The Divided City - The Ashes of Berlin by Luke McCallin

Author:Luke McCallin [McCallin, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780698407220
Publisher: Berkley Books; Penguin Random House
Published: 2016-10-31T14:21:06+00:00

29

THURSDAY

“So, what’s your plan for this investigation, Reinhardt?” Weber asked, a facetious edge to his voice. “To wait until a body turns up in every building in Berlin?”

The hotel was the Am Zoo, a good establishment on the Kurfürstendamm in the British sector. It was something of a miracle it was actually open, but Allied bombing and the Soviet assault had only damaged but not destroyed it. The hotel staff had finally opened the guest’s room—a man called Jürgen from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, created just last year by the British—after he had failed to keep an appointment and they went to the room to check on him. Jürgen, who Reinhardt now knew as one of IV./JG56’s pilots, was laid out on his bed, dressed in a dark suit. Reinhardt knew with Weber here, he need not worry about Ganz or Tanneberger bestirring themselves to actually be at a crime scene, let alone one so early in the morning, but his mind was at once too fugged to care, and too focused on what he saw in front of him.

From the look of the body, Jürgen had not been dead long. Certainly not more than a day or so, that was clear, meaning the killer was still killing, still moving around the city. The ex-pilot lay on his bed, faceup and, unlike the other bodies, his arms were still tied to the head of the bed by lengths of rope, and the skin was raw and livid from where, it seemed, he had struggled against his attacker. A dark tie curled across the white of Jürgen’s shirtfront, and his head and shoulders were covered in a dusting of grit. Sand, Reinhardt was sure, forced down the man’s mouth. Jürgen’s shirtfront was unbuttoned, and he carefully separated it to reveal a massive bruise across his chest.

“The same killer?” Weber asked. Reinhardt nodded. Weber pursed his lips, nodding his head, as if it affirmed something for him, but when Reinhardt glanced at him from the corner of his eye, the young detective was chewing his lip, his attention focused on something elsewhere, and there was a trace of amusement in the angle of his mouth. Probably picturing Reinhardt in Margraff’s office explaining the city’s rising body count, he imagined, not liking the self-pity that tinged his thoughts. Taking a deep breath, Reinhardt gently prised open Jürgen’s jaw, a trickle of wet sand flickering from the corner of the body’s mouth. Reinhardt opened Jürgen’s mouth wider, saw within the packed outline of sand. Bruising around Jürgen’s mouth and nose indicated the killer had clamped his nose and mouth shut as the man asphyxiated.

“May I see his documents, please?”

Weber handed over an identity card from Cologne, in the British Occupation Zone. Jürgen’s face stared up blandly from the card, older by nearly ten years from the photograph in his soldbuch that Reinhardt had seen hours earlier.

“What else did you find?” Reinhardt directed his question at Weber, and at an elderly uniformed officer, a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.