Allan Martin - Death in Tallinn

There was no choice. “Go for it.”

She paused briefly, then fired. Kleber staggered as he ran, and fell over.

“Well done,” said Hallmets, “Check him out. Arrest him if he’s still alive….”

“He won’t be,” she said grimly.

“Check him anyway. Then go to the distillery and get some uniforms round here.”

“Will do, chief!” and she was off.

Hallmets pulled out his Browning and joined the others in concentrating fire on the defenders in the stable block. Soon all the windows on the front of the block were smashed. There seemed to be six or maybe seven shooters. But both sides were well shielded, so it seemed a bit of a stalemate. Hallmets suspected this was just what the defenders wanted; it gave their fellows time to get the crates out of the lorries and into hiding. The deadlock needed to be broken.

Two minutes later it was. With a loud roar the van with the reinforced bars raced round the corner and smashed into the blank wall between the gates. The driver had guessed that the gates would be well bolted, but the wooden wall between would be weaker. He was right. The van’s bonnet buried itself in the wall, splintering the wooden slats around it. The defenders’ fire immediately turned on the van, but its roof and sides were armoured, and the shots had little effect. Lesser and his men increased their fire to cover the van’s retreat. But it only reversed a few metres turned sharply, and came alongside the building, so that the passenger window was near the hole they’d made.

Hallmets smiled. He recognised this move from the war. He knew the passenger would now toss a stick bomb or hand grenade into the hole in the building. The van reversed suddenly and there was a loud explosion from inside the building. The van moved forward again and a few seconds later there was another explosion. This time some of the slats in the wall were blown out. Lesser ordered his men to concentrate their fire through the gaps in the hope of chasing out any of the men who had been unloading the lorries. The defenders returned fire, but only sporadically. Maybe they were trying to decide what to do next.

Their decision was hastened by a new bout of firing. Hallmets recognised rifle fire and peeped round the corner. Some of the men who’d secured the distillery had reached an upper floor at the rear of the barn, and were pouring rifle fire from a row of small windows down into the stable. The defenders would be unable to hold their position in the face of powerful fire coming down onto them. Now they would have to retreat, but where to?

The fire from the stable windows ceased, but there were no calls of surrender. Lesser waved the armoured van around the side of the stable, and he and his men followed in its wake. Hallmets went after them, pausing to call to the men in the barn to come after them.

As he came around the corner, Hallmets reached another, smaller, courtyard at the back of the stables. It was empty, apart from the armoured van parked by the rear door of the stable, to Halmets’ left. Beyond it, in front of him, was the rear of the manor house. To his right was a low building with a thatched roof which he guessed was a smokehouse.

He saw Lesser and his men standing in the cover of the van’s rear. “What’s happened?” he asked.

“Saw two of them get into the manor house. One whole, one wounded. Shall we follow?”

“No, not yet. Check out the lorries first. We need all the evidence we can get before we go for the house.”

Lesser waved his men into the stable through the rear door, and Hallmets followed. The scene reminded him of the war. The hand grenades had done what they were designed for: produce a localised but powerful blast that would destroy anything in the immediate vicinity, and cause injury further afield through flying debris. Two men lay dead. One had an arm and half his face missing, the other had been flung against the door of a lorry and lay like a broken doll by the mud-encrusted tyre. On the other side of the lorries they found two more men on the ground, at the foot of the staircase leading to the upper floor, both with bullet wounds, but still alive. Hekk was already by one, tying a makeshift bandage around a profusely bleeding head wound. “Two more dead up here,” shouted Lesser from the top of the stairs.

“Well done,” Hallmets called back. “Let’s see to these wounded men first, then get some crates open.” His concern for the injured men was not simply a gut reaction from wartime, to save whatever lives you can. He also knew that they needed living witnesses, who would confess to whatever had been going on before those at the top had time to summon their lawyers and prepare their alibis.

While the injured were being bandaged up, and that included Mürakas, who’d picked up a gash on the back of his hand, the men with the crowbar and sledgehammer arrived, along with Sergeant Larsson. She reported to Hallmets that the distillery had been secured, and five arrests made. They’d also found the bottling plant and a storeroom well-stocked with Leikari vodka, as well as a smaller amount of Three Monks Georgian brandy.

One of the wooden crates had already been removed from its lorry, and they all gathered as the crowbar man got to work. As the lid was lifted, all they could see was straw. Hallmets nodded to Lesser, who tentatively slipped his hands into the straw and after some rummaging produced a package just under a metre long wrapped in cloth. Lesser carefully peeled back the cloth. There was a few moments’ silence as they all stared at the weapon, a little like a rifle with a much shortened vented steel barrel. They could smell the oil and see the sheen on the barrel.

“Sub-machine gun,” said Lesser, “Looks brand-new. No magazine. They must be packed separately. Are they Swedish or German?”

Larsson leaned forward, “Let me have a good look.” She took the gun carefully from Lesser’s hands, examined the stock, felt the weight. “Finnish. Suomi KP/-31. Only came out in ’31. State-of-the-art. Our army would die for these.”

“Are they made there?” Hallmets asked her.

“The factory’s in Jyväskylä, right in the middle of Finland. So they must have been taken by rail or truck to Turku, and loaded onto Dimitrios there. These weapons aren’t cheap, chief.”

“So the question is, who were they going to sell them on to?”

“If all these crates are full of them,” said Lesser, “They could supply every gangster in the Baltic States, or equip a small army,.”

“OK,” said Hallmets, “We need to get this operation finished. From the fact those two ran to the manor house, and the amount of money that seems to be involved in this whole business, we have to suspect Heinrich von Langenstein of being party to it. But we need more people here, to examine the distillery, itemise this stuff, and search the whole estate.”

“Inspector Sõnn’s on that,” said Larsson, “He phoned Pikk Street from the distillery. Their office is well-equipped. I suspect they’ve got records of every single shipment in the filing cabinet there.”

Hallmets asked Ilves and Mürakas to guard the arms lorries until the reinforcements arrived. Then, pistol in hand, and followed by Lesser, Hekk and Larsson, he made for the rear door of the manor house.

The door was a very ordinary wooden one, once painted black, but now the paint was peeling. They entered a cramped and dim hallway with a stone floor; what light there was came through the grimy window over the outer door. A door to the left was closed, but one on the right was ajar, so Hallmets took that one, moving swiftly into a roomy kitchen. It was very warm, heated by a fire in the wide hearth at the far end. There was a smell of soup which reminded Hallmets of the beetroot soup his mother often made.