3
‘AH, GOOD, I see you’re awake.’
The voice came to Payne through clammy cobwebs of consciousness. His head was full of fuzzy dreams. He blinked and smacked gummy lips, wondering where he was and why he was lying in a bed.
‘You’ve had quite a shock, Detective Inspector,’ Captain Booth said.
Payne jerked as memory returned. A terrible sensation of panic filled him, but he could not remember what had caused it. Payne swung his legs over the edge of the bed, gasping. His head ached.
‘What happened to me?’ he said, touching the lump on the side of this head.
‘We were rather hoping you’d tell us, Detective Inspector. We’ve spoken to the soldier who was with you when the attack occurred, but his report was rather garbled. Do you remember anything about your assailant?’
Assailant? Yes, Payne remembered something now, but the memory seemed fragmented and unreal, like some half-recalled nightmare. Payne struggled to concentrate on the facts, to winnow out the false information fear and surprise had caused him to register.
‘There was a man in the garret of the house,’ he said slowly, speaking for his own benefit as well as Booth’s. ‘He must have been there when I arrived at the house and was therefore trapped by my presence. I sent a soldier up into the garret. Whoever was there attacked him, slit his throat. When I followed the young soldier up, the same man attacked me. He hit me with a stone. I must have passed out.’
‘What did this man look like?’
That was the bit Payne was trying to focus on. The only images he had were grotesque and distorted. ‘He wore a mask, I think. A mask made of leather.’ Payne stretched. ‘How long have I been unconscious?’
‘They brought you in yesterday evening. It’s the afternoon of the next day now. Here, let me get that for you,’ Booth said, when Payne reached a tremulous hand towards the water pitcher beside the bed. ‘You’ve missed all the excitement in the interim.’
‘Excitement?’
‘Colonel Bassett is convinced you were attacked by werewolves. He’s turned the whole district upside down. Random searches, roadblocks, patrols. And the curfew’s been brought forward by two hours. Some of the men are joking it’s the most work they’ve had to do since D-Day.’
Payne sipped water as he listened. His head hurt. ‘You don’t agree about it being werewolves, though, do you, Captain Booth?’
‘No. No, I don’t,’ Booth said, after chewing his lip. ‘I’m convinced now that there is a maniac on the loose, a man from Wolffslust prison. That’s why I wanted to come here and speak to you. Why are you investigating Quartermaster Sergeant Suttpen?’
Payne shrugged. ‘I’ve said all along that I suspect he is involved somehow. Whether he has anything to do with the killings is another matter, but I should have brought him in for questioning a long time ago. If Colonel Bassett won’t let me speak to him, perhaps you could have the MPs pick him up?’
Booth scratched his cheek. ‘There’s the rub, Detective Inspector. Quartermaster Sergeant Suttpen has gone AWOL.’
‘AWOL? When?’
‘No-one knows precisely. I spoke to the MPs and mentioned your suspicions. That was yesterday evening. They went out to speak to Suttpen this morning, but no-one can find him.’
‘They waited a whole night before trying to bring him in?’
‘To be fair to the MPs, they didn’t have a great deal of choice, what with Colonel Bassett blustering and bullying about his wretched werewolves.’
‘What happened at the house?’ Payne said. ‘After I was attacked, I mean.’
Booth’s face became serious. ‘As you mentioned, young Smith was presumably killed by your assailant. The other soldier, Private Ainsley, managed to loose a few shots as the man ran from the house. Then he ran out to the road and flagged an Army lorry down. After that, practically the whole ruddy garrison was put on alert. It’s been bedlam these last twenty hours or so. Most of us have been up all night.’
‘What did you do with the suitcases and clothes? And did you notice the well?’
It was only now that Payne realised how strained Booth looked. The captain’s face was sallow and grey.
‘That’s another reason I wanted to speak to you. There’s going to be a conference later on to discuss what we’ve found at the house. It’s really quite an . . . extraordinary situation. You were right to look in the well. I suppose it was you that prised the top off?’
‘Yes.’
‘By the time I arrived, they’d got you and the dead man out of the garret and taken you off to hospital. Everyone was rushing around, promising vengeance on the Jerries and not really taking a blind bit of notice of anything else. But then I spotted that the well had been opened.
‘Well, I took one sniff and knew something was amiss. Dry wells are not supposed to smell like that. Anyway, once the white powder inside the well was identified as quicklime, I sent for a team of engineers. They established that the well was around ten metres deep and dry. Then they sent a man down.’
‘What did he find?’
Booth went to speak but words failed him. He ran his fingers through his hair.
‘I think it’s simpler if you come downstairs to the mortuary and see for yourself.’
When the RAMC medical officer, Shelley, emerged from the mortuary thirty minutes later he was pale and his hands shook. Silas Payne followed him out. He removed his face mask and rubbed away the smear of Vaseline beneath his nose.
Captain Booth had waited for them outside.
‘Tell me something, Detective Inspector,’ he said, extinguishing his cigarette, ‘have you ever seen anything like this before?’
Payne’s eyes flickered towards the door to the mortuary. The metal tables with their blanket-covered mounds were visible through the door’s rounded window. He shook his head.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Booth said. ‘I saw the aftermath of plenty a battle during the war and I’ve not seen anything that gruesome since Falaise.’
