The Defeated Aristocrat Read Online Free Page A

been subjected to atrocities too abominable to mention to our readers. We can however reveal that the officer’s private parts had been slashed from his body and stuffed into his mouth. Our sources confirm that other parts of his corpse are missing.
    The maid who stumbled across the horrific scene said the room was mired in “more flesh and blood than a slaughterhouse”. She confirmed that his genitals had been sliced from his body. Our experts have stated that the missing organs are frequently used in Black Arts and Devil Worship.
    Yet the Konigsberg Police under the direction of Kriminalrat Dorfman are no closer to discovering the perpetrator or perpetrators of this revolting crime than they were two days ago. As usual they appear to be more concerned with harassing and silencing hardworking journalists than finding the killer.
     
    KONIGSBERGER ZEIT MONDAY JANUARY 6th 1919
    TRAGIC DEATH OF POLICE OFFICER
    In the early hours of this morning the remains of a police officer were found in a hotel room in Wasser Strasse. A spokesman for Kriminalrat Adelbert Dorfman refused to confirm or deny rumours that the victim had been mutilated. He stated that the victim’s name was known to the authorities but would be withheld until his relatives had been informed of his demise. He added that the victim was an exemplary officer, personally known to him, who will be greatly mourned and missed by all his family and colleagues.
     
    ‘You’re so hard up for news you have to scour five-day-old newspapers?’ Helmut Norde taunted Wolf Mau.
    ‘Says something for your companionship, doesn’t it, Helmut?’ Wolf folded the papers he’d found abandoned on a bench in Berlin railway station.
    ‘Keeping them as a blanket in case your wife doesn’t want you back?’
    ‘I may have told you our respective ranks are irrelevant now the war is over, but the common courtesy and respect due every man still applies, Helmut,’ Wolf warned.
    ‘If you don’t knock it off, Helmut, I’ll use those newspapers to make your shroud,’ Ralf snapped.
    ‘Knock what off?’ Helmut demanded.
    ‘You know,’ Ralf growled.
    The five German officers had been discharged from a POW camp in Wiltshire, England seven weeks before, Lieutenant Helmut Norde, Captains Ralf Frank and Josef Baumgarten, Major Peter Plewe, and Colonel Wolfgang von Mau. They’d been travelling across the frozen wastes of Northern Europe ever since. Lack of onward transport had delayed them at every connection. They’d spent a week cooped up in a church hall close to Victoria station in London waiting for a boat train to take them to Dover. When they eventually reached the port they’d been forced to spend a further ten days living – if you could call it that – under dripping canvas in a field waiting for a ship to take them across the channel.
    They’d been delayed twice in France, both times for over a week, and again in a Berlin so impoverished they’d had problems recognising the capital from the place of their pre-war visits. At every stop they’d received apologies and the excuse: ‘There are simply too many defeated German soldiers travelling to their homes in the east.’
    The Red Cross met, deloused, and fed them, in that order, at every transit point. The chemicals used to kill the lice stank, the soup was thin, the bread half sawdust, but they’d eaten and drunk worse. For the past five days they’d been allocated bed space, but no bed or bedding, on the stone floor of a third-class station waiting room in Berlin, but, unlike other stops, after the ritual delousing they’d been given riches. Five marks each. One for each day the authorities had warned them they’d have to wait for seats on a train to take them on the last leg of their journey into East Prussia.
    Peter spent twenty-six pfennigs a day on a loaf of black bread, and the remaining seventy-four on a chunk of blood sausage; Wolf added jugs of beer, which made for decent suppers for the five of them.