“So, got anything yet?” the farmer suddenly exclaimed behind Cecil, almost jolting his heart into a full stop. He gasped sharply as he turned to the old man, and held his breath until his eyes returned to their normal size.
“Gee-zuss, Nigel!” he wailed.
“Sorry, sorry, son,” the old man apologized with an irresistible smirk forcing its way onto his face. He was wearing his leather hat and gloves. “Anything I can do to help you with?”
“Uh, no, thanks, Nigel. You are welcome to watch. Look, I am not promising anything. By the looks of this one it was definitely a truck. Look at that force. If it was a normal car it would sustain considerable damage and would have to have been going at over 120 km per hour too.”
“There is no way you can drive that road at 120,” Nigel Cockran declared. “No bloody way.”
“You see here?” Cecil directed his attention to the neck of the sheep. “That is a broken neck, but not just a broken neck, you see. By the way the bone is embedded in the tissue, this animal was…” he looked at the desperate look on the old man’s face, waiting in anticipation for an answer, “crushed.”
“Like when a truck would hit him,” Nigel affirmed.
The veterinarian was more than a bit unsettled; that was plain. He wanted to leave it at that, so that Farmer Cockran would have a logical answer and be able to carry on with peace of mind.
“There is more, isn’t there?” Cockran asked without any prompting. Cecil did not know whether to lie it away and be done with it, or to address the interesting phenomenon. If he chose the latter he would be tied up with a time-consuming, yet far more intriguing, mystery. “Well?” the old man pressed.
Cecil sighed and nodded his head. Again, he pointed to the fracture in question. “Do you see the way the spinal cord is pushed into the skull?” Cockran nodded. “That proves that whatever killed this animal did not only break its neck, it crushed the broken bones right into the flesh. And notice this?” he continued, gesturing the old man forward to better regard the twisted stump of brittle bone he was pointing out. “That is evidence of upward dislocation.”
“What do you mean by that?” Cockran asked, looking grave.
Cecil stared at the concerned farmer with equal worry. “It means that its head was screwed off like a bottle cap.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cockran gulped.
“Only the hide and some of the subcutaneous tissue was still holding it on the body,” Cecil elucidated to the old man’s horror. Cockran was speechless, hanging his head. His feet moved, but he went nowhere, stomping in one place in bewildered indecision. Suddenly he looked up. “And the other one?”
“Will get to that one now,” Cecil said.
“There are no natural large predators here, you know,” he told Cecil. “We have no beasts that hunt and kill livestock. I mean, Christ, we don’t even have anything more hazardous than a bloody feral cat on this island. If a truck did not do it, then you tell me son, what in God’s name has the force of a truck and the propensity of breaking a sheep’s neck short of decapitation?”
Cecil was quiet. He agreed with Cockran, yet he could provide no cogent explanation.
6 Nazi Grammar
At Wrichtishousis, Nina was finalizing the cataloguing of documents. These were the very documents Purdue had held back from the authorities before deliberating the deal which discussed the way he had procured the documents. Although she reckoned that the Nazi soldiers deserved not to be returned to their country, she found some things in Purdue’s hoard quite sentimental. Wedding rings, short notes to loved ones, and monotone photographs of children gave the mummified Nazi devils some humanity.
Bruich shot in from the main corridor, but Nina did not notice him. Her nose was buried in a love letter found on one of the cadavers, one Feldwebel Dieter Manns from Wolfsburg. The scribblings represented a passionately terrifying farewell that, according to Nina’s reasoning, the soldier wrote without any hope of it ever reaching its destination. Addressing someone called Heike, the letter contained more than a sorrowful vergiss mich nicht-type of goodbye. As a matter of fact, the letter contained those very words.
“This means they knew they were going to die,” she whispered to herself. Across the room from her, some of the bodies were individually wrapped and placed in respective, makeshift coffins. Nina’s imagination fused the subject matter of this particular document with the silence in the brightly lit forensic laboratory under the hallways of Purdue’s mansion. Her German was pretty good, so her only obstacle was deciphering the man’s horrendous handwriting. Dressed in her lab coat, Nina grabbed a pen and note pad to translate the words as accurately as she could to put them in context. Even in his own tongue, some of the grammar did not prove Feldwebel Dieter Manns to be much in the way of a well-educated writer.
The first section of the letter to his Heike, Nina was able to ascertain that they were married and very much in love. However, the rest she copied down was a tedious exercise in misplaced knowledge of the planet.
“What are you talking about?” Nina moaned, a deep frown sinking into her forehead.
“My mum always said that pulling my face while the clock struck 12 would leave my face in a permanent wince,” Sam remarked.
Somewhat irate at both the dead crewman and Sam, Nina’s sat up with a jerk. Her dark, perfectly lined eyebrow lifted over her right eye. “I see you did not listen to her warning.”
“Ouch!” he cried, holding his chest in mock hurt. “What are you not understanding there, love?” He sauntered over and had a look at the page she was working from. “Geez, no wonder you don’t know what he is saying. Look at how he makes an ‘r’!”
“Sam,” she sighed in vexation.
“What? Look at it! Bloody terrible,” he teased.
“Sam,” she repeated.
“Alright, I’ll shut it. Just let me sit here with you, okay?” he pleaded.
“Daylight hammering your head?” she asked nonchalantly as she went back to her business.
“Aye,” he sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Worst hangover in a long time.”
Nina’s lack of response conveyed a subtle message for Sam to shut his mouth, while she concentrated. Slowly, as she read, her right hand crept along the note pad’s surface, forming the words one by one as she translated them. The unsettling silence of the lab produced no more than a miserable buzz from the overhead lights, and Sam quickly rebuked a momentary urge to slam his hands down on the desk to give Nina a scare. He knew better, though, and abandoned the juvenile idea to save his testicles from a hearty pummeling.
“My God, this man is uneducated. He cannot possibly have been this ignorant, especially for a German recruit in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. No way,” she muttered.
“Why? What does it say?” Sam asked.
She shook her head without taking her eyes off the page and replied, “He is jumbling up his bloody sentence structure like a daft bastard. This is not the right way to say these things. I mean, shit, he is German, but he writes like a goddamn six-year-old. Things like this just irritate me. I can’t help it.”
“You cannot help being a grammar Nazi?” Sam jested openly, phrasing the two words to sink in with a flavor of mockery. Nina paused and then looked up. She gave Sam one of her rip-your-bollocks-off looks, waiting for him to utter another nail in his proverbial coffin. Sam laughed jovially at her reaction. He lifted his hands in surrender and sat farther back against his chair to keep his distance, just in case she struck.