Mistress Murder

by Bernard Knight

  For the first time, the Eurasian looked uneasy.

  ‘I don’t know – he should be there. Why ask?’

  ‘He’s taken a powder by the look of it,’ snapped Benbow, ‘but he’ll have some awkward questions to face when we pick him up.’

  It took a week to find Albert, as it turned out. Getting a tip-off on the internal phone from the doorman, the waiter had nipped smartly up the rear fire escape and gone to earth in Stepney, until a disgruntled junkie had shopped him to the local police.

  Back in the club, the Admiral had another poser for Ray Silver.

  ‘Ever heard of Jack Feiner?’ he rapped.

  Silver had never heard the name, although he would probably have recognised the addict’s face. He was able to put on a genuinely puzzled expression and shake his head with convincing innocence.

  Benbow sighed. ‘Come on then, Roberts, let’s have a look around – give me your keys, Silver.’

  The proprietor handed them over and sat complacently as the policemen rooted through all his drawers and cupboards. Bray and a PC pulled up the carpets and looked for loose floorboards, they sounded the walls and moved the pictures – all without finding anything incriminating.

  ‘The big key is the one for the safe,’ sneered Silver with offensive helpfulness.

  Benbow felt from the start that they would find nothing in the office and cursed silently. The big safe held a few hundred pounds in cash, some ledgers, stock books, and an empty steel drawer. There was nothing else to be seen in it.

  Benbow was turning away in disgust when he caught a wink from the Drug Squad man. Roberts made a gesture with his thumb that clearly meant that he wanted Silver out of the room.

  ‘Nothing here, Bray,’ said Benbow loudly. ‘Take Mr Silver out into the other rooms here and ask him to open all the cupboards for you, and try to find that bloody waiter.’

  He threw the bunch of keys over and Bray shepherded the grinning owner outside. When the door had closed, Benbow dropped to his knees beside Roberts who was still staring into the safe.

  ‘What’s all the mystery?’

  ‘Look – in the crack where those runners for the drawer are fixed.’

  The sergeant pointed to a pair of supports which were welded on to the sides of the safe to support the drawer. Benbow craned his thick neck nearer.

  ‘Ah, that white stuff, you mean – in the cracks?’

  ‘Yeah, might be nothing but if it’s dope we’ve got something to throw at him – he’s so damn cocky that he’s obviously unloaded all his stock. He must have got a whisper somehow.’

  As he spoke, Roberts was carefully brushing the few grains of white powder from the runners into a clean envelope that he took from the desk. There were a few more on the opposite side and he added these to the collection.

  ‘No need to put that greasy swine on his guard if it is morphine or heroin. And if it isn’t, it’ll save us from looking damn fools.’

  They went to the bar and with the help of the detective constables, shifted all the bottles, pulled down the glasses, and explored the cupboards below the great engraved mirrors.

  Snigger looked on uneasily and almost blew a blood vessel when he saw one of the men push aside his pile of carefully prepared cigarette packets in order to tap the back walls of a cupboard. For a moment, he thought that the detective was going to look through the cartons themselves but, at the last minute, he collected them up and replaced them. Snigger let his breath out in a long controlled sigh of sheer relief, but he was soon disturbed again by Benbow summoning him to the office.

  Leaving Molly to look after the disarranged bar, and the two already inebriated patrons, he followed Silver and the policeman back to the room at the rear of the club. Here Benbow and Roberts put them through a snappy interrogation.

  Where was Albert? Did they admit to any dealing in drugs? Did they know of any addicts amongst the customers? A string of accusative questions fell like water on so many ducks’ backs. Snigger maintained a shocked indignant pose, while Silver blandly denied knowledge of anything at all.

  Eventually, Benbow gave up and led the procession back to the front door. The Eurasian pranced behind, still sweating slightly but as cocky as a fat bantam.

  ‘Barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. Your snout must have been having you on … you ought to know I run a respectable business.’

  He watched them drive off, blissfully unaware of the few grains of dusty powder carefully tucked away in Sergeant Roberts’ breast pocket.

