“Oh yes,” Natasha said, deep in thought. “That was before Bruce called, demanding our immediate return.”
Henry was puzzled by Natasha’s demeanour, watching her with a frown as she turned the envelope over in her fine hands.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.
Natasha’s eyes, which had been searching the room for something elusive, suddenly turned to Henry and fixed on his. She looked as though she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“Tell me,” Henry urged, taking her hand gently in his.
It felt warm, soft and strangely fragile. She did not withdraw it. He heard her swallow, noisily.
“Bruce is convinced that the killer is based in Britain, probably here in London.” The words came out like a confession floating on a sigh.
Henry felt his heart leap into his throat.
“I’m really worried about you, Henry. Everyone with a tattoo has wound up dead. Now you’re here in this flat all alone, cut off from the protection of the police.”
Her eyes searched his and he could feel the pressure from her fingers increase. His heart began to beat faster. For a brief moment he was back in Carsac, imagining his face pressed into the lumpy pillow as her fingers massaged not just his neck, but his soul.
“Stay with me,” Henry heard himself say.
Natasha looked down before closing her eyes briefly. What could have been an exhilarating, passionate silence quickly became awkward.
“I have to go,” she said suddenly, pulling away and standing up.
“Why?”
Natasha gathered her things, flustered.
“Believe me, Henry, if things were different I would stay without a moment’s hesitation. I really would. I’m so sorry… I… I just have to go.”
Her eyes were moist, filling with tears. Before he knew what had happened, she was out of the door. Henry frowned and thrust his hands into his denim pockets. Something was afoot, something she had not revealed to him.
Then his head began to ache, deep within his skull, throbbing, pulsating, crushing his capacity for clear thought. What bad timing he thought: moments earlier and Natasha may have stayed and helped ease the discomfort.
He walked to the coffee table and picked up a flapjack in his fingers, studied it and then began to bite away at it hungrily, licking his fingers as he went. What was on the telly, he wondered?
Sixty-Nine
The Polizei had been knocking and calling through the door of 17 Wollingerstrasse for about thirty minutes, peering through windows, conferring with neighbours and listening with increasing curiosity to the cacophony of cat calls emanating from within.
Munich Police had responded positively to the call for assistance from Scotland Yard. Superintendent Bruce was a diplomatic and persuasive officer when he needed to be and he convinced them that Dieter Schröder was worth a closer look. The difficulty was finding him: no one had seen or heard from Schröder for some time.
Eventually it came through: permission to break and enter Schröder’s house. Two burly officers swung the ram and splintered the multitudinous locks in the door frame with a resounding crack, pushing the door open to reveal a hallway filled with cats of all colours, walking back and forth, meowing frantically and looking up expectantly at the police officers. The cats left tiny red paw prints wherever they walked, as if they had stepped in spilled red paint – only it wasn’t paint – a macabre detail not missed by the Polizei.
Once the door had finally been opened the interior of the house revealed for the first time its odour of contained death, advanced death, which not even the neglected smell of untended cat urine could mask.
Seventy
Natasha sat in front of Bruce’s desk, knotting her fingers together in her lap. Her hair was not as finely brushed as usual and her face not as carefree. Bruce noticed.
“You OK, Sergeant?”
Natasha did not look up.
“We’ve traced this Gustav Nauhaus to a small village in eastern Germany called Wernigerode,” she said, reading from a notepad in her lap. “He is known by the name Gustav Huber, now seventy-two and retired from his job as a teacher in the local school.”
Bruce studied her carefully over his clasped hands, elbows resting on the desk.
“He is very active in a group called Lebensspuren, ‘Traces of Life’, which is an association for children born in Lebensborn homes during the Third Reich.”
“What is its purpose, this association?” Bruce asked, unclasping his hands momentarily.
“It encourages German Lebensborn victims to embrace their past, to speak out and uncover their secretive and ignominious childhood… as well as adult… experiences.”
Bruce pulled a face.
“Do the local police regard him as a potential threat?”
“No, sir, though he has, for many years now, used his father’s surname of Huber, apparently to avoid being pestered by Lebensborn historians.”
Bruce raised his eyebrows fractionally.
“In any case he is elderly, hard of hearing apparently, and walks with a stick.”
Bruce sniffed loudly.
“How much effort does it take to pull a trigger?”
“The killer did slit two victims’ throats, sir.” Natasha countered. “One of them on top of a bridge over the Dordogne.”
“My understanding is that we don’t know for certain where Pequignot was killed,” Bruce said sharply. “But I take your point, Sergeant. So we’re no further forward than Dieter Schröder?” Bruce said, partly as a statement and partly a leading question.
Natasha did not answer.
“I have been liaising with the Munich Police. They cannot find Dieter Schröder,” Bruce said, clasping his hands beneath his chin.
Natasha’s face twisted.
“I am really concerned about Henry, sir. He’s all alone in his apartment. If Schröder’s missing…”
“Is his girlfriend back in Kabul?”
“Cairo, sir. You see, Henry shares just about every unlikely common factor that links all these different victims together,” Natasha said, eyes downcast, her fingers digging into each other.
