A Necessary Hell

by Nigel Price

  Ingrid stared into space. Harry watched her. “What are you thinking?”

  “I go into the hospital to give eye tests to patients who are unable to come to the practice.”

  “Bedridden?”

  “That’s it. I’ve never been to the mortuary, but I know where it is. It’s no big deal.”

  “All right then,” Harry said. “You’ve taken the morning off work?”

  “As far as they’re concerned, I’ve said I’m not going in. Helmut, the man you spoke to, told me to take all the time I needed. So I will. He will handle my appointments for me. I have done the same for him before.”

  “Are you sure Thomas is all right?” Harry asked.

  “As sure as I can be. My mother delivered him to school, and as she is expecting me to be at work, she has agreed to pick him up rather than leave him to take the school bus. That will be safer. So he is fine.”

  “Good.”

  They downed their brandies, neither of them eager to set out on the next task of the day.

  “Do you want to use the bathroom?”

  A morning of coffee and excitement had put Harry in need of one. Ingrid had stuck some of Thomas’ drawings on the walls, and ornamental frogs seemed to be the theme. Wax candle ones, china ones, papier-mâché frogs, frogs stuck round the side of the mirror.

  He washed his hands and stepped outside. Ingrid was waiting for him in the hallway. “I thought you’d gone to sleep.”

  “Just admiring the decor. What is it with frogs?”

  She laughed. “Don’t ask. Frogs and I go way back. A story for another time.”

  Leaving it at that, Harry and Ingrid went in search of a corpse.

  Nineteen

  Krankenhaus St Catherine sat on the eastern side of town on the Schwarzerweg road heading out to the little spa resort of Bad Sassendorf. The hospital had been built in the 1980s and refurbished two decades later, with an added ward block, enlarged car park and a Zen rock garden. Supposedly low maintenance, the garden had succumbed to infestation by Japanese knotweed, which Harry thought was somehow appropriate. The genus of weed, that is, not the infestation per se. Though he felt certain there was a metaphor in there somewhere.

  “What’s the German for mortuary?” He had seen a directory bolted to the wall beside the entrance.

  “Just follow me,” Ingrid said. “And it’s Leichenhalle, from …”

  “Leich meaning body?”

  “Leiche.”

  “I thought it was something … leich that.”

  She didn’t bother to respond. More than the idea of viewing a corpse, the notion of entering the mortuary illegally was sapping her confidence.

  Working on the principle that boldness was best, they strode in as if they belonged in the hospital. To an extent, Ingrid did. One of the three receptionists behind the glass-panelled booth greeted her with a cheery wave and called a greeting. Ingrid acknowledged it as enthusiastically as her waning spirits would allow.

  “This way,” she said quietly, and led Harry along a corridor to the left. The walls were painted a brilliant white and the bright strip lighting overhead shone as if they were in a solarium. Harry was going to make a hilarious quip about needing sun-block but one glance at Ingrid and he kept it to himself.

  They got in a lift and went down to the basement where the mortuary was hidden away. On the drive over they had agreed on a story. So when the lift doors opened and they covered the last twenty yards of subterranean corridor, pushed through double swing doors and came to a desk, they gave it a go. Harry produced his ID card that had been issued to him by the airport authorities at the start of his exercise. It gave him access to all areas of the airport. Not to the local mortuary in downtown Soest, but so what?

  Ingrid fired away. Herr Brown was from the airport where the body had been discovered and needed to complete a final check of this or that so they could conclude their paperwork and close the file.

  To their astonishment it worked. The young man behind the desk scrutinised the ID card, noting it was in date, and the photo was indeed of Harry. He consulted a register then scrolled through files on his computer screen. Harry and Ingrid risked swapping a ‘bloody-hell-it’s-working’ glance.

  The moment they did so, it stopped working.

  “You’re too late. The body was cremated yesterday.”

  Ingrid started to translate for Harry but he had already got it. He stared at him. “It was cremated the day after it was found?”

  The man frowned at the English. Harry was about to repeat it, when the light dawned and the man understood.

  “That must be a record,” Harry said.

  “Maybe there was some health risk. Perhaps a religious sensitivity? I don’t know. I wasn’t on duty yesterday.” He liked showing off his linguistic talent. He looked again at his screen. “Part of the body was delivered to us late, I see.”

  “Yes, a hand.”

  “That’s it. That was cremated together with the body.” He saw the expression on the face of the two people before him. “I’m sorry. Was it important?”

  Harry shrugged. “Probably not.” There was no point raising suspicions. More decisively he added, “Not a problem. It was only a routine procedure anyway.”

  The man smiled knowingly. “Box-ticking, eh?” Harry wondered when the fellow had last had the chance to use that.

  “Exactly. Has to be done though.”

  They turned to go, when Ingrid asked, “What about the deceased’s clothing and personal effects?”

  “What about them?” the man replied.

  “Well, he won’t have been cremated in them. What has happened to those?”

  “They would be disposed of too. Incinerated usually. More hygienic.”

  “Yes, but not with the body. Not at the same time. Have those gone yet?”

  Again the man scrolled down his screen. “It doesn’t say. There’s no mention of his effects.”

