The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘Claude Pellisier,’ I said. ‘I know you asked me to steer clear but something’s come up with this carrier business that I thought you’d better know.’

  ‘Okay, shoot.’

  I gave him what I presented as Peter’s theory that the body in the château might have been Kearney’s and that the French were going to exhume the body.

  ‘I don’t know if they can prove the body is Kearney’s, not after two years in the ground, but it does leave open the possibility of Pellisier still being alive.’

  Tuchman toyed with his glass. ‘You haven’t mentioned this to anyone beyond your office?’

  ‘No. Pellisier isn’t my concern. Even if I was sure he was at the château when Kearney and his men arrived, it’s hardly credible he killed Kearney and Dabs himself. And if he did, there’d be no way to prove it without a witness. I’m satisfied it was a unit of the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers who killed the men. But since they found Kurt Meyer guilty of what was a massacre and still didn’t hang him, they aren’t going to hang Pellisier or some SS man for a couple of British Tommies, even if they could pin their deaths on them.’

  ‘They’ve probably got enough on Pellisier to hang him anyway,’ Tuchman observed.

  ‘Well that’s a different matter,’ I said. ‘Kearney and Dabs were casualties of the conflict, even if they did die in cold blood. Far worse things happened than that. The things Pellisier did, for one. But that’s not my concern. I just thought I ought to let you know.’

  I knocked back what was left of my drink and stood up.

  ‘I’ll let myself out. Say goodbye to Julia for me, won’t you?’

  *

  Out on the street, although the longest day had passed no more than ten days earlier, I felt I could already sense the shortening of the summer evenings. Perhaps it was the cloud which had drifted up, obscuring the sun by which Julia had been reading; perhaps it was my mood.

  I felt oddly empty. I hadn’t eaten since the buns Jack had bought that morning but it wasn’t hunger. It was a sense of deflation, as though all the impetus of the last couple of weeks had leaked away, leaving me hollow. We’d got closer to a conclusion than I might have expected. Yet it didn’t bring anything in the way of satisfaction. At least not for me. The ghost of other possibilities seemed to hang over it still. There was the life Robert Burleigh might have come home to live, with his wife Edna and his two children; not a comfortable or prosperous one, probably, but one at least which might have held the capacity for improvement. It would have been life, anyway. Not the long struggle Edna Burleigh now faced alone with two kids to bring up. Ida, I suspected, was well out of a union with Arnie Poole although he might have changed. There was always the old adage of what a “good woman” could achieve, although personally I doubted she would have made much of an impression on the man Poole had become. I suspect Joseph Dabs——had he lived——would have been destined for a life in and out of prison.

  That left William Kearney——or Billy O’Connell. I couldn’t help thinking of him as someone apart. What might have become of him had he managed to stay out the vengeful reach of Diamaid Caomhánach? Perhaps together with Rose...? The wistful fondness she evinced whenever she spoke of her Billy made me doubt that she could have pulled the trigger on him if she’d ever found him. But perhaps I was being sentimental.

  I wondered if I was somehow equating the chance they had lost with the one I still might have with Penny. Yet that sentiment, even as I considered it, was in some manner bound up with the feeling of emptiness I was experiencing. The fact that the investigation into Kearney’s carrier seemed to have ended outside the Château de Hêtres, brought it too close to home. The connection with my wife’s family now hung over it all like an ominous cloud, if a cloud I had decided I could leave to Tuchman to dispel.

  Or so I thought.

  27

  July 4th

  Late Thursday afternoon Peter appeared in the doorway looking unusually pleased with himself.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’

  ‘We’ve got one of Müller’s men. SS-Sturmmann Karl Hess. He’s presently in POW camp 65.’

  ‘You’re sure? How did you find him?’

  ‘You were right. There is a muster of 25th SS-Panzer companies but not a complete one. And, as we expected, there were several names that matched those we got from Müller and Richter. None fitted the bill, though. Anyway, I left that with Stan and tried a different tack.’

  He paused. For dramatic effect, I suppose.

  ‘Well?’ I finally asked.

