Ice Station Wolfenstein

Chapter 1

"Your move, Bruich. Get out of that one, if you can."

Sam Cleave leaned back triumphantly, pushing the hair back out of his eyes. He reached for his cereal bowl and shoved a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth, wrinkling his nose at the blandness of them. Next to the chessboard was a tumbler of whisky left over from last night. He picked it up and carefully poured it over the cornflakes, distributing it evenly.

"That's better," he said, taking another spoonful. "Bruich, I saw you touch that knight. You've got to move it now."

Bruichladdich lifted his ginger head and meowed at Sam.

"Don't talk to me like that," Sam said. "That's the rules, you wee cheat. Now hurry up and move so I can checkmate you."

The cat reached out a tentative paw and kicked the knight, Sam's queen, and a couple of pawns off the board. He stepped onto the board, turned around a couple of times, then curled up and stared accusingly at Sam.

"What?" Sam demanded. "What is it? What are you looking at me like that for? You've had your breakfast. Don't you try and tell me you haven't." He spun his chair around to face his desk. An untidy pile of papers lay on top of his laptop. He picked up the bundle and transferred it to the floor, then opened the laptop and stared at the open document.

He had got no further than that. His digital voice recorder was full of sound bites from concerned citizens who objected to the presence of another urban supermarket near their expensive homes. He had not yet transcribed them. He was not sure that he would bother. They had all said pretty much the same thing, and Sam was struggling to care.

He closed the document. With nothing else open on the screen, all he could see was the desktop wallpaper — a smiling man and a woman with their arms around each other. The woman was tall and slim with long, ash-blonde hair and blue eyes. Her head was slightly tilted and her face turned toward the man, so Sam could just make out the little bump in her nose where it had once been broken.

The man was a little taller than she was, with brown hair and eyes and a five o'clock shadow. He was a little too thin, perhaps, and his dress sense left much to be desired, but with the woman in his arms he looked like the happiest man alive. Sam could hardly believe that just eighteen months ago, that man had been him. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still convince himself that he could hear Patricia's sweet voice and filthy laugh. He reached for the whisky bottle, again.

The buzzer sounded. Sam froze. Bruichladdich shot under the couch. "Let's just wait this one out, Bruich," Sam whispered. He had had too many mornings ruined by debt collectors banging on his door recently. It made it very difficult to ignore the growing pile of unopened mail accumulating behind the front door. Gingerly, as if they might hear him from the street outside, he picked up the bottle and took a swig. He counted out one minute, then two, then five. At last he reasoned that the coast must be clear and breathed a sigh of relief.

That was when the pounding at the door began. Damn it, Sam thought, They must have buzzed one of the neighbors and now they're in the stairwell. Ah well. Just lay low for a—

"Samuel Fergusson Cleave!" an authoritative voice called from the other side of the door. "Open up! Police!"

At once, Sam relaxed. He strode over to the door and flung it open. "Come on in, you old bastard," he said, welcoming DCI Patrick Smith into the flat.

Smith grinned. "I thought you'd never ask," he said. "I think I scared the students upstairs when I buzzed them. Told them it was the police; I think they thought I was coming to take their stereo away. Now they just think I'm here to arrest you." As Smith made his way into the living room and cleared himself a space on the messy couch, Bruichladdich emerged from his hiding place and jumped onto his lap. Smith scratched the cat behind the ears. "Hello Bruich. You never miss a chance to cover me in ginger fur, do you?"

"You should think yourself lucky," Sam remarked. "Some of us never get to see this side of Bruich. Some of us just provide him with Whiskas and get hissed at for telling him to get out of the sink."

"Well, it's not like you use it for washing up or anything."

"Touché." Sam gathered up some scattered pieces of crockery as nonchalantly as he could. "Want a cup of tea?"

"Please."

