Huber's Tattoo Read online

  But I cannot think of anyone who would have wanted to kill him. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors, though? I still remember the shock about Fred West, if you get my meaning?

  Witness Statement 4

  Mrs Margaret Boyle (Jeremy Haysbrook’s secretary at LSE)

  14 Thames Valley Way

  Professor Haysbrook, well, he said I should call him Jeremy a few years ago, was more than a professor to me, more than my boss, he was someone I had come to rely upon.

  His routine was fastidious, his manners beyond criticism – a real gentleman of the kind you don’t get any more – and I knew where I stood with him and around him. He was… dependable and not at all haughty about it.

  I am devastated by his death and especially the manner of it. I cannot sleep just thinking of it. Who on this earth would wish such harm on poor old Jeremy? He had endless time for his students, even though most were so ignorant compared to him. His intellect simply soared above everyone else’s and they all respected him enormously.

  Even his peers at LSE admired his brain and college dons can be a pretty jealous and petty bunch at times.

  I used to feel very sorry for him because I think, despite his acclaim and his importance, that he was very lonely. I’ve never heard him speak of family or relatives anywhere, ever.

  He used to go to Mensa Club once a month – he really liked that – and he belonged to an amateur astronomers’ group called Orbis, or something like that.

  Some people speculated behind his back that he was gay, but I don’t know. He was just a nice, quiet man to me.

  *

  “They all say the same thing,” Natasha said, placing the last sheet face down on the desk in front of her. “Nice man, private, shy and quite possibly homosexual.”

  Henry sipped coffee, pulling a face as he stared into the paper cup before leaning to one side and binning it.

  “Fly?” Natasha asked.

  “Cold.”

  He was rocking on the back two legs of his wooden desk chair with his feet crossed on the edge of the desk. The office smelled damp because it was raining outside and every officer who came in, soaked and sweaty from exertions of duty, exuded the same humid odour.

  “His passport has his place of birth as Steinhöring in Germany,” Natasha added, flicking Haysbrook’s British passport to one side.

  Henry paled and his heart quickened. He hadn’t heard that named for many years, not until recently when he approached South Bank Genealogy Services. Now he had heard it again, this time associated with Jeremy Haysbrook. It caught him off guard.

  “What is it?” Natasha asked.

  “Nothing.” He shuffled the papers on his desk.

  “Have you heard of Steinhöring?” Natasha asked.

  “No,” he lied, feeling colour rise in his face under her scrutiny.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me, the things you Mensa types discuss.”

  Henry studied the faint freckles and light grey eyes fringed by perfectly groomed straight golden hair. He sighed. He had never told anyone and this was not the time, or the place, nor indeed the context.

  “Who told you about Mensa?”

  “Bruce.”

  Henry did not react.

  “So how, if he was born in Steinhöring, and why, did Haysbrook end up in England?” Henry said, rubbing his chin rhythmically. “Without parents, it appears.”

  “Orphan, perhaps?”

  Henry smiled briefly.

  “What’s funny?” Natasha asked.

  Henry shook his head.

  “That’s what George accuses me of being – an orphan.”

  Natasha winced, embarrassed.

  “Are you?”

  Henry shrugged and met her eyes again.

  “When did she leave?” Natasha said.

  “Saturday.”

  “When will she be back?” Natasha floated the question softly, hoping it did not seem inappropriate.

  “I never know.”

  Henry’s feet thudded to the floor and he stood up noisily, signalling an end to the conversation about George. Just then a young uniformed officer burst into the room waving a DVD in his outstretched hand. He was grinning and looked pleased with himself.

  “I found Professor Haysbrook on Covent Garden underground CCTV, Inspector.”

  “Good work,” Henry praised him and then, as the officer bent over to play the disc on the desk computer, gesticulated to Natasha and mouthed the words ‘what’s his name again’ behind the officer’s back.

  Natasha mouthed the name ‘Jones’ in return.

