‘Why was he drinking? Any particular reason? I mean, before you left him.’
‘Yes, I understand. He was drinking because of what was happening at the Air Ministry. That Jew, Erhard Milch, was trying to undermine Ernst. All of the people in his department had been fired and Ernst took that very personally.’
‘Why were they fired?’
‘Because that bastard Göring didn’t have the guts to fire Ernst. He figured that if he fired all of Ernst’s people then Ernst’s sense of honour would compel him to resign. He blamed Ernst for the failure of our air attacks on Britain. That’s what he said to Hitler, to save his own skin. Of course it wasn’t true, not a damned word of it, but Hitler believed him anyway. But that was just one reason he was depressed.’
I groaned, inside. After Prague I needed this case like I needed a pair of silk stockings of the kind Inge Bleyle was wearing on her lovely legs.
‘And another reason?’
She shrugged. Suddenly she was looking evasive, as if it had dawned on her that she was talking to a cop.
‘What with the war in Russia, well that was getting him down too. Yes, he was depressed and drinking too much. Only – well, he wasn’t long back from a clinic in Bühlerhöhe. They’d dried him out. He did that for me, you know. Because he wanted me back and I’d made that a condition of our getting back together. But I wanted to wait a little, see? Just to see if it took – the cure.’ She sipped her whisky and grimaced. ‘I don’t like whisky.’
‘In this house? That’s not unusual.’ I took the glass and put it on the table between us.
‘Then, a couple of days ago, something happened to him. I don’t know what, exactly. Ploch, his chief of staff at the Ministry until Milch had him fired, had just returned from Kiev. He went to see Ernst and told him something. Something awful. Ernst wouldn’t say what it was, just that it was something happening in the East, in Russia, and that no one would ever believe it.’
I nodded. You didn’t have to be a detective to know what Ploch had probably told him. And it wasn’t anything to do with aeroplanes.
‘Because of that, Ernst had telephoned Göring to ask him about it and they’d argued. Badly. And Ernst threatened to tell someone at the American Embassy what Ploch had told him.’
‘He said that?’
‘Yes. He had a lot of American friends, you see? Ernst was very popular. Especially with the ladies. The late ambassador’s daughter – I mean the American ambassador’s daughter, Martha Dodds, she was a very close friend. Perhaps more than just a friend. I don’t know.’
She paused.
‘And he told you all of this on the telephone?’
‘Yes. We were talking. Ernst was crying some of the time. Begging me to come and see him. One thing I do remember him saying. It was that he could no longer believe in Germany; that Germany was a wicked country and deserved to lose the war.’
The more I heard about Ernst Udet, the more I started to like him. But Inge Bleyle felt obliged to disagree; anyone would have felt the same.
‘I didn’t like it that he was saying such things. I mean, that kind of talk is not good, Commissar; even if you are a decorated hero like Ernst. I mean, you hear stories about the Gestapo. People being arrested for unpatriotic talk. I told Ernst to be quiet and to keep his mouth shut in case he got us both into trouble. Him for saying such things and me for listening to them without ringing off. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you hear those things. You understand, the only reason I stayed on the line was that I was concerned for his state of mind.’
I nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘Then I heard the shot.’
‘Had he talked about killing himself?’
‘Well, no. Not in so many words.’
‘Did you hear anything else? Voices, perhaps? Footsteps? A door closing?’
‘No. I put the telephone down and drove straight over here. I live only a short distance away in the West End. When I got here all the lights were on. And I still had my key so I let myself in. I shouted his name a couple of times and then went upstairs and found him dead, as you saw. I came back downstairs and used the telephone in the study – it’s a different line – to call the police. I didn’t want to touch the one in his hand. That was an hour ago. I’ve been here ever since.’
‘Do you think he killed himself?’
She opened her mouth to say something; checked herself – the way you do – and said: ‘It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?’
Sensible girl. No wonder she was driving a Rolls-Royce. They don’t hand those cars out to just anyone.
After that two fellows from the Air Ministry showed up: Colonel Max Pendele, who was Udet’s adjutant, and another officer. That was at eight a.m. Then someone from the Ministry of the Interior turned up as well. That was at nine.
At about eleven o’clock I drove back to the Alex to type out my report.
After I’d done this Lüdtke asked me to come up to his office, and when I got there, he told me I was off the case.
I didn’t ask why. By then I hardly needed to. It was plain that someone important didn’t want me asking any awkward questions, and there were plenty that could have been asked about the death of Ernst Udet; and it was only after Heydrich’s death that I learned it had been he who told Lüdtke to take me off the case.
Five days later they buried Udet. It was a state funeral. They carried him out of the Air Ministry in a casket covered with a Nazi flag, placed him on a gun carriage and then processed up to Invaliden Cemetery, where they buried him close to his old pal the Baron von Richthofen. Of course, state funerals were for heroes, not suicides or enemies of the state, but that was okay because the story released by the authorities – and this was the reason behind my removal, since of course I knew different – was that Udet had been killed testing an experimental fighter plane.
Hermann Göring delivered a eulogy; the nine-centimetre flak gun in the Tiergarten fired a salute that had many Berliners running for an air-raid shelter thinking that the RAF was back in our skies. A few days later they were back, although not to drop any bombs.
It was as well I was off the case. Being a detective has made me unreasonably suspicious. I see connections and conspiracies where other people see only the need to look the other way and keep their suspicions to themselves. Another air ace, Werner Mölders, was killed flying back to Germany for Udet’s funeral, from the Crimea; and around the Alex there were whispers that there was a lot more to his death – the Heinkel on which he was a passenger crashed as it tried to land in Breslau – than had been allowed to meet the eye.
Certainly the British thought so, for the RAF dropped leaflets over Germany alleging that, like Ernst Udet, Werner Mölders had been opposed to the Nazi regime. And that he had been murdered.
Six days later, Mölders was also given a state funeral and he was buried alongside his great friend and confidant Ernst Udet in the Invaliden Cemetery.
In retrospect both of those two state funerals felt like dress rehearsals for what followed six months later in June 1942.
It was six a.m. I was on my way home after a night at the Alex when I received a telephone call to go and see Arthur Nebe in his office at RSHA headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse. It was a summons I had been dreading. I knew of the attempt on Heydrich’s life: on 27 May, a group of Czech terrorists had thrown a grenade into his open car as it drove through the streets of Prague. Heydrich had been seriously injured but, as far as anyone knew, he was making a strong recovery. It was only what you might have expected of such a brave hero; at least that’s what the newspapers said.