SS-GB

Chapter Five

When Douglas got back to his office that afternoon, he had barely enough time to clean himself up, and put on dry shoes, before there was a message from the first floor. General Kellerman wanted a word with Douglas, if that was convenient. It was convenient. Douglas hurried upstairs.

‘Ah, Superintendent Archer, so good of you to come,’ said Kellerman as if Archer was some sort of visiting dignitary. ‘I seem to have such a busy day today.’ Kellerman’s senior staff officer passed his chief a teleprinter sheet. Kellerman looked at it briefly and said, ‘This chap from Berlin, Standartenführer Huth…you remember?’

‘I remember everything you said, sir.’

‘Splendid. Well, the Standartenführer has been given a priority seat on the afternoon Berlin-Croydon flight. He’ll be arriving about five I should think. I wonder if you would go there and meet him?’

‘Yes, sir, but I wonder…’ Douglas couldn’t think of a good way to suggest that an SS-Standartenführer from Himmler’s Central Security Office would consider a welcome from one English Detective Superintendent less than his rank and position merited.

‘The Standartenführer has requested that you meet him,’ said Kellerman.

‘Me personally?’ said Douglas.

‘His task is of an investigative nature,’ said Kellerman. ‘I thought it appropriate that I assign to him my best detective.’ He smiled. In fact Huth had asked for Archer by name. Kellerman had energetically opposed the order that put Douglas Archer under the command of the new man, but the intervention of Himmler himself had ended the matter.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman reached into the pocket of his tweed waistcoat and looked at his gold pocket watch. ‘I’ll start right away,’ said Douglas, recognizing his cue.

‘Would you?’ said Kellerman. ‘Well, see my personal assistant so that you know all the arrangements we’ve made to receive the Standartenführer.’

Lufthansa had three Berlin–London flights daily, and these were additional to the less comfortable and less prestigious military flights. Standartenführer Dr Oskar Huth had been given one of the fifteen seats on the flight which left Berlin at lunch time.

Douglas waited in the unheated terminal building and watched a Luftwaffe band preparing for the arrival of the daily flight from New York. The Germans had the only land-planes capable of such a long-range, non-stop service and the Propaganda Ministry was making full use of it.

The rain had continued well into the afternoon but now on the horizon there was a break in the low clouds. The Berlin plane circled, while the pilot decided whether to land. After the third circuit the big three-engined Junkers roared low over the airport building, and then came round for a perfect landing on the wet tarmac. Its hand-polished metal flashed as it taxied back to the terminal building.

Douglas half expected that any man who had his doctorate included with his rank on teleprinter messages might have retained a trace of the bedside manner. But Huth was a doctor of law, and a hard-nosed SS officer if Douglas had ever seen one. And by that time Douglas had seen many.

Unlike Kellerman, the new man was wearing his uniform, and gave no sign of preferring plain clothes. It was not the black SS uniform. That nowadays was worn only by the Allgemeine SS – mostly middle-aged country yokels who donned uniform just for village booze-ups at weekends. Dr Huth’s uniform was silver-grey, with high boots and riding breeches. On his cuff there was the RFSS cuffband worn only by Himmler’s personal staff.

Douglas looked him up and down. There was something of the dressmaker’s dummy about this tall, thin man, in spite of the state of his uniform which was carefully pressed and cleaned but unmistakably old. He was about thirty-five years old, a powerful, muscular figure with an energy in his stride and demeanour that belied the hooded eyes that made him seem half-asleep. Under his arm he carried a short silver-topped stick, and in his hand a large briefcase. He didn’t go to the door marked for customs and immigration, he rapped the countertop with his stick, until a uniformed Lufthansa official opened the gate for him to go into the reception hall.

‘Archer?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The, officer shook his hand perfunctorily, as if his briefing had said that all Englishmen expect it.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Huth.

‘Your staff…your baggage…’

‘Shotguns, golf clubs and fishing tackle, you mean? I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense,’ said Huth. ‘Have you got a car here?’

