aged, overweight, but she was a fuck, and that was all that mattered to him. At his side, on the bedside cabinet, lay the large hunting knife he had stolen from the car spares shop.
After enjoying the woman, he moved to another room and spent a restless night on a lumpy old divan mattress. When he woke, he enjoyed a little breakfast while staring morosely at the dead farmer. It was just after six in the morning, and he would need to leave soon. Farm people were early risers and he had no idea whether anyone else was due to call on the Bridges.
So he took himself upstairs again, and had her one more time.
With a lot of heavy breathlessness, he finally ejaculated, and paused a moment to savour the spasmodic thrills coursing through him. Four? Five times now? In under twenty-four hours.
“Getting on in years, but it hasn’t done me no harm,” he said to Iris as he climbed from the bed and began to dress. “Now I have to deal with you, tubby, before I move on.” He stroked her plump breast, and patted her wobbling abdomen. “This, Mrs Farmer’s Wife, is going to hurt, but it’s necessary. I have to show them what kind of man they’re dealing with. The pain won’t last long. Trust me; I’m becoming an expert on death.” He leaned across and picked up the knife. “The amount of blood coming from your veins will ensure that you lose consciousness fairly quickly, and you’ll know nothing after that, but the cut will hurt. Take some consolation from the knowledge that by the time I’ve sent a text to Sinclair’s boyfriend, your miserable existence will be over.”
He drew the knife to her neck. Iris wriggled impotently, shaking her head from side to side, pressing her chin down on her breastbone in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.
“That’s what I like to see,” Billy chuckled. “A bit of fight. Won’t do you any good, but you have to go for it, don’t you?”
He pressed her head away from him, applied the serrated steel to her pulsing jugular, and slowly drew it across, applying pressure to the blade. Dark, venous blood flowed, richer, arterial blood spurted. Iris tried to scream but her gag prevented her. Her pupils rapidly dilated.
Wrapping used condoms in a tissue, Billy placed the knife on the pillow next to her, and took out Ted Sinclair’s mobile phone. Quickly, deftly, his fingers danced across the keypad as he put together a text, and then sent it to Croft’s number.
The killing stops only when you deliver The Deep Secret.
13
(As recounted by Franz Walter to Julius Reiniger.)
In one of the grand, recently restored apartments of Heidelberg Castle, Walter stood before Hauptmann Jochen Lehrer, the recently appointed commandant of the local garrison. In contrast to the officer’s smart, grey uniform, Walter, manacled hand and foot, his chains clanking with every movement, was clad in standard prison coveralls, unshaven and unwashed.
Six long years had passed since his arrest in 1934, and he had been housed at Heidelberg prison ever since. He had spent a year and half on remand while Ludwig Mayer worked with Anna at the university. Despite Walter’s best attempts, which included sending Julius to Anna’s home to deliver the command ‘loxitov’, which would silence her completely, Mayer had nevertheless broken through most of his controls and Anna had produced some damning testimony of his ‘work’ with her. Although she was too ill to testify in court, she had identified him as Dr Bergen, and Julius as his accomplice.
Walter had defended himself in court, putting forward eloquent arguments against Anna’s testimony; arguments which included Mayer’s own opinion that a hypnotised subject could never be compelled to carry out any acts contrary to his or her moral standards.
“It follows, therefore, that everything Anna alleges I have done, must have happened with her consent. Therefore, neither I, nor my manservant, Herr Reiniger, can be guilty of the charges of technical rape, living off immoral earnings and attempted murder. The charges should be dropped.”
In a shrewd move, Mayer dismissed his own opinions.
“The scientific understanding of hypnotism is still in a formative state, and my opinion, which in any event was based on supposed common knowledge, was that of a young psychiatrist barely out of medical school. The abuse of Anna Etzler has caused me to look again at that supposition, and I conclude that more research is required into this phenomenon.”
After three weeks, the presiding judges found Walter guilty and sentenced him to ten years at hard labour. They also found Julius guilty, but concluded that he had acted, in the main, under the influence and instruction of his master, whereupon they sentenced him to four years.
Largely free of Walter’s malign misguidance, Julius became a model prisoner. He did his work, he obeyed the rules, and he was freed in 1938. He promptly signed on with the Wehrmacht as an infantryman, where he would distinguish himself in Poland and Denmark.
Walter, on the other hand, remained aloof and uncooperative. He was subject to even harder work at the wine presses and out in the streets of Heidelberg, and in the prison, he was also given many beatings.
The prison authorities reckoned without the power of his mind. He understood natural analgesia, the brain’s ability to ignore pain, and he suffered all the torture heaped upon him by simply retreating into himself. Even when one of his fellow prisoners deliberately hit him with a sledgehammer, breaking his right foot, Walter did no more than cry out before bringing that superior mind to the fore and suppressing the pain.
With the advent of war, he spotted a slim chance of escape and, ever the opportunist, he began to work upon it through Private Lukas Kohler, his jailer. Kohler had been a civilian prison officer, but like all such men, with the outbreak of war, he was effectively drafted into the Wehrmacht and compelled to wear the drab grey uniform.
Walter had been working on him ever since first being incarcerated in Heidelberg prison, and in the late summer of 1940, when he finally judged the private to be ready, he asked for a meeting with Hauptman Lehrer.
The Captain was not in a particularly gracious mood. Tall and lean, his fair hair cut regimentally short, an icy blaze of contempt filled his Aryan blue eyes when
he spoke to Walter.
“Germany is a nation at war, and you have the audacity to ask to see me?” Lehrer barked. “Soon, you and your fellow Jews, all six thousand of you, will be removed from the city of Heidelberg. The air, I’m sure, will smell much sweeter.”
Withstanding the gnawing ache in his belly, the need for food and comfort, Walter maintained his aplomb. “You are mistaken, Captain. I am not a Jew.”
“Our records say different, and our records are never wrong.”
Long accustomed to working with recalcitrant opposition, albeit most of it female, Walter played Lehrer like an angler tiring out his prey. “The accuracy of the State’s record keeping has no equal, Captain, but in this instance, it is, I’m afraid, in error.”
Lehrer sighed. “And you wonder why you are beaten so regularly?”
“No, sir. I know why I am beaten so regularly. It is because of my refusal to comply with your demands. And why do I refuse?”
“Because you are a subversive Jew.” Lehrer’s tones made it sound as if the answer were obvious.
“No, sir. It is because I have been wrongly imprisoned. Not,” he added hastily, as Lehrer half rose, “because the judges were to blame, but because the records were deliberately falsified by a minor town official, Heinrich Etzler.”
“Herr Etzler is no longer here to defend himself,” Lehrer snapped. “He gave his life in the service of the Reich on the Polish front.”
“I am aware of that, sir,” Walter said, “and I have no wish to besmirch his reputation, but the truth is he was very angry at the time. I freely admit that I had a long running affair with his wife, Anna, while I was treating her. It was reprehensible, and from that point of view, I can understand Herr Etzler’s fury. And that, sir, is why I have accepted my punishment. However, with the Fatherland at war, I now believe I can atone for my sins by offering my services to the country I love.”
Suspicion haunted Lehrer’s lean features. “Services? Do you think the Reich needs the services of a communist Jew?”
The Deep Secret Page 10
