Mistress Murder (16 page)

‘So what sort of distance, sir?' sought the inspector, pencil and notebook hovering at the ready.

Korb made a gesture of impatience.

‘Can't be exact, man. The type of weapon, the size of the propellant, the age of the cartridge, the type of powder – they all make a difference. These new explosives produce very little powder burning, not like the old black stuff.' He seemed to savour some past memory for a moment then hurried on with the work.

‘Say less than half a metre – probably quite a bit less.'

He bent very near the dead man's neck and examined it minutely.

‘No singeing of the hairs on his neck – again probably more than a dozen or so centimetres, but less than fifty … does it matter?' he ended with annoyance.

‘We try to reconstruct these affairs, doctor,' said the judge mildly. ‘So far the inspector here tells me that the site of the killing is known. A gardener in Thalkirchen reported vandalism to the police early this morning. There were signs of a disturbance in a flower bed on the Brudermühlbrücke, and at the bottom of the slope at the river's edge, there were bloodstains and signs of dragging of a body into the water. That right, inspector?'

The judge, sorry for the detective's brow-beating at the hands of Korb, was sheltering him under his wing with kind words.

‘Yes, judge, a regular fight must have gone on from the edge of the road right down the bank to the water. I've got a skin-diver searching the river bed now, looking for the weapon – it may have been thrown in after the corpse.'

‘Some hope!' muttered the pathologist crossly.

‘What size gun would you think it will be?' asked the indefatigable policeman.

‘Small hole – hard to tell, really. Something less than nine-millimetre, I should say – not a Luger anyway.'

He pointed to the X-ray, still dripping developer, which hung on an illuminated box on the wall. ‘Have a look at that, the bullet is buried in the eighth dorsal vertebra in the middle of the back. You can get some idea of the calibre from that, but I'll be getting it out for you soon, anyway.'

After looking at a similar hole in the chest, the doctor began the bloody business of the internal examination. The judge noted that he was particularly interested in the teeth.

‘The fillings seem a bit odd-looking … can't place what it is, but I don't pretend to be a forensic odontologist; I'll get a colleague down to look at them. They certainly aren't local work.'

The examination went on for half an hour, being punctuated by scarifying flashes from the photographic flashguns fixed in the ceiling over the table.

The judge sat patiently, his thoughts gently on his disturbed breakfast – it was still only ten o'clock, the police had moved fast after Gunther had reported the body in the river. The detective scribbled in his notebook whenever Dr Korb muttered some scrap of information, and the patrol man stood immobile the whole time, chewing the cud like some sturdy bullock.

Eventually the pathologist threw down his knife with a clang and went to a sink to rinse the blood from his gloves. The judge slowly came back to earth and the eager inspector stood almost panting for the final revelations.

‘Shot through the chest almost dead centre,' began Korb, pushing off the tap with an elbow. ‘The second entrance wound is just to the left of the centre of the breastbone, quite low down. So it's gone straight through the heart and finished up in the spine. Here it is, Inspector, if you want it for the lab.'

He walked back to the post-mortem table and carefully picked up a shining bullet with a rubber-tipped forceps, so as not to harm any identifying marks.

‘You're lucky it's not deformed, even though it has gone through two bits of bone … odd calibre, looks something like a six-millimetre.'

The detective took a small cardboard box from his pocket and laid the bullet reverently in a bed of cotton wool. ‘Yes, doctor, I doubt if it came from a German pistol. It's copper-jacketed, so it's from an automatic, not a revolver, in all probability.'

He gave it to the waiting uniformed man, with instructions to rush it to the ballistics laboratory of the police department.

‘Ask them if they can identify the make of weapon as soon as possible, tell them we've got no gun to compare it with at present.'

The black-uniformed patrolman saluted briskly, coming to life at last. After he had hurried out, Korb spoke again. ‘Anyone missing from the city lately?'

