THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END (12 page)

What the hell is in this box? Old sample bags full of dust and pieces of flint, lecture notes, a model of a Stone Age causewayed enclosure made for the university open day, complete with plastic sheep, a theatre programme (
A Little Night Music
– when had she ever gone to see that?) and, oh my God, a picture of Ruth, Peter and Erik standing by the henge, as triumphant as if they had made it themselves.

She peers more closely at the photo. Christ, she is wearing a bikini top. She must have been at least three stone lighter then. Erik is in a billowing white shirt that has a faintly druidical feel. Peter is wearing a Chelsea football vest; his face red and sweaty. It had been a hot summer, she remembers. Working in the sun all day had been hard; they all wore hats, Ruth’s a wide-brimmed straw number, Peter’s one of those legionnaire’s caps with a flap at the back,
Erik’s a jaunty panama. In the photo Erik is waving his hat, very white against the improbably blue sky. Now Erik is dead and the henge has disappeared, its timbers taken to a nearby museum to be preserved. Cathbad and the other druids had protested violently. ‘They belong to the wind and the sky,’ Ruth remembers Cathbad shouting, his purple cloak flying out behind him as he took his position in the centre of the sacred circle. ‘They are not yours to take, to bury in some soulless museum.’ Erik had sympathised but the university, who was funding the dig, had insisted. And now the timbers lie in an artificially controlled climate behind smoked glass, no longer a henge, just some oddly shaped pieces of wood.

Ruth thinks about Broughton Sea’s End, about the sea advancing, eating away at the cliffs, destroying brick and stone, uncovering secrets. Was there a link between the bodies and the oil drums? The strange-smelling material had certainly looked the same. She has taken it to the lab (her car still reeks) and will run tests on it. Six German soldiers, shot and buried under a remote cliff, buried in sand so their bones will disintegrate, oil drums containing petrol and diesel fuel. Ruth is reminded of a film that she saw years ago with her father. Nazis marching through an English village. What was its name?

She has got precisely nowhere with the tidying. The bed is still buried under boxes, although Flint has found a pillow and is kneading it busily. She will have to be ruthless. Erik sometimes used to call her Ruth the Ruthless. Time to live up to her name. She’ll get some black plastic bags and chuck the lot away.

As she crosses the sitting room she sees, with a shock, that there is somebody at the front door. Her bell hasn’t worked for years but her few visitors know this and usually hammer and yell. God knows how long this polite person has been standing there. She opens the door, prepared to apologise.

A man is standing on the doorstep, smiling. Blond and good-looking, there is something unmistakably foreign about him. Maybe it’s the green coat or the backpack – or the smile, which shows extremely white teeth.

‘Dr Ruth Galloway?’

‘Yes.’ She likes it when people use her correct title. She doesn’t see why strangers should call her Ruth and she despises ‘Miss’.

‘My name is Dieter Eckhart. I wish to talk to you about some dead German soldiers.’

‘You’d better come in,’ says Ruth.

Dieter Eckhart steps politely over the piles of books and folders in the sitting room (part of the tidying process) and perches on the edge of the sofa. Ruth offers him tea which he accepts but disconcerts her by asking for lemon instead of milk. She hasn’t got any lemon but finds a wizened lime at the back of the fridge (from Shona’s tequila phase). It’ll have to do.

‘I am sorry to trouble you at home,’ says Eckhart, accepting the unpleasant-looking drink with every appearance of pleasure. ‘But I ask at the university who is the forensic archaeologist in charge of the case.’

Ruth is gratified that someone has identified her as being in charge but rather mystified as to how Dieter Eckhart has managed to find out about the bodies so quickly. Thanks to Whitcliffe, there has been nothing in the British press.

The mystery is soon explained. From his backpack Eckhart pulls a map of Norfolk, a book about the D-Day landings and a crumpled letter written in thin black ink.

‘I’m a military historian,’ he says. ‘I have written several
articles about the rumoured German invasion of Norfolk in the Second World War. One day last month I received this letter.’

