A Necessary Hell Read online

  A Necessary Hell

  Nigel Price

  © Nigel Price 2019

  Nigel Price has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  For Anthea, my big sis.

  One

  There was something wrong. Harry Brown was sure of it. He just didn’t know what it was. That annoyed him. It had been nagging at him for a couple of days. It was a hair in his shirt.

  He was sitting in a wicker chair on a stone terrace facing an expanse of rough, dark water. His feet – at the ends of his long legs – rested on a low stone wall, crossed at the ankles. The shoes on his feet were brown leather, worn to the point where they might have been museum exhibits excavated from a Danish bog. They were old friends. He thought he might wear them until they fell off and then go barefoot. He wondered what old man Delaney would say about that.

  He flicked back the sleeve of his stone-coloured jacket and checked his watch. No rush. He took a sip of the iced water which he had been swirling in a tumbler resting on his lap. Ice cubes chinked on cut glass. He wished it was Scotch but he had driving to do. A brush with the Verkehrspolizei would not start the day well. Nor would a breakfast of whisky for that matter. Though it wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Herr Brown?”

  He turned to the voice. It belonged to the merry proprietor of Haus Fischer, the small hotel where he had been quartered for the duration of the project. Herr Fischer stood above and behind him at the end of a meandering path and the top of a flight of stone steps that led up to the hotel entrance. He held aloft the packed lunch that Harry had ordered. With a big smile he waved it in the air. Eyes locked on Harry’s, he placed it on a table with great deliberation for Harry to fetch. He might have been training a dog.

  Harry began the process of standing, collecting his feet from the wall, planting them on the terrace flagstones then rising slowly like Poseidon from his watery domain. He stretched. Adrift in his forties, standing was not yet complicated by stiff joints. Upright, he surveyed the lake before him. Actually it was a reservoir, beautifully set in wooded, gentle hills. A stiff wind had been blowing across it throughout the night and the surface was choppy with white foam. At one end a sailing club was shuttered and deserted. At the other, out of sight around a projecting headland, was a massive stone dam. Once, it had been breached with bouncing bombs. The Möhne Dam. The Lancaster bombers of 617 Squadron would have roared at treetop-level right in front of Harry’s vantage point.

  He ambled up the path, mounted the steps and retrieved the package. Inside, Herr Fischer was busy behind the bar which stood to one side of the reception desk. All neat and cosy as befitted a family enterprise that had been run by the last three generations of Fischers. He caught Harry’s eye as Harry swapped his tumbler for the packed lunch.

  “Coffee?”

  Harry shook his head.

  Behind his bar, Herr Fischer braced to attention. “Until this evening then.” The topmost slice of him was obscured by a row of beer mugs suspended in a line.

  “Bis heute Abend,” Harry replied.

  He jogged back down the steps and towards a row of cars parked beside the quiet road. He took out his keys, pressed the fob and a dark blue Jaguar XJ woke on command. As he folded himself into the driving seat he couldn’t avoid a twinge of regret that it was hired. With an eye on his expenses, he had aimed for something more modest. It wasn’t his fault that the car he had booked had been unavailable. He had tried not to grin like a schoolboy when offered the Jaguar in its place and at the same price.

  He reversed out, noting an envious glance from a passer-by. Too bad a sticker on the rear bumper announced the hire company. He aimed the shark-like grille in his direction of travel and depressed the accelerator. There. No stopping it this time. That schoolboy grin now there was no one to see it. It was hardly a Bugatti Veyron or Ferrari Aperta, but to Harry it might as well have been. More than he could afford if he had to buy it himself. He would enjoy it while he could, and pretend.

  As the tarmac purred beneath him and the trees bordering the waterline fired past, he sat back and mentally fiddled with the nagging suspicion, trying to find the prickling hair. He took a right turn and the road started to climb. In a series of loops it mounted a long, low ridge running parallel to the reservoir. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the ridge had been home to squat barrack blocks, all discreetly concealed among trees. Anti-aircraft missile batteries had been housed in some. First Canadians and then British troops had been quartered in the region. The Canadian legacy was a skating rink, once used for their ice hockey, now just as a rink for German youth. The British legacy, a memory of punch-ups in the local Gasthofs.

  The barracks were all gone now. Either flattened or redeveloped into polite industrial estates, clean and tidy after the German fashion. Not grubby and sordid like the one that housed Delaney’s, Harry’s current employer. Harry had been a soldier himself. Sandhurst, then infantry ops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he was civilianised into crisis management. A consultant in disaster planning with Delaney’s.

  The car sliced through the countryside. Vast fields rolled away on either side. It was the asparagus harvest. Handwritten signs beside the various farmsteads announced Spargel for sale. Harry had noted that Spargelzeit was a big deal for the Germans. Spargel was plastered all over Herr Fischer’s menu in various forms. Harry had tried the soup the previous evening and it had been excellent. But then all the food at Haus Fischer was excellent. Which was why he stayed there. It was his second visit. He had discovered it when conducting the recce and planning, and had determined to return when the time came to run the exercise itself.

