Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

‘But doctor it you certainly did. Kritzinger reports seeing Kuttner looking very tired at around two. So the drug was already working its effect. But Kuttner didn’t know that, so when he got back to his room he took his regular dose of Veronal and actually passed out with one of the pills still in his throat. Which accounts for how he only had one boot off. My guess is that you wanted him to sleep extra soundly, although why you didn’t just do him in with an overdose, I’m not sure. Possibly you wanted to make sure he was indeed dead and there is, as you must know, always something uncertain about an overdose. It’s amazing just how much people can swallow without dying. But a bullet is much more certain. Especially when it’s fired point-blank to the heart.

‘In the morning, you let Captain Pomme and Kritzinger try to rouse him before making sure that you were on the scene to authorize them to break down the door. And being a General, naturally you were first into the bedroom, which meant you were also the one who was able to take charge and examine Kuttner’s drugged body and pronounce him dead. Naturally, they took your word for it, General. You’re not an easy man to contradict, sir.

‘Judging by his appearance, of course, it hardly looked at all probable that he was still alive. He was half dressed from the night before, and there was an open bottle of Veronal on the bedside table, so everyone assumed that the obvious explanation was the correct one: Kuttner had taken an overdose, possibly intentionally — after all, most of his fellow officers were aware he’d had some sort of breakdown — and was dead. No one suspected that he had been shot because the fact is he hadn’t been shot. Not at that moment. At that moment he was only unconscious.

‘Having ordered Kritzinger to call an ambulance and Captain Pomme to fetch Doctor Jury, you were now alone in the room with the Captain’s unconscious body. Doctor Jury’s room is in the other wing of the house, so you knew Pomme would take several minutes to return with him. Apart from the telephone in your office, the nearest telephone is on the ground floor, so Kritzinger was far away, too. All the same, you probably waited a few minutes just to make sure that no one was around before closing the door as best you were able. There was now plenty of time for you to produce a gun from inside your fencing jerkin, pull aside his tunic and coolly fire two shots in rapid succession into Kuttner’s body at close range, killing him instantly. Because he was still wearing his tunic, the gunshot wounds were not immediately obvious to anyone who had already seen the body. Moreover these wounds didn’t bleed much either because Kuttner was lying on his back. Not to mention the convenient effect that the extra Veronal would have had on the dead man’s blood pressure.’

Heydrich listened patiently, still denying nothing. Folding his arms he placed a thoughtful finger across his thin lips. He might have been considering some plan for the evacuation of Prague’s Jews.

‘You put the gun back inside your jerkin. Then you opened the window, just to help ventilate the room a little more, just in case someone caught a whiff of the shots. When you opened the window, that’s when you saw the footman, Fendler, with the ladder; you told him that the ladder was no longer required; that poor Kuttner was dead of an overdose, because after all, you were obliged to pay lip service to what at that moment everyone else believed.

‘Then you did a quick search on the bed and the floor for the spent brass. You wanted to pick this up so that you could help to muddy the waters and add to the mystery that was bound to attach to a murder in a room locked from inside. That might have taken a while. They’re elusive things when you need to find them in a hurry. Of course, if someone had entered the room you would have given some excuse about looking for clues. After all, there were pills on the floor. You were just picking them up. You are a policeman, after all. Maybe it was you who chucked them there for effect. Set dressing, so to speak. But to me it never seemed right that the Veronal bottle remained upright on the table when there were pills on the floor.

‘Having found the two spent brass cartridges, you flung them along the corridor, lit a cigarette to help conceal the smell of the two shots — although, as I discovered for myself a little while ago, it isn’t particularly noticeable, and certainly no more noticeable than the noise of two shots. I fired my own pistol in Kuttner’s room while you were all eating lunch and, of course, no one noticed a thing. Most people assume a noise like that is something else, something a little less dramatic. A car backfiring. A vase of flowers knocked over. A door slammed by a careless footman. Of course you already know that. I’ll bet you even conducted a similar experiment yourself when you were planning this whole thing.

‘It was about then that Captain Pomme and Doctor Jury arrived in the room. Doctor Jury was a good choice. For one thing Jury was possibly still drunk, and at the very least badly hungover, and he probably didn’t even notice that the dead man was still bleeding, only that he’d been shot. Again no one was about to suspect your own first version of events. Besides, there was now an even bigger mystery in front of everyone’s eyes, which is how a man could be found shot dead in a room locked on the inside with no murder weapon on the scene. It’s a useful thing, mystery. Any stage conjurer knows the value of misdirection. You draw attention to what one hand is doing while the other hand does the dirty work.

‘People do love a good mystery, don’t they? You included, General. Perhaps you more than most. On your bookshelves I found a well-read copy of a detective novel by that writer you mentioned to me when I arrived here: Agatha Christie. It’s a novel called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And I only had to flick through it for a few minutes to see that the book contains certain similarities with this case. A body in a locked room. Only that person, Roger Ackroyd, isn’t dead at all; not in the beginning; and it’s the person who supposedly finds the body — Doctor Sheppard, isn’t it? — who turns out to be the murderer. As indeed you are. In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting that’s where you got the idea in the first place.

‘But my neck and my head hurt and I just can’t figure out why. Why would you murder your mother’s favourite piano pupil? It couldn’t be that, could it? Jealousy? No, not you. That would be much too human of you, General Heydrich, sir. No, there has to be some other reason. Something much more important than personal revenge.’

I paused and lit another cigarette.

‘Well, don’t stop there,’ said Heydrich. ‘You’re doing so well and I have to confess I’m actually quite impressed. This is more than I had expected of you, Gunther.’ He nodded firmly. ‘Keep going. I insist.’

‘For old time’s sake, you’d rescued Albert Kuttner’s career. That was oddly sentimental of you. And quite out of character, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir. Or perhaps you did it at someone else’s request. Kuttner’s father. Your mother, perhaps.’

‘You’d best leave my mother out of this, Gunther, if you don’t mind.’

‘Gladly. You’d rescued Albert Kuttner’s career only to discover that, as you told me yourself, he was a disappointment. More than just a disappointment, he’d become something of a nuisance, even an embarrassment. Kuttner was insubordinate. For example, there was that scene at the Officers’ Training School with Colonel Jacobi. And what was worse, you had found out he was quite possibly homosexual, too. After what happened to Ernst Rohm and some of his warmer friends in the SA, that was too much. Did you worry that you might be tainted with an association like that? I wonder. In Germany it’s one thing to be suspected of being a Jew, as you are, and quite another to be suspected of being soft on homosexuals. Even then, however, you could have sent Kuttner quietly back to Berlin. To one of those nice private clinics in Wannsee where top Nazis go to dry out or be weaned off drugs. Some of them even claim they can cure you of homosexuality. So you must have had an important reason to murder him in cold blood like that. There must have been some sort of gain in it for you. But what?’