Walking in there after snatching a few hours of sleep back at my apartment, and presented with the sight of Hans Illmann waiting patiently for me with a dossier of photographs, I didn’t think that the place was about to get any more pleasant. Congratulating myself on having had the foresight to eat something before what promised to be an unappetizing meeting, I sat down and faced him.
‘So this is where they’ve been hiding you,’ he said.
‘It’s supposed to be only temporary,’ I explained, ‘just like me. But frankly, it suits me to be out of the way of the rest of Kripo. There’s less chance of becoming a permanent fixture here again. And I dare say that suits them too.’
‘One would not have thought it possible to cause such aggravation throughout Kripo Executive from such a bureaucratic dungeon as this.’ He laughed, and stroking his chin-beard added: ‘You, and a Sturmbannfuhrer from the Gestapo, have caused all sorts of problems for poor Dr Schade. He’s had telephone calls from lots of important people. Nebe, Muller, even Heydrich. How very satisfying for you. No, don’t shrug modestly like that. You have my admiration, Bernie, you really do.’
I pulled open a drawer in my desk and took out a bottle and a couple of glasses.
‘Let’s drink to it,’ I said.
‘Gladly. I could use one after the day I’ve had.’ He picked up the full glass and sipped it gratefully. ‘You know, I had no idea that there was a special department in the Gestapo to persecute Catholics.’
‘Nor had I. But I can’t say that it surprises me much. National Socialism permits only one kind of organized belief.’ I nodded at the dossier on Illmann’s lap. ‘So what have you got?’
‘Victim number five is what we have got.’ He handed me the dossier and started to roll himself a cigarette.
‘These are good,’ I said flicking through its contents. ‘Your man takes a nice photograph.’
‘Yes, I thought you’d appreciate them. That one of the throat is particularly interesting. The right carotid artery is almost completely severed thanks to one perfectly horizontal knife cut. That means that she was flat on her back when he cut her. All the same, the greater part of the wound is on the right-hand side of the throat, so in all probability our man is right-handed.’
‘It must have been some knife,’ I said, observing the depth of the wound.
‘Yes. It severed the larynx almost completely.’ He licked his cigarette paper. ‘Something extremely sharp, like a surgical curette I should say. At the same time, however, the epiglottis was strongly compressed, and between that and the oesophagus on the right were haematomas as big as an orange pip.’
‘Strangled, right?’
‘Very good,’ Illmann grinned. ‘But half-strangled, in actual fact. There was a small quantity of blood in the girl’s partially inflated lungs.’
‘So he throttled her into silence, and later cut her throat?’
‘She bled to death, hanging upside down like a butchered calf. Same as all the others. Do you have a match?’
I tossed my book across the desk. ‘What about her important little places? Did he fuck her?’
‘Fucked her, and tore her up a bit in the process. Well, you’d expect that. The girl was a virgin, I should imagine. There were even imprints of his fingernails on the mucous membrane. But more importantly I found some foreign pubic hairs, and I don’t mean that they were imported from Paris.’
‘You’ve got a hair colour?’
‘Brown. Don’t ask me for a shade, I can’t be that specific.’
‘But you’re sure they’re not Irma Hanke’s?’
‘Positive. They stood out on her perfectly Aryan fair-haired little plum like shit in a sugar-bowl.’ He leaned back and blew a cloud into the air above his head. ‘You want me to try and match one with a cutting from the bush of your crazy Czech?’
‘No, I released him at lunchtime. He’s in the clear. And as it happens his hair was fair.’ I leafed through the typewritten pages of the autopsy report. ‘Is that it?’
‘Not quite.’ He sucked at his cigarette and then crushed it into my ashtray. From his tweed hunting-jacket pocket he produced a sheet of folded newspaper which he spread out on the desk. ‘I thought you ought to see this.’
It was the front page of an old issue of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic publication. A flash across the top left-hand corner of the paper advertised it as ‘A Special Ritual Murder Number’. Not that one needed reminding. The pen-and-ink illustration said it eloquently enough. Eight naked, fair-haired German girls hanging upside-down, their throats slit, and their blood spilling into a great Communion plate that was held by an ugly caricature Jew.
‘Interesting, don’t you think?’ he said.
‘Streicher’s always publishing this sort of crap,’ I said. ‘Nobody takes it seriously.’
Illmann shook his head, and reclaimed his cigarette. ‘I’m not for one minute saying that it should be. I no more believe in ritual murder than I believe in Adolf Hitler the Peacemaker.’
‘But there is this drawing, right?’ He nodded. ‘Which is remarkably similar to the method with which five German girls have already been killed.’ He nodded again.
I glanced down the page at the article that accompanied the drawing, and read: ‘The Jews are charged with enticing Gentile children and Gentile adults, butchering them and draining their blood. They are charged with mixing this blood into their masses (unleavened bread) and using it to practise superstitious magic. They are charged with torturing their victims, especially the children; and during this torture they scream threats, curses and cast magic spells against the Gentiles. This systematic murder has a special name. It is called Ritual Murder.’
‘Are you suggesting that Streicher might have had something to do with these murders?’
‘I don’t know that I’m suggesting anything, Bernie. I merely thought I ought to bring it to your attention.’ He shrugged. ‘But why not? After all, he wouldn’t be the first district Gauleiter to commit a crime. Governor Kube of Kurmark for example.’
‘There are quite a few stories about Streicher that one hears,’ I said.
‘In any other country Streicher would be in prison.’
‘Can I keep this?’
‘I wish you would. It’s not the sort of thing that one likes to leave lying on the coffee-table.’ He crushed out yet another cigarette and stood up to leave. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘About Streicher? I don’t exactly know.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll think about it after the formal ID. Becker’s on his way back here with the girl’s parents by now. We’d better get down to the mortuary.’
It was something that Becker said that made me drive the Hankes home myself after Herr Hanke had positively identified the remains of his daughter.
‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to break bad news to a family,’ he had explained. ‘In a strange way they always hope against hope, clinging on to the last straw right up until the end. And then when you tell them, that’s when it really hits them. The mother breaks down, you know. But somehow these two were different. It’s difficult to explain what I mean, sir, but I got the impression that they were expecting it.’