  The road started to descend as Harry came off the far side of the broad, squat ridge. In front of him and below, the north German plain stretched away into the distance. Somehow, after the war, the American forces had ended up with the most beautiful part of the country in the centre and south. The Brits had been stuck with the north. Flat and endless tank country.

  The car creamed lazily into a series of bends, dipping through a hamlet of tall barns, the farm houses themselves set back from the road. This was the heart of spargel country. Rows of long plastic-covered knee-high mounds covered the fields. Much of it was still to be harvested. Here and there a farmer was already at work. Checking this, uprooting that. German asparagus was buried to the neck, giving it a pale yellow colour. Americans let their
s reach for the stars which turned it green.

  The next bend was sharper than the previous ones. Harry steered into it with ease. He was a little too much in the centre and a VW Golf coming towards him flashed its lights. He corrected his line and raised a hand in apology. The driver was a young woman. For an instant their eyes met. No time for anything profound. Her slight alarm, Harry’s attempt at a smile, probably crooked.

  And that was that. Until Harry couldn’t stop himself glancing in the rear-view mirror and saw the Golf wobble. Something at the roadside had distracted the driver. A farmer. He seemed to be raising something in the air. Caught by the same sharp bend that had almost undone Harry, the Golf mounted the grass verge and tipped sideways into a drainage ditch. The momentum carried it forward until a tree barred the way. Cushioned in the Jaguar, to Harry the crash was soundless. Had he not been watching he wouldn’t have noticed. He would have driven on. His day would have panned out as planned. And everything thereafter.

  He hit the brakes. There were no other vehicles around so he managed a three-point turn and cruised back towards the wreck. There was a driveway just past it and he pulled in, safely off the road.

  Out of the car, he ran the twenty yards back to the Golf. Steam was belching from the crumpled bonnet. An airbag filled the windscreen, job done.

  He wrenched open the driver’s door. Buckled, it took three hefty tugs to do it. The driver was slumped with face deep in the airbag. She was conscious. More confused than hurt.

  “Take it easy,” Harry said. He realised that was a bit lame. She wasn’t in a position to do much else. And she probably didn’t speak …

  “What kind of scheiße driver are you?”

  As she peeled her face out of the deflating airbag, she blinked and seemed to remember something. She looked Harry full in the face. Blinked again. “The farmer. What was he …?” Some mystery, greater than Harry’s lazy steering, puzzled her anew. She tried to look round.

  Harry did it for her. He straightened and looked back at the figure he had glimpsed near the roadside. The man was still there, watching. He was huge and hulking. His shoulders were rounded not from age or infirmity. Gravity had simply got the better of him, pulling his great muscular bulk earthwards, training it into a stoop like a tree branch laden with heavy, unpicked fruit. At the end of each long dangling arm, a massive fist was curled into a giant meaty claw. One of them was empty. The other one held something. The colossus raised it.

  Harry narrowed his eyes the better to see. Also to check he was seeing what he knew he was seeing.

  In his paw, the creature held up a hand. It had been severed at the wrist. A daft grin split his face and he looked from his trophy to Harry and the girl, and back again. Twice. To Harry, he might have been a muscular Bacchus holding aloft a bunch of purple grapes.

  “Well there’s something you don’t see every day,” Harry said, as the girl leaned over his scuffed shoes and threw up.

  Two

  For a moment Harry wondered what best to do. It was a bit surreal. First he tried to shake the vomit from his shoes. Most of it had missed, but there was enough on the worn leather to warrant a few scrapes on the tall grass covering the verge.

  The girl eased herself out of the car, testing her limbs and neck as she went. She twisted her head this way and that and appeared content when it didn’t fall off. She straightened and faced Harry who inspected her for damage. He looked past her to the grinning monster.

  “Is that a hand?” she asked, sounding as if she didn’t want to hear it confirmed.

  “Seems to be.”

  “What the hell is he doing …?”

  Harry made a move towards the creature who hadn’t shifted his stance and showed no sign of doing so. The girl gripped his shoulder. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “I wasn’t driving that badly, was I?”

  She looked at him, puzzled. To his surprise she shook her head and smiled sourly. “The good old English humour. How I’ve missed it.” She didn’t sound wholly sincere.

  “Missed it?”

  “Long story. My ex-husband was English.”

  “Bad luck.” Harry stepped round the wrecked Golf and walked towards the farmer. The closer he approached, the more obvious it became that the creature wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards. Somewhere in the belfry the bats were having one hell of a party.

