Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘Mrs Sheila Parsons, 62, who lives near the M1, said that she often saw children playing on the bridge.

  ‘“I’ve reported the matter several times to the police but they don’t seem to do anything about it I knew something like this would happen.”

  ‘Chief Inspector Jeffrey Round of the Hertfordshire police said they had had reports in the past of young people throwing things from bridges. They were pursuing their inquiries in the area.

  ‘An Air Ministry spokesman described Squadron Leader Spencer as one of the most experienced pilots in the RAF.’

  Spencer turned the pages of the book. Most newspapers had substantially the same story.

  Then came the follow-ups. The Mail had done a feature on juvenile vandalism on the motorways; and there had been one or two other pieces on the same lines in other papers.

  A week later there had been a story in the Express saying that the police knew who had thrown the fatal stone. The paper described him as a ‘small, sturdy six-year-old’ whose parents both worked and whose favourite TV programmes were the American crime series. The family had been warned, said the newspaper, that unless stricter parental control was exercised, the child would be taken into care.

  And that was that. There was nothing anyone could do.

  He finished the Madeira and fetched the half bottle of rum. He read on for a while and then sat back in the chair staring in front of him. The sun had long since gone and the winter afternoon brought darkness. He finished the rum and later went for the sherry.

  The doorbell woke him the following morning but his head was like an anvil on which someone was beating and he ignored it. Finally it stopped and he heard footsteps going down the path to the street. He fell asleep again and this time — it was between half-past nine and ten — he was awakened by the telephone. He heard it as though in a dream and ignored it too. After a while he got up, drank a cup of coffee, left the house and went out to the Heath. It was a cold, grey morning and he was wearing only a thin cardigan. He walked past Kenwood to the Highgate ponds and then up to the Spaniards where he had two large whiskies. When he returned home at lunchtime Robert Calland was waiting for him in his car.

  ‘John!’ Calland said.

  Spencer stopped at the gate hardly recognizing him.

  ‘You all right?’ Calland said.

  ‘Yes.’

  They stared at each other for several seconds and then Calland said, ‘Can I come in?’

  Spencer led him into the drawing-room. The curtains were still closed, there was an empty whisky bottle on the floor, and several dirty glasses. ‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you a drink.’

  ‘That’s all right. I don’t want one.’

  What’s it all about?’

  Calland looked at him in surprise. ‘We were worried, John.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘Armstrong tried to raise you at the usual time but no one answered the bell. We phoned. No one answered the phone. Naturally we were worried.’

  ‘I was out,’ Spencer said.

  They sat in an embarrassed silence, then Spencer suddenly had a vision of himself and his house as seen through Calland’s eyes. The hung-over, unshaven, seedy man in the ill-kempt and seedy room.

  ‘John, you’re not looking after yourself,’ Calland said. ‘Isn’t there someone who comes in and cleans?’

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ Calland gave him one and lit it. ‘I let her go after Sue... after what happened.’

  ‘It’s not good being alone.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, stop worrying about me and stop nagging me! I’m all right.’

  ‘You’re not all right. A blind fool could see that. The reaction’s hitting you. It’s taken some time but that’s what’s happening.’

  Spencer looked at Calland with fresh eyes. He saw the neat, well-groomed, after-shaved, manicured young executive. What the hell did Calland know about reactions, or behaviour, or life itself for that matter?

  They talked on for a while, Spencer hardly listened. The Goddard contract was coming up, there was more trouble with the works manager in Slough. There were other decisions that had to be made. Suddenly he stood up, tired of it all and said, ‘I’m going away for a while. You deal with it.’

  A look of relief passed across Calland’s face and was replaced by a more calculating expression. Was this the opportunity he was waiting for, Spencer wondered? Would he make his big push now to be rid of the ‘old man’? He found he did not care, could not even think about it.

  Calland stayed, making worried noises for another ten or fifteen minutes and then Spencer watched him go down the path to the car. There was a jauntiness in his step that had not been there when he arrived. Spencer gave him a minute or two and then he went out again, this time to the Duke of Hamilton and had two more large whiskies. He wandered down Heath Street almost as far as Chalk Farm before turning back. When he got home he made himself an egg nogg, drank it, then brought in some twigs and a bucket of smokeless fuel from the garden shed and lit a fire in the drawing-room. He fetched the photograph albums and the cuttings albums and watched them burn. By the time they were nothing more than ash — and it took a long time for the fire to reduce them — he had come to a decision.

  Twice in his lifetime his family had been taken from him — for after the crash on the motorway it could be said that Margaret’s alcoholism was tantamount to death — twice people he loved had been killed. The first time there was nothing he could do: what if he had hunted for the children, what if he had found them? Could he have beaten them? Kicked them? Made them suffer as they had made others suffer? Even in his anger he had not contemplated that. But now? Now there was someone who could be made to pay, not only for Sue but the debt that went all the way back to Berlin. It was a question of finding Bruno.

  At seven o’clock the following Saturday evening the doorbell rang. For a moment he was tempted to ignore it, then it occurred to him that it might be Detective Chief Superintendent Nichols.