‘The Rolls,’ said Douglas, pointing to where, seen through the doors of the terminal, there stood the highly polished car with uniformed SS driver and Kellerman’s official pennants.

‘Kellerman let you have the Rolls-Royce, did he?’ said Huth as they got into it. ‘What is he using this afternoon, the coronation coach?’ Huth’s English accent was perfect, with the sort of polish that comes only from multilingual parents, or a multilingual mistress. And yet, for all Huth’s smooth polish, there was no mistaking the hard ambition that shone beneath it.

Huth’s father was a professor of modern languages. The family had lived in Schleswig-Holstein until, after the first war, the new frontier had made their home a part of Denmark. Then they had moved to Berlin, where Oskar Huth had studied law before going on to complete his studies at Oxford, where Douglas Archer had gone a few years later. In spite of the disparity in their ages, Douglas Archer and Huth were able to find memories and acquaintances in common. And Douglas’s mother had, as a young woman, been an English governess in Berlin; Douglas knew it from her stories of that time.

‘What are you working on at present?’ Huth asked very casually as he looked out of the window. The car slowed for the traffic at Norwood. A long line of people waited in the rain for the bread ration to arrive. Douglas half expected Huth to comment on them but he leaned forward with balled fist, and used his signet ring to rap against the glass of the driver’s compartment. ‘Use the siren, you fool,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’ve got all day!’

‘Double death in Kentish Town Tuesday. They fell on the electrified rail of the Underground railway. I treated it as murder at first, but then decided it was a suicide pact; the man was an escapee from the camp for British POWs at Brighton.’ Douglas scratched his cheek. ‘A shooting in a nightclub in Leicester Square on Saturday night. A machine-pistol was used, about one hundred and fifty rounds; no shortage of bullets it seems. All the signs of a gang killing. The proprietor says the takings were about six thousand pounds – if you allow for what he’s probably falsifying on his tax returns, it’s probably double that – in used notes: O-Marks mostly. Manager and cashier both dead, three customers injured and one still in hospital.’

‘What about the Peter Thomas murder?’ said Huth, still looking out of the window at the drab, rainswept streets.

‘That was only this morning,’ said Douglas, surprised that Huth was so up to date on what was happening.

Huth nodded.

‘So far we’ve found no one who heard the pistol shot but the doctor thinks death occurred about three A.M. The dead man carried papers saying he was Peter Thomas but the papers are probably forgeries. Criminal records have nothing listed under that name. Fingerprints are working on it but it will take a long time before they finish. He had a railway ticket from Bringle Sands. That’s a small coastal holiday resort in Devon.’

Douglas looked at Huth who was still staring out of the window. ‘I know exactly where Bringle Sands is located,’ said Huth. Douglas was surprised. He’d not known where it was himself until consulting an atlas.

‘Go on,’ said Huth without looking at him.

‘There were military stores in the apartment…not much. Typical black-market items: cigarettes, drink, petrol coupons. We have a written statement from the neighbour who insists that a Luftwaffe Feldwebel was there frequently. He gave a description so my Sergeant went to see the Feldgendarmerie this afternoon. I will wait now to see if they want to take over the investigation, or whether I continue.’

‘What about the murder?’

‘It has all the signs of a killer who let himself in, waited for the victim to arrive home…’

‘But you don’t think so?’

Douglas shrugged. There was no way to tell this SS officer of the problems such investigations brought. The penalties for even slight breaches of the regulations were now so severe that ordinarily law-abiding men and women would give false evidence. Douglas Archer understood this, and, in common with all the rest of the police in Britain, he turned a blind eye to many less serious offences. ‘Probably a black-market murder,’ said Douglas, although his instinct told him that there was more to it.

Huth turned and smiled. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand the way you work, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘Probably a black-market killing, you say. And Saturday’s was a gang killing. Tuesday’s was a suicide pact. Is this the way you work at Scotland Yard? You have these convenient pigeon-holes that are a cunning way of classifying cases that would otherwise be put together in a gigantic file marked “unsolvable”. Is that it?’

