BooksBarbecue
Back March Violets Save as PDF
Chapters (22)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Chapter 2
  6. Chapter 3
  7. Chapter 4
  8. Chapter 5
  9. Chapter 6
  10. Chapter 7
  11. Chapter 8
  12. Chapter 9
  13. Chapter 10
  14. Chapter 11
  15. Chapter 12
  16. Chapter 13
  17. Chapter 14
  18. Chapter 15
  19. Chapter 16
  20. Chapter 17
  21. Chapter 18
  22. Chapter 19

‘How would you like to come and work for me? I need someone to be my assistant, someone to do the digging around in public records and to be here now and then. I think it would suit you. I could pay you, say, sixty marks a week. Cash, so we wouldn’t have to inform the labour people. Maybe more if things work out. What do you say?’

‘Well if you’re sure . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I could certainly use the money.’

‘That’s settled then.’ I thought for a minute. ‘Presumably, you still have a few contacts on papers, in government departments?’ She nodded. ‘Do you happen to know anyone in the DAF, the German Labour Service?’

She thought for a minute, and fiddled with the buttons on her jacket. ‘There was someone,’ she said, ruminatively. ‘An ex-boyfriend, an SA man. Why do you ask?’

‘Give him a call, and ask him to take you out this evening.’

‘But I haven’t seen or spoken to him in months,’ she said. ‘And it was bad enough getting him to leave me alone the last time. He’s a real leech.’ Her blue eyes glanced anxiously at me.

‘I want you to find out anything you can about what Six’s son-in-law, Paul Pfarr, was so interested in that he was there several times a week. He had a mistress, too, so anything you can find out about her as well. And I mean anything.’

‘I’d better wear an extra pair of knickers, then,’ she said. ‘The man has hands like he thinks he should have been a midwife.’ For the briefest of moments I allowed myself a small pang of jealousy, as I imagined him making a pass at her. Perhaps in time I might do the same.

‘I’ll ask him to take me to see a show,’ she said, summoning me from my erotic reverie. ‘Maybe even get him a little drunk.’

‘That’s the idea,’ I said. ‘And if that fails, offer the bastard money.’

Chapter 11

11

Tegal Prison lies to the north-west of Berlin and borders a small lake and the Borsig Locomotive Company housing-estate. As I drove onto Seidelstrasse, its red-brick walls heaved into sight like the muddy flanks of some horny-skinned dinosaur; and when the heavy wooden door banged shut behind me, and the blue sky vanished as though it had been switched off like an electric light, I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy for the inmates of what is one of Germany’s toughest prisons.