Blood Relative (31 page)

I turned and there was Meyer, running straight at me, his hands held low, a dull glint of light reflecting off the bare blade of the knife in his right hand. If he got close to me I was a dead man. But I still had one chance. I stepped towards him and before he could get his knife within range leaned forward and swung a wild right-handed punch, a crude, untrained haymaker towards the side of his head. I was at the very far limit of my reach, but Meyer can’t have been expecting such an aggressive response to his charge because his left arm was slow in coming up to block me. My arm skimmed over the top of his counter and smacked into his temple with all my fourteen and a half stones behind it.

Meyer went down like a cartoon cat that’s just run into a frying pan. At the same time an agonizing pain exploded through my right hand as my knuckles shattered against his skull. For a second the pain simply served to make me even angrier. As Meyer sank to his knees I swung my leg in a smooth, rugby punt arc that connected with the side of his chin, sending him sprawling unconscious across the path.

Tretow, however, was very much still with us. He still looked groggy and a little unsteady on his feet but he was getting better with every second that passed. Meanwhile, he too had taken out a knife – from the same coat pocket, perhaps, in which he’d claimed to be keeping photographs – and was coming towards me in a slow, crouching advance, the knife out in front of him.

He was armed and I was not. I’d had one lucky shot, but now I had to defend myself without the benefit of surprise. And this time I only had one working hand.

Keeping my eyes fixed firmly on Tretow’s knife hand, I stepped backwards. Directly behind me there was a gap between two stones: a cross-path intersecting with the one we were on. If I could get onto that there would be nothing to stop me making a run for it. I couldn’t hit Tretow any more. But there was no reason why I couldn’t outpace him.

I took another step back …

And tripped on Meyer’s outstretched arm.

I stumbled backwards, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the icy, snow-dusted slush until I finally lost balance and slipped backwards, instinctively putting my hands out to break my fall and screaming out in pain as my broken bones bore the full weight of my tumbling body against the rock-hard tiles from which the path was formed.

As I propped myself up on my elbows, Tretow appeared in the gap between the stones through which I had just fallen. His shoulders and chest were heaving for breath as he took another step towards me. I lashed out at him with my feet, hoping to hit him in the knee, or at least on the exposed shin bone, but he was able to turn so that my shoes simply collided with his calves, the force of their impact softened by the heavy flesh. I tried again, hoping to trip him this time, but he was ready for me, stepping past me to my left, squeezing between my body and the side of the nearest monolith, the knife coming ever closer to me.

In desperation I kicked my right leg up and across, aiming for his knife hand. Tretow swung the blade towards me and it slashed through the fabric of my jeans and cut across my shin.

Tretow took another pace and now he was standing right over me. I raised my left arm in a pitiful attempt to fend him off, but he knew I didn’t stand a chance.

His lips twisted into that predatory, blood-hungry smile and I knew in that moment that he was revisiting an old pleasure: he had killed before.

He leaned forward, grabbing my throat with his left hand as his right pulled back and cocked like the hammer of a revolver, ready to deliver the first deadly stab to my guts. I should have been terrified, but in that moment the sensation that filled me was a strange kind of acceptance. My brother had been killed by the cut of a knife and now I was going to die the same way. It felt somehow like an act of atonement, as though I were paying the price for my wife’s act of sin.

For a moment Tretow’s face was just a few centimetres from my own, the reek of his aftershave was almost overpowering and his voice was as soft and coaxing as a lover’s caress as he purred, ‘The answer was in the allotment.’

He seemed to gather himself, summoning all his force for the killing blow …

And then his face disintegrated, right before my eyes, as a deafening crack echoed between the concrete slabs. An explosion of blood, bone fragments and grey brain matter spattered across my face, the bones stabbing me like acupuncture needles, and there was a clatter behind me: the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the path and embedding itself in concrete.