‘I didn’t use that word, Standartenführer, you did. In my opinion, such cases are perfectly straightforward, except that Wehrmacht personnel are involved. In such cases my hands are tied.’

‘Very plausible,’ said Huth.

Douglas waited, and when he added nothing more said, ‘Would you please elaborate on that, sir?’

‘You don’t for one moment think it’s a “black-market killing”,’ said Huth contemptuously. ‘Because a man like you knows every damned crook in London. If you thought this was anything to do with the black-market you’d have searched out every important black-marketeer in London and told them to hand over the culprit within a couple of hours, or find themselves doing ten years’ preventive detention. Can you tell me why you didn’t?’

‘No,’ said Douglas.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I can’t tell you, because I don’t know why I didn’t do that. All the evidence is as I told you…but there’s more to it, I think.’

Huth stared at Douglas and tipped his peaked cap back on his head with the tip of his thumb. He was a handsome man but his face was colourless, his grey drill uniform, and its black and silver SS collar patches, little different from the pale complexion resulting from a life spent in ill-lit offices. Douglas found no way to discover what was going on inside this man’s head, and yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that Huth could see right through him. But Douglas did not avert his eyes. After what seemed an interminable time, Huth said, ‘So what are you doing about it?’

‘If the Feldgendarmerie identify the Feldwebel mentioned in the neighbour’s written statement, it will be up to the Feldgericht der Luftwaffe to decide…’

Huth waved his hand disdainfully. ‘A teleprinter message from Berlin instructed the Luftwaffe to pass all papers back to you.’

Douglas found this truly astonishing. The Wehrmacht jealously guarded the right to handle their own investigations. The SD – the intelligence service of the SS – had achieved the seemingly impossible when it extended its investigative powers to include not only the SS, but also the SA and the Nazi Party. But even they never attempted to bring charges against a member of the armed forces. There was only one level at which the Luftwaffe could be ordered to pass an investigation over to the SIPO – and that was the supreme controller of civil power and supreme commander of the armed forces, Adolf Hitler.

Douglas’s imagination raced ahead, to wonder if the crime might have been committed by some high-ranking Nazi, or a relative, associate or mistress of such a person. ‘Is there a theory about who the killer might be?’

‘You find the killer, that’s all,’ said Huth.

‘But why this particular crime?’ persisted Douglas.

‘Because it’s there,’ said Huth wearily. ‘That should be enough for an Englishman surely.’

Douglas’s mind was filled with fears and objections. He didn’t want any part of this very important investigation, with a sinister SS officer looking over his shoulder all the time. But this was obviously not the moment to voice his objections. A little watery sunlight dribbled through the clouds and lit the shiny streets. The driver used the distinctive police siren and sped past the high walls of the Oval cricket ground.

Douglas said, ‘I will collect you at seven-thirty for the reception in your honour at the Savoy Hotel. But, on the way to your accommodation, in Brook Street, Mayfair, General Kellerman thought you might like to see Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.’

‘General Kellerman is a peasant,’ said Huth affably in German.

‘And does that mean you would like to drive past Buckingham Palace or not?’

‘It means, my dear Superintendent, that I have not the slightest intention of spending the evening watching a roomful of army officers, and their overdressed women, guzzling champagne, and, between mouthfuls of smoked salmon, telling me the best place to buy Staffordshire china.’ He continued to speak German, using the word ‘fressen’, normally used to describe the eating habits of livestock.

‘Take me to my office,’ said Huth. ‘And get the best damned pathologist available to look at Peter Thomas tonight. I want to be there for the postmortem.’ He saw the bewilderment on Douglas’s face. ‘You’ll soon get used to the way I work.’

A man can get used to yellow fever, thought Douglas, but many of them die in the attempt. ‘So I’ll cancel the reception?’

