The Girl in Berlin (26 page)

Biermann’s body lay slumped face downwards on the floor in the hallway, where he’d been shot.

‘A professional job?’ Slater looked at the pathologist. ‘It looks efficient.’

‘Possibly.’

Slater squatted down and looked closely at the dead man sprawled against the skirting board. He shook his head and stood up again. He turned to Jarrell. ‘We’d better have a look around.’

‘His girlfriend wasn’t here?’

The uniformed sergeant looked at Jarrell. ‘What girlfriend?’

‘There was a young lady living here as well.’

‘How do you know that? She’s not here now.’

‘Obviously not.’

The sergeant lost interest, the body was hauled on to a
canvas stretcher and Jarrell and Slater were alone. Leaving Jarrell in the untidy living room, Slater made a rapid first reconnoitre of the rest of the flat and returned.

‘We’d better do a search,’ he said grimly. ‘There’s just a small kitchen and bathroom and a bedroom, that’s all. You search the bathroom and bedroom. I’ll start in here. After that we’ll talk to the neighbours.’

Jarrell began with the bathroom. There was nothing to interest him. The rickety wall cabinet contained only routine chemists’ remedies: milk of magnesia, aspirin, some antiseptic ointment and some plasters. Neither basin nor bath, grey-rimmed from the hard London water, had been cleaned for some time. Toothpaste smeared the glass shelf below the mirror. Jarrell looked at his own reflection with distaste, but the general disorder offended his fastidious nature even more. What a couple of bohemians they were! It was a painful contrast with the comfortable, orderly home in High Barnet he shared with his parents and younger sister.

It was also depressing to be indoors on such a lovely day. The glass in the small, half-opened window was of a familiar frosted pattern of fleur-de-lis; the metal frame was rusted. He stared out at a white wall and when he turned away the pattern continued to throb, floating hotly in front of his eyes. He shook his head and forced himself to move on.

The bedroom was obviously shared. The bed was unmade. On each side of it stood a packing case serving as bedside table and each holding a small lamp. The clothes crushed into the narrow wardrobe were both men’s and women’s. Several pairs of boots and shoes were tumbled at the bottom. The top of the chest of drawers was crammed with books, papers, a packet of condoms, some make-up and a biscuit box containing jewellery, some of which looked valuable, because the rings were neat and small, the thin chains obviously gold. They reminded Jarrell of his grandmother. Papers were stacked on the floor:
newspapers, what looked like typed articles and notes, mixed with Communist Party leaflets and booklets.

Jarrell pulled out each drawer and searched thoroughly among the sweaters, shirts and women’s underwear. It would be necessary at some point to read through at least all the typed notes, yet he was convinced he’d find nothing that he didn’t know already.

‘Come and look at this,’ called Slater.

Leaving the stacks of papers, Jarrell obeyed.

‘I’ve found his diary.’ Slater waved a small, leather notebook. ‘And some research of some kind in this folder. You’d better have a look. It’s more your area.’

‘It’s a shame DI McGovern isn’t here,’ murmured Jarrell, ‘he’d be much better at this than me.’

‘Take a quick look – we’ll take it away with us if it seems interesting and you can go through it properly later.’

Jarrell sat down on the sofa and opened the black ringfolder Slater had handed him. The top sheet was a hand-written letter from an address in Yorkshire and began, ‘Dear Comrade’. The letter concerned a local association of resettled Ukrainians and the writer was writing to Biermann in his former capacity as a reporter on the
Daily Worker
, assuming, or hoping, that he would pass the information on and that the paper would investigate what he claimed were fascist interlopers in the Dales.

Biermann had evidently followed up the information. There was a stonewalling letter from a government department, notes and some cuttings from local newspapers, and a petulant handwritten letter from someone who seemed to have been part of the postwar refugee-vetting operation. There was also a name, Mihaili Kozko, written on a sheet of otherwise blank paper.

‘Biermann went to see Eberhardt a number of times,’ said Slater, who was reading through the diary.

‘We know they knew each other,’ said Jarrell wearily. ‘Don’t
we need to talk to his girlfriend – if we can find out where she is? We’ll have to tell her—’

Ignoring this, Slater said: ‘Let’s take as much of this stuff as we can carry away with us and go and talk to the neighbours.’ As they left, Jarrell made sure he had the Ukrainian material and he also slipped Biermann’s diary into the bag.

