Huber's Tattoo

by Quentin Smith

  “What’s wrong?” Natasha enquired from behind his left shoulder.

  Henry looked around, his eyes drawn to her elegant figure dressed in a smart black trouser suit.

  “A monster headache.”

  “Tell me about it over a glass of wine?” she suggested. “I’ll massage your neck for you.”

  Henry stood up.

  “Let’s get away from here, somewhere near the Thames.”

  They found a small pub just off Savoy Place near to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, an illustrious building that Henry had previously visited for a Mensa function.

  Natasha ordered a glass of chilled chardonnay, Henry, a merlot and they sat beside the window looking out on to a quiet, narrow street. The Who sang ‘Pinball Wizard’, barely audible above the noise from a table of dark-suited men who conversed ever more boisterously.

  “How’s the…?” Natasha tapped the back of her head.

  Henry bowed his head slightly and felt the crusty skin, the sharp suture knots and the lumpy skin margins around the healing wound.

  “It’s okay. Still feels very tight.”

  They each drank a little wine, arms on the table, hands just inches apart, knees almost touching beneath the battered wooden table.

  “Have you heard?” Natasha asked.

  Henry nodded.

  “My tattoo ink is a perfect match with Vera Schmidt, Jeremy Haysbrook and, I’ll bet, the young American as well.”

  He forced a smile.

  “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what… is there anything…?” Natasha said, her eyes showing her compassion and distress. He placed his hand on top of hers.

  “I’ve had this tattoo all my life, Natasha, since I was a baby most likely.” He was on the verge of an emotional outburst. “I never knew anything about it, all these years. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know where I got it, I don’t know who gave it to me.” He paused, biting his lip. “Who am I?”

  Natasha squeezed his hand.

  “Something tells me you do have a good idea where you got it.”

  He looked away and then met her eyes again.

  “If not there, then I have no idea.”

  “Do you know what you’ll find when we get there?” she asked, still holding his hand.

  Henry shook his head disconsolately and picked up his glass.

  “We’ll figure it out together, Henry. I just really worry about your safety and I still think you should come off this case. We don’t know what else might connect you to the other victims.”

  Gently, Henry withdrew his hand and rubbed the muscles on the side of his neck.

  “I have to go to Steinhöring with an official mandate, Natasha, to give me unrestricted access, to find what I must know. I just have to. I cannot afford to be taken off this case.”

  He emitted a little moan and put the glass down roughly, spilling some wine.

  “Is it your head still?” Natasha asked.

  He nodded, grimacing.

  “Let’s get you home and I’ll give you a massage.”

  She helped him up and they walked out slowly, clinging to each other like a wounded soldier does to a nurse, making their way to Charing Cross.

  Thirty-Seven

  Steinhöring

  Bauer sat behind his desk, reclining in his chair, legs crossed and fingers drumming on the wooden surface. He was wearing his black SS uniform and this, together with the fact that he did not make eye contact, made Huber feel somewhat on edge.

  “So she bled to death?” Bauer said, flicking his eyes up at Huber briefly.

  “Yes, Professor.” Huber was uncertain whether to address Bauer as Professor, or Standartenführer. He gambled on their historic familiarity from KWI.

  “You could not save her?”

  Huber hesitated, trying to feel his way diplomatically into this avenue of opportunity without endangering himself.

  “Perhaps if we had been able to perform an emergency hysterectomy we could have stopped the bleeding,” he said, looking up to judge Bauer’s reaction.

  Bauer stood up and dismissed this suggestion with an irritable wave of his arm, as though swatting a fly. He stood in front of the hominid evolution map, staring at it.

  “She would be no use to us without a uterus, super intelligent or not,” Bauer said gruffly, rocking back and forth on his heels such that the thick leather of his black boots creaked.

  “Perhaps the help of a good gynaecologist might have saved her life and salvaged her fertility?” Huber offered, contemplating the back of Bauer’s head. “We are in experimental territory, Professor, pushing the boundaries of human reproduction. Do you not think the services of a good gynaecologist would only augment what we neuroscientists have to offer?”

  Bauer spun around and fixed Huber with a bland stare.

  “You have someone in mind?”

  Taken by surprise, Huber’s eyes widened.

  “I have to get back to Berlin urgently, Rolph, and I need you to be my eyes and ears here at Heim Hochland,” Bauer continued, sitting down impatiently once again.

  “Sturmbannführer Oskar Pahmeyer is a fine gynaecologist, Professor. We worked together at Hadamar and I have known him for many years.”

  Huber’s heart was beating fast, though he tried to appear nonchalant. Bauer seemed distracted, on edge, less approachable than on preceding days.

  “We have already lost some mothers and babies in childbirth,” Bauer reflected sombrely. “We cannot afford to keep doing so. Our first batch of twenty has yielded six babies, two died, the other twelve are currently on our two wards.” He gesticulated vaguely with his arm.

  “Were some of these six babies at the baptism the other day, Professor?” Huber asked, thinking about Himmler’s presence.

  Bauer nodded.

  “Nobody but Himmler and I knew that. Now you know, too.”

