The victim had been utterly crushed, so much was clear. The mangled body was lying on the concrete floor of the garage, just under a hydraulic lift. The vehicle lift had been raised by one Constable Collins, the police officer who had found the victim.
When Detective Chief Inspector Bramble arrived on the crime scene, stepping out of his car and through the workshop door, he automatically looked out for the highest-ranking member of the local police who was present. He stepped up to a man wearing the chevrons of a sergeant. “What do we have here, Sergeant, erm…?”
“Sergeant Thompson Sir. A suspicious death, to say the least Sir.”
“Any ID on the victim?”
“Yes Sir. Martin McCullough, sixty-eight years old, owner of the garage, well known to the police on account of links to the IRA… But he was retired. From the IRA, that is, as far as we know. Still liked to tinker in his garage, though.”
“I can see that.” The detective crouched next to the dreadfully mangled body. It was a real horror show of spilling guts and brains. The dirty blue overalls the man was wearing had been mashed into his flesh.
“Any relatives we need to notify?”
“Yes Sir. I called the station, and they found out that there is a wife, Eileen, sixty-two, and a son, Neilan, thirty-three.”
“All right, I’ll have to go and see them… Any chance that it was an accident? A mechanical failure of the lift or something?”
“I couldn’t tell Sir. You’d have to ask an expert. We’ve already called in the forensic pathologist, of course.”
“Not much he’ll be able to do by the look of it… All right; who found the body, by the way?”
The sergeant pointed to the constable standing guard by the door and making sure that the curious onlookers didn’t come too close. “Constable Collins. He was on duty at the station when an anonymous call was made.”
“All right. I want to talk to Collins. You take his place.”
The detective motioned the constable to come over, and the eager-looking young policeman did so at once.
“So you received an anonymous call about this? Any idea what kind of person?”
“Male voice Sir, youthful-sounding, a bloke mumbling through his fist in a useless ploy to disguise his voice. Didn’t waste any words, though. The call lasted only a few seconds.”
“And what did he say, exactly?”
“That I should check on the McCullough garage. That it would be worth my while.”
“So you came over at once…”
“No Sir. The call came at half past one last night, and as I was on duty until six, I had to wait for the end of my shift. I found the body at around six thirty this morning.”
“You were doing the night shift? So you’re not even on duty right now! Why are you guarding the door?”
“Well Sir, the sergeant doesn’t know that I’m off-duty, and I thought I’d stick around for a while. This is the most baffling case I’ve ever seen.”
When he had joined the Met, the constable had dreamed of heroic actions and of solving heinous crimes single-handedly. Instead of which he’d had long hours of office drudgery and unvarying patrols in a neighbourhood not originally his own. He was positively thrilled by the gruesome stiff that had now turned up on his turf. At last he was going to deal with a real case, after spending many nights at the station reading up on scientific criminology…
Detective Chief Inspector Bramble presently said, “What makes you say that the case is baffling, apart from the gore?”
“Well Sir, I couldn’t help overhearing just now. You were wondering aloud if it could be an accident; a mechanical failure. As it happens, my dad has a garage just like this one, and so I can assure you that an accident is out of the question. You see, that’s the whole point of a hydraulic vehicle lift. Hydraulics never fail: you want to lower the car, you have to release the lift by actuating a valve. You have to do something. The button for that is over there on that panel, at a safe remove from the installation. If an accident ever happens, it means somebody caused it.”
“And then he calls the local station in the middle of the night.”
“That’s right Sir.”
“Well-well, Constable, it seems that you’re the expert I was wishing for. I have a little theory of my own about your caller. In cases like this it is often a member of the family who did it. It appears that the victim had a thirty-three year old son. You mentioned a youthful male voice on the phone, so what would you say? Could it be the son?”
“I wouldn’t know about that Sir. Patricide is rather uncommon, but you could be right, of course. But even if it turns out to be the son, there is something else that is highly disturbing about what happened here, if I may say so Sir.”
“Oh really? And what would that be?”
“If you care to take a look Sir.”
Constable Collins crouched next to the body. “Do you see how the cloth of the victim’s work overalls did not soak up any blood? That could be significant. It looks like the victim was bled dry before he was put through the meat grinder.”
By now the detective was kneeling next to Constable Collins; he was all ears. “Wait a minute, what are you saying?”
“The victim was bled to death before he was crushed by the lift. You can see it on the grate of this drain well, right next to the man’s head. There are traces of congealed blood. His blood just flowed into the well under the lift.”
“Good God! What kind of sick ritual took place here?”
“Exactly Sir. But the really baffling thing is not that the victim was bled to death, it is rather that he was bitten to death. If you care to take a look at his neck—well, the part of the remains here, above his shirt collar—you can see the marks of the teeth. Human teeth, of course… The man was definitely bitten.”
“Good Lord! But then why crush the body as well afterwards?”
