chin-beard. He was wearing gum-boots, a heavy apron, rubber gloves and a stiff collar and a tie.
I stepped quietly through the doors, and contemplated the corpse with professional curiosity. Moving closer I tried to see what had caused the man’s death. It was clear that the body had been lying in water, since the skin was sodden and peeling away on the hands and feet, like gloves and socks. Otherwise it was in largely reasonable condition, with the exception of the head. This was black in colour and completely featureless, like a muddy football, and the top part of the cranium had been sawn away and the brain removed. Like a wet Gordian knot, it now lay in a kidney-shaped dish awaiting dissection.
Confronted with violent death in all its ghastly hues, contorted attitudes and porcine fleshiness, I had no more reaction than if I had been looking in the window of my local ‘German’ butcher’s shop, except that this one had more meat on display. Sometimes I was surprised at the totality of my own indifference to the sight of the stabbed, the drowned, the crushed, the shot, the burnt and the bludgeoned, although I knew well how that insensitivity had come about. Seeing so much death on the Turkish front and in my service with Kripo, I had almost ceased to regard a corpse as being in any way human. This acquaintance with death had persisted since my becoming a private investigator, when the trail of a missing person so often led to the morgue at St Gertrauden, Berlin’s largest hospital, or to a salvage-man’s hut near a levee on the Landwehr Canal.
I stood there for several minutes, staring at the gruesome scene in front of me, and puzzled as to what had produced the condition of the head and the differing one of the body, before eventually Dr Illmann glanced round and saw me.
‘Good God,’ he growled. ‘Bernhard Gunther. Are you still alive?’ I approached the table, and blew a breath of disgust.
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘The last time I came across body odour this bad, a horse was sitting on my face.’
‘He’s quite a picture, isn’t he?’
‘You’re telling me. What was he doing, frenching a polar bear? Or maybe Hitler kissed him.’
‘Unusual, isn’t it? Almost as if the head were burned ’
‘Acid?’
‘Yes.’ Illmann sounded pleased, like I was a clever pupil. ‘Very good. It’s difficult to say what kind, but most probably hydrochloric or sulphuric.’
‘Like someone didn’t want you to know who he was.’
‘Precisely so. Mind you, it doesn’t disguise the cause of death. He had a broken billiard cue forced up one of his nostrils. It pierced the brain, killing him instantly. Not a very common way of killing a man; indeed, in my experience it is unique. However, one learns not to be surprised at the various ways in which murderers choose to kill their victims. But I’m sure you’re not surprised. You always did have a good imagination for a bull, Bernie. To say nothing of your nerve. You know, you’ve got a hell of a nerve just walking in here like this. It’s only my sentimental nature that stops me from having you thrown out on your ear.’
‘I need to talk to you about the Pfarr case. You did the PM, didn’t you?’
‘You’re well informed,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact the family reclaimed the bodies this morning.’
‘And your report?’
‘Look, I can’t talk here. I’ll be through with our friend on the slab in a while. Give me an hour.’
‘Where?’
‘How about the Kunstler Eck, on Alt Kolln. It’s quiet there and we won’t be disturbed.’
‘The Kunstler Eck,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll find it.’ I turned back towards the glass doors.
‘Oh, and Bernie. Make sure you bring a little something for my expenses?’
The independent township of Alt Kolln, long since absorbed by the capital, is a small island on the River Spree. Largely given up to museums, it has thus earned itself the sobriquet ‘Museum Island’. But I have to confess that I have never seen the inside of one of them. I’m not much interested in The Past and, if you ask me, it is this country’s obsession with its history that has partly put us where we are now: in the shit. You can’t go into a bar without some arsehole going on about our pre-1918 borders, or harking back to Bismarck and when we kicked the stuffing out of the French. These are old sores, and to my mind it doesn’t do any good to keep picking at them.
From the outside, there was nothing about the place that would have attracted the passer-by to drop in for a casual drink: not the door’s scruffy paintwork, nor the dried-up flowers in the windowbox; and certainly not the poorly handwritten sign in the dirty window which read: ‘Tonight’s speech can be heard here.’ I cursed, for this meant that Joey the Cripp was addressing a Party rally that evening, and as a result there would be the usual traffic chaos. I went down the steps and opened the door.
There was even less about the inside of the Kunstler Eck that would have persuaded the casual drinker to stay awhile. The walls were covered with gloomy wood carvings – tiny models of cannons, death’s heads, coffins and skeletons. Against the far wall was a large pump-organ painted to look like a graveyard, with crypts and graves yielding up their dead, at which a hunchback was playing a piece by Haydn. This was as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, since a group of storm-troopers were singing ‘My Prussia Stands So Proud and Great’ with sufficient gusto as to almost completely drown the hunchback’s playing. I’ve seen some odd things in Berlin in my time, but this was like something from a Conrad Veidt film, and not a very good one at that. I expected the one- armed police-captain to come in at any moment.
Instead I found Illmann sitting alone in a corner, nursing a bottle of Engelhardt. I ordered two more of the same and sat down as the storm-troopers finished their song and the hunchback commenced a massacre of one of my favourite Schubert sonatas.
‘This is a hell of a place to choose,’ I said grimly.
‘I’m afraid that I find it curiously quaint.’
‘Just the place to meet your friendly neighbourhood body-snatcher. Don’t you see enough of death during the day that you have to come to drink in a charnel-house like this?’
He shrugged unabashedly. ‘It is only with death around me that I am constantly reminded that I am alive.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for necrophilia.’ Illmann smiled, as if agreeing with me.
‘So you want to know about the poor HauptSturmFuhrer and his little wife, eh?’ I nodded. ‘This is an interesting case, and, I don’t mind telling you, the interesting ones are becoming increasingly rare. With all the people who wind up dead in this city you would think I was busy. But of course, there is usually little or no mystery about how most of them got that way. Half the time I find myself presenting the forensic evidence of a homicide to the very people who committed it. It’s an upside down world that we live in.’ He opened his briefcase and took out a blue ring-file. ‘I brought the photographs. I thought you would want to see the happy couple. I’m afraid they’re a pair of real stokers. I was only able to make the identification from their wedding rings, his and hers.’
I flicked through the file. The camera angles changed but the subject remained the same: two gun-metal grey corpses, bald like Egyptian pharaohs, lay on the exposed and blackened springs of what had once been a bed, like sausages left too long under the grill.
‘Nice album. What were they doing, having a punch-up?’ I said, noticing the way in which each corpse had its fists raised like a bare-knuckle fighter.
‘A common enough observation in a death like this.’
‘What about those cuts in the skin? They look like knife wounds.’
‘Again, what one would expect,’ said Illmann. ‘The heat in a conflagration causes the skin to split open like a ripe banana. That is, if you can remember what a banana looks like.’
‘Where did you find the petrol cans?’
He raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘Oh, you know about those, do you? Yes, we found two empty cans in the garden. I don’t think they’d been there very long. They weren’t rusted and there was still a small amount of petrol which remained unevaporated in the bottom of one of them. And according to the fire officer there was a strong smell of petrol about the place.’
‘Arson, then.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘So what made you look for bullets?’
‘Experience. With a post-mortem following a fire, one always keeps in mind the possibility that there has been an attempt to destroy evidence. It’s standard procedure. I found three bullets in the female, two in the male and
