Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘This could be the end of everything. The Poles are already in fear of their lives. If the commission gets wind of this they might never come out of their damned hut.’

‘Then you’ll have to try to contain the situation,’ she said, coolly. ‘Won’t you?’

‘That’s not going to be easy.’

‘No, it isn’t. But what else can you do?’

‘Gentlemen, this is Dr Kramsta,’ I said to the field police. ‘She’s been assisting Professor Buhtz at Katyn Wood. Look, you’d best fetch Lieutenant Voss from Grushtshenki right away. And General von Tresckow’s adjutant, Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff. The field marshal will have to be told, of course. Next, I shall want the immediate vicinity of this crime scene cordoned off. No one from the international commission is to see or hear about this. No one. You understand?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘If any of them ask about the police whistle, it was a false alarm. And if anyone asks about the professor, he had to return to Spain unexpectedly.’

‘Yes sir.’

Ines was kneeling beside the body. She pressed her fingers against the dead man’s neck. ‘Body’s still warm,’ she murmured. ‘He can’t have been dead long – half an hour, perhaps.’ She bent forward, sniffed at the dead man’s mouth, and then pulled a face. ‘You know, he stinks of garlic.’

‘Search the area,’ I told two other field policemen. ‘See if you can find the murder weapon.’

‘Maybe,’ said Ines, ‘the person who you thought took a shot at you earlier wasn’t shooting at you at all. Maybe it was Berruguete he was shooting at.’

‘Looks like it,’ I said, although it was not obvious why if someone had been aiming to shoot Berruguete, they had almost hit me on the opposite side of the forest.

‘Or maybe they were aiming at you and hit him instead. Lucky for you. Not so lucky for him.’

‘Yes, even I can understand that.’

‘Here,’ said Ines to one of the field policemen. ‘Give me your flashlight.’

I bent down beside her as she took a closer look at the dead man’s body.

‘He appears to have been shot through the forehead.’

‘Right between the eyes,’ I said. ‘A good shot.’

‘That all depends, doesn’t it?’ she asked.

‘On what?’

‘On how far away the shooter was when he fired the cannon.’

I nodded. ‘He smells of garlic. You’re right.’

‘But it’s not the reason Berruguete wasn’t exactly popular with his medical colleagues.’

‘And what is the reason?’

‘He held some rather extreme views,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t exactly put him outside of polite society. Not these days. Some of our leading citizens hold views that would embarrass Doctor Mabuse.’

Ines shook her head. ‘From what I heard, Berruguete’s views were rather worse than his.’

‘So maybe one of them shot him,’ I said. ‘Professional jealousy. Settling an old score. Why not?’

‘They’re all of them highly respected doctors, that’s why not.’

‘But this Spanish fellow wasn’t highly respected. At least not by you, Dr Kramsta.’

‘No. He was – he was-’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘It doesn’t really matter what I think about him now, does it? Not now he’s dead.’

‘No, I guess not.’

She stood up and looked around. ‘If I were you I’d stick to my first instinct: which was to try to cover this up, not investigate it. There’s a bigger picture here, right? Those men from the international commission have enough awkward questions of their own without you asking some more.’

‘All right,’ I said and stood up next to her. ‘There’s that way. And then there’s my way – the Gunther way.’

‘Which is?’

‘Maybe I can find out who did it without asking anyone any awkward questions. During the course of the past decade I’ve grown to be quite good at that.’

‘I’ll bet you have.’

‘Sir,’ said one of the field policemen. ‘Over here sir. We’ve found a gun.’

Ines and I walked toward him. The cop was about seventy or eighty metres away. His flashlight was trained on the ground – it was pointed right at a broom-handle Mauser, very like the one Ines had found in the door pocket in Von Gersdorff’s car. I might even have said it was the same one, because of the red number nine that was burned and painted onto the grip panel to warn the pistol’s users not to load it with 7.63 ammunition by mistake but to use only the nine-mill Parabellum cartridge for which the gun had been re-chambered.

‘That looks kind of familiar,’ said Ines. ‘Doesn’t your friend with the 260 own a Mauser exactly like this?’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘Hadn’t you better see if he’s still got it?’

‘I don’t see what that will prove.’

‘I don’t know, but it could prove that he did it,’ she said.

‘Yes, I suppose it could.’

‘You know I don’t see what there is to be so cagey about, Gunther, I was only making a suggestion.’

‘Do you remember back in your hut just now, I was telling you I might need a tetanus shot, and you were telling me you didn’t think it was necessary?’

She frowned. ‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. And nor did you.’

‘Exactly. You do your job, doctor and I’ll do mine. Okay?’

She stood up abruptly, momentarily angry. Her hands were shaking and it took a moment for her to calm down.

‘Is it your job?’ she said, evenly. ‘To play detective here? I don’t know. I thought you were working with the ministry of propaganda in Katyn.’

‘Actually it’s the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda; and being a detective, enlightenment – which is to say the full comprehension of a situation – is what I’m good at. So maybe I’ll just stick to that.’

‘You manage to make being a detective sound almost religious.’

‘If praying helped solve crimes there would be more Christians than there are lions to eat them.’

‘Spiritual, then.’

I borrowed the field cop’s flashlight and flicked it over the ground while she talked. Something small caught my eye, but for a moment I left it alone.

‘Maybe. The ultimate goal of the science of criminal detection is a state of complete understanding, and of course the liberation of oneself from various states of imprisonment.’ I shrugged. ‘Although these days there’s only one state of imprisonment that means a damn to anyone.’

‘Self-preservation, huh?’

‘It’s generally preferable to ending up like your friend Dr Berruguete.’

‘He was no friend of mine,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know him.’

‘That’s good. Maybe that makes you the right person to perform an autopsy.’

‘Maybe,’ she said stiffly. ‘In the morning, perhaps. But right now I’m going to bed. So, if you want me, I’ll be in my hut.’

I watched her walk away into the darkness. I wanted her all right. I wanted to feel her smooth thighs wrapped around me the way I had the previous night. I wanted to feel my hands squashed under her behind as I nudged deep into her. But it bothered me a bit that she had tried – oh so subtly – to scare me off from behaving like a detective. It bothered me also that she had mentioned the word cannon before we’d found the broom-handle Mauser. Of course she might have been in the habit of describing guns as cannons – some people were. Then again, she’d used the name ‘box cannon’ when she’d been handling the gun in Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes, and that was what some people called a Mauser C96. And I knew she could handle a gun. I’d seen her handling the Mauser as comfortably as her Dunhill lighter.

It also bothered me that she’d been so quick to finger him for the murder and that she’d had mud on her shoes when I’d gone to see her in the hut – shoes she had not long changed into after removing her medical whites and boots.