End of Spies by Alex Gerlis (popular ebook readers .txt) 📕

cricket. It’s slow and pointless. There seems to be no sense of urgency. Surely we should be getting warrants to search the gallery and their homes and bringing them in for questioning.’

Prince said he had to agree, and he arranged a meeting with Tom Gilbey. MI5 are rather dawdling, sir, I think we need to up our game…

But before the meeting could take place, a message came from Berlin, from Bemrose. Gurevich wants to see you. He says it’s urgent – it’s to do with kestrel.

‘We’ve found him!’

Commissar Iosif Gurevich clapped his hands and stood up. There was a wide grin on his face and a shot glass of vodka held high above his head as he prepared to deliver yet another toast. Slightly confused, and beginning to feel the effects of the vodka they’d already been obliged to consume, both Hanne and Price slowly stood too before sipping their drinks.

It was late in the morning in Gurevich’s new office on the top floor of the building on Behrenstrasse. This one had sweeping views of what remained of Berlin and felt more like a dining room than an office, with its highly polished furniture and expensive-looking rugs. Hanne and Prince were exhausted from their overnight flight from London: they’d hoped for some time in Berlin to rest before their meeting, but Bemrose had insisted they travel to the Soviet zone immediately.

‘You found Friedrich Steiner?’

Gurevich shook his head as he topped up his glass.

‘His father, then?’

‘No, not yet – but hopefully very soon. You recall the file I showed you last time – this one here?’

He angled a folder on his desk so they could see it better. ‘This is Wolfgang Steiner’s file and it gave us a link between him and the Kestrel Line, if you remember. We assumed FFM stood for Frankfurt, which from what you tell me was probably a correct assumption, but we had no idea what the other initials – RLB, V and T – stood for, though we thought T must be Turin. I said at the time that these were notes added to the file after an interrogation, and that the officer who made them had failed to include his initials – that he was most probably in a hurry. I also said I’d try and find that officer.’

Minutes later they were joined by that officer. Kapitan Leonid Fyodorov looked improbably young – perhaps in his mid-twenties – with a mop of unruly hair, and black eyes that watched them suspiciously. He also spoke good German.

‘I have assured Kapitan Fyodorov that he has done nothing wrong,’ Gurevich began. ‘This is not a disciplinary matter in any way. I understand that he made these notes at a time when he was interrogating maybe a dozen Nazis a day. His oversight in failing to add his initials and not making the notes more explicit is therefore quite understandable.’

Kapitan Fyodorov nodded, and allowed a thin smile to cross his young face.

‘Perhaps, Fyodorov, it would be best if you explained everything in your own words. Would anyone like some more vodka first?’

Hanne and Prince both said they were fine, thank you very much, and Fyodorov didn’t respond as he opened the file and his notebook. Before he spoke, he stood up and shook hands with the two visitors, looking them both in the eye. He seemed intrigued by them. Prince wondered how Gurevich had explained their presence.

‘Since July, I’ve been working at Hohenschönhausen prison in Lichtenberg.’ He nodded to the window, presumably in the direction of Lichtenberg. ‘My job was – and still is – to interrogate Germans whom we suspect of being involved in war crimes or who held senior positions in the regime. On the twelfth of July, I was told to interrogate a prisoner who’d actually requested to speak with us, which was most unusual. His name was Paul Hoffman, and he was a Kriminaldirektor with the Kripo – the Kriminalpolizei, essentially the detectives in the regular police force, though they came under the Nazi security structure. Hoffman was reasonably senior – a Kriminaldirektor is probably equivalent to your rank of major, which is why he was held in custody.

‘You understand that by then I had interrogated hundreds of men and all claimed they’d never been Nazis, and I can honestly say that Hoffman was the first one I believed and who I actually found likeable. He told me he’d been based at the police station in Wedding and ran the department investigating serious crimes. He said he had nothing to do with anything political or to do with Jews, and I believed him, because such matters weren’t handled at that police station.

‘He also told me that not only was he not a Nazi, but he was actually a communist.’ Fyodorov paused and looked at Hanne and Prince to see if they reacted. ‘I know this sounds remarkable, but according to Hoffman, he’d been a member of the KPD.’

‘The KPD?’

‘Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – the German Communist Party. He said he’d been a member in the 1920s, and although he’d joined the police in 1929, he’d retained his party card until the organisation went underground in 1933. That was not unusual: many of our comrades did likewise. Many also joined the Nazi Party and—’

‘Perhaps it would be best to stick to the story, Fyodorov.’

‘Of course, sir. Hoffman insisted that he had done what he could to help people, including Jews and party comrades, and gave me many examples. He said he thought some people would still be alive who could vouch for him. As it happens, he mentioned one senior comrade who’d gone to Moscow in 1932 and who returned here when we liberated the city, and this man was able to confirm that Hoffman had indeed been a member of the KPD.

‘However, we still needed to investigate him; to be sure he’d not been involved in serious crimes. Then he told me a story he admitted was hard to verify but he felt I