“You really do think he may be a potential target for the killer, don’t you?” Bruce asked, narrowing his eyes.
Natasha nodded.
“Shouldn’t we be protecting him, sir? The killer struck when Henry was in Durham and possibly when he was in the Dordogne as well. How long can his good fortune last, especially now that I’m not with him all the time? We’ve just cast him out and he’s alone and quite possibly vulnerable.”
Bruce pondered this for a moment before reaching for the phone on his desk and picking it up.
“I agree. Get yourself over there, Sergeant, while I arrange for uniformed officers to shadow him. You’d better call him and tell him.”
Natasha’s face brightened.
“Thank you, sir. This makes me feel much better.”
Bruce nodded and then held up a finger in the air, as if summoning Natasha to wait.
“Have you spoken to his girlfriend yet?”
“About what, sir?” Natasha felt a sense of foreboding.
Bruce stared at her and shrugged.
“You’re a clever detective, Sergeant: you’ll know what to ask.”
Natasha’s face flushed.
“I would call her,” Bruce said, tapping the side of his nose.
Natasha stood up.
“Oh, one more thing,” he said, cupping the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand. “I heard back from NABIS. The ballistic experts have come up with a second weapon as a possible match to the markings on the recovered bullets.”
Natasha recalled NABIS previously matching the bullets with high probability to a Glock.
“What other weapon?” she asked, apprehensively.
“Believe it or not, Sergeant, but a German Luger 9mm Parabellum, as used in the Second World War.”
Natasha’s head began to spin. This fitted perfe
ctly with her suspicions about Dieter Schröder.
“We need to find Schröder, sir.”
Her eyes fixed intently on Bruce’s face.
“I agree, Sergeant. Get yourself to Henry’s apartment.”
Seventy-One
Gustav Huber leaned on the rickety wooden podium beneath ornate eighteenth century Bathstone columns that supported the lavish minstrels’ gallery. He was standing in the old Tearoom at Bath’s Assembly Rooms in front of an audience of about twenty-five, mostly silver-haired people in coats, with a splash of journalists brandishing cameras and microphones to one side.
“It is deeply ironic that I stand here today to talk to you about Lebensborn,” he began in perfect English, inflected with a noticeable Teutonic accent.
He glanced at the small audience, scattered through the first ten rows of padded seats on wooden strip flooring. Except for the journalists, they were all at least sixty to seventy years old; several bald heads, most wearing glasses and holding walking sticks. Gustav himself was glabrous with bushy strips of wispy, white hair above each enlarged ear in which he wore flesh-tone hearing aids. His eyebrows were white and thick, like a Hawk Moth’s antennae.
“The first irony is that soon after I was born, to a nation seeking perfection in every respect and domination over the world, the Luftwaffe bombed this beautiful building in which I am standing now, causing considerable fire damage.” He glanced up at the high plaster ceiling, resembling an inverted apfelstrüdel, and three imposing two-tiered glass chandeliers that hung down the length of the room.
“Thankfully, they did not succeed in destroying it,” he said with a chuckle.
The audience shuffled, some coughed, while the journalists listened intently as their cameras clicked.
“The second irony is that I was born to be perfect, selected to be perfect, raised to be perfect, yet look at me now: I am grey like everyone else my age; I am losing my hair, like everyone else my age; I have arthritis and walk with a limp and a stick, like many people my age, and I wear glasses, just like my father did.”
Gustav was slightly overweight, round-faced with a broad button nose. He did have the deepest blue eyes imaginable behind the thick lenses of his square, black-framed spectacles.
“I was born to rule the world, yet I have worked as a humble school teacher for the past twenty years, trying to figure out who exactly I am meant to be, why society neither recognises my superior genetic composition nor my failure to live up to expectations.”
A door creaked open near the back of the room and a tall man with short black hair entered. He moved slowly and quietly and chose to sit unobtrusively in one of the last rows in the room. Gustav paused and watched with curiosity as the man sat down.
“So what makes me different? What makes some of you different?” He pointed to members of the audience who shuffled uncomfortably. “We are stigmatised by our pedigree, by our ancestors. Who can be proud to be the child of the very Nazis who bombed this beautiful building?” He raised an arm and swept it across in front of his body. “The very Nazis who murdered and committed genocide against ethnic groups because they had the wrong skin or hair colour.”
He looked at the faces in front of him. They were captivated, but self-conscious, ashamed perhaps, unaccustomed to being in the limelight.
“The people responsible for these crimes are dead now, but we continue to live with our personal shame, our emotional emptiness and scars, until we, too, eventually, die.”
Gustav’s eyes faltered as they scanned the faces of those in front of him. Nobody moved a muscle, not even the journalists. “But we do not have to be alone any longer. There is now a network of Lebensborn children in Germany called Lebensspuren, which means ‘Traces of Life’ in English. We meet to talk about our past, our dark secrets and forbidden memories, our shared sense of shame. Society no longer fears and hates us as they did soon after the end of the war, but now they need to know about us and learn from us. Our terrible secret can no longer be kept silent, and Lebensspuren helps to get it all out into the open.”
