‘Stop stringing beads. I want the whole thing, quickly.’
‘Grey buses then. Thirty-one seats and room left over for the guard. The windows were blackened from the inside. Where possible, they moved them at night.’
‘You said there were thirty-two bodies, not thirty-one-‘
‘There was the Belgian labourer, wasn’t there? The one who worked under the cliff and talked to the French trusty? They knew what to do about him all right. He’d found out a bit too much, hadn’t he? Like Leo, now.’
‘Here,’ said Bradfield, getting up and bringing the coffee over to him. ‘You’d better have some more of this.’ Turner held out his cup and his hand was fairly steady.
‘So when they’d pulled him in they took Karfeld up to Hamburg and confronted him with the bodies and the evidence, such as they had, and he just laughed at them. Bloody nonsense, he said, the whole story. Never been to Hapstorf in his life. He was an engineer. A demolitions man. He gave a very detailed account of his work at the Russian front – they’d even given him campaign medals and Christ knows what. I suppose they did that for them in the SS and he made a great spiel about Stalingrad. There were discrepancies but not that many, and he just held out all the time against interrogation and denied ever having set foot in Hapstorf or possessing any knowledge of the plant. No, no, no all the way. For months on end. “Okay,” he kept saying, “if you’ve got the proof, bring a case. Put it to the Tribunal. I’m not bothered; I’m a hero. I never administered anything in my life except our family factory in Essen, and the British have pulled that to pieces, haven’t they? I’ve been to Russia, I haven’t been poisoning hybrids; why should I? I’m a little friend of all the world. Find a live witness, find anybody.” They couldn’t. At Hapstorf, the chemists had lived in complete segregation, and presumably the desk-men had done the same. The records were destroyed by bombing, and everyone was known by his Christian name or an alias.’ Turner shrugged. ‘That seemed to be that. He even threw in a story about helping the anti-Nazi resistance in Russia, and since the units he mentioned were either taken prisoner en masse or shot to pieces, they couldn’t get any further with that either.He doesn’t seem to have come out with that since, the resistance bit.’
‘It’s no longer fashionable,’ said Bradfield shortly. ‘Particularly in his sphere.’
‘So the case never reached the courts. There were plenty of reasons why not. The War Crimes investigation units themselves were near to disbandment; there was pressure from London and Washington to bury the hatchet and hand over all responsibility to the German courts. It was chaos. While the Unit was trying to prepare charges, their Headquarters were preparing amnesties. And there were other reasons, technical reasons for not going ahead. The crime was against French, Belgians and Poles if anyone, but since there was no method of establishing the nationality of the victims, there were problems about jurisdiction. Not material problems, but incidental ones, and they contributed to the difficulty of deciding what to do. You know how it is when you want to find difficulties.’
‘I know how it was then,’ Bradfield said quietly. ‘It was bedlam.’
‘The French weren’t keen; the Poles were too keen and Karfeld himself was quite a big wheel by then. He was handling some big Allied contracts. Even sub-contracting to competitors to keep up with demand. He was a good administrator, you see. Efficient.’
‘You say that as if it were a crime.’
‘His own factory had been dismantled a couple of times but now it was running a treat. Seemed a pity to disturb it really. There was even some rumour,’ Turner added without changing the tone of his voice, ‘that he’d had a head start on everyone else because he’d come by a special consignment of rare gases, and stored them underground in Essen at the end of the war. That’s what he was up to while the RAF was bombing Hapstorf. While he was supposed to be burying his poor old mother. He’d been pinching the goods to feather his own nest.’