Shooting Captain Booth had been an accident. It was one of the few times Payne had been unable to put his reasoning skills to good use. This failure would plague him; he knew that already. His hand was still trembling, a sense memory of the recoil as the pistol fired.
The killer lay on the floor where Payne had shot him. The soldiers had covered him with a tarpaulin. Payne lifted it and examined his face. It had been a lucky shot: a quick, clean death. The man’s face still held an expression of surprise, the features frozen in the precise moment when the bullet had struck and for that one split second his brain had registered that the shot was mortal.
How old was he? It was difficult to tell, he was so battered and scarred. Payne examined the starburst scar on the man’s jaw and wondered what had caused it. He stayed at the crime scene for two hours, overseeing the collection of evidence and trying to piece together what had happened.
There had definitely been a fight in the room. That must have been between the killer and the male captive. The woman did not have a mark on her.
Payne tried to reconstruct the scene in his mind.
Flense would have injected the woman first. That stood to reason. And then what? The woman would have passed out. Did the male victim become suspicious? Had he attacked Flense? Yes, that must have been what had happened. The male had been beaten unconscious. Payne returned to the police station, brewed tea and drank it slowly, staring at the embers of the flame.
An hour later a soldier knocked at the door.
‘Pardon me, sir. Captain Shelley, the medical officer, asked me to bring these over to you. When they were putting the young lady to bed at the hospital they found these tucked inside her clothes. There was another one on the dead man.’
Payne recognised the cardboard documents: they were Red Cross travel permits.
He thanked the soldier. Then he said, ‘You’ve made sure the two casualties are under guard, haven’t you?’
The soldier nodded.
Payne went inside and opened the first travel document. The woman’s face stared back at him. Payne wondered who she was, what it was she was trying to run from. He held the photo up to the window and tried to detect something in the woman’s features that might betray why she needed to escape.
There was nothing: she looked utterly nondescript, pretty even, in a worn, weary kind of way.
Perhaps the man’s photo would show more.
Payne opened the document . . .
. . . and ran across the room towards the door, waving his hands at the soldier who was turning his jeep around.
‘Is there a problem, sir?’ the driver said, halting his jeep with a squeal of brakes.
‘The male victim, where did you take him?’
‘To the hospital, sir. But what on earth’s the matter?’
‘The man on this card, the man that was trying to escape Germany. This is the man I shot.’
They drove straight to the hospital, but when Payne saw there was no guard in the corridor outside the male prisoner’s room he was certain of what he would find when he opened the door. He pushed at it, found it blocked from the inside. He had to find someone to help to break it down.
Only the guard was inside, lying stretched out on the floor. A thin trickle of blood ran down his forehead. The cord from the window blind was wrapped tightly around his neck. His eyes and tongue bulged horribly. His battle-dress blouse and trousers were missing.
The window was open.
16
ILSE AWOKE IN a hospital bed. For a moment she lay completely still, enjoying the luxurious sensation of the clean linen against her skin. Then she began to remember what had happened and wonder where she was and how she came to be there. She remembered that Johannes had been arguing with Joost, the lorry driver, in the cellar of a house. Joost wanted to vaccinate Johannes but Johannes had become suspicious. He had insisted that Joost inject Ilse first. He had threatened the man with a knife. Ilse remembered allowing Joost to roll up her sleeve, the prick of the needle. And then . . .
. . . nothing. She couldn’t remember a thing after that. It was all a blank.
She sat up in bed and realised a man in a civilian suit was sitting on the chair beside the bed. The man poured her a glass of water. Ilse drank it, handed back the glass.
‘Who are you?’ she said, looking up at his long, angular face.
‘My name is Payne. I’m a British policeman. What happened in that cellar?’
‘My name is Ilse. Ilse Hoffman, née Drechsler.’
‘I know. That isn’t what I asked you.’
‘The man from the Red Cross, the lorry driver. He was going to vaccinate me. He wanted to inject my brother first but Johannes wouldn’t let him. He made the man inject me instead.’
