‘I think his hands were tied behind him,’ Shelley said. ‘It’s difficult to tell, given the extent of his injuries, but there seem to be some scraps of twine embedded in the wounds close to the wrist.’
‘Is it my imagination, or is there some sort of design on the blindfold?’ Booth said.
Shelley donned rubber gloves and carefully spread the fabric out, to reveal a black pennant. A crude runic design was stitched in its centre, a capital Z, the diagonal crossed with two horizontal lines.
Each man there stared at it. ‘Bastards,’ Freddy said, then whispered something to the colonel.
Bassett’s eyebrows bristled; his eyes narrowed. ‘Am I correct in surmising, Captain Booth, that the symbol on that pennant is the one used by those wretched werewolf partisans?’
Booth nodded. ‘It’s the Wolfsangel, sir, The Wolf’s Hook. During the advance across Germany, the Nazi regime encouraged civilians to scrawl this on the doors of people collaborating . . . or, rather, helping us, the Allies. But it’s strange that the werewolves would announce their presence so –’
‘Am I also correct in recollecting that your assessment of the werewolf threat in this sector was ‘negligible’?’
‘With respect, sir, I don’t think this incident proves –’
‘What in God’s name does it prove then, captain?’ Bassett said, his voice rising to a roar. ‘I’ll tell you what this incident proves. It’s a challenge. They’ve murdered one of our men and they want us to know it was them. Well, by God, if these blighters want to play it rough, I will give it to ’em rough. I want to know how this happened. And I want those responsible caught and punished. If Jerry hasn’t realised yet he’s lost this war, we will just have to show him, won’t we? And if you ain’t up to the job, Captain Booth, I’ll damned well find someone who is.’
With that, Bassett stalked from the room. Freddy lingered a moment, long enough for his eyes to meet Booth’s and a faint smile to flicker across his lips.
‘You’d best get cracking, Captain,’ he said. ‘You’ve some werewolves to catch.’
PART TWO
1
A LITTLE AFTER dawn, Little Otto walked out to the house on the Brunswick Road. He carried with him his big heavy killing knife and a torch. He kept to the paths through the woods as the roads were alive with military activity. That was good, though, it was what Otto had hoped for when he set Lockwood loose among the mines. It would keep them distracted, keep them from looking for Little Otto.
When he arrived at the house, he hid for twenty minutes among the trees, watching the kitchen door, just to be sure. He was aching to return and take possession of his treasures, but he knew he must be cautious.
Finally, when he could take it no longer, he stole across the lawn and entered the house. Inside the kitchen, he closed all the shutters. He didn’t want anyone peering in. Then he reached inside his jacket and withdrew the Mask of Many, his skin tingling with anticipation. He sucked in its sweet aromas as he raised the mask to his face and tied it into place. Then he walked across the room and headed upstairs, fingering the key to the garret door and thinking about his Papa . . .
Back when Little Otto was a boy, his Papa had always called the people they kept in the cellar ‘guests’. ‘I’m going to see to our latest guest,’ he would say to Mutti as he dabbed his mouth and rose heavily from the dinner table. Sometimes, Little Otto would secretly watch through the keyhole as Papa scrubbed his hands with carbolic, tied the leather apron around his wide waist and pulled on the gloves and face mask. When Papa opened the cellar door, Otto could smell the cold air and chemicals that wafted up from below.
The other people who came to the house – the ones that were not taken straight to the metal table in the cellar – had serious faces and uniforms. The women who came wore black and cried into their handkerchiefs.
Little Otto was ten the first time Papa took him down into the cellar.
‘This is what I do, Otto,’ he’d said, ‘what puts food on our table. One day, you will do the same.’
That was the first time he had helped Papa with one of the guests – their guests, now – setting the modesty cloth over the body’s sticky, stinky parts and bending and flexing the stiffness from the rigid joints.
