Huber's Tattoo

by Quentin Smith

  “Good God, what are we dealing with, Inspector, a serial killer of sorts?”

  “I don’t know, I really do not know. Superintendent Bruce, however, does not much like that term.”

  Thirteen

  It was nearing eight-thirty by the time Henry turned the key in his front door and pushed it open to be enveloped by an unexpected aura of light. No music, not even a sound, no smells of cooking, but he knew that George must be home.

  She was sitting with her knees tucked under her chin, bare feet pressed against the backs of her exposed thighs on the suede leather as she hugged what appeared to be one of Henry’s blue and white striped shirts around herself protectively.

  Henry’s smile faded quickly as he processed the sombre tone in the room.

  “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” he said, flopping in to the single suede chair opposite her and tossing his bunch of keys on to the coffee table in front of him.

  “It’s Vera’s memorial service on Thursday. Flights are erratic out of Cairo at the moment, so I took one when I could.”

  Henry had always thought that George never wore any make-up but he could see that tears had streaked through something cosmetic applied around her eyes, leaving tell-tale tracks.

  “Oh yes, I am so sorry, Georgie…” he began, uncertain how to finish. Reminded again of his perceptions that Vera had been making sexual overtures towards his girlfriend, his voice trailed off. It worried him that George was so upset. “How was it in Cairo?” he asked awkwardly.

  “I cannot imagine why anyone would want to murder her,” George said, for the first time meeting Henry’s eyes.

  Henry wanted to say that people always think that, but that inevitably it turned out there was someone out there who, perhaps for reasons as old as the hills themselves, did perpetrate the most unthinkable of crimes. But he decided against it.

  “What do you know about Vera?” Henry said sitting forward, suddenly energised.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me about her background, friends, relationships, conflicts, anything you know which could be helpful.”

  George narrowed her eyes at him.

  “What have you discovered?”

  He sat back and tapped his outstretched fingers together.

  “Investigation is still ongoing, but what I can say is that there is more to this case than meets the eye, in my opinion.”

  George looked horrified.

  “She was murdered, right?”

  Henry made a face.

  “Probably, but we don’t know for certain yet. Suicide is unlikely, let’s put it that way. But what interests me is her potential linkage to other victims and that’s why I want to know more about her.”

  George put her feet on the carpeted floor and pulled Henry’s striped shirt tails around her legs, seemingly straightening herself out for business.

  “I haven’t seen her for a while, you know. Last time was an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square, I think,” George’s eyes focused somewhere behind Henry. “She was single, I think, no men…”

  “Or women…?” Henry interjected.

  George shot a look at him.

  “Single, Henry.”

  “Did she have family? Where is she from? Schmidt sounds…”

  “German, as far as I know,” George said, “I never heard of family, but that’s not to say there wasn’t any. She seemed a little bit of a loner, sort of isolated, like an orphan.”

  The word brought their eyes together, but it went no further. Henry let it go.

  “Was she born in Germany?” he said.

  “I think so, but came here as a very young child. You can tell, could tell, that she was schooled and educated here.”

  Henry nodded pensively.

  “Do you know where in Germany she was born?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It may be important.”

  George was silent, thinking.

  “Somewhere near Munich, I think. A small village is what I recall her telling me, but she’s never been back. There were no ties, I don’t think.”

  “Enemies?”

  “In Germany?”

  “Anywhere.”

  George exhaled loudly.

  “She was an outspoken anti-war campaigner, an artist with strong convictions who wrote controversial and sometimes offensive plays. She spoke her mind; she was a brilliant thinker: yes, of course she had enemies, but with strong enough motive to kill her, not that I was aware of, anyway.”

  “How could you know?” Henry challenged her.

  George shrugged.

  “She was a lovely, loveable person, Henry.”

  The words rankled with Henry, and he stood up and walked to the kitchen.

  “And I think she would have confided in me,” George added.

  Henry opened the fridge door and bent over to search inside.

  “There was one occasion when she mentioned that she had been threatened for the most unusual thing,” George said off-handedly from the sitting-room.

  “What was that?” Henry said, straightening at the fridge door and looking towards George.

  “It was about her sexual permissiveness, you know she was bisexual, and also for her excessive smoking.”

  “I knew she was bisexual,” Henry said tersely, as if George was being sarcastic.

  “Very peculiar it was, warning her that such behaviour was against the order, or something like that.”

  Henry froze.

  “The order?” he said.

  “Something like that.”

  He recalled the letter Sean Wylie had given him, mentioning the exact same thing about Jeremy Haysbrook. This could surely not be a coincidence.

  “Did Vera belong to any secret societies or organisations, anything like that?”

  George pulled a face.

  “What sort of question is that?”

  It was a stab in the dark, Henry acknowledged.

  “Does ‘G3’ mean anything to you, George, in the context of Vera?”

  George looked at Henry incredulously.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Henry shrugged.

  “I don’t know. That’s why we investigate every possible avenue, as ludicrous as some may sound.”

  George stared at him, her face blank. She could be like this sometimes, as though absorbed in her warzone world once again, removed from the social etiquettes of civilized society, re-living the horrors that she had experienced and unable to detach herself from them.