  “Here you can see Haysbrook entering the underground station at Covent Garden, alone, at 9.50pm on the night he was murdered. He stands around and then boards the train… here… again alone.”

  They watched the grainy images on a flat screen monitor on the desk beside the officer as he tapped his index finger on the screen at appropriate moments.

  “Well done, Jones,” Henry said, patting the man on the shoulder.

  “I found you, too, Inspector. Here you are.”

  Henry exchanged a look of surprise and horror with Natasha. The officer backtracked on the DVD to 9.40pm and tapped his finger on the screen again as the image of Henry walked across the station platform, standing almost exactly where Haysbrook would stand in ten minutes’ time. Henry straightened and felt his blood freeze.

  “It is you, Henry!” Natasha said with a slight giggle. “My God, what were you doing there?”

  All Henry could do was shrug his shoulders. He had absolutely no recollection of being on the Covent Garden underground station on the night of Haysbrook’s murder. He stared in disbelief at the grainy CCTV image of himself, frozen on the flickering screen just as he was now frozen to the floor.

  “Probably going home, I guess,” he said.

  Natasha frowned.

  “Surely it’s quicker to take the Circle or District lines to reach the DLR?”

  Henry tasted the bile of irritation and awkwardness rising in his throat as heat began to prickle beneath his skin.

  “We’re getting sidetracked on nonsense here! Let’s focus on Haysbrook. We need to see him get off the train at Greenwich as well. Is he still alone? Does he meet anyone at the station, or outside the station? Do you have that footage, officer?”

  PC Jones shook his head and removed the DVD from the disc drive almost apologetically.

  “No, sir. But I’ll get back to the tapes right now.”

  Jones scuttled off and Henry sighed with relief. He was perspiring. What the hell had he been doing on the Covent Garden Underground, coincidentally just minutes before Haysbrook?

  And why could he not remember being there?

  Natasha stared at Henry from an expressionless face. Suddenly she recalled Superintendent Bruce’s explanation of Henry’s unusual behaviour: you’ll know it when you see it.

  Was this it?

  Seven

  “How was it?” Natasha asked, as Henry flopped into the passenger seat of the waiting white Ford Mondeo.

  He shook his head and exhaled through pursed lips as he looked up at Scotland Yard’s imposing exterior.

  “That bad?” Natasha pulled out into the traffic.

  “The strategic defence plan for London 2012 Olympics includes positioning ground to air missile systems on the rooftops of residential apartment buildings around the Olympic Park.”

  “What?”

  Henry nodded, rubbing his temples.

  “That’s what I said. This is London, not Tripoli.”

  As he pulled the seatbelt across his chest and fastened it his phone rang. It was George. His eyes widened in astonishment.

  “Hello, darling,” he said. “This is a surprise.”

  Natasha shifted uncomfortably in her seat, concentrating on the road and making an effort not to listen. A cyclist pulled up to the car at the traffic lights and stared approvingly at her. She flashed her Met badge at him without even glancing in his direction.

  “I’m s
orry, sweetheart, I have some really bad news,” George said. Her voice was distant and sounded as though she was speaking from the bottom of a large metal drum.

  Henry’s heart leapt.

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine, don’t worry about me. We’re staying in the Cairo Hilton. It’s quite safe for journalists.”

  Henry felt himself relax at this news. He switched the phone to the other ear and smiled at Natasha, mouthing the word ‘sorry’.

  “Vera’s dead. We’ve been told that her body was found a few days ago outside London,” George said, her voice modulating like an old long wave radio signal.

  “Vera?”

  “My friend, Vera Schmidt. You know her, Henry, you used to complain about her incessant smoking.”

  “Oh, yes.” Henry grimaced.

  Vera Schmidt was well known amongst the libertines in London, a gritty playwright and vocal anti-war campaigner. George had drawn considerable inspiration from Vera’s courageous determination, something that Henry held against her.

  “What happened, George?”

