Death on the Rhine

by Charles Whiting

  Next moment a harsh official voice commanded, ‘All right, cease firing out there. Cease firing! We’ve nabbed the other two.’

  ‘Sir!’ Taggart answered smartly and rose to his feet, suddenly aware that the whore was still under the bridge and a used French letter lay on the towpath. He turned, white torches flashed on the deck and he whispered urgently, ‘Bugger off, Frowlein. Mark schnell… bugger orff!’ There was the sound of high heels running and Taggart breathed a sigh of relief. He knew what the orderly sergeant would do to him if he found he had been with a woman while on sentry-go. As he’d heard so many commanding officers say to him in the past, as he had stood smartly to attention, flanked by two regimental police. ‘Your trouble, Taggart, is too many women and too much drink. You’d make a fine NCO if it were not for that. All right, I sentence you to ten days jankers…’

  * * *

  But at two o’clock on this cold March morning, Private Taggart was not fated to be ‘crimed’ yet again. Instead, he found himself facing a pudgy-faced, balding politician, who he recognised easily enough from the papers. It was the same politician who had sent him to the Dardanelles, where he had been wounded for the second time, caught malaria and been infected with a certain sexual disease by a bint in a Cairo knocking shop. That had cost him his first set of sergeant’s stripes.

  Now, after stuffing his false teeth into his mouth, Churchill reached over for his wallet and said, ‘Private Taggart – that is your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yessir,’ said Taggart, standing stiffly to attention in the centre of the wardroom, watched by a group of stern-faced officers.

  ‘I should like to thank you for your vigilance. You have probably saved my life.’ Churchill grinned. ‘I am sure, Taggart, that there are many people in London who wouldn’t be so grateful to you for that, however.’ He opened his wallet and pulled out a large crisp, white five-pound note. ‘Here you are, my good fellow. Take it.’

  Taggart’s eyes bulged. He had never had so much money in his whole life. Five quid! That’d keep him in tarts for a month or more. ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ he answered smartly, and took the note.

  Churchill nodded and Taggart’s company commander bellowed, as if he were back on the barracks square, ‘About turn, Taggart. Officer on parade. Salute!’

  Taggart slammed down his boot, clashed his hand across his rifle butt and marched out.

  Churchill’s grin vanished. ‘There is something amiss here in Germany, gentlemen,’ he announced, as a mess steward brought him a drink, which he accepted, as if the steward never existed. ‘These recent killings of our people and then this attempt which was obviously directed at me.’ He turned and said to the big major with the green brassard of staff intelligence on his sleeve, ‘Billingborough, I would like you to send a full report of what you find out from those two prisoners to you-know-whom in London.’

  ‘Sir. Yessir. I’ll see to it straight away.’ The big major went out and Churchill sipped his drink reflectively, staring at his pudgy face in the mirror opposite. Outside, all was quiet again. ‘Years ago, gentlemen,’ he said softly, stroking his glass, ‘I went hunting in India with the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda. The Maharaja owned one of the first automobiles in India and I sat in the rear seat with the cheetah he used for hunting between me and its keeper.’

  The staff officers listened, fascinated, yet wondering where this story in the middle of the night was leading. ‘Finally,’ he went on, ‘we spotted a buck in the jungle. The car was stopped. The Shikari unhooded the cheetah, slipped its lead and it was off like a shot. Off it went after its prey. When we caught up with it, the buck lay on the ground looking up at us with inexpressible anguish in its glazing eyes, its throat held in a vice-like grip by the cheetah. The Shikari waited for the poor animal to give its last agonised convulsion, and then the cheetah relaxed its hold. Thereupon the servant gave the cheetah its coveted reward – the bloody testicles of the dead animal.’

  Someone exclaimed, ‘I say!’ Another young officer gasped and involuntarily let his hands fall to the base of his stomach.

