“I take it that you have a well-developed skill set in the martial arts yourself, is that not the case, Major?”
“I take a modicum of pride in my training and skills. I have won tournaments and have had direct experience in unarmed hand-to-hand combat during my career. I have to admit that the murderer was better than me. It was obvious that I had engaged a trained soldier or perhaps a skilled assassin. Whatever the case, he knocked me cold. I guess I should feel lucky to be alive.”
“What did you discover when you came to?”
“It took a while, but finally I studied the scene. It was quite evident that the general was dead. I had been wrong about what the assailant was doing. It was certainly no judo chop. I saw the handle of one of the bar’s ice picks driven into the junction between his skull and his neck—a favorite killing site. I myself was trained to try to stab or bayonet an opponent through what the anatomists call the foramen magnum. That results in an instant death due to a cut or transection of the brain stem. This murderer knew with precision what he was doing.”
“It would seem that you yourself are quite knowledgeable on the subject, Major. What you are telling us that the general had been pithed—apparently quite expertly. I have to ask: did you murder Gen. Hill-Brownwell?”
Major Donelly looked shocked.
He raised his voice, “I most certainly did no such thing! I am neither a murderer nor a liar, and I take great offence at your inference.”
“No need for a display of anger, Major. These are just questions that have to be asked. DI Snowden and I are just doing our jobs, however distasteful they may be. I’m sure you understand,” DI Bourden-Clift soothed.
Major Donelly worked to ratchet down his emotions several notches and nodded his understanding. He could not entirely erase the look of resentment from his facial expression.
“Major, the Army and Navy Club is a gentleman’s club for commissioned officers of all ranks in Her Majesty’s Regular Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Marines. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Although it must seem beyond any reasonable possibility, is there any member or person on the staff at the club who could have committed this terrible crime?”
“Not for the life of me can I think of a living soul who is a member or on the staff here. But then, I did not really know many of the members or staff that well.”
“How about Brewster? Did he have motive enough, means, and opportunity, do you think?”
“Circumstantially, I suppose. However, my encounters with the man face-to-face would not lead me to consider him to be a suspect. I looked into the face of the killer. It was not Brewster. Furthermore, as I think about it, if he did want to kill the general—even by use of a proxy—why wait until today, years after the incidents which angered him took place? Surely there was a more opportune time or place during that decade or so.”
“It would seem,” DI Snowden agreed.
“Oh, and it occurred to me that the man I put my arms around to tackle was taller. Besides—and most obvious to me—I saw his face. He was older than Brewster, had short white hair, and several facial scars which looked altogether like dueling saber scars. Strong and swift as he was, I think I saw a bit of a limp as he was running towards the general.”
“That is helpful, Major. Do you have any further questions for the major, Tony?”
DI Anthony Bourden-Clift shook his head.
“Then, that should be it for now, Major Donelly. Thank you for your assistance and cooperation. Please don’t leave the city. We may have further questions as our investigation continues.”
After Donelly left the room, Bourden-Clift, asked, “So what’s your take, Angela?”
“He seems genuine, but the circumstantial evidence points to him as the first person of interest and to Brewster as the second.”
“Or the pair of them as the third,” Bourden-Clift added, and Snowden nodded her agreement.
“Both of them are experienced military veterans, fit, and, at least—in the major’s case—young and athletic,” Bourden-Clift went on. “I can’t get it into my head that either of them would murder for the reasons we have heard. They are practical men, and revenge would seem like an inadequate motive this far out.”
After they joined DCI Crandall-White on the first floor, the three detectives went over what they had learned.
The DCI added the final note, “We have our work cut out for us, and we ought not to jump to any hasty conclusions. We need to know everything there is to know about our three persons of interest first, then about the membership and staff of the club; and finally, we will have to get into the old military records and the files on the POW camps. Maybe we just don’t know about some revenge-seeking German who finally snapped and came after our general. One of those former POWs could be our man. We will have to wear out some shoe leather and do some regular ‘Old Bill’ flatfoot work. This is not going to be a simple or quick investigation. Since we are dealing with a senior army officer, we will likely encounter some flack and considerable lack of cooperation both from the army and from her majesty’s government.”
