When morning came, and brought Felicity back up north from Focal House, I felt that my hunch had been justified. 6D2 in Bonn had lost no time at all: the physical details of William Smith had fitted one Willi Gelder from Nuremburg, a man known to the West German police and our own people in Bonn as dangerous, a Nazi intellectual dedicated to the cause of re-establishing the Reich along the old Hitler lines, one of the top undercover brass of the Werewolf gang. Horst Flegel, Max’s opposite number in Bonn, had been surprised to learn that Willi Gelder had entered the United Kingdom. On the other hand, since he had manifestly done so, Flegel was not surprised that he had gone to Yorkshire. Willi Gelder’s documentation revealed the fact that, like so many Nazis, he was a homosexual; and he had had a boy-friend, a bisexual who had later married an English girl and had gone to live in Pickering on the fringe of the North Yorkshire Moors. This man’s name was Heinz Stummerl and he, too, was known to have extreme Nazi sympathies.
“Telephone directory,” I said to Felicity. “We’ll see if Herr Stummerl is still around.” I took up the directory from my bedside table and flipped through the pages. Stummerl was around all right, but no longer in Pickering. He had shifted to a place called Loxa Mill. I’d never heard of Loxa Mill, but when we went down to the Volvo my road atlas showed that it was a small village deep in the moors, left-hand turn off the road running through from Helmsley to Stokesley — and it could well have been the place Plug and his mates had been aiming for when we got snowed up.
I said, “Herr Stummerl might be interesting.”
Felicity gave her fair hair a toss; it looked great against the snow. She asked, “Do we go right in and ask questions?”
“Not too fast.”
“There’s not much time.”
I agreed, but said we would spy out the land first and we would do that right away. “Maybe after we’ve done that I’ll ask the nick to put on surveillance,” I said. “Stummerl could be better watched than bearded.”
We drove out of York on the Thirsk road, and in Thirsk I turned for Helmsley. The snow-ploughs had kept the main routes open. From Helmsley I followed the route taken by Plug a couple of nights before and picked up the side road, or what I hoped was the side road. It turned out soon enough that it was the right one. It was clearer of snow now; I doubted if the snow-ploughs would have bothered but someone, a local farmer perhaps, could have brought a bulldozer through, and the snow formed high banks on either hand. Going on past the point where Plug’s car had been forced to a halt, we began to go down a steep gradient, not Sutton Bank standard but bad enough on icy surfaces … down and down as if into the bowels of the earth, with hills around us and the sky seeming to recede beyond the summits.
Felicity shivered. “Some place to have a mill,” she said, “which I assume they had.”
I pointed upwards. “Could have been on that hill.”
She nodded; looking sideways, I caught a pensive look. Loxa Mill, into which we were now coming, was a lonely place, very isolated, and at the best of times the moors were eerie enough. No wonder the monks of old had believed the moors to be the abode of the Devil himself. They weren’t the only ones to believe that: no human lived in the moors in the early times, and the only people to penetrate were the monks themselves, setting out bravely from Rievaulx Abbey to plant their moorland crosses to drive Satan away. I had a feeling Felicity believed he lived there still, and was waiting with his pronged fork around the next corner.
But what we did find round that next corner was human enough: an elderly woman, muffled to the eyeballs in scarves and a woolly hat, her arms sticking out rigidly on account of what I assumed to be the many jerseys under her coat.
She waved us down; she seemed agitated. I operated my window and she thrust her head close and said breathlessly, “Oh, dear, ah can’t get through ont’ telephone, lines must be down wi’t’ weight, and doctor’s needed.”
“You want me to go for him?”
“Aye. And t’ police.” Her eyes were quite glazed and she was shaking with more than the bitter cold, which was now coming into the car. She almost whispered the next words. “Murder’s been done!”
“Has it, indeed?”