  ‘Swedish Red Cross. It occurred to me their lists might be better than ours. Persuading them to help wasn’t easy so I got Susie to sweet-talk one of the male clerks. She’s a revelation. Just don’t believe anything she tells you.’

  ‘Where’s Camp 65?’

  ‘Setley Plain in Hampshire.’

  ‘All right, get on to them and tell them we want to interview Hess. Only they’re not to tell him we’re coming.’

  ‘Already done. They’re expecting us tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow is Friday. Colonel G’s day.’

  ‘Stan can handle him,’ said Peter.

  So we left Jekyll to Stan. Susie was to find something decent to go with the colonel’s tea and Stan was to sweeten it with a spoonful of how well we were doing and how we’d managed to trace one of the men who’d been in SS-Obersturmführer, Franz Müller’s platoon. I thought it might be going a little far to state categorically that this Hess was there when Kearney’s men were killed so I told Stan to imply as much without actually saying so and to leave Jekyll to infer the rest himself. If we had the wrong Hess at least we’d have the weekend to come up with a plausible excuse for the error.

  The next morning we took the train to the nearest station to POW Camp 65, which turned out to be Brockenhurst, in the New Forest. On the way down I belatedly took the opportunity to tell Peter what I knew about Clause Pellisier’s background, omitting the fact he had been known to my wife’s family.

  ‘I got this from my Special Branch contact,’ I explained as if I just learned it.

  Peter frowned. ‘What interest would Special Branch have in a French collaborator?’

  I then had to spin him a story about how Special Branch was in touch with an American from the War Crimes Commission who was interested in Pellisier. Peter nodded although I suspected he hadn’t swallowed it. He didn’t ask anything else, though, so I left it at that and, after a minute or two, began gazing out of the window at the passing countryside.

  I’d never been to the New Forest before and was somewhat bemused to find there were hardly any trees, just hundreds of acres of heath; gorse and bracken and heather just coming into bloom, painterly daubs of mauve and russet brown amid a dozen shades of green. It had me humming Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo until a sideways glance from Peter shut me up.

  We were met at Brockehurst station by a car from the camp. The village looked pleasant enough, with crooked-gabled redbrick houses and a few thatched cottages, even if the whole was somewhat spoiled by the railway and the level crossing that dominated one end of the hamlet. A corporal was leaning against an Austin 12 in the gravel car park, smoking and watching the women who had got off the train. When he saw us he threw down the cigarette and up a salute which turned out to the smartest thing about him; the rest of him was all creased tunic and trousers, scuffed boots, and skin that looked as if it hadn’t seen the ablutions for a week or two.

  ‘Corporal Givens,’ he announced. ‘Sent to escort you to the camp, sir.’

  We climbed into the back of the Austin and Givens swung it out of the car park and bumped it over the railway lines of the level crossing.

  I studied the back of Givens’ grubby neck then caught his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Do you know Sturmmann Karl Hess, corporal?’

  ‘Hess, sir? Yes sir.’

  Peter had mentioned the camp had its own theatre and I wondered if Givens was in the habit of giving a music hall turn on Saturda
y nights.

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘You know he was SS?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We don’t have many of that sort here. We’ve got a camp on the Isle of Wight where they sometimes put the SS till they settle down. I think that’s where Hess was for a few months. We used to have Eyeties here at first. Soft bunch. To be honest we could never see much harm in them. Jerry’s a different matter but most of those we got were just soldiers doing what they were told. We don’t have any that were involved in the sort of thing you see on the newsreel at the pictures.’

  ‘They keep them in the camps up north,’ I told him.

  It was a fact, although I didn’t know exactly why. The hardliners and recalcitrant POWs, the died-in-the-wool Nazis, the malcontents and trouble-makers——the outright dangerous——had all been restricted to camps in the north of the country. Out of sight and out of mind, I suspected. That was usually where you found the SS POWs; where I might have expected to find SS-Sturmmann Karl Hess.

  ‘Any trouble from him?’ I asked Givens.

  ‘No, sir, not as I’m aware. Does his work. Does what he’s told when he’s not doing his work.’