‘No, sir … we've had a few girls and a couple of children reported this week, but no man for a fortnight – and the last few of those were nothing like him.' The detective gestured to the opened body on the slab.

The pathologist smiled cynically. ‘Don't worry about the fortnight; this chap's only been dead a short time. When I saw him first at nine o'clock, his temperature was still thirty degrees centigrade. Even in the Isar in winter he couldn't have been dead longer than say, twelve hours.'

The judge bobbed his head wisely.

‘Are we going to get any help from you in identifying him?'

‘General stuff only at present,' replied Korb, drying his hands on a cloth while he gazed thoughtfully at the remains. ‘Approximate age from appearances and X-rays of some bones. He appears to be in his middle thirties. Then height, weight – all that stuff is written on the form there. No scars or tattoos to be seen.'

He reached for an open jar of stomach contents and put it to his nose. He offered it to the judge but the older man jerked his head back. ‘Just tell me, doctor – I'll take your word for it,' he said wryly.

‘Drink – a strong smell of beer and spirits. I wonder where he was last night. He certainly took a skinful.' He took another sniff at the jar, all revulsion having left him years before.

‘Another thing, judge, he has small injection marks on his arms which are septic in some places – looks exactly like the unsterile jabs that a drug addict gives himself. I'll get an analysis done, but that will take a day or two.'

‘He's a big man, doctor,' ventured the inspector.

‘Yes, heavily muscled. He has some thickening of the eyebrows and a twisted nose which might suggest that he was used to being in a fight now and then. I've seen it in many strong-arm criminals, not necessarily boxers.'

‘You say his fillings look foreign – what about his clothes, any lead there?' asked the judge.

‘All the pockets emptied and the labels tom out, sir,' explained the inspector. ‘Good quality suit, I just don't know whether it's foreign manufacture or not. All Western clothes look much the same, except to an expert tailor. The tom labels were almost certainly done by the killer at the time of death, the rips are fresh and deliberately confined to the inner pockets and neckbands of the shirt and vest.'

The judge got up and went to look at the clothing.

‘So to add up all we know, doctor, we've got a big man of possibly foreign origin, who has been shot twice, the one through the chest having killed him. He was either drunk or had been drinking heavily, and he may have been taking small quantities of narcotics – right?'

Korb nodded abruptly. ‘You can add that the first shot through the neck was a wild one, at close range and the second one a more deliberate discharge, possibly at a slightly greater distance, designed to kill. From the signs of the struggle on the bridge, with absence of blood at the top of the slope, it seems that they fought up there, but did not use the weapon until they reached the bottom.'

The detective took up the tale here. ‘The killer must have been cool enough to empty the dead man's pockets, rip out the tabs, and then push him into the river … I wish I knew what he did with the gun.'

By the afternoon a fairly firm opinion as to the deceased's country of origin was arrived at by the dental expert, who declared that the technique and materials of the numerous tooth fillings were typically British.

The detective was a little sceptical about relying too much on this evidence, but he had dramatic confirmation from two directions within the next few hours. Firstly, the ballistics department reported on the bullet extracted from the dead man's spinal column. The inspector muttered a summary of it to his assistant.

‘Not a metric size projectile … a .25 inch copper-clad bullet, corresponding to 6.35 millimetres … from the rifling pattern left by the barrel it must have been fired from an automatic weapon with six right-hand grooves with a pitch of one turn in twenty-five centimetres. The groove width was 0.56 mm and the land width 2.65 mm … this corresponds to the specifications of the British Webley self-loading pistol, made in two models, one hammerless, both of .25 inch calibre. One has a short free-standing barrel, is small and is unlike any other German or Continental weapon.'

Almost before he had digested all this, a motorcycle roared up to headquarters with a courier sent from the Brudermühlbrücke with a pistol that an aqualung diver had just grovelled from the bed of the Isar.

It was a .25 Webley automatic.

