A Man Without Breath

Von Kluge knew the telephone on his desk was not working properly – I remembered him complaining to an operator about it when I was in his office. He must have realized – too late – that his compromising conversation with Adolf Hitler could have been overheard by the two signallers from the 537th manning the switchboard at the castle. It would have been a relatively simple matter for Alok Dyakov – who was often in and out of the castle to see his girlfriend Marusya – to check the duty roster and see who had been running the telephones during the leader’s visit to Smolensk and – on his master’s orders – to have killed them, unaware that one of them had already thought to record the conversation on tape. Naturally, Von Kluge would have correctly assumed that the leader would have approved of Dyakov’s actions.

If any of this was true I would have to move even more carefully with an investigation into Alok Dyakov than could ever have been supposed.

I switched on the map light again and took another look at the key from the brown envelope. It was the key for a BMW motorcycle.

Everything was starting to make sense now. On the night of their murder, Ribe and Greiss would hardly have been on their guard meeting a figure as familiar to them as Dyakov outside the Hotel Glinka; and the sound of a German motorcycle heard by the SS sergeant who had disturbed their killer was now explained: Dyakov had access to a BMW. It certainly explained why their killer had chosen to escape along the Vitebsk road: he was heading home to Krasny Bor.

And if he had murdered Ribe and Greiss, then why not Dr Batov and his daughter, too? Here, the motive was harder to fathom, although the killer’s penchant for using a knife looked persuasive. Dyakov could easily have learned about their existence from Von Kluge after I had petitioned the field marshal to give the two Russians asylum in Berlin – a petition he had resisted. Was it possible the field marshal was sufficiently against the idea of their being granted the right to go and live in Berlin that he had ordered his Putzer to kill them, too?

But if he had just shot and killed Dr Berruguete, why had Dyakov gone to Katyn Wood and got drunk? To celebrate the death of a war criminal, perhaps? Or was the reason more prosaic – that by drawing attention to himself in Katyn Wood, he was simply trying to establish an alibi for what had happened at Krasny Bor? After all, who would have suspected a drunken man who was threatening to shoot himself of the cold and calculated murder of the Spanish doctor? And had I helped with that alibi by rendering him insensible?

But I was getting ahead of myself. First there was some elementary detective work to complete – work I ought to have done weeks ago.

I drove back to Krasny Bor and parked next to Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes. As usual his car door was not locked, and sitting in the passenger seat I searched the glovebox for the bayonet, intending to give it to Professor Buhtz in the hope that he might be able to find traces of human blood on the blade. But it wasn’t there. I checked the door pocket, too, and under the seat, but it wasn’t there either.

‘Looking for something?’

Von Gersdorff was standing immediately by the car, with a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at me. I sat up, sharply.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Gunther, it’s you. What the hell do you think you’re doing in my car at nearly one in the morning?’

‘Looking for your bayonet.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Because I think that it was used to murder those two signallers. Just like your Mauser was used to murder Dr Berruguete. By the way I found your shoulder-stock.’

‘Did you? Good. Look, I can easily see why I might make a better suspect than Ines Kramsta. Her legs are better than mine.’

‘I didn’t say you were a suspect, colonel,’ I said. ‘After all, I hardly think you’d have been so careless as to use your own Mauser. No, I think someone else used a gun and a bayonet that he knew were in this car – quite possibly with the intention of compromising you at some later stage; or perhaps they were just convenient for him, I don’t know.’

Von Gersdorff holstered his Walther and went around to the back of the car, where he unlocked the trunk. ‘The bayonet is in here,’ he said, fetching it out. ‘And when you say someone, Gunther, I assume you don’t mean Dr Kramsta.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Funny thing about this bayonet,’ said Von Gersdorff, handing it to me. ‘When I fetched it from the glovebox the other day I thought for a minute it wasn’t mine.’

‘Why?’ I pulled the bayonet out of the scabbard and the blade gleamed in the moonlight.

‘Oh, it was mine. I just thought it wasn’t. That’s why I put it away in the trunk.’

‘Yes, but why did you think it wasn’t yours?’

‘It’s the same bayonet all right, just a different scabbard. Mine was loose. This one is a close fit.’ He shrugged. ‘Bit of a mystery, really. I mean, they don’t repair themselves, do they?’

‘No, they don’t,’ I agreed. ‘And I think you just answered my question.’