“I’ll work on the British records,” said Angela, the star analyst of the team.
“I’ll put in a few calls, and try and see if there are other murders like this one. If this is a revenge murder, it is possible that the perpetrators hold a grudge against other men and even foreign nationals,” Tony offered.
“I’ll shepherd the evidence and run interference with the chiefs of the ‘Old Bills,’ the government tops, and push the brass at Northwood. I will probably run into a lot of static, but there is more to this crime than meets the eye. It was certainly no robbery. Sir Hill-Brownell had a Rolex watch, a diamond pinky ring, and a billfold full of pound notes, all untouched.”
“Before this is over, Boss, and you have talked to the man—and we have offended the veterans and the foreign nations, we will probably conclude that we have really stepped in it,” Angela said.
“That’s why we get all the rhino and the nicker [centuries-old British slang for ready cash or big money],” DCI Crandall-White said.
The team of three left the Army and Navy Club and drove back to the CID on Victoria Embankment.
BOOK TWO
WHY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Magadan, Siberia, April 1953
The two men were too exhausted to be able to enjoy a psychological, spiritual, or philosophical sense of being free men after eight years of enslavement in the harshest of all the world’s prisons. They were gaunt, sallow complexioned, and shrunken. After little more than an hour of cautiously savoring the novelty of being free from the homicidal confines of the Butugychag Tin Mine—the Soviet Siberian gulag on the Kolyma River camp for German POWs who were designated for “special treatment”—the novelty gave way to more primal concerns. Paramount of these concerns was the need for food. The two men were starving, just as they had been for the past eight years. And it was cold; they needed better clothing and some sort of shelter.
For all they knew, they had the dubious distinction of being the only members of their regiment still alive. They moved away from the other former prisoners, a natural grouping in which countrymen tended to find some similitude of camaraderie with their own. Hungarians, Serbs, Germans, and Baltics went their separate ways two-by-two. The two men—who looked like emaciated raggedy hoboes—were soon all lost among a milling populace of exceedingly poor and deprived Northern Russians who were just eking out a living in an unforgiving land. Most of those people had arrived during the recent war as displaced persons and were only a little better off than the newly released prisoners of the gulag. No one took an interest in anyone else. No one had the strength or resources to give help to another human being. Although it was somewhat better than the gulag, it was still a Hobbesian world.
Antoine and Michaele were used to hard work; the basic philosophy in the camp had been work or die. So, they set to work. They stole a grubbing hoe with a heav
y iron head and an old shovel and dug themselves a rude pit in the side of an embankment which allowed at least some respite from the biting wind. They waited until darkness fell before daring to venture out to steal food. Both men were sure that the semi-starving wretches in the city and on the hardscrabble farms would guard their caches of food to the death. It was bitter cold and a starless dark night; both of those climatic conditions worked in their favor. They were accustomed to working in near darkness and to being cold. They knew from bitter experience that they had to keep moving, or they would die. They also knew that without food another day, they would weaken and become unable to forage or to defend themselves.
A light ahead alerted them to the possibility that they were seeing a farmhouse, and they began to hope for the possibility of food. They kept to the brushy areas along the road, and the going was slow. Antoine hand-signaled for Michaele to move to the rear of the rude hut while he moved slowly and quietly towards the front on the opposite side. He heard a woman singing a vesnyanky [song invoking the spring season] in an old scratchy voice. There was accompaniment by a Yat-kha [long zither similar to Korean gayageum]. Antoine had a brief moment of nostalgia. He had heard the local people living outside the Gulag prison occasionally singing folk music and playing on their very different string instruments. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He and Michaele had work to do, not the sort of work that could allow any softness like nostalgia to intrude.