The guest’s skin had been ice cold and blue-white. Little Otto had never seen anything so beautiful. People were hot, noisy, smelly creatures, but the cellar guests were different: death had made them quiet and cold and perfect. He lay awake that night, imagining the spirit of the cellar-guest flitting like a bat beneath the eaves of the house.
Year by year, he learned more of Papa’s trade. Papa always worked with a photo of the guest beside the big metal table. First, he used a curved needle and ligature to seal the mouth; then he set the eye caps to keep the lids closed. If the guest was a man, he would shave the stubble. Then the injections began and Little Otto would watch the big white ghost of Papa’s reflection slide on and off the curved silver surface of the tank which held the embalming fluid.
One Sunday morning Little Otto feigned stomach ache. Papa wanted to force him to go to church, but Little Otto could always get Mutti on his side. ‘Let the boy sleep,’ she’d said, stroking his hair, while Little Otto nuzzled his face into her soft bosom and sucked in her hot, swampy smells. He had watched from his bedroom window as they walked away, down the street towards the church. Then he went straight to the cellar.
The new guest was a young peasant girl from the village. Something heavy had fallen on her and cracked her neck. Little Otto pulled the sheet down to admire the perfection of her. Mutti would have looked this way once, he thought, blond and plump. The girl’s hair smelt of soap and flowers. Otto had pressed his face against her cold white flesh, wishing somehow he could dive within her skin and know what it was like to be a different person, to see out through a different pair of eyes.
That was the first time he felt it, that awesome sense of serenity, as if the quiet calm of cathedral cloisters had filled every particle of his being. There was nothing sexual about the feeling, despite what they told him later in life. He never felt so chaste as when he was with one of his guests, the master and the mastered, the god with his disciple.
He feigned illness again the next week and went down to the cellar. The third Sunday was when Papa caught him, the pristine intimacy of the cellar sucked away by the sudden swish of the door opening and Papa’s podgy silhouette framed by the hall light.
‘My God, boy, what are you doing?’ . . .
2
IT WAS MIDDAY now and the streets outside the police station were alive with the sounds of military activity: jeeps, lorries, marching boots, shouting voices.
Silas Payne drank tea and watched the soldiers come and go from the window. As with most military activity, the emphasis seemed to be on looking and sounding busy rather than actually getting anything done.
Captain Booth had been right about one thing: this Colonel Bassett fellow was an idiot. Not because he’d embarrassed Payne earlier by insisting he leave Lockwood’s autopsy – such petty insults meant nothing to Silas Payne. No, Bassett was an idiot because he mistook knee-jerk impulse for decisive action. If he’d taken five minutes to listen to Payne, he would have seen that all the check points and searches that he was implementing were a waste of time. Mr Lockwood’s death had nothing to do with the werewolf insurgency; Payne had been certain of that even before he had caught Shelley, the medical officer, outside the Rathaus and asked him for the details of the autopsy.
He sipped his tea as he pondered the matter. The obvious suspect was the quartermaster sergeant, Suttpen, but he had an alibi; Payne had checked. Suttpen had been playing poker the night before with no less than seven men from different units. The game had begun in the early evening and did not end until four in the morning. Suttpen had not left the game at any point.
Back home, Payne would have brought Suttpen in
for questioning anyway; given him a good, long session. It was the only way with men like Suttpen: you had to show them you were possessed of limitless reserves of patience as you walked them through the same series of events once, twice, three, four, five times – as many as it took for them to talk themselves into knots. Suttpen might not have set Lockwood free in the minefield, but he knew something about the incident, of that Payne was certain. But Suttpen had the backing of both his CO and Colonel Bassett. Payne would have to wait before he approached the man again.
So, who had killed Lockwood?
Payne sat on his trestle bed with notepad and pencil and began to write down what he knew.
