The old woman was sitting erect on a hard wooden bench in the Seydel Strasse mortuary. She wore a brown tweed suit, brown hat with a drooping feather, sturdy brown shoes and grey woollen stockings. She was staring straight ahead, a handbag clasped in her lap, oblivious to the medical orderlies, the policemen, the grieving relatives passing in the corridor. Max Jaeger sat beside her, arms folded, legs outstretched, looking bored. As March arrived, he took him to one side.
“Been here ten minutes. Hardly spoken.”
“In shock?”
“I suppose.”
“Let’s get it over with.”
The old woman did not look up as March sat on the bench beside her. He said softly: “Frau Trinkl, my name is March. I am an investigator with the Berlin Kriminal-polizei. We have to complete a report on your brother’s death, and we need you to identify his body. Then we’ll take you home. Do you understand?”
Frau Trinkl turned to face him. She had a thin face, thin nose (her brother’s nose), thin lips. A cameo brooch gathered a blouse of frilly purple at her bony throat.
“Do you understand?” he repeated.
She gazed at him with clear grey eyes, unreddened by crying. Her voice was clipped and dry: “Perfectly.”
They moved across the corridor into a small, windowless reception room. The floor was made of wood blocks. The walls were lime green. In an effort to lighten the gloom, someone had stuck up tourist posters given away by the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft: a night-time view of the Great Hall, the Fuhrer Museum at Linz, the Starnberger See in Bavaria. The poster which had hung on the fourth wall had been torn down, leaving pockmarks in the plaster, like bullet holes.
A clatter outside signalled the arrival of the body. It was wheeled in, covered by a sheet, on a metal trolley. Two attendants in white tunics parked it in the centre of the floor — a buffet lunch awaiting its guests. They left and Jaeger closed the door.
“Are you ready?” asked March. She nodded. He turned back the sheet and Frau Trinkl stationed herself at his shoulder. As she leaned forward, a strong smell — of peppermint lozenges, of perfume mingled with camphor, an old lady’s smell — washed across his face. She stared at the corpse for a long time, then opened her mouth as if to say something, but all that emerged was a sigh. Her eyes closed. March caught her as she fell.
“It’s him,” she said. “I haven’t set eyes on him for ten years, and he’s fatter, and I’ve never seen him before without his spectacles, not since he was a child. But it’s him.” She was on a chair under the poster of Linz, leaning forward with her head between her knees. Her hat had fallen off. Thin strands of white hair hung down over her face. The body had been wheeled away.
The door opened and Jaeger returned carrying a glass of water, which he pressed into her skinny hand. “Drink this.” She held it for a moment, then raised it to her lips and took a sip. “I never faint,” she said. “Never.” Behind her, Jaeger made a face.
“Of course,” said March. “I need to ask some questions. Are you well enough? Stop me if I tire you.” He took out his notebook. “Why had you not seen your brother for ten years?”
“After Edith died — his wife — we had nothing in common. We were never close in any case. Even as children. I was eight years older than him.”
“His wife died some time ago?”
She thought for a moment. “In ’53, I think. Winter. She had cancer.”
“And in all the time since then you never heard from him? Were there any other brothers and sisters?”
“No. Just the two of us. He did write occasionally. I had a letter from him on my birthday two weeks ago.” She fumbled in her handbag and produced a single sheet of notepaper — good quality, creamy and thick, with an engraving of the Schwanenwerder house as a letterhead. The writing was copperplate, the message as formal as an official receipt: “My dear sister! Heil Hitler! I send you greetings on your birthday. I earnestly hope that you are in good health, as I am. Josef.” March refolded it and handed it back. No wonder nobody missed him.
“In his other letters, did he ever mention anything worrying him?”
“What had he to be worried about?” She spat out the words. “Edith inherited a fortune in the war. They had money. He lived in fine style, I can tell you.”
“There were no children?”
“He was sterile.” She said this without emphasis, as if describing his hair colour. “Edith was so unhappy. I think that was what killed her. She sat alone in that big house — it was cancer of the soul. She used to love music — she played the piano beautifully. A Bechstein, I remember. And he -he was such a cold man.”
Jaeger grunted from the other side of the room: “So you didn’t think much of him?”
“No, I did not. Not many people did.” She turned back to March. “I have been a widow for twenty-four years. My husband was a navigator in the Luftwaffe, shot down over France. I was not left destitute — nothing like that. But the pension… very small for one who was used to something a little better. Not once in all that time did Josef offer to help me.”
“What about his leg?” It was Jaeger again, his tone antagonistic. He had clearly decided to take Buhler’s side in this family dispute. “What happened to that?” His manner suggested he thought she might have stolen it.
The old lady ignored him and gave her answer to March. “He would never speak of it himself, but Edith told me the story. It happened in 1951, when he was still in the General Government. He was travelling with an escort on the road from Krakau to Kattowitz when his car was ambushed by Polish partisans. A landmine, she said. His driver was killed. Josef was lucky only to lose a foot. After that, he retired from government service.”
“And yet he still swam?” March looked up from his notebook. “You know that we discovered him wearing swimming trunks?”
She gave a tight smile. “My brother was a fanatic about everything, Herr March, whether it was politics or health. He did not smoke, he never touched alcohol, and he took exercise every day, despite his … disability. So, no: I am not in the least surprised that he should have been swimming.” She set down her glass and picked up her hat. “I would like to go home now, if I may.”
March stood up and held out his hand, helping her to her feet. “What did Doctor Buhler do after 1951? He was only -what? — in his early fifties?”
That is the strange thing.” She opened her handbag and took out a small mirror. She checked her hat was on straight, tucking stray hairs out of sight with nervous, jerky movements of her fingers. “Before the war, he was so ambitious. He would work eighteen hours a day, every day of the week. But when he left Krakau, he gave up. He never even returned to the law. For more than ten years after poor Edith died, he just sat alone in that big house all day and did nothing.”
Two floors below, in the basement of the morgue, SS Surgeon August Eisler of Kriminalpolizei Department VD2 (Pathology) was going about his business with his customary clumsy relish. Buhler’s chest had been opened in the standard fashion: a Y incision, a cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, a straight line down to the pubic bone. Now Eisler had his hands deep inside the stomach, green gloves sheened with red, twisting, cutting, pulling. March and Jaeger leaned against the wall by the open doorway, smoking a couple of Jaeger’s cigars.
“Have you seen what your man had for lunch?” said Eisler. “Show them, Eck.”
Eisler’s assistant wiped his hands on his apron and held up a transparent plastic bag. There was something small and green in the bottom.
“Lettuce. Digests slowly. Stays in the intestinal tract for hours.”
March had worked with Eisler before. Two winters ago, with snow blocking the Unter den Linden and ice skating competitions on the Tegeler See, a barge master named Kempf had been pulled out of the Spree, almost dead with cold. He had expired in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Accident or murder? The time at which he had fallen into the water was crucial. Looking at the ice extending two metres out from the banks, March had estimated fifteen minutes as the maximum time he could have survived in the water. Eisler had said forty-five and his view had prevailed with the prosecutor. It was enough to destroy the alibi of the barge’s second mate, and hang him.
Afterwards, the prosecutor- a decent, old-fashioned sort — had called March into his office and locked the door.
