by Menon, David
‘I just want to show my wife how much I love her.’
‘Do you want to go upstairs before dinner, detective?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
FOUR
Paul was sitting in his office when he took a call from his friend Colleen Price, the Head of Tatton High school.
‘Hi gorgeous!’ said Paul. ‘Are you still making it hard for other women to look good?’
‘Why do I always get my best compliments from gay men?’
‘Well with all due respect to your shamelessly handsome husband who gets better looking, the older he gets with his greying hair and bright blue eyes, straight men don’t know dick unless they want to get it into your knickers.’
‘Howard loves it that you fancy him,’ said Colleen, laughing. ‘He thinks that being fancied by a gay man makes him really cool. He boasts about it to all and bloody sundry.’
‘Well it’s nice for him to know that he’s got options, Colleen.’
Colleen laughed even louder. ‘Enough, you! I need to talk to you about something serious.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Sam Cowley? He’s with the school nurse. He came in this morning and his teacher could see there was something wrong so he asked him what that might be.’
‘And?’
‘He started sobbing uncontrollably and he hasn’t really stopped since. We’ve been trying to talk to him but he says he only wants to talk to the man from the social called Paul. I assume that’s you.’
Paul drove straight down to the school and Colleen took him to the room where Sam was. As soon as he walked in Sam ran to him and held on to him for dear life. He was sobbing his little heart out.
‘Hey, mate’ said Paul, softly. ‘What’s up?’
‘She’s burnt all my books!’ he cried.
Paul knelt down and placed his hands on Sam’s shoulders. ‘Who, mate?’
‘Me Mum’ said Sam between sobs. ‘She made a bonfire in the back garden and threw all my Harry Potter books on it.’
I’ll swing for her, thought Paul. I’ll fucking swing for the pig ignorant bitch.
‘Then she said I can’t come anymore to the extra reading classes that Mrs. Price has got for me.’
Paul looked up at Colleen who could see the anger in his eyes. Then he turned back to Sam. ‘Sam, I want you to stay here with Mrs. Price whilst I go and see your Mum. Okay?’
‘I don’t want to go home’ Sam pleaded. ‘She’ll hit me if she finds out I’ve told anybody.’
‘Now you listen to me, Sam. Nobody is going to hit you. Do you understand? I’m going to see to that.’
Paul ran out to his car followed by Colleen.
‘Paul’ she said ‘Don’t go in like a bull in a china shop. Take some deep breaths and relax. I can see how worked up you are.’
‘Leave this to me, Colleen’ said Paul. ‘I’ll have calmed down by the time I get there but she’s not getting away with this.’
Lorraine Cowley opened the door and then left it open for Paul to come in.
‘What happened to Sam’s Harry Potter books, Lorraine?’
‘I burned them,’ said Lorraine. Sam would do as she told him and that was that. She wasn’t going to have the likes of this stupid Paul bastard dictating to her how to bring up her kids. Reading and books and all that shit was for other families, not hers.
‘So you don’t deny it?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Well do you want to tell me why you did such a deliberately hurtful thing to him?’
She pointed her finger at him. ‘It was your fault not mine.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You accused me of not taking enough interest in what he was reading and that whatever he was reading might be … what did you call it? … oh yeah, I know, you called it … inappropriate. So I decided to make sure that if anything was inappropriate he wouldn’t be able to read it anymore. I was following your advice. If he’s upset then it’s down to you.’
‘Lorraine, you are not twisting this to absolve yourself of the responsibility.’
‘Will you speak fucking English?’
‘I am not to blame for you burning Sam’s books, Lorraine. You are and nobody else. It was a deliberate act of cruelty on your part and you know it.’
‘What gives you the right to come in here and talk to me like that?’
‘I’m an employee of the state, Lorraine, and this whole household and everyone in it is funded by the state. That’s what gives me the right.’
‘Big fucking brother!’
‘Only those with something to hide use that argument, Lorraine’ said Paul. ‘What I’m trying to get through to you here is that education should mean everything to a family like you. Your kids may not have had an equal start but they can have the chance of a future if we all work together on their behalf. Don’t you want that for your kids? Don’t you want them to be able to stand beside kids from more advantaged backgrounds and hold their own? Lorraine, am I getting through at all? You’ve got too lazy and complacent, too reliant on people like me to tell you it’s not your fault and that all you need are more benefits. That’s the case, isn’t it, Lorraine? Because that’s what it looks like from where I’m standing.’
Lorraine shrugged her shoulders indifferently.
‘Lorraine, do you want me to take Sam into care?’
‘Might be better all round’ said Lorraine. ‘I can’t cope with him.’
Paul scratched his head. He’d probably get into bother with the head of social services at the council, who’d say he’d been too hasty and too quick to judge, but he didn’t care. The Children’s Act clearly states that the interests of the child should always be the first consideration. Well he’d applied that principle and concluded that Sam would be better off in a foster home than in his own.
