A Man Without Breath

‘It would seem that I’m going to need your help. At least to get him on the table.’ Ignoring my question, Ines put on her gown and gloves and then dabbed at her beautiful nostrils with perfume. ‘Want some?’

‘Please.’

She dabbed it on me, crossing the stuff on my forehead for the comedy of it, and then we lifted the stiff body onto the table, where in just a few seconds she cut the clothes away with a razor-sharp knife. Her sleeves were rolled up and the area between the edge of the gown and her glove revealed a muscular arm that rippled powerfully as she wielded the knife. For a moment I thought I loved her, but before I was sure, I knew I would first have to answer the question that remained at the back of my mind like an awkward collar stud. Had she killed Berruguete?

‘I take it this isn’t your first autopsy,’ she said.

‘No.’

I might fairly have added that it was however my first autopsy at which the chief suspect was performing the procedure, but I was interested to see if Ines Kramsta would say anything that might reveal guilt. It wasn’t much of a plan and the whole thing made me uneasy, because it wasn’t anything other than a low trick designed to exact some sort of emotional response from a woman I admired. After all, if Berruguete was half the bastard Canaris had said he was and Ines was guilty of murdering him, then she was to be commended, not deceived into yielding a tacit admission of her own culpability. But there was little emotion to be seen on her face, and not much in her hands or in her tone.

‘I was in Barcelona, for a while in thirty-seven,’ she said, finally answering my earlier question. Her voice was even and uninflected and quite without expression, as if most of her concentration was directed through the knife that was scoring a pink-grey line along the centre of the dead man’s torso. ‘I spent ten months working in a clinic for the Popular Front. During which time I saw some things that will stay with me for the rest of my life. And atrocities that were committed on both sides. That cured me of politics for ever. You might tell Rudolf that the next time you’re gossiping about me.’

‘Why don’t you tell him yourself?’

‘Oh no.’ She sounded momentarily wary. ‘Too much water has flowed down the mountain since then for that to happen. We were lovers briefly. Did he tell you that?’

‘No. No he didn’t. Only that your brother met an unfortunate end. In Spain.’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’ She allowed herself a quiet smile. ‘I wouldn’t be so quick to rule him out for this if I were you. Rudi’s much more ruthless than he seems.’

‘Oh I know. He can be explosive. And who said I was ruling him out?’

‘Only that you seemed touchy about this when I mentioned it last night. Dr Berruguete was at Rudolf’s wedding you know. In 1934. Berruguete was finishing his studies in Germany and I believe he knew Renata’s family. The Kracker von Schwartzenfeldts.’

‘According to him, you were also at his wedding.’

‘True, but I didn’t invite Berruguete.’ She smiled again. ‘Small world, isn’t it?’

‘It would seem so.’ I paused. ‘At least that’s how it must look from up there. I imagine it’s pretty crowded on that high mountain top that you and the vons and zus are pleased to share with each other.’

‘It bothers you, doesn’t it? The idea of a German aristocracy.’

‘I imagine it must have bothered you, too. Or else why the youthful Bolshevism?’

‘It did. But there seems to be so much more to be bothered about now than a simple matter of inherited wealth and privilege. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Can’t argue with that. What happened to her anyway? His wife.’

‘Renata? God, she was a lovely woman. The loveliest woman I ever knew. She died last year, didn’t she? She was just twenty-nine, I think. I forget what it was, exactly. Complications after childbirth, perhaps, I don’t remember.’

She worked quickly and without hesitation, revealing first of all that Berruguete had been shot twice – through the head and the heart – before digging a bullet out of his chest and, in the absence of a Petrie dish, laying it in an ashtray, but only after throwing away the ash and the spent matches. Her hands were quite steady – steady enough to have fired a broom-handle Mauser and hit what she was aiming at.

‘Well, that was a surprise,’ she murmured.

‘What was?’

‘I had supposed he was only shot in the head.’

‘Maybe not a surprise to me. I heard three shots last night. Only one of those bullets came my way.’

‘There’s the second gunshot wound and the fact that he even had a heart.’

‘You sound like you knew him. From the wedding, perhaps.’