Tretow’s body slumped forward onto mine, forcing me back to the ground in a gruesome embrace. As I lay there, pinned to the cold, wet, iron-hard path, I screamed, ‘Get off me!’ and swiped my hands across my face, frantically trying to get the contents of Tretow’s skull off my skin and hair. Then I saw a pair of women’s leather boots below tight-cut blue jeans and heard the sound of Gerber’s voice, like an irritable wife upbraiding a wandering husband as she said, ‘You should have told me where you were going.’

But I wasn’t paying any attention to her. A sense of calm was slowly cutting through the disgust, the nausea and the panic of my death embrace with Hans-Peter Tretow as I realized that my quest had finally reached its holy grail. Now I knew why Mariana had killed my brother. And I knew what had made her do it, too.

48

THURSDAY

They took me to the nearest casualty department and I was shoved full of painkillers while my hand was x-rayed and plastered and my lower leg stitched up. With my one working hand I washed Tretow’s bloody remains from my face and then stuck my head under the tap, tunelessly humming, ‘I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.’ It was gallows humour, the song of a man who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death and somehow come out the other side.

While I was still in the hospital Gerber and Weiss interviewed me about the sequence of events that had led me to the showdown with Tretow at the Holocaust Memorial. I had a question for Gerber, too: ‘How did you find me in there?’

‘With difficulty. I had put a tracker into the lining of your coat while you were talking to Wahrmann. It was my opinion, and that of my colleagues, that you might try to do something reckless. But Tretow chose the worst possible place for me to find you. There are almost three thousand of those concrete slabs and each one of them provides excellent cover, as well as interfering with any kind of signal. It was only when you shouted out in pain that I was able to get a bearing on where you were.’

I looked at the massive plaster mitten through which only the tips of my fingers were visible: ‘So breaking my knuckles saved my life … doesn’t seem too much of a price to pay.’

‘It saved your life twice over since you also disabled Meyer.’

‘Will he live?’

‘Oh yes. He has a little concussion, some whiplash on his neck. That is all.’

‘And Tretow … He said something to me, just before he died. “The answer was in the allotment.”’

Weiss frowned. ‘Do you know what he meant by that?’

‘Yes, I think so. There were allotments near the orphanage. They’re still there, even though the orphanage itself has gone. Anyway, Tretow had one of them. He used to take the kids there, his favourites. I think you’ll find something there. Something that explains exactly what he did.’

‘We’ll start a search in the morning, at first light.’

‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘When I was talking to Tretow he said he still had films of the kids with men. Important men. You should try to get hold of them before someone else does.’

Weiss glanced at Gerber and she rose to her feet, pulling her mobile out of her bag. As she left the room she was already giving instructions to organize a search of Tretow’s home. I turned back to Weiss: ‘He also said he had pictures … of my wife Mariana, when she was little. He said they were—’

‘We found them in his coat,’ Weiss said, gently interrupting me. ‘They are – how should I say this – very explicit, very disturbing. I would not advise you to look at them now. But maybe we could make copies of them for the benefit of your wife’s lawyers. They would, perhaps, help in her defence.’

‘Thank you.’ I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking of the photographs of herself that Mariana had sent me years before. Had she been aware of the echoes from her childhood, or was she unconsciously playing out the same scenarios as she exposed herself to the camera lens: compelled to do it, but not knowing why?

‘So what will you do now?’ Weiss asked. ‘I can have someone take you back to your hotel. Perhaps you can get an hour or two of sleep before you fly home.’

‘Not yet. There’s somewhere else I have to go first, someone I need to see.’

49

It was half past five in the morning, still pitch-dark outside and hardly a sociable time to pay a visit. Still I pressed my finger to the doorbell and kept it there, even when there was no answer for ten seconds, thirty … almost a minute before the intercom crackled and a tired, cross voice asked, ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Crookham, we need to talk.’

‘Go away. I have nothing more to say to you.’

‘Please, wait … Tretow is dead. You’re safe now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s dead, I promise. Let me in and I’ll explain it all …’

Heike Schmidt pressed the buzzer, the lock clicked open and I went up to her apartment. She brewed some coffee, we sat down at her kitchen table and I gave her a version of the account I’d provided for Gerber and Weiss, minus Tretow’s remarks about Schmidt herself.

