‘Your name is Ilse Drechsler. You were married to Herr Hoffman’s son, Rüdiger.’
‘Let me go.’
The woman’s grip increased.
‘Not so high and mighty now, are you? Where’s your car and driver? Where’s your precious Party, Ilse?’
The soldiers at the gate had begun looking towards them. Ilse pulled the woman out of their sight.
‘What do you want from me? Money? Food? I have neither.’
The hag sneered. ‘I’m not going to blackmail you, don’t worry.’
‘Then what do you want?’
‘I want you to come with me, to my home. I want to show you something.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous?’ The woman’s voice rose as she spoke. ‘You dare to call me ridiculous, Frau Hoffman?’
She enunciated the last two words with exaggerated clarity. Ilse hissed for her to be quiet. The hag smiled triumphantly.
‘If you want me to be quiet, come with me. If not, I will go straight to the Tommies and tell them who you really are.’
Ilse had no choice but to comply. They left the camp and walked in silence along country lanes, back towards the edge of the town, then turned into a street where the buildings were little more than brick boxes filled with rubble and broken wood. Dazed, dusty women sat in the street, half-heartedly trying to scrub clothes in makeshift tubs, while tattered children played.
The hag took Ilse to a set of steps that led down from street level to a cellar door.
‘In here,’ she said.
The dark room smelt of cabbage and damp brick. There was little in the room apart from a few sticks of furniture and what seemed to be half of a sideboard, its splintered edge pushed up against the wall. A child, wrapped in blankets, lay on a makeshift bed in a corner of the room. The child moaned and whimpered softly as the hag approached. She made soothing noises, then turned and motioned for Ilse to approach.
‘This is what you must see,’ the woman said and flung back the covers.
Ilse stifled a cry as she saw the wretched, twitching thing beneath the blankets was not a child, but a young man. His legs ended in puckered stumps a foot below his hips and his face was missing an eye and most of the teeth. The remaining orb rolled and darted beneath the scarred lid like that of a frightened horse. Saliva dripped from the jabbering lips and gums.
‘There,’ the woman said. ‘That is all I have left of three sons. No, look at him, you heartless bitch,’ she said, when Ilse tried to turn. ‘My eldest was killed in Africa. My second died in Italy. And this . . . this is how my youngest came back from the fighting in Normandy. I had everything I wanted in life. Then you Nazis came and turned the world upside down and now I have nothing. Less than nothing. What argument did I ever have with the English or the Americans? Or the Russians? Or even the damned Jews?’
Ilse wanted to flee, but she found herself paralysed by the woman’s cold fury.
‘What do you want from me?’ Ilse said. Her voice trembled as she spoke: she was genuinely afraid of hearing the reply.
The woman looked at Ilse and as she did so the blaze of hatred in her eyes, which had been suppressed before, flared up; her lip curled. ‘You were a Nazi, Frau Hoffman. For years you strutted around in front of the ordinary people, making out you Nazis were something special when in reality you were selfish, arrogant shits, the whole lot of you. So, I want you to say sorry. I want you to look at my son, I want you to hold his hand and I want you to apologise.’ She came so close now that Ilse could smell her breath, which was rank with acorn coffee. ‘You people, you Nazis, you filled their heads with drums and dreams of glory. But this is where you led them. That is why I want you to kneel beside his bed and ask his forgiveness. This is your fault and you must admit it. Then I will decide whether to tell the Tommies who you really are.’
Ilse could not move. It seemed to her that a hundred possible courses of action were flashing through her mind as she stared down at the crippled soldier, but she could not decide which one to take. When the hag put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her down, Ilse’s knees buckled. She knelt beside the bed.
The man’s scarred hand was hot and dry when she held it. She opened her lips but no words emerged. The woman prodded her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ilse whispered.
‘Again.’
‘I’m sorry.’
The woman knelt beside her.
‘Kiss his brow and tell . . . don’t you dare try to run, you bitch!’
But Ilse was up now and stumbling towards the door.
‘Come back,’ the woman hissed. Behind her, the lump on the bed began to rock and cry, flapping his stumps impotently against the wooden board in an effort to rise.
‘I’m sorry. I’M SORRY!’ Ilse cried, then turned and ran for the door. She fell and grazed her knee on the stairs outside, but she got up again quickly and did not stop running. Children stopped and watched her as she fled along the street, weeping hysterically, but their dead eyes showed no emotion. They had seen far worse things.
11
CAPTAIN BOOTH’S INTEREST in the Flickschuster case had confirmed Payne’s suspicions. This business with the dead bodies and Lockwood had nothing to do with Nazi partisans. There were no werewolves. Something else was going on, Payne was certain of it. That was why at midday he walked out to the murder house on the Brunswick Road, carrying a canvas sack filled with tools.
It was always good to return to a crime scene. Payne found it helped focus his mind on the facts that had been learned in the intervening period. And he nearly always spotted something new, some tiny detail he had previously overlooked . . . and it was the tiny details that usually made the difference between success and failure in a criminal investigation.