Gustav stooped over to drink from a glass of water on the podium and in so doing bumped the microphone, producing a jarring noise that reverberated throughout the stone room.
“You are here because you share something both with me and with each other, a common origin, common childhood experiences and memories. Let me tell you something: I grew up in luxury and comfort, the likes of which few children in Steinhöring could ever have dreamed of in 1939. My mother was in charge of the Lebensborn home, where I was born, and my father was a Nazi officer doing experiments on unborn babies.” He paused, gripping the podium. “I have every reason to believe that my father conducted these experiments on me as well, undoubtedly with my mother’s consent, of course.”
Gustav gazed intently at the audience. The sniffles and coughs had subsided, the shuffling feet had fallen still, even the man at the back was enraptured. Gustav could tell because every eye in the room was fixed on him. But he knew it was not out of sympathy.
“As for many of you, too, it did not end there. When I was eighteen years old I discovered that Heinrich Himmler was my godfather, that he was present at my baptism and that he swore an oath of allegiance to The Third Reich on my behalf. Can you imagine living with such a thing?” He paused, a grimace pulling at his face, tormented by his own public declaration, one that he had perhaps made countless times before to similar audiences across Germany and possibly beyond.
“But, I also know that every one of you here will have your own childhood horrors to recount. We are not here to talk about me, we are here to talk about Lebensspuren and what it can do for each one of you. It can liberate you from your suffocating past; it can give you a family with whom to seek comfort and support; it can bring you out of your silent and lonely suffering and make you realise that you are not alone, and that you are not to blame.”
The audience stared at Gustav, some with tears in their eyes. Old men grasped their partners’ hands and held on for dear life. The emotion in the room was tangible. The journalists’ cameras clicked and flashed away furiously as they lashed shorthand notes on to their pads, trying to capture the intense passion of the moment. Gustav smiled, a warm smile, a smile that he had developed to cover his own personal torment and the pain that threatened to overflow and envelop him again, every time he spoke openly.
The man at the back of the room had stood up and walked forward almost soundlessly to where most of the people were sitting. A few heads turned to see who it was that had approached them from behind. For a moment the man just stared at Gustav, barely breathing.
“Does anyone in this room have a tattoo on the back of their head?” he said.
Gustav paled and his fingers tightened their grip on the podium. He narrowed his eyes and studied the man who stood before him; arms hanging limply at his sides, face drawn and expressionless. Who was he? How did he come to know about the tattoo? What did he want?
Seventy-Two
Natasha sat in the back of the police car, chauffeured by two uniformed policemen. The phone to her ear just rang and rang. Why wasn’t Henry answering? Panic began to rise in her throat, making it difficult for her to breathe. She dialled again.
They were only a few minutes away from Henry’s apartment building, she estimated, with her ear glued to the mobile phone.
“Not at home, Sarge?” one of the PCs enquired.
“I can’t get a reply. Shit!” she said tightly, her lips thinly drawn as Henry’s voicemail clicked in again.
The car braked hard and thudded to a halt against the pavement, beyond which a small grassed playground with swings and a seesaw was home to two children scrambling over a slide, the mother, seated at the picnic table, distractedly eating a sandwich.
“This it, Sarge?”
Natasha glanced out of the window and up at the grey and white stucco apartment block.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
They walked briskly to the lifts, Natasha s
till trying with renewed determination to reach Henry on the phone. Once inside the lift, she lost signal, cursed and clamped her teeth together tightly. As soon as the doors opened her phone rang. It was Bruce.
“Sir?” Natasha said, frowning.
“Natasha, are you with Henry?”
“Still trying to locate him, sir. We’ve just arrived at his apartment,” Natasha said, struggling for breath and brushing fingers through her hair.
“I’ve had the Munich Police on the phone.”
Dieter Schröder or Gustav Huber, who would it be, Natasha wondered?
“Schröder is dead. The police broke into his house and found his body.”
Natasha breathed out slowly.
“Single gunshot wound to the head,” Bruce said.
“Where is Gustav Huber?” Natasha said, her voice strained.
“They’re looking for him.”
“Shit!” Natasha said. “I’ve got to find Henry.”
She terminated the call abruptly and began to dial again as they knocked on the apartment door. This time Henry answered the phone.
“Henry?”
“That you, Natasha?”
“I’ve been trying you for the last half hour. Where the hell are you?”
Henry chuckled. In the background, cathedral bells rang.
“Sorry. Do you need me for something?”
“We’re standing outside your apartment. Are you inside?” Natasha said breathlessly, her eyes darting around.
“We?”
“Bruce has finally relented and agreed to police protection for you. I have brought them with me,” Natasha said, eyeing the two PCs who stood behind her in their black body armour, looking about as she spoke. One of them pointed at the door and mouthed the words ‘Is he inside?’
Natasha shrugged.
“I don’t need bloody police protection. What a waste of money. You tell Superintendent Bruce what he can do with his police protection,” Henry said.
“Are you in your apartment?” Natasha said, with growing irritation.
“You know, as it turns out I didn’t need you to find Gustav Huber for me after all,” he continued.
Huber's Tattoo Page 32