“Oh, it was that nasty!” She waved her arms sideways from her body, and rocked to and fro. She was really upset, and not surprisingly I supposed, though Loxa Mill had that sort of feel about it and she ought to have become accustomed … she went on, “I do for him, like, or did do any road, done for him ever since his wife passed on — ”
“May I ask who he is?” Somehow I had already anticipated what the answer was going to be, and I was right. It was Mr Stummerl, a German gentleman he’d been, and a right odd one too, though she shouldn’t say that now he was dead — he didn’t deserve murder. I cut into the tumbling reminiscences and said that was funny, but I’d been on my way to see him.
That, stopped her; her reaction was rather as though I was the murderer arrived too late, if such made sense. “Well, I never!” she said accusingly, then for the first time she looked at Felicity, who had no aspect at all of murder, and she asked, less accusingly, was Mr Stummerl a friend of mine.
“Yes,” I said. “This is bad news, Mrs — ?”
“Miss,” she said. “Miss Salderthwaite.” Her arms were still rigidly held by the jerseys, sticking out like those of a scarecrow, but she managed to point. “His cottage … over there. P’raps you’d like to see, then go for t’ doctor, like.”
I said yes, I would like to see my old friend and then I would do anything I could, take it all off her back. She was immensely relieved, and managed a smile. I drove across to where she had pointed, and parked, and we got out. We walked up a short path from a green-painted gate, behind Miss Salderthwaite, who pushed open the front door which she had been too agitated to lock after her dreadful discovery.
I saw the body after going through a front room to the kitchen. Except for the body itself, everything was tremendously neat; evidently Miss Salderthwaite was a treasure. The body, for whom I could feel no sympathy, spoiled the picture of Yorkshire tidiness and cleanliness. It lay face down on a Marley-tiled floor, in a pool of blood in front of an electric cooker and a deep freeze, and from its back a bayonet protruded. I recognised that bayonet as of German Army pattern as used in the Second World War. I went forward and knelt down by the body: like the cottage, it was stone cold. The bayonet, which had been sharpened, I believe, on a grindstone, was in almost to the hilt and must probably have come out the other side. I lifted the body a little way; it had, and was driven into the floor. I had to give Stummerl quite a tug to free it. All that meant that Stummerl had been bayoneted whilst actually on the floor. Lying inert, after having been attacked and felled?
I couldn’t see any other injuries, but forensic would delve.
I stood up. “Terrible,” I said to Miss Salderthwaite.
She was shaking more than ever and seemed about to go to pieces. She began to apologise for the cold kitchen; she had come in late because of a bad night with the rheumatics — she’d overslept. So no fire had been lit in the front room. Stummerl had, I thought, been dead some while, but her evidence might help to pinpoint the time. If he’d been alive at fire-lighting time, he would presumably have laid a grate somewhere himself and used a match. But that, too, was a job for forensic. In the meantime, I meant to carry out my own investigations, and these would involve a painstaking search of the cottage and grounds, and I didn’t want Miss Salderthwaite around. So I suggested she made some tea and after having a cup herself that she might go off and lie down with a couple of aspirins or whisky if she had any. She hadn’t — too bad. There was a bottle of Stummerl’s whisky on a shelf but it might be wanted for fingerprints; I could have used a handkerchief, but even handkerchiefs can smudge. Anyway, she made tea which was welcome, then off she went. I didn’t doubt she’d be back soon. I was surprised there hadn’t been more neighbours around, frankly, but just after she had shut the gate Miss Salderthwaite came back again to say the
re was no-one else she could have asked for help — no other man, anyway — since Loxa Mill these days was reduced to just four inhabitants, herself, Mr Stummerl, a Mrs Barnsley and the rector. Now there were only three — apart from a farmer who lived up the road. I wondered why the rector wasn’t counted as a man; possibly his cloth could not be tainted with murder. Anyway, it was to be a case of think of the devil: just as I was starting to search the cottage with a toothcomb, Miss Salderthwaite having left again, someone like a little fat black bat came up the path and banged at the door.
“Who the bloody hell’s that?” I asked Felicity, and she said the lector was calling. I cursed in an unchristian way but went to the door. The rector didn’t seem surprised to see me; no doubt he had just met Miss Salderthwaite. For my part I knew I had seen him somewhere before but couldn’t place where. Obeying an inbuilt sense of caution, I didn’t ask where it might have been.
