No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (21 page)

Taking his weight on the left arm, Ron reached up, grabbed the thong and held the weapon dangling from his own wrist as he clambered down to the ground.

There was a lot of discolouration, dark, almost rust coloured with raised particles sticking to the wood. Worrall had no doubt that this was the weapon that had bludgeoned Doris Butler to death. He called to the other men, giving instructions so that Billy Bones came over and held a large cellophane evidence envelope under the truncheon, allowing Ron to drop the weapon into the bag and so hold it safe from contamination. Whoever had battered Doris to death in her kitchen had crept out to the hiding place, then tossed the item gently into the tree where it had luckily slid among the branches, snagging itself almost hidden against the trunk.

‘Might never of found it,’ observed Trickman.

‘What goes up must come down.’ Ron said. ‘Lucky throw.’

‘Yea,’ Bones agreed.

The two uniforms in their blue overalls still moved up and down the lawn, searching.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mungo was still with Tommy when they arrived back at the Central Sheffield nick. ‘I’m going to London and you’re coming even if I have to crush you into my suitcase,’ Tommy told him. ‘And when I’ve talked to your guv’nor you could find yourself on permanent traffic duty … in the Orkneys.’

‘Most restful, sir.’ Mungo’s face didn’t show a flicker.

Tommy said he should get his overnight bag. ‘I’m not going to see Woolly Bear without you, Mungo. I want you there when he lays his nasty bits of secret news on me. And don’t go playing hide and seek round the nick because I’m not leaving without you.’

‘Ears, sir,’ said Mungo in a passable imitation of Detective Chief Superintendent Bear.

There was good news and bad news waiting when Tommy got to the little office they had given him: two chairs, a plain table for work, two telephones and one of the amusing
Careless Talk Costs Lives
posters on the wall – the one with Hitler and Goering on a bus sitting behind a pair of yattering women. ‘Reminds me of you, heart,’ he’d said to Suzie when describing his surroundings to her.

First was the bad news, Brian came in to say he’d heard the chief wanted him.

‘We’re going up to town, Brian. Get the Wolseley juiced up.’

‘The Wolseley’s u/s, Chief.’

‘Well, get us a car from here.’

‘None available, Chief. I’ve been dashing around like the proverbial blue-based fly trying to get one. No can do.’

‘How long to get the Wolseley operational?’

‘Two to three days.’

‘What the hell’s wrong with it? Sprung a leak?’

‘Something like that. Needs a new rotor arm and they’re muttering dark prophecies about a rebore.’

Tommy thought for a minute, said
he
needed a rebore, and added that they’d have to go by train. ‘Myself, Ron and that bugger Mungo.’

Brian went off to check the trains and Ron Worrall came in with a smile that could have got an award. He held the bagged truncheon up like the Chancellor of the Exchequer holding his dispatch box for the cameras before making his budget speech.

‘Another sixpence on fags?’ Tommy asked.

‘No, the Holy Grail.’ Ron tried for a wider smile. ‘The murder weapon.’

Tommy had collected bits of naval slang from Suzie’s Royal Marine brother. ‘Shave off!’ he said. Then once more with feeling, ‘Shave off! Stroll on!’

Ron told him about the drama of finding the truncheon.

‘Stroll on,’ Tommy repeated. Then he asked about prints. All the film scripts had coppers talking about ‘dabs’ which they just didn’t like and certainly didn’t do. They always spoke of ‘prints’.

‘There’s plenty of gore and possibly flesh on it. Where there’s muck there’s money, Chief.’

‘We’ll do it properly. You come with us, Ron. It can go over to the Bureau as soon as we get in, then you can ride it over to Hendon.’

‘Chief,’ Ron acknowledged. The Fingerprint Bureau was part of Scotland Yard itself. A former inspector general of the Bengal Police, Edward Henry, had been appointed Assistant Commissioner (Crime) early in 1901. A few months later he set up the Bureau, continuing the wonderful work he had begun in India. Hendon, the site of the Police College, was also the home of the Forensic Science Laboratory. The College had been closed for the duration when the war broke out in ’39, but the laboratory remained, despite the mistrust of ‘scientific policing’ in some circles.

Tommy was fond of telling people that when the famed Lord Trenchard, ‘Father’ of the RAF, had become Commissioner of the Met in the Thirties he was told by eminent doctors that they were dead against police-paid scientific experts giving evidence in court. They said the public and the judges wouldn’t accept such evidence.

‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that the blood and flesh on that truncheon belong to Doris Butler,’ Tommy said, then picked up and opened the large envelope that had come from the Yard addressed to him. Suzie’s reports and the photographs spilt out onto the table just as Sergeant Mungo came in with his overnight case.

‘Crikey,’ Mungo peered at the picture of Michael Lees-Duncan, ‘Stan Gittins doesn’t look so good.’ He scowled. ‘Positively peaky.’

‘Who?’ Tommy looked up at him, frowning, then down at his finger touching the edge of the photo of Michael Lees-Duncan looking only half alive even though he was actually dead.

‘That’s Stanley Gittins.’ Mungo said. He was telling them that this was Stanley Gittins, corporal in the 1
st
Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, friend of Doris Butler. Probably the last person she had been seen with.

‘Of course it is,’ said Tommy feeling the best he’d felt all day. Jackpot, he thought. Bingo, reaching for the telephone to ring Suzie.

Hold the front page, heart.

Got a scoop, have you?

May even have a result. Now this is what I want you to do …

*   *   *

It was towards the end of August that the bad news came to Max Voltsenvogel. The pink flimsy paper he held in both hands trembled unnecessarily, so he lowered his elbows to the desktop and looked above the paper at the young Unterscharführer Schmidt, his servant, his shadow and, sometimes, his conscience. Now the man’s steady blue eyes appeared to be holding Voltsenvogel’s like a radar beam trying to detect movement. It was a quiet benign battle of wills.

‘This came direct?’ Voltsenvogel asked quietly.

‘Less than five minutes ago, Herr Gruppenführer. In the normal traffic we get around six o’clock. It was sandwiched between an aircraft test transmission and a series of BBC Overseas rubbish.
Flaubert would like to speak with Lapin. The willow still weeps in Henley-on-Thames.
You know the kind of stuff, sir. It’s clever to piggyback on top of those radio messages. The British are too arrogant to monitor those broadcasts.’

‘I’m surprised London still needs to send the messages, now they’re actually here, on the ground.’

‘It is not altogether a pessimistic situation. Some would say it was evidence that they are not in control of their so-called resistance forces.’

Voltsenvogel smirked. ‘General de Gaulle’s resistance forces, you mean.’

Schmidt nodded with a tight little smile, followed by a small shrug and a knowing look.

Voltsenvogel knew that what he held in his hands was genuine information. It was also bad news. ‘So we must consider that Bellwether (he used the German word
Leithammel
) is dead?’

‘That’s what it says, Herr Gruppenführer. He’s dead.’

Voltsenvogel nodded and ground his teeth, moved his head in a sideways turn, as if winking, then cursed. Bellwether had been the weak link from the beginning. ‘Always had private agendas, Bellwether.’ He looked at the little corporal as though he was blaming him, personally, for the news of his agent’s death. ‘These Nazis who’re intellectually transformed are like Roman Catholic converts: more holy than the Pope himself: more of a fascist than the Führer. At least we have the Ram.’ –
Der Widder.

‘You said some time ago, Colonel, that much depended on him – on Bellwether. Now he has come unstuck.’ Schmidt’s eyes showed no sign of moving away, steady as a barmaid’s hand on the pump, Voltsenvogel thought. The boy had nerve. Was it paranoid of him to suspect the young man? He hardly thought so. His byword was that you should suspect everyone, especially those who bring bad news and this was bad news for Operation
Löwenzahn
: Lion’s Teeth.

‘You don’t get more unstuck than dead. But, yes, we have the Ram,’ Voltsenvogel repeated. In his heart he felt the two agents had been wrongly named. Bellwether should have been called the Ram, while the Ram should have been called Bellwether. Why in heaven’s name had Bellwether killed the woman? She was a good, dependable little cog in Voltsenvogel’s English part of the organisation: someone who couriered, and looked after agents for the odd night. ‘Our bed and breakfast girl,’ Schmidt called her. Someone for them to talk with. Damn Bellwether. What had happened? She’d probably looked at him the wrong way, or made a remark he took to be disparaging. He was always a little unhinged, apt to fly off the handle. Become violent. Fool.