“My guess would be: a useless ploy to disguise this sick ritual as an accident. This was done either by a very dumb person, or by someone under the delusion that they were being very clever.”
“Hang on to me and act helpless, Baloo!”
The young man who said this was propelling himself through the Tube station in a wheelchair. Baloo was an elderly blind lady with pitch black round glasses and a white cane. She was tall and shapely, with a riot of half-grey, half-blonde curls gathered in an unruly bunch on top of her head. With one hand she was holding on to the shoulder of the wheelchair-bound man, while she tap-tapped spectacularly with the long white cane held in her other hand.
They approached the top of an escalator going down. Suddenly the blind lady let go of her companion, who twirled around in his wheelchair; then she stepped forwards onto the descending escalator. The young man propelled himself backwards after her, apparently bent on throwing himself down the sheer endless flight of moving stairs.
People gasped and cried out. The ones just ahead of this strange couple were quite alarmed for a moment. Already a guard from the London Underground was rushing towards them, but as the wheelchair keeled backwards, the young man leaned forwards and grabbed the rubber handrails left and right with his hands. As by miracle his wheelchair stayed in place on a step of the escalator, apparently perfectly stable.
Again the blind lady clung to the wheelchair-bound man, her arms around his shoulders, and seeing this, the guard stopped in his tracks and beat a hasty retreat. The lady was obviously as blind as a bat. He had intended to tell off the young man for his reckless behaviour—taking the escalators in a wheelchair was strictly forbidden!—but under the circumstanced he thought better of it.
Still hanging on to his shoulders, the blind lady leaned forwards and giggled softly into her companion’s ear: “Louie! How can I act helpless when I’m about to have a giggling fit!”
“No worries, Baloo. The guard has already scampered. Victory is ours! You know, the first time I saw you entering a Tube station with your white cane, I knew right away that you’d be a real urban warrior…”
“Warrior my foot. I’m a pensioner, for Pete’s sake! And you, King Louie, are still wet behind the ears. I could be your mother, you know.”
“Well, apart from all else, we have a lot in common, you and me. It takes a lot of balls and drive to get up in the morning when you’re blind or wheelchair-bound. Normal people have no idea how hard we have to push ourselves, compared to them. That’s why when we team up, we rule!”
It was a fine day at the end of May, and Hans Konradi was sitting at the dining table with his family, in their small flat in Lichtenberg, Berlin. “Listen, Grete, children, there’s a serious rumour going around about the new regime in Hungary. They’re tearing down the border fence with Austria. That’s not just propaganda from the West. How about that? Apparently you can get across the Iron Curtain there…”
His remarks were greeted with an uncomfortable silence. This was Papa’s dangerous talk again, using words like “regime” and “Iron Curtain”. If they were being wiretapped they could get into serious trouble. But on the other hand, they were not important people, just your average Hans and Grete, not into politics at all, so why would they be bugged? “We even have it pretty good,” Hans Konradi reflected. He had climbed up the ladder to become a shop manager. They had a flat of their own, albeit a small and derelict one. It included a private kitchen and bathroom. And they had a car, a little Trabant, parked outside in the street. But life was stifling and excruciatingly boring under the communist regime. You had no freedom. Hannelore and Hanspeter were due to finish their secondary school in a couple of years; they were bright kids, but they would not be allowed to choose their studies or their profession. If the State needed engineers you became an engineer. With his work at the State shop, Hans had always felt that he was performing under his abilities. He’d wanted to be an English teacher, but the State wanted children to study Russian only…
“Listen up, gang, here’s my plan: we’re going to Hungary on a weekend trip. So far nothing dramatic. But once we’re there, we’ll have a look at that border crossing, and if the rumours are true, we’ll drive on into Austria and we’ll never come back.”
“Oh Hans,” his wife gasped, “isn’t it dangerous? It could be a trick; a trap. They’ll arrest us… or even shoot us!”
“Don’t worry, Gretchen, we’re not going to do anything reckless. We’ll take a good look at what’s going on; we’ll proceed only if we all agree that it’s safe.”
“All right, but you have to promise that we won’t be the first ones to do it. I want to see someone else ahead of us crossing the border unharmed.”
“Of course, darling, that’s the idea. Now, the most difficult part for the moment is this: we may never come back, but we can’t take all our possessions with us. It has to look like we’re going on a weekend trip, remember? For my part I’ve already decided that I’ll take only the clothes I’m wearing, plus our photo albums in the small suitcase; maybe the marriage and birth certificates as well. Our family history is all that matters to me. Now, I want the three of you to think along the same lines: one bag each; take only what you want to keep for the rest of your life…”
Suddenly young Hannelore became tearful. “Papa! I’m scared… and what about my friends? Will I ever see them again?”
“Impossible to say, sweetheart. But you do understand that you cannot say goodbye to them, don’t you? Officially we’re only having a weekend outing to Hungary. Nothing more than that.”