Payne turned to Shelley.
‘What are your conclusions?’
Shelley rubbed his long chin. ‘You’ll understand that as an army doctor I’ve not really had much experience with autopsies,’ he said. ‘But we did do a little theory work at Med. school. I’ve arranged the body parts that were found at the bottom of the well as best I can. Each cadaver has been dissected, post mortem. The dissection follows a similar pattern in each case, with saw cuts made below the knee, at the top of the thigh and below the chin. There are seven bodies in total, four men and three women. Each is complete bar one omission. There are no heads. Not a single one.’
‘What does that mean?’ Payne said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How long have they been dead?’
‘It’s not possible to say with any degree of precision, owing to the effects of the quicklime. That stuff sucks all the moisture out of flesh, causes it to mummify. I would guess two of them died fairly recently, probably within the last three weeks. The other five died before that, although I can’t really be specific. We had a hell of a time cleaning the lime from the body parts: water makes the ruddy stuff caustic.’
Payne had his notebook and pencil out. ‘How did they die?’ he said.
‘Again, I can’t say with total certainty. But given that the first two victims – the Waffen SS man and his girlfriend that you found in the cellar of the house – had been strangled, I made a detailed examination of the neck stumps and found indications that the seven victims in the well also died from strangulation.’
‘So, our killer drugs his victims, then strangles them. Then he cuts them into little pieces and throws them into the well,’ Booth said. ‘What possible purpose does it serve?’
Payne shrugged. ‘Who can say? Look at the Jack the Ripper crimes. What explanation is there for what he did to those w
omen? And yet, in the killer’s mind, the savagery served some purpose. But that’s presuming the crimes are related.’
‘Surely they must be,’ Booth said.
‘I agree. But it’s dangerous to make assumptions until we have concrete proof.’ He turned to Shelley. ‘Do any of the bodies have the SS blood group tattoo?’
Shelley shook his head.
‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t SS,’ Booth said. ‘Only fighting troops tended to have the tattoo. Also, the Germans seemed to have used the tattoo less and less as the war went on.’ Booth looked at his watch. ‘It’s nearly time for the conference. We need to tell people what we’ve found. Do you think it is the same man, Detective Inspector? Is it the Flickschuster?’
‘It’s either the same man or someone who knows of his crimes.’
Shelley lit a cigarette. ‘There’s something else I’d like to show you before we go to the conference,’ he said.
Booth and Shelley followed him upstairs to his office.
Payne shuddered when he saw the leather mask that lay face upwards on a sheet of brown paper in the centre of Shelley’s desk. It was the one his assailant had worn.
The mask depicted a human face in a rough sort of a way. The surface of the mask was creased and crumpled as if made of different layers, like papier-mâché. Crude stitching formed a seam along the line of the lips. Payne found himself unable to examine the thing for long: there was something unwholesome about the mask, something that made him shy away from too detailed an examination.
Booth leant down to examine the mask more closely.
‘Is that leather?’
Shelley extinguished his cigarette and took a sip of water. ‘No. It’s human skin.’
Booth jerked upright. ‘Surely you’re joking?’
Shelley shook his head. ‘What you are looking at there is called in dissection a facial mask. An incision is made across the hairline, down along the jaw and across under the chin; the skin is then peeled away downwards from the scalp.’
‘But why would anyone create such a thing?’ Booth said. ‘Have you ever heard of anything like this, Inspector?’
Payne nodded. ‘There was a series of murders just before the war. Three prostitutes were beaten to death in the space of a week. They were really savage attacks and in each case some of the victim’s fingernails had been pulled out post-mortem. Then we noticed the girls’ hair had been snipped, too. And that was how we caught him, in the end. He had the nails and the hair in an envelope underneath his pillow.’
‘But why?’
‘It was a type of trophy, a keepsake. These people kill as part of some strange ritual only they understand.’
The three men stood in silence, regarding the mask.
‘If it’s human skin, why is it so thick?’ Payne said after a while.
‘Yes, that puzzled me at first, too.’ Shelley leant on the table edge and began indicating parts of the mask with the tip of his pencil. ‘If you look, there are parts where the mask appears not to coincide. And the eye holes are an odd shape. It took me a while to realise why: there is more than one facial mask here. It’s quite possible there are four or five of them, placed one within the other and glued together.’
‘Are you saying our man is a doctor?’
‘No. But I would say that whoever did this had rudimentary medical knowledge. That’s another reason the edges are so ragged.’
Payne thought about the surgical tools he had found beside Konrad Jaeger’s body. ‘Presumably the killer was about to operate on the two original victims but was interrupted?’ Payne said.
‘That must be the case,’ Shelley said, ‘I’m certain of it.’
‘I’ll tell you something else we can be certain of,’ Payne said, looking at his notes. ‘Given the ritualistic nature of the crimes, I think our man already has a real taste for killing. He won’t ever stop. Not unless we catch him.’
4
THE CONFERENCE WAS held that evening in the main room of the Rathaus. All the heads of the military government in Eichenrode were there. The mood inside the room was sombre.
