‘Why is that?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Speaking to these men requires some finesse,’ explained Stalin, ‘and your method of questioning suspects is apt to be a little primitive.’
Pekkala could not argue with that, but he had one more thing to say before he left. ‘Garlinski asked me to put in a word for him.’
‘A word about what?’ Stalin asked.
‘About his living conditions here in Moscow. He thinks he deserves something more.’
Stalin nodded. ‘Indeed he does, Inspector. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.’
On the island of Bornholm, the Ottesen brothers had done nothing to clean up the mess caused by the explosion the night before, and the yard was still scattered with fragments of splintered wood, old horse tack and a splintery coating of straw.
For now, at least, they contented themselves with simply observing the destruction.
The two men perched side by side upon a bale of charred hay in the middle of their barnyard. Both of them were smoking pipes that had long thin stems and white porcelain bowls with tin lids to dampen the smoke.
Emerging from their house at sunrise that morning, they had discovered, amongst the wreckage, several pieces of what appeared to be metal fins and heavy discs of metal pierced by a multitude of drill holes.
The idea that it might have been an aeroplane was quickly set aside. Where were the wheels, the brothers asked themselves. Where were the propellers? Or the pilot? No. This was no work of human hands.
By pooling their combined intelligence, the Ottesen brothers decided that it must have been a spaceship of some sort. Having arrived at this conclusion, they could advance no further in their thinking, and so they sat down and smoked their pipes and waited for events to unfold.
It was not long before three policemen arrived in a truck, ordered the brothers back into their house and then began to rummage through the ruins of the barn.
The Ottesens watched through the gauzy fabric of their day curtains as the policemen removed several chunks of mangled metal from the barn, loaded them aboard the truck and then left without saying goodbye.
Not wanting to disobey orders, the brothers remained in their house for another hour before finally returning to the barnyard.
Soon afterwards, another car showed up and two more policemen climbed out.
‘You’re too late,’ said Per, removing the pipe stem from his mouth. ‘The other lot already came and went.’
‘What other lot?’ demanded the policeman. His name was Jakob Horn and he had served for many years as the only policeman stationed at the southern end of the island. With him was a German named Rudi Lusser who, as part of the small occupation force located on Bornholm, was tasked with accompanying Horn wherever he went, and reporting everything back to Northern District Police Headquarters, located in Hanover. Lusser had been there since 1940, and he had never received much encouragement from Hanover. In fact, he had grown to suspect that his reports weren’t even being read. Now that Hanover had fallen to the enemy, Lusser was growing increasingly nervous about his prospects for the future. Lusser and Horn had never got along well. In the early days of their forced partnership, Lusser had been intolerant of Horn and of these islanders, whom he had written off as ludicrously provincial. He had made no attempt to learn Danish and relied instead of Horn’s rudimentary grasp of German. Now that the war was as good as lost, Lusser was beginning to regret his previous attitude, and he made every effort to ingratiate himself with Horn and with these men, who might soon be his captors.
Lusser beamed a smile at the brothers, as if he was a long-lost friend.
The Ottesens ignored him. They had always ignored Lusser and now they ignored him even more, if such a thing were possible.
‘What other lot?’ repeated Horn.
‘The other policemen,’ explained Ole. ‘They must have come down from the north end of the island.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘We didn’t recognise them.’
Lusser, who could make no sense of what was going on, continued to smile idiotically.
‘Did they speak with you?’ Horn asked the twins.
‘No,’ answered Ole. ‘They just told us to stay in our house.’
‘What did they do then?’
‘Took a bunch of stuff from the spaceship,’ said Per.
‘Spaceship?’ asked Horn.
‘At first we just thought it was God,’ Ole told him.
‘But then we found the metal bits,’ said Per, ‘and that’s how we knew it was a spaceship.’
‘And what did these men do with the things they found?’
‘Put them in their truck and drove away.’
‘Where did they go?’ asked Horn. ‘Which direction?’
Ole aimed his pipe stem down the road towards Arnager, a little fishing village on the southern coast.
Horn shook his head in disbelief. ‘Did it not occur to you to wonder why policemen from the north end would be down this way at all, let alone why they would head off to the south when they left here?’
It had not occurred to them.
Horn stared at them for a moment. Then he got back into the car, along with Lusser, and the two policemen raced towards Arnager.
Arriving not long afterwards, they found an empty truck parked at the quayside and three police jackets, stolen from the Klemensker station at the north end of the island, lying heaped on the passenger seat.
When Major Kirov walked into the interrogation room at the Alexeyevska prisoner-of-war camp, which was reserved for high-ranking enemy officers, he found a tall man with pale skin and greying hair, still wearing the tattered uniform of a colonel in the German Army. The colonel sat at a table, hunched in a chair and clasping a green enamel cup filled with hot tea. Except for one other chair, on the opposite side of the table, there was no other furniture in the room.
The soldier’s name was Hanno Wolfrum.
He had been in charge of a convoy of trucks fleeing the advance of the Red Army towards the Baltic. Having departed from Konigsberg, the column had planned to travel due south to Pultusk, just north of Warsaw and from there to head west towards the German lines. Fearing that his route might be cut off by Russian reconnaissance units, Wolfrum sent his own scouts ahead to ensure that the roads were still passable. As they crossed the Polish border and entered the region of Masuria, Wolfrum’s scouts reported that Soviet tanks had been seen on the road to Pultusk. There were no westbound roads between him and the town, and he did not dare retrace his steps towards the north, so Wolfrum had been forced to detour to the east, towards the enemy lines, in the hopes that he could then find another route south. As the column made its way along a winding road which passed beside the Narew river, they came under Soviet mortar fire from the opposite bank. The lead and rear trucks on the convoy were destroyed, stranding the vehicles in between. The drivers and a small number of men who had been serving as armed escorts for the convoy all fled into the surrounding countryside.
Russian soldiers crossed the river, hoping to find food in the trucks. Instead, they discovered engine parts for both V-1 and V-2 rockets. As word of the discovery reached the Russian High Command, specialised troops of the NKVD Internal Security Service were dispatched to the scene. The rocket parts were quickly inventoried and transported to the rear and a hunt began for the men who had been travelling with the convoy.
By then, most of them had already been killed by Polish civilians. Wolfrum himself was found hiding in a barn by Red Army soldiers who had been out foraging. He was brought to the Alexeyevska prison camp, where he underwent weeks of interrogation.
During this time, Wolfrum was neither tortured nor mistreated. His interrogators, who were among the most skilled in the Russian Intelligence Service, were well aware that Wolfrum, in time and if properly treated, would supply them not only with the answers to their questions, but with questions which they had not thought to ask.