Sachse pulled up at the corner of the Charité opposite the Lessing Theatre where Ida Wust was playing in a show called
‘How about it, Werner? Shall I go in and get us a pair of tickets while we’re here?’
Sachse smiled thinly and shook his head.
‘Not an Ida Wust fan, huh? You surprise me.’
‘That old trout? You must be joking. She reminds me of my mother-in-law. But the other one’s all right. Jane Tilden.’
‘She’s a bit too wholesome for my taste.’ I opened the car door but Sachse stayed put. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’
‘You don’t need me in there, do you?’
Sachse was already looking a little green, and after hearing me relate my favourite but strictly after-dinner anecdotes from the gay world of forensic science, I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to come in to the Pathological Institute. This, of course, was the intention behind these gruesome stories. I hardly wanted the mortuary attendant asking me any awkward questions in front of Werner Sachse about why I was back there with the same knife to check the same wounds in the same body.
‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘there should always be two officers present when a body is examined; however, on this occasion, perhaps that won’t be necessary. Nothing ever quite prepares you for the sight of a body that’s been chewed up by a railway locomotive.’
Sachse nodded. ‘Thanks, Gunther. You’re all right.’
Chuckling sadistically – the idea of a squeamish Gestapo man just struck me as funny – I went into the hospital and along to the morgue, where I found the same attendant and, having established that Vranken’s dismembered body was still safely stored there, informed him that the investigation was now a Gestapo matter and that in no circumstances was the body to be released for burial or incineration without first clearing it with me.
As always, mention of the Gestapo worked an almost magical effect, akin to uttering ‘Open sesame’, and the attendant signalled his total compliance with a nervous bow. Of course there was no need to see or examine Vranken’s body again. I already knew what I was going to tell Werner Sachse: that Franz Koci had murdered Geert Vranken. And feeling pleased that I had managed to reopen what was now a proper murder case, I made my way back to the car.
A good humour never lasts long in Berlin. The smell of the war wounded in that hospital was asphyxiating. Dying men lay in dusty wards like so much left luggage, while to walk through a hallway or public corridor was to negotiate an obstacle course of rickety old wheelchairs and dirty plaster casts. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, I came out of the hospital and encountered a little squad of Hitler Youth marching down Luisenstrasse – most likely from a trip to see the National Warrior’s Monument in the Invaliden Park – their throats full of some stupid warlike song and quite oblivious of the German warrior’s true fate that was to be found in the not-so-glorious charnel house nearby. For a moment I stood and watched these boys with a kind of horror. It was all too easy to think of them as carrying the infection of Nazism – the brown-shirted bacilli of death and destruction and the typhus of tomorrow.
Feeling more sombre than before, I tapped on the window of the Horch-built Audi. It’s a useful courtesy to observe with a man sleeping in his own car when he happens to be carrying a loaded automatic.
Sachse sat up straight, lifted the tip of his black felt hat, and opened the passenger door.
‘Any luck?’
‘Yes. If you can call it that. The Dutchman was stabbed by the Czech all right. Franz Koci’s knife fitted those stab wounds like they’d been cut for it by a good tailor.’
‘Well, you’re the expert.’
‘The question is, why? Why would a Czech spy stab and kill a Dutch railway worker?’
