‘Oh?’ I said, still not sure whether this was another of his long-winded wind-ups.
‘Your grandfather lived in a mansion flat in Hove, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Where a lot of the Chosen Race live.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I made no comment.
‘He was killed by a gunshot wound to the head.’
‘Really?’ I tried not to let the shock show in my voice, but failed.
‘The murder weapon hasn’t been found.’
I didn’t risk another comment.
‘The flat was locked, and it’s up on the third floor, isn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘They can’t work out how the murderer got in or out of the place.’ Larkin corrected himself. ‘That is to say: they can’t yet work it out. But they will.’ He didn’t want to cast aspersions on the competence of his worshipped father. ‘They’ve taken a lot of documentation away from the flat.’ He was using the long word to make himself sound more authoritative.
‘What kind of d-d-documentation?’
It was obvious he didn’t know the answer, so he just said, rather grandly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t reveal that.’
‘You promise me you’re not making all this up, Larkin?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ He paused portentously, then announced, ‘My D–, my old man reckons the murder was the work of a Nazi assassin.’
I knew what ‘assassin’ meant, but it was the first time I had heard the word ‘Nazi.’
‘That’s what he reckons, and of course he knows about these things,’ Larkin continued magisterially. ‘My old man reckons everything’s going to hell in a handcart. He says that there’s no logic to what’s happening these days.’
I knew that Larkin’s father was wrong. As Dietrich Gartner had told me, there was logic to everything. The challenge was to find that logic.
It was not until some time after the war that my mother and I were told that my father was not coming back. Gallant Alec Smithson had helped to defeat Hitler by sacrificing his life in some secret mission for British Naval Intelligence. Whether my mother was ever informed of the exact circumstances of his death, I don’t know. I was certainly never told.
The news precipitated my already volatile mother into a full-scale nervous breakdown. By then at a boarding public school (my fees paid for by a grateful nation), I was spared the worst of the initial trauma, but I did inherit from it a woman virtually on permanent suicide watch. During the term times, I was to some extent insulated by rugby or cricket, according to the season, but the emotional strains of the holidays were considerable. If any school sports tours or foreign trips were offered for those times, the name ‘Smithson, B.A.’ would be the first on the list.
When my mother did die (of natural causes, breast cancer) in her early forties (maybe some hereditary link there from her own mother), I have to confess my predominant reaction was relief.
My initial response to the news of my father’s death, however, was one of disappointment. I felt disappointed that I would go through the rest of my life fatherless, but I did not feel grief. I had not seen enough of my father as I was growing up to feel that kind of emotion. Besides, all the grief my thirteen-year-old self could produce was still focused on the loss of my grandfather. Hence the almost manic reading and rereading of novels by Richard Treeting. Maybe I hoped he had hidden some message for me in their pages. But I didn’t find it.
I made steady, but unspectacular, progress through my public school. There was some talk of my trying for Oxbridge, but by then the determination to pursue my chosen career was so engrained that my teachers did not argue when I said I wanted instead to go to Hendon Police College. At that time degrees were not thought to be of much benefit to potential police officers. So, in my last term at school I had the honour of captaining the First XI cricket, and then I was out in the real world.
By then, I had come to terms with the bereavements of my life. My father I never thought about, and the death of my mother, soon after I started my training, was, as I said, just a merciful lifting of responsibility. She had been well served by the Navy’s pension provisions, so I inherited the Brighton house. This I promptly sold, putting the proceeds into a flat of my own in Muswell Hill.
I still remembered my grandfather, but the anguish of his loss settled down over the years into a mild regret. And I was so absorbed in the career towards which he had inadvertently directed me, that I had little time to think of him.
It was therefore a great surprise, soon after my twenty-first birthday in 1953, to receive a solicitor’s letter, informing me that I was the sole beneficiary of the will of Dietrich Gartner. I inherited very much more money than I would have expected, and was able to trade up from the flat to a large family house in Muswell Hill. My grandfather’s largesse allowed me a much more varied London social life than most of my contemporaries in the Met.
In time, I met and married Jane, and I think ours would have qualified for the description of ‘a happy marriage.’ We didn’t have children, and I never felt the loss. Looking back from the perspective of retirement, I was something of what would now be called a ‘workaholic.’ My career was everything to me. Though Jane never complained, there was, at times, a sadness about her. Since she’s died—cancer again—I’ve come to the conclusion that the sadness was probably something to do with our lack of children.
I did well in the Met—rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent and, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 1991, the year before I retired, was awarded a CBE. More valuable to me, though, was the respect of my colleagues. At my farewell do, the Commissioner described me as ‘one of the finest detectives in the force,’ and said that I ‘would never give up until I had hounded down and arrested the perpetrator of a crime.’ And my track record was particularly strong, he announced, ‘when it came to the solving of cold cases…’
Then he added a line which was greeted with a huge laugh: ‘…that is, if Barney’s attention could ever be drawn away from his crossword!’
