SS-GB (3 page)

‘Superintendent Archer,’ said the PK journalist in heavily accented English, ‘is it true that, here at Scotland Yard, the men call General Kellerman “Father”?’

Douglas hesitated, pretending to be holding still for the photo in order to gain time. ‘Can’t you see how your question embarrasses the Superintendent?’ said Kellerman. ‘And speak German, the Superintendent speaks the language as well as I do.’

‘It’s true then?’ said the journalist, pressing for an answer from Douglas. The camera shutter clicked. The photographer checked the settings on his camera and then took two more pictures in rapid succession.

‘Of
course
it’s true,’ said Kellerman. ‘You think I’m a liar? Or do you think I’m the sort of police chief who doesn’t know what goes on in my own headquarters?’

The journalist stiffened and the photographer lowered his camera.

‘It’s quite true,’ said Douglas.

‘And now, gentlemen, I must get some work done,’ said Kellerman. He shooed them out, like an old lady finding hens in her bedroom. ‘Sorry about that,’ Kellerman explained to Douglas after they’d gone. ‘They said they would need only five minutes, but they hang on and hang on. It’s all part of their job to exploit opportunities, I suppose.’ He went back to his desk and sat down. ‘Tell me what’s been happening, my boy.’

Douglas read his report, with asides and explanations where needed. Kellerman’s prime concern was to justify money spent, and Douglas always wrote his reports so that they summarized the resources of the department and showed the cost in Occupation Marks.

When the formalities were over, Kellerman opened the humidor. With black-market cigarettes at five Occupation Marks each, one of Kellerman’s Monte Cristo No 2s had become a considerable accolade. Kellerman selected two cigars with great care. Like Douglas, he preferred the flavour of the ones with green or yellow spots on the outer leaf. He went through a ceremony of cutting them and removing loose strands of tobacco. As usual Kellerman wore one of his smooth tweed suits, complete with waistcoat and gold chain for his pocket watch. Typically he had not worn his SS uniform even for this visit by the photographer. And Kellerman, like so many of the senior SS men of his generation, preferred army rank titles to the cumbersome SS nomenclature.

‘Still no word of your wife?’ asked Kellerman. He came round the desk and gave Douglas the cigar.

‘I think we have to assume that she was killed,’ said Douglas. ‘She often went to our neighbour’s house during the air attacks, and the street fighting completely demolished it.’

‘Don’t give up hope,’ said Kellerman. Was that a reference to his affair with the secretary, Douglas wondered. ‘Your son is well?’

‘He was in the shelter that day. Yes, he’s thriving.’

Kellerman leaned over to light the cigar. Douglas was not yet used to the way that the German officers put cologne on their faces after shaving and the perfume surprised him. He inhaled; the cigar lit. Douglas would have preferred to take the cigar away with him but the General always lit them. Douglas
thought perhaps it was a way of preventing the recipient selling it instead of smoking it. Or was it simply that Kellerman believed that, in England, no gentleman could offer a colleague a chance to put an unsmoked cigar in his pocket.

‘And no other problems, Superintendent?’ Kellerman passed behind Douglas, and touched the seated man’s shoulder lightly, as if in reassurance. Douglas wondered if his general knew that his internal mail had that morning included a letter from his secretary, saying she was pregnant and demanding twenty thousand O-Marks. The pound sterling, she pointed out, in case Douglas didn’t know, was not the sort of currency abortionists accepted. Douglas was permitted a proportion of his wages in O-Marks. So far Douglas had not discovered how the letter got to him. Had she sent it to one of her girlfriends in Registry, or actually come into the building herself?

‘No problems that I need bother the General with,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman smiled. Douglas’s anxiety had led him to address the general in that curious third-person form that some of the more obsequious Germans used.

‘You knew this room in the old days?’ said Kellerman.

Before the war it had been the Commissioner’s procedure to leave the door wide open when the room was unoccupied, so that messengers could pass in and out. Soon after being assigned to Scotland Yard, Douglas had found an excuse for coming into the empty room and studying it with the kind of awe that comes from a schoolboy diet of detective fiction. ‘I seldom came here when it was the Commissioner’s room.’

