Werewolf

by Matthew Pritchard

  ‘When and where were these other crimes committed?’

  Payne opened his notebook. ‘In Würtemburg. And then in Grafenwöhr in Bavaria. That was in October ’44. And Münstereifel in Westphalia, in December. Do you recognise those names, Captain?’

  Booth tapped his pencil against his teeth. He did recognise the names but he couldn’t remember from where.

  ‘It was Operation Greif,’ Payne said. ‘The men of the SS unit trained in Grafenwöhr during the autumn of 1944. Then they began operations out of Münstereifel in December. That’s what Toth meant when he said Greif was of special significance. Our man was part of Operation Greif. That was how they found him. The fact he had murdered in those places meant they could pin him down to specific areas at specific times. He’d created a trail they could follow: the murders coincided with his movements as part of Operation Greif. And that means our man might not have entered the programme until January 1945.’

  Booth was nodding. ‘If you’re right, it means something else. It means our man can speak English. He may even be fluent.’

  ‘Yes. That was what Toth meant about him being especially dangerous. He can blend in. But that might be to our advantage. If he is fluent, he must have some link to an English speaking country. Keep looking through the files. I am going to follow up on the travel documents. I need to speak to one of the nurses from the Red Cross camp. I think she knows something about O’Donnell.’

  Booth set to work again, searching through the paperwork. Hours passed. Outside, it began to rain. Army lorries rolled past, their tyres spattering mud against the windows of the building. At three, hunger got the better of him, so he stopped for an hour and went in search of lunch.

  He had to force himself to go back to the paperwork. His eyes were hurting from sifting through type-written documents all day.

  He sat down, opened up a new box and lit a cigarette . . . and there it was, the information he had spent all day hoping he would find.

  Patient 43. His parents were Germans but he had been born in South Africa, where he had learned English and Afrikaans. Christ, this is him, Booth thought as he read through the details and saw the date Patient 43 had entered the programme: January 22nd, 1945.

  Booth put all the other paperwork aside and concentrated on the details of Patient 43.

  Twenty minutes later, Booth had telephoned the archivist at Corps HQ. ‘Killy? I need you to pull the RuSha files on a man named Scharführer Otto Flense. Joined the SS early 1936. Served as a medical orderly with the Order Police in Poland and Russia, attached to the 14th Army as part Einsatzgruppen I. Can you check if you have his personnel files? Would you mind dropping whatever it is you’re working on and doing it right now? I’ll take the flak.’

  Booth put the phone down. His hands were shaking as he reread Doctor Wiegand’s notes on Patient 43, this man named Otto Flense.

  A variety of visual stimuli were shown to the patient. He experienced severe reactions to film reels A, B, D, E and F. He proved indifferent to reels C and G.

  Patient 43’s pathology is founded upon the tangle of contradictions that form the very centre of his being. He considers himself a witty, sophisticated and intelligent man, but his conversation is actually dull and repetitive. There is no more substance to his personality than there is to the wooden hoardings on a film set. The epicentre of his being is a monstrous and overwhelming selfishness, if that word can be applied to a patient whose psyche understands only the concept of self; beyond that, there is only vacuum. He is torn between an infantile self-absorption and a deep-seated loathing of his own mediocrity. Just as the coprophile is drawn to his or her own feculence, patient 43 seems obsessed by the evil within himself.

  He values others only in as much as he can dominate and use them. Many aspects of the patient’s case are typical: the restrictive, religious father, the doting, permissive mother; the adolescent patterns of petty crime and cruelty to animals. Indeed, his first description of the sensation of ‘empowerment’ associated with his crimes comes from his killing of cats and dogs as an adolescent, although, interestingly, his experiments with burning and hanging the animals were discontinued as ‘they squawked too much’.

