Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

I lit a cigarette, flicked the match into the lake, and almost immediately regretted it when an old Swiss woman tutted loudly and gave me a look of disgust. It was only then that I noticed how clean the water was. Probably that was why the sparrows were having a wash in it.

“What do you think, Bernie?”

“About what?”

“About this murder.”

“I’ll admit, it doesn’t sound much like suicide,” I said. “But without seeing the boat or the body, I’m not sure there’s much I can say. It sounds like the perfect murder. I’ll be sure to think of this if ever I want to murder my wife.”

“The body was buried long ago,” said Meyer. “But we can still see the boat, if you like.”

I stifled a yawn. “All right. I’ll take a look. But in my experience, with a cold case like this, there’s really very little to go on. It was an absolute fluke that I caught Gormann. I couldn’t say it at the conference last summer, for obvious reasons. But it was. I might have said more about that but my bosses in the RSHA wouldn’t have liked it. They’re wedded to the idea of German efficiency and police omniscience. Now, that’s what I call fiction.”

We walked along the Strandweg to a ramshackle boatyard with the word RAPPERSWIL painted in large letters on a sliding yard door, in case there was any doubt about where we were. A sign advertising boat-hire lay propped half-forgotten against the wall; looking around the yard, it was hard to see a boat that could have kept your feet dry. A diminutive bearded man as brown as an oven-baked nut with a briar pipe in his face was carefully craning a polished motorboat out of the lake and into the yard. There was a hole in its hull. Most of the other boats in the yard were in similar stages of disrepair. Across the yard, another man with an oxyacetylene torch was welding a rudder back together. A small dog lay asleep inside the rim of a large car tire and a radio was playing some German band music. The bearded man seemed to recognize Meyer and left off craning the boat for a moment to chat in the weird German that people spoke in and around Lake Zurich. I’d long given up trying to understand it. We followed the man into the corner of the yard, picking our way carefully between boats, trailers, tool kits, coils of rope, fenders and buoys, oil drums, planks of wood, and outboard engines. Puffing his pipe and possibly himself back into life, he pulled away a tarpaulin to reveal a boat that was about nine meters long, with a beam of about two meters, and a little cabin at the back. The boatman found us some steps and we stood on these and peered into the boat’s dilapidated interior, which told me absolutely nothing. Not that I expected the boat to tell me anything. It was beginning to feel embarrassing the way Meyer seemed to regard me as some kind of great detective, one of these other omniscient sleuths from popular fiction. I wanted to tell him that these detectives were no more real than the gods they seemed to imitate and perhaps even just as false in the devotion they seemed to inspire.

“The lady was found in a fetal position on the floor,” said Meyer. “Which suggested that she’d been killed and placed there before rigor mortis could set in. The knot on the rope around her neck was a bit unusual. A bit like the knot in a cravat. And the lady was wearing a pink pinafore-style dress, expensive shoes, silk stockings, and — most interesting of all — a good diamond ring. And I mean a good diamond. At least three carats in size and worth a lot of anyone’s money. I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone not taking that ring before disposing of the body. That’s what made the newspapers take notice. The size of the diamond. What else? Red-and-white cushion covers on the seats of the boat. Nothing unusual about that. Swiss people are fond of red and white, the colors of our national flag. That’s about all, I think.”

“I don’t understand,” I told Meyer. “A woman’s body was found in the lake. So what? Why does this interest you? Paul, this is 1943. If it’s dead bodies you want, I’ll take you to the Ukraine and show you thousands.”

“This is Switzerland, Bernie. Murders like this just don’t happen here. In peacetime we have one of the lowest homicide rates in Europe. Most murder is domestic, and in half of these cases a firearm is involved. Less than ten percent of our murder cases remain unsolved. But it was the ring that awoke the public’s interest. I mean, a three-carat ring is the size of a bird’s egg. So she had to be somebody, right? That’s what interests me. One day I want to write a book about this case. I thought I might call it The Lady in the Lake . It’s a good title, don’t you think?”

“Oh, sure. But look, Paul, everyone is somebody. Even when they’re nobody. That’s the first thing you tell yourself when you join the Murder Commission. Doesn’t matter if it’s a homeless old man, a ten-year-old child, Walther Rathenau, or the king of Yugoslavia. They all rate investigation. At least they used to before our government started doing most of the killing.”

It sounded good but the truth was that after what I’d seen in the Katyn Forest earlier that year, I was hardly inclined to think of one woman’s death as in any way important. Death had undone so many since the beginning of the war that one more murder seemed irrelevant.

“Of course, of course, I just thought that something might occur to you, that’s all,” said Meyer. “In your speech last year you said that a cold case is nothing but all of the false and misleading evidence that, over a period of years, has come to be accepted as true. In other words, you start by patiently challenging almost everything you think you know.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to be rude to Meyer after his kind hospitality but it was all I could do to stop myself from telling him he was wasting his time and mine. From what I’d seen so far, this case was as cold as the Ypres Salient. And it wasn’t his fault that he’d managed to get through the war without seeing a single body. I envied him that, just as much as I envied him his lovely château at Wolfsberg and his beautiful wife. Besides, my nose was hurting and I really only had room for one thing in my mind and that was seeing Dalia once more. Especially now that I had a telegram from Goebbels. At least after our hotel tryst I’d be able to tell him that I’d seen her again. Maybe I could walk her up to the telegraph office in Rapperswil and get her to send him a telegram; that way I’d be off the hook.

Dinner at the Schwanen Hotel with Meyer and Police Inspector Leuenberger wasn’t any more interesting than my afternoon trip to the Rapperswil boatyard. Very thoughtfully, the Swiss cop brought some color photographs to the table but I didn’t look at them and there are better after-dinner subjects to talk about than a woman who’s been half-eaten by some pike perch, especially when that’s what’s on the menu. In spite of everything I now knew about their diet, I’m fond of pike perch. But the Riesling was a good Trocken and I drank a little too much of it, or at least enough to ask some questions about the lady in the lake, and from these I gathered only that the Rapperswil police were utterly clueless. It seemed that even a top detective from Bern had turned up and pronounced himself completely baffled.

“Maybe she had it coming,” I suggested when we finished the wine and started on the schnapps. “Maybe nobody came forward because people were glad to see this lady dead. That happens, you know. It’s not just nice, innocent people who get murdered. Not so innocent ones do, too. Perhaps someone bashed her head in because she deserved it. Did you think about that for a motive? That someone did the world a favor?”

Inspector Leuenberger frowned. “I don’t believe that for a second. No one should die that way. And it’s a very cruel thing to say about a woman you don’t know.”