The Pale Criminal by Philip Kerr Page A

had resigned my rank of Kriminalinspektor in order to become the house detective at the Adlon Hotel. Another few months and they would have probably fired me anyway. If anyone had said then that I’d be back at the Alex as a member of Kripo’s upper officer class while a National Socialist government was still in power, I’d have said that he was crazy.
    Most of the people seated round the table would almost certainly have expressed the same opinion, if their faces were anything to go by now: Hans Lobbes, the Reichskriminaldirektor’s number three and head of Kripo Executive; Count Fritz von der Schulenberg, deputy to Berlin’s Police President, and representing the uniformed boys of Orpo. Even the three officers from Kripo, one from Vice and two from the Murder Commission who had been assigned to a new investigating team that was, at my own request, to be a small one, all regarded me with a mixture of fear and loathing. Not that I blamed them much. As far as they were concerned I was Heydrich’s spy. In their position I would probably have felt much the same way.
    There were two other people in attendance at my invitation, which compounded the atmosphere of distrust. One of these, a woman, was a forensic psychiatrist from the Berlin Charite Hospital. Frau Marie Kalau vom Hofe was a friend of Arthur Nebe, himself something of a criminologist, and attached officially to police headquarters as a consultant in matters of criminal psychology. The other guest was Hans Illmann, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and formerly senior pathologist at the Alex until his cool hostility to Nazism had obliged Nebe to retire him. Even by Nebe’s own admission, Illmann was better than any of the pathologists currently working at the Alex, and so at my request he had been invited to take charge of the forensic medical aspects of the case.
    A spy, a woman and a political dissident. It needed only the stenographer to stand and sing ‘The Red Flag’ for my new colleagues to believe that they were the subject of a practical joke.
    Nebe finished his long-winded introduction of me and the meeting was in my hands.
    I shook my head. ‘I hate bureaucracy,’ I said. ‘I loathe it. But what is required here is a bureaucracy of information. What is relevant will become clear later on. Information is the lifeblood of any criminal investigation, and if that information is contaminated then you poison the whole investigative body. I don’t mind if a man’s wrong about something. In this game we’re nearly always wrong until we’re right. But if I find a member of my team knowingly submitting wrong information, it won’t be a matter for a disciplinary tribunal. I’ll kill him. That’s information you can depend on.
    â€˜I’d also like to say this. I don’t care who did it. Jew, nigger, pansy, stormtrooper, Hitler Youth Leader, civil servant, motorway construction worker, it’s all the same to me. Just as long as he did do it. Which leads me to the subject of Josef Kahn. In case any of you have forgotten, he’s the Jew who confessed tea the murders of Brigitte Hartmann, Christiane Schulz, and Zarah Lischka. Currently he’s a Paragraph Fifty-one in the municipal lunatic asylum at Herzeberge, and one of’ the purposes of this meeting is to evaluate that confession in the light of the fourth murdered girl, Lotte Winter.
    â€˜At this point let me introduce you to Professor Hans Illmann, who has kindly agreed to act as the pathologist in this case. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s one of the best pathologists in the country, so we’re very fortunate to have him working with us.’
    Illmann nodded by way of acknowledgement, and carried on with his perfect roll-up. He was a slight man with thin, dark hair, rimless glasses and a small chin beard. He finished licking the paper and poked the roll-up