He peered in the window. It appeared that there were only two people in the room—old ones dressed in dirty ragged peasant tunics, not so different from his own. A woodstove was ablaze, and on it was an iron pot filled with a thick bubbling stew. The reaction in his salivary glands and stomach was so intense that it was painful. The reaction drove out every other thought than food. He moved to the back and signaled Michaele. His gesture pointed towards the interior of the hut. He returned to the front; and–when he was set–he gave two sharp shrill whistles.
Antoine smashed through the door; and Michaele pushed his way into the living quarters, passing through a pen containing pigs, sheep, and goats. The old lady fainted, and the old man put his zither vertically in front of himself in a reflex defensive move. He did not utter a sound. When Antoine swung his shovel at the old man’s head, the victim did not flinch or throw his forearms or hands up in defense. The sound of the shovel blade striking the peasant’s head was like a watermelon being struck. Michaele smashed the old lady’s head with the heavy iron blade of the grubbing hoe. From the time of entry into the hut until the couple was dead, less than three minutes had elapsed. The two former Gulag prisoners dragged the bodies out of the hut and up to the top of the low hill behind it. They shoveled out a shallow pit in the snow and chopped down a pile of birch tree branches to cover the bodies. The deaths of Karp and Marita Petrenko were not discovered for three years, two years after Antoine and Michaele were herded aboard busses and taken via the Kolyma Highway [known to the local populace as the “Road of Bones”] and loaded onto uncomfortable buses and troop trucks to Tommot where they were herded onto the Amur-Yakutia Mainline train for a fourteen-day starving trip all the way to Moscow.
The Petrenkos were among the limited number of survivors of mass deportees from all around Russia at the outset of the successful Bolshevik revolution. Their crime was that they were Kulaks—supposedly rich farmers, almost as antithetical to the communists as if they had been part of the bourgeoisie. Their records were lost, and anyone who knew of them back in Stalingrad where they were born would presume that they had long since perished in the barren frigidity of the far north.
The two starving men ate the entire cauldron of rich vegetable and mutton soup. It was savory and delicious and full of fresh vegetables. They engaged in a frenzy of devouring their first decent food in almost a decade. Antoine and Michaele ate too much and too fast for stomachs unused to being filled up, especially with cream and mutton fat-based broth. The two ex-POWs cursed and laughed as the rich meal exited both ends of their alimentary tracks in a night-long orgy of vomiting and diarrhea. Once they were cleaned out and able to be up and about again, they commenced a program of eating the year’s supply of food they discovered in the kitchen, the pantry, and the pens of their victims. Having vowed to exercise more prudence, they waited a day then slaughtered one of the goats and made another stew. It was as good as the mutton stew, and this time they were able to eat smaller portions and to savor the rich meat—something lacking in their diets for the past eight years.
At first Antoine and Michaele alternated guard duty in an around-the-clock vigil to defend themselves and their invaluable treasure of food and warm clothing. After a few months—and no one came to bother them—the two men relaxed and became Siberian farmers, tilling the fields, planting, and harvesting. They were none too good at farm work, however; and over the next several months, their efforts were not nearly as productive as the Petrenkos’ had been. When the harsh fall began to change to bitter winter, Antoine and Michaele finally had to admit that the idyllic peaceful and safe pastoral life they had envisioned for themselves was not going to persist. By late October, they were out of food. Both men had regained body weight, fat, and muscle, and could go for perhaps a month before they would begin to deteriorate seriously.
Having advanced their life’s condition to the point that they were genuinely healthy, neither man had any intention of returning to the condition they were in when they lived in the tin mine gulag. They decided to become hunters. The former prisoners knew they had to exercise great caution to avoid detection or capture—or even drawing attention toward themselves. They worked only at night and walked many miles away from their small home on the outskirts of Magadan. During the first week, they were able to steal two decent horses and enough provisions to last them a week. The horses gave them a wider latitude for their predations; and by mid-December, they had accumulated a food storage sufficient to keep them going for the next two months. They decided not to go out again until it was absolutely necessary, even if it meant having to kill and eat their horses.
