Douglas Brodie 03 - Pilgrim Soul
Page 33
I stared at her, trying to equate this little woman with her crimes. Then I thought of her latest atrocity. Anger bubbled up.
‘And you traded Isaac Feldmann for your lover. You killed my friend!’
She pointed at the Irgun agents. ‘They killed Klaus!’
Bleakness washed over me. Danny betrayed me for his woman. Kellerman murdered Isaac for her man.
‘An eye for an eye, Doctor? Is that your medical ethics?’
Her shoulders slumped. I grabbed her, shook her.
‘The Nazis who helped you kill Isaac – are they the same four who killed Malachi? Where are they?’
Her mouth lifted at the corners in a condescending smile. ‘Still in Glasgow, I imagine. Where they belong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have like-minded supporters everywhere.’
The man with the music-hall German accent who phoned Rabbi Silver demanding we free Langefeld.
‘Blackshirts? Mosley’s boys?’
She shrugged. ‘Everyone takes sides.’
I pushed her away.
‘Heard enough, Brodie?’ asked Danny. ‘We need to get going.’
I looked down on Kellerman, weighing up her crimes against the good she was doing in Glasgow. Weighing up Israeli justice against our own. Asking myself was I really ready to have a shoot-out with my terrible twin.
‘Take her.’
Kellerman’s mouth opened and closed as if to make one last plea. She searched my face, seeing my answer. She just nodded. Then she turned and walked forward into the ambit of Danny and the Irgun agents.
‘Shall we go?’ she said.
Danny spoke briefly to the two men. They opened the door, shepherded her through and began walking her down the platform. Danny followed for a few steps, finishing his instructions. For a moment, I was left with Ava Kaplan. I spoke softly.
‘Do you love him?’
She made a maddening, noncommittal face and my anger at Danny dissolved.
‘The poor bastard. At least be kind to him.’
She held my gaze; finally she nodded. And the moment was gone. Danny returned and took her hand. His face was a mix of emotions. When he looked at her, it opened up. Would I have done this for Sam? Then he looked at me . . .
‘Brodie? Brodie, I’m—’
‘—an eejit. Bugger off, Danny.’
Absolution wasn’t within my gift.
The pair turned and walked away, hand in hand. I stood and watched until they got to the barrier. Danny glanced back. I thought he was going to wave. Then he was gone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are many historical truths in this story.
Glasgow had a population of over 12,000 Jews in 1946, many living in the Gorbals, and some speaking Scots-Yiddish. If you thought Glaswegian was hard on the ears . . .
In 1923 the League of Nations handed Great Britain the poisoned chalice of administering the mandate for Palestine. It was a thankless task made miserable in the post-war, post-Holocaust era when the surviving ranks of European Jews sought refuge in their ‘Promised Land’. The poor British squaddie was piggy-in-the-middle between Arabs and Jews. Our soldiers were bombed, shot and assaulted right up to May 1948 when the United Nations permitted the creation of the state of Israel. And then things went downhill . . .
Rat lines were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of the Second World War. They ran from Germany through Italy, Austria and Franco’s Spain to safe havens in South America, the USA and Canada. Escapees included Dr Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. The organisers of these rat lines included US intelligence agencies, fascist organisations such as the Croatian Ustashe, and senior churchmen such as Bishop Alois Hudal in Rome, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant of France, Cardinal Antonio Caggiano of Argentina, and Father Krunoslav Draganovi of Croatia.
The wartime Special Operations Executive was blessed with some extraordinarily courageous and daring young women. They were led by Vera Atkins and included Odette Sansom, GC. After her capture Odette survived Ravensbrück by keeping her head and maintaining the fiction that she was married to a relative of Winston Churchill. She avoided the wretched fate of her fellow SOE agents in Ravensbrück: Cicely Lefort, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe.
Malcolm McCulloch was Chief Constable of Glasgow from 1943 to 1960. He succeeded Sir Percy Sillitoe (Chief Constable 1931–43), who went on to become head of MI5 (1946–53).
Donald Campbell was Archbishop of Glasgow from 1945 to 1963 and had nothing whatsoever to do with rat lines, Scottish or otherwise.
