‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Take my word for it. There’s a whole new generation of police experts out there.’ I let this remark settle for a moment before adding, very carefully, for appearance’s sake, ‘I find that very reassuring, sometimes. That there are so many good men to take my place. Eh, Sergeant Stumm?’
‘Yes sir.’ But I could hear the doubt in the uniformed sergeant’s voice.
‘Walk with us,’ I said, warming to him. In a country where ill-temper and petulance were the order of the day – Hitler and Goebbels were forever ranting angrily about something – the sergeant’s imperturbability was heartening. ‘Come back to the bridge. Another pair of eyes might be useful.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What are we looking for now?’ There was a weary sigh in Lehnhoff’s voice, as if he could hardly see the point of investigating this case any further.
‘An elephant.’
‘What?’
‘Something. Evidence. You’ll certainly know it when you see it,’ I said.
Back up the track we found some blood spots on a railway sleeper and then some more on the edge of the platform outside the echoing glasshouse that was the station at Jannowitz Bridge.
Below, someone aboard a river barge that was quietly chugging through one of the many red-brick arches in the bridge shouted at us to extinguish our lights. This was Lehnhoff’s cue to start throwing his weight around. It was almost as if he’d been waiting to get tough with someone, and it didn’t matter who.
‘We’re the police,’ he yelled down at the barge. Lehnhoff was yet another angry German. ‘And we’re investigating a murder up here. So mind your own business or I’ll come aboard and search you just because I can.’
‘It’s everyone’s business if the Tommy bombers see your lights,’ said the voice, not unreasonably.
Wurth’s nose wrinkled with disbelief. ‘I shouldn’t think that’s very likely at all. Do you, sir? It’s been a while since the RAF came this far east.’
‘They probably can’t get the petrol either,’ I said.
I pointed my flashlight on the ground and followed a trail of blood along the platform to a place where it seemed to start.
‘From the amount of blood on the ground he was probably stabbed here. Then he staggered along the platform a ways before falling onto the track. Picked himself up. Walked a bit more and then got hit by the train to Friedrichshagen.’
‘It was the last one,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘The one o’clock.’
‘Lucky he didn’t miss it,’ said Lehnhoff.
Ignoring him, I glanced at my watch. It was three a.m. ‘Well, that gives us an approximate time of death.’
I started to walk along the track in front of the platform and after a while I found a greyish green passport-sized book lying on the ground. It was an Employment Identification Document, much like my own except that this one was for foreigners. Inside was all of the information about the dead man I needed: his name, nationality, address, photograph and employer.
‘Foreign worker’s book is it?’ said Lehnhoff, glancing over my shoulder as I studied the victim’s details under my flashlight.
I nodded. The dead man was Geert Vranken, aged thirty-nine, born at Dordrecht in the Netherlands, a volunteer railway worker; living at a hostel in Wuhlheide. The face in the photograph was wary-looking, with a cleft chin that was slightly unshaven. The eyebrows were short and the hair thinning to one side. He appeared to be wearing the same thick flannel jacket as the one on the body, and a collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck. Even as we were reading the bare details of Geert Vranken’s shortish life, another policeman was coming up the stairs of Jannowitz Station with what, in the darkness, looked like a small round bag.
‘I found the head, sir,’ reported the policeman. ‘It was on the roof of the Pintsch factory.’ He was holding the head by the ear, which, in the absence of much hair, looked as good a way to carry around a severed head as any you could have thought of. ‘I didn’t like to leave it up there, sir.’
‘No, you were right to bring it along, lad,’ said Sergeant Stumm and, taking hold of the other ear, he laid the dead man’s head carefully on the railway platform so that it was staring up at us.
‘Not a sight you see everyday,’ said Wurth and looked away.
‘You want to get yourself up to Plotzensee,’ I remarked. ‘I hear the falling axe is very busy these days.’
‘That’s him all right,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘The man in the worker’s book. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And I suppose someone might have tried to rob him. Or else why go through his pockets?’
‘You’re sticking to the theory that this is a murder and not an accident then?’ enquired Lehnhoff.
‘Yes. I am. For that reason.’
Sergeant Stumm tutted loudly and then rubbed his stubbly jaw, which sounded almost as loud. ‘Bad luck for him. But bad luck for the murderer, too.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, if he was a foreign worker, I can’t imagine there was much more than fluff in his pockets. It’s a hell of a disappointing thing to kill a man with the intent of robbing him and then find that he had nothing worth stealing. I mean, these poor fellows aren’t exactly well paid, are they?’
‘It’s a job,’ objected Lehnhoff. ‘Better a job in Germany than no job back in Holland.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘I don’t think I like your insinuation, Sergeant,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Leave it, Lehnhoff,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the time or the place for a political argument. A man is dead, after all.’
Lehnhoff grunted and tapped the head with the toe of his shoe, which was enough to make me want to kick him off the platform.
‘Well, if someone did kill him, like you say, Herr Commissar, it’ll be another of them foreign workers that probably did it. You see if I’m wrong. It’s dog eat dog in these foreign-worker hostels.’
‘Don’t knock it,’ I said. ‘Dogs know the importance of getting a square meal now and again. And speaking for myself, if it’s a choice between fifty grammes of dog and a hundred grammes of nothing then I’ll eat the dog anytime.’
‘Not me,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘I draw the line at guinea pigs. So there’s no way I’d ever eat a dog.’
‘It’s one thing saying that, sir,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘But it’s another thing altogether trying to tell the difference. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the cops over at Zoo Station are having to put on night patrols in the zoo. On account of how poachers have been breaking in and stealing the animals. Apparently they just had their tapir taken.’
‘What’s a tapir?’ asked Wurth.
‘It looks a bit like pork,’ I said. ‘So I expect that’s what some unscrupulous butcher is calling it now.’
‘Good luck to him,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘A man needs more than a stirring speech by the Mahatma Propagandi to fill his stomach,’ I said.
‘Amen,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘So you’d look the other way if you knew what it was?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, getting careful again. I might have been suicidal but I wasn’t stupid: Lehnhoff was just the type to report a fellow to the Gestapo for wearing English shoes; and I hardly wanted to spend a week in the cells removed from the comfort of my warm, night-time pistol. ‘But this is Berlin, Gottfried. Looking the other way is what we’re good at.’
I pointed at the severed head that lay at our feet.
‘You just see if I’m wrong.’
CHAPTER 2