  ‘What work do the prisoners do?’

  ‘Forest work mostly, sir. Felling and clearing. There’s a saw mill close by and some of them work on the local farms or do gardening. But only one prisoner to a property, thems the rules. And no fraternizing, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Different with the Eyeties. After a while you almost forgot they were supposed to be prisoners. We had to call them “co-operators”.’

  ‘Not the Germans, though.’

  ‘No sir, not the Germans.’

  The camp lay a couple of miles outside the village, south on an arrow-straight road cut through the heath. Rows of Nissan huts flanked four or five low redbrick buildings with concrete paths between the huts. There were no goon towers, gun emplacements or machineguns, just a barbed-wire fence strung around the perimeter. Low enough to hurdle if the cookhouse wasn’t over-generous with the bread and potatoes, and you felt like a wander round the blasted heath. It was a phrase Shakespeare had often favoured and I daresay if we’d brought Jack with us he could have quoted a line or two from Lear or Macbeth to complement the scene.

  The car stopped at the gate and Givens spoke to the guard. The prisoners we saw beyond certainly didn’t look underfed. One of the perennial complaints of the public was that German POWs were better fed than our own civilian population. As there was still a couple of hours until lunch I told Givens we’d eat in the canteen before we left, to see if it was true.

  They had SS-Sturmmann Karl Hess waiting for us in one of the redbrick buildings, sitting at a table in a makeshift office with a guard at the door. Almost as if our interest had suggested that he might be worth keeping an eye on. In the room leading to it one of the camp officers was sitting on the edge of a desk, chatting to an NCO, a lance corporal, leafing through paperwork and adding an occasional signature. He looked up as Givens showed us in and introduced himself as Lieutenant Nugent. He must have been forty, with a ruddy face and folds of allied fat that bulged over his shirt collar, lending him the impression he was quietly asphyxiating. Not the man to hurdle the wire after decamping POWs. He didn’t waste any time in letting us know he was new to the camp and was expecting his discharge papers any day. Conveying an implication, I assumed, that if we discovered something nasty in Camp 65 it would have nothing to do with him.

  He looked concerned all the same. ‘War Crimes unit? Anything we should be worried about?’

  I was noncommittal. ‘An enquiry into a man he might have served with. We’ve nothing against Hess.’

  Nugent relaxed. ‘I’ve looked over his file. He spent time on the Isle of Wight. That would have been because he was SS. Behaviour was regarded as good, according to them. He’s been no trouble here.’ He glanced at the lance corporal as if seeking corroboration. The corporal ignored him.

  Nugent offered me Hess’s file and I passed it to Peter. We followed him into the small office and SS-Sturmmann Karl Hess jumped to his feet as we entered. He saluted but didn’t offer the stiff-armed Nazi greeting and accompanying cry of Heil Hitler that many diehard SS men habitually gave anyone from a British officer to a tea lady. I returned his salute and in my rusty German told him to sit down again. Nugent hung in the doorway a moment, shifting his weight from one sturdy leg to another, until finally saying, ‘I’ll leave you to it then.’

  We waited until he closed the door before sitting down. Peter opened Hess’s file while I watched the man.

  I had been prepared to find him young——many of the Hitlerjugend had been recruited straight from their youth brigades and still might have been two or three years from leaving their teens. Hess I judged to be around twenty and had managed to keep a youthful bloom about him; smooth unblemished skin marked only by traces of a fair fuzz that was still struggling to become a beard. His hair was blond and swept back from his forehead. Beneath was a square, good-looking face with a straight nose and firm jaw and lips. The model of a Nazi Aryan, I suppose, the kind Leni Riefenstahl’s lens might have lingered over while filming Triumph des Willens. Only Hess’s eyes suggested he might have seen more in his twenty years than one might have wanted. He was using them to watch us in return, his handsome if somewhat bland face warily alert.