The small block had three floors with two flats on each floor. It didn’t take them long to work through them. Most of the occupants were out on this beautiful weekday afternoon – or had chosen to lie low behind locked doors – but an elderly woman, in the flat below Biermann’s, said she had heard a ‘funny noise’ and someone running down the communal concrete stairs. Pressed, she admitted she had looked out of the window and had caught a glimpse of a man walking away towards the main road, but she’d seen only his back and couldn’t describe him other than to say he was ‘biggish’ and wearing ‘rough clothes’. She spoke warmly of Alice Bridgenorth. ‘She’s ever so kind, poor thing,’ said the old lady. ‘She goes to the shops for me sometimes. When I’m feeling poorly. She said she was going to stay with her parents. They live in the country somewhere.’ Then with that special expression Jarrell had noticed women used when imparting morally dubious news, she added in a stage whisper, ‘Mind you, I don’t think they were married.’

They crossed the road and knocked on the doors of the little houses opposite. The three women and two men who’d been watching the scene as Slater and Jarrell arrived all denied seeing anyone. No-one had heard a shot and they’d emerged onto the pavement or looked out of a window only when the siren of the ambulance had alerted them to the drama playing out across the road.

Slater insisted on going for a drink. Jarrell had no objection to working with Slater while McGovern was away and since Slater’s sergeant, Monkhouse, had fortuitously been suspended
after a serious accident while driving a police car, the arrangement had become almost inevitable. What Jarrell did object to was what he viewed as Slater’s lax approach. Still, he was pleased to be at the heart of the investigation. But instead of discussing the case, as he’d hoped, Slater was soon laughing and exchanging police gossip with another colleague. Jarrell sipped his Rose’s lime juice.

‘I found an address for his girlfriend’s parents,’ he said. ‘Might she be staying up there? It’s in Northampton. I could phone the local constabulary, or phone the parents. There’s a number as well.’

‘Why don’t you toddle off and do that, Jarrell. Instead of sitting there like a constipated virgin.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Yeah, yeah, off you go.’ Slater waved him away with a genial smile, but Jarrell heard merriment behind him as he crossed the saloon bar. No doubt they had him down as one of the weird Special Branch nutters, but he didn’t care.

He took the underground to Sloane Square. From there he caught a bus to World’s End and thence to a pleasant house behind a high wall in this Fulham backwater. Slater hadn’t noticed that Jarrell still had the bag of papers from the flat but anyway he wouldn’t (unlike the protocol-mad Monkhouse) have been too bothered that Jarrell was enough of a work-obsessed fanatic to want to work on them at home. But before studying the papers Jarrell had decided to talk to Mrs Garfield.

It took rather a long time for Mrs Garfield to open the front door in response to his ring and when she did it was clear to Jarrell, with his hyper-sensitive teetotaller’s antennae for alcohol, that she’d been drinking. But she was coherent and friendly and soon he was seated opposite her in yet another chaotically untidy living space, this time a high-ceilinged drawing room with chintz armchairs and sofa and a huge gilt mirror over the marble chimneypiece.

Mildred Garfield gestured to the sofa and raised a halfempty bottle of wine in an invitation to Jarrell to join her. So insistent was she that in the end he was forced to declare himself an abstainer.

‘Good heavens, how very amusing. I thought the police all drank like fish.’

‘I’m the exception that proves the rule,’ he replied, not untruthfully. ‘Look, I’m afraid I’ve some very bad news,’ he said. ‘Someone who was at your husband’s funeral has been shot – murdered, in fact. Alexander Biermann.’

Mildred Garfield stared at Jarrell with her large, watery blue eyes. For a moment she seemed not to take in the information, but then she murmured: ‘Oh … oh … but that’s terrible.’ She drained her glass and poured more wine into it. ‘How on earth … oh, what a dreadful thing to happen.’ She sat staring in front of her.

Jarrell tried to choose his words carefully. ‘I don’t suppose you knew him well, I suppose he was a friend of your husband, was he, but I wondered – when was the last time you saw him?’

‘It was only the day before yesterday,’ she murmured and now her large eyes began to fill with tears.

‘I’m really sorry to upset you, Mrs Garfield,’ said Jarrell, ‘but it would be very helpful if you could tell me how he seemed. Was he worried about anything, for example?’