  The unusual post-mortem treatment of his victim is, I feel, fully explained by his father’s working as a mortician. Patient 43 grew up in an environment where death was a commonplace and, crucially, divorced from any sense of tragedy or pain. The patient described first helping his father with the dressing of corpses at the age of ten but was not allowed to speak with the relatives of the deceased until well into adolescence.

  Interestingly, it is this familiarity with death which seems to be the fulcrum upon which his pathology rests, as the trauma of his experiences on the east front, particularly the liquidations en masse of Jews as part of Einsatzgruppen I, are paramount in understanding the deviant reasoning behind his crimes. The unrestrained displays of suffering he witnessed there seem to have clashed violently with his preconceptions of death; indeed, to have shattered them utterly.

  In conversations with me, he has described the eastern front killings as ‘crude and brutish’ and seems to regard them as having offended his aesthetic sensibilities. He talks of making his victims ‘perfect’ through his ritual and reserves the highest praise for the ‘silent and painless’ way in which he dispatches his victims. However, again we see the contradictions at the root of this case, as Patient 43 admits to having killed a number of times long before he was sent to the eastern front and has also proved to be a savage and opportunistic predator, quite capable of acts of extreme violence should he feel his secret to be threatened. He is a –

  Booth jumped when the phone rang. His hand trembled as he reached for the receiver.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ Killy said. ‘I’ve got him here. Otto Flense, born 1906. Ugly-looking brute.’

  ‘Killy, take the whole file, put it in a briefcase and get the first dispatch rider you can find to bring it to me right now. I can’t stress how important this is.’

  The file arrived an hour later, the soldier on his motorcycle skidding to a halt outside Booth’s billet.

  Booth opened the file and removed the single photo inside, a head and shoulders photo of Flense in SS uniform, staring into the camera.

  Killy was right: Flense was an ugly bugger. His nose was big and bulbous, his eyes small, crafty and cruel. His fair hair was shaved into a severe line just below the crown of his head. Booth had hoped that he might recognise the man, but he was disappointed. Flense looked like a hundred other SS men.

  And yet . . .

  There was something. Booth angled the photo towards the light. Was it his imagination or was there something familiar about the man’s face, the arrogant set of his jaw-line? Had he seen the man before?

  He was still examining the photo when a knock sounded at the door and Sergeant Hoyle’s face appeared, pale with worry.

  ‘What is it, sergeant?’

  ‘There’s a bit of a problem at the interrogation centre, sir.’

  ‘Problem? What sort of a problem?’

  ‘With Captain Fredrickson, sir. I think you’d better get over there right away.’

  Booth jogged from his jeep to the building where the makeshift interrogation centre had been set up and followed Hoyle towards the steps that led to the cellar. As they descended them, Booth noticed a smear of blood on one of the steps.

  There was more inside the door, a trail of red droplets that led along the corridor and towards a room at the back of the cellar. Booth heard shouts coming from the room. He hastened towards the door and flung it open.

  Freddy was standing with his back to the door, bellowing at a youth who was sitting on a chair.

  ‘What the devil’s going on, Captain Fredrickson?’

  Freddy turned. His face was red and sweat covered his forehead. ‘Oh, it’s you, Booth.’

  ‘Yes
, it is me. Now answer my damned question. What are you doing?’

  ‘This little shit,’ Freddy said, twisting the boy’s head round to face Booth, ‘is the root of our werewolf problem. A patrol picked him up last night. He was trying to cut some telephone lines. Got him bang to rights. He had wire cutters, pliers and a knife on him.’ Freddy gestured towards the tools and weapon which lay on a table beside him.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Booth said.

  ‘Putzi.’

  ‘Do we have anything on him?’

  ‘He was a student at the Napola Academy close to here. And that’s enough for me.’

  Booth wasn’t listening. He was looking at the boy’s bruised and bloodied face. ‘Have you struck him, Captain Fredrickson?’

  Freddy snorted. ‘I might have tapped the little bastard a couple of times, just to keep him on his toes. But there’s no permanent damage, I’ve made sure of that. I want him to be awake when they shoot him.’

