Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“When was this?”

“February 1936. So. As you can see, I’ve had three years to get used to the idea that I don’t live up here anymore. No, now I live down in the town. In Berchtesgaden. If I had been going to shoot Flex, I think I would have done it back then, when my blood was hot about it.”

“It takes a cool head to make an accurate shot.”

“Then that lets me out. I never was much of a shot.”

“I can vouch for that, Commissar,” said Ambros. “Peter’s a terrible shot. He can barely hit a mountainside with the shotgun, let alone the rifle.”

“What about Johann Brandner? The local photographer who fell foul of Bormann. He’s a good shot.”

“He’s in Dachau,” said Ambros.

“Actually he was released a couple of weeks ago and is living in Salzburg.”

“Sensible of him,” said Geiger. “To stay away from here. I expect people in Berchtesgaden would be too afraid to give him work now.”

“Anyone think he could have shot Flex?”

“No one’s seen him,” said Hayer.

“He was a better shot than he was a photographer,” said Ambros. “That’s all I’ll say.”

“You know, now I come to think of it, Herr Commissar,” said Geiger, “I’m almost certain that the poacher’s rifle I gave to Major Högl was a Mannlicher carbine. With a telescopic sight. Perhaps you should ask him about it. Or for that matter, ask him who shot Dr. Flex.”

“You might even find that they were both sweet on the same whore from the P-Barracks,” added Ambros. “Then again, be careful how you ask that question. Our Major Högl was in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry.”

“So? I wouldn’t have thought that’s so unusual around here.”

“He was a noncommissioned officer. A sergeant. And by all accounts his orderly in the Sixteenth was a man named Adolf Hitler.”

After leaving the Landlerwald we stopped in the village of Buchenhohe, outside the Leader’s Territory, to search Flex’s house. Like everywhere else in Obersalzberg there was no one abroad or on the streets that I could see. Possibly the people were all huddled indoors keeping warm, listening to the BBC and holding their breath while we waited to find out if there would be war. Nobody, including me, could quite believe that the British and the French might be prepared to fight for the Poles, whose Sanation government was no more democratic than the government of Germany. All wars seem to start for all the wrong reasons and I didn’t suppose this one — nobody doubted that Hitler wasn’t prepared to call the British bluff — would be any different.

The house itself was made of wood and stone, and was sited close to a curious little gray church that was nearly all sloping roof and squat steeple; it looked like a Big Bertha — a forty-two-centimeter heavy howitzer we’d used to destroy the Belgian forts at Liège, Namur, and Antwerp. It was quite out of keeping with the Bavarian quaintness of Buchenhohe. But the idea of firing an eight-hundred-kilogram shell at the Berghof was not an unattractive one, and well within a giant howitzer’s twelve-kilometer range. That really was a prayer to send up more than once a day.

“Most of the RSD officers employed at the Berghof live here or at Klaushohe,” said Kaspel. “Myself included. And quite a few of the engineers from P&Z. With the major difference that the majority of these houses were purpose-built. No one here had their house bought by compulsory purchase. At least nobody that I know of.”

“How do you stand it here after Berlin?” I asked. “It’s like being trapped inside an endless Leni Riefenstahl movie.”

“You get used to it.”

Kaspel parked the car on a postage stamp of a driveway in front of a stone-arch doorway that was beneath a heavy black wooden balcony. Friedrich Korsch was there to greet us. Using a car borrowed from the Villa Bechstein, he’d driven the long way round to Buchenhohe, via the main road through Berchtesgaden, and was now peering in through the window. Hermann Kaspel had brought the house keys found in the dead man’s pockets, but it quickly became apparent that we wouldn’t need them.

“Someone’s been here already, boss,” said Korsch. “Unless the cleaner didn’t come today and they had a wild party last night, it looks as if this place has been burgled.”

Kaspel opened the front door, which was no longer locked. I stopped to take note of a piece of string hanging out of the letterbox and then followed Kaspel inside. Flex’s books and ornaments were strewn everywhere. There was even some house dust still floating in the air as if a gorilla had just finished shaking an outsized snow globe.

“I don’t think they’ve been gone for very long,” I said, clearing my throat of dust.

“Maybe we should wait for the fingerprints people,” said Korsch.

“What’s the point? On Hitler’s mountain it’s bound to be someone that Flex knew, whose fingerprints were already here before they turned the place over.”

On the floor was a silver salver, and on the table in the kitchen, a ten-mark note. “It certainly wasn’t money and valuables they were after,” I said. “Whatever it was, I’m guessing they didn’t find it.”

“Why’s that?” asked Kaspel as we wandered from room to room.

“Because there’s so much mess,” said Korsch. “Usually when people find what they’re looking for, they stop throwing things around.”

“Maybe it just took them a while to find it. Whatever it might be.”

“When you create this much havoc, it actually makes it more difficult to find something,” said Korsch. “And there’s always one room that’s left untouched if they do find what they want. But here it looks like they were desperate. And short of time. And they probably went away empty-handed. Which is good for us. Because that means we might be more successful than they were.”

“How do you work that out?” asked Kaspel.

“Because we’re the law and we don’t mind if anyone sees us in here. And because we’re not in a hurry.”

“There’s something else,” I said. “None of the drawers have been opened but the furniture has been moved around quite a bit. Things were knocked over and broken when the furniture was moved. And when the pictures were removed from the walls. It’s as if they were looking for something larger. Something you might hide behind a sideboard or a picture.”

“A safe, perhaps?” Korsch picked up a polished rosewood humidor that was still full of Havana cigars.

“A safe, probably,” I said. “The list of Flex’s possessions included a set of house keys that we now have. And a key on a gold chain that was around his neck, and which we think Dr. Brandt might have stolen. Might that have been the key to a safe? A safe someone knew of? Someone who knew not to bother with the house keys, perhaps because they already had another set. Or knew where one was. Which would explain the piece of string hanging out of the letterbox. There was probably a door key on the end of that. I don’t suppose you noted a manufacturer’s name on the missing key, did you, Hermann?”

“I didn’t write one down,” said Kaspel. “But I’m pretty sure it was an Abus.”

“Abus make padlocks,” I said. “Not safes.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Kaspel.

“I imagine our burglar didn’t know it, either. But I’ll still bet my pension it’s a safe he was looking for. There isn’t one wall in here that hasn’t been exposed and examined. By the way, where does Dr. Brandt live?”

“Here. In Buchenhohe. A couple of hundred meters away. Close to the Larosbach river.”

“So he’d have had plenty of opportunity, then.”