He hands it to Ruth:

Dear Mr Eckhart

Please excuse my presumption in writing to you. I read your recent article in
History Today
entitled ‘The Great Invasion Mystery’ and it awoke some very vivid memories, memories that I have, for many years, been trying to suppress. I was a member of the Broughton Sea’s End Home Guard from 1940 to 1941. I was one of the three younger members of the platoon which was captained by one Buster Hastings. I am now 86 and in poor health, yet a memory of a particular event in 1940 has haunted me all my life. I feel I must discuss it with you. You, sir, are a young man, an academic and a German. It is for these reasons that I feel compelled to contact you. A great wrong was done many years ago, Herr Eckhart, and, unless we tell the truth to the generations that follow, the evil will lie waiting beneath the earth.

I am, sir, your honourable former enemy,

Hugh P. Anselm.

Ruth looks across at Dieter Eckhart, who is calmly sipping his tea. Her mind is racing. The rumoured German invasion of Norfolk. Nazi officers patrolling the streets. Six bodies found buried under the cliff.
The evil will lie waiting beneath the earth.

‘I made enquiries,’ says Eckhart. ‘There was indeed a Home Guard platoon captained by a man of that name. I decided
to come to England. For many years I have been planning to write a book about the invasion.’

‘But they didn’t really invade, did they?’ responds Ruth. ‘I mean, I know there were rumours, and there was a film. I saw it with my father. But there was never any evidence.’

‘I believe there was,’ says Eckhart, putting down his cup. ‘But I believe that the evidence was deliberately destroyed.’

‘So you think the Germans came here? To Norfolk?’

Eckhart looks at her. He has very blue eyes, which reminds Ruth of Erik. He says, as if reading from a script: ‘In September 1940, in the village of Crostwick, Norfolk, villagers reported seeing a convoy of army trucks carrying dead German soldiers. Later that same month two bodies were found on the Kent coast between Hythe and St Mary’s Bay. They were identified as German soldiers by their uniforms. The bodies were burned from the waist down.’

‘Burned?’

Eckhart continues as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘On October the twenty-first the corpse of a German anti-tank gunner, Heinrich Poncke, was recovered from the beach at Littlestoneon-Sea. The discovery was openly reported in the press at the time.’

‘But I thought all these stories had been disproved,’ says Ruth, impressed, despite herself, by this recital. ‘The invasion was one of the myths of the Second World War. Like nuns parachuting or Hitler having a double.’

‘The parachuting nuns may well have been a myth,’ says Eckhart with the ghost of a smile, ‘but the invasion definitely happened. It was not the full-scale exercise that had been planned, the so-called Operation Sealion, but I believe
that small reconnaissance groups did land on the Norfolk and Kent coasts in September 1940. The story has been denied and the solders involved vanished into thin air.’

‘How could they just vanish?’ says Ruth, but she has an uneasy memory of the bodies at Broughton Sea’s End, bodies buried in sand, sand which destroys bone. ‘Why would anyone want to deny that an invasion happened, if it did happen?’

‘Because,’ says Eckhart, ‘what we are looking at is a British war crime.’

Ruth is silent, thinking of Bosnia and the war crimes tribunal, thinking of Hugh P. Anselm’s letter.
A great wrong was done many years ago.

Eckhart looks at her for a moment and then continues. ‘I arrived in England yesterday and I went at once to Broughton Sea’s End. I learnt that the son of Buster Hastings still lived in the same house and I asked for an interview. He refused. He did not want, and I quote, to speak about his father, who was a war hero.
Especially not to a German
. I accepted this. I wandered around the village. It is very small, very picturesque. I went to the local pub. And there I had a stroke of luck.’ He pauses.

‘What?’ prompts Ruth.

‘I met Jack Hastings’ daughter Clara. She told me about the bodies found on the beach. Then I knew. I knew I had uncovered the truth.’

I uncovered it, you mean, thinks Ruth. Or, rather, Ted, Trace, Steve and Craig did. She is beginning to find Eckhart’s manner rather irritating.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you just go to
see this Hugh Anselm, the one who wrote the letter?’

‘That was, of course, my first plan,’ says Eckhart unperturbed. ‘But when I arrived at his home, a settlement called, I believe, sheltered housing, I discovered that he was dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes. A week before the warden had discovered him, sitting in his stair-climbing device.’

‘A stairlift?’

‘Yes. A heart attack I am told.’