  Booth motioned to Hoyle to leave the room. Then he said, ‘Christ, Freddy, how much longer are you going to continue with this charade?’

  Freddy flexed his fists. ‘Charade? What the devil are talking about?’

  ‘This. The boy. The interrogations. I know why you’re doing it. I know what happened at Wolffslust. About the German guards.’

  ‘What about the German guards?’

  ‘You killed two of them.’

  Freddy’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’ve been chatting with that weasel, Tubbs, haven’t you? That’s absolute rot about the guards. You want to get your facts straight before you make accusations like that, Captain. As it is, you’re for the high jump anyway when Colonel Bassett finds out what this chap has told me,’ Freddy said, gesturing towards the boy slumped on the chair.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘This one is just the tip of the iceberg. He’s got a Waffen SS accomplice hiding out in the woods, something you would have been aware of if you hadn’t been chasing your tail with nonsense about murderers. That’s why I’m trying to sweat some answers out of the little swine.’

  ‘How could you possibly know he has a Waffen SS accomplice?’

  ‘Two days ago a local woman, a friend of young Putzi’s mother, came here to denounce a known Nazi, someone she recognised from before the war. Apparently, she saw young Putzi acting suspiciously in town and decided to follow him, whereupon said woman saw Putzi speaking to this SS fellow.’

  ‘And how did she know he was SS?’

  ‘Because she got a damned good look at the bugger and she recognised him as a local man. That’s his RuSha file over there. Ex-Waffen SS. And wanted for about every war crime you can possibly imagine. But do you know the really interesting bit? This SS bastard is planning on getting himself some false travel documents.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to get out of our friend here. He spoke to someone in the town about it. Apparently this SS fellow is going to have to pay 2,000 dollars for his documents. But little Putzi won’t tell us who the contact is.’

  ‘How can you be so certain this woman recognised the man?’

  ‘Oh, if you’d seen the hatred in her eyes when she said his name, you’d have had no doubt. It seems this fellow ran the local Hitler Youth before the war. The woman claims this Drechsler fellow blinded her son. Beat him with a horsewhip.’

  But Booth wasn’t listening. A local man named Drechsler?

  He walked across the room, opened the SS man’s file and withdrew the photos within.

  The bottom fell from his world.

  11

  FOR THE SECOND time in a week, Ilse found herself digging a grave in the garden. She cried as she dug. The tears welled up suddenly from somewhere deep within her and she could no more stop them than she could have stopped water seeping from a leaking pail.

  She had been too late to stop Johannes. It had taken her all of twenty seconds to get outside and into the garden, screaming Johannes’s name as she went, but by the time she could run to the spot where she had seen Piotr emerge from the trees, Johannes was already walking back from the woods, wiping the blood from his knife blade with a leaf.

  Ilse had rushed past him, hands trembling. Piotr lay where he’d fallen, face up, his hare lip splayed. Blood welled from a horizontal slit in his chest just above his heart.

  That was for whom she was digging the grave. The blisters on her hands bled as she scratched at the earth with the shovel, but she paid no mind to the pain.

  She stopped as she sensed her brother behind her.

  Johannes nodded towards the grave. ‘That hole’s nowhere near deep enough, you know,’ he said, as Ilse grasped Piotr’s ankles and dragged him towards the narrow trench.

  ‘Leave me alone, Johannes. Go back to the house. Or go to hell, for all I care. But leave me be. I’ve had enough of you.’

  Johannes came close and stood in front of her. ‘Are you crying, sister?’ he said, mumbling through a mouthful of apple. ‘Whatever for? Those tears can’t possibly be for that, can they?’ he said, gesturing towards Piotr’s corpse. ‘A filthy Polack. And a diseased one, too. What was that phrase Rüdiger always used? You know, when he was pontificating from the end of the dinner table. Untermensch. That was it. God, I can see him now, waving that huge cigar around and patting his fat belly.’