  Chapter Twelve

  A grey, cloudy dawn was breaking when Gunther Frey set out with his poodle on their regular morning walk.

  Gunther worked in an office in the centre of Munich and it was an act of faith with him to take Mitzi out before she was left alone in the flat all day. Every morning, they left the door in Morassistrasse and walked along the embankment to the Ludwigsbrücke, where they crossed the Isar.

  It was cold and wet underfoot, the weather having changed from the mildness of the previous evening. Mitzi pranced along at the end of her red lead, while Gunther, still half-asleep, trudged behind with his head buried in the upturned collar of his overcoat. The street lights were still on as the pair crossed the bridge.

  They walked along the path that split the river lengthwise, across the top of a breakwater that joined up two islands in the river. Behind, on one island, lay the great bulk of the Deutschsmuseum. Ahead, the flood weir carried on to the next island which carried the Maximilianbrücke. The grey waters swirled sullenly alongside Gunther as he stopped to unhook the little dog’s lead.

  Mitzi shot off, pirouetting and prancing on the deserted path. The grey sky and the sodium lamps shone on the water as Gunther tramped on, thinking about his income tax. The surroundings were too familiar for him to spare them a glance. Then Mitzi darted away and began to yap incessantly.

  She had stopped at a railing on the deep side of the weir and here, wagging her trim little tail, she kept up a persistent staccato yapping.

  ‘Ach, be quiet, for Heaven’s sake,’ muttered her master, walking past. Mitzi stayed put and Gunther had to come back to her. ‘Right, back on your lead then,’ he threatened, as she continued to stare down and bark at the river.

  As he stooped to fix her lead to the collar, he casually followed her intent gaze down into the swirling waters. Bobbing sluggishly in a blind angle of the concrete buttresses, were the shoulders of a man.

  Every few seconds, eddies in the water would roll the body slightly so that the back of the head and buttocks appeared. The second time this happened, Gunther’s horrified eyes saw a jagged wound at the back of the lower ribs, as if something had burst out from inside, bloodied flesh gaping from a long tear in the jacket.

  He took a grip on himself and looked to see if the river was likely to dislodge the corpse from the backwater and carry it over the weir. It seemed to be making no progress downstream, however, and taking a chance on its not getting swept away in his absence, Gunther Frey began running with Mitzi back to the Ludwigsbrücke and the nearest telephone.

  ‘One bullet is still in there, lodged in the spine.’ The pathologist announced this blandly to the court judge, who, to his sorrow, had to be present at all criminal post-mortem examinations in Munich.

  Two mortuary attendants lifted the big body from the X-ray machine in the comer, to the stainless-steel operating table in the middle of the room. The scene was the basement chamber that was the forensic mortuary of the Munich medical college, not far from the part of the river where the body had so recently been found.

  The judge sat uncomfortably on a hard chair at the side of the bare white-tiled chamber. ‘What about that wound in the back?’ he asked.

  ‘Pah! A red herring – nothing to do with the death.’ The pathologist, Korb, was a small hard-faced man with sparse red hair.

  ‘One bullet entered the front of the chest and didn’t come out again. The other went in the throat and straight out of the side of the neck.’ He waved
a rubber-covered hand at the corpse as the attendants settled it on the table. ‘That gash must have happened as the body was floating down river, probably caught against a tree stump or a bridge support.’

  He turned back to the body and, knife in hand, stood impatiently while the assistants fussed around getting things ready. A police inspector and a uniformed patrolman stood by as Korb began his examination.

  The elderly judge slumped in his seat with a sigh. He had seen too many post-mortems, but they still revolted him. He envied the British system, where the only contact the judiciary has with blood and gore was through the hygienic medium of foolscap documents.

  Korb was looking intently at the exterior of the body again, before starting to cut. The clothing had already been carefully removed and lay on a side table, each garment labelled and packed in a plastic bag.

  The pathologist studied the face, neck, and stomach, then an attendant rolled it over for him to see the back. Eventually he came back to the neck again.

