Speaking through the wire, Taylor addressed him in German.
‘We’ve been told you know something about a murder that occurred close to the town of Eichenrode.’
Toth’s face became sly. ‘Yes, that is true. I fear a beast is loose among you. There could be more deaths. Many more. But I can help to prevent them.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
For the first time, the German smiled, an ironic curl of the lip, revealing sharp white teeth. His dark eyes sparkled.
‘I can tell you who this beast is and how he hunts. And, more importantly, I can tell you how to catch him.’
3
AT LUNCHTIME BOOTH returned to Wolffslust Prison.
He was taking a chance by going back there, as Colonel Bassett had instructed him to prepare a briefing on the dangers of werewolf activity in the area, but Booth wanted to find out what was behind the ‘dungeon’ door, for the simple reason that if he didn’t, no-one else would.
The overcast day gave the hulking brick prison a sinister air. As he pulled up in the courtyard, he saw the promised engineer detachment was already there, unloading equipment from a lorry. Booth went downstairs to the dungeon door and found the sergeant in charge of the engineers bending to examine the lock.
‘It’s pretty jammed up in there, sir,’ he said.
‘I know, sergeant,’ Booth said. ‘That’s why I called you.’
The sergeant had a slow West Country accent. He continued as if Booth had not replied. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised to find someone snapped the key off inside the lock,’ he said, poking in the keyhole with a screwdriver. He straightened and banged his fist against the door. ‘Mighty fine piece of wood, though.’
‘Can you open it?’
‘We can dynamite it. But that would ruin the door.’
‘Do what you have to do, sergeant.’
Booth left the engineers to it and went back to sorting paperwork. The sound of drilling and banging echoed up through the stone walls of the prison. An hour later one of the sappers came to say they were ready.
‘You’ll want to take cover over there,’ the engineer sergeant said, as he attached electrical cables to a plunger. Booth had the soldiers clear the underground passages and return all the prisoners to their cells. All around the prison courtyard, faces were pressed to the barred windows, watching. Booth took cover and waved to the engineer sergeant, who twisted the plunger and pressed it down.
There was a split second pause, as if the world had caught its breath, then smoke and dust billowed from the corridor, driven forth on a roaring wave of sound. Booth gritted his teeth and put his fingers in his ears. There was a metallic creak, followed by the sound of falling rubble, then the force created by the huge impact shuddered through the roots of the building.
It took two minutes for the dust to clear. When it was safe to descend the stairs once more, Booth saw that the door had been blown clear of its hinges and fallen forwards.
‘Right, let’s see what we can find through here,’ he said, clicking on his torch.
Dust spiralled in the beam of light as Booth crept forward across the shattered door. The air was thick with the smell of explosive. It was pitch dark in the room beyond; Booth searched until he found a light-switch. When he clicked it on, a strip light in the ceiling flickered into life.
Each man there drew his breath.
‘What the hell is all this?’ someone said.
Booth looked around him. The walls of the large room were of rough ancient stone, worn and stained by centuries of dripping water. In the centre of the chamber was a metal chair with leather restraints for head, wrists and ankles. Beside it was a wheeled metal trolley, also equipped with restraints. A machine with wires, cables and electrometers stood beside the trolley. Metal tools dangled from a rack on the wall.
Booth motioned for the men behind him to stay where they were and moved towards the chair at the chamber’s centre. As he got closer, he saw that the metal chair was attached to some form of ratchet and could be tipped backwards with a lever. A square hole was dug in the ground behind the chair. When Booth shone his torch into the darkness of the hole, he saw it was filled nearly to the top with liquid.
He bent to sniff it. It smelt of brackish water.
Booth looked around the room. There were dozens of packing crates and boxes piled against the walls. Booth had the impression that the equipment in the room had been moved from a larger facility and never properly unpacked. Metal filing cabinets in one corner leaked thousands of documents. Beside them were piles of cardboard boxes, also filled with documents. Thousands more sheets of paper were strewn across the floor.
One pile of packing crates had swastikas burnt into the surface of the wood and the words ‘Institute of Racial Hygiene’ printed below. Some of the crates also bore the strange symbol Booth had seen inside the lid of the film canisters, the sword and ribbon surrounded by runic symbols. This must be where the films came from, he thought.
He motioned for the other soldiers to come into the room. Together they began searching the boxes.
Booth took a handful of papers from one of the crates and flicked through them. They were written in neatly-typed German and looked like film scripts. As Booth read them he realised that in reality they were transcripts of conversations held between a doctor named Wiegand and various patients. The patients’ names were not given; instead, each one was identified by a number.
He opened another of the cardboard boxes and recoiled when he realised it was filled with human skulls, more than a dozen of them, packed together in the box like bleached eggs.
When he had recovered from his shock, he began to remove the skulls from the box. Each was carefully labelled with a German man’s full name. Lines had been scratched into the bone of each skull, forming grids on which various sections had been labelled with words in Latin that Booth could not understand.
