A Terrible Beauty

'To begin with, he claimed that his name was Jan Vermeeling, and that he was a Dutch merchant seaman. However we discovered papers and letters under the floorboards of his room in the names of John or Jack Callwood, Jan Rufenwald and a birth certificate in the name of Dieter Hartmann, from Munster, in Westphalia. To my astonishment we also found a ticket that showed that he had arrived in Ireland from New York on the ill-fated Lusitania, and so must have been one of her seven hundred and sixty-five survivors. Yet when I checked the manifest of all the Lusitania survivors, and their photographs, Dieter Hartmann (or whatever his real name happened to be) did not appear to be among them.

'The answer to this conundrum, however, was in Dieter Hartmann's wardrobe. Apart from a British army uniform and a tweed jacket and several men's shirts, we found three women's dresses, as well as bodices and lace petticoats. At first we assumed that he was cohabiting with a woman companion, but then it occurred to me to look again at the photographs of those who had been rescued when the Lusitania was torpedoed. My intuition proved to be correct: among the survivors was a woman called Miss Mary Chaplain, described in the original list of survivors as a retired teacher from White Plains, New York. The face in the photograph, however, was of a much younger person than any retired teacher would have been, and on closer examination I realized that 'Miss Mary Chaplain' was in fact Dieter Hartmann in women's clothing and a wig.

'Under intensive interrogation, Hartmann eventually admitted that he had taken on the identity of 'Miss Mary Chaplain' to avoid detection on board the Lusitania. He confessed that he was wanted for questioning by the Massachusetts police and he was afraid that a wireless message might be sent to the Lusitania's captain to detain him. His fear was well founded because there had been a thorough search of the vessel in mid-Atlantic, although as 'Miss Mary Chaplain' he evaded discovery. He claimed that there had been some 'misunderstandings' between him and the Massachusetts police concerning the disappearance of several women.

'I contacted my superiors at the War Office and informed them that we had successfully arrested the man we believed to be responsible for abducting the eleven Irishwomen. I told them that I believed him to be Dieter Hartmann, although I also gave them his several aliases-Jan Rufenwald, John Callwood, and Mary Chaplain. I was satisfied that I would be able to send him for trial to the Cork County courts.

'Almost by return, however, I received a coded wireless message ordering me to execute Dieter Hartmann summarily and to 'eliminate' all evidence of his existence. I was to tell Colonel Wilson and all of the other officers and men who had assisted me that my investigation was now concluded and that they were not to speak of it again, in the interests of national security.

'With three NCOs I took Dieter Hartmann that same evening to a bog close to Glanmire, where he was made to kneel and shot once in the back of the head with a service revolver. He was buried very deep in the bog and we left no marker.

'I wondered for many years afterward why I should have been ordered to execute Dieter Hartmann so expeditiously and so secretly. After all, he was a German, and in my estimation at the time it would have been matchless propaganda for the Crown forces if we were credited with catching the man who had abducted and presumably murdered so many Irishwomen-not that we ever found their remains.'

Jimmy lit up his cigarette and blew smoke out of his nostrils. Katie would love this stuff, and it would mean that they could wind up their own investigation, too, thank God.

Colonel Corcoran had written: 'I thought no more about Dieter Hartmann until 1923, when I received a copy in the post of a rather sensational American magazine called True Crime Monthly.It had been sent to me without any attached comment whatsoever by Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, who was now working for a merchant bank in New York. The magazine carried an article about the notorious ritual murders of scores of women in Massachusetts. The man suspected to be responsible was 'Jack Callwood'-believed to be one of Germany's worst mass murderers, 'Jan Rufenwald.' The article said that Jack Callwood had booked passage on the Lusitania to escape from the United States and had almost certainly drowned with the other one thousand one hundred ninety-five victims-'so even if he escaped the electric chair, natural justice caught up with him.' But of course Colonel Wilson and I knew full well that Callwood had survived, and that it wasn't natural justice that had caught up with him-but us.

'My curiosity about the affair was once again aroused, and through old friends in naval intelligence I managed to obtain the records of the wireless signals that were sent to the Lusitania prior to her sinking. At the subsequent board of inquiry, the Lusitania's captain, William Turner, was blamed for ignoring the Admiralty's directives for evading German submarines. He said that he had slowed down because of patchy fog off the southern coast of Ireland, and that he had not understood that he was supposed to steer a zigzag course unless a U-boat was actually sighted.

'But here in the top-secret Admiralty files was the handwritten record of a wireless message which hadorderedhim to slow down and take a particular heading close to the Old Head of Kinsale. It was here that U-boats habitually lurked, waiting for British merchant ships, and he was intercepted by the German submarine U-20, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Walther Schwieger.

'On further investigation, which took me many months, and in which I naturally had to be extremely circumspect, I discovered from records at the War Office that a telephone message was made to the German Embassy in Dublin on the night of May 4, 1915, to the effect that Jan Rufenwald, alias Jack Callwood, was traveling on board the Lusitania to Liverpool. When the liner passed the southern coast of Ireland, they would have an opportunity to exact their revenge on the worst mass murderer that Germany had ever known.

'Of course I have no absolute proof. But even at the time, rumor was rife that the British intelligence services colluded in the sinking of the Lusitania as a way of provoking outrage against Germany in the United States (which had previously shown little interest in the war in Europe and had even been protesting against the British blockade of German ports).

'My personal belief is that it was British intelligence who advised the Germans of the presence on board the Lusitania of Dieter Hartmann, and that the Lusitania was specifically instructed to slow down to a speed at which she would present herself as an easy target to U-20. In a war which had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, a further one thousand one hundred ninety-five were of very little consequence compared with the benefits of bringing the United States into the conflict on the Allied side.

'That is why I was ordered to dispose of him so secretly. If it ever emerged that the War Office had used him as a bait to encourage the Germans to sink the Lusitania, the damage to Anglo-American relations would never have recovered.'

There was a cautious knock at the door, and Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan appeared, red-faced, looking as if he had just eaten a rather large Irish breakfast.

'Jesus, the state of that fellow downstairs. No fecking arms. Jesus.'