pension, but with so many younger officers now serving in police battalions on the eastern front he had come back into the force to make a nice cosy corner for himself at the Alex. The little Party pin he wore in the lapel of his cheap suit would only have made it easier for him to do as little real policing as possible.
We walked south down Dircksen Strasse to Jannowitz Bridge and then along the S-Bahn line with the river under our feet. There was a moon and most of the time we didn’t need the flashlights we’d brought, but we felt safer with them when the line veered back over the gasworks on Holtmarkt Strasse and the old Julius Pintsch lighting factory; there wasn’t much of a fence and it would have been easy to have stepped off the line and fallen badly.
Over the gasworks, we came across a group of uniformed policemen and railway workers. Further down the track I could just make out the shape of a train in Schlesischer Station.
‘I’m Commissar Gunther, from the Alex,’ I said. There seemed no point in showing him my beer-token. ‘This is Inspector Lehnhoff and Sergeant Wurth. Who called it in?’
‘Me, sir.’ One of the cops moved toward me and saluted. ‘Sergeant Stumm.’
‘No relation, I hope,’ said Lehnhoff.
There had been a Johannes Stumm who had been forced to leave the political police by Fat Hermann because he wasn’t a Nazi.
‘No, sir.’ Sergeant Stumm smiled patiently.
‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Why did you think that this might be a murder and not a suicide or an accident?’
‘Well, it’s true, stepping in front of a train is a most popular way to kill yourself these days,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘Especially if you’re a woman. Me, I’d use a firearm if I wanted to kill myself. But women aren’t as comfortable with guns as men are. Now with this victim, all of the pockets have been turned inside out, sir. It’s not something you’d do if you were planning to kill yourself. And it’s not something that a train would normally take the trouble to do, either. So that lets out it being an accident, see?’
‘Maybe someone else found him before you did,’ I suggested. ‘And just robbed him.’
‘A copper maybe,’ offered Wurth.
Wisely Sergeant Stumm ignored the suggestion.
‘Unlikely, sir. I’m pretty sure I was the first on the scene. The train driver saw someone on the track as he started to gain speed out of Jannowitz. He hit the brakes but by the time the train stopped it was too late.’
‘All right. Let’s have a look at him.’
‘Not a pretty sight, sir. Even in the dark.’
‘Believe me, I’ve seen worse.’
‘I’ll take your word for that, sir.’
The uniformed sergeant led the way along the track and paused for a moment to switch on his flashlight and illuminate a severed hand that lay on the ground. I looked at it for a minute or so before we walked on to where another police officer was waiting patiently beside a collection of ragged clothes and mangled human remains that had once been a human being. For a moment I might have been looking at myself.
‘Hold the flash on him while we take a look.’
The body looked as if it had been chewed up and spat out by a prehistoric monster. The corrugated legs were barely attached to an impossibly flat pelvis. The man was wearing a workman’s blue overalls with mitten-sized pockets that were indeed inside out as the sergeant had described; so were the pockets in the oily rag that was his twisted flannel jacket. Where the head had been there was now a glistening, jagged harpoon of bloody bone and sinew. There was a strong smell of shit from bowels that had been crushed and emptied under the enormous pressure of a locomotive’s wheels.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ve seen that could look worse than this poor Fritz,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘Me neither,’ observed Wurth, and turned away in disgust.
‘I dare say we’ll all see some interesting sights before this war is over,’ I said. ‘Has anyone looked for the head?’
‘I’ve got a couple of lads searching the area for it now,’ said the sergeant. ‘One on the track and the other down below in case it fell into the gasworks or the factory yard.’
‘I think you’re probably correct,’ I said. ‘It looks like a murder all right. Quite apart from the pockets, which have been turned out, there’s that hand we saw.’
‘The hand?’ This was Lehnhoff talking. ‘What about it?’
I led them back along the track to take another look at the severed hand, which I picked up and turned in my hands like it was an historic artefact, or perhaps a souvenir once owned by the prophet Daniel.
‘These cuts on the fingers look defensive to me,’ I said. ‘As if he might have caught the knife of someone trying to stab him.’
‘I don’t know how you can tell that after a train just ran over him,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Because these cuts are much too thin to have been inflicted by the train. And just look where they are. Along the flesh of the inside of the fingers and on the hand between the thumb and the forefinger. That’s a textbook defensive injury if I ever saw one, Gottfried.’
‘All right,’ Lehnhoff said, almost grudgingly. ‘I suppose you are the expert. On murder.’
‘Perhaps. Only of late I’ve had a lot of competition. There are plenty of cops out east, young cops, who know a lot more about murder than I do.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Take my word for it. There’s a whole new generation of police experts out there.’ I let this remark settle for a moment before adding, very carefully, for appearance’s sake, ‘I find that very reassuring, sometimes. That there are so many good men to take my place. Eh, Sergeant Stumm?’
‘Yes sir.’ But I could hear the doubt in the uniformed sergeant’s voice.
‘Walk with us,’ I said, warming to him. In a country where ill-temper and petulance were the order of the day — Hitler and Goebbels were forever ranting angrily about something — the sergeant’s imperturbability was heartening. ‘Come back to the bridge. Another pair of eyes might be useful.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What are we looking for now?’ There was a weary sigh in Lehnhoff’s voice, as if he could hardly see the point of investigating this case any further.
‘An elephant.’
‘What?’
‘Something. Evidence. You’ll certainly know it when you see it,’ I said.
Back up the track we found some blood spots on a railway sleeper and then some more on the edge of the platform outside the echoing glasshouse that was the station at Jannowitz Bridge.
Below, someone aboard a river barge that was quietly chugging through one of the many red-brick arches in the bridge shouted at us to extinguish our lights. This was Lehnhoff’s cue to start throwing his weight around. It was almost as if he’d been waiting to get tough with someone, and it didn’t matter who.
‘We’re the police,’ he yelled down at the barge. Lehnhoff was yet another angry German. ‘And we’re investigating a murder up here. So mind your own business or I’ll come aboard and search you just because I can.’
‘It’s everyone’s business if the Tommy bombers see your lights,’ said the voice, not unreasonably.
Wurth’s nose wrinkled with disbelief. ‘I shouldn’t think that’s very likely at all. Do you, sir? It’s been a while since the RAF came this far east.’
‘They probably can’t get the petrol either,’ I said.
I pointed my flashlight on the ground and followed a trail of blood along the platform to a place where it seemed to start.
‘From the amount of blood on the ground he was probably stabbed here. Then he staggered along the platform a ways before falling onto the track. Picked himself up. Walked a bit more and then got hit by the train to Friedrichshagen.’
‘It was the last one,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘The one o’clock.’
‘Lucky he didn’t miss it,’ said Lehnhoff.
Ignoring him, I glanced at my watch. It was three a.m. ‘Well, that gives us an approximate time of death.’
