Death in Berlin: A Mystery Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  By the same author

  Death in Berlin

  Copyright

  TO

  all those Army wives who like myself

  have followed the drum

  Author’s Note

  This story is set in the battered Berlin of 1953—eight years after the end of World War II and eight years before the infamous Berlin Wall went up, cutting off all free communication between the East and West sectors of the city.

  My husband’s British regiment was already serving in Germany when they received orders to move to Berlin, and within less than ten days of our arrival he himself was suddenly transferred to a new post in England, where there was no immediate accommodation available for his family—myself and our two small daughters. He departed alone, leaving us behind until such time as an army quarter could be found for us, and it was during the following few weeks of waiting that I thought up the plot for this book—largely as a result of long walks through the green, leafy suburbs between the Herr Strasse and the Grünewald where there were any number of ruined, roofless houses in which the Nazi élite had once lived, and wondering what their late owners had been like and what had become of them?

  The Berlin I have described here is the Berlin I saw then. For being at a loose end I had plenty of time on my hands, and I spent a great deal of it exploring and taking notes for future use: scribbling down detailed descriptions of the ruined city, where the worst of the devastation was in the sector occupied by the Russians. Making rough sketches of the Maifeld, that vast, pretentious stadium-complex that Hitler had had built in the 1930s for the Olympic Games, and which later became the setting for innumerable Nazi rallies—and later still, after a brief period of Russian occupation, the headquarters of the British sector.

  I also made notes on other things besides scenery and ruins. Small incidents that I thought might come in useful, such as the fact that only a few hours after our arrival at the original, ramshackle Families’ Hostel, where we had to spend a night or two before moving into our army quarter, I happened to catch a glimpse of the woman who would be allotted to us as our cook-housekeeper. She had, it seemed, dropped in to visit a friend who worked at the hostel.

  My husband, Goff Hamilton, says that his own clearest memory of his first brief stay in Berlin is of finding me standing in the dusk one evening beside the big outdoor swimming-pool in the Stadium area, staring down at the dark stagnant water with its ‘anti-freeze’ criss-cross of heavy straw cables, and replying (when he remarked a shade tartly that he presumed I was busy drowning someone in there?), ‘Yes, I’ve had an idea about that straw…’ The trials of a man whose wife writes murder stories!

  Goff was a major at that time, and when, six years later, he returned to command the British sector’s Berlin Brigade, we lived in a lovely house complete with a heated swimming-pool and a spectacular view over the Havelsee; and I could barely recognize the city as the Berlin I had described in this book, for by that time most of the ruins had disappeared: from the British sector, at least. The Russians too had vanished from the Rundfunk; though they still mounted a guard on a memorial they had built on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, and took their turn at garrisoning Spandau gaol, ostensibly to keep an eye on its three remaining Nazi inmates, but obviously because it allowed them to keep a foot inside the West Berlin door! The ruined Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche on the Kurfürstendamm, that had once seemed to me so strangely beautiful, had by now been pared down to a single broken spire which, in the guise of a war memorial, had been incorporated in a new and very modernistic church where it no longer looked like some romantic ruin from Angkor Wat, but regrettably like the stump of a blackened and rotted tooth that should have been pulled out long ago.

  A few months before we left, The Wall went up. And with its rise many fond hopes for the future of humanity came tumbling down. I watched it being built: which is possibly why, when I look back, I think that I prefer the battered but more hopeful Berlin of 1953.

  Prologue

  With nightfall the uneasy wind that had sighed all day through the grass and the gorse bushes at the cliff edge died away, and a cold fog crawled in from the sea, obliterating the darkening coastline and muting the drag of waves on shingle to a rhythmic murmur barely louder than the unrelenting and monotonous mutter of gunfire to the west.

  The hours crept by in silence until at last the moon rose, tingeing the fog with silver and bringing with it a night breeze that blew gently off the land and eddied but did not disperse the fog.

  Something that appeared to be a bent whin bush moved and stood upright, and a low voice spoke in the patois of that lonely stretch of coast: a man’s voice, barely above a whisper. ‘It is good. Now we go—but without noise. I go first, and each one will put the hand on him who is ahead. It is better to carry the children. Now______!’ There was a rustle that might have been the wind among the bushes and the harsh sea-grass as the little band of refugees, formless and without substance in the uncertain moonlight, rose from the shelter of the whins and began to creep forward along a narrow goat track that descended the low, sandy cliff.

  But despite their desperate caution it proved impossible for them to move without noise, for the dry, sandy soil broke under their feet, sending little showers of earth and pebbles rolling and clattering down to the beach. A child whimpered softly, and there was a sudden harsh tearing sound as a woman’s skirt caught and ripped on a length of rusty sheep wire. And when at last they gained the shore their stumbling progress across the rattling banks of shingle was a torture to stretched nerves. But at least they had now reached the sea …

  Behind them the wolf packs of hate and destruction howled across Europe, while on either hand the smoke from the pyres of Rotterdam and Dunkirk blackened the sweet May skies; but ahead of them, beyond the narrow sea and the shifting fogbanks, lay the coast of England.