There was a lot of military traffic on the roads today, so Payne walked along the grass verge, the sack thrown over his shoulder. Before he reached the murder house, he walked to a property that was on the hillside opposite, the only one that overlooked the crime scene. Really he should have done this when he first began investigating the matter, but he’d been distracted.
There had been a fence outside the house once: lines of torn earth showed where the fence posts had been ripped out. The house’s shutters were all gone and the lower floor windows were boarded up from the inside.
Payne knocked at the ruined front door. When no-one answered, he peered through the chinks in the window boards. An elderly woman’s face appeared at a second-storey window.
‘Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ she said.
‘Could you come down, please?’ Payne said in German. ‘I need to ask you something.’
‘Are you a soldier?’ she said. ‘When will you people go back to your homes and leave us in peace?’
Payne thought about showing her his CCG identity card, but thought better of it: telling her he was a policeman might not calm her, given the reputation that the first wave of Allied soldiers to reach Germany had acquired. ‘Come down and speak to me; then I will leave you in peace.’
It took the woman a while to remove whatever it was that was holding the front door closed. When she did so, it fell inwards. The old woman was wrapped in a ratty dressing gown. She was trembling, Payne noticed, although the day was not cold.
‘How long have you lived here?’ Payne said.
‘All my life.’
‘Who owns that house over there?’ he said, pointing towards the murder house.
‘Herr Tauber.’
‘Where is he?’
She shrugged. ‘Someone in the village said he was killed fighting with the Volkssturm. I’ve not seen him since November.’
‘Did you ever see anyone come to the house? In the last few months, I mean.’
The old woman thought about this. ‘There were some English soldiers, but that was back in May. They only stayed
a few weeks. Then people came in a lorry sometimes.’
‘A lorry?’
‘Yes, a big one, painted green.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Travellers.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘They had suitcases with them. And they were always gone the next day. I think they only ever spent single nights there.’
‘How many people did you see?’
‘I don’t know. Four, maybe five couples. And lights. I saw lights in the house at night sometimes.’
‘When?’
‘I’m seventy-three. I can’t remember things like that. Every few weeks or so.’
‘When was the last time?’
‘Last night.’
Payne froze.
‘Last night? Are you sure?’
The woman nodded.
‘Which windows did you see the light in?’
‘That one, at the top,’ she said and pointed her stick towards the garret window.
When Payne got to the murder house, he went straight to the well in the garden and prised the top off it with a crowbar. This was something else he should have done when he first began investigating.
It took a bit of brute strength to break the wood free from the padlocks, but he managed it in the end. Payne tossed the wooden cover to one side and put his hand to his nose. The chemical smell he had detected on his first visit was stronger now; there was no doubt it was coming from the bottom of the well.
Covering his mouth with a handkerchief, he shone his torch down into the dark cylinder of the well shaft. The red bricks seemed peppered with white powder, as if someone had thrown sacks of flour down into the darkness. The chemical smell rising from the well was unpleasantly strong and caught in his throat.
Payne rested his hands on the edge of the well-head and dropped a stone into the darkness. The faint thud that sounded a few seconds later told him the well was deep and dry. Payne was unsure whether it was his imagination, but his nostrils seemed for a moment to detect the faint whiff of decay amid the chemical stench. He replaced the crowbar in the sack and headed towards the house. The kitchen door was closed but not locked. It creaked as he pushed it open.
It was pitch black inside the kitchen; the blacked-out windows were all closed.
Had the soldiers left it like that? Payne closed his eyes, trying to picture the kitchen as he’d left it. No, the windows were definitely open then: he remembered shafts of dusky evening sunlight that had crossed the kitchen and shone on the enamel surface of the sink.
Payne used his torch to guide him to the nearest window and fumbled the latch open. Gloom disappeared as summer sunlight flooded the room. He crossed to the other pair of windows and opened those, too. The hatch to the cellar was closed. He opened it and went halfway down the stairs.
It was just as he’d left it.
He returned to the kitchen and headed for the stairs that led to the upper stories, but stopped when he had only reached halfway across the room. The muddy footprints Sergeant Beagley’s men had left on the kitchen floor had dried to dust and were still perfectly visible – except in one place near the door, where the dust had been scuffed. It looked as if someone had dragged something across it.
Payne cursed himself for not being more careful. He couldn’t be sure whether he’d done it himself while crossing the kitchen to open the window.
‘Hello?’ he called up the stairs. ‘Is anyone there?’
No answer.
He said the same in German and French.
The only response was a faint creak.
Payne crept upstairs a single step at a time, one hand on the wall to steady himself, neck craned upward. His heart was racing. This was not something he’d considered properly. He had always made a habit of returning to murder scenes, but never alone. There was something about places where violent death had occurred, he realised now: some echo or scent to which the animal in human instinct responded.
He paused at the top of the stairs. Sunlight flooded through the shattered windows. He checked each room, but there was no sign of anyone having been there. In the smallest bedroom, he paused and stared at the ceiling. Motes of dust were falling from a crack in the plaster. As he watched them, the beam above him creaked very slightly.