  “Is there something you’re hiding from me?” she said eventually, with just a flicker of movement in her eyes.

  “I would tell you if I knew something, and if I could, you know that. Shall I cook dinner?”

  George looked down at her bare feet and wiggled her toes.

  “Can you take me and show me where Vera was found in the morning? I don’t know the Rainham Marshes and I’d like to see her final resting place.”

  Henry pulled out a bottle of Beck’s beer from the fridge.

  “Sorry, Georgie, we’re off to Grasmere first thing in the morning following a new lead. Would you like a drink?”

  “We?”

  He felt the ice cracking beneath his feet.

  “My sergeant and I.”

  George nodded.

  “Natasha. Are you back tomorrow night?”

  Reluctantly, Henry shook his head.

  “Don’t even think of staying in the same hotel we did three months ago when we were there,” George said. “Those are our memories. Understood?”

  She stood up and padded her way down the hallway towards the bedroom, Henry’s striped shirt barely covering her dignity.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but the case we’re investigating might well be linked to Vera’s death, George. It could be of crucial importance.”

  George ran her fingers through her short cropped black hair. Henry’s gesture of confiding in her hadn’t worked.

  “You know I am si
mply jealous because you see her every single day,” George shot back.

  “That, Georgie, is not my choice.”

  “No, and neither, I suppose, is the fact that she always wears such sexy clothes around you, flaunting herself to your admiring eyes.”

  “That’s enough, George. You’re upset and tired. Have a drink with me, some dinner, and let’s talk about what’s on your mind.”

  George paused at the bedroom door.

  “I’m going out,” she said.

  Fourteen

  Hadamar, December 1936

  Rolph Huber gazed out of the tall, elegant window in his office across the snow-covered rooftops of the surrounding Altstadt. The elevated hillside location of the Hadamar Institute, where he was based with his fellow Section Five officers, afforded far-reaching views of the fields and countryside beyond the humble houses encircling the hospital.

  Huber watched as another military green Mercedes bus pulled up outside the hospital. It was always the same: the windows of the bus were painted white so that no one could see either in or out of the bus, and it was escorted by two armed soldiers mounted on motorcycles.

  Huber’s dreamy state was shattered by a knock on the door.

  “Come!” he said sharply.

  Oskar entered in a neatly pressed black SS uniform, complete with his cap, and shut the door behind him. Huber jumped to his feet.

  “Sit down, Rolph, for God’s sake. I’ve only been promoted one rank to Sturmbannführer,” Oskar said, removing his cap and black gloves as he seated himself in the padded leather armchair in front of Huber’s desk and crossing his legs at the knee.

  “You’ve done well for yourself, Oskar.”

  Oskar waved a hand dismissively in the air. “It will be your turn next, Rolph, as soon as your next orders come through. I see we have another consignment.” He peered through the window at the bus down below.

  Together they watched as about forty children disembarked from the bus and were led into the Institute in single file, military style. Some limped, some held on to others, a few were carried by adults, but most walked in like normal children, except perhaps for the lack of spirit. All of them looked unkempt in tatty clothing, inadequately protected against the bitterness of early December snows. These were society’s unwanted progeny.

  Huber turned away from the window.

  “I’ve arranged for you to screen all those with sensory deficits and feeblemindedness, as this is within your expertise,” Oskar said, dropping a folder on to the desk in front of Huber.

  Huber didn’t look at the tan folder. He stood up and walked to a window on the opposite side of the room, facing west across the hillside. Visible beyond a long stone wall were straight rows of snow-covered earthen graves, each adorned with a tiny wooden cross, separated from the next by a narrow channel no more than two feet wide.

  “At this time of the year, when I look out at the cemetery, those elongated snow-covered mounds remind me of Stöllen sprinkled with icing sugar. This analogy should perhaps disgust me, but actually all I feel is hunger, a desire for sugary almonds,” Huber said.

  “You are truly telepathic, Rolph, for the kitchen today has prepared Stöllen as a festive treat for all of us.” Oskar slapped the thigh of his breeches in delight.

  Huber’s head bowed at the window as he looked down from the rows of graves at another green bus pulling up the Institute’s driveway, painted windows, military escort, as usual.

  “Are you thinking of Liesel?” Oskar said, an uncharacteristic softness in his voice.

  “It’s nearly a year since she was taken from me, yet I still miss her as if it was yesterday. This will be my first Weihnachten alone.” Huber breathed a little deeper before turning back to Oskar, who remained seated at the desk, legs crossed at the knee, cap and black gloves in his lap.

  “I will not let you be alone, my friend. You will celebrate with me and my close friends. We will get drunk on burgundy and cognac, and you will spend St Nicholas with us, too.”

  Huber managed a weak smile as he sat down again, glancing through the window at the second bus disgorging its ragtag band of forward-looking German society’s rejects.

  “God, it’s at times like this that I miss smoking the most.”

  Oskar wagged an admonishing finger at his friend.