  At the water’s edge the shadowy bulk of a fishing boat loomed out of the surrounding fog, and despite the darkness it could be seen that the man who stood knee-deep in the creaming water, holding the prow to the shore, was tense and listening. His head was raised and he was not looking towards the stumbling line of refugees, but to the right, where the curve of the bay ran out in a huddle of weed-covered rocks.

  He spoke in a harsh whisper and without turning his head: ‘I am afraid. Be swift!’ Then over his shoulder to a dim figure in the boat: ‘Be ready with the sail, Pierre.’

  A child began to cry in small gulping sobs: the sobbing of one who would normally have screamed its woe aloud, but who had been reduced by an adult experience of fear to the status of a terrified animal.

  ‘Hush thou!’ The whisper was savage with fear as the small figure was lifted over the gunwale. There followed three more children, the last of whom appeared
to be clutching a large doll. The man who had been carrying her climbed in after her and turned to pull a shivering woman into the boat.

  ‘Quick!’ muttered the man in the water. ‘Oh be quick!’

  And then, with shocking suddenness, the darkness was ripped apart by a streak of flame, and the fogbanks and the low sandy cliffs that curved about the lonely bay echoed to the crash and whine of bullets, hoarse shouting voices and the clatter of running boots upon rock and shingle.

  Without words the man who steadied the prow of the boat, and he who had led the refugees down the goat track, put their shoulders to the laden boat and thrust her off into deep water. The sail, invisible against the night and the drifting fog, rose and took the breeze and, slowly at first, the boat began to move away from the shelving beach. The two fishermen hauled themselves aboard and the remaining refugees, panic lending them strength, flung themselves screaming into the water, clawing at the receding prow, and were dragged on board.

  A lone figure ran wildly across the shingle. It was the woman whose clothing had caught on the rusty tangle of sheep wire. She had paused in the darkness to free herself, appalled by the noise of the ripping material and the fear that she might dislodge stones and clods of earth if she dragged at the cloth, and so had arrived late upon the beach.

  She rushed into the water, her feet stumbling among the treacherous pebbles as the waves snatched them from under her. But the boat had gone. The fog had closed behind it, and there was nothing to show that it had ever been there. She tried to scream: to shriek to them to come back for her, to save her and not leave her alone on that dark beach. But her throat was dry and her breath came in hoarse gasps.

  The vicious chatter of a machine-gun added itself to the noise of running feet, and tracer bullets ripped brilliant orange streaks through the fog around her. Turning from the sea that had betrayed her, she ran back like a hunted animal towards the dark whin bushes, the low sandy cliffs and the hostile land …

  CHAPTER 1

  Miranda Brand knelt on the floor of a bedroom in the Families’ Hostel at Bad Oeynhausen in the British Zone of Germany, searching her suitcase for a cake of soap, and regretting that she had ever accepted her cousin Robert Melville’s invitation to spend a month with him and his family in Berlin.

  There was something about this gaunt building, about the dimly familiar, guttural voices and the wet, grey miles that had streamed past the train windows all that afternoon, that had acted unpleasantly upon her nerves. Yet it could not be Germany, and the fact that she was back there once more for the first time since childhood, that was responsible for this curious feeling of apprehension and unease that possessed her, because she had been aware of it before she had even set foot in the country.

  It had begun … When had it begun? Was it on the boat to the Hook of Holland?… Or even earlier, on the boat-train to Harwich? She could not be sure. She only knew that for some inexplicable reason she felt tense and uneasy, and … And afraid!

  Yes, that was it: afraid. ‘Well then what are you afraid of?’ Miranda demanded of herself. ‘Nothing! But you can’t be afraid of nothing!’

  I’m getting as bad as Aunt Hetty, thought Miranda ruefully, and was smiling at the recollection of that neurotic and highly strung spinster when the door burst open and Stella Melville rushed in and slammed it noisily behind her, causing Miranda to start violently and drop the lid of the suitcase on the fingers of one hand.

  ‘Ow! What on earth is the matter, Stel’? I wish you wouldn’t make me jump like that. It puts years on my life.’ Miranda blew on her injured fingers and regarded her cousin’s wife with affectionate indignation.

  Mrs Melville drew a quivering breath and her hands clenched into fists: ‘I hate the Army! I hate it! Oh, why did Robert have to be a soldier? Why couldn’t he have been a farmer, or a pig-breeder, or a stockbroker or—or—oh, anything but a soldier?’

  Stella flung herself face down upon the bed and burst into tears.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Miranda blankly.

  She stood up hurriedly and perching on the edge of the bed threw a comforting arm about Stella’s shoulders: ‘What’s up, darling?—that tiresome Leslie woman been sharpening her claws on you again? Forget it! I expect all those seasick pills have upset her liver. Come on, sweetie, brace up!’

  ‘Oh go away!’ sobbed Stella furiously, attempting to burrow further into the unyielding hostel pillow: ‘You don’t understand. No one understands!’