‘These are difficult times,’ said Kellerman, as if apologizing for the way in which Douglas’s visits
were now more frequent. Kellerman leaned forward to tap a centimetre of ash into a white china model of Tower Bridge that some enterprising manufacturer had redesigned to incorporate swastika flags and ‘Waffenstillstand. London. 1940’ in red and black Gothic lettering. ‘Until now,’ said Kellerman, choosing his words with care, ‘the police force has not been asked to do any political task.’

‘We have always been completely apolitical.’

‘Now that’s not quite true,’ said Kellerman gently. ‘In Germany we call a spade a spade, and the political police are called political police. Here you call your political police the Special Branch, because you English are not so direct in these matters.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But there will come a time when I can no longer resist the pressure from Berlin to bring us into line with the German police system.’

‘We English don’t take quickly to new ideas, you know, sir.’

‘Don’t play games with me, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman without changing the affable tone of voice or the smile. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

‘I’m not sure I do, sir.’

‘Neither of us wants political advisers in this building, Superintendent. Inevitably the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.’ Kellerman said it in a way that conveyed the idea that he didn’t consider these elements nearly so undesirable as his superiors in Berlin thought them.

‘It would split the police service right down the middle,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman didn’t answer. He reached for a teleprinter message on his desk and read it, as if to remind himself
of the contents. ‘A senior officer of the Sicherheitsdienst is on his way here now,’ said Kellerman. ‘I’m assigning you to work with him.’

‘His duties will be political?’ asked Douglas. The SD was the SS intelligence service. Douglas did not welcome this sinister development.

‘I don’t know why he’s coming,’ said Kellerman cheerfully. ‘He is on the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS and will remain directly responsible to Berlin for whatever he has to do.’ Kellerman inhaled on his cigar and then let the smoke drift from his nostrils. He let his Superintendent dwell upon the facts and realize that the new man presented a danger to the status quo for both of them. ‘Standartenführer Huth,’ said Kellerman finally, ‘that’s this new chap’s name.’ His use of the SS rank was enough to emphasize that Huth was an outsider. Kellerman raised his hand. ‘Under the direct orders of Berlin, so that gives him a special…’ he hesitated and then let the hand fall, ‘…influence.’

‘I understand, sir,’ said Douglas.

‘Then perhaps, my dear chap, you’d do everything you can to prevent the indiscretions – more particularly the verbal indiscretions – of your mentor downstairs from embarrassing us all.’

‘Detective Sergeant Woods?’

‘Ah, what a quick mind you have, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman.

Some said there had not been even one clear week of sunshine since the cease-fire. It was easy to believe. Today the air was damp, and the colourless sun only just visible through the grey clouds, like an empty plate on a dirty tablecloth.

And yet even a born and bred Londoner, such as Douglas Archer, could walk down Curzon Street, and with eyes half-closed, see little or no change from the previous year. The Soldatenkino sign outside the Curzon cinema was small and discreet, and only if you tried to enter the Mirabelle restaurant did a top-hatted doorman whisper that it was now used exclusively by Staff Officers from Air Fleet 8 Headquarters, across the road in the old Ministry of Education offices. And if your eyes remained half-closed you missed the signs that said ‘Jewish Undertaking’ and effectively kept all but the boldest customers out. And in September of that year 1941, Douglas Archer, in common with most of his compatriots, was keeping his eyes half-closed.

The scene of the murder to which, as Detective Sergeant Harry Woods had predicted, they were called, was Shepherd Market. This little maze of narrow streets and alleys housed a mixture of working-class Londoners, Italian shopkeepers and wealthy visitors, who found in these tortuous ways, and creaking old buildings, some measure of the London they’d read of in Dickens, while being conveniently close to the smart shops and restaurants.

The house was typical of the neighbourhood. There were uniformed police there already, arguing with two
reporters. The ground floor was a poky antique shop not much wider than a man could stretch both arms. Above it were rooms of doll’s-house dimensions, with a twisting staircase so narrow that it provided an ever-present risk of sweeping from its walls the framed coaching prints that decorated them. Only with difficulty did Harry get the heavy murder bag to the top floor where the body was.