He tiptoed up the stairs to the garret, to find that the solid door at the top was closed. Payne turned the handle and leant his weight against it. The door would not budge. He ran his hand across the rough surface of the door. There was no way he could force it, even if he could get a run at it. He tried the handle again, rattling the door in frustration, then walked back downstairs. The house was utterly quiet now, although it seemed to Payne’s jangled nerves the silence was more that of a breath being held.
When a window shutter banged in the wind he nearly jumped out of his skin. Then he was running helter-skelter downstairs, out through the kitchen and on into the daylight in the garden.
He stood in a shaft of sunlight, one hand pressed to his chest, and let the warmth calm him. It had been years since he’d had such a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.
Then he went out and stood on the side of the road. He knew that an army vehicle would be along soon.
Twenty minutes later, two soldiers in a jeep that Payne had managed to flag down returned with a long wooden ladder balanced along the length of their vehicle.
Payne had originally hoped to get some engineers to open the garret door but they were all too busy working on the minefields outside the town, so he had been forced to resort to Plan B. If they couldn’t get into the garret via the door, they would have to use the hole in the roof.
The two soldiers shouldered the ladder and followed Payne across the grass towards the back of the house. The sun shone bright and strong; its light glinted on the thousands of tiny fragments of shattered window that lay among the grass.
‘That’s where I want to get to,’ Payne said, indicating the ragged hole in the building’s crow-stepped roof.
The elder of the two soldiers was called Bill Ainsley. He scratched his cheek and shook his head like a builder assessing a tricky piece of work. ‘Are you sure it’s safe up there? Look at those roof beams, they’re all cracked. It could be a death-trap.’
‘I’ve been up to the garret on the inside,’ Payne said. ‘It seems structurally sound.’
The ladder was just long enough to reach the edge of the collapsed roof.
‘There you go, sir,’ the younger soldier said, when the ladder was in place. ‘Do you want me to foot it for you?’
Payne looked up at the ladder. This was one practicality he hadn’t considered. It was a long way up. Christ, how high was it? Eight yards? If he fell from that height he’d break his neck.
The young private beside him smiled when he saw the doubt on Payne’s face.
‘Do you want me to go up there, sir? I used to be a window cleaner, so heights don’t bother me.’
‘If you wouldn’t mind, son. Just see if there’s a way to open the door from the inside.’
The young soldier climbed the ladder. He paused at the very top and examined the splintered brickwork around the edge of the hole.
‘Seems solid enough,’ he said as he pulled himself up onto a roof beam, swung his legs over into the hole and dropped down. A few seconds later, his blond head appeared amid the cracked roof tiles.
‘It’s a bit of a mess up here,’ he said, ‘but it seems solid enough.’
‘What can you see?’ Payne said.
‘Well, there’s a ruddy great hole just behind where I am standing. But the other half of the room seems fine. There’s a load of clothes up here. And suitcases.’
‘Suitcases? How many?’
The head disappeared for a moment.
‘I can see seven. But there might be more.’
‘Can you see if the
door opens from the inside? It might be bolted.’
‘Will do, sir.’
‘And you watch your footing up there, Charlie,’ Ainsley said. ‘You’ve come a long bloody way if it’s only to go and break your neck now.’
Charlie grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Bill, it’s fine up here. I think the mortar went through and –’
The young soldier’s head snapped downward so suddenly, both Ainsley and Payne cried out. It was as if the floor beneath him had collapsed but there was no sound. Then a hand flailed in the opening and Payne heard a muffled scream before the sound was cut short. A faint gurgle followed, then silence.
Ainsley continued to shout the soldier’s name as Payne began to climb the ladder, taking the rungs two at a time. The ladder wobbled and jerked beneath him as he neared the top; roof tiles slid away and smashed on the ground below. Payne ignored them as he took hold of the jagged masonry on either side of the hole in the roof and lowered himself down into the garret.
‘Charlie?’ Payne said. He saw a pair of boots poking from the rubble. There was no answer.
The garret was little more than a triangular crawl space formed by the peak of the roof but there was enough space to walk upright at its centre.
Charlie lay on the floor, totally still. A huge puddle of blood had pooled beneath his head and throat. Payne knelt beside him, felt for a pulse. There was none. Then Payne lifted the boy’s chin, and drew his breath when he saw the horizontal rent in his throat that had severed both carotid artery and windpipe.
How the hell had that happened? Had he slipped and impaled himself on something? Payne stood . . .
. . . and the figure pounced, rising up from behind a pile of rubble with a terrible cry.
Payne caught a momentary glimpse of motion through the fallen beams, then cried out as he realised the face rushing at him was formed of patches of leathery skin, the lips sewn shut with thick loops of twine; animal eyes blazed from the ragged eyeholes and then the man-thing was upon him, pushing him backwards as it hissed and wailed, a shrill German voice that screamed ‘BlasphemouscuntI’llkeepyouawakewhileIcutyou!’
Werewolf Page 15
