Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘What happened then?’

‘We intercepted a message from somewhere on the Baltic coast, mentioning something about a “diamond stream”.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Pekkala.

Garlinski shrugged. ‘Whatever it was, it got their attention up at Headquarters. They contacted Christophe, asking for more information, photographs and so on. They’re afraid it might be some kind of new weapons system – one of the miracles the German High Command keep promising will turn the tide of the war. But whether Christophe was successful or not, I don’t know.’

‘The British have come to us, asking if we might be prepared to get Christophe out of Berlin.’

‘Berlin?’ Garlinski turned to face Pekkala. ‘And what fool are you sending on that suicide mission?’

‘That fool would be me,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Well, I’m sorry for you, Inspector, because none of it matters now anyway.’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Pekkala, rising to his feet.

‘The enemy is done for and they know it. All but a few of them, anyway.’

‘It’s those few we have to worry about,’ Pekkala said as he headed for the door.

‘Put in a good word for me, could you?’ asked Garlinski. He spread his arms, taking in the hollowness of the dirty room. ‘Tell them I deserve more than this.’

‘Diamond stream?’ Stalin rolled the words across his tongue, as if to speak them might unravel the mystery of their meaning.

‘Garlinski said he thought it might have something to do with one of the German secret-weapons programmes,’ said Pekkala. ‘Is there anyone who might know for certain?’

‘We have a number of high-ranking German officers at a prisoner-of-war camp north of the city. It is a special place, where men are slowly squeezed,’ Stalin clasped his hand into a fist, ‘but gently, so that they barely notice, and before they know it they have told everything. You might find someone there who still has a drop or two of information which we haven’t yet wrung from his brain. You’d better send Kirov, though.’

‘Why is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Speaking to these men requires some finesse,’ explained Stalin, ‘and your method of questioning suspects is apt to be a little primitive.’

Pekkala could not argue with that, but he had one more thing to say before he left. ‘Garlinski asked me to put in a word for him.’

‘A word about what?’ Stalin asked.

‘About his living conditions here in Moscow. He thinks he deserves something more.’

Stalin nodded. ‘Indeed he does, Inspector. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.’

On the island of Bornholm, the Ottesen brothers had done nothing to clean up the mess caused by the explosion the night before, and the yard was still scattered with fragments of splintered wood, old horse tack and a splintery coating of straw.

For now, at least, they contented themselves with simply observing the destruction.

The two men perched side by side upon a bale of charred hay in the middle of their barnyard. Both of them were smoking pipes that had long thin stems and white porcelain bowls with tin lids to dampen the smoke.

Emerging from their house at sunrise that morning, they had discovered, amongst the wreckage, several pieces of what appeared to be metal fins and heavy discs of metal pierced by a multitude of drill holes.

The idea that it might have been an aeroplane was quickly set aside. Where were the wheels, the brothers asked themselves. Where were the propellers? Or the pilot? No. This was no work of human hands.

By pooling their combined intelligence, the Ottesen brothers decided that it must have been a spaceship of some sort. Having arrived at this conclusion, they could advance no further in their thinking, and so they sat down and smoked their pipes and waited for events to unfold.

It was not long before three policemen arrived in a truck, ordered the brothers back into their house and then began to rummage through the ruins of the barn.

The Ottesens watched through the gauzy fabric of their day curtains as the policemen removed several chunks of mangled metal from the barn, loaded them aboard the truck and then left without saying goodbye.

Not wanting to disobey orders, the brothers remained in their house for another hour before finally returning to the barnyard.

Soon afterwards, another car showed up and two more policemen climbed out.

‘You’re too late,’ said Per, removing the pipe stem from his mouth. ‘The other lot already came and went.’

‘What other lot?’ demanded the policeman. His name was Jakob Horn and he had served for many years as the only policeman stationed at the southern end of the island. With him was a German named Rudi Lusser who, as part of the small occupation force located on Bornholm, was tasked with accompanying Horn wherever he went, and reporting everything back to Northern District Police Headquarters, located in Hanover. Lusser had been there since 1940, and he had never received much encouragement from Hanover. In fact, he had grown to suspect that his reports weren’t even being read. Now that Hanover had fallen to the enemy, Lusser was growing increasingly nervous about his prospects for the future. Lusser and Horn had never got along well. In the early days of their forced partnership, Lusser had been intolerant of Horn and of these islanders, whom he had written off as ludicrously provincial. He had made no attempt to learn Danish and relied instead of Horn’s rudimentary grasp of German. Now that the war was as good as lost, Lusser was beginning to regret his previous attitude, and he made every effort to ingratiate himself with Horn and with these men, who might soon be his captors.

Lusser beamed a smile at the brothers, as if he was a long-lost friend.

The Ottesens ignored him. They had always ignored Lusser and now they ignored him even more, if such a thing were possible.

‘What other lot?’ repeated Horn.

‘The other policemen,’ explained Ole. ‘They must have come down from the north end of the island.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘We didn’t recognise them.’

Lusser, who could make no sense of what was going on, continued to smile idiotically.

‘Did they speak with you?’ Horn asked the twins.

‘No,’ answered Ole. ‘They just told us to stay in our house.’

‘What did they do then?’

‘Took a bunch of stuff from the spaceship,’ said Per.

‘Spaceship?’ asked Horn.

‘At first we just thought it was God,’ Ole told him.

‘But then we found the metal bits,’ said Per, ‘and that’s how we knew it was a spaceship.’

‘And what did these men do with the things they found?’

‘Put them in their truck and drove away.’

‘Where did they go?’ asked Horn. ‘Which direction?’

Ole aimed his pipe stem down the road towards Arnager, a little fishing village on the southern coast.

Horn shook his head in disbelief. ‘Did it not occur to you to wonder why policemen from the north end would be down this way at all, let alone why they would head off to the south when they left here?’

It had not occurred to them.

Horn stared at them for a moment. Then he got back into the car, along with Lusser, and the two policemen raced towards Arnager.

Arriving not long afterwards, they found an empty truck parked at the quayside and three police jackets, stolen from the Klemensker station at the north end of the island, lying heaped on the passenger seat.

When Major Kirov walked into the interrogation room at the Alexeyevska prisoner-of-war camp, which was reserved for high-ranking enemy officers, he found a tall man with pale skin and greying hair, still wearing the tattered uniform of a colonel in the German Army. The colonel sat at a table, hunched in a chair and clasping a green enamel cup filled with hot tea. Except for one other chair, on the opposite side of the table, there was no other furniture in the room.