Werewolf

by Matthew Pritchard

  Werewolf

  Written in Pritchard’s characteristic fast-paced and compelling style, Werewolf is set in August 1945 in the British Zone of occupied Germany. Silas Payne is a Scotland Yard detective seconded to the Military Government in Germany to run a police training school as part of the denazification policy.

  When a former Waffen SS soldier is found murdered in the cellar of a requisitioned house, Payne begins an investigation that leads him on a tortuous path of discovery, via interned Gestapo agents, corrupt British officials and secret SS medical experiments, as he seeks to maintain his high moral code in a world where the line between justice and arbitrary vengeance has become fatally blurred.

  The narrative moves with a Chandleresque efficiency; the dialogue is stark and often harsh, but always highly effective. Full of intriguing twists and high-octane action, Werewolf is a thrilling new novel from the acclaimed author of Scarecrow which keeps readers guessing until the end.

  PRAISE FOR SCARECROW, MATTHEW PRITCHARD’S PREVIOUS NOVEL:

  “Pritchard’s promising debut doesn’t take long to put trouble in paradise. Pritchard paces the narrative nicely, and convivial tapas bars, mass unemployment, corrupt bureaucrats, forgotten migrants and petty thugs form an entertaining, vivid backdrop to the lurid crimes and determined clue-gathering.” —JAMES SMART The Guardian

  “I have no idea of whether this is the authors debut novel, but I’m guessing it may well be. If so, I stand and applaud him. I will also find his author page and sign up for notifications of when his next book will be released as I don’t want to miss it. He is that good folks.” —RUSS THOMPSON Hellnotes

  “The twists in here are exceptional – none of this cliché stuff – and you’ll be impressed at how such a complex novel can be both easy to read yet challenging on the mind. If you’re looking for a great plot, engaging characters, fast pace and a completely different read to the norm, then make sure you get it on your Christmas list – you won’t be disappointed.” —STEPH ROUNDSMITH Mean Streets: The Home of Crime Fiction

  “A nail-biting murder mystery with a distinct European flavor, steady pacing that leads to an exciting finish, and characters with depth and humor.” —TAMMY SPARKS Books, Bones and Buffy

  Matthew Pritchard worked as a journalist in Spain for ten years, writing mainly for the ex-pat press and UK nationals. He grew up in a house filled with gas masks, military ­helmets, swords and rifles and has possessed a passionate ­interest in WWII ever since. Together with his father and uncle, he has amassed a sizeable collection of memoirs and memorabilia contemporary to the period.

  Also by Matthew Pritchard

  Scarecrow

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Matthew Pritchard, 2014

  The right of Matthew Pritchard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2014

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-84471-989-1 electronic

  ‘Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.’

  – BERTOLT BRECHT

  PART ONE

  1

  August 1945

  Occupied Germany, British Zone

  SAFE NOW WITHIN the shadows of the trees, Little Otto pulled the mask from his face and peered back towards the house.

  British soldiers in berets and leather jerkins lounged by the wrecked kitchen door, smoking cigarettes and chatting as a shaven-headed sergeant dragged Little Otto’s suitcases out of the kitchen and smashed the locks from them with a rifle butt. One by one the soldiers yanked articles of clothing from the suitcases and began comparing and trying them against themselves.

  ‘Blasphemous pricks,’ Little Otto hissed, as he saw his trophies defiled. That clothing was his. It was meant to be savoured and enjoyed. Caressed. Touched. Smelt.

  Little Otto’s fingertips fluttered across the surface of his Mask of Many, seeking reassurance in the rasp of its leathery surface. He buried his face in the mask’s rigid folds, sucking in its soothing aroma – glue and the tang of cured flesh. His breathing slowed and his heart stilled; anger and hatred faded. He ran his fingers across the loops of twine that bound the mask’s lips as he considered his position.

  The soldiers would head down into the cellar soon. That was when the real fun would begin: he’d left all his tools down there. But it was what he’d left at the top of the house that most concerned him. His eyes went towards the garret window, the room he’d been in when the soldiers had arrived and begun bashing at the door with their boots. Otto had had to escape through the hole in the roof.

  He fingered the heavy key in his pocket. Should he move his treasures? No. There were too many of them. Where would he put them all? He would just have to wait it out.

  A cry sounded within the bowels of the house, followed by shouts and sudden flustered activity. A young soldier ran outside, rested his rifle against the side of the house and sprinted in the direction of the town, his face pale.

  Little Otto watched the soldier go then tucked the Mask of Many inside his coat and loped towards the deeper dark at the centre of the wood.

  A small matter. He had been interrupted before. He knew what to expect.

  But he wouldn’t let anyone stop him this time, though.

  2

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR SILAS Payne took the Brunswick road north-east out of Eichenrode. He followed the pitted strip of tarmac for a half-mile then turned his utility onto a dirt road. A soldier in British uniform appeared from between the trees and waved for him to stop.

