Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

‘What did you do while you were waiting for Doctor Jury?’

‘Let’s see now. I opened the window, to get some air. I was feeling a little queasy for some reason. No, that’s not fair. He was a friend of mine. I lit a cigarette, to calm my nerves. But I tossed the end out of the window when I was finished. The crime scene is substantially uncontaminated.’ He shook his head and then ran a thin hand through his short hair. ‘I can’t think of anything else. After a while Doctor Jury turned up with Pomme. The doctor was, as Pomme says, very hung over. But not so hung over that he was incapable of pronouncing poor Kuttner dead. After that I had Ploetz call you and the local police right away. At approximately seven-thirty.’

‘Where’s Doctor Jury now?’ I asked.

‘In the library, sir,’ said Kritzinger. ‘With Doctor Honek. He asked for a pot of strong black coffee to be brought to him there.’

‘Has Doctor Honek examined the body?’

‘No,’ said Heydrich firmly. ‘I decided that there was no urgency about doing so. I thought it might be better if he waited until you had had a chance to examine the body yourself.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll do that now, if I may.’

‘Of course,’ said Heydrich.

‘Mister Kritzinger,’ I said. ‘Would you ask Doctor Jury to join us in Captain Kuttner’s room?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Captain Pomme? Perhaps you’d like to lead the way.’

I stood up and looked at Kahlo, the Criminal Assistant from Prague Kripo. ‘You’d better fetch the evidence kit that Zennaty brought,’ I said.

‘Right you are, sir.’

‘General? If you’d care to join us?’

Heydrich nodded. ‘Major Ploetz? You’d better inform the rest of my guests of what has happened. And that they will be required to answer the Commissar’s questions before anyone is allowed to leave. And that includes everyone at the Upper Castle.’

‘Yes sir.’

Kuttner’s room was on the same floor as mine, but it was in the south wing and overlooked a little glass winter garden. On the pink-papered walls were some pictures of English hunting scenes that made a welcome change from the Czech ones with which I was more familiar. The fox, who appeared to be smiling, must have believed he stood a good chance of escaping from the hounds, and that was all right with me. Lately I’m the kind of antisocial type who cheers when the fox makes a clean getaway.

Before I looked at the body I made my way around the room, noting a large pile of books by the bed and a bottle of Veronal beside a water carafe on the desk. The screw cap was still off the bottle. There were several pills on the floor but, oddly, the bottle was upright. Kuttner’s belts and the holster containing his Walther automatic were hanging on the back of his chair.

Heydrich saw me pick up the open bottle of Veronal. ‘Until I realized the true nature of his injuries I assumed that the Veronal was the culprit,’ he said. ‘It was only when Doctor Jury opened the tunic of his uniform to examine Captain Kuttner that we realized he’d suffered a lethal wound to his abdomen.’

‘Mmm hmm.’

Kuttner lay at an angle across the bed, as if he’d collapsed there. His eyes were closed. One of his arms lay neatly alongside his torso; the other was sticking straight out at right angles to the rest of his body, like a dead Christ. Well, half of a dead Christ anyway. But both hands were unscathed and empty. There were four buttons on his captain’s fart-catcher tunic with three of them unbuttoned from the top. He was wearing a white collarless shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and no tie. It was easy to see how anyone could have missed the fact he’d been shot. It was only when you lifted the flap of the tunic that you could see the blood covering the shirt. He was still wearing his riding breeches, and just one boot. The monkey-swing — his adjutant’s braided rope — was off his top button but still attached to the right epaulette. He looked like a man who had been shot while he was still undressing.

‘Has anyone been over the floor yet?’ I asked Heydrich. ‘To look for evidence?’

‘No,’ said Heydrich.

I nodded at Kahlo who, without complaint, dropped onto his hands and knees and began to look for a bullet-shell, or perhaps something as yet unimagined.

I collected the P38 from Kuttner’s holster, sniffed the barrel and then checked the magazine. The gun was dirty and not well maintained, but clearly it hadn’t been fired in a while.

‘Your conclusions?’ asked Heydrich.

‘Beyond the fact that he was shot in the torso and that it hardly looks like a suicide I don’t yet have any,’ I said.

‘Why do you think it doesn’t look like a suicide?’ asked Pomme.

‘It’s unusual to shoot yourself and then neatly replace the weapon in the holster,’ I said. ‘Especially when you weren’t being neat about so much else. If you were going to shoot yourself, you would take off both boots, or neither of them. Quite apart from that his own pistol has a full magazine and hasn’t been fired in a while.’

I shrugged.

‘Then again there is no other gun in the room. But all the same it’s hard to imagine that he was shot, returned to his room, locked the door, lay down on the bed, took off one boot, and then quietly died. Even if that’s what it looks like.’

‘What I can’t understand,’ said Heydrich, ‘is why nobody seems to have heard a shot.’

‘Well, we don’t know that until we ask everyone,’ I said.

‘I can ask around, if you like,’ offered Pomme.

‘What I mean,’ Heydrich said firmly, ‘is that the sound of a shot would surely have raised the alarm. Especially here, in a house full of policemen.’

I nodded. ‘So the chances are that somehow the shot was muffled. Or someone did hear the shot and either chose to ignore it, or thought that it was something else.’

I went to the open window and put my head outside.

‘Today I can’t hear anything,’ I said. ‘But yesterday when I arrived here, at around the same time, someone was out there shooting birds. Rather a lot of birds.’

‘That would have been General von Eberstein,’ said Captain Pomme. ‘He likes to shoot.’

‘But not this morning,’ I observed.

‘This morning, he has a hangover,’ said Pomme. ‘Like General Jury.’

Kahlo stood up. ‘Apart from all of these pills, there’s nothing on this floor, sir,’ he said. ‘Not so much as a bloodspot.’

‘What, nothing at all?’ I frowned.

‘No sir. I’ll organize a more thorough search, after the body’s gone. But this floor is clean, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a mystery. Maybe he shot himself, threw the gun out of the window, closed it again, and then collapsed on the bed and died.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Heydrich, sarcastically. ‘Or maybe Captain Kuttner was just shot by a man who could pass through solid walls.’

‘You’d better check outside, anyway,’ I told Kahlo.

He nodded and left the room.

Heydrich shook his head. ‘That man is an idiot.’

‘How well do you know this house, General?’

‘You mean, are there any false walls and secret passages?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve not been here for very long at all. Von Neurath had the house before I did. He knows this place much better than me, so you’d better ask him that.’

Absently I drew open Kuttner’s drawers and found several shirts, a toilet bag, some underwear, a shoe-cleaning kit, some Der Fuhrer magazines, a clay pipe, a book of poems, and a framed picture of a woman.

‘Can I ask von Neurath something like that?’

‘As I told you already, Gunther, I expect everyone to cooperate. No matter who or what they are.’