Luke McCallin: The Man from Berlin

‘Your German is very good, Doctor. Murder weapon?’

‘Thank you. Medical studies in Berlin in the thirties. A knife. A big one. Very sharp. Something like a kitchen knife, or a bayonet.’

‘Has it been found?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Time of death?’

‘At a guess, I’d say sometime late on Saturday night.’

‘Did you look at the other body?’

‘Briefly. I was told to concentrate on this one. But I’d have said he died about the same time.’

‘Has forensics had a look at her, yet?’

Begovic snorted. ‘ Forensics?! Seriously? In this town? This isn’t Berlin, my friend, and we aren’t the Kripo.’

‘Right,’ Reinhardt breathed. What the doctor said would have been true of the Kriminalpolizei about ten years ago, but not anymore. He raised the dead woman’s arm by placing his wrists above and below hers so as to avoid leaving his own prints and saw the telltale marks of lividity underneath and on what he could see of her back. Reinhardt bent her arm, and it moved fairly well. Rigor mortis had come and was mostly gone. Begovic was probably right with his guess, but they would need the pathologist to be sure.

The sound of someone taking the stairs two by two came from the other room. There was a pause as the person reached the top, and then the sound of the parquet as he came over to the bedroom. Reinhardt turned as the man in the suit he had seen from the window entered the room. Another tall man, but without Putkovic’s weight. He had longish brown hair, and dark, flat eyes. He glanced over the room and at the two of them standing there. His mouth firmed, and he stepped inside the room. ‘You are Reinhardt?’ he said. ‘I am Inspector Andro Padelin. From the Sarajevo police. My chief informs me we are to work together?’

‘That’s correct.’ Reinhardt stepped over to shake his hand. Not a small man himself, Reinhardt felt his hand enveloped in the other’s fist and squeezed, relatively hard. All the while Padelin looked at him with those dead eyes. It was he who let go, with a slight push, and the faintest of glances up and down, from Reinhardt’s boots to his greying hair. ‘Have you been briefed?’ Padelin nodded. ‘The doctor here was just giving me some insight into the wounds the woman sustained.’

Padelin turned those heavy eyes on the doctor, who did not seem perturbed. Probably because he had his glasses off again to polish them. ‘Yes. Well, it would have been courteous to wait.’

‘Shall we hear what he has to say, then?’ asked Reinhardt. Padelin nodded, slow and heavy, like a cat sunning itself. ‘Doctor, if you please?’

Begovic cleared his throat. ‘Well, for what it’s worth, whoever did it was probably left-handed. Probably. That’s from the pattern of the wounds. The stab wounds go from her right to her left. The slashing wounds from her left to her right. And she received nearly all her wounds here, in this room and on the bed.’

‘Slashing and stabbing…’ said Reinhardt, quietly. ‘What does that tell you, Doctor?’

The coroner stared at her arm where it sagged stiffly over the side of the bed, the palm and fingers dark with blood. ‘I would guess from the depth of the wounds that whoever did it was not very strong. But from the spread of the wounds, the killer was slashing and stabbing wildly, maybe in a great hurry, or was deranged, or had strong reason to hate her. Maybe a combination of all.’

Still staring at the body, Reinhardt shook an Atikah from his pack and put it in his mouth, before offering the pack to Begovic and Padelin. The detective refused with a shake of the head, while Begovic pounced eagerly on his cigarette, rolling it delicately between his fingers before letting Reinhardt light it. The flare from his match woke answering glints in Vukic’s eyes, and the memory of dancing with her under a spreading chandelier came to him again. A Christmas dance, just a few months ago, for the officers of the garrison, the city caked in snow and ice. She had smiled and laughed, joked and cajoled, given as good as she got with the banter, posed for photographs, danced with them, then left, all light and movement, and a scent that glittered. A smell of tobacco tangled with the iron scent of the woman’s blood, clamouring across the memory of that evening. Reinhardt swallowed and took a little round tin from his hip pocket, into which he tapped his ash.

‘He beat her, then stabbed her?’

‘Could be,’ said Begovic, around a deep drag. He tore a page from his notebook and crumpled it in his hand to serve as an ashtray.

Reinhardt stared at her. At the rumpled sheets. A champagne glass with a thick smudging of fingerprints stood on a bedside table. On the other side of the bed, on a similar table, was an ashtray with a number of stubbed ends. ‘Was there sex?’ As he moved slightly, the surface of the table caught the light. A ring mark, faint and almost faded.

‘Dressed like that?’ Begovic quipped. ‘I would certainly hope so.’ Padelin snarled something at him in Serbo-Croat. Begovic sat up a bit straighter in the chair and answered back, but Padelin cut him off. Begovic sighed and switched back to German. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell. The pathologist will know, soon enough.’

‘You said most of the wounds she got here on the bed. Where did it start? The stabbings, I mean.’ Reinhardt got down on his hands and knees to peer under the bed, squinting around the curl of smoke that drifted across his eyes.

Begovic stared down at Reinhardt’s back and pointed unnecessarily with his notebook to the foot of the bed. ‘There, I think. A spray of blood across the bed hangings. Find something under the bed?’ Padelin knelt to see what Reinhardt had seen. He straightened up.

‘And is a forensics team coming?’ Reinhardt asked Padelin.

‘Yes.’

Reinhardt studiously made a point of not looking at Begovic, himself engrossed in watching the tip of his cigarette burn. ‘Make sure they know there’s a bottle and a glass, probably not the woman’s, under the bed.’ He looked around the room, at the drawn curtains and the lights. ‘Do you know whether the room was lit like this when the police arrived?’ he asked Padelin.

‘I can ask the maid.’

‘Please do,’ said Reinhardt. ‘Are you nearly finished?’ he asked Begovic.

‘Yes. Why do you think it’s not the woman’s?’ asked Begovic.

Reinhardt pointed at the glass on the table. ‘She lived here. Stands to reason she’d use the side of the bed nearest the bathroom.’

Begovic nodded, his mouth making an O. ‘Well, I’m all done, unless you gentlemen need something else?’

Reinhardt looked at Padelin questioningly. The big detective shook his head. ‘Wait downstairs, please, Doctor.’

‘Shall we have a look in the bathroom?’ asked Reinhardt, as the doctor left. He dropped his cigarette stub into his little tin and pocketed it, letting Padelin go first, watching. The detective walked right in, standing in the middle of the room. Reinhardt paused in the doorway. It was lavishly equipped, with a huge white bath, gold taps, an ornate showerhead. Tiles in a repeating blue-and-gold motif ran around the room at waist height, and a mirror in a mosaic frame that looked Spanish hung over the sink. Toothbrush, toothpaste, French cosmetics on the white enamel sink. Towels and brushes on a set of tall wrought-iron shelves, from which hung a black silk dressing gown. And luxury of luxuries, a toilet with a shiny wooden seat.

Casting an eye around the room, Reinhardt spotted the blood marks on the wall on either side of the toilet, and a bloody towel wadded up and thrown into a corner. Large as the room was, Padelin filled the space with his bulk, watching Reinhardt with those dead, catlike eyes. Reinhardt peered into the toilet, but it was empty. Blood marks on either side of the sink, as if someone with blood on their hands had leaned on it for balance or support. He stared around the room once more, trying to imagine what had happened and what he might be missing. Putting his tongue between his teeth, he sighed, turned and walked out, back into the bedroom.