  “How will we tell them apart and identify them for future work?” Huber asked.

  Bauer looked at Huber without a flicker of reaction.

  “They have names, we have records.”

  Huber sat forward.

  “This is important scientific work, Professor. From one group to another we must know where we stand, whether interventions are effective and how we are progressing.”

  “What do you suggest then, Rolph?”

  “The babies need to be marked, somehow.”

  Bauer shrugged.

  “Very well. You are a scientist, you will figure out something appropriate, I’m sure. Just make it discreet.”

  An awkward silence ensued as Bauer sat and rubbed his index finger across his lips, occasionally tapping them for a few seconds before resuming the pattern. Suddenly, he inhaled sharply.

  “I cannot have you, as my deputy in this unit, outranked by a gynaecologist, Rolph. That would not be right.”

  Huber’s heart sank.

  “I will have to arrange for you to be promoted to Sturmbannführer with immediate effect. This Pahmeyer fellow will come via Berlin to see me so that I can brief him personally before he enters this facility. He will report to you and you will report to me.”

  Huber sat, stunned. He couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  “Give me his details and I will make the arrangements,” Bauer said, extracting a pile of brown folders from the filing cabinet before closing and locking it. “You will need to read these tonight, Rolph, case files and details of the interventions we are presently undertaking on our subjects. Any questions by breakfast, please. I leave for Berlin at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Bauer dropped the folders on to the desk, sending a few sheets of loose paper flying across the room. He studied Huber’s face dispassionately.

  “It should all be quite familiar to you as you know Vogt’s work. As a neuroscientist you will understand the principles and the science behind it. It has simply never been used in this way on humans before, that is all that is different.”

  Bauer spoke as though he was merely discussing a
new recipe for preparing sauerkraut. Then he stood up to leave, pausing beside Huber as he placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “The Führer is depending on us, Rolph. We must not disappoint him. If you do this well, Reichsführer Himmler will surely remember your name; if you do this badly, he will not forget your name.”

  Bauer patted Huber twice on the shoulder before opening his office door with a muted, oily squeak. He turned around to look at Huber.

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  Huber felt as though he was in the headmaster’s office. He sighed heavily.

  What had he got himself into, he wondered, closing his eyes?

  Thirty-Eight

  Henry stooped and fumbled with the key to his apartment. His head felt ready to burst, like an overripe melon baking in an unrelenting sun. The door suddenly yielded inwards and he stumbled in, followed by Natasha in a fragrant mist of summer flowers.

  The lights were on in the apartment, Carole King sang and Henry suddenly felt the Medusa-like stare of George upon him. He looked up, though the bright light stabbed at his eyes and his head throbbed.

  “George?” he managed to say, confused.

  “My, my, am I disturbing the happy couple?”

  George was sitting in the armchair wearing a charcoal grey tracksuit, one leg elevated and resting on a pouffe.

  “I have to sit down,” Henry mumbled, gripping his head in both hands and falling into the suede sofa.

  Natasha’s face was creased with concern, but she was paralysed, frozen to the spot by the awkwardness and embarrassment of finding George in the apartment.

  “He has a really bad headache,” Natasha explained, gesturing feebly towards Henry who was doubled over on the sofa with his head buried in his hands.

  George did not move a muscle, though her eye twitched involuntarily. She simply sat and absorbed the scene, calculating her next move, measuring the depth of the blow she would strike.

  “So, Natasha, do you normally at this point give Henry an Indian head massage to alleviate your boss’s headache?”

  Neither Natasha nor Henry responded. Natasha did not know where to look, and Henry’s eyes were shut.

  “Well, at least now we all know how you found the tattoo. Question is simply, I suppose, how long has this been going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on, George,” Henry mumbled through his fingers.

  “I should go,” Natasha said, turning to the door.

  Henry straightened in his seat, wincing as though he had pulled a muscle.

  “No, you’ve done nothing wrong, Natasha. Please stay, have coffee,” he said.

  Natasha could feel the icy cold of George’s disapproving eyes.

  “Thank you, but I think I’ll go home. I hope you’re feeling better in the morning… guv.” She shut the door quietly behind her.

  Henry folded over again and groaned.

  “That was rude, George.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Henry. Do you have any more surprises planned?”

  “I wasn’t expecting you home so soon.”

  George sat back and clasped her hands together. She stared unsympathetically at Henry.

  “Does that imply that if you knew I was here you would have been more discreet?”

  “She saw me home, George, I have a bad head. That’s all there is to it.”

  George leaned forward as if to sniff him like a territorial animal.

  “Has she slept in our bed, Henry?”

  Henry looked up at her, his eyes pink and strained. He felt a sudden pang of guilt about the Ibis Hotel in Carsac and because he was sorry that Natasha had left.

  “No, damn silly question, George.”

  George did not move, staring at him as he suffered, her temporal muscles tightening rhythmically as she clenched her jaws. Henry sank back into the sofa and closed his eyes.

  “It was good of you to come back on my behalf, though, but you didn’t need to,” he said, massaging his temples with two fingers on each side of his head.