‘And deprive Kellerman and his friends of their party? What sort of fellow are you, Superintendent, a kill-joy?’

He gave a soft laugh. Then he rapped the glass partition again and shouted ‘Scotland Yard!’ to the driver.

Chapter Six

And so, at the very time when General Kellerman, HSSPf (Senior SS and Police Leader) Great Britain, was playing host to some of the senior officials in London, their guest of honour was in a mortuary behind Baker Street wearing a white butcher’s apron and watching Peter Thomas’s corpse being slashed open by Sir John Shields, the pathologist.

It was a grim little building, set back from Paddington Street by enough space for the hearses and ambulances to unload behind the oak doors that make the entrance so innocuous to passers-by. The interior of the mortuary building had received so many coats of dark green and brown paint that the brickwork was now smooth and shiny, like its stone stairs and polished wooden floor. The low-power light bulbs provided only small puddles of dull yellow light, except where a green-shaded brass lamp had been pulled down close to Peter Thomas’s pale dead belly.

There were nine people present: Huth, Sir John Shields and his assistant, Douglas Archer, a man from the coroner’s office, a clerk, two mortuary workers in rubber aprons and waterproof boots, and a fussy little German police Major who had also flown in from Hamburg that day. He took notes, and continually asked for translations of bits of Shields’s impassive commentary. There were too many people round the slab, and Douglas readily conceded his place in the front row. He had no taste for these gory excursions, and even with his eyes averted, the sounds of the knife and hacksaw and the gurgling liquids made him want to retch. ‘Haemorrhage, haemorrhage, haemorrhage!’ said Shields, indicating with the knife. They peered closely at the dead man’s insides. ‘I don’t like the look of his liver,’ said Shields, grabbing it, cutting it free and holding it nearer to the light. ‘What do you think, doctor?’ His voice echoed in the dark mortuary.

Shields’s assistant prodded the liver, and looked at it through a magnifying glass for a long time. Shields bent down to sniff at the corpse.

‘Explain to me,’ said Huth impatiently.

‘Diseased,’ said the doctor. ‘Most interesting. I’ve never seen one quite like it. I wonder how the fellow kept going.’

The little German police Major was scribbling in his notebook. Then he, too, wanted to look at the liver through a magnifying glass. ‘How near to death was he due to failure of the liver?’ he asked in German and waited while his query was translated by Huth.

‘I’d not like to answer that,’ said Sir John. ‘A man can go the devil of a time with a bad liver – you should see the chaps at my club!’ He laughed.

‘This is not a joke,’ said Huth. ‘Was the man sick?’

‘He certainly was,’ said Sir John.

‘To death?’

‘I wouldn’t have given him more than a couple of months, would you, doctor?’

Sir John’s assistant demonstrated agreement by means of a noisy intake of breath, and a slight shake of the head.

Huth put his arm round the shoulder of the Major and steered him away, out of earshot, where they stood and whispered together. Sir John clearly thought this a breach of good manners and he did nothing to hide his annoyance.

When Huth returned to the slab he told Sir John that he would want all the internal organs packed and ready to be flown to Berlin on the next day’s flight from Croydon.

‘Then there is nothing to keep me here,’ said Sir John Shields.

‘Don’t be offended, Sir John,’ said Huth with a smooth charm that Douglas had not seen him use before. ‘We’ve no one in Berlin with your knowledge and experience. I’m hoping very much that you and your colleague will continue with the postmortem so that we can have a report by tomorrow morning.’

Sir John took a deep breath, and came to his full height, as Douglas had seen him do so often in the law courts just before crushing some overconfident counsel. ‘There can be no question of my attempting any further examination of this body without the facilities of a hospital laboratory, fully equipped and fully staffed.’

Huth nodded but said nothing.

Sir John continued. ‘Even then, it would be a long job. All the London hospitals are overworked to a point of near exhaustion, and that for reasons that I will not embarrass you, or your army colleague, by elaborating.’