She trembled as the mention of her brother’s name brought her memories crashing back. ‘My God. Johannes. He killed the boy. The Polish boy.’
The policeman knew that, too. His expression did not change, but he nodded. ‘He’s been buried now. Did you know a man named Captain Booth?’
Ilse nodded.
‘I’m afraid he’s been flown back to England. He suffered an accident.’
‘Accident?’
‘He was shot. In the stomach.’
‘Did my brother do it?’
The policeman looked towards the window. ‘No. Your brother is dead. I shot him.’
Ilse felt nothing initially. Then relief swept through her.
‘Will Captain Booth survive?’
Payne hesitated before answering and his eyes became briefly distant. ‘Yes, he’ll live. He might not recover completely, though.’
On the next day, Ilse was woken by a military nurse with a cold, abrupt manner. The nurse bullied her out of bed, gave her a plain shift to wear and clumpy boots with no laces.
‘Where am I going?’ Ilse said.
‘To an internment camp. At first. They’ll decide what to do with you when you get there.’
Ilse followed the nurse outside towards the waiting lorry, watching her laceless boots stir dust as she walked past the British soldiers, her head bowed.
EPILOGUE
Little Otto was nearing the end of the winding path now. His feet ached, but the mountain air was so crisp and pure he felt he could walk all day. He turned and looked back at the green plains of southern France. This would be one of his last opportunities to see them before the path wound down into a valley. But his spirits were soaring. He was looking forward to seeing Spain.
Two hours later he paused to eat some cheese and salt beef. He had made sure that he was well-provisioned.
Evening came as Little Otto spotted the huntsman’s cabin at the far end of the valley. A light snapped on in the window.
Little Otto paused and watched it twinkling as shadows crept down the foothills. He wouldn’t be alone tonight. That was lucky. It had been a while now.
He rummaged in the bottom of his bag, looking for his scalpels.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following people:
Chris, Jen, Linda and Jim from Salt Publishing for their continuing support.
Peter and Rosie from Ampersand for believing in me.
My family and friends for . . . everything, really.
Ian Wickes and Domyan Shalloy, who both read early drafts of the book and helped sharpen the storyline.
Hugh ‘Basset’ Winter, who served in occupied Germany after the war and was the first person of my acquaintance to mention the word ‘werewolf’ in connection with German soldiers. Although I am certain most of the stories he told me were either wildly exaggerated or entirely apocryphal, they did pique my interest enough that in later life I began to investigate the subject further.
The historian, Dr Christopher Knowles. Not only did his blog provide me with fasci
nating details of day-to-day life in the British Zone of Occupation, he was also deeply generous in giving me both his time and opinions as I sought to make the book as historically accurate as possible.
I used about thirty different books while researching Werewolf. Rather than list them all, I will only mention those that I found particularly helpful or inspiring.
The Last Nazis – SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 by Perry Biddiscombe and Christian Ingrao’s The SS Dirlewanger: The History of the Black Hunters were both obvious sources of inspiration. A Strange Enemy People: Germans Under the British, 1945–50 by Patricia Meehan was an excellent source of information on British policy during the occupation, while Richard Bessel’s Germany 1945 – From War to Peace painted a vivid picture of just how chaotic the situation was in Germany in the months after the German capitulation. My father also gave me an original copy of a booklet entitled Why We Are Here that was distributed among the soldiers of 30 Corps when the occupation began and which was invaluable as a tool to think myself into the mindset of British troops back then.
Finally, I must mention Death in the City of Light by David King, which tells the real life story of Marcel Petiot, a serial killer who terrorised Paris during and after the German occupation of the city. It was never my intention to write a second novel with a serial killer as the principal antagonist (in fact early drafts of Werewolf had a totally different focus) but I found Petiot so horrifying that, without realising at first, my baddie began to morph into something quite different from what I had originally intended. Now, much of Otto Flense’s modus operandi (such as the mask of human skin, the use of a false escape line to lure victims and the treasure trove of suitcases) is based directly on Petiot’s.
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