  ‘Shot twice from the front. Probably the first shot was in the neck. It could hardly have been fatal – it passed through the windpipe but missed all the important arteries – too far forwards.’

  ‘Why was it the first shot, Herr Doctor?’ asked the police inspector respectfully. Korb was one always to be used with respect. His acid tongue and temper were renowned in Bavarian police circles.

  ‘Because the wound in the chest must have penetrated the heart and caused almost immediate death,’ snapped Korb. ‘One would hardly shoot a mortally wounded man a second time in such a trivial manner.’

  The inspector had reservations about a shot through the windpipe being trivial, but he kept his mouth shut.

  ‘What sort of range was he shot from, doctor?’ asked the judge.

  The pathologist thumbed at the spread out clothing and then pointed at the neck of the corpse.

  ‘Not much help from the suit after being stirred around in the Isar for hours, but the skin here tells us a thing or two.’

  The judge rose and walked over to the post-mortem table. He saw a neat hole punched in the throat at the front, with a faint speckling of black on the surrounding skin.

  ‘This one was pretty close, but not contact,’ explained Korb, ‘The entrance hole is not jagged from the tearing effect of the cartridge gases as it would be at a mere few centimetres range, but it was near enough to produce this tattooing from flecks of un-burnt powder on the surrounding flesh.’

  ‘So what sort of distance, sir?’ sought the inspector, pencil and notebook hovering at the ready.

  Korb made a gesture of impatience.

  ‘Can’t be exact, man. The type of weapon, the size of the propellant, the age of the cartridge, the type of powder – they all make a difference. These new explosives produce very little powder burning, not like the old black stuff.’ He seemed to savour some past memory for a moment then hurried on with the work.

  ‘Say less than half a metre – probably quite a bit less.’

  He bent very near the dead man’s neck and examined it minutely.

  ‘No singeing of the hairs on his neck – again probably more than a dozen or so centimetres, but less than fifty … does it matter?’ he ended with annoyance.

  ‘We try to reconstruct these affairs, doctor,’ said the judge mildly. ‘So far the inspector here tells me that the site of the killing is known. A gardener in Thalkirchen reported vandalism to the police early this morning. There were signs of a disturbance in a flower bed on the Brudermühlbrücke, and at the bottom of the slope at the river’s edge, there were bloodstains and signs of dragging of a body into the water. That right, inspector?’

  The judge, sorry for the detective’s brow-beating at the hands of Korb, was sheltering him under his wing with kind words.

  ‘Yes, judge, a regular fight must have gone on from the edge of the road right down the bank to the water. I’ve got a skin-diver searching the river bed now, looking for the weapon – it may have been thrown in after the corpse.’

  ‘Some hope!’ muttered the pathologist crossly.

  ‘What size gun would you think it will be?’ asked the indefatigable policeman.

  ‘Small hole – hard to tell, really. Something less than nine-millimetre, I should say – not a Luger anyway.’

  He pointed to the X-ray, still dripping developer, which hung on an illuminated box on the wall. ‘Have a look at that, the bullet is buried in the eighth dorsal vertebra in the middle of the back. You can get some idea of the calibre from that, but I’ll be getting it out for you soon, anyway.’

  After looking at a similar hole in the chest, the doctor began the bloody business of the internal examination. The judge noted that he was particularly interested in the teeth.

  ‘The fillings seem a bit odd-looking … can’t place what it is, but I don’t pretend to be a forensic odontologist; I’ll get a colleague down to look at them. They certainly aren’t local work.’

  The examination went on for half an hour, being punctuated by scarifying flashes from the photographic flashguns fixed in the ceiling over the table.

  The judge sat patiently, his thoughts gently on his disturbed breakfast – it was still only ten o’clock, the police had moved fast after Gunther had reported the body in the river. The detective scribbled in his notebook whenever Dr Korb muttered some scrap of information, and the patrol man stood immobile the whole time, chewing the cud like some sturdy bullock.

  Eventually the pathologist threw down his knife with a clang and went to a sink to rinse the blood from his gloves. The judge slowly came back to earth and the eager inspector stood almost panting for the final revelations.