Mildred Garfield shook her head. ‘Alex wasn’t the worrying type,’ and she smiled. ‘He was always full of what he was doing, his enthusiasm of the moment. We talked about Konrad – Konrad Eberhardt. He knew Konrad well, had done since childhood and Konrad was a good friend of my late husband. Mind you, they’d had disagreements recently, but …’

Maybe it was a waste of time, but Jarrell asked anyway. ‘What sort of disagreements?’

Mildred Garfied was still dabbing tears from her eyes with an
already sodden handkerchief, but she managed a watery smile. ‘I shouldn’t mention it, I suppose. Of course, it was a secret, but – well, poor Bill isn’t here any more and …’ She paused. ‘They were both very much against Stalin, you know. I suppose you’d call them anti-communists, they were very caught up in all this Cold War business. Bill was a bit obsessed, I thought, I told him so. Myself, I think they’re all the same in the end, left, right. Well, anyway, politics bores me. They do nothing but argue. All those arguments, oh, how boring they are, I get so sick of all the opinions … but Konrad and Bill – they thought they were doing the right thing – you know, passing on information to the authorities, about people they thought were pro-Russian, friends of theirs, you understand. I thought it was a bit … well, not quite the done thing, I suppose, but … you know, it was always impossible to argue with Bill and—’ The sentence faded away into a shrug. After a pause she continued: ‘Bill worked for intelligence during the war and he knew one or two people and he used to drop the odd hint now and then, that’s all it was. Of course he – we – continued to move in those sort of … you know … circles, and people trusted him, so … he thought he was doing the right thing, of course.’

Her tone implied that although some might take a different view, words such as ‘informant’ or ‘treachery’ would be too harsh.

Jarrell was fascinated to hear that Bill Garfield, the well-known, even famous, leftish writer had been grassing up his friends, but he didn’t want to lose the thread. ‘Was that what he and Dr Eberhardt disagreed about?’

‘No … on the contrary, Konrad and Bill were all in that together. In fact, Konrad worked more closely with … you know … the secret services than Bill. He felt very strongly about some of the things communists had done and he was very argumentative, he always thought he was right and he could be quite vindictive as well, I honestly didn’t like him very much – and
once his wife died, after Greta passed away, he was always a bit smelly and unkempt.’ She smiled again. ‘Oh dear, that’s rather an awful thing to say. Let’s just say he was a bit lost after she’d gone.’

‘Did you know about Alex’s plan to get Dr Eberhardt back to Germany?’

‘That was what Konrad and Bill argued about! They fell out over that. Konrad kept changing his mind about everything. Bill thought he was mad! I secretly thought he might be happier if he went back to Germany, but Bill – well, so far as Bill was concerned, Konrad had betrayed all his anti-communist ideals.’ She lifted the bottle, but it was empty. ‘If you’ll just excuse me for a moment—’

When she returned with a fresh bottle, Jarrell watched her walk unsteadily across the room. She was eccentrically dressed in a long skirt with a fringed hem that looked like a curtain and a clashing Tyrolean sweater and had bound round her shoulders an embroidered Chinese shawl.

‘Are you
sure
you won’t join me?’

Jarrell shook his head firmly. ‘Did Alex Biermann talk to you about his work at all? He was interested in some refugees, refugee communities in the north of England?’ He looked hopefully at Mildred Garfield, but with a bewildered expression she pressed her hand to her breast. ‘I just can’t believe he’s been –
murdered
, you said. Who on earth would want to murder Alex? He was just the sweetest, oh, the
sweetest
boy.’

And Jarrell, although he was only twenty-five years old, knew without a shadow of doubt that this was the moment the truth about Alex Biermann’s fate had finally hit her. He wasn’t going to get any more information out of her, for now she finally burst into floods of tears.

twenty-six

A
S SOON AS MCGOVERN CAME
alongside the car he knew he’d made a mistake. But it was already too late. There were three of them. The rear door was opened and they bundled him into the back before he had time to retreat. One moment he was there, free, stopping, looking at the black sedan, deciding to turn back; the next he’d been grabbed, kicked as he was shoved into the car, held down and blindfolded. He’d been hit with the butt of a revolver and now his head was held downwards against a pair of knees clad in rough material. He was in near agony from the cold, greasy metal of the gun pressed against the jawbone behind his ear. He dared not even try to raise his head. He smelled dust, metal, petrol, cigarette smoke.