Sam disappeared into his tiny kitchen and put the kettle on. It was a stereotypical single man's kitchen, with chipped, mismatched mugs that had to be washed before use, well-hidden tea spoons, and milk that had gone past its use-by date over a month ago. In a moment of optimism, Sam opened the carton to see how it smelled. He took a sniff and recoiled, screwing the lid back on as fast and as tightly as he could, then dropped the whole thing into the bin.

However, even if he could not be trusted to have fresh milk, the one thing Sam could be relied on to have a ready supply of was tea bags. He put two in each mug, added the hot water and stirred until it resembled tar. He dumped a heaped spoonful of sugar into each, then added another for good measure and to make up for the lack of milk.

"There you go," he said, handing one of the mugs to Smith. "Now what brings you here?"

Smith, settled on the couch with Bruichladdich curled up on his lap, looked doubtfully at the tea. "Something I thought you'd want to know about. I got called out to an old folk's home last night. Some old boy was murdered. Pretty gory, to tell you the truth. We haven't let the media know yet, but we'll have to soon and I thought you might want to get in there first."

"Might be a bit too exciting for me these days, Paddy," Sam replied, taking a large gulp of scalding hot tea. "Covering anything more dramatic than whatever's upsetting the Bruntsfield mums might set me off on a downward spiral again."

"Sam, have you looked at yourself lately?" Smith asked. "Frankly, the only way is up. Ugh, what's this supposed to be? I thought you said it was tea?"

"Spoken like a true friend, Paddy." Sam said. "It is tea; it's just not the kind of puny tea you're used to. I know you boys on the force all think that you know about caffeine and tannins, but I wouldn't feed the stuff you drink to a baby."

"This is why no one would leave you in charge of a baby," said Smith. "You'd just put whisky in its bottle. Anyway, I need you to cover this. It's a bit weird and I'd like to know that there's someone out there who'll cover it sensibly. I have a feeling that the local papers are going to go nuts with this and blow it out of all proportion, which means that when the nationals get hold of it — and they will, because it's an old folk's home — it'll be a giant mess. If you cover it, the national papers will look to you because they know you. That way I'll know that they're getting something resembling the actual facts, not some nonsense dreamed up by some twelve year old waiting for her big break."

Sam shook his head. "Gory murders aren't my thing anymore," he sighed. "No murders, no drug deals, no international crime rings, nothing. How gory can it possibly be, anyway? Your beat is South Queensferry, for Christ's sake. Nothing interesting happens out there."

"Not usually, I'll grant you." Smith conceded. He took another sip of his tea, as if trying very hard not to taste it. "But this… I've never seen anything like it. I mean, you don't expect this kind of thing to actually happen except on the telly. I got called out to check out a possible intruder at the assisted living facility — Forth Valley, do you know the one? No, of course you don't. Anyway, I got there and found this old boy tied to his chair, mouth stuffed with cloth, and he'd had his throat cut."

"Sounds to me like someone broke in, tied the old guy up while they robbed the place, then got spooked and killed him in case he identified them," Sam speculated. "What's so weird about that?"

Smith took a deep breath, staring intently into his tea as he spoke. "His fingers and toes had been cut off. Not all of them. Two fingers, both on the left hand, and the little toe on the right foot. But they hadn't been taken off in one go. When we found the digits, they'd been cut off bit by bit. Really nasty. And his throat wasn't just cut. It was slit. Neatly. Like whoever was holding the knife really knew what they were doing. If it was just an interrupted burglary you'd expect it to be messy, just someone slashing away because they were angry. But this… it looked like a professional job."

He looked up at Sam. "Now can you see why I'm worried about it getting sensationalized? It's bad enough already, and the last thing my department needs right now is some huge story about how South Queensferry's the kind of place where elderly people in secure housing facilities get hits taken out on them and get tortured to death on a regular basis. I really need someone who can handle this sensitively, Sam… Please?"

Sam leaned back in his seat and pressed his fists into his eyes. He was still a little hung over from the previous night, when he had made his first attempt at the Tesco Metro article and accidentally drunk himself to sleep instead. Listening to Smith was causing the slight ache behind his eyeballs to grow into a full-blown pounding headache.