  But the man on the doorstep was of medium height and plump, almost pear-shaped. His face was round, with heavy patches under his eyes which gave him a weary look. On his head he wore a green felt Tyrolean hat with a large brown-and-orange pheasant’s feather at the side. It gave him a raffish, decadent appearance, like a battered old car painted a psychedelic pattern.

  ‘Herr Spencer?’ Hearing the German accent turned Spencer’s blood cold.

  ‘Yes.’

  The man held out some sort of identification card, then bowed and said, ‘Hoest. Kriminalpolizei.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You would say Chief Superintendent. Chief Superintendent Hoest. Berlin police. Have you some minutes?’

  He hesitated. ‘I’ve seen the criminal police. And the political police.’

  ‘I know,’ Hoest said gendy. Somehow, Spencer was not quite sure how, the policeman had managed to insinuate himself between Spencer and the door-frame and was standing in the hall.

  ‘You are going somewhere?’ He was looking at a suitcase leaning against the wall.

  ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  Hoest sighed gendy. ‘It is good, I think. It will help after what happened. Where do you go?’

  ‘Scotland,’ Spencer said, caught unawares, and only realized after he had said it how ridiculous it must sound — Scodand in November. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Perhaps we could talk for a little. Not long.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to add.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Come on then.’ He led the way to his study.

  ‘A moment,’ Hoest said as he reached the first landing. He looked into the study. ‘This is where they...’ he waggled the first and second finger of his right hand and allowed them to represent the missing words. ‘...Riemeck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then they came out here; Herr Riemeck, the other man and your wife. Down the staircase. Where is the k
itchen?’

  ‘At the back.’

  ‘Yes. I understand. All I want is — geography? Is that how you say it?’

  ‘Of the house?’

  ‘Geography of the house.’ He looked about him for another few seconds. ‘They came out, went down the staircase, across the hall and there, at the door, he shot them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now I have the picture in my head.’

  They went into the study. ‘I was going to make myself some coffee,’ Spencer said.

  ‘Coffee?’ Hoest smiled gendy.

  ‘Tea, then.’

  ‘Tea is better for me.’ He tapped his ample belly. ‘Coffee is gas to me. But tea, especially English tea, I like. Do you know of Twinings tea? I buy Twinings tea in Berlin; the best, I think.’

  ‘I have Jackson’s Darjeeling.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  Spencer went out to make the tea, leaving Hoest alone. The Chief Superintendent walked slowly around the room, taking in the array of stereo equipment. It reminded him of rooms glimpsed in his wife’s glossy magazines. He seated himself on the Chesterfield, upright, hands on knees, staring straight ahead. He seemed to be dissociating himself from his surroundings and in a sense this was true. Hoest was only truly happy at home in Berlin. He and his wife — his chidren were grown up — occupied one of the old pre-war apartments that had escaped the bombing, behind the Hotel Sylterhof, and if his investigations had never taken him farther west than Grunewald and farther east than the Brandenburger Tor, he would have been delighted. He had glassed in the balcony of his apartment and it was here that he grew his geraniums. Colleagues brought him cuttings from Spain and Portugal, France and Italy, and he tended them with loving care, though he admitted, even to himself, that geraniums did not need a great deal of care. That suited him very well.

  But there were times when crimes were committed outside his ideal area and he was forced to travel. He had been to Stuttgart, Bonn and Munich many times and he had become used to such visits. There were also trips to foreign lands, France for instance, and Holland, and once to Norway. He had spent a week in Oslo where it had rained incessantly and he’d had to buy an umbrella. That journey was best forgotten.

  These quirks of Herr Hoest’s nature often brought smiles to the faces of his colleagues, especially now that he was getting on towards retirement. He tolerated their amusement. He did not need to remind them that he had been the youngest Chief Superintendent in the history of the Krimindpolizei; they knew all about that.

  Spencer came back with a tray. ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’

  Hoest sipped at his tea, then said, ‘What do they say?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your police.’

  ‘Come now, you’re not going to tell me you have to come to me for your information.’

  ‘We are in touch, naturally. But sometimes, you know, we like to keep things from each other.’

  ‘They don’t seem to be any further. I mean, they don’t know who the men were or why they wanted Riemeck.’ He thought Hoest looked relieved. Or perhaps it was simply his normal weary expression.

  ‘I would like you to look at something.’

  ‘More pictures?’

  ‘Just a few.’

  He took out his wallet and selected four photographs. The first was of a young woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, with short black hair. She was sitting on a suitcase in what looked like a railway station. The second was the head and shoulders of a strong-jawed man with a big square face and long sideburns. The third showed a man standing in front of a lake. He was short and bald. Spencer shook his head doubtfully. ‘The third one, the one who was killed. That looks like him.’

  ‘Yes. His name is Tellier. Louis Tellier.’

  ‘So you know one of them?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe all three.’

  ‘Who was this Tellier?’

  ‘We don’t know all his background.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Later, Mr Spencer. First let me ask you, have you ever seen such a thing before?’

  He drew from his wallet a small piece of material and placed it on the desk. It was the same as the one Spencer had received in the post, the three heraldic leopards. He felt the blood drain away from his skin and realized that Hoest was watching him carefully. ‘No,’ he said, reaching forward and picking it up. He looked at it casually but carefully as he imagined he would have done if it had been unfamiliar. Then he turned it over and looked at the back. ‘Should I have seen it?’