It showed the Commissioner had done his research. My habit of diverting myself from the complexities of the case under investigation by trying to solve the Times crossword was notorious throughout Scotland Yard. I knew my colleagues made fun of me about it, but on more than one occasion concentration on an abstract problem had helped me to look with new eyes and achieve a breakthrough on a real one.
I can’t say I took well to retirement. My work had been so much the centre of my life that I had few other resources. The false camaraderie of the golf club, which attracted many of my former colleagues, was not for me. And, though I was wealthy enough to travel to any destination I chose, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. I was also surprised how much I missed Jane, and I felt an unsettling guilt about how little attention I had given her during my working life.
By November 1992, only six months after I’d retired, I was, quite frankly, bored.
And then my next project became clear to me. Finally, I had time to reconsider the great unsolved crime of my lifetime. The coldest of cold cases. Perhaps it was the lack of a grandson to whom I could communicate my enthusiasms, as Dietrich Gartner had to me, that made me think again about my grandfather’s death.
The first thing I did was to reread all of the Richard Treeting Locked Room Mysteries. Maybe, amongst the many ‘impossible’ murder methods, I would find how the death of Dietrich Gartner had been staged.
But though I enjoyed revisiting the stories, admired their skill, and again felt they brought me closer to my long-dead grandfather, nothing I read got me any nearer to an explanation.
One thing the police have always been good at is keeping records. Some got destroyed by fires caused by enemy action during the war, but the Brighton Borough Police’s archives for 1939 fortunately remained intact. And—coppers stick together—there was no problem about allowing
access to them for a retired officer with my distinguished track record.
The archivist in Hove was very helpful in finding the relevant files. He also very generously gave me permission to photocopy the contents and take the copies with me when I left. I’m not sure that was technically legal, but once again the coppers’ old boy network proved its worth.
Though maybe in the future such information will be keyed into computers, what was handed over to me came in a reassuringly old-fashioned manila file. On it, ‘Dietrich Gartner’ was written in black ink longhand. Across the name had been stamped in faded blue the single word: UNSOLVED.
The papers inside were crisp with age. Some were joined together with old-fashioned treasury tags. Paper clips had rusted and bled brown into the documents they clasped.
The cover page was a standard form about the details of the investigation. It gave me a frisson to see the name of the officer in charge of the case. Detective Inspector Derek Larkin. Must be long dead. I wondered if his proud son was still alive. We’d had no contact since he’d left the prep school we both attended.
The photographic evidence in the file, seen so long after the event it recorded, disturbed me profoundly. The faded monochrome images placed me exactly back in the flat where I had last seen my grandfather. He lay back, in his usual dark wooden chair, close to the fireplace. And, though there was little black blood to be seen from the neat bullet wound on his temple, it pained me to see the reality of Dietrich Gartner dead.
Still, I was trained in viewing horrors and I scrutinised the photographs obsessively, looking for anything that struck a discordant note, any clue that might point me in the direction of a solution.
But I could see nothing, and turned my attention to the documentary evidence.
It was then that I found out, as well as his eminence as Richard Treeting, writer of crime novels in English, my grandfather’s other claim to fame. Up until 1933, he had been Herr Professor Dietrich Gartner, a very distinguished academic who headed up the School of European History at Hamburg University. His fall from grace had been predictable and precipitate. It was not long after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor that Jews in many German universities found themselves jobless. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, and under intense emotional blackmail from his daughter, it was then that Dietrich Gartner had left the home of his birth to join her. Once in England, he had never spoken again about his academic achievements. Instead, he started up his new career as Richard Treeting, writer of Locked Room Mysteries.
The researches of Detective Inspector Larkin—or more probably of his juniors in the Brighton Borough Police—had been extensive. As well as this basic biographical sketch, they had found out a lot more about the murder victim. Before being hounded out of his job, the professor had been a vocal critic of the Nazis. He and a fellow don at Hamburg University, Herr Professor Samuel Levisohn, had co-edited a monthly magazine called Grosse Freiheit. The title, Larkin’s researcher pointed out, had been ironic, referring both to a street in the city’s red-light district, but also to the ‘great freedom’ to which Gartner and Levisohn aspired, in the face of Hitler’s bully-boys.
The magazine was, unsurprisingly, closed down in 1933. But there was a suggestion that the two professors might have stayed in touch through the 1930s, and continued to work undercover for the destruction of the Nazi regime.
The likelihood of this was supported by the presence in the file of a newspaper clipping from the Völkischer Beobachter, official newspaper of the Third Reich. It was printed in Gothic font and I spoke no German, but one of Larkin’s team had been thoughtful enough to provide a translation. Dated May 1939, the report recorded the execution by firing squad of one Samuel Levisohn ‘for espionage and crimes against the state.’
The clipping had been found on a table beside the chair in which my grandfather’s body lay.
Detective Inspector Larkin’s report suggested that the news of his old friend and collaborator’s execution might have been sufficient motive for Dietrich Gartner to take his own life, ‘were it not for the fact that the circumstances of the death make a verdict of suicide impossible.’
