The White Gallows (49 page)

‘You’re trying to play games, Superintendent. My client does not wish to answer.’

‘Is that what you think the problem is? Is playing games the preserve of lawyers only? You’re not even giving your client the chance to confirm the answer to a simple yes or no question. You’re answering for him. He’s already answered “no”. I’m asking him to confirm his answer. If the answer is in fact yes, then he was at the scene of a murder at the time that it approximately occurred. If the answer is no then…’ McEvoy shrugged.

‘No,’ Koch said panicking. ‘The answer is…’

‘We are not prepared to answer any more questions until I have consulted with my client,’ Rice interrupted quickly. ‘Privately.’

‘That was the wrong answer, Professor Koch,’ McEvoy said with satisfaction. ‘You see, we
know
that you were there yesterday morning. The killer’s footprints had been over-stamped by your horse’s. You’ve not had chance to return since, so it could only have happened when you were there meeting Mr O’Coffey. By answering no you’ve caught yourself in a lie. Juries don’t like lies. But they do like concrete, forensic evidence.’

‘I demand some time to talk to my client,’ John Rice snapped.

‘Okay, I did ride past the field but it was empty,’ Koch conceded.

‘Charles,’ Rice warned.

‘I never met Peter O’Coffey,’ Koch finished.

‘But surely you’d have seen him in the field if your horse’s hoof prints were over the top of the killers?’

‘I didn’t look into the field,’ Koch said pulling an amused smirk. ‘And who’s to say I was passing at the time of the murder? It could have occurred either before or after I went by.’

‘And yet your horse’s hoof prints are scattered all over the gateway as if he’d been tied up there.’

Koch stayed silent.

‘And the killer’s footprints were mixed in with your horse’s. In fact, some of his prints were over the horse’s and vice versa. The only way that could have happened is if whoever the killer is got off and on the horse. Which means you are the killer, Professor Koch. You killed Peter O’Coffey.’

Koch cast his gaze down to his hands and stayed silent.

‘Superintendent, I’d like to consult with my client,’ Rice said firmly but lacking his usual edge.

‘Absolutely,’ McEvoy said standing, feeling a swell of confidence in his chest. ‘We will find additional forensics to place you at the scene, Professor Koch – traces of cordite or blood or mud on your clothes and shoes or on your horse or his tack.’

As McEvoy reached the door, Koch cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t intend to kill him, Superintendent,’ he said calmly.

‘Pardon?’ McEvoy said startled, turning back to face him.

‘I said, I didn’t intend to kill him…’

‘Charles, I strongly advise you to…’

Koch placed a hand on Rice’s sleeve to silence him.

‘They have all the evidence they need, John. As the Superintendent says, they’ll find more. Why fight it? Murder seems to be in our nature – first my father, then my son and now…’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve all taken another person’s life.’

‘Charles, I really think that you…’ Rice persisted.

‘John, it’s over,’ Koch said more harshly. ‘Even your brilliance isn’t going to get me out of this.’

‘You shot Peter O’Coffey,’ McEvoy prompted, sitting back down at the table, amazed at Koch’s change in attitude.

‘He wouldn’t listen to reason; he wanted too much for Francie’s freedom.’

‘So you decided to silence him?’

‘It was the only way,’ Koch said neutrally. ‘I tried to make it look like suicide. I obviously failed. He
had
been involved in the death of my father. Do you know what I was thinking when I made him kneel down in the mud? Nothing. My mind was a complete blank. I could have been peeling potatoes. I knew then how my father could have killed all those people. They were nothing to him. They were just potatoes.’

Koch stopped and McEvoy stayed silent waiting for him to continue. John Rice had folded his arms, tipped his head back and was staring at the blistered paint on the ceiling, obviously fuming at his client’s foolishness.

‘He begged me for his life, you know. Begged. It was pathetic. We both knew that if I let him walk away he would come running to you. He wouldn’t have accepted a single payment; he would have kept coming back for more. It was bad enough that those Yellow Star scum and the press wanted to try and destroy us - we expected that; but someone we took in and helped? We rescued his great aunt from shame and poverty and took on her daughter as one of our own. We gave his grandfather work and helped him establish their farm and that’s how he tried to repay us? I thought I would feel remorse afterwards, but I felt nothing. Nothing then, nothing now. I guess I am my father’s son.’

‘And you were at your father’s house on Saturday night?’ McEvoy prompted.

‘I thought I’d have the place to myself given Roza was away for the evening. It seems I wasn’t the only one.’

‘You found your father in the library?’

‘I thought he was just unconscious at first. I carried him up to his bed and then went to look for his attackers. I assumed it was those two yids who’d been making trouble, asking their stupid questions. When I returned he was dead. My father knew that someone might come one day to kill him. He didn’t want any publicity. He looked like he’d just passed away in his sleep so I tidied up the house and left. I told Marion in the morning. She was to look after the funeral arrangements.’

‘Only Roza had called the guards,’ McEvoy stated.

