'Are you certain that there was no one else about when you discovered the body?'
'I did not see anyone, Mr. Renaday. After I spotted the body, and after I made certain Captain Bedford was dead, I used my torch to quickly sweep the building. But the night was still upon us, and there are many shadowy places a man could hide. So I cannot be completely certain.'
'Thank you, Fritz. One last thing…'
The ferret stepped forward.
'I want you to go find us a camera. Thirty-five millimeter, loaded with film. With a flash attachment and at least a half dozen flashbulbs. Right now.'
'Impossible, flying officer! I know of no-' Renaday instantly stepped forward, pushing his face up toward the lanky ferret's nose.
'I know you know who's got one. Now, go get it, and bring it here without letting anyone know what the hell you're doing. Got that? Or would you prefer it if we marched over to the commandant's office and demanded it?'
Fritz Number One looked panicked for a moment, trapped between duty and the desire to be correct. Finally, he nodded.
'One of the tower guards is an amateur photographer…'
'Ten minutes. We'll be inside.'
Fritz Number One saluted, turned on his heel, and hurried away.
'That was smart, Hugh,' Tommy Hart said.
'Figured we might need some pictures.' Then Hugh turned to Tommy and seized him by the arm.
'But look, Tommy.
What's our job here, after all?'
Tommy shook his head.
'I'm not sure. All I can tell you is that Lincoln Scott is going to be accused of doing what's inside the Abort. And the major says they've got all the evidence they need to convict him. I suppose we should try to help him as much as we can.'
And with that, the two men stepped up to the door to the latrine.
'Ready?' Tommy asked.
'Forward the light brigade,' Hugh replied.
'Theirs not to reason why…'
'Theirs but to do and die,' Tommy finished the refrain. He thought this might have been a poor verse to select at that moment, but he did not say this out loud.
The Abort was a narrow building, with a single door located at one end.
The wood-plank floor of the building was raised up several feet, so that one had to walk up a short flight of rough steps to enter. This was to allow space beneath the privies for huge green metal drums that collected the waste.
There were six stalls, each with a door and partitions to provide privacy. The seats were hewn from hardwood and polished to a shine by use and near-constant scrubbing. Ventilation was provided by slatted windows up just beneath the roof line. Twice each day Abort details carted off the barrels of waste to an area in a corner of the camp where it was burned. What wouldn't burn was dumped in trenches and covered with lime. About the only thing the Germans provided the kriegies in abundance was time.
A stranger walking into an Abort for the first time might have been overcome by the fetid thickness of the smell, but the kriegies were used to it, and within a few days of their arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen, the airmen learned that it was one of the few places in the camp where one could go and have a few minutes of relative solitude.
What most of the men hated was the lack of toilet paper. The Germans didn't provide any, and the Red Cross parcels were skimpy, preferring to send foodstuffs. Men used any possible scrap of paper.
Tommy and Hugh paused in the doorway.
The familiar stench filled their nostrils. There was no electricity in the Abort, so it was dim and dark, lit only by the gray overcast sky that filtered through the high slatted windows.
Renaday hummed briefly, a nameless snatch of music, before stepping forward.
'Tommy,' he said, 'think for a second. It was five in the morning, right? That's what Fritz said?'
'Correct,' Tommy answered, keeping his voice low.
'What the hell was Vic doing here? The inside toilets were still operating.
The Krauts don't shut off the plumbing until midmorning.
And this place would have been pitch black. Except for the searchlight that sweeps over it… what?… every minute, maybe ninety seconds.
You wouldn't be able to see a thing.'
'So, you wouldn't come out here unless you had some good reason…'
'And going to the bathroom isn't the reason.'
Both men nodded.
'What're we looking for, Hugh?'
Hugh sighed.
'Well, they teach you in cop school that the crime scene can tell you everything that happened if you look closely enough. Let's see what we can see.'
In unison, the two men stepped into the Abort. Tommy swung his eyes right and left, trying to absorb what had taken place, but uncertain in that second precisely what he was looking for. He moved ahead of Renaday, and pushed forward.
He paused just before reaching the final stall in the row, pointing down at the floor.
'Look there, Hugh,' he said quietly.
'Doesn't that look like a footprint? Or at least part of one?'
Renaday knelt down. On the wooden floor of the latrine was the clear outline of the front of a boot heading toward the Abort stall. The Canadian touched the outline gingerly.
'Blood,' he said. He looked up slowly, his eyes on the door to the last stall.
'In there, I guess,' he spoke out with a small, quick inhale of breath.
'Check the door first, see if there's anything else.'
'Like what?'
'Like a bloody fingerprint.'
'No. Not that I can see.'
Hugh got out his sketch pad and pencil. He quickly started to draw the interior layout of the Abort. He also noted the shape and direction of the footprint.
Tommy pushed the stall door open slowly, like a child peeking into his parents' room in the morning.
'Jesus,' he whispered sharply.
Vincent Bedford was sitting on the privy seat, his pants pulled down to his ankles, half-naked. But his upper torso was thrust back against the wall, and his head lolled slightly to the right. His eyes were open wide in shock. His chest and shirt were coated with deep maroon streaks of blood.
His throat had been cut. On the left side of his neck the skin was laid open in a gory flap.
One of Trader Vic's fingers was partially severed and hung limply at his side. There was also a slashing cut in his right cheek, and his shirt was partially ripped.
'Poor Vic,' Tommy said quietly.
The two airmen stared at the dead body. Both had seen a great deal of death, and seen it in horrific form, and they were not sickened by what they witnessed in the Abort. The sensation both men felt in that second was different, it was a shock of context. They had both seen men ripped asunder by bullets, explosions, and shrapnel; eviscerated, decapitated, and burned alive by the vagaries of battle. Both men had seen the viscera and other bloody remains of turret gunners actually hosed out of the Plexiglas cocoons where they'd died. But all those deaths came within the context of battle, where they both expected to see death at its most brutal. In the