  “Where would they be? Here?” Harry asked.

  The man shook his head. “No, that will be in the … what is the word? Todesfälle büro.”

  “Bereavement office,” Ingrid said.

  “That is it.”

  “Where is that?” Harry asked. “Is it here in the hospital?”

  “Of course. But not in this block.” He came round from behind his desk and led the way back through the double doors. “Come this way. I will show you.”

  They retraced their steps back to Reception and went outside. They stood under the entrance porch and the man pointed across the car park to a small building that stood alone. “There. That is it. All personal belongings are held there for the family members to collect.”

  “And if there aren’t any family members?”

  “They are still held there. It is all the same.”

  They thanked him and walked away, both of them glad to be out of the mortuary’s strong smell of disinfectant. Both glad, too, not to have to look at a corpse.

  As they walked across the car park, Harry said, “Who could arrange something like this? I mean, in England it would take days. There’d have to be a medical certificate for the Cause of Death, then the formal Death Certificate and then permission to cremate the remains. It all takes time. Not much, but more than thirty-six or forty-eight hours. Here it was barely even that. Who could cut through all that and speed them through?”

  “I don’t know. The police I suppose.”

  “Why would they want to? What’s the rush?”

  “I said I don’t know Harry.”

  “The stowaway was an embarrassment to someone. Someone wanted the whole thing cleared up quickly. Someone who had the clout to do this. And do it fast.”

  “In which case we probably won’t find anything here either.”

  “Unless they were in such a hurry that they slipped up and overlooked it. The cremation of the body and the incineration of the clothing and personal effects would be two separate procedures. There’s just a chance they haven’t both been carried ou
t yet.”

  They hadn’t been.

  “You are in luck,” the duty clerk said, checking the records. “They are to be collected this morning, in fact.” He looked up. “Is that why you are here?” A look of puzzlement. “You’re not who I was expecting.”

  “Who were you expecting?” Harry asked.

  The man looked confused. More rummaging through a mess of papers littering his desk. His housekeeping wasn’t up to the same anal retentive standard of the mortuary clerk.

  He located a slip of paper. Read from it. “It doesn’t say. Just that it is to be collected at …” he checked his wrist watch.

  “We’re early,” Ingrid said quickly.

  “No you’re not,” the man replied. “You’re late. They were supposed to have been collected an hour ago.”

  Harry jumped in. “So they’re still here?”

  More confusion. “I thought you said you had come to collect them? If so, then you must know they’re still here?” His expression hardened.

  Ingrid went into über-charm. “I’m so sorry. We’re a bit muddled this morning. What with one thing and another.”

  “I’ll need a signature,” the man said sternly, as if the threat of having actually to sign for something would be guardian enough.

  “Of course,” Ingrid replied. She reached down and picked up a pen lying amongst the detritus on the desk. “Where?”

  There was a momentary stand-off during which Harry wondered if the whole thing was about to fall apart. Then the man produced a form, most of which had already been completed. He thrust it under her pen. “Here,” he said, stabbing a thick forefinger on the dotted line.

  Ingrid scribbled a signature and the man went through to a back room, the door swinging shut behind him.

  When they were alone, Ingrid seemed to realise what she had just done. “Harry, what the hell do we do with the stuff once we’ve got it? These things have to be done properly. Someone is going to come to collect them. As he said, they’re already late. They could be here any minute. What do we do with the clothes and things once we’ve seen them?”

  “We dump them.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Why?”

  “They need to be properly disposed of. Incinerated.”

  “Then we’ll do that. We’ll burn them if it makes you feel better.”

  “But what when they find out who collected them?”

  “Did you put your real name on the form?”

  She looked insulted. “No, of course not.”

  “Well there you are then. I don’t know about here, but in England things are sometimes stolen from dead people’s personal possessions. I mean, the stowaway himself isn’t going to complain, is he? And there’s no family.”

  “No, but whoever speeded up the cremation. They’re going to be alerted to the fact that someone else is tracking all of this.”

  He smiled. “Judging from my run this morning, I’d say that ship has sailed.”

  “Ship?”

  “They already know. And they know it’s me who’s digging into it. So this is hardly going to make it any worse. Ernst will guess straight away. He’ll know that I haven’t accepted his kind offer.”

  The door to the back room opened and the man returned lugging a black plastic bag tied at the neck. He dumped it on the floor and consulted a paper tag fixed to the ties. “That’s everything.”

  Ingrid thanked him. Harry picked up the bag and they walked out.

  The fresh air struck them both full in the face. They sucked it in, trying their best not to break into a run and hurtle off the premises. They headed for the Jaguar across the car park. Harry took out his key fob, aimed and fired.

  “Why do you do that?” Ingrid asked.

  “I just like to see how far away I can be and still get it to work.”

  “Are you going to regret not accepting the bribe?”

  “I already do. But life’s full of regrets.”

  She laughed. “You’re funny.”

  “Funny odd or okay funny?”

  “Odd. Definitely odd.”

  “Well I’m hoping that’s a good thing.” He hefted the plastic sack in his hand. “Not a vast amount in here by the feel of it.”