Larkin then went on to detail those circumstances. The bullet which had killed my grandfather came from a Luger Pistole 08, a weapon carried by German soldiers during the First World War. Whether Dietrich Gartner himself possessed such a gun was not known, but it was possible. What made it impossible to find out exactly how the death had occurred was the absence of the murder weapon itself.
And also the absence of evidence as to how the perpetrator managed to enter or exit Dietrich Gartner’s flat. The front door was locked on the inside and its key had been found on the table beside the deceased. The block had no fire escape to allow access from outside. All of the sash windows had been locked shut and there was no broken glass or other sign of forced entry.
Perhaps at another time the investigation would have lasted longer, but with the outbreak of war there were more pressing demands on police resources. A clearly frustrated Detective Inspector Larkin concluded the most likely scenario was that Dietrich Gartner had been killed by a Nazi assassin. The victim might have avoided the fate of his former associate, Samuel Levisohn, in Germany, but no one—wherever they hid themselves—could escape the justice of the Third Reich forever.
As to how this conjectural Nazi assassin had effected the crime without leaving any trace, the Inspector could offer no explanation.
The murder was, in fact, the perfect example of a Locked Room Mystery.
Though many owners had come and gone in the previous fifty-odd years, and the interior décor had been gentrified beyond all recognition, no structural changes had been made to the mansion block in Hove. That November Monday morning, the current occupants, a family with two small children, were very happy for me to look around the flat where I had spent so much of my childhood. They knew nothing of the mysterious death which had taken place there, and I did not mention it. No point in upsetting them unnecessarily. My visit, I claimed, was just an old man’s nostalgia trip.
Obviously, although I expressed polite interest in the rest of the flat that I was shown around, my focus was on the sitting room, the scene of the crime. The dimensions were exactly as I remembered them, but white-painted walls made it seem larger. Children’s toys scattered across the floor, together with early attempts at primary school art Blu-Tacked here and there, aided the transformation. The old sash windows had been replaced, but with near-identical modern replicas, which must have cost a pretty penny. Maybe some listing restrictions for the block prevented changes to the look of the windows. The replacements had bright brass latches, just like the ones that had all been locked when my grandfather died.
The big change to the room was the fireplace. Gone was the dark stone hearth in front of which I had spent so many happy hours. In its place was an ornate cast-iron structure of Edwardian, or possibly even Victorian, provenance. In front of it stood a vase of fresh flowers.
‘Do you use that?’ I asked. ‘Ever light it?’
The young mother who was showing me round shook her head. ‘Oh no, it’s just for show. We’ve got gas-fired central heating. Nice, though, isn’t it?’
I conceded that the redundant fireplace was rather splendid.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘there’d not be much point in having an open fire here. You’re only allowed to burn smokeless fuel, no logs or anything. And smokeless fuel fires are so…I don’t know, somehow soulless. I’m happier with the gas on a day like this, thank you very much.’ She shivered theatrically as she looked at the cold rain against the windows.
‘So, nobody in the block has an open fire, do they?’ I asked, more to make conversation than anything else. I’d the feeling that the room had no secrets to reveal to me. Seeing it had just been an aide-mémoire, and I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.
‘I don’t think anyone does,’ the woman repli
ed, ‘…oh, except for Mrs Blaustein in the flat below.’
It seemed incredible to me that Mrs Blaustein, the widow for whom my grandfather had always bought extra kuchen, was still alive. Having never met, and only hearing his accounts of her, I had somehow assumed they were contemporaries. Also, when you’re seven, you tend to think all old people are the same age. And the word ‘widow’ implied a level of seniority. But maybe Mrs Blaustein had been very young when she lost her husband.
The lady—she was definitely a lady, not a woman—who opened the door to me was probably in her eighties. Her grey hair, rigidly fixed in place, suggested a recent visit to the hairdresser. She wore a simple dress in a flowered print. Only her feet, swollen under Velcro-strapped sandals, betrayed her age.
Once I had identified myself, her welcome was immediate. The sitting room she ushered me into almost made me catch my breath—it was so like my grandfather’s. It was not just that the two flats had an identical floor plan, hers, too, had the dark green wallpaper and the original stone fireplace. In it, as the mother upstairs had suggested, shone the anaemic glow of smokeless fuel.
While Mrs Blaustein went to the kitchen to prepare her hospitality—black tea and kuchen she promised me—I scanned her bookshelves. They were not extensive as my grandfather’s, but, in pride of place, I saw the vertical spines of all Richard Treeting’s oeuvre.
I felt that at last my investigation was making progress.
Unlike a lot of old people, Mrs Blaustein had no desire to talk about herself. She knew that my interest was in the death of my grandfather, and so that was what she concentrated on.
‘I was actually away on holiday in Sidmouth when he died.’ Her voice still bore a trace of her German origins. ‘I was very shocked when I heard the news.’
‘The police didn’t question you?’ I recalled that there had been no mention of her in the file I had scrutinised with such attention.
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