  ‘Are you the gentleman from Scotland Yard, sir?’ the young private said, as he bent beside the car window. ‘HQ said you were coming.’

  Payne handed him his identity papers. As the private turned to examine them, Payne noticed the man seemed to have an article of clothing stuffed down the front of his battle blouse: the end of a white woollen sleeve was dangling above the private’s belt buckle.

  ‘How many bodies are there?’ Payne said, taking back his identity papers.

  ‘Two. Least that’s what I heard.’

  ‘You’ve not seen them?’

  The private adjusted the strap of his rifle and shook his head. ‘I’ve seen enough of dead bodies for one life, sir, what with all the fighting I’ve done. The house is just around the corner. Ask for Sergeant Beagley.’

  Payne drove away, thinking how glad he was that the war was finally won; the private looked barely old enough to vote.

  The house was set back from the road behind a row of oaks. It would have been an impressive dwelling once – three stories of half-timber built in the rural German style with bay windows on the lower floor – but the walls were peppered with bullet holes and a mortar had ripped a massive hole in the crow-stepped roof. The shell had obviously exploded inside the house, as the unkempt garden was strewn wi
th glass and household items.

  A group of soldiers stood beneath the shade of an oak. When Payne pulled up next to them, they waved for him to go round to the back where a burly sergeant with close-cropped hair stood leaning against the jamb of the back door, hands in the pockets of his leather jerkin.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ he said when Payne asked if he was Sergeant Beagley.

  ‘Detective Inspector Payne, Scotland Yard. Major Norris of Public Safety Branch has asked me to look into this matter.’

  The sergeant looked him up and down, as if to check Payne was real. Then, he said, ‘You’re a bit off your usual beat, aren’t you, Detective Inspector?’

  Payne smiled politely. He’d been in Germany only four days, but he’d already heard that particular quip more times than he cared to remember.

  Beagley led him inside.

  ‘The corpses are in the cellar,’ he said, indicating a low door in the wall beside the fireplace. He crossed the kitchen and started down the cellar steps, but paused when Payne did not follow him.

  The crime scene was a shambles from a procedural point of view, but nineteen years’ service with the Metropolitan police had taught Payne the benefit of taking the time to notice the small things. He stood in the centre of the room and slowly turned a full circle.

  There were no chairs or tables in the kitchen, but there was a sink in the far corner and the shelves above it were lined with tins of British army rations. Payne turned back towards the door. The wood on the inside of the frame was splintered. He crossed the room and bent to examine the door handle.

  The wood around the latch bolt was cracked and the escutcheon plate was crumpled inwards. It looked like the door had been kicked open from outside. The damage looked recent, too. Had Beagley stood in the doorway to hide that fact? Payne decided that he had: Payne’s examination of the door had caused Beagley to frown.

  Payne straightened and traced his finger over the words chalked on the exterior face of the door: ‘Requisitioned by 21st Army Group’. Those hadn’t been written recently, though, the chalk was too faded and smudged. That meant the house had likely been requisitioned by combat troops when they occupied the area back in May. The occupation force was called the BAOR now, the British Army of the Rhine.

  ‘Are British personnel billeted here?’ Payne said.

  Beagley motioned towards the tins on the shelf. ‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’

  Payne picked up a tin of bully beef and wiped a fingertip through the light covering of dust on its top. There was dust on nearly all the horizontal surfaces in the kitchen, now that he came to look. No, Payne thought, no-one had lived there for at least a month, maybe longer.

  The air in the cellar was moist and cool. Cobwebs dangled from the rough-hewn beams in the ceiling and the wooden steps creaked as Silas Payne followed Beagley’s torch-light down into the darkness.

  The male corpse lay on a heavy table in the centre of the cellar. The woman lay on the earth floor. Both were naked but for pieces of sacking that covered the woman’s breasts and both their groins.

  ‘Did you put that sacking there, Sergeant?’ Payne said.

  Beagley shook his head. ‘That’s how we found them. My boys didn’t touch a thing.’

  Payne turned on his own torch and touched the back of his fingers to the man’s naked arm. The corpse was ice cold and rigid, the skin a whitish-blue colour. The woman’s was the same. Blood had pooled in the lower half of both corpses, in the buttocks and the backs of the calves. That told Payne they’d been lying like that when they died, or had been placed in that position soon afterwards.

  Payne shone his torch on the horizontal bruise that circled the man’s neck just below the Adam’s Apple. It looked like someone had wrapped a ligature around his neck then twisted it tight, but there were no other injuries on the man’s body: no cuts, bruises or scrapes; no damage to the fingernails. That was uncommon in a strangling: the violence of the victim’s death throes was normally terrible.

  The woman’s body had the same horizontal bruise across the neck. However, unlike the man, she seemed to have struggled. Two of her fingernails were broken and she had a bruise on the side of her face. Her upper lip was slightly swollen, too.

  That still wasn’t much damage if she’d been strangled, though, Payne thought. Perhaps the killer had knocked her unconscious first.