  ‘I do not know. That is what I am asking.’

  ‘What is it? It looks like a badge of some sort.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You sew it onto a shirt or something. Or perhaps on your sleeve. Like Boy Scouts.’

  Hoest smiled. ‘Boy Scouts? Ah, yes. No, not Boy Scouts, I think. Do you know where we found this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the Volkswagen. It was — how do you say in English? — wod-ged in two pieces of wood.’

  ‘Wedged.’

  ‘Wedged. In the wardrobe of the Volkswagen. We looked for the other but could not find it anywhere.’

  ‘What other?’

  ‘There are always two, Mr Spencer.’ He picked up the cloth patch and placed it against his collar. ‘This one goes here, but where is the one for here?’ He tapped the other side of the collar.

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘That is what we fear. We thought you might be able to help.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘They came here, Mr Spencer. It might have dropped on your carpet; you might have picked it up.’

  ‘No, I would have told the police. Our... Scotland Yard, I mean.’

  ‘And you didn’t. Well, that is a help by itself.’

  ‘You mean they might have kept it from you?’ He was talking for the sake of talking. Trying to act normally. But his behaviour seemed enlarged, like a drunk acting sober; everything was too deliberate, too planned.

  ‘More tea?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hoest said, shaking his head.

  ‘What’s so special about them?’ Spencer asked.

  ‘Have you heard of the Freikorps, Mr Spencer?’

  ‘The what?’ He could feel the tips of cold fingers touching his heart.

  ‘Friekorps. Free Corps. There were several of them. During the war some of those people in the occupied lands wished to join with the German forces and fight the Russians. They formed units called Freikorps.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the Spanish Blue Division. I know they fought on the Eastern Front for the Germans against the Russians.’

  ‘No, these came from occupied countries. Do you recognize names like Joyce, Baillie-Stewart, Amery?’

  ‘You mean William Joyce?’

  ‘You called him Lord Haw-Haw, not so?’

  ‘That’s right. Weren’t the others traitors too? Weren’t they called the Radio Traitors because they broadcast anti-British propaganda from Berlin to Britain?’ He could feel the sweat breaking out on his brow and under his arms and running down his rib-cage.

  ‘That is correct. Do you know what happened to them after the war, Mr Spencer?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The English hanged them, yes?’

  ‘That’s right. But what has this got to do with the free — the Freikorps?’

  ‘It was one of your people, Amery, who suggested a Freikorps of British — ’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. I can understand the Germans recruiting in occupied countries, but they couldn’t recruit in Britain.’

  ‘Correct. But there were thousands of British and Australians and South Africans and New Zealanders in prisoner-of-war camps. That is where they recruited. Amery and one or two other sympathizers went round the camps talking to the prisoners. If they showed interest they were taken to a rest centre in Berlin, given good food, drink and women. It was like a holiday. If they were not sure, they were sent back to the camp; the difference
between the rest centre and the camp was very great. Good psychology, not so? Were you not in a camp, Herr Spencer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘You know damn well where it was.’

  ‘Yes, of course, near Bremerhaven.’

  Spencer stared angrily at Hoest. He imagined that this was what he should be doing; in reality he felt quite different.

  Hoest veered away from the dangerous area. ‘Do you know how many of the prisoners joined the British Freikorps, Herr Spencer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not more than forty. Out of all the camps, out of all the thousands of soldiers and sailors and flyers, unhappy men, prisoners, not more than forty.’ He looked up. ‘It is something to be proud of, that.’

  ‘Yes. What happened to them?’

  ‘Some fought in the last battles in Berlin and were killed. Some deserted from the Freikorps and were picked up by your soldiers. Some were brought back to England and sent to prison. And some...’ he moved his hand ‘...some were never found.’

  ‘What do you mean? Their bodies?’

  ‘I mean that they disappeared, Herr Spencer. No one knows what happened to them or where they went. According to the camp records at Bremerhaven, you were sent to Berlin on the fourth of November, 1944. Why?’

  It was so sudden that even though he had been half waiting for it, it took him by surprise.

  ‘What are you trying to insinuate?’

  ‘Insin — ?’

  ‘What are you getting at? What are you after?’

  ‘The truth, Herr Spencer.’

  ‘Don’t talk bloody rubbish to me! You come in here and start badgering me. You’ve no rights here, you know. This isn’t Berlin. I don’t have to answer any of your questions.’

  ‘My dear Herr Spencer, I know — ’

  ‘No, you don’t know. This is London, England.’ He was on his feet now, standing over the Chief Superintendent. ‘I’ve told everything I know to the English police and if they want to ask any further questions, that’s fine. But no one else, is that clear?’

  ‘That is clear. Please, Herr Spencer, let me apologize if I have offended you. In my work I’m afraid it is often so.’ He climbed wearily to his feet. ‘But sometimes it is necessary. You see, there is an unexplained gap in your life and policemen do not like gaps. They like everything so and so, like bank manager. Forgive me.’