"Paddy," he groaned. "I appreciate what you're trying to do, ok? I know you think you're being really subtle with all this stuff about your department, but it's bullshit and we both know it. Look, I know the state I'm in. I know you're trying to get me out of it and you think that if I get my teeth into a story that's more like what I used to do, it'll bring me back to my old self, right? Well, forget it. It doesn't work that way. You can only do what I used to do if you really care about it, and I don't any more. My days of valiantly pursuing a story to the bitter end, come what may, risking life and limb like some stupid bloody superhero? They're over. Sorry."

Smith grimaced. "Sam… you're right. I'm not subtle. But honestly, seeing you like this is painful. I know things have been tough. What happened to Patricia… it shouldn't have happened to anyone. You shouldn't have had to see it. I can understand that it's done a number on you. But this… Sam, you know damn fine that if you don't get your act together you're going to get fired. You're already on your final warning. I was hoping that this might, I don't know, fire your interest again." He looked Sam straight in the eye. "She wouldn't want to see you like this, Sam."

Sam's mug went flying, spilling tea all over the floor as he leaped to his feet. Bruichladdich was awake in a split second and dived back under the couch.

"Don't you dare tell me what she would have wanted!" he yelled. "You don't know what Trish would want. No one does. She's dead, all right? Patricia is dead and no one — not you, not me, not anyone — knows what she'd want." Smith put up his hands in a conciliatory gesture, hoping to calm things down, but Sam plunged on. "Maybe the only thing she'd really want is not to have been killed, did you ever think of that? Maybe that's the only thing that actually matters. Who gives a damn what happens to me? I don't." He collapsed back into his desk chair and glared at his laptop. "All I need is for the Post to keep me on long enough to let me drink myself into a stupor."

"Sam, I'm sorry—"

Sam shushed his friend and waved an aimless hand. "It's fine," he said, "doesn't matter. Look, could you leave me on my own for a bit? I need to be on my own."

Smith was just about to leave when he saw Sam's hand close around the whisky bottle. "Isn't it a wee bit early for that, Sam?" he asked as gently as he could.

"Nope," said Sam, taking a prolonged swig.

DCI Patrick Smith decided it would be best to beat a tactical retreat. He showed himself out.

He did not even make it to the end of the street before his phone beeped. He took it out and read the text.

Forty-five minutes later, Sam and DCI Smith were in the car, approaching South Queensferry. At Smith's insistence they stopped at a café on the way out of town and he bought them both breakfast. Sam's preference for rolls containing black pudding, haggis, and fried egg topped with brown sauce turned Smith's stomach, but he was happy to know that Sam had eaten something that morning — and that it wasn't just whisky-soaked cornflakes. He had also persuaded Sam to have a quick shower before leaving the flat, but as far as he could tell it had not made much of a difference.

"So what else do we know about this guy?" Sam asked, as they got back in the car. He drew a cigarette from the packet, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Apart from the fact that he's dead."

With a pointed but unnoticed glance at Sam's lit cigarette, Smith rolled down his window. "He's German," he said. "Born in Potsdam in 1916. His full name's Harald Josef Kruger. No relatives, as far as anyone knows. The nurse at the home said nobody ever came to see him and he paid all his bills himself. No next of kin listed. Very neat, though. Organized. He didn't have much stuff, but his papers were all in order. Every bank statement for the past ten years, all his receipts, all his personal documents neatly filed. Not that it made for very exciting reading, as he's been in the home since 1998. There certainly wasn't anything to suggest that anyone would want to chop him into wee bits."

They turned off the main road, toward Hopetoun House, then turned again into a rather dismal housing estate. "Look, Sam," Smith said. "I know that you know the ropes, but just… be prepared for a bit of hostility here. The nurses are fine, but the facility managers aren't too chuffed to have us crawling all over the place. And if you find being in the room too much, just say, ok?"

"What, you think I'm going to lose it at the sight of blood, Paddy?" Sam chuckled.