Huth nodded gravely. ‘Of course not. And that’s why I have arranged for the SS Hospital, at Hyde Park Corner, to have their laboratory entirely at your disposal. I have two cars and an ambulance here, a telephone line has been kept clear for you and you have only to ask for any extra personnel and materials.’

Sir John looked at Huth for a long time before answering. ‘I would like to believe, Brigadier, that this extraordinary display of German military resource is a compliment to me. However, I suspect it is more accurately a measure of your concern with this particular death. I’d therefore appreciate it if you’d be a little more forthcoming about its circumstances – and what you know already.’

‘Standartenführer,’ said Huth, ‘Standartenführer, not Brigadier. All I can tell you, Sir John, is that I dislike mysteries even more than you do, and that especially applies to mysterious death.’

‘Epidemic?’ said Sir John. ‘Contagious disease? Virus? Plague? Pestilence?’ His voice rose a fraction. ‘You mean you’ve seen something like this before?’

‘Some of my staff have seen something like this before,’ admitted Huth. ‘As for plague and pestilence, we’re dealing with something that could prove so deadly that not even the Black Death would compare with the consequences – at least, that’s what my experts tell me.’

Chapter Seven

It was after midnight before Huth and Douglas Archer got back to Scotland Yard. For the first time Huth was persuaded to go to the office that had been prepared for him on the mezzanine floor. It was a magnificent room, with a view across the Thames to County Hall. Endless trouble had been taken to get the room exactly right, and General Kellerman had inspected it twice that afternoon, showing great concern that the rosewood desk was polished, the cut-glass light-fitting washed and the carpet cleaned and brushed. There was a new Telefunken TV set ready for the BBC’s resumed service that was promised for Christmas. Under it, a panelled cabinet contained Waterford cut glass and a selection of drinks. ‘He’s sure to like it, isn’t he?’ Kellerman had asked in that hoarse whisper that Harry Woods could imitate to perfection.

‘Anyone would, sir,’ said Kellerman’s senior staff officer, whom Kellerman liked to call his ‘chief of staff’.

‘A very nice place,’ said Huth sarcastically. ‘A very nice place to hide me away so I don’t interfere with the workings of the department. Even my phone goes through Kellerman’s switchboard, I notice.’

‘Is it the location you don’t like?’ said Douglas.

‘Just get rid of all this furniture and junk,’ said Huth. ‘It looks more like a Victorian brothel than an office. Does Kellerman think I’m going to sit here getting drunk until the TV begins?’

‘There is a cable TV connection,’ said Douglas. ‘It can be used to carry police information; photos of wanted persons and so on.’

‘I’ll get you a job in the bloody Propaganda Ministry,’ said Huth. ‘How would you like that?’

‘Perhaps I could have time to think about it,’ said Douglas, pretending to take it seriously.

‘Just get this furniture out of here. I want metal filing-cases, with good locks on them, and a metal desk with locks on the drawers, and a proper desk light, not that damned contraption. You’ll be sitting in the adjoining office, so you might as well get whatever you want in there too. Get phones: four direct lines and have your extensions changed to up here. In the corridor I want a table and chair so that my sentry won’t have to stand all the while – and where the hell is the sentry?’

‘Sentry, sir?’

‘Don’t stand there repeating everything I say,’ said Huth. ‘The Peter Thomas murder investigation is part of an operation we have code-named “Apocalypse”. No information of any sort – in fact nothing at all – goes outside this room without my written permission, or that of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. Is that clear?’

‘Unforgettably so,’ said Douglas, desperately trying to fathom what could be behind it.

Huth smiled. ‘In case the unforgettable quality lessens, there will be an armed SS sentry outside in the corridor for twenty-four hours of every day.’ Huth looked at his wristwatch. ‘He should be on duty now, damn him. Get on the phone to the SS guard commander at Cannon Row. Tell him to send the sentry and half-a-dozen men to clear this furniture out.’