‘I’ll make all the necessary arrangements with regards to Sam,’ said Paul after he’d followed Lorraine into the back garden. There wasn’t much in the way of garden there. It seemed to be more about another place to dump stuff. ‘Lorraine, Sam made it very clear that he didn’t want to come home. Your own eight-year-old son pleaded with me not to make him go home. You’re his mother, Lorraine. What do you have to say about that?’
‘If you take him into care will I lose the benefits I get for him?’
*
The squad had been waiting for information on Dieter Naumann to come through from the Polish authorities before they proceeded. Now that it had come through it was Joe Alexander’s job to decipher it. He sat at his desk and read the text on his computer screen.
“Dieter Henrick Naumann was born in Munich in 1918 to an upper class staunchly Roman Catholic family who’d lost everything in the depression following the First World War. His father joined the National Socialists and Dieter joined the Hitler Youth movement when he was 15. Dieter rose quickly through the ranks and became part of the Fuhrer’s inner circle just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite his young age he showed great courage and promise, so much so that he was promoted into the SS and became part of the invasion force that advanced across Poland in September 1939. Ruthless doesn’t come close to describing the way he carried out his duties but it was an incident in the early months of the war that had made him infamous and that had soured relations between Poland and Germany ever since. In a small village just inside the border with Germany, Naumann discovered that nearly a hundred men had formed an underground resistance to the German occupation. He rounded them up and they were hung in the town square whilst their wives and children were made to watch. Their wives were then forced to dig a mass grave and after their husbands bodies had been thrown in, the wives were shot, most of them by Naumann himself with his own pistol firing a bullet into the back of their heads. Their bodies were then piled on top. The children were left to fend for themselves except for the blond, blue-eyed ones who were taken away to Germany, never to be seen again.”
Joe felt sick. This was some twiste
d bastard. Joe briefed Sara and she shared his revulsion. Naumann had been arrested as part of the European arrest warrant process and Lady Eleanor had put up the bail that had been set at one hundred thousand pounds. Naumann had then been released on condition that he surrendered his passport, which was in the name of Gerald Edwards, and that he stayed at Gatley Hall. A case had to be made against him within twenty-eight days for the arrest warrant to remain current. The Polish woman who’d recognised him in the shop that day had been a small child back in 1939 when Naumann had murdered her parents, first her father then her mother, in front of her. She’d been taken in by a cousin but she’s never forgotten the face or the eyes of that cold blooded killer.
‘Mr. Naumann, why did you come to England back in the 1940’s?’ asked Sara as she started the interview with Naumann at Gatley Hall. ‘We know what you’re alleged to have done in Poland but we need to find out what happened after then, that led you to being given a British identity. That was quite a journey after all.’
‘Very well,’ said Dieter who’d decided with Eleanor to give the police enough of the truth to keep them happy. ‘Lady Eleanor Harding was always against the war and in favour of making a deal with Hitler. She was very well connected in the higher echelons of British society including the royal family, and when the opportunity presented itself she persuaded Churchill that she could contact a member of Hitler’s inner circle who could negotiate a way out of the war that would save the face of both Britain and Germany. I was that person, I was that opportunity. I was married to Lady Eleanor’s sister Ruth and we were in close contact.’
‘And what was the proposal?’
‘That Britain would leave Germany to do whatever it wanted with the continent of Europe in return for Germany’s promise never to touch any part of the British empire. It was quite an audacious yet marvellous and sensible plan dreamed up by Eleanor entirely by herself. You see, detectives, much of the British aristocracy supported the idea because much of their wealth was gained from the empire and they had no desire to go to war for anyone across the Channel. Support for the plan went all the way up to the then Queen herself. It was the one thing she had in common with her brother-in-law Edward and his wife Wallis Simpson but it’s a fact that’s been, shall we say, airbrushed out of history because such a belief would contradict her status in later years as a faultless Grandmother of the nation.’
‘You’re saying that the Queen Mother was a Nazi?’ asked Sara, astonished at Naumann’s assertion. ‘They’d have had your head for that a couple of centuries ago.’
‘No, I’m not saying she was a Nazi. Not in the sense that I was. But she did support moves to make a pact with Hitler. And if all of continental Europe had now been speaking German whilst this untouched sceptred isle of Britain was still lauding it over her empire, she wouldn’t have gone to her grave broken hearted.’
‘Well now I’m really intrigued, Mr. Naumann,’ said Sara who hadn’t learned any of this in history lessons at school. ‘Go on.’
‘I took my instructions from the Fuhrer and secretly flew over to be the guest of Lady Harding here at Gatley Hall where negotiations with the British government would be held.’
‘And if you’d succeeded then the whole course of the war could’ve been very different?’ said Sara.
‘That is correct,’ said Dieter, ‘I suppose you could even suggest that if we had succeeded then Eleanor and myself might’ve been eligible for the Nobel peace prize.’
Sara and Joe looked at each other and just had to let that one go without comment. ‘So why didn’t you succeed, especially if the plan had the backing of the British government?’ said Sara.