  ‘Why did you kill him? He meant no harm.’

  ‘He saw my tattoo.’ Still bare-chested, Johannes raised his left arm and pointed to the small gothic letters tattooed on the underside of his arm. ‘I saw his eyes. He knew what it was. They are hunting Germans with these tattoos.’

  ‘You had no right to kill him.’

  ‘No right?’ Johannes laughed. ‘If you’d ever bothered to take a walk down to your husband’s fucking mine, you would have seen a dozen corpses like that every day, I promise you that. But you didn’t, did you, Ilse? You stayed in your house and pretended the world was still a fresh and innocent place.’ Johannes spat on the floor and his eyes dripped with contempt. ‘Take a good look at the boy’s body, Ilse. That’s your fucking Lebensraum right there.’

  He waited for Ilse to respond. When she said nothing, he tossed his apple core into Piotr’s grave and went.

  Ilse did the best she could with the grave, but it was a poor effort. It was obvious to anyone what the rectangle of freshly dug earth represented. And Johannes was right. It wasn’t deep enough. She was hampered by the blisters on her hands.

  She didn’t go back inside the house afterwards. She sat beside the grave and dried her tears while she considered her predicament.

  Her brother was mad. She believed the worst now. That photo of him with the saw, it wasn’t a fake. The money didn’t matter anymore, Ilse decided. She would take her chances in Germany.

  She sat there in the garden for the rest of the day. When the sun began to set, Johannes came outside.

  ‘You need to get ready.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you, Johannes.’

  Johannes took a step forward. His scarred hand grasped her arm. The pain made Ilse cry out.

  ‘The travel documents are for a husband and wife, so you have got to come. You’re coming as far as the Spanish border, at least. After that, you can do whatever the fuck you want.’

  ‘I won’t go. Do you hear? I won’t –’

  Johannes struck her across the face, knocking her to the ground. A second later, she felt the blade of Johannes’s knife pressing into her throat.

  ‘You are coming, Ilse. If you don’t, I will kill you.’

  Ilse said nothing. One look at Johanne’s eyes and she knew he was in deadly earnest.

  He stood over her as she packed her belongings, his knife tucked into his belt again, but with his fingers resting on the handle.

  They l
eft an hour after sundown. When Ilse went to lock the door of the farmhouse, Johannes began laughing.

  ‘Even if you were to come back here, what is there inside to steal? Leave it open,’ he said when she continued to work the key inside the stiff lock.

  She left it open in the end. She didn’t want to arouse his suspicion. She had already decided how she would get away from him. She would claim she needed to pee, then she would run away into the darkness and hide herself. She would wait until it was daylight and make her way back to the house. Johannes would not be able to hang around for long.

  When they set off, Johannes insisted she walked in front. He was using her as bait, she realised. If there were attackers lurking in the darkness, Ilse would meet them first. And then Johannes would deal with them.

  They crossed the silent fields and woodland paths, with only the silvery light of the moon to guide them. That didn’t matter. They both knew these tracks.

  When they arrived at the address, Ilse withdrew the key Doctor Seiler had given them.

  ‘No,’ Johannes said, looking around him at the darkness, his scarred hand wrapped around the hilt of his knife. ‘We will wait outside, sister.’

  ‘We were told to wait in the cellar.’

  ‘And leave myself trapped? Do you think me so stupid?’

  Johannes took her by the arm and pulled her towards the bushes.

  12

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON when Payne drove out to the townhouse where the Red Cross nurses were billeted. He had to ask directions of soldiers a couple of times and they gave him sly grins when they heard his destination.

  When he arrived, he asked to speak to the Belgian nurse. The women on the porch frowned, but when Payne said he was a policeman one of them went inside and returned a few minutes later with the Belgian woman, who was wearing a man’s dressing gown and towelling her wet hair. When she saw Payne, she smiled at her workmates to show them it was fine and drew Payne away towards his car. She seemed to suspect why he was there.