A Man Without Breath

‘Given the field marshal’s threat to hang me,’ I said, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Rope again. I was going to have to find Peshkov and return his belt and keep a close eye on his expression as I did so.

‘Yes, you should,’ said Hodt. ‘The man’s a damned nuisance. He’s always in here. Acts like he owns the place. Only no one wants to irritate the field marshal by telling him to clear off.’

‘Maybe this incident will have brought Dyakov to his senses,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the field marshal will have a word with him.’

‘I wish I shared your confidence in the field marshal.’

Back in the car I thought some more about Peshkov and remembered his familiarity with the history of the NKVD – the way he’d known about Yagoda and Yezhov and Beria. Was there more to his knowledge than just an interest in politics and current affairs? I unlocked the glovebox and was stuffing the rope inside when I noticed a brown envelope and remembered I still had Alok Dyakov’s things from the hospital. I placed the envelope on the seat beside me so as not to forget to return them and drove off. I hadn’t gone very far when an animal shot out of the bushes and across my path and instinctively I braked hard. A wolf, perhaps? I wasn’t sure, but now that we’d opened the graves the smell of the bodies had been drawing them in and the sentries had reported seeing several at night. I glanced down at the passenger seat and saw that the contents of the envelope had spilled to the floor of the car, so I risked the wrath of the sentry who was enforcing the blackout by turning on the map light to pick them up. As nurse Tanya had said, there was a watch, a gold ring, a pair of spectacles, some occupation money, a key and a simple piece of thin brass about ten centimetres long.

And suddenly all thoughts of the rope in the glovebox and Peshkov were gone.

I was looking at an empty brass stripper clip from an automatic weapon. It worked like this: you would fit the stripper clip of nine bullets, arranged one on top of the other, into the top of the pistol and then push them straight down into the magazine, leaving the strip standing proud of the gun. When you removed the stripper clip, the bolt would fall on the first round in the chamber and the weapon was ready to fire. Mauser was the only manufacturer that used a loading mechanism like that. The stripper clip for an M98 held five rounds and was shorter; this was the clip for a broom-handle Mauser, and from the amount of polish on the clip it was almost certain that this was one of the stripper clips that had been in the door pocket of Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes, and before that in his father’s immaculate wooden presentation case.

They were useful and you tended not to throw one away. Unless it was prima facie evidence of a murder, in which case you ought to have thrown it away as soon as you’d loaded the gun, and certainly not kept it in your pocket out of habit, no doubt. The one I was holding was as clear a piece of evidence of murder as I’d seen in a long time, and had it not been for my hangover I might have cheered. But a moment’s further reflection persuaded me that there was still considerable reason for caution; a simple stripper clip in the Russian’s pocket would hardly have persuaded a man like Field Marshal von Kluge that his Putzer had murdered Dr Berruguete. I was going to have to find out why he had murdered him, and to do that I was going to have to find out a lot more about Alok Dyakov before I took what I had learned to his master.

It was then that I remembered the bayonet in Von Gersdorff’s car. If Dyakov had murdered Berruguete with Von Gersdorff’s gun, was it possible he might have used the Abwehr officer’s razor-sharp bayonet to do a bit of throat-cutting, too?

I switched off the map light and sat in the darkness of Katyn Wood for a moment before returning at last to the only reasonable explanation – an explanation that took account of the field marshal’s strange loyalty to his own Putzer. Everything was exactly as I had supposed from the very beginning, and the call-girl business that Ribe had been running from the castle switchboard had been nothing more than herring smoke that had got in my eyes.