The police doctor was there, seated on a chintz-covered couch, a British army overcoat buttoned up tight to the neck, and hands in his pockets. He was a young man, in his middle twenties, but already Douglas saw in his eyes that terrible resignation with which so many British seemed to have met final defeat.

On the floor in front of him there was the dead man. He was about thirty-five years old, a pale-faced man with a balding head. Passing him in the street one might have guessed him to be a rather successful academic – the sort of absent-minded professor portrayed in comedy films.

As well as blood, there was a large smudge of brown powder spilled on his waistcoat. Douglas touched it with a fingertip but even before he raised it to his nose, he recognized the heavy aroma of snuff. There were traces of it under the dead man’s fingernails. Snuff was growing more popular as the price of cigarettes went up, and it was still unrationed.

Douglas found the snuff tin in a waistcoat pocket. The force of the bullets had knocked the lid off. There was a half-smoked cigar there too, the band still on it, a Romeo y Julieta worth a small fortune nowadays; no wonder he’d preserved the unsmoked half of it.

Douglas looked at the fine quality cloth and hand stitching of the dead man’s suit. For such expensive, made to measure garments they fitted very loosely, as if the man, suddenly committed to a rigorous diet,
had lost many pounds of weight. Sudden weight loss was also suggested by the drawn and wrinkled face. Douglas fingered the bald patches on the man’s head.

‘Alopecia areata,’
said the doctor. ‘It’s common enough.’

Douglas looked into the mouth. The dead man had had enough money to pay for good dental care. Gold shone in his mouth but there was blood there too.

‘There’s blood in his mouth.’

‘Probably hit his face as he fell.’

Douglas didn’t think so but he didn’t argue. He noted the tiny ulcers on the man’s face and blood spots under the skin. He pushed back the shirt sleeve far enough to see the red inflamed arm.

‘Where do you find such sunshine at this time of the year?’ the doctor said.

Douglas didn’t answer. He drew a small sketch of the way that the body had fallen backwards into the tiny bedroom, and guessed that he’d been in the doorway when the bullets hit him. He touched the blood on the body to see if it was tacky, and then placed a palm on the chest. He could feel no warmth at all. His experience told him that this man had been dead for six hours or more. The doctor watched Douglas but made no comment. Douglas got to his feet and looked round the room. It was a tiny place, over-decorated with fancy wallpapers, Picasso reproductions and table lights made from Chianti bottles.

There was a walnut escritoire, with its front open as if it might have been rifled. An old-fashioned brass lamp had been adjusted to bring the light close upon the green leather writing top but its bulb had been taken out and left in one of the pigeon-holes, together with some cheap writing paper and envelopes.

There were no books, no photos and nothing personal of any kind. It was like some very superior
sort of hotel room. In the tiny open fireplace there was a basket of logs. The grate was overflowing with ashes of paper.

‘Pathologist here yet?’ Douglas asked. He fitted the light bulb into the brass lamp. Then he switched it on for long enough to see that the bulb was still in working order and switched it off again. He went to the fireplace and put his hand into the ash. It was not warm but there was no surviving scrap of paper to reveal what had been burned there. It was a long job to burn so much paper. Douglas used his handkerchief to wipe his hands.

‘Not yet,’ said the doctor in a dull voice. Douglas guessed that he resented being ordered to wait.

‘What do you make of it, doc?’

‘You get any spare cigarettes, working with the
SIPO?’

Douglas produced the gold cigarette case that was his one and only precious possession. The doctor took the cigarette and nodded his thanks while examining it carefully. Its paper was marked with the double red bands that identified Wehrmacht rations. The doctor put it in his mouth, brought a lighter from his pocket and lit it, all without changing his expression or his position, sprawled on the couch with legs extended.

A uniformed Police Sergeant had watched all this while waiting on the tiny landing outside the door. Now he put his head into the room and said, ‘Pardon me, sir. A message from the pathologist. He won’t be here until this afternoon.’

Harry Woods was unpacking the murder bag. Douglas could not resist glancing at him. Harry nodded. Now he realized that to keep the Police Surgeon here was a good idea. The pathologists were always late these days. ‘So what do you make of it, doctor?’ said Douglas.