‘The Fuhrer sent the Luftwaffe over the English Channel and the Battle of Britain killed off any chance of a deal.’
‘But why did he do that if he’d been serious about Lady Eleanor’s plan?’ asked Joe.
‘Because of my wife, Ruth. Not long after I’d arrived in England she was arrested back in Berlin. I knew then why the Fuhrer had apparently torn up our plan to negotiate with the British government. I‘d had no idea that Ruth had been a double agent and neither had her sister Eleanor. It came as a terrible shock to us both but it meant that I was no longer trusted by the Fuhrer.’
‘What happened to Ruth?’
‘She was executed,’ Naumann answered coldly. ‘I didn’t waste any sympathy on her. She’d betrayed the Reich and made it impossible for me to go home. Because of her I would probably have been arrested and executed too if I’d gone back to Germany. They would not have believed that I didn’t know about her treachery. So I persuaded the British authorities to let me stay. It was in their interests too, seeing as I was privy to much secret information. They made a deal with me. I would remain under house arrest at Gatley Hall until the end of the war and then I would be given a new identity and a chance to start again.’
‘And at the end of the war they gave you the new identity of Gerald Edwards?’ said Joe.
‘Yes,’ said Naumann. ‘When the end of the war came I completed my medical studies and graduated in 1949. Not long after that I met Joan, the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my children and was able to put the past behind me, at least on the outside. On the inside I never stopped being Dieter Naumann and I never stopped loving Eleanor. Our affair has lasted seventy years.’
‘And your wife didn’t know?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ said Dieter. ‘When my wife died I didn’t marry Eleanor for the sake of my children. I wanted to protect them from the reality of my existence.’
‘But Lady Harding was a widower too by then,’ said Sara. ‘Why would your children have needed to know the truth? You could’ve come together as Lady Harding and Gerald Edwards? Why didn’t you do that?’
‘My children loved their mother very much,’ said Dieter, ‘I don’t think they’d have accepted someone else in my life.’
‘And why didn’t Lady Eleanor divorce her husband back in the forties and marry you then?’
‘Because Eleanor and Ronald had an arrangement that Ronald insisted that she kept to,’ said Naumann. ‘He was a homosexual who wanted the cover of marriage. You might imagine that he and I were never the best of friends after that.’
‘Do you think you should face justice now for your alleged war crimes, Mr. Naumann?’ asked Joe.
‘Justice?’ scoffed Dieter. ‘We were at war. I knew that the present Polish government would have to bow under the pressure they’d be under from various Jewish organisations and their sycophants around the world. But I’m not overly concerned. They can do what they like to me now. I’m too old to care.’
‘Nearly a hundred men were hung in that Polish village on a bitterly cold winter’s day at the end of 1939,’ Joe went on.
‘What village might that be?’
‘The village that you were in charge of,’ Said Sara. ‘Your presence there is well documented and will form the basis of any war crimes case against you.’
‘There was a war on and I played my part in trying to ensure that Germany would be victorious.’
‘So you’re admitting to your involvement in the murders?’ said Sara.
‘I’m admitting to nothing, Detective,’ said Dieter, ‘and you are not a lawyer. You’re merely a law enforcement agent.’
‘It became known as one of the most infamous massacres of the entire war,’ said Joe.
‘Many things happened during the war years that couldn’t be explained.’
‘Would it not be the honourable thing at this stage in your life, Mr. Naumann, to admit your complicity in the massacre?’ said Joe. ‘Don’t you think you owe it to the dead if not the living?’
Naumann smirked, ‘I don’t owe anything to anybody. As for these so-called charges, well, just you try and prove it.’
‘The men were hung in front of their wives and then you made the women dig a mass grave and when they were done burying their own husbands you killed each and every one of them with a bullet in the back
of their heads.’
‘I say again, detective,’ said Naumann who hadn’t flinched or even blinked his eye. ‘Just try and prove it. Your accusations are fanciful and irrelevant.’
‘Irrelevant?’ Joe questioned.
‘To the life I’ve lived in this country for all these years, to the contribution I’ve made to this country for all these years.’
‘And you think that will save you?’ said Joe. ‘Think again, sir.’
‘How would it look in the press?’ Dieter demanded angrily. ‘Me being such an old man with little left of the strength I once had? If there’s one thing you can count on the British for it’s their sentimentality about their old folk.’
Sara took a deep breath to try and quell her mounting anger. The old bastard was playing them good and proper.
‘Not when it comes to matters relating to the war, Mr. Naumann,’ said Sara.
‘If you say so, detective.’
‘We will be back, Mr. Naumann,’ said Joe.
‘As you wish,’ said Dieter.
‘You didn’t even tell your children about your past, Mr. Naumann,’ said Sara. ‘How do you think they feel about you having betrayed them? How do you think they feel about you having betrayed their mother for all those years?’
‘Leave my wife out of this!’
‘I will,’ said Sara. ‘Pity you didn’t.’
‘She never knew anything about any of this!’