  “Don’t go there, my friend. You have made a good impression so far. Weitkamp speaks respectfully of you. Your career in the Schutzstaffel could really take off from here.”

  Huber sat in silence and fingered the folder that Oskar had placed on the desk in front of him.

  “There are a lot of graves out in that cemetery, Oskar. It’s hard to believe so many of the patients die in our hospital,” Huber said, glancing at the rows of plain black crosses visible through the window.

  Oskar flicked at his breeches with his leather gloves.

  “Surgical sterilization and anaesthesia are imperfect and crude, you know that, so not all of these unfortunate Mindwertigs survive the procedure. Perhaps that in itself is testimony to the inadequacy and inferiority of their genes and their existence, don’t you think?”

  Huber clasped his hands beneath his chin and breathed out slowly. He could not help thinking of his poor Liesel: did she die because she too had inferior genes, unable to withstand the Scarlet Fever that invaded her body? He pinched his eyes shut and shook his head.

  “I suppose you are right. Many of them are indeed weak and unable to survive without special care.”

  “Exactly.” Oskar held his palms out, each grasping one black glove, in a symbol of Papal clemency. “We are helping not just the people out there,” he gestured out of the window at Hadamar’s snowy rooftops, “but in many instances also the wretched creatures with their handicaps that are sent to us.”

  Huber picked up the folder and flicked through its meagre contents.

  “Life unworthy of life,” Huber mused as he read the typed pages.

  “I should perhaps not tell you because it is still highly classified,” Oskar said, sitting forward and fixing Huber with excited eyes, “but I’ve heard that Himmler is looking for ways of accelerating and making the sterilization program more efficient. It is too slow, too cumbersome, and much too costly in its present form.”

  Huber frowned and leaned back in his chair.

  “How do they propose doing that?”

  “They haven’t decided, but Himmler is asking physicians in the Institutes such as ours for their ideas. It’s an opportunity for promotion, Rolph, for honour, for recognition in the Schutzstaffel.”

  Huber folded his arms contemplated his friend and senior officer.

  “I think they are planning to move me from here anyway,” Huber said.

  “Do you know where?”

  Huber shook his head. “Not yet, but Brack has been questioning me at length about my work with Professor Vogt at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.”

  “Is Brack interested in brain research?” Oskar raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  Huber paused, studying Oskar’s face.

  “Very.”

  *

  Huber sat behind a utilitarian, rectangular wooden desk in a fairly spacious room. On the desk were three piles of neatly stacked papers. Beside his left elbow rested the shiny black and silver SS cap and stretching away through an open doorway in front of his desk was a long queue of children in a single line. The room smelled of dusty, uncovered floor boards and unwashed bodies.

  “Next!” the square-built nurse standing guard beside Huber’s desk shouted unnecessarily loudly.

  The next two boys in line shuffled closer, glancing anxiously over Huber’s shoulder at the fearsome nurse.

  “Only one!” the nurse yelled, raising an arm like a red flag.

  “We are brothers,” the older boy said, squinting through thick round glasses pressed up against his podgy, unwashed face.

  Huber motioned for them to approach.

  “Let them come together.”

  The boys st
ood side by side touching the front edge of the desk, the younger boy wearing a knitted green jumper with a hole in the midriff, the older one an ill-fitting, coarsely woven woollen jacket, perhaps a discarded item from his father.

  “Names!” the nurse commanded as she bent over to peer into the boys’ ears and mouths.

  “Klaus Schaffer, twelve years,” said the older boy. “This is my brother Hans, he is nine.” His voice wavered though he tried hard to be brave.

  Huber had picked up two pages off the central pile and began to drag the nib across the paper, leaving a swirling trail of black ink.

  “You wear glasses?” Huber said, rhetorically.

  “I am short-sighted, Obersturmführer,” said Klaus.

  “You know my rank?”

  “I know them all.”

  Huber nodded thoughtfully. A patriot?

  “And what about you, Hans?” Huber said, his mouth curling into the faintest of smiles as he turned his eyes to the younger boy.

  Hans smiled back, riding on his heels, digging his fingers into the edge of the desk, seemingly in his own world.

  “Answer the doctor!” the nurse barked, prodding the boy harshly on the shoulder.

  Hans turned sharply to look at the nurse, startled by her touch.

  “He cannot hear you, Obersturmführer,” Klaus said. “He is deaf.”

  Huber and the nurse exchanged a glance and then Huber lowered his head and scratched away with the nib. The nurse pulled Hans’ jumper and shirt off, exposing the boy’s torso. He looked to be a fine specimen of a boy, well proportioned and straight. His arms and legs, too, were muscled and strong. Klaus stripped similarly, revealing a normal adolescent boy’s physique.

  “Does he speak?” Huber asked the older boy.

  “Not much, Obersturmführer. It is hard to understand him as well. I look out for him.”

  Huber turned his attention to the older boy.

  “You are not hard of hearing?”

  “No, Obersturmführer.”

  “Is your father or mother deaf?”

  “My mother had bad hearing, but she is dead now,” Klaus said. His head slumped forwards and he studied the floor, shuffling his dusty boots back and forth.