The Killing Club. Paul Finch

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СКАЧАТЬ his jacket pocket. ‘Can give you his addy right now.’

      ‘Might be easier if you were to introduce me to him,’ Heck said. ‘Help break the ice maybe.’

      The older PC glanced at his mates as if he couldn’t believe the audacity of such a request. ‘Before or after I’ve had my nosh?’

      Heck stood up. ‘I’ll probably need an hour actually. Can you meet me downstairs at two?’

      ‘Well … suppose I can put this lot away in an hour.’ The older PC indicated his plate, which was piled with chips, eggs, sausage, beans and buttered bread. In less charitable mode, Heck might have commented that considering his bulk, which, now he was seated, bulged over his waistband and utility belt like a stack of tyres, the guy would be lucky to live through the next hour, but that would hardly help.

      Besides, his thoughts were now on other things.

      Like the Leibstandarte.

      ‘What?’ Jerry Farthing said – that was the older PC’s name. ‘The Leibstan-what?’

      ‘Full title … 1st SS Division Leibstandarte,’ Heck said from the front passenger seat of Farthing’s patrol car.

      Farthing drove thoughtfully on. ‘Nazis, yeah?’

      ‘Frontline shock-troops. Total fanatics. Most of them had been recruited from the Hitler Youth when they were still too young to see through the Führer’s bullshit.’

      Farthing looked puzzled. Up close, he gave off a faintly sour odour – sweat, unwashed armpits. He hadn’t shaved particularly well that morning; his leathery, pockmarked cheeks were covered with nicks. ‘I’m sure this is leading somewhere … I just hope it’s worth it.’

      ‘There was one place where we saw the Leibstandarte at their best.’ Heck checked a mass of notes he’d recently scribbled in his notebook. ‘Wormhoudt. A farming area near Dunkirk. That’s where they murdered a bunch of British POWs with machine guns and grenades. Eighty men died … after they’d surrendered.’

      ‘Nasty.’ But Farthing still looked baffled as to how this concerned him.

      ‘That was in 1940,’ Heck said. ‘In 1945 it was the other way around. Then, the 1st SS Division were in the rear-guard as Hitler’s forces fell back into Germany. That April, quite a few of them got captured by British airborne forces at Luneburg. Ever heard of Luneburg, Jerry?’

      ‘Can’t say I have.’

      ‘Well … if someone else had won the war, it would have gone down as a place of infamy. It’d be regarded as the scene of a notorious war-crime.’

      ‘I’m guessing we got payback for Wormhoudt?’

      ‘At least forty members of the Leibstandarte were executed on the spot.’

      ‘What goes around comes around.’

      ‘Yeah. It was war. What’s interesting to us, though, is the method of the execution.’

      ‘Okay …?’

      This train of thought hadn’t occurred to Heck straight away on hearing that Ernie Cooper’s father had been a commando in World War Two, or that Cooper himself was a World War Two obsessive. But then the word ‘para’ had been mentioned, and it had jogged Heck’s memory again – this time significantly.

      The other thing, of course, was the wire.

      ‘The British paratroopers who grabbed those SS men made them run the gauntlet,’ Heck said. ‘You know what that means?’

      ‘Aye. Blokes line up on either side and hit them with rifle butts while they run down the middle.’

      ‘Rifle butts, spades, trenching tools, anything,’ Heck said. ‘After that – and this is something I knew I’d read about once before – they tied them to posts … according to some accounts, with barbed wire.’

      ‘Jesus,’ Farthing said. Then the parallel seemed to dawn on him. ‘Jesus! … Are you serious?’

      ‘Then they cut their throats.’

      ‘Throats …’ Briefly, Farthing was almost distracted from driving. ‘Okay, there’s a similarity with the way Nathan Crabtree copped it …’

      ‘More or less with the way they all copped it …’

      ‘Yeah, but that was probably nothing to do with Bert Cooper.’

      ‘On the contrary …’ Heck flipped a page in his notebook. ‘Bert Cooper’s unit, the 15th Air Pathfinder Brigade, were implicated. In fact, our Corporal Cooper was one of ten men arrested by the Special Investigation Branch. It was even suggested he did the throat-cutting. He was held for six days while the evidence against him was assessed.’

      Farthing had turned a slight shade of pale. ‘And?’

      ‘He was released on grounds of “battlefield trauma”. Instead of being charged and sent to the glasshouse, he received four months “psychotherapeutic counselling”.’

      ‘And … where’ve you learned all this?’

      ‘It’s all in the public domain, Jerry … you have heard of the internet?’

      Farthing shrugged. ‘Aye, but … even so.’ He clearly wasn’t enjoying hearing these revelations. ‘What’s it got to do with his son? I mean it’s seventy bloody years ago.’

      ‘Well for one thing, his son’s still got the knife. Or so you said.’

      ‘Hang on … we don’t know it’s the same knife. It probably isn’t.’

      Heck glanced sidelong at him. ‘Seriously? Why else keep it in a place of honour?’

      ‘He told me his dad took that knife off a dead Gurkha at Medenine in 1943.’

      ‘Even if that’s true, doesn’t mean it wasn’t the weapon used two years later on those SS prisoners. Might even have been a kind of poetic justice in that.’

      Farthing shook his head. ‘I’m sorry … this is a stretch.’

      ‘Well, let’s look at Ernie Cooper himself. You told me he’s got form for violence.’

      ‘Nothing serious.’

      Heck flipped another page. ‘Wounding his wife?’

      ‘That was quite a while ago, wasn’t it?’

      Heck read on. ‘1977, to be precise. He actually assaulted her twice that year. On the second occasion, which was so serious that she subsequently left him, he received a two-month prison sentence. In 1979, he served time again, this time six months for threatening to kill members of a local Irish family. Apparently the Irish dad had been mouthing off down the pub about the Warrenpoint massacre of eighteen paratroopers by the IRA, saying it was justice for Bloody Sunday. Ernie Cooper went round that night, banging on their door and windows, threatening to burn the place down while СКАЧАТЬ