"Just trying to be sensitive," Smith muttered. "It's your first crime scene since—"

"I know, I know. Since that crime scene." He sucked down another lungful of smoke. "But you know, Paddy, it's actually not my first since then. You have no idea how many crime scenes I see. There's the place on St Andrew Square where cyclists keep going onto the pavement when they're not allowed, and there's the newsagent on Easter Road that got cleared out of cigarettes twice in one year."

"Ha. Funny." Smith grimaced. "But you know what I mean. Just… watch yourself, ok?"

"Ok."

Despite DCI Smith's assurances that the nurses were comparatively friendly, Sam found himself on the receiving end of an icy reception. The staff nurse at the desk looked him up and down with frank disapproval.

"Do you have any press identification, Mr. Cleave?" she asked. The expression on her face made it clear that she did not believe that anyone so unkempt could work for a reputable paper.

"Nope," said Sam. "Sorry, but the days when we all stuck press badges in our fedoras are long gone. You can google me if you like, but I promise you, my byline picture looks even worse than the real thing."

"I can vouch for him," Smith said, flashing his ID. "He's here because he's the one journalist I trust to handle this sensitively, ok? Everyone else, you just keep telling them to contact the station."

The nurse looked deeply suspicious, but she let them pass. Smith led the way to G21 with Sam trailing in his wake. He watched carefully as Sam entered the room. The body had been removed, but the forensic team was still swarming all over the place and the bloodstains stood out starkly against the magnolia paint on the walls.

The dark stench of blood hit Sam like an uppercut. It took all his concentration not to recoil, or to run out of the room, or to throw up. He fixed his eyes on an unsullied patch of burgundy carpet and focused on breathing through his mouth. There was no way he would give anyone the satisfaction of seeing that he couldn't handle a little blood. Least of all himself.

Once he was sure that he wouldn't vomit, Sam raised his eyes and took in the scene. It was a completely anonymous room. Pale walls, standard issue bedding, a few small, banal pictures, the kind of default decoration that no one actually chooses. There was nothing to indicate the tastes or personality of the occupant.

Having got a grip on himself by checking out the mundane objects, Sam forced himself to look at the wing chair. He was standing behind it, so all he could see was the spattered blood on the wall and a little on the carpet. The worst, he knew, would be around the other side, where the old man's blood had soaked the fabric of the chair. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. Come on Sam, he thought. You've seen worse. Get on with it.

"Are youse the police?"

Sam whirled around, grateful for the interruption. An elderly man in a pale blue dressing gown was standing in the doorway, supporting himself on a Zimmer frame.

"I said, are youse the police?"

A nurse came up behind the old man and began flapping and shushing him, trying to lead him away, but the man was having none of it. DCI Smith crossed the room in a couple of steps and positioned himself in the doorway, blocking as much of the view into the room as possible. In his best calm, professional voice, he began to reassure the old man that they were the police, and they were doing everything they could to find out what had happened.

Sam decided that he had taken a liking to the old man. Perhaps it was something about the unkempt hair, perhaps it was the belligerent refusal to listen to the nurse, but for a moment Sam felt as if he was staring his own future in the face. He walked over to the door and stood at Smith's shoulder.

"Who's this?" the old man asked, pointing to Sam. "He's no police, is he? Look at the state of him."

Yes, Sam thought, as the nurse led the old man away toward the bathroom. I definitely like this guy. He turned to Smith. "Have you lot got statements from everyone?" he asked. "Am I ok to talk to people?"

"Statements are done," Smith confirmed. "But honestly, I doubt you'll get much out of Mr. McKenna. DI Andrews was with him for the best part of an hour this morning and said that he hadn't seen or heard anything much, he just wanted to ramble on about how Mr. Kruger was a Nazi."

"Great!" Sam smiled. "I'll go and talk to him once he's out of the bathroom. If the Post doesn't like the Nazi angle, I can maybe try selling the story to News of the World."

"Hilarious," Smith remarked, deadpan. "Now come and I'll show you around the crime scene while you wait for him to do his business."