  “Guten morgen,” Harry said, not quite exhausting his German vocabulary. “Was haben sie da?” He was pretty sure that was wrong, but he had dropped German at the age of fifteen after the very lowest pass mark possible. Since then he had used it on and off, here and there. He reckoned he had enough for basic communication. To order a beer and say “My friend will pay.”

  The creature thought differently. His expression turned to a scowl.

  Harry tried again. “Ist das ein Hand?” That couldn’t be too far off.

  His German wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. The creature’s brow furrowed as understanding dawned. He nodded and held up his trophy. Behind him, Harry heard the girl softly whistle, adding, “Mein Gott,” for good measure.

  Now things were going to get tricky. Where did you get it? Whose hand is it? Do you have the rest of the owner in pieces, wrapped in clingfilm stored in a chest freezer?

  He half wished he had paid more attention in class all those years ago. His master had gone by the nickname ‘Shit Face’, which was a reflection of the high esteem in which he was held by his pupils.

  Fortunately the girl stepped forward and let loose a torrent of German. Harry got the gist of it. Pretty much asking the questions he had been unable to translate. Except the one about the chest freezer.

  The creature stumbled over a reply. From the expression on the girl’s face it was unintelligible.

  “Maybe it was an accident?” she said. “Farm machinery or something.”

  “Then we’d better take a look around.”

  She stared at Harry as if he was mad. In response he added, “Someone might be hurt and bleeding to death. We can’t rely on Godzilla here to call an ambulance.”

  “Then maybe we should do that?” She showed no signs of wanting to move any closer to the creature than she already was.

  “The delay might cost someone their life. Or it might be that no one’s hurt, in which case we need the police, not an ambulance.”

  “If no one’s hurt, where did he get that?” she asked reasonably.

  Rather than carry on the debate, Harry walked up to the creature. He tried a nice smile, big and open. The creature stuffed the severed hand behind his back. It was his. No one was going to take it from him.

  Harry felt the girl move up beside him. He kept his eyes on The Beast but was aware of her on the periphery of his vision. He could smell her perfume. Something crisp and fresh. Lemony, but not too much.

  She spoke, softer this time. The creature slowly produced his treasure for their inspection. Harry made the slightest move and it was withdrawn. The girl said something that sounded reassuring. We’re not going to take it. Something like that. The treasure reappeared.

  Harry studied it from a metre’s distance. At that range it looked more black than purple. At least the extremities were. The fingers and nails. As the creature turned it Harry also understood something else. It was solid. Either mummified with age or because it had just come out of a freezer. Which confirmed what he had first thought. The blackness of the finger tips and nails looked like frostbite.

  He leaned closer to inspect the stump. It was a clean cut. It might have been severed by a sabre or machete. Interestingly there didn’t seem to be blood. The hand had been severed after being frozen. Incongruously, the third finger had been stripped of flesh. Degloved. The bone underneath was intact and stood pale and thin next to its thick, blackened neighbours.

  The creature noted Harry’s study of it and decided that was enough. He stuffed it out of sight again.

  “Ask him where he found it?” Harry said. The girl’s face was pale. Sh
e put a hand to her mouth but nothing came out. She had already emptied her breakfast across Harry’s shoes.

  “Ask him—”

  “I heard you,” she snapped. And did so.

  For some reason the creature got all of this instantly and seemed enthused by the idea of showing them. He turned on his heel and set off at a surprisingly quick pace for someone of his bulk.

  Harry and the girl swapped a glance and followed.

  “I’m Harry, by the way,” Harry said. “Harry Brown.”

  The girl grunted. She was concentrating on avoiding clumps of manure and other farmyard stuff. Chickens were scampering freely and hadn’t been overly concerned where they emptied their bowels. Nor had a variety of other animals.

  “And you are …?” Harry prompted as they came to the edge of the asparagus field, its plastic ridges stretching away before them.

  “Ingrid Weber,” the girl replied. She glanced warily at Harry and paid the price, stepping in something nasty.

  “What am I doing here?” she hissed, looking in vain for something to wipe her shoe on. “You are the cause of all this.”

  Harry felt this was unfair.

  Ingrid mumbled something angry as the creature started down one of the narrow avenues between two plastic ridges. Every few steps he turned to check his guests were following. He was cradling the severed hand in front of him as if nursing it from the hurt it had suffered.

  At last he stopped. Harry and Ingrid came up behind him, as closely as the narrow lane would allow. In front of him was a wheelbarrow. It was half full of recently picked asparagus. The almost-white stems were neatly piled. Harry tasted salt, a memory of the soup he had consumed the previous evening in Haus Fischer. The asparagus stems were the colour of the degloved finger.

  The creature grunted and pointed. Harry was none the wiser.

  Ingrid asked a question and in response the creature pointed all the way to the centre of the pile. On the topmost row of harvested asparagus, Harry noted a small dark patch. Old blood? Some sort of residue? Either way, Herr Fischer’s spargel suppe would never taste quite the same again.