His first contact with Lockwood had prompted the little man to run straight to Suttpen. Payne thought about the conversation he had witnessed between the two men, of the panic on Lockwood’s face and Suttpen’s contemptuous reaction. The two men were up to something together, that much was clear, although Lockwood seemed to have been regretting his involvement. That same afternoon, an unidentified man had visited Lockwood’s billets. Later that evening, Lockwood had walked to the edge of town and disappeared.
Payne thought about the pair of spectacles he’d found. It was clear Lockwood had been abducted, but he hadn’t been killed straight away. Instead, the killer had waited approximately thirty hours, then set Lockwood free in a minefield. That meant the killer obviously had access to a place where he had held Lockwood captive. But why choose such a public way of killing him? Why not kill the man and bury him? And why use a werewolf pennant as a blindfold?
There was only one answer, Payne decided: the action had been so blatantly visible that it had to be a ruse to divert attention from something else. What that something might be, though, still eluded Payne. Once again, he had the feeling he was only seeing one small part of a far larger whole.
Payne was still pondering the matter when someone knocked at the door of the police station. He opened the door and found a man in a long, tatty overcoat standing outside. He addressed Payne in German.
‘Are you the English policeman? My name is Schaeffer. I have information I need to give you.’
From the man’s furtive behaviour Payne deduced that he did not want to impart the information on the stairs of the station, so he invited him in. He stirred the embers of the stove and warmed tea for them both.
Wherever it was that Schaeffer had come from, he had clearly been walking for a long time. The lower edges of his serge coat were spattered with mud and one of his military boots was held together with a twist of ripped fabric. But despite his dishevelled appearance there was a neatness and precision to his manner.
‘I shall be brief,’ he said. ‘There have been murders here recently, have there not? In a house. With surgical implements found.’
Payne’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘What do you know about that?’
‘It is my belief that certain very dangerous individuals are at large among the civilian population. And it is not what I know that should interest you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was formerly an officer in the Wehrmacht. Until yesterday, I was held prisoner at an internment camp ten miles from here. In this camp there is an ex-Gestapo man. He claims to know who is responsible for these murders.’
‘How did he know about the murders if he was interned?’
Schaeffer laughed mirthlessly. ‘What else do interned men have to do but gossip with the guards? And men get moved from one facility to another. Somehow or other this Gestapo man has found something out.’
‘Tell me about him,’ Payne said.
‘His name is Toth, Amon Toth. He was a Kriminalkommisar in the Gestapo. A few days ago I overheard him talking about this house here in Eichenrode, about the bodies that were found in the cellar. He was laughing, saying that the Tommies did not know what they were up against. He claimed that this murderer had already killed more than a dozen people in Germany during the war and that now the Tommies had set him loose.’
Payne was watching the man carefully now. ‘Why do you set such store by what this Gestapo man says? He could have been making it up out of boredom.’
Schaeffer sipped his tea. ‘My brother-in-law was a military policeman. When I was last home on leave he told me his unit had been sent to a prison near here, Wolffslust Prison, on two occasions, with orders to execute prisoners. These men were not part of the usual prison population. They were part of a special research programme, run by a doctor. He said they had been transferred from a medical institute in Brunswick after the city was bombed. These men who were brought for the doctor’s programme had been serving on the eastern front. They were murderers and rapists.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because it is my duty. One does evil enough when one does nothing good,’ Schaeffer said. ‘Recent German history is surely proof of that. If what this Gestapo man says is true, people could be in danger. I have been to the prison and the security there is very lax.’
But Payne was thinking of something else, of the old woman who had knocked on the door of the police station the day Payne had arrived in Eichenrode. He’d paid her little attention at the time, but now memory of her words sent a chill through his body. ‘I’ve seen him,’ she had said. ‘The man that raped my daughter. They put him in Wolffslust Prison, but I saw him this morning, walking the streets, free as a bird!’
Payne went straight to Major Norris and said he wanted to question the Gestapo man, Toth.
Norris wasn’t keen on the idea, but relented when Payne persisted. ‘You won’t get into an internment camp alone, though,’ Norris said. ‘I’ll have to ask someone from Field Intel to go with you.’
