Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Claussen was standing not far away, seemingly absorbed in the picture of the begging soldier. Reinhardt straightened up. ‘Sergeant?’ he said softly.

Claussen turned and looked at him, then back at the picture. ‘You know, for a moment, I thought that it looked like a friend,’ he said softly. ‘Boeckel. Poor sod got most of himself blown off at Naroch.’ The sergeant shook his head, and Reinhardt left him to it, running his eyes over the room one last time and walking back into the living room.

Standing in the centre of the room he looked around, turning slowly, trying to imagine what had happened. There were two glasses on the coffee table. There was a fight. Someone kills the soldier. Takes Vukic into the bedroom, rapes her, beats her. Stabs her to death. No. That did not feel right. Besides, there were the champagne glasses in the bedroom. Vukic and whoever was with her, they took their time, had fun about it. So what went wrong? And why was Hendel shot, when Vukic was stabbed? He looked from the bedroom to Hendel’s body, the study, the ransacked darkroom. Back to the bodies, where Hendel lay sprawled across the floor, and Vukic, seemingly at rest on her bed.

Someone was looking for something, came the thought. Searching the study, the darkroom. But they heard a noise… He shook his head. It felt elusive, too light. Not enough evidence.

He turned as Claussen came into the room. ‘I’m going to go and find my new partner. Inspector Padelin.’

‘He’ll be the one giving the maid hell, would he?’ quipped Claussen. As they arrived at the stairs, Reinhardt paused, looking up as the sound of voices drew him down.

‘Sergeant, have a quick look up there. Don’t touch anything. Just see what’s there.’

The kitchen was as well appointed as the bathroom upstairs. On a chair in a corner, with Padelin looming over her, sat an elderly lady in a neat black uniform and a cleanly pressed and starched apron. Her hair was grey, tied up behind her head in a bun. She swallowed a sniff as he came into the kitchen and rose quickly to her feet, did a little curtsy. Reinhardt watched her the whole time, saw the fear shoved back in watery little eyes at the sight of him, but the urge he once had to reach out and calm people like her was long gone, quashed deep inside him. It only ever confused them anyway; people did not expect sympathy and understanding from people like him, not anymore.

He looked questioningly at Padelin, who looked down impassively at the maid. She shook her head, not able to look up at him and whispered something into a crumpled handkerchief.

‘She has told me what she knows.’

‘I look forward to hearing it,’ said Reinhardt. He glanced around the kitchen again. It was neat, tidy, smelling of polish and a faint smell of spices. The only thing drawing his eye was a padlock hanging from a tall cupboard door by the stairs. ‘Just ask her one thing, if you would. Does she know where her mistress kept an address book?’ Padelin rapid-fired a question at the maid, who peered at him over the ripple of her knuckles. She looked at Reinhardt as she replied, gesturing upstairs. She sniffed as Padelin answered for her, her eyes flickering back and forth between the two of them, hands clenched hard around her handkerchief.

‘Upstairs in the study. A red leather book.’

‘It would seem it’s gone.’

As the two of them went out into the hallway, Claussen came downstairs. Padelin looked hard at him, and then at Reinhardt. ‘Who is this?’

‘This is Sergeant Claussen. He is assisting me.’ Claussen nodded cordially at Padelin.

‘What were you doing up there?’

‘Checking the top floor. There’s nothing there, sir,’ he said to Rein shy;hardt. ‘All the rooms have been closed up for a while. Sheets over the furniture. It hasn’t been cleaned in a while. My boots left marks in the dust, and mine were the only tracks up there.’

Padelin said nothing, only stared at Claussen. Claussen, unfazed, stared back. ‘And the ground floor, Inspector? What do we have down here?’

The detective turned his eyes slowly from Claussen. ‘Downstairs was the father’s apartments. The parents were divorced, said the maid. Father and daughter lived here. But he was killed last year by Cetniks, and the maid said these rooms have not been used since then.’ He turned and went back outside.

Reinhardt and Claussen exchanged glances. ‘Sergeant, quickly, go upstairs and have a look at the bodies. Just look at them. I’ll ask you later what you think.’ Claussen nodded, and then Reinhardt followed Padelin out, holding back when the detective began talking to three uniformed policemen. Hueber was hovering nearby, and Reinhardt motioned to him to listen to what was being said while he went back over to their car.

Padelin gave a flurry of orders to his men, then came over to Rein shy;hardt’s car. Reinhardt offered him a cigarette, which he again refused. Lighting his own, he waited for the detective to tell him what the maid had said.

‘The last time the maid saw Vukic was Saturday morning. She was asked to prepare food and drinks for Vukic and a guest. A man. She does not know who the man was, but she’s positive it wasn’t to be your officer. Hendel, she knew. This other one, she didn’t.’ Reinhardt took a deep pull on his cigarette and nodded for him to continue. ‘She has Sunday off. She came in this morning, found the bodies, and called the police. According to her, when Vukic wasn’t travelling, she kept a busy social agenda. Lots of parties and outings. People coming and going.’

‘Very good. So we need to find some of these friends. Talk to them. See what they know.’

Padelin grunted assent, those eyes flat, far back in his head. ‘That is for us, I think.’

Reinhardt pursed his mouth and stared at the ground. Not much to go on, his new partner already playing jurisdiction games, and they were the best part of two days behind the killer, or killers. He raised his head. ‘There is something I heard about a witness who might have seen something on the night of the murder?’

Padelin blinked slowly and nodded. ‘Hofler. The old lady across the alley. She saw a car on Saturday night.’

‘Hofler? A German? I’d like to talk to her. Coming?’

The two of them headed over the narrow road and away from Vukic’s house. The houses up here were beautiful, set in large lawns, with all the space the city lacked. ‘Who lives up here?’ Reinhardt asked, as they walked.

Padelin glanced around as he spoke. ‘Only the rich live out here. Bankers. Lawyers. Businessmen.’

‘And how did Vukic come by the house she was in?’

‘The maid said it was her grandfather’s.’

Reinhardt nodded. ‘And the father? What happened to him? The Serbs got him?’

Padelin’s strides were heavy, his arms hanging almost unmoving from his wide shoulders. ‘Yes. The father was a senior Ustase official,’ he said, referring to the governing political party in the NDH. The Ustase were fascists, and quite incredibly brutal about it, to the extent that their excesses sometimes even turned the stomachs of their German allies, and had thrown up two main resistance movements in Bosnia: the Cetniks, Serb nationalists and royalists led by a former colonel in the Yugoslav Army called Mihailovic, and the more formidable Partisans, who were Communists and, far more worryingly, multiethnic, led by a man known only as ‘Tito’. ‘Cetniks killed him in an ambush in Herzegovina, down near Gacko.’ He turned at a house a couple of hundred metres up from Vukic’s, with a high, pointed roof and walls of red brick. Reinhardt finished his cigarette and tossed the butt onto the road as Padelin rang the doorbell and heard a dog bark somewhere inside. A maid dressed in a neat, black uniform with a white lace apron answered the door. She ushered them in and asked them to wait a moment in the hallway while she announced them. She whispered down the hall and vanished into the main living room. A shrill, imperious sounding voice rang out in Austrian- shy;accented German.