‘This is hardly the time for apologies,’ Bradfield retorted, and rang Miss Peate for some coffee.
‘I’m going to tell you the way it is on the files,’ Turner said. ‘The case against Karfeld. You’d do me a favour not interrupting. We’re both tired, and we’ve not much time.’
Bradfield had set a sheet of blue draft paper on the blotter before him; the fountain pen was poised above it. Miss Peate, having poured the coffee, took her leave. Her expression, her single disgusted glance at Turner, was more eloquent than any words she could have found.
‘I’m going to tell you what he’d put together. Pick holes in it afterwards if you want.’
‘I shall do my best,’ Bradfield said with a momentary smile that was like the memory of a different man.
‘There’s a village near Dannenberg, on the Zonal border. Hapstorf it’s called. It has three men and a dog and it lies in a wooded valley. Or used to. In thirty-eight, the Germans put a factory there. There was an old paper mill beside a fast-flowing river, with a country house attached to it, right up against the cliff. They converted the mill and built laboratories alongside the river, and turned the place into a small hush-hush research station for certain types of gas.’
He drank some coffee and took a bite of biscuit, and it seemed to hurt him to eat, for he held his head to one side and munched very cautiously.
‘Poison Gas. The attractions were obvious. The place was difficult to bomb; the stream was fast-flowing, and they needed that for the effluent; the village was small and they could chuck out anyone they didn’t like. All right?’
‘All right.’ Bradfield had taken out his pen and was writing down key points as Turner spoke. Turner could see the numbers down the left side and he thought: what difference does it make about the numbers? You can’t destroy facts by giving them numbers.
‘The local population claims it didn’t know what was going on there, which is probably true. They knew the mill had been stripped and they knew that a lot of expensive plant had been installed. They knew the warehouses at the back were specially guarded, and they knew the staff weren’t allowed to mix with the locals. The labour was foreign: French and Poles, who weren’t allowed out at all, so there was no mixing at the lower level either. And everyone knew about the animals. Monkeys mainly, but sheep, goats and dogs as well. Animals that went in there and didn’t come out. There’s a record of the local Gauleiter receiving letters of complaint from animal lovers.’
He looked at Bradfield in wonder. ‘He worked down there, night after night, putting it all together.’
‘He had no business down there. The basement archive has been out of bounds for many years.’
‘He had business there all right.’
Bradfield was writing on his pad.
‘Two months before the end of the war, the factory was destroyed by the British. Pinpoint bombing. The explosion was enormous. The place was wiped out, and the village with it. The foreign labourers were killed. They say the sound of the blast carried miles, there was so much went up with it.’ Bradfield’s pen sped across the paper.
‘At the time of the bombing, Karfeld was at home in Essen; there’s no doubt of that at all. He says he was burying his mother; she’d been killed in an air raid.’
‘Well?’
‘He was in Essen all right. But he wasn’t burying his mother. She’d died two years earlier.’
‘Nonsense!’ Bradfield cried. ‘The press would long ago-‘
‘There’s a photostat of the original death certificate on the file,’ Turner said evenly. ‘I’m not able to say what the new one looks like. Nor who faked it for him. Though I should think we could both guess without rupturing our imaginations.’
Bradfield glanced at him with appreciation.
‘After the war, the British were in Hamburg and they sent a team to look at what was left of Hapstorf, collect souvenirs and take photographs. Just an ordinary Intelligence team, nothing special. They thought they might pick up the scientists who’d worked there… get the benefit of their knowledge, see what I mean? They reported that nothing was left. They also reported some rumours. A French labourer, one of the few survivors, had a story about experiments on human guinea pigs. Not on the labourers themselves, he said, but on other people brought in. They’d used animals to begin with, he said, but later on they wanted the real thing so they had some specially delivered. He said he’d been on gate duty one night – he was a trusty by then – and the Germans told him to return to his hut, go to bed and not appear till morning. He was suspicious and hung around. He saw a strange thing: a grey bus, just a plain grey single-decker bus, went through one gate after another without being documented. It drove round the back, towards the warehouses, and he didn’t hear any more. A couple of minutes later, it drove out again, much faster. Empty.’ Again he broke off, and this time he took a handkerchief from his pocket and very gingerly dabbed his brow. ‘The Frenchman also said a friend of his, a Belgian, had been offered inducements to work in the new laboratories under the cliff. He went for a couple of days and came back looking like a ghost. He said he wouldn’t spend another night over there, not for all the privileges in the world. Next day he disappeared. Posted, they said. But before he left he had a talk to his pal, and he mentioned the name of Doctor Klaus. Doctor Klaus was the administrative supervisor, he said; he was the man who arranged the details and made things easy for the scientists. He was the man who offered him the job.’