  “What do you mean, ‘I didn’t need to’?”

  “The tattoo thing, it’s all under control, nothing to be concerned about.”

  George frowned.

  “Why do you have one? What does it mean, Henry?”

  Henry hesitated before answering.

  “I don’t know, yet.”

  George stood up with difficulty, guarding the leg that had been propped up on the pouffe. She hobbled, winced and cursed.

  “So where are you and the lovely Natasha off to next in your investigation?” she asked, her voice heavy with insincerity.

  Henry’s eyes were still closed and he seemed oblivious to George’s disingenuousness.

  “Probably Germany.”

  “Is that where you think you came from?”

  Her voice became more distant as she entered the open plan white and glass kitchen, dragging her bad leg carefully behind her. Henry shrugged.

  “Ouch! Damn it!” George cursed as she bumped her leg into the kitchen cabinet.

  Henry’s eyes burst open. He blinked, dazzled by the bright light.

  “What’s wrong with your leg?” he asked.

  George waved a dismissive hand. She soothed her thigh with the flat of her palm, before straightening and searching in the grocery cupboard above her head.

  “Ugh, it’s nothing. Tiny piece of shrapnel, that’s all.”

  Henry’s aching brain turned this over with a resounding clunk.

  “Is that why you came back?” he asked.

  George shrugged in a non-committal manner.

  “You didn’t even tell me about this,” he said.

  In that instant he suddenly felt immensely lonely. Just as he had hit rock bottom with the discovery of the tattoo linking him to a brotherhood of murdered, curiously different individuals without a past, just when he needed the support of George, the woman with whom he had shared the last six years, he was faced with this harsh reality: it was not his plight that had brought George back to London, but a tiny piece of shrapnel. Despite not having a sense of belonging, no family to call upon, even George didn’t seem to care about what he was going through.

  “You didn’t actually come back because of my tattoo, did you?”

  “That’s not entirely fair,” George said, shooting a defensive glance across at him.

  Despite his throbbing head, Henry stood up quickly and began to move across towards the bedroom.

  “Henry, I… er…”

  “I’m tired, George, I have the mother of all headaches and I’m going to bed.”

  George stood in the kitchen facing the white Shaker-style cabinets in silent contemplation, her arms pressed down on the white melamine worktop either side of her.

  Thirty-Nine

  Henry’s phone rang. He squinted at the alarm clock and forced his eyes open: he had overslept and it was eight o’clock. Remembering suddenly that George was home, he rolled back and reached out an arm only to find the bed cold and empty. His hand rustled against a sheet of paper as the phone continued to ring.

  Hospital appointment for my leg. Didn’t want to wake you. Hope you’re feeling better. George x

  He answered the phone on the tenth ring.

  “Henry?” It was Natasha.

  “Yeah, hi, I’m sorry, I overslept. It must have been the headache.”

  “Henry, you’re not going to believe this.”

  Henry fought back the vestiges of nagging weariness.

  “We’ve got another body with a matching tattoo.”

  Henry sat bolt upright and switched the phone from one hand to the other.

  “What? Where?”

  “In Durham. A fresh one. Bruce wants us up there by, you know, yesterday. We’ll have to move.”

  He frowned, rubbing his forehead with his free hand.

  “Who called it in?”

  “Durham Constabulary, when they saw the post mortem report and someone eagle-eyed spotted the matches on HOLMES
.”

  “It’s not…”

  “No, it’s not Professor Guinney.”

  “Thank God. I’ll see you at Kings Cross in…”

  “Forty-five minutes, sir,” Natasha said, adding, “Don’t tell the missus that it’s me again.”

  Henry smiled. “She’s not here.”

  *

  They were met at Durham Railway Station by the globular frame of DI Doug Stanbridge, who was wearing a billowing, diaphanous black shirt. The sky was clear but for thin, cirrostratus clouds high up in the atmosphere.

  “It looks very quaint, sir,” Natasha remarked as she admired the panoramic view of the small peninsula city flanked on three sides by the River Wear and its ring of dense woodland.

  “That it is. Did you know I went to primary school here?” Henry said as they climbed into the back of a white Vauxhaull Astra marked with blue and yellow checked livery.

  “Now, the body was found by school children searching for a football near Prebends Bridge,” Stanbridge said in his thick Geordie accent. Henry wondered if he would have to translate for Natasha, as in France. Stanbridge had turned his rotund frame through forty-five degrees in the front seat to be able to see Henry and Natasha in the rear of the car. “The victim is a young music lecturer at the university, only thirty-five years old, shot in the head.”

  Natasha and Henry exchanged a glance as the police car pulled away, driven by a young uniformed constable.

  “How did you know to contact the Met about this case?” Henry asked.

  “Well, at the post mortem the doc found a tattoo on his skull. Mind, he did have quite a few tattoos on his body, but this one was different. He also said something about the man’s brain being quite large and when we checked HOLMES we spotted the matches. You’ve had three cases, haven’t you, DCI?” Stanbridge said.

  Good work, Henry thought.

  “We’ve had two in London, one occurred in Grasmere, and a fourth in France.”

  “France?”