Jamie allowed his face to harden. ‘I can assure you that we saw more than enough on our last visit, Kommissar.’
She nodded distractedly. ‘Of course, forgive me. So you would like to go inside the bunker?’
‘If that would be possible. It would take only a few moments.’
Lotte Muller hesitated. She had orders to keep the bunker secure, and she was a great believer in obeying orders. But Jamie Saintclair and Sarah Grant had found the bunker and the Raphael, and despite the extra workload it had brought, she was grateful to them for the opportunities it created. She made her decision.
‘Very well.’ She smiled tiredly. ‘I finish my shift in a few minutes. I will drive you there. No,’ she raised a hand as Jamie opened his mouth to protest. ‘I insist. Your car will stay here. There is a rental garage in town and I’m sure the mechanic will be here very quickly. They are extremely efficient.’
Ten minutes later she joined Jamie and Sarah in the car park. Sarah carried a large bunch of colourful flowers and Lotte nodded approvingly. ‘They are lovely,’ she said. ‘We have very similar blooms in the town square. They are just reaching their peak in time for the summer.’
As they got into the black BMW Sarah attempted to disguise the fact that the bouquet had no florist’s wrapping and some of the stems still had the roots attached.
Lotte Muller took the southern route from the town. She noticed Jamie’s puzzlement.
‘This is not the most direct route, but it will save another hike through the forest,’ she explained. ‘We discovered the main entrance to the bunker in the hills to the west of the river. It was a working quarry and a sub-camp of the Dora-Nordhausen konzentrationslager, but it closed towards the end of the war and never re-opened. The current owners of the site, a company registered in the Cayman Islands, have gone to great lengths to keep people away. Given the circumstances, the company is naturally part of our inquiry, but so far we have had little success discovering who is behind it.’
After crossing the river they turned north, and a little later left the main road on to a forest track.
‘Of course, the bunker is still a murder scene, but we have completed our initial investigations in the area where the bodies were discovered. The strangest thing is that they were all already dead.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Sarah leaned forward from the back seats.
‘You noticed that many of the bodies were in a remarkable state of preservation? It seems that conditions within the bunker were conducive to partial mummification. Our initial forensic investigations showed that several victims had similar tattoos on the inside of their left forearm. You understand the implications of this?’
Jamie shook his head, but Sarah said she did.
The police chief explained. ‘Whatever you think of the Nazis, Mr Saintclair, they were extremely thorough. Every concentration camp prisoner received a personal identification number. At first, the numbers were sewn on their prison clothes, but because of the nature of the camps the clothing must be reused: again and again and again. So instead of on the clothing, the number would be written on the prisoner. Much more economic and efficient, yes? When the prisoner was disposed of, his number was disposed of with him.
‘Fortunately, some records from the camps still survive and we have been able to identify those victims whose tattoos are still readable.’
‘Who were they?’
‘To the best of our knowledge, they are all either scientists or technicians.’ She pointed to a file in the compartment beneath the passenger window. ‘Please. The most well known was a man called Abraham Steinberg, a Berlin physicist who, before the war, worked closely with some of the scientists who were eventually involved in the Uranverein project. Many of his Jewish colleagues found ways to escape Germany, but poor Herr Steinberg elected to stay with his family.’ Jamie opened the file and found himself staring into the face of a stern, bearded man standing behind a workbench filled with scientific equipment. He turned to the next sheet and his heart lurched. ‘Another of the victims – the youngest we have identified – is his niece, Hannah Schulmann, a laboratory technician who worked closely with him.’ Lotte gave a sad smile. ‘She was nineteen years old.’ In the black-and-white photograph Hannah Schulmann had the ethereal, cinematic beauty that in other times would have won her a place on the screen. A softness and a sensitivity that surrounded her like a halo. Her dark eyes sparkled with humour and her smile showed tiny pearls of perfect white teeth. The eyes drew him in, and he choked, making the women stare. So much life. So much potential. Wasted. A terrible darkness descended on him and he felt a hatred for Walter Brohm and his like that made him wish it had been his finger on the trigger and not Matthew’s.