‘You call this evidence?’
‘Wait. Just wait. The team reported their findings and a copy went to the local War Crimes Group. So they took it over. They interrogated the Frenchman, took a full statement but they failed to produce corroboration. An old woman who ran a flower shop had a story about hearing screams in the night, but she couldn’t say which night and besides it might have been animals. It was all very flimsy.’
‘Very, I should have thought.’
‘Look,’ Turner said. ‘We’re on the same side now aren’t we? There are no more doors to open.’
‘There may be some to close,’ Bradfield said, writing again. ‘However.’
‘The Group was overworked and understaffed so they threw in the case. File and discontinue. They’d many bigger cases to worry about. They carded Doctor Klaus and forgot about him. The Frenchman went back to France, the old lady forgot the screams and that was it. Until a couple of years later.’
‘Wait.’
Bradfield’s pen did not hurry. He formed the letters as he always formed them: legibly, with consideration for his successors.
‘Then an accident happened. The kind we’ve come to expect. A farmer near Hapstorf bought an odd bit of waste land from the local council. It was rough ground, very stony and wooded, but he thought he could make something of it. By the time he’d dug it and ploughed it, he’d unearthed thirty-two bodies of grown men. The German police took a look and informed the Occupational authority. Crimes against Allied personnel were the responsibility of the Allied judiciary. The British mounted an investigation and decided that thirty-one of the men had been gassed. The thirty-second man was wearing the tunic of a foreign labourer and he’d been shot in the back of the neck. There was something else… something that really threw them. The bodies were all messed up.’
‘Messed up?’
‘Researched. Autopsied. Someone had got there first. So they reopened the case. Somebody in the town remembered that Doctor Klaus came from Essen.’
Bradfield was watching him now; he had put down his pen and folded his hands together.
‘They went through all the chemists with the qualification to conduct high-grade research who lived in Essen and whose first names were Klaus. It didn’t take them long to unearth Karfeld. He’d no doctorate; that comes later. But then everyone assumed by then that the staff were working under pseudonyms, so why not give yourself a title too? Essen was also in the British zone, so they pulled him in. He denied the whole thing. Naturally. Mind you: apart from the bodies there was little enough to go by. Except for one incidental piece of information.’
Bradfield did not interrupt this time.
‘You’ve heard of the Euthanasia scheme?’
‘Hadamar.’ With a nod of his head Bradfield indicated the window. ‘Down the river. Hadamar,’ he repeated.
‘Hadamar, Weilmunster, Eichberg, Kalmenhof: clinics for the elimination of unwanted people: for whoever lived on the economy and made no contribution to it. You can read all about it in the Glory Hole, and quite a lot about it in Registry. Among the files for Destruction. At first they had categories for the type of people they’d killed off. You know: the deformed, the insane, severely handicapped children between the ages of eight and thirteen. Bed-wetters. With very few exceptions, the victims were German citizens.’
‘They called them patients,’ Bradfield said, with intense distaste.
‘It seems that now and then certain selected patients were set aside and put to medical uses. Children as well as adults.’ Bradfield nodded, as if he knew that too.
‘By the time the Hapstorf case broke, the Americans and Germans had done a fair bit of work on this Euthanasia programme. Among other things, they’d unearthed evidence of one busload of “hybrid workers” being set aside for “dangerous duties at the Chemical Research Station of Hapstorf”. One busload was thirty-one people. They used grey buses by the way, if that reminds you of anything.’
‘Hanover,’ Bradfield said at once. ‘The transport for the bodyguard.’
‘Karfeld’s an administrator. Everyone admires him for it. Then as now. It’s nice to know he hasn’t lost the old touch, isn’t it? He’s got one of those minds that runs in grooves.’