Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 7

Planting evidence was hardly uncommon at the Alex. For a lot of detectives lacking the skills or the patience to do the job properly, it was the only way they could ever secure a conviction. I’d never done it myself but there’s a first time for everything and, in the absence of the evidence that was legally held by the Gestapo in the death of Franz Koci, I decided to ‘find’ some new evidence that hitherto was held only by me. But first I had to make Lehnhoff’s earlier on-the-scene inquiry seem like what it was: incompetent, only more so, and when I reviewed his case notes I discovered that no fingertip search of the area in Kleist Park where Koci’s body was discovered had ever been conducted. So I telephoned Sachse at Gestapo headquarters to prick his ears with this new ‘information’.

‘I thought you told me that all of the evidence at the scene of the crime had been collected.’

‘I did. It was.’

‘Like hell. With a homicide, especially an important homicide like this one, it’s standard practice to have ten or fifteen police officers on their hands and knees in a line to comb the general area. Or at least it was while this department had real police working here. Real police who did real police work. But there’s no record of a fingertip search of the ground where Koci’s body was found.’

‘But looking for what?’

‘Evidence. What evidence, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what it might be. But I think I’d recognize it when I saw it.’

‘You really think that park’s worth another look?’

‘Under the circumstances, yes I do. Between you and me, Inspector Lehnhoff – the first investigating detective – is lazy and dishonest, so it wouldn’t have been your fault if the ground wasn’t properly searched. I suppose you just took his word for it that things had been done properly.’

I was saying half of this in case Lehnhoff decided to say anything about my assaulting him.

‘Well, yes, I did.’

‘I thought so. All right. You weren’t to know. But under the circumstances you’d better organize a search yourself. Commissioner Lüdtke has told us all that budgets at the Alex are tight. I don’t want him coming down on my neck about the cost of this.’

‘I’ll organize it immediately.’

‘Good. Please let me know if they find anything.’

Of course I knew exactly what they were going to find in Kleist Park. I knew because I’d already put it there myself. And when later on that same day Sachse appeared in my office with a plastic bag containing a switchblade, I made a big show out of looking surprised.

‘This is made by Mikov,’ I said, examining the switchblade carefully. ‘That’s in Czechoslovakia, isn’t it? I mean Bohemia and Moravia.’

‘Yes.’

‘That would fit with our friend Franz Koci, wouldn’t it?’ I leaned back in my chair and frowned a frown that could have made it big in silent movies. ‘I wonder.’

‘What?’

I made another big show of thinking hard. I walked around my office, which contained several filing cabinets, a lot of empty ashtrays, and on the wall a nice picture of Adolf Hitler. The picture had been put there by the previous occupant and while I hated it, for me to have taken it down would, in the eyes of the Gestapo, have made me look like Gavrilo Princip.

I opened one of the filing cabinets. This was as full as the Prussian State Library and contained unsolved cases and reports going back years. Very little of what was in there had anything to do with me, and for all I know, Philipp Melancthon’s report to the Diet of Worms was one of the older files at the back of the drawer. But I knew what I was looking for. I forced a gap and tugged out a grey folder with Geert Vranken’s name on the corner.

‘Geert Vranken. Aged thirty-nine, a foreign railway worker from Dordrecht, in the Netherlands. Educated at the University of The Hague. Murdered earlier this month. His body, what remained of it, was found on the railway line just south of Jannowitz Bridge after being struck by a train to Friedrichshagen.’

‘What about it?’

Sachse sat down on the corner of my desk, folded his arms and then checked his hair. This was still as neat as a field of wheat and approximately the same colour, and I briefly wondered if it ever looked any different in a high wind or underwater. Probably not. His head could have been found on the roof of the Pintsch factory, like Vranken’s, after a train had gone over his neck and there wouldn’t have been a hair out of place.

‘I was the investigating officer, that’s what. And while it’s not uncommon for people to get hit by trains in the dark it is uncommon to find that they had already sustained multiple stab wounds. I examined the torso myself and I seem to remember that the contour of the wounds was not unlike the shape of this Bohemian switchblade.’

‘How can we find out for sure?’

‘Got a car?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. You can drive me out to the Charité. Let’s hope that they haven’t incinerated the body.’

Sachse pulled up at the corner of the Charité opposite the Lessing Theatre where Ida Wust was playing in a show called The Main Point is Happiness. I couldn’t disagree with that.

‘How about it, Werner? Shall I go in and get us a pair of tickets while we’re here?’

Sachse smiled thinly and shook his head.

‘Not an Ida Wust fan, huh? You surprise me.’

‘That old trout? You must be joking. She reminds me of my mother-in-law. But the other one’s all right. Jane Tilden.’

‘She’s a bit too wholesome for my taste.’ I opened the car door but Sachse stayed put. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

‘You don’t need me in there, do you?’

Sachse was already looking a little green, and after hearing me relate my favourite but strictly after-dinner anecdotes from the gay world of forensic science, I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to come in to the Pathological Institute. This, of course, was the intention behind these gruesome stories. I hardly wanted the mortuary attendant asking me any awkward questions in front of Werner Sachse about why I was back there with the same knife to check the same wounds in the same body.

‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘there should always be two officers present when a body is examined; however, on this occasion, perhaps that won’t be necessary. Nothing ever quite prepares you for the sight of a body that’s been chewed up by a railway locomotive.’

Sachse nodded. ‘Thanks, Gunther. You’re all right.’

Chuckling sadistically – the idea of a squeamish Gestapo man just struck me as funny – I went into the hospital and along to the morgue, where I found the same attendant and, having established that Vranken’s dismembered body was still safely stored there, informed him that the investigation was now a Gestapo matter and that in no circumstances was the body to be released for burial or incineration without first clearing it with me.

As always, mention of the Gestapo worked an almost magical effect, akin to uttering ‘Open sesame’, and the attendant signalled his total compliance with a nervous bow. Of course there was no need to see or examine Vranken’s body again. I already knew what I was going to tell Werner Sachse: that Franz Koci had murdered Geert Vranken. And feeling pleased that I had managed to reopen what was now a proper murder case, I made my way back to the car.

A good humour never lasts long in Berlin. The smell of the war wounded in that hospital was asphyxiating. Dying men lay in dusty wards like so much left luggage, while to walk through a hallway or public corridor was to negotiate an obstacle course of rickety old wheelchairs and dirty plaster casts. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, I came out of the hospital and encountered a little squad of Hitler Youth marching down Luisenstrasse – most likely from a trip to see the National Warrior’s Monument in the Invaliden Park – their throats full of some stupid warlike song and quite oblivious of the German warrior’s true fate that was to be found in the not-so-glorious charnel house nearby. For a moment I stood and watched these boys with a kind of horror. It was all too easy to think of them as carrying the infection of Nazism – the brown-shirted bacilli of death and destruction and the typhus of tomorrow.

Feeling more sombre than before, I tapped on the window of the Horch-built Audi. It’s a useful courtesy to observe with a man sleeping in his own car when he happens to be carrying a loaded automatic.

Sachse sat up straight, lifted the tip of his black felt hat, and opened the passenger door.

‘Any luck?’

‘Yes. If you can call it that. The Dutchman was stabbed by the Czech all right. Franz Koci’s knife fitted those stab wounds like they’d been cut for it by a good tailor.’

‘Well, you’re the expert.’

‘The question is, why? Why would a Czech spy stab and kill a Dutch railway worker?’