The Defeated Aristocrat Read Online Free

broken shell. The roles of parent and child had been reversed, and she sensed her father hated the change, as much as she did.
    She looked into her father’s kitchen. Bertha was mincing veal, onions, capers, and spices for Konigsberger Klopse.
    ‘You’re late this morning,’ Bertha commented. ‘Not that it’s surprising after his lordship’s performance last night.’
    Lilli changed the subject. ‘Did Amalia get to school on time?’
    ‘Don’t I always get her there on time?’
    ‘Just checking. Good morning, Ernst.’ Lilli was glad that the caretaker had joined them before Bertha could say any more about Dedleff. ‘Call me a sleigh, please. I need to go to Wasser Strasse.’
     
    Wasser Strasse, Konigsberg, Saturday January 4th 1919
    The sign said ‘Hotel’ but given the mound of iced snow in front of the door, Lilli was suspicious. In her experience, hotels cleared their access first thing in the morning for the convenience of outgoing and incoming guests. Fighting pain, she climbed awkwardly from the sleigh, paid the driver and pulled the bell. She rang three times before a slovenly woman in grubby overalls, down at heel slippers and men’s walking socks appeared. She eyed Lilli suspiciously.
    ‘You want a room? Twenty five pfennigs an hour.’ She confirmed Lilli’s impression the place was a house of assignation, not hotel.
    ‘I’m Lilli Richter of the Konigsberg Zeit .’ Lilli used her maiden name on newspaper business because most people in the city knew her father, at least by reputation. ‘I received a message to meet someone in room 10.’
    ‘Twenty five pfennigs.’ The woman held out a hand.
    ‘Whoever sent the message will have paid.’
    ‘Each!’
    Lilli opened her bag, felt in her purse, pulled out two coins and seeing the woman’s blackened fingernails dropped them into her palm.
    ‘First floor, turn right at the top of the stairs.’
    Lilli steeled herself as every step brought increased pain. The dark stairwell stank of cheap perfume and stale fish. She’d interviewed enough prostitutes to recognise the smell of sex. She found the room and knocked the door. There was no answer. She knocked again. The door swung inward.
    She called out, ‘Hello,’ stepped inside, retched and reeled.
    The woman who’d let her in shuffled up the stairs. ‘What’s going on?’
    Lilli leaned against the wall in the passage. ‘You have a telephone?’ she whispered when she could speak.
    ‘What’s it to you?’
    Lilli retched again.
    The woman pushed past Lilli into the room. She swayed and dropped in the doorway.
    Lilli crouched beside her. Mesmerized, she couldn’t stop staring at the bed.
    The bloodied, hacked, and mutilated remains of a naked man were sprawled over the quilt. Between his legs was a bloody pulp of raw flesh. But it was his head that commanded her attention.
    It was locked in a rusting metal bridle. Lilli had seen one like it in the town’s castle museum. A long narrow central guard covered the nose. Two circular discs with hollow centres obliterated all but the hazed opaque eyes. Jagged pointed metal ‘teeth’ projected over both lips. Dangling from them hung the man’s flaccid, uncircumcised penis. Below it spilled his scrotum, an obscene hairy pouch of wrinkled skin that rested on the rusting metal bar that encircled his neck.
    The woman moaned. Lilli shook her.
    ‘Telephone the police. Ask for Kriminaldirektor Georg Hafen. Give him this address. Tell him Lilli Richter needs him here, urgently.’

CHAPTER THREE
    A train travelling east from Berlin, Friday January10th 1919
     
    KONIGSBERG SONNE MONDAY JANUARY 6th 1919
    GRUESOME MURDER. MUTILATION OF POLICE OFFICER.
    CITY IN SHOCK
    Are there bloodthirsty demons at work in Konigsberg?
    That is Max Meyer’s question after the desecrated remains of an as yet unnamed police officer were discovered strewn inside a house of ill repute on Wasser Strasse on Saturday morning: Mutilated and savagely dismembered, his corpse had