  “Do you think you’ll find what you’re hoping for?”

  “No idea. I have to try though. If it’s going to cost me the Jag and a hundred grand, I’d like to make it worth it.”

  “And the ferry ticket to Dover.”

  “How could I forget the cherry on the top?”

  “I just want to know who frightened my son this morning. If anyone hurt Thomas I’d tear them apart.”

  Harry smiled. “I can believe that.”

  They reached the car and got in. Harry slung the bag onto the back seat and started the engine.

  “Harry, wait a minute,” Ingrid said. She stopped dead. “Are we doing the right thing? Maybe Ernst is right. Maybe we should just forget the whole business. Give the bag back and drive away. They would leave us alone.”

  “Are you sure about that?” They sat with the engine idling, on the cusp of decision.

  “Why wouldn’t they? You say the man was trying to kill you this morning. He could have done when you were running over the bridge – that long straight run. Rat in a drainpipe, you said. But he didn’t. Then Ernst with the Jag and the dollars. They want to drive us off. Maybe we should let them.”

  He was silent for a moment. Was she right? What was driving him? A sense of injustice? Self-righteous indignation at the bribe? Or a less noble fear of being found out by Delaney’s if he rigged the report and accepted Hafner’s bribe?

  Was he trying to settle some score on behalf of a wholly unknown individual whose clothing now sat on his back seat?

  More importantly, whatever was driving him was dragging Ingrid and her son into it too.

  He reached for the starter button to turn off the engine. He looked across towards the office. It would be simple to walk back and dump the bag back on the desk without a word. Or say that there had been some mistake and this wasn’t the stuff. Then walk out and walk away.

  The car park was still. There was no one around. On the furthest side, a car turned into the entrance and started to search for a parking place. It was looking for one closest to the Bereavement Office.

  “I think our chance to return the bag and slip away unnoticed just expired,” Harry said.

  The car was a grubby white Skoda. In it were two bulky men. Squeezed in the front like adults on a children’s fairground ride.

  Twenty

  They drove out, keeping the bulk of the parked cars between them and the Skoda. The exit was on the far side, diametrically opposite the entrance, disgorging its cars into the one-way system ringing the hospital.

  As Harry waited for a gap and then drew out into the traffic, Ingrid kept an eye on the office. Both men went inside. Harry got onto the main road then hit the gas, accelerating away.

  They were heading out of town, south towards the motorway. “Where are we going?” Ingrid asked.

  “I thought the hotel might be best. We can open the bag there.”

  “Why not my house? It’s closer.”

  “Exactly. It’s the first place those guys will go when they find the bag’s been taken, and when they match the clerk’s description to us. Even they should be able to work it out.”

  “Yes. And the hotel will be the second place.”

  “By the time they get there, we’ll have looked at the stuff, and then—”

  “And then what?”

  “We escalate. Your police forces are organised individually by state, aren’t they? But don’t you have an FBI equivalent? A federal organisation?”

  “Yes. The Bundeskriminalamt. The BKA. What about them?”

  “Well, if there are a few rotten apples in the local state police, firstly the rot probably doesn’t spread too far from the point of origin, it’ll just be a handful. And secondly, however far it does spread will be irrelevant if
the BKA becomes involved. Their jurisdiction spreads across state boundaries. If there is anything going on here, and if the local boys are trying to cover it up, we simply rack it up a notch and bring in the grown-ups.”

  She wasn’t wholly convinced, but with little choice they sped south towards Harry’s lakeside hotel.

  The ridge came and went, and a while later the car turned into a vacant parking space in front of Haus Fischer. Harry was relieved to see no sign of the proprietors when he and Ingrid walked smartly through Reception lugging the black plastic bin bag. They went up to Harry’s room. He unlocked the door and dropped the bag in the middle of the floor. He closed the door and locked it. The two of them stood over the bag looking down at it as if it was the dead stowaway himself.

  “Want a drink?”

  Ingrid nodded. Two glasses chinked onto the desk and Harry tipped Black Label Scotch into them from a bottle he had bought in Duty Free. “I’m afraid there’s no ice.”

  Ingrid didn’t seem too bothered as she downed an impressive slug. “You going to open it?” she said, her voice small.

  Harry took a long drink himself, then set down his glass and knelt beside the bag.

  The ties at the top came undone easily. He opened the neck of the bag and was about to reach a hand inside. It felt like sticking an arm into a rock hole in the desert. Snake or scorpion nest? So instead he tipped the sack upside down and tumbled the contents onto the carpet.

  “Ah.”

  “What?”

  In answer he picked up an item of clothing with the tips of forefinger and thumb and held it up so that its shape became clear. Then a second item in the other hand. “Salwar kameez. It’s Pashtun. The khet and the partug, he said, indicating the shirt and the trousers. God, takes me back.”

  “What? Holding up another man’s clothing?”

  Harry wasn’t amused. His face was like stone. He was back in the arid rock hills. Back in the barren mountains. “He was an Afghan.”

  “So what was he doing in Istanbul?” Ingrid asked.

  Harry’s smile was hard and bitter. “Just passing through. On the way to a better life. A life better than the shit-hole he’d just come from.”