  We began by confirming Hess’s details as logged in the file. Peter’s German was of the academic style, learned in school and university and was a little dry, like his lawyerly training. He’d spent some family holidays in Germany as a boy, he’d once told me, but didn’t seem to have picked up much in the way of colloquial speech. My German, on the other hand, was little more than colloquialisms, picked up mostly in beer halls and on the streets.

  Hess nodded and answered in the affirmative to most of what we said. His name was Karl Hess and he was an SS-Sturmmann——that is a Lance Corporal——in the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment, Hitlerjugend. He had been captured, like Müller and many others, from the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment, in the fighting around the Falaise Pocket in the middle of August, July 1944.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him as Peter paused to consult the file.

  A slight frown marred the perfection of his Aryan brow. ‘Little English. Guards’ speak...“Be quick. Pick up this...move that. March, left right, left right...”’ He smiled as though it was amusing.

  'Wir sprechen Deutsches,’ I told him, then to Peter, while still watching Hess, ‘Ask him about Obersturmführer Franz Müller.’

  The smile faded and Hess’s eyes became guarded again.

  Peter asked and the German’s eyes flicked from Peter to me as if uncertain which one of us to address.

  ‘Franz Müller? Es gab viele Männer namens Müller.’

  ‘SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller,’ Peter said again. ‘Fünfundzwanzigste Panzergrenadiere.’ He laid a notebook and pencil beside the file, picked up the pencil and held it poised over a blank page.

  Knowing how Peter would handle him, I was able to follow most of the dialogue: some phrases and words familiar; others, like jigsaw pieces, to be slotted in where they fit.

  ‘Obersturmführer Müller,’ Peter continued in his precise German, watching Hess steadily, ‘has testified to that fact that you were a member of his platoon.’

  Hess’s mouth twitched and a little colour came into his pallid Germanic features. ‘Now I remember Obersturmführer Franz Müller, yes.’

  ‘On July 10th 1944 the platoon was ordered to a house known as the Château de Hêtres, a kilometre to the east of the village of Maltot. Do you remember the Château de Hêtres?’

  ‘The date again, please?’

  ‘July 10th, the day the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers evacuated Caen.’

  ‘You say Obersturmführer Müller has told you this?’

  ‘Yes. Now we would like to hear what you have to tell us. Do you remember the Château de Hêtres and w
hat happened there on that day? July 10th?’

  ‘It is not easy to remember,’ Hess replied. ‘A day two years ago...things happen and you forget. If you can tell me what Obersturmführer Müller has said, I might be able to recall this château.’

  ‘Have you had any contact with Obersturmführer Franz Müller since you were taken prisoner?’

  Hess nodded. ‘We were in the first camp together for some weeks, yes. It was not easy. They...some of the men...they still acted...,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Our senior officers, SS officers, they expect us to behave as if we are still in combat. I did not think this way.’ He straightened in his chair. ‘I am a prisoner. I think for me the war is over and Germany cannot win.’

  Peter glanced at me. I nodded.

  ‘Obersturmführer Müller is dead.’

  Hess’s licked his lips.

  ‘He committed suicide. Something to do with his family in Berlin.’

  ‘He had a wife and daughter in Berlin.’

  ‘They died.’

  Hess became sombre. He looked down at the table for some time.

  ‘This is not good news,’ he eventually said. ‘Obersturmführer Müller was a honourable soldier. He served on the eastern front where our regiment was almost destroyed. If Obersturmführer Müller has told you, I will also tell you what I remember. What exactly is it you wish to know?’

  ‘Müller was your Obersturmführer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Among the other men in the platoon, there was an SS- Unterscharführer named Otto Vogel――’

  ‘Vogel was killed before we were captured,’ Hess said.

  ‘We are aware of this. There were also men in the platoon named Neumann, Schimdt...Klein...Hartmann...?’

  ‘All, yes.’

  Peter noted Hess’s replies in his book. I glanced down at the shorthand he used, a scrawl that looked like Arabic to me.

  ‘And you recall the evacuation of Caen and the Château de Hêtres?’ Peter continued.

  ‘We had been told to hold Caen but our Brigadeführer knew we could not. We were ordered out of the city. To wait in reserve at a village to the south...’