Beneath the skulls were a number of neatly folded charts and diagrams. Each chart referred to a different man’s skull and was filled with measurements and algebraic calculations of which Booth could make little sense.
As he looked at the names, he paused, wondering why they seemed so familiar. Then he remembered. These were the same surnames that he had read on the insides of the film canisters. He looked at the skulls. No wonder the names had been crossed through.
Booth tried to lift a swastika-marked packing crate down from the top of a pile, but stopped when he realised how much it weighed. He pulled a chair over and stood on it to peer down at the two glass jars that were inside. Both jars measured roughly a foot in width and height and were filled with clear liquid: formaldehyde, by the smell of it. Booth signalled for the engineer sergeant to help him and together they lifted the box down from the shelf.
‘Oh Lord, is that what I think it is?’ the sergeant said, hurrying to put the jar down on a desk. ‘Oh God, it is, isn’t it?’
A human brain bobbed within the liquid.
Booth looked at the name on the front of the jar: Tjaden, Albrecht.
He’d seen that same name on one of the skulls. What the hell had been going on down here?
One of the other soldiers had found a box containing hundreds of documents relating to births, marriages and baptisms, together with family trees and genealogical tables. The documents all bore the official stamp of the Rassenforschungsamt, the Nazi Race Investigation Office, and all of them related to the names on the skulls.
‘They seemed very interested in the racial lines of whoever these people were,’ Booth said, as he flicked through the pages. ‘There’s one here whose family tree goes back to the times of Martin Luther.’
All the documents were originals. The edges of some pages showed signs of having been razored out of books. That explained the wonderful smell of antique paper, but it didn’t explain why dozens of parish records had been ruined.
Whoever these people were, they must have been important in some way.
‘What the hell is this?’ someone said, putting a calliper rule down on the desk and withdrawing another tool from a box. It was a curious angle of metal with screws and straps attached to it.
‘I think it’s a craniometer. For taking measurements of people’s heads,’ Booth said.
‘What for?’
‘Anthropometry, I would guess,’ Booth said, ‘given the nature of these documents. It’s a sort of pseudo-science, by which a person’s intelligence can supposedly be calculated by taking precise measurements of his or her body.’
On the far side of the room, a door led into a long rectangular chamber. A film screen hung at the far end of the room and there was a film projector to the side of the door. Wires ran across the walls and were hooked up to speakers in each corner. Apart from that, the room was entirely empty, save for another metal chair with restraints set in the centre of the room. Booth noticed that this one was bolted to the floor.
‘I could get this working, if you liked, captain, ‘ the engineer sergeant said, fiddling with wires and switches in the dais beneath the film projector. ‘It doesn’t look too complicated. If we just plug this thing in –’
The speakers erupted into a burst of static, followed by a deafening blast of sound. So sudden and tremendous was the cacophony that Booth fell backwards with his hands to his ears.
Then he noticed the images on the screen. Naked women stood in a line, some holding children. German soldiers with dogs and whips prowled beside them. The sound was so loud that Booth felt it almost as a tangible thing. Screams. Shouts. Shots. Dogs barking. A wailing wall of noise, a perfect distillation of human suffering, as if a thousand voices were raised in an agony of supplication.
Booth gestured frantically towards the engineer sergeant, who lunged for a lever below the dais. The sound and images died.
‘What in God’s name was that?’ one of the soldiers hissed.
Booth was dusting off his trousers. ‘That is precisely what I intend to find out,’ he said.
4
FOR THE FIRST time in what seemed an age, Ilse slept late.
For one glorious moment when she awoke and pulled her hair from her eyes, she had no idea where she was. Then the wind stirred and blew through the cracks in the wall and she remembered everything.
Cousin Ursula was dead.
Her last family member was gone.
Ilse walked to the window and looked down at the messy grave she’d dug in a corner of the garden, a long, ragged scar of freshly turned earth. How anyone was supposed to dig a grave six feet deep was beyond her. In the end, all she’d managed to create was a trench perhaps a little over three feet deep in which to lay Cousin Ursula’s body – and that had taken her all night. Her palms and fingers were one mass of blisters. She hoped the layer of rocks and rubble she had placed on top of Ursula’s body would be enough to deter animals from scratching and scrabbling at the remains.
The enormity of the situation hit her suddenly and she burst into tears. Then sudden fear gripped her and she ran to the other side of the room and looked through the window, towards the rose bush by the path.
No, you couldn’t see the other hole, she realised, the hole Ilse had dug when she had first come to the house two months before. The grass had grown back and only the faintest outline of it was visible, a rectangular hole, two feet by twelve inches.
That was good: Cousin Ursula was not the only one of Ilse’s secrets buried in the garden.
It was cold when she went downstairs. After days of wishing to be free of Cousin Ursula, Ilse now found the house felt strangely empty. Having two people inside it had given an illusion that the place was still a dwelling; now she was alone again, the house was revealed for what it really was, a battered box of brick and beam without any water or electricity.