  “Her body washed up at Rainham Marshes. Apparently she had been in the Thames for quite some time.”

  Henry imagined a water-decayed corpse being recovered from the flat medieval marshes, then tried to remember when last he had been in Vera’s company and what she looked like.

  “Don’t worry about it, George, I’ll make some enquiries. Leave it with me.”

  “She was shot, Henry.”

  “Vera?”

  “Yes, murdered.”

  The signal was deteriorating and echoed even more.

  “I’ll call you when I know something,” Henry said.

  “Thank you.”

  He hesitated and shifted position in his seat, self-conscious so close to Natasha.

  “You just keep your head down over there and don’t take any chances.”

  “Everything all right?” Natasha enquired.

  “Yeah. A friend of Georgie’s was found in the Thames at Rainham Marshes. She wants me to make enquiries.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Vera Schmidt, writer with a vocal social conscience, anti-war campaigner, activist, chain smoker and unfortunately role model for my girlfriend. George says Vera was murdered – shot – and was apparently dumped in the Thames some time ago,” Henry said, thinking. “Mind you, she knew how to make enemies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Henry chuckled quietly.

  “I was convinced once that she was hitting on George. They have in the past spent a lot of time together, you know, sharing such similar journalistic interests. I didn’t like it.”

  “Was she a lesbian?”

  “Bi, I think.”

  They drove on in silence for a while, making little progress in the heavy traffic.

  “So was Vera successful?” Natasha teased.

  “Piss off, Sergeant,” Henry retorted.

  Natasha pushed her tongue out at him.

  “I know a Sergeant Davey Jordan down in Essex Constabulary. I could give him a call,” she said.

  *

  The next day Henry and Natasha found themselves on the bleak flat expanses of Purfleet’s marshes at Rainham. Used by the Ministry of Defence as a test firing range for nearly a hundred years, the desolate landscape still evoked a sinister sense of foreboding. The wet ground smelled strongly of sulphur from the decaying plant material in the peaty soil, softened only slightly by a salty breeze blowing across the Thames estuary from the east.

  “She was found in a shallow pool of water near the estuary bank,” Sergeant Jordan said, pointing at a watery area just ahead of them. “Roughly around there.”

  Silver-haired, square-jawed with an athletic physique, Jordan was wearing olive-green wellington boots and seemed quite at home trudging through the mud. Henry, on the other hand, stepped gingerly in his black Oxfords, but despite this his shoes still sank deep into the sucking quagmire. He could feel the dirty moisture squirting between his toes as his socks became saturated. Syrupy mud spattered his dark grey trousers.

  “Is there any unexploded ordnance left behind?” Henry asked as his feet sank yet again into the spongy surface, this time up to his ankles.

  “Hell, I hope not!” Jordan said. “Rainham Marshes is the biggest unspoiled tract of land around London, unchanged for hundreds of years. It attracts a lot of naturalists since the MoD abandoned it.”

  Henry surveyed the flat and desolate greenish landscape.

  “So she could well have been murdered upstream of here and dumped in the Thames?” he said.

  “We get a lot of floaters downstream from your patch. Unlikely she was murdered here as the landscape is too flat to hide a body for any length of time and this area is very popular with bird-watchers,” Jordan explained, drawing his arm across the sweep of the landscape.

  The marshes were teeming with wildlife: lizards writhed to safety amongst the undergrowth while avocets, lapwings and ringed plovers flapped and glided around the open skies. Little egrets darted across the mud pools, sending dragonflies buzzing into the air.

  Henry’s mass of curly hair was being blown asunder by the wind. He turned back to see Natasha still seated in the Mondeo. She hadn’t been enthusiastic about the tramp across the mud.

  “Cause of death?” Henry said.

  “She was pretty decomposed, having spent two or three weeks in the water, but we reckoned single gunshot to the head. What a head, mind you, size of a football.”

  Henry stopped in his tracks, the wind playing tricks in his ears.