  Churchill didn’t seem to notice. He was too wrapped up in his tale of long ago. ‘When the cheetah had satisfied its appetite, it allowed itself to be hooded and leashed with the utmost docility. As we left the scene of the killing, the sinister beast, having licked its bloody chops, settled down on the seat once more with ingratiating friendliness. I shrank away from it.’ He paused. Suddenly that mild, bantering look that was always present on his face, even at moments of seriousness, appeared. He looked around at the circle of puzzled faces in the yellow light of the lantern and said quietly, very quietly, so that they had to strain to hear his words, ‘Today when I think of the German people, I am strongly reminded of that cheetah of so long ago.’ He shivered dramatically and finished his drink in one gulp…

  Two

  A single, flaring gas jet lit the white-tiled mortuary, which was freezingly cold. The place was bare of any furniture save for a long steel dissecting table. Along the wall were the freezers in which the dead bodies were placed.

  With a curt nod, the coroner of St Pancras indicated the two white-clad attendants should open up the ‘depository’, as it was called.

  Swiftly, they stepped forwards to carry out their task. It wasn’t every day that they had such important visitors as Professor Spilsbury and the man ‘from the Foreign Office’, with his ramrod-straight back and monocle.

  They pulled open the drawer, emitting a cloud of icy air, and revealing the body. With a grunt they bent, lifted it out and placed it on the steel table. Spilsbury looked at the nervous little coroner and he said to the attendants. ‘Go upstairs and get my electric fire. That should do the trick.’

  Minutes later the heat from the single-bar electric fire started to thaw out the naked body, which the man ‘from the Foreign Office’ watched with a certain amount of fascinated horror. Steam began to rise from the limbs and there was a steady drip-drip from the stiff, yellow feet.

  Now Professor Spilsbury, the most famous pathologist in England, began his examination. He pulled on rubber gloves and set his horn-rimmed glasses more firmly on the bridge of his big nose. As was his habit, as if his secretary were there taking notes, he talked aloud as he conducted the examination. ‘Split lower lip… grazed nose… abrasions on the chin… Further abrasions on right breast… finger marks.’ He looked up at the man with the monocle and said in that pedantic manner of his, which had rattled many a lawyer in the Old Bailey, ‘Clear indication she was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground.’

  The other man nodded but said nothing. Those who knew him – and there were very few people in the whole of the British Empire who were allowed to know him – would have seen that he was becoming irritated by the pathologist’s slow and self-satisfied performance. For he was beginning to tap his wooden leg with his malacca cane: a sure sign he was losing patience.

  Gently, Professor Spilsbury forced open the woman’s legs, peered into her vagina, holding the lips apart with a spatula.

  ‘Hell’s teeth,’ the man with the monocle cursed to himself, as he watched, ‘what a profession – peering up dead women’s insides – disgusting!’ But he kept his thoughts to himself, as Spilsbury announced, ‘Sexually assaulted with great violence… She was virgo intacta… tear in hymen… private parts heavily soiled with blood.’

  The other man nodded. ‘Our authorities in Germany thought she had been raped. Her underthings were found next to her. But what can you tell me of the cause of death and who may have done it, Professor?’

  Professor Spilsbury said, ‘Tut-tut.’ He did not like to be disturbed in his labours, even by such important people as the ‘man from the Foreign Office’, though he suspected the man with the monocle who had brought him here wasn’t from that department. His language had been decidedly undiplomatic when their taxi driver narrowly missed running over a butcher’s boy on his bicycle. It had been a flavour more of the quarterdeck.

  Gently bu
t firmly he rolled the dead woman over on to her stomach. Carefully, he searched the body, starting at the feet and working his way upwards. He grunted suddenly. ‘Raped first,’ he announced, ‘vaginally and anally. Clear evidence of that – here,’ he pointed with his gloved hand.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, Professor,’ the man with the monocle said grimly.

  Next to him, the little coroner shook his greying head. ‘There’s been some terrible types about since the war. The trenches brutalised so many of our young men. For instance, there’s been a tremendous increase in this area of young men riding without lights. Quite blatant some of them, when stopped on their bicycles by the constables—’

  Spilsbury shot him a baleful look and he shut up immediately. ‘Naturally, I can only hazard a guess on this. Without a PM – er, post-mortem – I cannot be sure. However, my guess is this. The girl was felled from behind, then raped vaginally and anally. After that, she choked in mud or something like that, where she lay unconscious. There are clear asphyxial haemorrhages on her cheeks and neck.’