  ‘Shot through the chest almost dead centre,’ began Korb, pushing off the tap with an elbow. ‘The second entrance wound is just to the left of the centre of the breastbone, quite low down. So it’s gone straight through the heart and finished up in the spine. Here it is, Inspector, if you want it for the lab.’

  He walked back to the post-mortem table and carefully picked up a shining bullet with a rubber-tipped forceps, so as not to harm any identifying marks.

  ‘You’re lucky it’s not deformed, even though it has gone through two bits of bone … odd calibre, looks something like a six-millimetre.’

  The detective took a small cardboard box from his pocket and laid the bullet reverently in a bed of cotton wool. ‘Yes, doctor, I doubt if it came from a German pistol. It’s copper-jacketed, so it’s from an automatic, not a revolver, in all probability.’

  He gave it to the waiting uniformed man, with instructions to rush it to the ballistics laboratory of the police department.

  ‘Ask them if they can identify the make of weapon as soon as possible, tell them we’ve got no gun to compare it with at present.’

  The black-uniformed patrolman saluted briskly, coming to life at last. After he had hurried out, Korb spoke again. ‘Anyone missing from the city lately?’

  ‘No, sir … we’ve had a few girls and a couple of children reported this week, but no man for a fortnight – and the last few of those were nothing like him.’ The detective gestured to the opened body on the slab.

  The pathologist smiled cynically. ‘Don’t worry about the fortnight; this chap’s only been dead a short time. When I saw him first at nine o’clock, his temperature was still thirty degrees centigrade. Even in the Isar in winter he couldn’t have been dead longer than say, twelve hours.’

  The judge bobbed his head wisely.

  ‘Are we going to get any help from you in identifying him?’

  ‘General stuff only at present,’ replied Korb, drying his hands on a cloth while he gazed thoughtfully at the remains. ‘Approximate age from appearances and X-rays of some bones. He appears to be in his middle thirties. Then height, weight – all that stuff is written on the form there. No scars or tattoos to be seen.’

  He reached for an open jar of stomach contents and put it to his nose. He offered it to the judge but the older man jerked his head back. �
�Just tell me, doctor – I’ll take your word for it,’ he said wryly.

  ‘Drink – a strong smell of beer and spirits. I wonder where he was last night. He certainly took a skinful.’ He took another sniff at the jar, all revulsion having left him years before.

  ‘Another thing, judge, he has small injection marks on his arms which are septic in some places – looks exactly like the unsterile jabs that a drug addict gives himself. I’ll get an analysis done, but that will take a day or two.’

  ‘He’s a big man, doctor,’ ventured the inspector.

  ‘Yes, heavily muscled. He has some thickening of the eyebrows and a twisted nose which might suggest that he was used to being in a fight now and then. I’ve seen it in many strong-arm criminals, not necessarily boxers.’

  ‘You say his fillings look foreign – what about his clothes, any lead there?’ asked the judge.

  ‘All the pockets emptied and the labels tom out, sir,’ explained the inspector. ‘Good quality suit, I just don’t know whether it’s foreign manufacture or not. All Western clothes look much the same, except to an expert tailor. The tom labels were almost certainly done by the killer at the time of death, the rips are fresh and deliberately confined to the inner pockets and neckbands of the shirt and vest.’

  The judge got up and went to look at the clothing.

  ‘So to add up all we know, doctor, we’ve got a big man of possibly foreign origin, who has been shot twice, the one through the chest having killed him. He was either drunk or had been drinking heavily, and he may have been taking small quantities of narcotics – right?’

  Korb nodded abruptly. ‘You can add that the first shot through the neck was a wild one, at close range and the second one a more deliberate discharge, possibly at a slightly greater distance, designed to kill. From the signs of the struggle on the bridge, with absence of blood at the top of the slope, it seems that they fought up there, but did not use the weapon until they reached the bottom.’

  The detective took up the tale here. ‘The killer must have been cool enough to empty the dead man’s pockets, rip out the tabs, and then push him into the river … I wish I knew what he did with the gun.’