  “What did you say?”

  “Gunshot to head, Inspector.”

  “No, about her head.”

  “Oh, it was unusually large for such a petite woman. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Henry paused. Coincidence, subjective misjudgement, damage from the gunshot – there could be dozens of explanations for an observation of a big head. But it caught his attention.

  “She hasn’t been cremated, has she?”

  “Her body is still up in Romford at the mortuary,” Jordan said, looking puzzled. “What’s your interest in this case?”

  Henry hesitated. The sergeant’s disclosure about Vera’s head was unexpected and unsettling. He tried to picture her face from the last time they had met and realized how little one ever appreciated of a woman’s cranial structure beneath a high street hairstyle, except of course, in the case of George, whose hair not only was shorter than his but whose bony contours he knew intimately.

  “I’m not sure yet. It’s a developing situation.”

  Henry could feel the beginnings of a severe headache coming on as his eyes began to throb in their sockets. He felt around for the familiar blister pack of ibuprofen in his coat pocket and decided he would ask Natasha for another scalp massage. She was proving very good at alleviating his insufferable malady.

  He returned to the car with one clear thought in his mind – he had to see Vera Schmidt’s body.

  Eight

  Hadamar, Germany, July 1936

  The black Opel Stabswagen bumped along narrow cobbled roads, jostling Obersturmführer Rolph Huber about on the firm rear seat, before turning sharply through the Limburg Gate into Hadamar’s Altstadt district. Huber perspired in the cramped back of the staff car as he admired his shiny new black uniform: the polished buttons; the silver insignia of three pips and two bars on his lapel; and, of course, the gleaming black patent leather jackboots.

  This was to be a new beginning for him, an exciting job prospect and an opportunity to move on and forget the past. He looked out of the small rear window at the quaint, timber-framed houses that lined the streets of the Altstadt.

  “Have you ever been to Hadamar before, Obersturmführer?” the uniformed driver asked him, glancing in the rear view mirror.

  “No, never,” Huber replied curtly, avoiding eye contact.

  The Stabswagen rattled over a centuries-old twin span stone bridge and then passed the
old timber-framed Rathaus, decorated and roofed in the typical Hadamar Baroque style.

  “How much longer? It’s stifling in this car,” Huber said, removing his black leather gloves and using them to fan his glowing face.

  “We are nearly there, Obersturmführer. You can see the hospital up ahead.”

  Huber craned his neck and peered through a grimy windscreen past the bulky frame of his driver. In the distance he could make out a large square brick building with very little redeeming architectural detail silhouetted against thick dark smoke that belched from a stubby brick chimney behind it. The smoke hung in the air above the little town, like a storm preparing to break. As the Stabswagen drew up on the gravel outside the simple main entrance, Huber felt both excited and filled with a sense of foreboding.

  “This is the Hadamar Psychiatric Institute, Obersturmführer,” the driver announced as he jumped out of the car and hinged the driver’s seat forward for Huber to clamber out of the cramped two-door vehicle.

  Huber paused outside the car and smoothed his neatly ironed black breeches and tunic, then adjusted his service pistol in its black leather holster before donning his gloves again. He studied the austere brick facade of the two-storey building, punctuated only by paired, elongated windows that were protected by sturdy security bars.

  “Rolph, is that you?” An officer wearing an identical neatly pressed black Schutztaffel uniform with black calf-length boots crunched across the gravel past the Stabswagen towards the main entrance. He paused at the foot of a short flight of stone steps and studied Huber.

  “Oskar?” Huber replied, squinting.

  “Of course it’s me!”

  They shook hands energetically. Oskar’s short, light brown hair was barely visible beneath the shiny black SS cap bearing the spread wings of the party eagle above a die-cast silver skull, the SS Totenkopf, at the front.

  “It is good to see you, my old friend,” Oskar said, a smile spreading across his youthful face.

  Huber noticed Oskar’s lapel insignia of three pips and four silver bands.