  ‘Poor girl, the poor girl,’ the man with the monocle said softly, visualising the scene that night: her man friend cruelly stabbed and thrown into the river, then the defenceless girl raped in such a bestial fashion and left to die all alone. She had never regained consciousness. There had been nothing the British Army doctors had been able to do for the pathetic, brutalised child.

  ‘Hello, what’s this?’ Spilsbury exclaimed suddenly.

  ‘What’s what?’

  Spilsbury didn’t answer. Instead he tugged a magnifying glass from the pocket of his topcoat and held it close to the girl’s bare right shoulder. For a moment he stared intently at the naked flesh, then he turned to the man with the monocle and beckoned him forwards.

  His wooden leg squeaking slightly as he moved, he said, ‘Well?’

  ‘It is quite common in these cases of anal rape,’ Spilsbury announced, as if he were lecturing a class of respectful students, ‘that the victim is held quite firmly by the shoulders. To prevent the victim moving around or squirming with the pain of the insertion. Oftentimes the attackers, thus, leave marks.’

  The man with the monocle nodded his understanding.

  ‘If you look closely, you can see the faint pink marks left by the attacker’s grip on her left shoulder.’

  ‘Yes, I can see them,’ the man with the monocle said. ‘They are the very mark of the beast.’

  Professor Spilsbury made no comment. He had long given up questioning the morality of the attackers of the many murder victims that he had to deal with. All that concerned him was to find out the cause of death and, if possible, discover who had been the criminal. And he often quoted to his sometimes appalled students those lines from John Wesley: ‘Ah, lovely appearance of Death, What sight on earth is so fair? Not all the gay pageants that breathe, Can with a dead body compare.’ Thereafter, he always had a good chuckle at the looks on their young faces.

  He focused the magnifying glass again, trying to catch as much light as possible from the single flaring jet. ‘Now look at the victim’s right shoulder.’

  Obediently, the other man let his monocle drop by its cord and stared through the proffered glass.

  ‘Again, you can see the marks of the attacker’s fingers. Look – one – two – three – the thumb and forefinger fused together in four. But examine more carefully finger mark number three.’

  The man with the monocle peered more intently through the glass. ‘I can’t see anything special about it,’ he announced after a few moments, annoyed by the pedantic medic who was taking him through his paces as if he were some damned fourth-form schoolboy.

  ‘Ah, because you are not trained to see everything.’

  The man with the monocle was tempted to retort, ‘If you knew what I’m trained to do, you old fool, you’d be damned well greatly surprised.’ But he kept that thought to himself. Instead he asked, ‘Well, what is it then?’

  ‘The indentation of a signet ring. Some men, as you are aware, turn the crest of their signet ring to the inside of the finger. There,’ he heightened the magnification of the glass. ‘You can see the design or emblem. Look, hold the glass and I’ll sketch it for you.’ He gave that pedantic smile of his. ‘I’m always very keen to get a sketch of the body and its position before the police take it away. I have often been complimented on my work by the authorities.’

  ‘Pompous old sod,’ the man with the monocle cursed to himself. Obediently, however, he held the glass while Spilsbury went to work with pencil and sketch-pad. Rapidly, he put an end to the sketch and held it up to the flaring jet so that the other man could see more clearly. ‘Well, what do you make of that?’

  The man with the monocle jutted his jaw angrily. There the old devil goes again, treating me like a damned snotty-nosed schoolboy, he told himself. He stared, a little puzzled, at what looked like a crooked cross. ‘Isn’t that the Greek cross?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Oh, it goes back further than the Greeks,’ Spilsbury said scornfully, eager, as always, to show off his knowledge. ‘We can trace its origins back to the cults of ancient India and Persia. In fact, it takes its name from the Sanskrit word “svastika”.’