Already a photograph of the dead man, touched up to look as lifelike as possible, had been printed and, armed with a copy, a squad of police were questioning airport staff, railwaymen, and taxi drivers.

At seven thirty, a cab driver who had not seen the photograph but had heard of the location of the murder, came forward to say that he had taken two men to the bridge around midnight.

While he was in the C.I.D. being questioned, a detective brought in another taxi man who recognised the dead person as a fare he had taken from the railway station to the Pension Walther.

The detective inspector soon found that both drivers agreed that the dead man's companion on both trips must have been the same fellow. The only point of dispute was that the first taxi man said that the man spoke good German with a Cologne accent, while the one who took the pair to Thalkirchen swore that the second man was Munich born and bred.

The time of the train that they had left was checked and was found to be the Tauern Express from Ostend. A call was made to Interpol in Lyon for assistance, asking for the names of all male passengers who had booked on that journey to Munich.

The inspector spent part of the night looking for the second man, who was now the prime suspect. The description from the cab drivers was too vague to be of any use – Golding's nondescript features functioned just as well outside Britain.

The next step was a visit to the Pension Walther in Schwabing. Wormser, cursing Schrempp for involving him, had to admit that he had given a room to the tall Englishman.

‘Why didn't he sign the register?' demanded the detectives.

Wormser gave a cringing shrug. ‘It was his first night, Officer. He was very tired after his long journey – I thought I'd not bother him till the morning. But he didn't come back.'

‘Come and open his room – let's have a look at his luggage.'

Wormser was in a spot again. He had already acquired the case, when he had to restore the original owner's belongings in the room he had given to Draper. He tried to explain and tied himself up in a worse knot. Eventually he produced the case from his office.

‘When he didn't come back I thought he'd ducked off without paying his bill … so I kept his case as security.'

The inspector had his own ideas about Wormser but the other matter was the more urgent. He rummaged through the case.

‘No passport … no papers,' he said in disgust. In fact, Conrad's passport was floating in the North Sea, after Jacobs had flushed the pieces down the toilet of a B.E.A. Comet on his way back from Hamburg.

A junior detective picked up a silk shirt from the case. ‘Made in London, sir … has the initials C.D. on the neckband.'

‘Corps Diplomatique?' suggested the inspector sarcastically. ‘Come on, Wormser, you've been up to something … tell me about the man who brought him here.'

‘I didn't know his name … I don't even know the name of this man.' He pointed to the case.

‘Hard luck. Why did they come here – to this particular hotel? You must have known the second person.'

‘I recognised him … he stayed here once. He was an English student,' lied Wormser desperately.

Exasperated, the inspector grabbed Wormser by the arm. ‘Come on, back to headquarters. Bring that case, Hans.'

When they arrived at the office, there was a list from the French Railways sent via Interpol. It showed that only twenty four males had booked all the way from Ostend to Munich at that slack winter period. There was only one name with the initials ‘C.D.' and that was Conrad Draper. There was no address given.

‘Have to check with London's Scotland Yard for that, they can get the full bookings from the London railway offices.'

‘What about the other man?' asked his assistant.

‘He was on the same train.'

Wormser came in for another heavy session of interrogation, but he gave a deliberately vague description that would have fitted a quarter of the population of Europe.

The inspector reported to his senior early next morning.

‘I feel that both these men had only a fleeting association with Munich, sir. I think that the motives are all back in England and I suggest that we inform the London police of all the facts'

His chief, already flooded with local crime, was only too ready to give his blessing for the inspector to pass the ball to Scotland Yard.

Back in his office, the detective picked up his telephone and asked for London.

Benbow took the call about noon on the Tuesday. He rapidly noted down all the information, asked for written confirmation and, after profuse thanks, put the phone down. He dialled Information Room to find out why the case had been given to him.

‘The officer who liaises with Interpol told us to put it through to you, sir.'

He rang the chief inspector concerned and was told something that almost sent him up to the ceiling.