Ruth shivers. She knows that there can be nothing sinister about Hugh Anselm’s death, he was eighty-six after all and had described his health as ‘poor’. All the same, the letter, with its references to evil and wrong-doing, had spooked her. It reminded her too vividly of other letters, letters about death, ritual and sacrifice, the letters which were her first introduction to Nelson and the Serious Crimes Unit. And, now, to think that its author was dead …

‘There’s another survivor from that time,’ she says, thinking that this information can’t possibly be classified. ‘Archie Whitcliffe. He lives in a nursing home somewhere near Broughton.’

Dieter leans back, compressing his lips into a thin smile. ‘Archie Whitcliffe too is dead. He died yesterday.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Perfectly. I have just come from the nursing home. Apparently the police are investigating.’

The police. That meant Nelson. Ruth feels obscurely hurt that Nelson hasn’t told her about Archie Whitcliffe’s death. But, then, it only happened yesterday. When she told him
about the bodies being German he had just left the Home after interviewing Archie. That reminds her.

‘How did you know the bodies were German?’ she asks.

For the first time, Eckhart looks disconcerted. ‘It was an assumption,’ he says at last, rather stiffly. ‘An informed guess.’ He looks at Ruth, the blue gaze very intense. ‘But you know, don’t you? You know that they are German.’

Ruth sighs. Eckhart knows so much she doesn’t see any point in stalling. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Mineral tests on the bones show that the bodies probably come from Germany.’

‘So,’ says Eckhart softly. Then he smiles at Ruth. He really is very good-looking. ‘In that case, Dr Galloway, I know who your soldiers are.’

‘
The Eagle Has Landed
,’ says Nelson. ‘That was the film. Michael Caine was in it. Not a lot of people know that.’

‘Michael Caine wasn’t in the film I mean,’ says Ruth. ‘It was a much older film. Black and white. I went to see it with my dad when it was part of some film festival.’

Nelson shrugs. ‘I don’t go much on films myself. I like Michael Caine though. He’s a real actor.’

As opposed to what, thinks Ruth. But she doesn’t see any point in pursuing the matter. Besides, she almost knows what Nelson means. Nelson, meanwhile, shows distinct signs of impatience. He’s not one for small talk and Ruth is sure he has only come to her house, in response to her phone call, because he hoped to see Kate.

‘So what did this journalist bloke have to say?’ he says now, pushing his coffee cup away and getting out a notebook.

‘He was a military historian,’ says Ruth. ‘As I say, he’d been researching the rumoured German invasion of Norfolk. Apparently six commandos from the Brandenburger Regiment went missing in September 1940. The story is that
they were part of a team based in Norway, whose job was to infiltrate the British mainland, do reconnaissance and sabotage, that sort of thing. He has their names and everything.’ She hands Nelson a sheet of paper.

‘“Major Karl von Kronig,”‘ he reads. ‘“Oberstleutnant Stefan Fenstermacher, Obergefreiter Lutz Gerber, Gefreiter Manfred Hahn, Gefreiter Reiner Brauer, Panzerfunker Gerhard Meister …” Bloody hell. No wonder they didn’t win the war with names like that. Take them a year and a half to do the roll call. What the hell’s “panzerfunker” when it’s at home?’

‘Radioman,’ says Ruth knowledgeably, though she only learnt the word a few hours ago. ‘And here’s something you should know. Stefan Fenstermacher was missing a finger.’

‘It’s them then,’ says Nelson. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I think so, yes,’ says Ruth. ‘All the men were from a region near Brandenburg, which fits with the isotope analysis. One of the bodies was missing a finger. The ages seem right.’

‘So the only question is how did a group of six German commandos end up buried under a cliff in Broughton Sea’s End?’

‘Do you think Archie Whitcliffe knew anything about it?’

‘I think he did,’ says Nelson slowly, ‘but he died before we could find out more.’

Ruth looks at him curiously. ‘Do you really think his death could be suspicious?’

Nelson sighs. ‘I don’t know, Ruth. Old man dies, no suspicious circumstances, doctor signs the death certificate right off. But, I don’t know … The day before he’d more or less admitted he knew something about the deaths. Said he couldn’t tell me because he’d taken a “blood oath”. Next
day, he dies. You don’t have to be Poirot to think that’s a bit suspicious.’

‘You might think it’s more suspicious when you hear this,’ says Ruth. And she tells him about Hugh P. Anselm.

‘Hugh,’ says Nelson slowly. ‘He was one of the men that Mrs Hastings mentioned. One of the three youngsters in the troop. Hang on … found dead on the stairlift …’ He is silent for a minute, thinking.