"But how come the police have to be here?" Mr. McKenna protested, as he and Sam sat down for a chat in the facility's lounge. It was a chilly room with plastic-covered seats. At Smith's insistence, DI Andrews had been sent in to accompany them.

"He's here to protect you," said Sam, nodding amiably at the young DI. "I've not had a criminal record check, so I'm not allowed to be in here on my own in case I'm dangerous."

Mr. McKenna harrumphed a bit, muttering about health and safety gone mad and suggesting that these rules had not done Mr. Kruger any good. Sam did not mind. It was good to be out of the crime scene. DCI Smith's account of finding the body had brought up too many memories that now needed to be submerged again, and a good chat with an elderly xenophobe would do the trick, he thought. Besides, in this room there was a pot of tea and a pile of cheap, prepackaged biscuits, and Sam always preferred to be where the tea was.

"I've already spoken to the police," Mr. McKenna grumbled. "I'm not doing it again. Get one of the nurses if you've got to have someone in here."

Sam looked over at DI Andrews. "Would that be ok?"

"Fine with me," the DI replied, looking relieved. Sam wondered how their earlier interview had gone. "I'll send someone in."

A moment later, a young male nurse was in the room and Mr. McKenna was directing him to sit at the far end and not listen in. DI Andrews made a swift exit, before the nurse could insist he stayed, and as he left Sam was sure he heard Mr. McKenna muttering "Fuck the filth!" under his breath. He stifled a laugh and tried to maintain his professional composure, such as it was.

"No recordings," Mr. McKenna said, seeing Sam setting up his Dictaphone between them. "Just you write things down. And don't you put my name in your paper. I don't want any of this linked to me, right?"

"No problem," said Sam. "You'll be 'sources close to Mr. Kruger,' is that ok?"

Mr. McKenna laughed. "No one was 'close' to Kruger. Not really. But we chatted a bit. We're both fond of whisky, and you've got to talk about something when you're drinking."

"So what did you chat about?" Sam asked.

"Him being a Nazi, mostly," said Mr. McKenna. Sam spluttered on his tea. He had known that the Nazi accusation was coming, but he hadn't expected it to be so matter of fact. "It's true!" Mr. McKenna insisted. "I'm not just saying that because he was German. He told me about it. We'd both been engineers — me in the RAF, him in one of the big Nazi research centers. Peenemünde."

"Peenemünde?"

"Aye. It was a research station on an island in the Baltic, up near the Polish border. Luftwaffe base. It's where Wernher von Braun developed buzzbombs and V2 rockets. Aeroballistics. That's what Kruger worked in. I nearly got killed by a buzzbomb when I was stationed in London. We used to laugh about how he probably built it."

Sam looked at the old man with interest. It was easy to forget that the residents of the facility had once been young people with active, complicated lives. Is this what's in store for me? Sam wondered. Anonymous old age, surrounded by staff who don't know or care that I used to be a real person? I wonder what this guy's life was like before he got dumped in here. "So how does someone get from working with Wernher von Braun to a retirement home in South Queensferry?" Sam asked.

"By getting old," Mr. McKenna replied. "You go where the kids are, if you've got any."

"I thought Mr. Kruger had no family?"

"Not now," said McKenna, "but he used to have a daughter. Elisabeth, her name was. Nice lass. I remember she used to come here sometimes to see him. You'd never have guessed them for father and daughter, what with her accent. She was American. Looked and sounded like a film star. That was because they were in California, you know. Or it might have been New Mexico. After Paperclip." He saw Sam's bemused expression. "Operation Paperclip? When the Russians came and the Yanks got all the Nazi scientists out?"

Sam nodded. "Heard of it. So what happened to Elisabeth?"

"She married a Scotsman. That's why she moved here. But they died, her and her husband both. Car crash. In 2000, I think it was. Maybe 2001? No, 2000, because Mary Williams was still living in the room to the other side of mine and she died just before my 80th birthday. Anyway, after Elisabeth died, Kruger didn't have anyone else. I think that's why he left his box with me."