The winter of 1947 was the worst in the twentieth century. It was bloody cold.
Irn Bru was spelled Iron Brew until 1946. Its sales were suspended during the war because of rationing.
The rest of this story is fiction . . . more or less . . . but it all adds up to a greater truth.
Trials for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity
From the end of the Second World War in 1945 until 1949 a number of war crimes trials took place across Europe. Among them were:
Belsen trials: British Military Court, Lüneburg. First trial 17 September to 17 November 1945. Second trial June 1946.
Nuremberg trials: trial of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. Subsequent trials took place up to April 1949.
Ravensbrück trials: British Military Court, Curiohaus, Hamburg. Seven trials in total from December 1946 to July 1948. The first ran from 5 December 1946 to 3 February 1947.
Verdicts and Sentences
Pilgrim Soul is peopled with fictional and real-life characters. Where I have invented a ‘baddie’ I’ve used an amalgam of names and vile deeds drawn from real life, e.g. Dr Herta Kellermann is a composite of Doctors Herta Oberheuser and Ruth Kellermann, both of whom conducted foul medical experiments at Ravensbrück. For her sins Oberheuser spent a mere seven years in prison before becoming a family doctor; Kellermann was never imprisoned. As for the other real Nazis I’ve deployed in my novel, these were their fates:
Suhren: Sturmbannführer [Major] Fritz Suhren, Camp Commandant Ravensbrück 1942–5. Also served at Sachsenhausen 1941–2. Escaped from American custody in 1946, recaptured in France in 1949. Hanged in Fresnes Prison, Paris, in 1950.
Schwarzhuber: Obersturmführer [Lieutenant] Johann Schwarzhuber, Deputy Camp Commandant Ravensbrück January–April 1945. Also served at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Convicted of war crimes, hanged May 1947.*
Hellinger: Obersturmführer [Lieutenant] Dr Martin Hellinger, Camp Dentist Ravensbrück 1943–5. Also served at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. Sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, released 1955.
Ramdohr: Ludwig Ramdohr, Gestapo Officer Ravensbrück 1942–5. Convicted of war crimes, hanged May 1947.*
Binz: Oberaufseherin [Chief Warden] Dorothea Binz, Ravensbrück 1939–45. Convicted of war crimes, hanged May 1947.*
Bösel: Aufseherin [Warden] Greta Bösel, Ravensbrück 1944?-5 . Convicted of war crimes, hanged May 1947.*
Haake: Nurse Martha Haake, Ravensbrück 1943–5. Tried in the fourth Ravensbruck trial May–June 1948, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, released on health grounds 1951.
Grese: Aufseherin [Warden] Irma Grese. Warden at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Belsen, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Belsen trials, hanged 13 December 1945.*
* Hanged by the busy British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, in Hamelin Prison, Germany. Pierrepoint’s final tally of Nazi executions was around two hundred.
Big thanks to:
Sarah Ferris, first reviewer, cheerleader and reality checker. Richenda Todd, editor and producer of silk purses from sow’s ears. Helen Ferris, CPsychol, for expert advice on post traumatic stress. Tina Betts, persevering literary agent and supporter. Tony Hanley for racing tips. The Rev John Bell of the Iona Community for his observations about Glasgow and human frailty. Sara O’Keefe and Tea
m Corvus for unstinting enthusiasm for ‘Brodie’.
Turn the page to see Brodie in action in
BITTER
WATER
Summer in Glasgow. When the tarmac bubbles and tenement windows bounce back the light. When lust boils up and tempers fray.
When suddenly, it’s bring out your dead...
Glasgow’s melting. The temperature is rising and so is the murder rate. Douglas Brodie, ex-policeman, ex-soldier and newest reporter on the Glasgow Gazette, has no shortage of material for his crime column: a councillor brutally silenced and a rapist tarred and feathered by a balaclavaclad group of vigilantes.
As violence spreads and the bodies pile up, Brodie and advocate Samantha Campbell are entangled in a web of deception and savagery. Brodie is swamped with stories for the Gazette. But how long before he and Sam become the headline?