The ground was still hard frozen down to the permafrost, and the nearly constant early March wind blew away patches of the accumulated snow, leaving stretches of bare ice. The cold was dreadful—falling as low as -45 to -65 degrees Fahrenheit most days. The early spring winds drove the effective temperature to fifteen degrees colder than that every night and until noon most mornings. Antoine and Michaele suffered from the cold, but considered it an advantage because no one but a mad man would venture out. Taking a breath at that level of cold would result in actual freezing of a man’s lungs.
They had not factored into their life’s equation the concept that others besides lunatics would venture out. There were also desperate men out there whose approaching starvation would drive them to attempt to take the two farmers’ food, even at the risk of being killed in the effort.
§§§§§§
In the very early morning hours of a bitterly cold night, Michaele awakened with a start. Antoine was snoring like a tank engine. Michaele gently placed his hand over his companion’s open mouth to silence him. Antoine became instantly awake. Michaele put his right index finger to his lips in the universal request for silence.
“What, mon frère?” Antoine whispered.
The two men listened so intently that they hardly breathed.
There it was again. The horses were restless and apparently rearing and kicking.
“Wolves?” Antoine asked.
Siberian Peasant Recipes
Pot Roast of Horse—Feeds 4
Ingredients
-2¾ boneless hindquarter roast, cut to fit pot. 2 tbsps oil-melted horse fat will do well; salt and pepper to taste.
-1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp beef boullion, 1 tsp crushed dried basil, ¾ lb new potatoes and or 2 med. sweet potatoes, 1 lb carrots or 6 medium parsnips, peeled, cut into 2 in. pieces, 2 onions, cut into wedges, 2 celery ribs cut into 1 in. pieces
-1/4 cup flour
&
nbsp; Preparation
-Trim fat from meat. Brown meat on all sides in hot oil in a 4– to 6–qt Dutch oven or pot. Drain fat.
-Mix 3/4 cup water, Worcestershire sauce, bouillon, basil and salt and pepper to taste; pour over roast and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer, covered, 1 hr.
-Quarter all new potatoes or peel and quarter sweet potatoes. Add potatoes, carrots, onions, and celery to pot. Return to boil. Reduce heat. Then simmer covered, until tender~45–60 mins. Add water as needed. Check for tenderness. May have to boil tough horse meat longer. Do not overcook vegetables.
-Transfer meat and vegetables to platter. Reserve juices.
-Prepare gravy: skim off fat, add juices and enough water to make cps. Return to oven.
In a small bowl, stir ½ cp water into flour. Stir into pan juices. Cook, stirring, on med heat until thickened, then 1 min. more. Season to taste. Serve with pot roast.
-After browning meat and adding liquid mixture to pan, bake, covered, for 1 hr at 325° F.
-Add prepared potatoes and vegetables to meat. Bake, covered, until tender, another 45–60 mins. Add gravy.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Magadan, Siberia, March 1954
Michaele slipped silently out of the bed they shared and crawled on his hands and knees towards the rude window facing out to where the horses’ corral was located. What he saw caused him to crawl like a man possessed.
“Not wolves,” he said, “at least not the four-legged kind.”
“Voleurs [thieves]?” Antoine hissed.
Michaele nodded, and he and Antoine moved into efficient and determined action which was second nature to them after their long careers as soldiers. They had set aside an assortment of weapons, including two Kalashnikov rifles they had managed to procure during one of their own nightly raids as voleurs.
Each man took a window to reconnoiter the magnitude of the threat and the direction from which it would came. They knew that thieves that brazen would not hesitate to kill them, even if only to buy a period of silence. The Patrenkos had purchased Antoine and Michaele two years of relative safety at the cost of their lives.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 17