The members of Colonel Bassett’s staff had gathered at one end of the large conference table, whispering among themselves. When Booth entered the room, Freddy looked up and for a moment his eyes burned with hostility. Then Freddy began speaking again with Bassett, who was clenching his big fists and nodding as he listened.
Seven suitcases of all shapes and sizes had been placed on the table, together with a mass of male and female clothing. The mask lay next to them on a sheet of brown paper.
‘We all know why we’re here, so I won’t bore you with preliminaries,’ Bassett said. ‘Another one of my men was killed yesterday. Had his throat slit with a knife. Now, it’s perfectly clear to me that this was the work of werewolves. And it’s my fault. I want you all to know that. I’ve been far too lenient.
‘Our problems in this area began with cut wires and vandalism and I did nothing. After that, we had pit traps and still I did nothing. Then a CCG man was blindfolded and set loose in a minefield. Only then did I react, but it was already too late. The rot had set in.
‘We’ve been too soft on the Jerries. But I want every man in this room to know that it’s going to stop now. I didn’t lead my men halfway across Europe only for them to have their throats slit by masked maniacs months after the bloody war ended. We’re going to catch this killer in short order. Do I make myself clear?’
Every pair of eyes in the room was fixed on the table. Bassett hadn’t led his ‘men’ anywhere: he’d been appointed by the military government a week after peace was declared.
‘Another thing: I don’t want a word of this to get out to the Jerries. Not the soldier’s death. Not the suitcases. Not the bodies in the well. We can’t have them gloating about this.
‘Now, I’ve spoken to the soldier that survived, this Ainsley fellow, and managed to get precious little sense out of him,’ Bassett continued. ‘I’ve allowed you to attend this meeting, Detective Inspector, in the hope that you can shed some light on the incident.’
Payne had been staring at the table while Bassett spoke. He began to explain what had happened at the murder house in clear, concise words, but Colonel Bassett interrupted him.
‘You say you saw someone in the garret of the house. Please be more specific.’
‘It was a man. He was wearing a mask. That one there, on the table.’
Each person at the table looked at the leather mask. Bassett was the only one able to fix it with his gaze for any length of time. He turned to Shelley.
‘You’ve given this the once over, Captain Shelley. What are your thoughts?’
Shelley explained what the mask was. A few men at the table winced as he spoke. Colonel Bassett looked at the mask again, and his moustache began to tremble. His cheeks flushed red.
‘Disgusting,’ he murmured, then repeated the word twice more.
‘I’ve consulted with Captain Booth and Detective Inspector Payne,’ Shelley said. ‘We do not concur with the opinion that this was the work of werewolves. We feel we are dealing with a deeply disturbed individual, a psychopath.’
Colonel Bassett gave a rumble of displeasure. ‘Individual? What the devil are you two talking about, man? There were seven bodies chopped to pieces and stuffed down a well and you think it was one person? This is clearly the work of an organisation.’
Silas Payne shifted in his seat. ‘I think it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions until we know the identities of the victims in the well.’
Captain Fredrickson was sitting next to Bassett. He smoothed his dark hair down, looking very smug.
‘I think I can shed some light on that, Detective Inspector,’ he said. Freddy stood up, opened a file and threw a handful of Red Cross travel permits on to the table. ‘We found these among the victims’ belongi
ngs.’
‘So these people were DPs?’ Payne said, examining the documents.
‘That’s the way it looks. Three Poles, two Czechs, a Frenchman and a Dutch woman. Precisely the sort of people werewolves would prey upon.’
‘But it makes no sense,’ Payne said. ‘The other two victims were Germans. These people could have been, too, travelling on false papers.’
‘Or they might have been capos in concentration camps,’ Freddy said. ‘Or informers. Or spies. Or just unlucky. Thousands of people were killed in the weeks after the war ended. I understand you’re used to peacetime policing, Detective Inspector Payne, but I’m afraid this werewolf attack is a little beyond your experience. And, if you’ll forgive me, your capabilities. What we have here is clearly the sort of terror tactics the werewolf insurgency was trained to engage in. They exist to promote confusion and dissension and generally do everything they can to ensure the occupation is as problematic as possible. They want to intimidate us. I spoke with a Russian officer when I was in Berlin and you wouldn’t believe the things the Jerries got up to out there.’
Colonel Bassett was nodding his head.
‘With all due respect, Colonel, ‘ Booth said, ‘Detective Inspector Payne has informed me of the results of his investigation and I, too, have grave doubts as to whether this business represents action by the Werewolf insurgency.’
‘Informed you, has he?’ Bassett said. ‘Well, that just proves this matter would have been better handled by the military from the get-go.’
Payne took a deep breath. ‘Perhaps I could continue to pursue my own investigations in parallel with the military response. I believe the army currently has a number of German police personnel in custody. Men from the Kripo criminal police and other security forces. Perhaps –’
‘Men from the Kripo and other security forces,’ Colonel Bassett interrupted. ‘You know what the Detective Inspector means by that, don’t you, gentlemen? The bloody Gestapo is what he means.’
Bassett rose and rested his meaty knuckles upon the table.
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