ONE
Bubonic plague starts with one flea bite. Spanish flu with one sneeze. Glasgow’s outbreak of murder and mayhem began simply enough and, like a flea bite, hardly registered at the time. In a volatile city of hair-trigger egos one savage beating goes unnoticed, a single knife wound is nothing special. Fighting goes with the Celtic territory, runs with the Scottish grain, is indeed fuelled by the grain, distilled to 40 proof. These belligerent tendencies explain my countrymen’s disproportionate occupation of war graves across the Empire.
So it’s just as well Glasgow’s a northern outpost of civilisation. The cold and damp keep tempers in check for much of the year. It’s just too dispiriting to have a rammy in the rain. But even Glasgow knows the taste of summer. When the tarmac bubbles, and the tenement windows bounce back the light. When only the great green parks can absorb and dissipate the rays. When the women bare their legs and the men bow their bald pates to the frying sun. When lust boils up and tempers fray.
When suddenly, it’s bring out your dead . . .
For the moment, in blithe ignorance, Glasgow was enjoying a hot July and I was enjoying Glasgow. It had been seven long years since I’d last stomped its checkerboard streets and bathed my ears in the tortured melodies of my countrymen. Six years of fighting across North Africa and Europe and one year trying to get over it.
What had I to show for it? They’d taken back the officer crowns and my life-and-death authority over a company of Seaforth Highlanders. A burden removed but my heart went with it. Now I queued with the housewives and the gap-toothed old fellas for a loaf of bread and a tin of Spam. I hated Spam. I had no more ration coupons than the wide-boy who’d spent the war dodging the call-up and pestering the lonely lassies. I had no wife to set my tea on the table or light the fire in the grate. I had no children to cuddle or skelp, read to or protect.
On the credit side, I had the clothes I stood up in – secondhand, having discarded my Burton’s demob suit in the Firth of Clyde. Not a sartorial statement, merely a choice between wearing it or drowning. My officer’s Omega had survived the dip as it had survived bombardments, desert dust and machine-gun vibrations. In a box in my digs, wrapped in a bit of velvet, lay the bronze stars of action in Africa, France and Germany. But they were common enough currency these days. Even the silver cross with its purple and white ribbon had little rarity value; not after Normandy.
I had a degree in languages; my French now sprinkled with the accents and oaths of the folk whose homes we razed in our liberation blitzkrieg; my German salted with the vocabulary of the tormented and the tormentors in the concentration camps I’d worked in after VE Day last year.
Outweighing all the negatives, I had a job. Not any old job. The job I was meant for after too many years of detours through academia and law enforcement. I was the newest and no doubt worst-paid journalist on the Glasgow Gazette, the voice of the people, by the people, for the people. Understudy and cup-bearer to Wullie McAllister, Chief Crime Reporter. The stories I’d fed him back in April about the wrongful hanging of my old pal Hugh Donovan had given him a spectacular series of scoops which had axed the inglorious careers of several prominent policemen. In return, when I came looking for a job on the Gazette, he’d opened doors for me. Mostly saloon doors, but that was part and parcel of the job.
It was another man’s death that called me to witness this morning. Big Eddie Paton, my editor, scuttled up to my desk in the far corner of the newsroom.
‘Get your hat, Brodie. McAllister’s no’ around. They’ve found a body. Foul play. Go take a look and bring me back a’ the details . . .’
Big Eddie rolled the words ‘foul play’ over his tongue as though he was savouring a single malt. I’d only been on the job a fortnight but I knew that when he said ‘details’ he meant as grisly as possible. Yet I liked Eddie. Beneath his rants and rages he was a newspaperman right down to the ink in his varicose veins. He could turn a run-of-the-mill tale of council overspend into a blood-boiling account of official corruption and incompetence.
The ‘big’ in front of Eddie was of course ironic. If you put a ruler alongside Big Eddie toe to top, you’d run out of Eddie about the 5’ 2” mark. He earned his name from his girth. And his mouth. His office attire was braces, tartan waistcoat and armbands. He was fast on his feet and could materialise by your desk like a genie, fat hands tucked into his waistcoat pockets or fingering his pocket watch. Time was always running out for Eddie.