‘I’d forgotten that Roza might return early in the morning. Marion was apoplectic.’ Koch smiled to himself. ‘She always had a short fuse.’

‘Why were you there? In the middle of the night?’

‘His will.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I was looking for his will. I knew that he’d altered it. I was afraid of what he’d done. He seemed to have become a changed man in recent months; he’d become more… distant; introspective. He was losing his mind and God knows what he’d done. I needed to check for myself and it seems I was right to be worried. A few months ago and he’d never have made a will like that. What a mess.’

‘And did you find it? Was it you that sent it around to everyone?’

‘Me? No, no. My guess is that was Stefan Freel stirring things up. He was the one with the most to gain. He’ll have wanted it in the public domain before Henry Collier produced the old will instead.’

‘And Francis?’ McEvoy prompted.

‘I didn’t know Francis and Peter had killed my father until I met Peter yesterday morning. I should have known it was them. They were obsessed with finding the vault. They’d been searching for the rumoured hoard of hidden Nazi gold since they were children. They were obsessed by it.’

‘You knew about the vault?’

‘I was there when it was built. I discovered a way in not long after. It was my playground; my library. I helped him build it up over the years. It’s probably one of the best private collections in the world,’ he said proudly and paused. ‘I knew all about my father’s past, Superintendent. He never confided in me, but we both knew I knew. The evidence was all around me.’

‘And you weren’t appalled by it? That he’d helped kill thousands of people?’

‘He was a product of his time and culture,’ Koch said evenly. ‘He’d been taught to hate the Jews with a passion. They all were – Hitler’s generation. He did what the regime required him to do.’

‘So he was just following orders?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even if those orders were to murder innocent people?’

‘They weren’t innocent. Not to the Nazis. They were the enemy; the reason that Germany had been on its knees. They were the parasites that were sucking away the good life.’

‘So an entire race deserved to be wiped from the face of the earth?’

‘He didn’t invent the final solution, Superintendent.’

‘But he did help enact it. He did take part in the Jewish Skeleton Project. He was more than a guard at Auschwitz. And what about the underground museum? Why collect all that memorabilia?’

‘The war affected my father deeply. It haunted him constantly that Germany lost and surrendered unconditionally. That all the cities were flattened. Everything destroyed. That the country was split in two. He was a believer in National Socialism – he felt it was his duty to preserve the past; to collect material so that he could try and understand how it all went wrong. Every spare moment he spent reading from his library.’

‘So why did you help him?’

‘I was his son, why wouldn’t I have helped him?’

John Rice tipped his head forward and shook it gently.

‘Because he was a war criminal. You knew, yet you did nothing about it.’

‘He acted under orders. It was war. Awful things happen during a war.’

‘He killed numerous people in cold blood, many of them fellow Germans.’

‘They’d been sentenced to death.’

‘By who? There was no trial, no judge, no jury! They were innocent victims who’d been rounded up, put on a train and taken to a monstrosity of a place to be killed and incinerated – wiped from the face of the Earth.’

‘He did what he needed to do to survive and to try and help his country win the war.’

‘If he loved his country so much, why did he come to Ireland? Why didn’t he stay in Germany after the war and help to rebuild it?’

‘You know why,’ Koch said calmly, picking at a fingernail. ‘He would have been persecuted and possibly executed as a scapegoat for Hitler’s madness. My father did not start the war, nor did he order the killing of the Jews. He was an ordinary German caught up in extraordinary times.’

‘He could have taken a different path.’

‘You think people had choices? People did what they were told.’

‘I thought you said he was a believer in National Socialism? He was a follower, an instigator, not some passive puppet; he actively sought to realise Hitler’s vision.’

Koch snorted derision. ‘Now you’re just trying to twist my words. My father did his duty, nothing more, nothing less.’

‘And what about your father’s will? It seems as if he changed his mind. It suggests that he saw himself guilty of a significant crime. After all, he left a fortune to Holocaust charities.’

Koch shook his head slowly. ‘The family will be contesting the will. He was an old man; he’d started to become confused. He was losing his mind.’

‘Or gaining it,’ McEvoy parried. ‘Along with a conscience.’

‘Ostara Industries was not built on the back of the Holocaust! My father built it by himself through hard work and vision. We owe the Jews nothing. You hear, nothing!’

McEvoy slowly shook his head. ‘Ostara Industries was founded on money stolen from two banks in 1955.’

‘Now you’re just being facile. You’ll never meet a man who worked as hard as my father. Never. Why would he rob a bank?’

‘Why would he kill innocent people?’

‘They weren’t innocent! There’s no such thing as innocence – only degrees of guilt.’

McEvoy sighed. It didn’t matter what he said, Charles Koch would always be an apologist for his father. There was a remote possibility that Koch was simply following orders during the war, but that didn’t negate the criminality of the acts. Yellow Star’s evidence though suggested that he’d been a proactive participant. He’d murdered several, powerless people and participated in genocide, taking an active role in the Jewish Skeleton Project of the Abnenebre. His actions were indefensible however much his son protested.