"His box?"

Mr. McKenna slowly leaned forward in his seat and called out to the nurse. "I need my box," he said. "There are things in it that I need to show to Sam here. I need you to go and get it for me. The wooden box. In my room."

The nurse, clearly accustomed to humoring Mr. McKenna's whims, was only gone for a moment. When he returned, he was carrying a battered wooden strongbox with a sturdy handle on the top. He set it on the table while Mr. McKenna fished out the key that hung on a string around his neck. As the nurse retreated to his chair at the other end of the room, McKenna handed the key to Sam.

"You get it, son," he said. "It's too fiddly for me these days."

Sam took the chunky brass key from him and fitted it into the lock. Despite the box's obvious age, it had been well maintained. It opened easily to reveal a neatly arranged selection of highly polished brass mechanical parts, folded papers, and a couple of small leather-bound notebooks. "Anything in particular I should be looking at?" Sam asked. "I'm not sure what most of this stuff is."

"Neither am I," said Mr. McKenna. "Most of the parts are things I don't recognize."

"He never told you what they were?"

"No. And I never asked. If he'd wanted to say, he would have." Mr. McKenna took out some papers and unfolded them. "You don't speak German, do you?"

Sam shook his head. "Not since school. If those papers aren't about how many brothers and sisters Kruger had, I won't be much use to you." He leaned forward to look at the papers. Some were neatly typed, some handwritten. He selected a notebook at random and opened it to see the same flowing script. These notes were brief, with lots of abbreviations, crossed-out sections, further notes added in the margins, hastily-scribbled equations. At the back, Sam caught a glimpse of a sketch. He smiled. Who ever thought about Nazi scientists stopping to doodle? "So why did he give you the box?"

"In case he died," Mr. McKenna said with a shrug. "They're not always that careful here when they clear out the rooms. If you don't have family to come in and do it for you. They just dump everything in a skip. They don't check for things that shouldn't be thrown away. If you've got something that's important to you, you pass it on to someone else so it won't go in the bin. I've got things from a few people. My son's got a list of the bits that he's to save when I go. Don't know what he'll do with them, mind. Probably just sell them. But at least they'll still be out there. I don't suppose I'll care, being dead."

"That's tea time, Mr. McKenna." The nurse stood up and moved toward Mr. McKenna, ready to help him back onto his feet.

"Can we have just a few minutes longer?" Sam asked.

"Sorry," said the nurse. "We serve dinner at five."

Sam bit back a sharp response. "Want me to take the box back to your room?" he asked Mr. McKenna.

"I don't want it," the old man whispered. "Can you take it?"

"Errr, sure." Sam was surprised. "Do you want me to pass it on to the police?"

Mr. McKenna scowled. "What would they do with it? They'd probably say I stole it or something. No, just you keep it. Or find someone who'd want it. I don't care. I just don't want it here."

Sam packed the papers and notebooks back into the box with great care while the nurse got Mr. McKenna to his feet, straightened his dressing gown and helped him balance. "Are you sure?" Sam called, as the nurse and Mr. McKenna made their way out of the room. "You could probably sell these. Could be worth a fair bit of money."

Slowly and painfully, Mr. McKenna took the handful of steps back toward Sam and clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe I could," he muttered, leaning in close. "But do you think I want to end up like Kruger?"

Fair point, Sam thought. So you gave it to someone who doesn't care. Good choice. He locked the strongbox again, picked it up by the cold brass handle and made his way back to join DCI Smith in Mr. Kruger's room.

"Were you carrying that box when we got here?" Smith asked as they got back in the car.

"What, this?" Sam glanced at the box as if it had only just appeared. "Nah. The old boy I was talking to earlier, Mr. McKenna, he gave it to me. Apparently it's a super secret Nazi box and I might want to write about it or something. He wasn't taking no for an answer, so I said I'd take it. I'll keep it for a bit. He's bound to want it back eventually."

"Poor old guy." Smith shook his head. "I hope I don't end up like that."