‘How did you hear?’
Eddie tapped his pug nose. ‘Ah’m surprised at you, Brodie. One of your ex-comrades tipped us the wink.’
In my time in the police I’d been aware of a cosy arrangement between a few of my fellow coppers and the press. For a couple of quid they’d make a call to an editor to leak some newsworthy bit of criminality, such as a prominent citizen being arrested for drunken or obscene behaviour. I’d tried to stamp it out, but now I was on the other side, my scruples seemed a wee bit quaint. It could be seen as a useful public service. Is that what six years of war does to you? You lose your moral footing?
I assumed Eddie’s instruction about my hat was figurative. It was broiling outside. I’d have left my jacket too if I’d had more confidence in the office protocol for greeting the dead. I grabbed my notebook and a couple of sharp pencils and set off into the sweltering streets of Glasgow. I hopped on a tram on Union Street and got off down by the dockside at the Broomielaw. I walked past the shuttered faces of corrugated iron and wood till I spotted the police car parked askew outside a shattered goods shed. The warehouse had taken a pasting in the blitz of ’41, and Glasgow weather and hooligans had been putting the boot in ever since. The big sliding door was jammed open with rust and distortion. There was a gap wide enough to slide through into a great echoing furnace. And there was a stench.
On the far side, in a shaft of sunlight slicing through the torn roof, stood a clutch of mourners. Two uniformed policemen and one civvie, presumably a detective, but all with their jackets over their arms and braces on show. They were gazing at a long pale lump that lay between their feet. They were arguing.
‘Should we no’ wait for the doctor, sir? And the forensics?’ said a uniform. His pale young face and the sergeant’s stripes on his jacket glowed white in the gloom.
The detective bristled. ‘And what’s that gonna tell us? That he’s deid? Ah can see he’s deid. Would you no’ be deid if you’d had that done to you? Ah just want to know who he is!’
I walked nearer and could see the dilemma. It was a body all right. A man’s. Podgy with skinny white legs. Shockingly naked apart from a pair of fouled pants. His mother would have ticked him off. His hands were tied behind him and his feet strapped together, with his own belt. But no matter where you looked, your eyes were always dragged back to the head. Or where the head should be. For the moment it was merely a presumption. It reminded me of a curious kid at the infirmary with its head stuck in a pot. To see if it would fit. But this very dead man-child had chosen a bucket. A grey knobbly bucket.
As I joined the crowd the officers turned their eyes to me. The impatient one snapped: ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Brodie, is it? Aye well, here’s something to wake up your readers, Brodie.’
‘Who is it?’ Then I realised what a stupid question that was. ‘I mean any identification? Anyone reported missing?’
I cast my eyes around the shadows looking for a pile of clothes. There was just a shovel and a small mound of grey. The sergeant cut in: ‘We’re just waiting for the man wi’ the Xray machine to come by.’
That earned some guffaws. The detective tried to trump the witticism.
‘Are you like this on Christmas Day, Brodie? Desperate to open your presents?’
Now I could see properly. The body wasn’t wearing a bucket. He was wearing the contents of the bucket. I could also see the long rope trailing away from his ankle strap. I looked up. Sure enough there was a beam above us. I guessed this poor sod had been hung upside down by his ankles and then lowered until his head was fully in the bucket. Then they would have poured in the concrete. Whoever did it must have waited patiently until it set, and hauled the dead man up a couple of feet to get the bucket off. Prudence? Meanness – was it their only coal scuttle? Or to remove all evidence? Then why dump the shovel? Maybe it was as simple as wanting to leave as brutal a message as possible. This man had to be silenced and that’s what they’d done. I shuddered at the horror of his last moments.
I glanced again at the detective: rheumy-eyed and meanmouthed, long broken-veined nose. Hat pushed back on his head. The name came back. Sangster. Detective Inspector Walter Sangster. I’d run into Sangster before the war when I was a sergeant with the Tobago Street detectives. By reputation he was volatile, someone with a short temper and an even shorter concentration span. I had taken an instant dislike to him in ’37 and found no reason to change my mind on renewing our acquaintance today.