A Man Without Breath

‘By the way, how’s that Russian bastard you clouted with the truncheon last night? Dyakov? Good job by the way, sir. If anyone needed a thump on the head it’s the field marshal’s pet Ivan.’

‘Alive, thank God. And on his way back to Krasny Bor and his master.’

‘Yes, I heard Clever Hans tore a strip off your face this morning. Makes you wonder what Dyakov has got on the field marshal to make him behave like that.’

‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’

I led Voss a short distance away to ask if the late Dr Berruguete’s sudden absence had caused any alarm among our distinguished guests.

‘Not at all,’ said Voss. ‘On the contrary, several of them seemed quite relieved to hear he’d had to return to Spain. That’s what Sloventzik has told them, anyway. A family tragedy that required his immediate return during the night.’

‘After what I learned about him today, I’m hardly surprised they’re glad to see the back of that man. Nor am I surprised that someone put a bullet in him. Two actually. According to the autopsy I just attended, he was shot once in the head and once in the chest.’

‘Could one of them have done it?’ asked Voss, glancing over at the commission.

I pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so, do you? Look at them. There’s none of them that looks like he could hit a vein with a needle, let alone fire a broom-handle Mauser and actually hit anything.’

‘But if not one of them, who?’

‘I don’t know. Find that shoulder-stock yet?’

‘No. To be honest I can’t spare the men to look for it. We have our hands full keeping people away from this place and Katyn Wood.’

‘That’s all right. I’m just on my way back to Krasny Bor now. I’ll take a look for the stock myself.’

*

Back in the woods at Krasny Bor all of the wild flowers were in bloom and it was hard to believe there was a war on. Von Kluge’s huge staff car was parked in front of his villa but almost everywhere else there was no clue that the place was anything other than the health resort it had once been. Behind the neat curtains of the wooden huts where Russians had previously stayed to take the sulphurous spring waters to move their bowels, nothing moved. There were just the trees whispering to each other in the breeze and some birds punctuating the silence with their bright exclamations that spring had truly arrived at last.

I drove through the gates and, leaving my car, walked to the place where the field police had found the murder weapon, which was marked with a little field police flag. I began to search the long grass and the bushes. I did this in ever-increasing circles, walking around the spot like the hands on a clock until, after about an hour, I found the paddle-shaped polished-oak Mauser stock resting against a tree. It was obvious at once that this was the spot from which the gunman had shot Berruguete, for tied to the branch of the tree at about head height was a length of rope through which anyone seeking to steady his aim might have pushed the Mauser’s 10-centimetre barrel and then secured it tightly with a couple of quick turns. The place where Dr Berruguete’s body had been found was almost a hundred metres away and unimpeded by any trees or bushes. Less obvious however was how the gunman could have used the same length of rope to shoot at me in the opposite direction; he would need to have turned more than a hundred and fifty degrees to his right, which would have left the barrel of the Mauser knocking against another branch of the same tree. In other words, to have shot at me from this same spot using the tie was impossible. This left me puzzled, and wondering if there might have been a second gunman.

I pocketed the length of rope and spent the next thirty minutes carefully searching the grass until I’d found two brass bullet casings. I didn’t bother to look for a third as it was immediately apparent that these could not have been fired from the same gun: one was a 9-millimetre Mauser casing, the other was something bigger – most likely a rifle bullet.

In Krasny Bor the spring silence endured, but inside my head there was now a riot of noise. Finally one clear voice asserted itself against the clamour. Had there been one gunman or two? Or perhaps one gunman with two different weapons – a pistol and a rifle? Certainly it made sense to shoot at me with a rifle – I had been the more distant target. But why not shoot Berruguete with the rifle, too – unless the reason had been to use the borrowed Mauser to point the finger of blame elsewhere?

I walked over to the upturned stump under which I had sought to bury myself to escape my putative assassin and glanced around, looking for the standing tree that the third bullet had hit instead of me, and when I found it I spent the next few minutes gouging it out with my lock-knife.

Lying on the palm of my hand were two misshapen pieces of metal, one of which – the one gouged from the tree – was larger than the other taken from my pocket, and before that from Berruguete’s chest.

*