‘Well done. I underestimated you, Gunther. I’ve always assumed that as a policeman you were the more muscular type. Tough, resourceful, and irritatingly dogged, but hardly intellectual. It seems I was wrong about that. You have a much better brain than I gave you credit for. I had hoped you might uncover the spy, it’s true. But I did not expect you would also solve the murder. That has been a real bonus. But now I really am intrigued. I want to know. I must have made a mistake. Exactly how did you conclude that it was me who shot Captain Kuttner?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you. It wasn’t anything clever, at all.’
‘Oh, come on. You’re being unnecessarily modest.’
‘Actually you told me yourself. Just a few minutes ago. Only I and the doctor who carried out the autopsy knew that Kuttner had been shot twice. Even Jury didn’t notice that. And I kept it secret in the hope that eventually the real killer would mention two shots when everyone else believes that it was just the one shot that killed him.’
Heydrich frowned. ‘Is that all?’
To my delight he sounded disappointed.
‘What else is there? I’m not one for crossword puzzles, General. Or detective novels. Actually I really can’t stand them. Me, I’m just a plain, old-fashioned cop. And you described me rather well a moment ago when you said I was irritatingly dogged. I don’t have the better brain you gave me credit for. These days I wouldn’t know what to do with it. You see, sir, most murders aren’t complicated. People just think they are. The same goes for the detection process. There are no great scenes of revelation. There’s just the small stuff. And that’s where I come in. Really, if detective work was as difficult as it seems in the books, then they wouldn’t let cops do it.’
‘Yes, I take your point.’ Heydrich sighed. ‘But now I have another question. And perhaps you should answer this one more carefully.’
I nodded.
‘What do you think you’re going to do about it?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. What could I do against a man of Heydrich’s standing and authority?
‘What I mean is: are you intending to try to arrest me, perhaps? To make a scene.’
‘You murdered someone, General.’
‘You’re right, of course. And I did regret having rescued Kuttner’s career. I could have lived with his behaviour in and after Latvia. What happened to him there is by no means unusual – which is of course why Reichsmarshal Göring has charged me with finding a better solution to this problem. I could even have lived with his behaviour to Colonel Jacobi. The two of them have some history, it seems; however, Jacobi is a prick and frankly anyone who gets the better of that man is to be admired rather than condemned.
‘But I was shocked when Berlin’s Gestapo informed me that my own adjutant was probably homosexual. Not that he was very obvious about it; indeed I was so sceptical that I sent him along to Pension Matzky, where I’m afraid to say he disgraced himself with a girl called Grete. When he failed to perform with her, unfortunately she mocked his inadequacy and earned herself a beating. He was very apologetic about it afterwards; he even sent her some flowers by way of compensation; most bizarrely he then seems to have adopted an entirely opposite opinion of the poor girl and decided that he felt some romantic attachment for her. I’m sure there are medical explanations for his mental state. But if there are, I have no time for them. That was when I decided to get rid of him. I dislike men who are violent to women almost as much as I dislike men who are unreliable.
‘Anyway, if I had sent him back to Berlin in disgrace it wouldn’t have been long before he disgraced himself again and, more importantly, disgraced his family in Halle. I couldn’t have that. I am very fond of those people. Fond enough to want to spare them any further pain. So I thought it was better for him to be quietly murdered by me in a way that can be easily hushed up rather than allow his family to endure the public disgrace that would follow his being sentenced to some SS punishment battalion. Indeed, it already seems to me much more probable that at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future Captain Kuttner will become an unfortunate victim of Vaclav Moravek, and heroically shot by him while trying to assist in the Czech terrorist’s arrest. We may even have to award him a posthumous decoration. That’s a story that should play well at home, don’t you think?’
‘Why not? He is as good a Nazi hero as any others I can think of.’