Ilse built the fire up and ate some of O’Donnell’s bread for breakfast. Then she remembered the wretch would be expecting information about the policeman from her when she went back to work at the transit camp. Well, O’Donnell would have to wait. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t seen Booth.
She warmed her toes by the fire and admired the dancing flame as she prepared tea.
When she went back into the pantry she spotted the bundle of letters on the floor. They were Cousin Ursula’s, the ones she’d held clutched to her chest all though the long agony of her death. They must have fallen from her hands when Ilse carried the body outside. Ilse went back to the fire with the letters.
Really, she should burn them. They had obviously been important to Ursula; they were private. Yet they were almost the only memento that remained of Ilse’s family. She looked at the top letter and the words that were written there: Liebling Ursula.
No-one would ever know, she decided, then saw that her fingers were already unpicking the blue ribbon that held the letters together.
Her eyes strayed across the first page. The letter contained precisely what she expected to find, cloying promises of love and undying devotion from some soldier, someone who had served on the eastern front. Ilse frowned when she spotted an allusion to ‘playing together as children’. Her frown deepened when she saw the letter was signed ‘Johannes D’.
As she skimmed through more of the letters, she realised her suspicion was correct: her brother, Johannes, had written them. There were so many references to childhood incidents and mutual relations, it had to have been him. Ilse frowned even more as she read the sugary protestations of love and promises of marriage that her brother had sent back from Russia.
How could that be? Johannes had always despised Cousin Ursula. He had bullied and taunted her as a child, even though Ursula was eight years older than he. Ilse’s expression grew yet more serious as she read on. The later letters were filled with talk of the glory of the Final Victory and how Johannes’s unit had imposed ‘German culture’ on the Slavs.
‘Good news, my dearest, sweet darling! I have achieved the posting of my dreams. Fortune has smiled upon me and I have been transferred to an elite unit, the SS-Sturmbrigade ‘Dirlewanger’. They really are the crème de la crème of our Führer’s boys. You should see how their boots and buttons sparkle when they are on parade. We’re very popular with the local Slavs. Whenever we visit one of their villages, all the women and men come crowding out into the street and head for the local church to sing our praises. We always give them a warm reception.’
Ilse looked at the letter. It was written in pencil on grubby, torn paper. There was certainly nothing about the scrawls that suggested an elite unit. And the whole tone of the letter was wrong: the Johannes she’d known would never have been capable of such saccharine sentimentality.
She looked at the date on the letter. That, too, did not dovetail with her memories of Johannes. It was dated November 1943. That meant the letter had been written a few months after Johannes’s final fateful visit to the Warthegau.
The last time Ilse had seen her brother he had been a changed man. Not only did he have that lean, hard look most of the fighting men from the east had, the cruel spiteful side of his character had come fully to the fore.
Of course, Johannes was the centre of attention at the party Ilse had organised in his honour – how could he not be? But every person who went to congratulate him on the prowess of the German Army walked away from him disturbed. They whispered that he was voicing all sorts of unwise opinions about the Party and the war.
It was inevitable Johannes should fall out with Rüdiger. ‘No, you don’t understand, Herr Hoffman,’ Johannes had shouted across the dinner table, after drinking a whole bottle of hock with the entrée. ‘We have to win this fucking war now, because if the Ivans ever come here and do to us even a fraction of what we’ve done to them, within a year there won’t be any Germans left.’
The dinner party had ended hours earlier than anticipated, by
which time Johannes had been lying unconscious before the scullery fire for some time.
Ilse sipped her tea. What had Johannes been doing, exchanging letters with Cousin Ursula? Had he changed? It was possible – sometimes the thought of coming home to a simple plain woman like Ursula was what a soldier needed to keep him going – but somehow it didn’t fit her brother’s character. If the sentiment wasn’t genuine, what had provoked his expression of it? Had Johannes been poking fun at Ursula?
Yes, that was more like it, she realised. Johannes had always possessed an odd sense of humour, the type that enjoyed laughing at rather than with other people. And who was this Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger? As far as she knew Johannes had always served with the 3rd Division, the Totenkopf.
What did it all mean?
She sipped tea, staring at the fire. And then it suddenly occurred to her in a spike of emotion just how pointless all this wondering and theorising was: they were all dead. All of them. Ursula. Johannes. Rüdiger. She had nothing, now, and no-one.
Ilse looked at her blistered hands, then rose and went to the pantry for the whisky bottle, trying to ignore the tears that had clouded her eyes.
5
AMON TOTH SAT in the centre of the interrogation room with a booted foot resting on the knee of his left leg. When Payne pulled aside the slat that covered the peephole and peered through, the German raised his hand and wiggled the tips of his fingers towards the door in a dainty wave.
Toth was in his early thirties and good-looking in a chisel-jawed Teutonic way. His hair was platinum blond and exceptionally fine, but his eyes were unusually dark and surrounded by darker lashes. Most SS men Payne had seen were unimpressive without their uniforms, but Toth had presence; there was something of the fallen angel about him, radiant and yet perverse.
Payne pulled the slat closed and said to the duty sergeant, ‘What can you tell me about him?’
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