  ‘That’s the creepy bit,’ Beagley said, motioning towards a small table at the far end of the cellar.

  The table was covered with surgical instruments. There were four scalpels, a hacksaw and a length of serrated wire ending in wooden handles. Beside them were a long, curved sewing needle and a roll of catgut; beyond those, various glass vials filled with liquid and a syringe. A leather apron hung from a hook in the wall and Payne saw there was a bundled tarpaulin beneath it.

  ‘That there’s a surgeon’s needle,’ Beagley said. ‘I’ve seen medics stitch wounds with ’em.’

  Payne crossed the uneven soil floor to take a closer look. A neat rectangle of felt covered the table top and the scalpels and hacksaw were set out upon it perfectly parallel to one another.

  Payne studied the labels on the vials. Avahxim. Goloqta. They sounded like brand names. The list of chemical compounds was written in German. Payne could understand the words, but they meant nothing to him.

  ‘Do you think someone was going to operate on ’em?’ Beagley said. ‘Before they were strangled, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Payne said, as the beam of his torch glinted on scalpel blades and curved glass. The same thought had occurred to him, but operate for what?

  ‘What were your men doing out here?’ Payne said. ‘It’s quite a long way from the town.’

  ‘We were doing a sweep through this area. We still do them even though the war’s over. Keeps the lads sharp. We’d not patrolled this area before and . . . well, we saw this house had been requisitioned so we came to see if we could scrounge a cuppa. Nobody was home, so we came inside and this is what we found.’

  Payne nodded. Beagley wasn’t lying, but he hadn’t told Payne the whole truth, either: the sergeant’s answers had been preceded by momentary pauses, as if assessing how best to answer to his own advantage. You didn’t get far in the Met without learning to spot that.

  Payne returned to the bodies. The dead man looked to be about Payne’s own age, early forties, but the woman was younger, perhaps as young as twenty-five.

  ‘What’s this tattoo here, sergeant?’ Payne said, indicating small Gothic letters tattooed on the inside of the man’s upper arm.

  ‘Lord, I didn’t notice that,’ Beagley said, bending to examine it. He blew air. ‘It’s his blood group. That means he was Waffen SS. We’ve been briefed to watch for that among the refugees. Some of these bastards are trying to skip the country now they’re facing trials for war crimes.’

  Payne pushed the brim of his hat upwards. That complicated things. He needed to speak to Major Norris.

  ‘Looks like the bastard got what he deserved, anyway,’ Beagley said with a sneer.

  Payne ignored the comment. From what he’d seen of conditions in the British Zone of Occupation, the line between proper justice and arbitrary vengeance had become badly blurred.

  ‘Men from the RAMC should be coming here soon to take the bodies away for an autopsy,’ Payne said. ‘Can you and your men guard the house until then?’

  Beagley agreed. The two men went back upstairs to the kitchen. Payne began to examine the rest of the house.

  Some of the ground floor rooms were furnished, but the air in them smelt stale. Payne’s shoes stirred dust as he walked across the rugs.

  There was nothing of any worth in the rooms upstairs. The furniture had all been broken up and burnt; charred scraps of chair legs and bed frames littered the fireplaces. It confirmed the impression Payne had formed in the kitchen: no-one had lived there fo
r weeks.

  At the rear of the first storey was a small staircase that led to the second storey garret. Payne climbed the steep, uneven steps with a wary eye on the ceiling above him: the mortar blast had cracked the roof beams and they sagged in a downward V directly above his head.

  The door at the top of the stairs was heavy and old. Payne turned the handle. The door wouldn’t budge, but Payne couldn’t decide whether it was simply locked or blocked by rubble on the other side. He tried shoving the door with his shoulder but stopped when the roof beams creaked and dust and rubble poured onto the brim of his hat.

  He went downstairs and out into the back garden. Cushions, scraps of paper and fabric lay mouldering in the unkempt grass. The sun was below the horizon now and the shadows between the trees were deepening into darkness. Thick clouds raced westwards, like puffs of dirty smoke.

  The branches of a tall oak shaded a bower at the back of the garden. The bower held a broken child’s swing and a circular well-head made of red brick that rose a yard or so above the ground. Moss grew between the pitted bricks of the well and its wooden cover was gnarled with age.

  Two hessian sacks rested against the bole of the oak. Payne toed the sacks and sniffed the air. Just for a moment, he fancied the wind carried with it a faint chemical tang. He tried to lift the cover from the well, but it was held in place by shiny padlocks, one on either side. He bent to examine the padlocks, but paused when a dull explosion sounded somewhere to the west of him. Payne took his binoculars and walked through the trees to where he could look out across the whole valley.

  Engineers were clearing anti-personnel mines from the western approaches to Eichenrode; the fields around the town were still strewn with thousands of the wretched things. From here, Payne could see the sandbag revetments of the German trenches that the mines had been placed to defend. He watched as a plume of dirt rose briefly against the horizon and another dull pop sounded.