It was then that I remembered the bayonet in Von Gersdorff’s car. If Dyakov had murdered Berruguete with Von Gersdorff’s gun, was it possible he might have used the Abwehr officer’s razor-sharp bayonet to do a bit of throat-cutting, too?
I switched off the map light and sat in the darkness of Katyn Wood for a moment before returning at last to the only reasonable explanation – an explanation that took account of the field marshal’s strange loyalty to his own Putzer. Everything was exactly as I had supposed from the very beginning, and the call-girl business that Ribe had been running from the castle switchboard had been nothing more than herring smoke that had got in my eyes.
Von Kluge knew the telephone on his desk was not working properly – I remembered him complaining to an operator about it when I was in his office. He must have realized – too late – that his compromising conversation with Adolf Hitler could have been overheard by the two signallers from the 537th manning the switchboard at the castle. It would have been a relatively simple matter for Alok Dyakov – who was often in and out of the castle to see his girlfriend Marusya – to check the duty roster and see who had been running the telephones during the leader’s visit to Smolensk and – on his master’s orders – to have killed them, unaware that one of them had already thought to record the conversation on tape. Naturally, Von Kluge would have correctly assumed that the leader would have approved of Dyakov’s actions.
If any of this was true I would have to move even more carefully with an investigation into Alok Dyakov than could ever have been supposed.
I switched on the map light again and took another look at the key from the brown envelope. It was the key for a BMW motorcycle.
Everything was starting to make sense now. On the night of their murder, Ribe and Greiss would hardly have been on their guard meeting a figure as familiar to them as Dyakov outside the Hotel Glinka; and the sound of a German motorcycle heard by the SS sergeant who had disturbed their killer was now explained: Dyakov had access to a BMW. It certainly explained why their killer had chosen to escape along the Vitebsk road: he was heading home to Krasny Bor.
And if he had murdered Ribe and Greiss, then why not Dr Batov and his daughter, too? Here, the motive was harder to fathom, although the killer’s penchant for using a knife looked persuasive. Dyakov could easily have learned about their existence from Von Kluge after I had petitioned the field marshal to give the two Russians asylum in Berlin – a petition he had resisted. Was it possible the field marshal was sufficiently against the idea of their being granted the right to go and live in Berlin that he had ordered his Putzer to kill them, too?
But if he had just shot and killed Dr Berruguete, why had Dyakov gone to Katyn Wood and got drunk? To celebrate the death of a war criminal, perhaps? Or was the reason more prosaic – that by drawing attention to himself in Katyn Wood, he was simply trying to establish an alibi for what had happened at Krasny Bor? After all, who would have suspected a drunken man who was threatening to shoot himself of the cold and calculated murder of the Spanish doctor? And had I helped with that alibi by rendering him insensible?
But I was getting ahead of myself. First there was some elementary detective work to complete – work I ought to have done weeks ago.
I drove back to Krasny Bor and parked next to Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes. As usual his car door was not locked, and sitting in the passenger seat I searched the glovebox for the bayonet, intending to give it to Professor Buhtz in the hope that he might be able to find traces of human blood on the blade. But it wasn’t there. I checked the door pocket, too, and under the seat, but it wasn’t there either.
‘Looking for something?’
Von Gersdorff was standing immediately by the car, with a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at me. I sat up, sharply.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Gunther, it’s you. What the hell do you think you’re doing in my car at nearly one in the morning?’
‘Looking for your bayonet.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Because I think that it was used to murder those two signallers. Just like your Mauser was used to murder Dr Berruguete. By the way I found your shoulder-stock.’
‘Did you? Good. Look, I can easily see why I might make a better suspect than Ines Kramsta. Her legs are better than mine.’
‘I didn’t say you were a suspect, colonel,’ I said. ‘After all, I hardly think you’d have been so careless as to use your own Mauser. No, I think someone else used a gun and a bayonet that he knew were in this car – quite possibly with the intention of compromising you at some later stage; or perhaps they were just convenient for him, I don’t know.’
Von Gersdorff holstered his Walther and went around to the back of the car, where he unlocked the trunk. ‘The bayonet is in here,’ he said, fetching it out. ‘And when you say someone, Gunther, I assume you don’t mean Dr Kramsta.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Funny thing about this bayonet,’ said Von Gersdorff, handing it to me. ‘When I fetched it from the glovebox the other day I thought for a minute it wasn’t mine.’
‘Why?’ I pulled the bayonet out of the scabbard and the blade gleamed in the moonlight.
‘Oh, it was mine. I just thought it wasn’t. That’s why I put it away in the trunk.’
‘Yes, but why did you think it wasn’t yours?’
‘It’s the same bayonet all right, just a different scabbard. Mine was loose. This one is a close fit.’ He shrugged. ‘Bit of a mystery, really. I mean, they don’t repair themselves, do they?’
‘No, they don’t,’ I agreed. ‘And I think you just answered my question.’
I told him about the bayonet and the pieces of broken scabbard found in the snow near the bodies of Ribe and Greiss.
‘So you think that was my scabbard probably?’ said Von Gersdorff.
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Christ.’
Then I told him about the stripper clip I’d found in Alok Dyakov’s pocket; and how Alok Dyakov was now my best suspect for the murders of Ribe and Greiss.
‘We’re going to have to be very careful how we proceed with this,’ he said.
‘We?’
‘Yes. You don’t think I’m going to let you do this alone, do you? Besides, I’d love to see the back of that Russian bastard.’
‘And Von Kluge?’
Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve got much chance of hurting him with this,’ he said. ‘Not without that tape.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I gave it to General von Tresckow,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘He judged it too dangerous to use and destroyed it.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I said, but I could hardly fault the general for thinking, as I had done, that a tape recording of the leader offering to buy the loyalty of one of his top field marshals with a substantial cheque was much too dangerous to keep.
‘You’ll remember that Von Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were arrested. At the time we were more worried about the Gestapo than we were about Günther von Kluge. And I’m afraid it will take a lot more than a tape recording of a compromising conversation to bring down Hitler.’
I nodded and handed him back his bayonet.
‘So what’s the next step?’ he asked. ‘I mean we are going after Dyakov, aren’t we?’
‘We need to speak to Lieutenant Voss,’ I said. ‘After all it was him who first encountered Alok Dyakov. The Russian told me his version of what happened on the road, much of which I’ve forgotten. I was distracted by the arrival of the members of the international commission when he told me. We need the whole story from Voss, I think.’
Before I went to bed I returned the envelope containing his belongings to Dyakov. His light was on in his hut, and so I was obliged to knock on his door and give him a story which I suspected he only half believed.
‘The nurse gave me the envelope to return to you,’ I said, ‘and then I’m afraid I forgot all about it. Your stuff’s been in my car all afternoon.’
‘I went back to the hospital to fetch it,’ he said. ‘And then I was looking for you, sir. Nobody knew where you were.’
Had he remembered that the stripper clip was in his pocket?
‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘But something came up. How’s your head, by the way.’
‘Not as bad as yours perhaps,’ he said.
‘Oh, is it that obvious?’
‘Only to a boozer like myself, perhaps.’
I shrugged. ‘Got some bad news, that’s all. But I’m fine now.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Glad to see you’re fine, too, old fellow. No hard feelings, eh?’
‘No hard feelings, sir.’