Kluckholn remained standing.
‘By the way,’ I said. ‘What other evidence did you destroy when you were burning Kuttner’s puppy mags?’
Kluckholn shook his head and sat down. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘A diary, perhaps, Some love letters? Photographs of the two of you on a nice trip to Rügen Island with all the boys?’
I wasn’t interested in any of these, although I might have been if I had ever supposed that they had been among his possessions. There was however one more thing I was interested in; something I knew had been in his drawer because I had seen it.
‘What about the pipe?’
‘What pipe?’
‘There was a broken clay pipe in his drawer. What happened to that?’
‘I didn’t see a clay pipe. But I fail to see what relevance a broken old pipe might have to anything.’
‘That all depends,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it, Kurt?’
‘Depends on what?’ Kluckholn asked.
‘Depends on what he smoked in it,’ Kahlo said. ‘Tobacco. Marijuana. Opium. They say a clay is best for opium, don’t they, sir? Clay keeps the heat better.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Opium or marijuana might be just the thing for a man who was having trouble sleeping. Or just to ease the conscience of a man who felt very guilty about what he’d done in Riga.’
‘Of course,’ added Kahlo, ‘you would only throw it away if you suspected that’s what it had been used for. You wouldn’t throw it away if you thought he’d only used it to smoke tobacco.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘Of course, if we still had it we could have tested it in the lab. They might have cleared him of any suspicion on that score. But now we’ll never know.’
Kluckholn was about to say something and then seemed to think better of it. For a moment his brown eyes met mine pleadingly, as if he wanted me to stop and he really did have some secret he couldn’t bring himself to reveal. He took hold of his fist in the palm of his other hand and started to squeeze it, trying to stop it from punching me, almost as if Belshazzar had managed to get hold of the disembodied hand that was interrupting his famous feast.
‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Punch me on the nose. Then we’ll have all the excuse I need to beat it out of you. Won’t we, Kurt?’
‘Just say the word, sir. I’d love to smack this bastard.’
Kluckholn regarded us with real hatred before he seemed to shrink into a silence and then a shape that made me think we really would have to beat anything else out of him.
Which effectively meant that the interrogation was over.
‘Back at the Alex, when a suspect won’t talk, we put him down in the cells to think it over. That’s what I’d do with you, Hermann, if we weren’t doing this in a nice country house with a good piano and some choice works of art. That’s what we’d do if we were doing this back in Berlin. We’d lock you up for the night, if we were doing this the proper police way, not like some bullshit scene in a crappy detective novel by that English lady novelist Heydrich seems to admire so much.’
I flicked my cigarette into the fireplace, where it smashed against the chimney wall in a hail of tiny sparks.
‘You can go,’ I said. ‘But I shall certainly want to speak to you again, Hermann. You can depend on it.’
Kluckholn stood up and, without uttering another word, he made straight for the door, which Kahlo then unlocked with a deliberate insolence that reminded me strongly of myself.
When the Captain was gone, Kahlo went over to the coffee table where I’d left my cigarette case and helped himself.
‘Guilty conscience, do you think?’ he asked.
‘Around here? I’m not sure what that might look like.’
‘The bastard was shaking like a rice pudding. If he didn’t do it, or knows who did it, then I’m a Blue Dragoon.’
The Blue Dragoons was the nickname of an Army punishment battalion stationed on the peat-bog moors of the Ems River region. They said that if the damp didn’t kill you, the labour – digging peat in all weathers – was certain to do it.
‘That’s probably what he’s worried about,’ I said. ‘Being sent there. Or whatever the SS equivalent of the Blue Dragoons might be. Some lesser circle of hell, probably.’
‘A firing squad looks like a better bet, if you ask me. He destroys evidence and won’t say what he and Kuttner were arguing about? Fuck off. Not to mention his declared dislike of the man. If it was me, I’d arrest him now and tap it out of him with a small hammer.’
Kahlo took a fierce drag of his cigarette and then bared his teeth like he was enduring pain.
‘And you know something, sir? Kluckholn might be just as good as it can get for us. In fact, I think he’s perfect for it.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Only that he’s standing right in front of your box camera with a name and number chalked on a piece of board. No, really. You could just as easily snap him for this murder as anyone else.’
‘You sound so like the Gestapo sometimes that I wonder why I like you, Kurt.’