Payne had instructed Schaeffer to wait for him while he spoke with Norris, but when he went back to the police station, Schaeffer had disappeared.
Small matter. Payne had the feeling that Schaeffer had told him all he knew, in any case.
An hour later Payne was on his way to the internment camp in a jeep driven by a lieutenant named Taylor from Booth’s Field Intelligence unit.
Outside Eichenrode, the countryside still bore signs of war. Burned-out vehicles sat beside the road and the grass verges were littered with scraps of clothing, broken pieces of ordnance and discarded army crates, all empty and smashed apart. People moved along the edges of the road, in both directions. Others lived in the woods. As they drove past, Payne could see fires flickering beneath ragged awnings and smoke drifting between the trees.
‘What a ruddy mess,’ Payne said, looking behind him as a man on the roadside swung a punch at a smaller man.
If Taylor heard him, he did not react.
Payne had been initially happy about going with Lieutenant Taylor – the prospect of a long drive with Captain Booth had not thrilled him – but as they drove in silence and Payne watched the man out of the corner of his eye, Payne realised the man was deeply troubled. Payne knew that nearly everyone called Lieutenant Taylor by his nickname, Tubbs, but whoever had given him the moniker obviously hadn’t seen him recently. Taylor now had the sallow skin of a man who had lost a lot of weight quickly. Payne had heard that Taylor had witnessed the clearing of a concentration camp and that he’d not been the same since.
Payne could believe it. Taylor’s eyes were bloodshot and he had a nervy, brittle edge to him as if, emotionally, he were staggering forward on his last reserves of energy. It happened to men, sometimes. On the outside they seemed fine but, like the lead of a dropped pencil, they were all broken apart inside.
The internment camp was set up within the grounds of a country manor that had formerly belonged to a German industrialist. The house itself seemed medieval in its size and splendour, but its magnificence was tarnished by a sort of shanty town that had grown up on the lawns beside it. As they drew closer, Payne saw that an area of perhaps the size of a football pitch had been enclosed within barbe
d wire. Inside, the ground was covered with all manner of makeshift shelters made from blankets, scraps of wood and holes dug in the ground. Watchtowers equipped with machine guns had been erected at each corner of the camp. Groups of British soldiers stood along the perimeter, chatting among themselves and smoking cigarettes.
Payne knew there were camps like this all over Germany now. In the final days of the war the Wehrmacht had begun to surrender in such massive numbers it was impossible to care for them all to the standards demanded by the Geneva Convention. To circumvent this, a new category of prisoner had been invented: DEFs, Disarmed Enemy Forces. Soldiers assigned to this category were not classified as POWs and therefore didn’t have to be looked after to the same standards. Payne had heard that there were still hundreds of thousands of Germans locked away in these camps.
‘It’s quite a contrast, isn’t it?’ Payne said.
For the first time in an hour, Taylor spoke. ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ he said, looking out across the grounds towards the mansion house and the camp beside it. He sneered. ‘It won’t do German soldiers any harm to see the sort of luxury they were fighting to preserve. I expect most of that mansion was paid for with Nazi war contracts.’
‘What’ll happen when autumn comes?’
‘They’ll get cold and wet,’ Taylor said in a way that made Payne feel the lieutenant would like the Germans to suffer far worse inconveniences.
As they approached the barbed wire perimeter of the camp, hundreds of eyes turned to meet them, staring from emaciated, dirty faces. The German soldiers wore every conceivable type of filthy and torn uniform and some men still had grubby bandages wrapped around their hands and heads.
Taylor spoke to an officer and explained what they were doing there. A call was put out for the former Gestapo man, Amon Toth. Ten minutes later, Toth arrived at the gates to the camp. He was painfully thin and shabbily dressed in a plain soldier’s camouflage uniform. Despite this, he displayed an innate hauteur.
Werewolf Page 10