  ‘Well tell me about it then,’ said Miranda reasonably. ‘Come on, Stel’, it can’t be as bad as that. Tell your Aunt ’Randa!’

  Stella gave a watery chuckle and sat up, pushing away a wet strand of blond hair with the back of her hand. ‘Aunt ’Randa! I like that, when I’m old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘Give yourself a chance, darling. I shall be twenty-one next month.’ Miranda hunted through her coat pockets, and producing a passably clean handkerchief handed it over.

  ‘Twenty-one,’ said Stella desolately. ‘Dear God! and I shall be forty!’ She blew her nose and sat looking at Miranda; her pretty pink and white face blotched with tears, and the ruin of her carefully applied make-up suddenly revealing the truth of that last statement.

  Miranda looked momentarily taken aback. ‘Will you? Well I suppose if you’d been married at eighteen I could just____Look, how did we come to be discussing our ages anyway? What has your age got to do with hating the Army?’

  ‘Perhaps more than you think,’ said Stella bitterly. She saw that Miranda was looking bewildered, and laughed a little shakily. ‘Oh, it isn’t that! It’s—well Robert has just met a man he knows, and—and oh ’Randa isn’t it awful? He told Robert that the regiment is going to be sent to Malaya next year!’ Stella’s blue eyes brimmed over with tears that coursed slowly down her wet cheeks and dripped off her chin, making ugly dark spots on her smart grey dress.

  ‘Malaya? But good heavens, Stella, why on earth should that upset you? If I were in your shoes I’d be thrilled to bits! Sunshine, palm trees, temple bells—not to mention masses of servants in lovely eastern clothes to do all the dirty work for you. Just think of it! No more washing up dishes or fuel economy: heaven! What are you worrying about? You don’t have to worry about Robert, because he told me once that Malaya was a “Company Commander’s war”—whatever that means. And anyway the papers all seem to think that this Templer man has got the bandits buttoned.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ repeated Stella impatiently. ‘I know you think it would be lovely to go there, but I’m not you. People like you think of the East as exotic and exciting, but to me it’s only uncivilized and frightening. Perhaps that’s because I’m not an exotic or exciting person. I don’t like strange places. I love my own bit of England and I don’t want to live anywhere else.’

  ‘But you can have it both ways,’ urged Miranda. ‘You can live in England and in between you can go off and see romantic foreign places.’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ said Stella drearily. ‘When I married Johnnie—you never knew Johnnie, did you—I thought what fun it would be. Being married, I mean. I thought we’d live at Mallow, or somewhere near it in Sussex or Kent, and that everything would be lovely. I actually thought that I should “live happily ever after” just like they do in fairy stories!’

  She gave a short laugh, startling in its bitterness, and getting up from the bed walked over to the window and stood with her forehead pressed against a pane, looking down at the narrow, darkening street and speaking in an undertone, almost as if she had forgotten Miranda’s presence and was talking to herself.

  ‘It didn’t work out that way. Perhaps it never does. We had to go to India. He … I hated it! The dirt, the dust, the flies, the dark, secret faces. The horrible heat and that awful club life. And I was ill; always ill.’ She shivered so violently that her teeth chattered.

  ‘It was heaven to come home again. To see green fields and cool grey skies____Oh, the awfulness of that brassy sunlight! But then the w
ar came and he had to go back there without me. And I never saw him again. When he—when the telegram came I thought I should never be happy again. But you can’t go on being unhappy for ever. That’s the merciful thing about it. And after the war I met Robert.’

  Her voice rose again suddenly, and she turned to face Miranda, her pretty mouth working and her slim fingers clenching and unclenching against the suave lines of the grey travelling dress.

  ‘But it was only the same thing all over again. They sent him to Egypt, and they wouldn’t let me go with him. They said I hadn’t enough “points”. Points! As if love and marriage were things on a ration card! Later the families were all sent away anyway, but that didn’t make it any better for me. And when he did get back, the regiment was in Germany so we get sent to Berlin! This, believe it or not, is a “Home posting”. Home! And now to be told that it will be Malaya next. I can’t bear it!’

  Stella turned away to stare desperately down into the street once more.

  ‘Stella, darling,’ Miranda spoke soothingly as though addressing a fractious child, ‘you’re feeling tired and nervy, and I don’t blame you. It’s all this wretched packing and moving. But it isn’t as bad as all that, you know. There won’t be flies and heat and oriental faces in Berlin, and Robert says your house is one of the nicest ones. And you are sure to be allowed to go to Malaya with him.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ repeated Stella tonelessly. ‘No one really understands. I don’t want to live in Germany. I’ve dreaded the idea. When I was six I had a German governess and I loathed her. And mother insisted on sending me to a finishing school in Brussels, and I hated that too: every minute of it. I don’t want to go to Malaya. I’m like that girl in one of Nancy Mitford’s books who hated “abroad”. I hate “abroad” too. I want to live in England. In my own home, with my own things around me. Not this awful endless packing and moving and separation, and living in soulless army-furnished quarters.’