Schmidt was sceptical, almost indifferent at first. But as my story went on and she came to believe that it might be true I could see her interest, attention and even excitement rising. From time to time she interrupted, asking me for extra details, or making me repeat a section she particularly liked, so that I felt almost like a father reading his child a bedtime story. And there was something childlike about her relish of the more gruesome aspects of the story.

‘Did his head just splatter, like a watermelon?’ she asked me after I’d described Tretow’s final moment.

‘I suppose so. Something like that.’

‘And you were covered with his actual brains?’

‘Yes,’ I almost retched. ‘It wasn’t very pleasant.’

‘Yuck! … So he’s absolutely certainly dead? He can’t ever get better?’

‘No. He’s gone forever and he’s not coming back.’

I felt as though I’d been talking to Schmidt’s eight-or nine-year-old self. The abused and exploited girl that had been hidden away inside her for so long was crawling back out into the light.

‘Now can I ask you some questions?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ she replied.

‘There are really just two things I want to know. The first sounds absurd, I know, but did Tretow ever wear aftershave when you knew him?’

Schmidt did not say a word. Instead, she burst out laughing, and not just for a second or two, but a full-blown attack of the giggles. A couple of times she tried to compose herself enough to talk, but then she collapsed again, leaving me unnerved, even alarmed by her manic emotion. I felt embarrassed. Finally, Schmidt took a deep breath, wiped the tears from her eyes and said, ‘Yes, he certainly did wear aftershave. In fact …’ she started to giggle again. ‘In fact … Control yourself, Heike! … In fact, we used to call him Mister Stinky because he always smelled so strongly. And the stuff he used was really horrible, too!’

‘Privileg?’ I asked.

‘Yes! That’s so funny! How did you know?’ she squealed delightedly. ‘When he first arrived at the orphanage he used to talk about the good old days when he had the finest French and American cologne. But now he had to make do with … what did he call it? Yes, “cheap communist muck”. Later, when … when we were all working for him, he sometimes got good stuff again. But we still called him Mister Stinky anyway.’

Suddenly the demon that had haunted my imagination from the night of Andy’s murder was brought right down to size. He was nothing more than Mr Stinky, a grubby pervert who soaked himself in cheap, malodorous perfume to cover the stench of his corruption.

‘Why did you want to know about Privileg?’ Schmidt asked.

‘My brother had found some while he was here. I think he was wearing it on the night he died. I think the smell of it and the memories it brought back was what made Mariana … you know, go crazy.’

‘My God, that’s terrible. Do you think he knew about Tretow, that he used to wear it?’

‘No, I’m certain he didn’t. Knowing Andy, he’d have done it as a joke.’

‘But not a funny joke, I am afraid …’

‘No, and my next question isn’t much fun, either … I have to know: what happened at Tretow’s allotment?’

Heike Schmidt said nothing. She sat quite still for several seconds then got up and went to her kettle, the old-fashioned metal kind, sitting on a gas hob. She fussed with it distractedly as she made herself another cup of coffee.

‘Want one?’ she said, not even bothering to turn in my direction.

‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

She opened a drawer in the unit next to the oven and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Supposed to have given up,’ she said. Any hint of childish innocence had disappeared now. This was an adult woman: one who had seen and suffered too much.

She held her hair back with one hand as she bent down to get a light from the hob. Finally, she brought her coffee cup and a saucer over to the table with her as she sat back down. She flicked some ash into the saucer: ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

‘Of course not. Go ahead.’

Schmidt smoked her cigarette right down to the filter, not saying a word before she finally stubbed it out in the saucer. Then she grimaced. ‘Stale … tasted horrible.’ She swallowed some coffee to take away the taste of the tobacco. Only when all that was done did she start to answer my question.

‘Tretow always made it very clear to the children that, you know, worked for him, that we must never tell anyone what went on between us and the men: not even our closest friends, not even the children who came with us on his “little trips to the country”. This was our special secret. I mean we all knew, of course, because we were all doing …’