The room in which Voltsenvogel sat had originally been planned as the main reception room of this long low bungalow, built in 1938 for a doctor who had his eye on retirement. As soon as you entered this room you were aware of the beautifully sprung and polished natural wooden floor, while the varnished panelling doubled the price. There were four high windows set in the outside wall, and two more in the shorter end wall, for the room was on one corner of the house. The casements were wooden, beautifully crafted and fashioned with great care. Once a show place, the interior, under the SS, had become vulgar and cheap. The curtains were a heavy silk, the colour of the bottom of a pond, which meant they did not match any other colours in the room, making the cream sofas look dingy and clashing unpleasantly with the three big throw rugs, and the heavy peach-coloured wallpaper, chosen by the doctor’s wife herself. Now also the pictures and decorations were not in keeping with the design of the place – Hitler photographed at his desk looking gravely into the camera, like a provincial schoolmaster, another of Reichsführer Himmler, looking exactly what he was – a chicken farmer – and a painting of the Brandenberg Gate in fog that would have not been out of place on a cheap box of chocolates.

The bungalow stood in a small patch of ground – a couple of acres – made into a pleasant formal garden just outside the small town of Huissen, some ten kilometres west of Arnem. Intelligence Group Odin – Voltsenvogel’s own overdramatic nomenclature of his unit – had used this spacious home as their headquarters for a little over a year now.

When he really owned to it, Odin had been conceived by Voltsenvogel as early as the summer of 1940 when, as a member of the RSHA – the Reich Security Administration – he had been trained and posted to Department VI, the Foreign Intelligence division. The plan itself had not formed until it began to flourish in the past two years. But the germ of it had been seeded into his mind back in the early summer of 1940 when nothing could go wrong for the Führer and the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

Voltsenvogel’s face was closed, showing nothing. ‘The Ram,’ he said again. Then, in English, ‘You are looking after the Ram, friend Schmidt? Taking care of him? Preparing him?’

Kurt Schmidt replied in English, fluent, a cultured accent – what the British themselves would, incorrectly, call an Oxford accent. ‘Night and day. I don’t let him rest.’ It was the accent and the man’s knowledge of colloquial English that gave Voltsenvogel occasional doubts. Only a week ago, the corporal had said he thought the officers who had tried to kill the Führer – the 20
th
July plotters – were ‘round the bend’. He had the British slang off to a T, and that had worried Voltsenvogel.

‘What,’ the SS-Gruppenführer asked now, ‘would have happened if von Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed Hitler? Tell me that, Schmidt. What would it have achieved?’

Schmidt held out a hand and tipped it from side to side. ‘Maybe the enemy would have sued for peace: a few thousand lives saved.’

Everyone was conscious that the battle was hopeless. The slow progress of the Allies would have no effect on the final outcome. Everybody in Voltsenvogel’s small command was jittery, straining as though they could hear the raucous sounds of battle from the west.

‘When you cut off the head, the body dies, yes?’ Voltsenvogel nodded. ‘Well, we shall see. Tell the Ram that his time is nigh.’ He sounded like a cheap evangelist thumping his Bible, and knew it, the spectre of a smile around his lips, not even rising up his cheeks.

‘In those words, Colonel?’

‘In those words exactly.’ A dismissive nod. He wondered if it would work in reverse, cutting off the head. He thought it would cause the Allies to flinch, shrink back and in that moment take their eyes off the ball. The Allies were all so obsessed with the goodness of their cause. It was partly the Jewish question. We would never behave like that, we
could
never carry out such barbaric acts, they would say to each other. So what was Hamburg and the firestorms? What Dresden? What Cologne? Voltsenvogel thought, ‘Don’t tell me the Allied leaders didn’t know what they were doing?’ Men, women and children consigned to the bombs and the flames?

Cut off the head and the body dies. We’ll see.

As he reached the door, Schmidt said there was one further thing, ‘A secure message on the cipher machine. For you only. From your friend SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Lottle. From Peenemünde. The beanpole adjutant. Remember him?’ For a moment their differing ranks disappeared.

‘Unzip it for me, Kurt…’

‘But it’s for you only. Your eyes.’

‘As the Yankees say, who’s counting?’

When Schmidt returned with the message neatly typed he told his superior officer that Lottle was showing off. ‘The signal came, forwarded by OKL – Luftwaffe Headquarters. He’s letting you know what an important man he is.’

Voltsenvogel read the message and chuckled. ‘Yes, he’s showing off. We talked about the British cryptonyms –
Diver
for the Fe103 and
Big Ben
for the A-4 rocket – the
Vergeltungswaffe Zwei.
I suppose he’s trying to be witty.’ He read aloud, ‘Big Ben will chime in Paris on 7
th
and London on 8
th
.’