The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(20)

[Editor’s note: The rest of this sentence was not readable, although we are unclear as to whether this is because Hugbert thought better of what he had written and crossed it out, or whether his letters were, after all, opened before reaching his fiancée, and this part was censored. Either way, he seems to be indicating that the two prisoners – the Russian, Alexei Iskander, and the unnamed Englishman – were at the root of what he calls tragic events in Holzminden.]

There has come a direct order from Hauptmann Niemeyer which I cannot disobey. The Hauptmann spoke to me most solemnly and earnestly, telling me what was wanted, then saluting my bravery.

I think I am singled out for this task in order that the Hauptmann can receive regular reports of our mission. It is known that I am a frequent correspondent with you, my liebling, and also with my parents, so I am thought able to write letters clearly and sensibly. I am to be accompanied by Hauptfeldwebel Barth, who is not very skilled with composition, although excellent when it comes to the frying of bratwurst, and we cannot all be accomplished at everything.

I should be glad if you will visit my parents as often as you can over the next few weeks. Your loving presence will help them not to worry. But of danger there is not very much, so you should not have concerns.

As always, your very devoted,

Hugbert





Seven


It was six o’clock. Nell locked the shop door, put the security shutters in place, and went across to the annexe behind the shop where she and Beth lived.

She put Bodkin aside and scanned the index of the first of the books lent by the bookseller. Would Holzminden be here? Yes, there was what looked like an entire chapter describing the camp, which had been opened in 1917 for British Officers. It had been a fairly small set-up, but had achieved a modest notoriety by being the scene of a successful escape – ten men out of twenty-nine escapees made it back to Britain – and also because several moderately well-known figures had been held there.

‘The escape was effected by means of the men digging beneath the camp to beyond the walls of the compound,’ wrote one of the contributors, and in somewhat school-masterish fashion went on to describe the means and methods employed by the men. Nell skimmed this; the details of the actual digging and the tunnel’s length, and the home-made bellows system for the air system would probably be of interest to serious students of such things, and they were certainly reminiscent of WWII legends and the films. John Mills being frightfully stiff-upper lip in Colditz, and Steve McQueen bouncing across the terrain on a motorbike amidst a hail of bullets. But they did not get her any nearer to the legendary Holzminden sketches or to the Gilmore family or even to Hugbert.

There was, however, some good primary source material. The Daily Sketch, it seemed, had called Holzminden ‘the worst camp in Germany’, castigating the commandant, Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, as arrogant, vindictive, given to pilfering prisoners’ food parcels, and unpleasantly devoted to the curative powers of solitary confinement. Niemeyer, thought Nell, pleased to find this link. Hugbert’s commandant, whom he disliked, and who sent him on some kind of task.

As well as this, there was a lively account from an unnamed Russian war correspondent who appeared to have found himself incarcerated in Holzminden shortly after it was opened. He had apparently written a series of articles about the camp, several of which had been translated for the book. In one of the articles, the journalist described the Kommandant, Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, as a devil, fierce as ten furies, clothed in a Prussian officer’s uniform, swinging the scaly horror of his folded tail as he regarded his hapless victims.

‘As for the camp itself, it was a stone-built, iron-hued devil’s citadel, akin to the evil ditches of Malebolge,’ he had added.

Nell, intrigued by the macabre but powerful imagery of the words, plundered the quotation books on her shelves, finally tracking the sources as Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost respectively. Could the journalist possibly be Hugbert’s arrogant Iskander who had known about the demons and the Ten Mile Stare, and had then in the same breath complained about inferior sheets and poor cooking? It was probably stretching coincidence a bit.

‘There must never be another war like the one that has just been fought and – mercifully – won,’ the journalist had written. ‘But if there should be, then the cruelties of the kind inflicted on prisoners in Holzminden must never be repeated.’

The next words seemed to jump off the page and smack into her eyes.

‘The sketches made while I was in Holzminden show some of the conditions of the camp very clearly—’

The sketches made in Holzminden … Nell stared at the words. Did that mean this unnamed journalist had been the legendary artist of the sketches? Or did it mean he had been there when the artist created them? The article continued:

—but they cannot convey the misery and the despair. Nor can they convey the madness that entered the souls of some of the men – many of them barely twenty years old, many of whom had witnessed the worst horrors of warfare already. There is something which has come to be called the Ten Mile Stare or even the Hundred Mile Stare, and it is a terrible thing to see. It’s not a wild or even a pain-filled look, more a heart-rending determination to look beyond the horrors – to focus on a faraway skyline or a landscape where the horrors have melted and there is only safe familiarity.

I met one young man at Holzminden for whom that safe familiarity was his home in England.