Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Freilinger sighed, running a palm up and then down each side of his face. ‘You see, that is what I was afraid you might say.’ He raised a hand to forestall Reinhardt’s protest. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong, Captain. I’m just saying you’ve no proof to make such an accusation. I know you and he have a long and tortured history and I know he is not always quite what we would expect in our Feldgendarmerie, but why would he do that? What would be his motivation? Who might ask him to do that? Becker will tell you he was looking for a deserter, this Peter Krause. Perhaps it is simply coincidence Krause was a friend of Hendel’s. For now you cannot place Krause at the murder scene. Although…’ He trailed off. ‘Although I will admit it is strange. Very strange…’ His hands resumed their dry-washing. ‘What else?’

‘Sir, I have come across one common element between Hendel’s death, his work, and my investigation.’ Freilinger raised his eyebrows. ‘An SS officer. Standartenfuhrer Mladen Stolic. 7th Prinz Eugen.’

Freilinger nodded, his eyes slipping sideways. ‘Go on.’

‘He has been hostile and vocal in opposing my inquiries. It would seem he objected to, or was jealous of, whatever relationship Hendel had with Vukic. In addition, he seemed to take an instant dislike to me.’

Freilinger smiled, a faint twitch of his lips. ‘Yes, he would. I know of him. Stolic is an angry man. And a rather violent one. He’s Volksdeutsche, on his mother’s side. He joined the Ustase in the thirties, hung around Italy with Pavelic and the other exiles, then came back with them in 1941 and joined the Croatian Army. When the Seventh was formed, though, he transferred out, and there’s the problem. He’s angry not to have seen enough action. If he’d stayed with the Croatian Army, he’d have gone to the USSR, and probably gone out in a blaze of glory at Stalingrad like the rest of them are supposed to have done. He tried to leave the Seventh but was refused. No action, or not enough. No decorations.’ Freilinger’s eyes strayed to Reinhardt’s Iron Cross. ‘He won’t have liked you on sight just because of that. And he wouldn’t have liked Vukic because she was a woman who refused him. To make matters worse, she was a woman who followed the Croats in the USSR almost to the end, and he was jealous of that, too. She went where he could not.’

‘Sir, how do you know this?’

‘I have my sources,’ responded Freilinger, simply. ‘I speak to my counterparts in the Domobranstvo, even in the Ustase. Stolic is well known to them. Mostly for the wrong reasons. And don’t forget, Hendel was Abwehr. He reported to me.’

‘I see.’

‘The case Hendel was working on, involving that Croatian Army colonel… ?’

‘Grbic, sir,’ supplied Reinhardt.

‘Grbic was anathema to Stolic because of his service record and because he was a decorated veteran. Stolic detested him. There was always trouble between them.’

‘I see,’ said Reinhardt, again. It seemed to be all he could manage.

‘So you keep saying,’ said Freilinger, drily. Reinhardt flushed. ‘You might find this interesting. The only real action Stolic has ever seen was in Spain, back in thirty-seven. He volunteered for the nationalists and came back with a reputation for being rather brutal with captured prisoners. A reputation he has wasted no time expanding upon here in Bosnia. He favours knives and hatchets, apparently, and is known to frequent a particularly nasty Ustase officer, called Ljubcic. One of those Black Legion men -’ Freilinger paused, and Reinhardt wondered whether that could have been the Ustasa at Stolic’s table at the Ragusa the other night. ‘What else?’

‘We interviewed Dusko Jelic, a member of Vukic’s film crew, with Inspector Padelin. He provided a lot of background information on Vukic’s movements over the past few months, as well as some personal details on her… predilections. Apparently she had rather distinctive tastes in men, preferring older men, especially decorated soldiers.’ Freilinger raised his eyebrows, and there was the ghost of a smile at the edge of his mouth that Reinhardt affected not to notice. ‘She also had particular sexual tastes and a rather voracious sexual appetite. According to what Jelic said, and from what I have been able to determine, neither Hendel nor Stolic would have been attractive to her, and I know Stolic took that badly.

‘The reason I mention her sexual activity,’ he continued, ‘is after the interview with Jelic I found a hidden room in her house containing a film camera but no film. Her darkroom had been ransacked – that, I noticed on my initial visit to the scene – and I believe the Feldgendarmerie, and whoever has asked them to assist, know or suspect Krause has the film and the film shows her with her murderer.’

Freilinger’s hands went still again, his eyes narrowing. ‘Now that is interesting,’ he said quietly.

Pausing a moment to swallow, Reinhardt reviewed the last things he had to say. He knew he needed to be convincing to Freilinger, as he could feel any control he had over this investigation slipping away. ‘Jelic told us Vukic had an affair while she was in the USSR with a senior army officer sometime in September last year. It was apparently rather tempestuous, and ended quite badly, and Vukic bore some kind of grudge. Jelic told me the officer in question recently transferred here, and he and Vukic had met, or were planning to. According to Jelic, Vukic did not play the role of jilted lover very well and it would not have surprised him if she planned some sort of revenge.’

‘A revenge that went wrong, and someone may have the proof of it…’ Freilinger grunted, looking away from Reinhardt for a moment.

‘At the moment, it’s all I have to go on.’

‘In any case,’ Freilinger sighed, looking back at him, ‘it is all somewhat irrelevant now. I received a call from Major Becker. The Sarajevo police have their suspect. He has admitted to killing Vukic. Becker tells me we can almost certainly pin Hendel’s murder on him, too.’

Reinhardt leaned forward in his chair, shaking his head. ‘Sir, whoever the Sarajevo police are putting forward is a scapegoat. The police are running a purely political investigation and are pretending there is no link between Vukic and Hendel.’

‘Well, you may be right, but after today’s little show in the mess and with Schwarz about to kick off, I don’t think anyone’s going to care. Do you?’ Reinhardt stayed mute, if only because he did not dare speak around the swell of frustration in his chest and the feeling of helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him. ‘We are invited tomorrow morning to police headquarters. There’s to be some sort of official gathering at which they’ll present their findings and suspect. You will go. And then I expect we will be told to bring our investigation to an end.’

Reinhardt looked back at Freilinger, wanting to protest, to keep him away from that mockery, but the steely look in the major’s eyes kept him quiet. As if assuring himself of Reinhardt’s quiescence, Freilinger leaned across to the side of his desk and pushed two blue folders towards him. ‘Feldgendarmerie traffic records. As we requested.’ shy;Reinhardt put the folders in his lap, resisting the temptation to consider them as useless now.

Freilinger stood and walked over to his window, clasping his hands behind his back. The sun was much lower now. From where Reinhardt was sitting Freilinger seemed outlined in light, his close cap of grey hair shining almost silver, but the rest of him just a dim suggestion of back and arms and legs. ‘It’s not over, Reinhardt,’ he said, finally. Reinhardt had to strain to hear him. ‘I have not received orders yet to end this. So keep at it, but whatever you’re doing, get it done soon, one way or the other. When Schwarz starts, no one will care about a dead lieutenant. But they will care about a captain getting in the way and asking questions.’