  ‘Svastika?’ the man with the monocle rolled the word around his tongue awkwardly. Then it came to him in a flash. He had seen that crooked cross once before. Just after the war, the beaten German Army had set up mercenary regiments from demobilised soldiers. Armed to the teeth, these free corps, as they had been called, had cut a bloody swathe through those eastern European countries which had once belonged to the old German Empire. In particular, one free corps division had been dreadfully feared throughout eastern Poland. It had been General von der Goltz’s so-called ‘Iron Division’, a ruthless mob of thieves, rapists and killers – and the soldiers of the ‘Iron Division’ had worn that same crooked cross painted in white underneath a skull-and-crossbones on their black coal-scuttle helmets.

  The man with the monocle gave a quick gasp, his mind racing electrically. The bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle seemed to be slowly coming together. But he wasn’t there yet. He’d have to get his skates on though. Since he had arrived back from Germany, Churchill had been breathing down his neck. The politician had even phoned him from Victoria Station as soon as the night train from Cologne had arrived – a clear breach of security – and ordered that something had to be done – ‘this day,’ as he had growled down the phone.

  ‘I shall carry out the post-mortem at my own hospital this afternoon,’ Spilsbury announced, when the other man didn’t speak. He turned to the coroner. ‘Ensure that the body is sent over straight away.’

  The little coroner opened his mouth to answer, but the man with the monocle beat him to it. Now he took his revenge. ‘There will be no post-mortem,’ he snapped, as if he were back on the bridge of the dreadnought he had once commanded, giving orders to some careless snotty. ‘The poor girl has suffered enough. Let her body rest in peace.’

  ‘But there has to be a post-mortem!’ Spilsbury snorted. ‘There has probably been a murder. The matter must be investigated on the basis of the medical evidence—’ He stopped short. Opposite him the man with the monocle was tapping his leg with his cane and for the first time, Spilsbury realised he had a wooden leg.

  ‘Spilsbury,’ the other man said harshly and slowly, ‘understand this. There will be no post-mortem. The poor girl will be buried in Hampshire by her people and that will be the end of it as far as you are concerned. And that goes for you – and you, as well,’ he indicated the coroner and the two mortuary attendants.

  ‘But you can’t do that,’ Spilsbury blustered.

  ‘Oh yes I can, Spilsbury.’ The man with the monocle tapped the pathologist’s skinny chest with the silver knob of his cane, ‘I can do many things of which you know naught. But suffice to say at this moment, if you breathe a word of what you have seen this afternoon in here, I shall ensure that you shall spend a spell in one of His Majesty’s pri
sons to which you have sent many unfortunates yourself in your time.’

  ‘Under what pretext, sir?’

  ‘No pretext. You will be consigned under the Official Secrets Act. Now good day to you.’ He turned and limped out, leaving Spilsbury, standing next to the dead woman, staring at his straight back deflated and utterly bewildered…

  Three

  Somewhere on the land a foghorn sounded mournfully. On the shore itself seagulls called shrilly, like babies calling for their mothers. Everything was damp and dripping with the wet fog. It was a typical east coast ‘sea rock’, cold and bone-chilling. Standing on the wet deck of the Swordfish, Lt Smith, known throughout England as ‘Common Smith VC’, shivered and cursed East Yorkshire yet again. As his second-in-command put it often, ‘East Yorks, old chap, really is the arsehole of the world – and we, unfortunately, are right up it.’

  Smith, forgot the ‘sea rock’, and concentrated on his front, trying to penetrate the rolling white gloom, as the Swordfish wallowed silently in the swell. Ever since the beginning of the year, freighters had been bringing timber from Murmansk in communist Russia and unloading it in Hull. The export of timber had become a very important source of foreign currency for the new masters of a bankrupt Russia. But they had also brought with them another export commodity which was not welcome to His Majesty’s Government in London – spies and agitators!

  Ever since the end of the war, London had been deadly afraid of Red revolution taking place in Britain, just as it had occurred in virtually every other European country. Britain seethed with discontent. Ex-soldiers who had discovered that their country offered them little after four years in the trenches; unemployed factory hands; left-wing intellectuals – there were scores of such groups who would join in any revolution which promised them work, hope and a new way of life.