“A tragedy,” the clergyman said, shaking his head. He was a small man, but he had a f ace like a bull. His cassock dripped melting snow on the floorboards; its trailing skirt seemed to have acted as a kind of personal snow-plough. Over the fireplace in the front room a clock ticked. I strove to remember who the rector was, or who, perhaps, he reminded me of. As for ourselves, I’d told him we were old pals of Stummerl’s which was perhaps why he said, “Your friend was well liked in the community.”
“There’s not much of it, I gather.”
He gave me a sharp look and his lips twitched disapprovingly. He had said the expected thing, and it should not have been thrown back in his face. He shrugged and said, “We’re close-knit in the moors.”
“One village with another?”
“That’s it. When it comes to sadness, you see. At other times, perhaps not.”
“Yorkshire suspicion of foreigners?”
I got another sharp look and the rector said, “Certainly he was a foreigner, yes — ”
“I didn’t mean it that way, but never mind.” Then I added, “ Was there suspicion of him, because he was German?”
“No, no. He’d settled in very well, and of course the wife was English. He was, perhaps, thought a little odd on account of his work.”
I nodded; the Bonn report had indicated that Stummerl had been a writer. That might possibly have disturbed the moor dwellers, who gained their livings by actual visible work. Authorship could be akin to witchcraft. I was still racking my brains as to the rector’s identity — he had introduced himself as Humphrey Rowbottom, but that hadn’t conveyed a thing — when he asked, pompously, if he could be with the body for a few moments.
I didn’t tick over very fast. I asked, “What on earth for?”
“Prayer,” he answered stiffly.
I said, “Oh, yes, of course. Please do,” and he opened the kitchen door and went in, pulling the door to behind him. It didn’t click shut and I had a view of a fat black backside as he knelt and bent forward and uttered a monotonous chant. Felicity whispered in my ear, “You never told him Stummerl was in the kitchen, did you?”
I gave a low whistle. “Too right I didn’t!”
“Isn’t that odd? The body could have been upstairs for all he knew.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” I said, then I remembered. “Miss Salderthwaite would have told him, wouldn’t she?” Felicity made some further remark but I wasn’t paying attention, because in that moment the sudden, blinding revelation had come to me. The Reverend Humphrey Rowbottom my arse! He may well be in the Church now, I thought, but he hasn’t made a lifetime’s work of it and how he had ever gained admission was a miracle in itself. It had all come back: when I’d last seen him — and he wouldn’t have been aware of me then — he was called Jason Clutch. He’d had a German mother; and the occasion had been a magistrate’s court hearing in London, when Jason Clutch, whose actual occupation I could not now remember, had come up while I was waiting incognito for another case to be heard. Jason Clutch had been charged with causing an affray at a march of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the reason he had stood out enough to be half recognised all these years later was that he had given the Nazi salute in the dock and had then shouted out “Heil Hitler!” before being hustled down the steps to the cells. It had been quite a scene; the stipendiary had been scandalised. He would have been even more scandalised had he seen Jason Clutch wearing a dog collar and cassock.
Praying finished, the parson came back into Stummerl’s living room. His eyes were still downcast. He said, “Poor fellow, poor fellow. Such a terrible end.”
“From a German bayonet,” I said.
He started a little, but covered what seemed to be his discomposure with a series of coughs. He banged at his chest. “Damp,” he said. “It gets right into one. Is it German?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Ah. Strange!”
“Herr Stummerl was a German, after all,” I said.
He opened his eyes wide. “You’re not suggesting suicide?”
“Not unless he was a contortionist. But the bayonet may have been his, a souvenir from the Fatherland — ”
“And someone broke in, and used it on him?”
I nodded. “It’s possible.”
“But the motive!”
“As yet unknown,” I said. “It could have been simple theft in the first place, an attempted burglary. On the other hand, at first glance, nothing seems to have been disturbed, so the motive may lie elsewhere, Mr Rowbottom.”
“You sound like the police,” he said.
I grinned. “I’m not the police. But they’ll be here when the news gets through. No doubt they’ll be in touch with you.”
