That is why Paul Ogorzow came into my mind when, late one night in the second week of September 1941, I was called to take a look at a body that had been found close to the line between the S-Bahn stations at Jannowitz Bridge and Schlesischer. In the blackout nobody was quite sure if the body was a man’s or a woman’s, which was more understandable when you took into account that it had been hit by a train and was missing its head. Sudden death is rarely ever tidy. If it was, they wouldn’t need detectives. But this one was as untidy as anything I’d seen since the Great War, when a mine or a howitzer shell could reduce a man to a mangled heap of bloody clothes and jagged bone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps that was why I was able to look at it with such detachment. I hope so. The alternative – that my recent experience in the murder ghettoes of Minsk had left me indifferent to the sight of human suffering – was too awful to contemplate.
The other investigating detectives were Wilhelm Wurth, a sergeant who was a big noise in the police sports movement, and Gottfried Lehnhoff, an inspector who had returned to the Alex after having retired.
Wurth was in the fencing team, and the previous winter he had taken part in Heydrich’s skiing competition for the German Police and won a medal. Wurth would have been in the Army but for the fact that he was a year or two too old. But he was a useful man to have along on a murder investigation in the event that the victim had skied onto the point of a sword. He was a thin, quiet man with ears like bell-pulls and an upper lip that was as full as a walrus moustache. It was a good face for a detective in the modern Berlin police force, but he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked. He wore a plain grey double-breasted suit, carried a thick walking stick, and chewed on the stem of a cherrywood pipe that was almost always empty but somehow he managed to smell of tobacco.
Lehnhoff had a neck and head like a pear, but he wasn’t green. Like a lot of other cops he’d been drawing his pension, but with so many younger officers now serving in police battalions on the eastern front he had come back into the force to make a nice cosy corner for himself at the Alex. The little Party pin he wore in the lapel of his cheap suit would only have made it easier for him to do as little real policing as possible.
We walked south down Dircksen Strasse to Jannowitz Bridge and then along the S-Bahn line with the river under our feet. There was a moon and most of the time we didn’t need the flashlights we’d brought, but we felt safer with them when the line veered back over the gasworks on Holtmarkt Strasse and the old Julius Pintsch lighting factory; there wasn’t much of a fence and it would have been easy to have stepped off the line and fallen badly.
Over the gasworks, we came across a group of uniformed policemen and railway workers. Further down the track I could just make out the shape of a train in Schlesischer Station.
‘I’m Commissar Gunther, from the Alex,’ I said. There seemed no point in showing him my beer-token. ‘This is Inspector Lehnhoff and Sergeant Wurth. Who called it in?’
‘Me, sir.’ One of the cops moved toward me and saluted. ‘Sergeant Stumm.’
‘No relation, I hope,’ said Lehnhoff.
There had been a Johannes Stumm who had been forced to leave the political police by Fat Hermann because he wasn’t a Nazi.
‘No, sir.’ Sergeant Stumm smiled patiently.
‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Why did you think that this might be a murder and not a suicide or an accident?’
‘Well, it’s true, stepping in front of a train is a most popular way to kill yourself these days,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘Especially if you’re a woman. Me, I’d use a firearm if I wanted to kill myself. But women aren’t as comfortable with guns as men are. Now with this victim, all of the pockets have been turned inside out, sir. It’s not something you’d do if you were planning to kill yourself. And it’s not something that a train would normally take the trouble to do, either. So that lets out it being an accident, see?’
‘Maybe someone else found him before you did,’ I suggested. ‘And just robbed him.’
‘A copper maybe,’ offered Wurth.
Wisely Sergeant Stumm ignored the suggestion.
‘Unlikely, sir. I’m pretty sure I was the first on the scene. The train driver saw someone on the track as he started to gain speed out of Jannowitz. He hit the brakes but by the time the train stopped it was too late.’
‘All right. Let’s have a look at him.’
‘Not a pretty sight, sir. Even in the dark.’
‘Believe me, I’ve seen worse.’
‘I’ll take your word for that, sir.’
The uniformed sergeant led the way along the track and paused for a moment to switch on his flashlight and illuminate a severed hand that lay on the ground. I looked at it for a minute or so before we walked on to where another police officer was waiting patiently beside a collection of ragged clothes and mangled human remains that had once been a human being. For a moment I might have been looking at myself.
‘Hold the flash on him while we take a look.’
The body looked as if it had been chewed up and spat out by a prehistoric monster. The corrugated legs were barely attached to an impossibly flat pelvis. The man was wearing a workman’s blue overalls with mitten-sized pockets that were indeed inside out as the sergeant had described; so were the pockets in the oily rag that was his twisted flannel jacket. Where the head had been there was now a glistening, jagged harpoon of bloody bone and sinew. There was a strong smell of shit from bowels that had been crushed and emptied under the enormous pressure of a locomotive’s wheels.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ve seen that could look worse than this poor Fritz,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘Me neither,’ observed Wurth, and turned away in disgust.
‘I dare say we’ll all see some interesting sights before this war is over,’ I said. ‘Has anyone looked for the head?’
‘I’ve got a couple of lads searching the area for it now,’ said the sergeant. ‘One on the track and the other down below in case it fell into the gasworks or the factory yard.’
‘I think you’re probably correct,’ I said. ‘It looks like a murder all right. Quite apart from the pockets, which have been turned out, there’s that hand we saw.’
‘The hand?’ This was Lehnhoff talking. ‘What about it?’
I led them back along the track to take another look at the severed hand, which I picked up and turned in my hands like it was an historic artefact, or perhaps a souvenir once owned by the prophet Daniel.
‘These cuts on the fingers look defensive to me,’ I said. ‘As if he might have caught the knife of someone trying to stab him.’
‘I don’t know how you can tell that after a train just ran over him,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Because these cuts are much too thin to have been inflicted by the train. And just look where they are. Along the flesh of the inside of the fingers and on the hand between the thumb and the forefinger. That’s a textbook defensive injury if I ever saw one, Gottfried.’
‘All right,’ Lehnhoff said, almost grudgingly. ‘I suppose you are the expert. On murder.’
‘Perhaps. Only of late I’ve had a lot of competition. There are plenty of cops out east, young cops, who know a lot more about murder than I do.’