“With me? I don’t know anything that would help!” The parson looked quite put about. “Why me?”
I said sardonically, “I’m not suggesting you killed him, Mr Rowbottom — ”
“Good gracious, what — ”
“But you shrove him. The police — ”
“One doesn’t shrive souls after the f act of death, my dear fellow. In any case, that’s my office. It’s scarcely evidence, is it?”
I apologised and left it at that. The rector seemed reluctant to leave the cottage with me and Felicity still in situ but I didn’t give him any option. I was staying for a while, I said; Heinz Stummerl had been a good friend and I didn’t like the idea of leaving him like that, all alone. Perhaps, while we held the fort as it were, Mr Rowbottom would himself drive to Helmsley if the telephones wore still out of order — they were, because I tried Stummerl’s to make sure — and tell the police. I would wait till they came. He went off with extreme reluctance, banging the gate behind him rather viciously. I looked at Miss Mandrake.
“What do you make of all that?” I asked.
She said, “I’m wondering why he turned up.”
I shrugged. “Parsons do, don’t they? In the country, anyhow. Things don’t change all that much. It’s natural to pray over the corpse.”
“Maybe,” she said, half agreeing, but only half. “I don’t know why I fee! he’s not straight. I just do.”
“Let’s have it,” I said. “Something’s on your mind. What is it, exactly?”
She said uneasily, “That praying. As you said, it’s natural, even proper, I suppose. But couldn’t there have been an ulterior motive?”
“Such as?”
“Could he have been taking the opportunity of — of accounting for fingerprints?”
“On the bayonet?”
“Yes,” she said defensively. “If we hypothesise that he was the murderer — ”
“Good God,” I said, “we don’t!”
“But if we do. He might have forgotten to wipe the bayonet handle … so came back to do just that-then when he found us he used his official capacity so he could say he touched it while he was praying.”
I asked curiously, “Just why do you think he may have been the killer, Felicity?”
“I told you,” she answered, “I don’t know! He just gave me the creeps, really.”
“
Which is not indie table. But now I’ll tell you something. There could be pointers towards an involvement of sorts, but I don’t believe it’s murder.” I told her all I had remembered about Jason Clutch and his Nazi outburst in court. When I had finished she gave me a sort of I-told-you-so look, but I rejected this and advised her not to be over hasty.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked.
“Absolutely not — quite the opposite. Look, we have to have clear minds over this. It’s all very involved.” I gave her a résumé of known facts, or anyway facts as gleaned from Plug and from Bonn. “The old guy in Chile, ex Wehrmacht, is, or was if dead now, all for getting his hero’s brain back into West Germany, right?”
She nodded.
“On the other hand, Lothar and Lotte Bolz, the carriers, believe they’ll be taking it back to East Germany to become a peep-show in Russia eventually. The West German Bundestag bloke, the one who made the discovery in the foothills of the Andes — remember? — he intends to hook it away from the Bolzes by some means, probably hi-jack, and ensure that it reaches West Germany in accordance with the old soldier’s wishes and his own — the Bolzes are just tools, that’s all. Willi Gelder — alias William Smith in the York nick — he was a member of the Plug gang, who’re in cahoots with the Werewolves in West Germany and who also want the brain to stay in the west for the purpose of rallying the faithful to the bloody banner. Okay so far?”
“Yes … ”
“Right. Well, Heinz Stummerl was Willi Gelder’s friend and sometime bedmate. We know they had similar views, and it’s likely enough they had similar hopes for the future. All Nazis together.”
“Together with Jason Clutch … Rowbottom?”
I nodded. “Sure. Clutch was very Hitler minded. Or was. I doubt if he’s changed.”
“He could have.”
“Yes. But I don’t think it’s likely. Fanaticism tends to remain, like in the case of that old NCO in Chile. And if I’m right, then Rowbottom certainly didn’t kill Stummerl. It’s a case of all hands to the pump except the Bolzes — or in this case, all hands to the brain transport safely into West Germany. For my money, Rowbottom came just to take a look at us, see who we were.”
Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16) Page 4