The Third Shadow

Forty

Cottbus is a small German town which lies roughly halfway between Berlin and Dresden. A quiet, picturesque kind of place I have read. Unruffled, calm. One of those localities where little of any great note ever happens. In 1982, of course, such a restrained sense of order would have been less an innate characteristic of the town and more a communist-controlled mandate.

In the early hours of June 2nd that year, however, an infrangible form of evil would pay a visit to Cottbus. From the midst of a car park on the edge of town a sudden explosion was heard. Thrusting back bedroom curtains, witnesses in the nearby streets beheld an intense ball of flames. Several would report another vehicle - possibly some model of Skoda - screeching quickly away from the area.

I can imagine the scene - the local polizei rolling up in their piece-of-crap Trabants, the fire engine some squeaky pre-war relic of thing as described by Reg in the Red Lion that beer-swishing World Cup night in Cologne. Once the flames were extinguished, both the vehicle and the two human remains inside were little more than blackened  chars. A male and a female, the attending coroner would conclude, twenty to forty years of age. To add to the tragedy, the young woman had also been pregnant.

Despite the blaze, the front number plate number was still legible. The vehicle would result as a Wartburg 353 registered to a resident of the Lindenstrasse area of East Berlin. The owner would claim that the car had been stolen the previous afternoon, June 1st, even if he had failed to report the theft to authorities.

Over the following weeks no missing person report within East Germany would match the car blaze dynamics. As such, the remains were eventually buried in government graves and the case file tossed in some dusty archive room.

There it would remain for the next thirty-two years until a methodical minor rank of the German Interpol dusted it down, passed it on to his or her superior. A young couple, the woman pregnant, the car's provenance the East Berlin district closest to Checkpoint Charlie. All this, plus the timing just a matter of days after Duggan and Holloway's last reported sighting in Cologne. Interesting, yes - enough so for the Nottinghamshire constabulary to be called in the hope a surviving blood relative might be traced. Christine Holloway's mother - the old lady with whom Marston had spoken - was duly paid a visit, a mouth swab taken. Her daughter's body was meanwhle exhumed from the German soil, her DNA extracted from bone marrow. As Nuzzo and I had been tucking into our lasagnes that Sunday lunchtime, the Nottingham and Cottbus forensic offices had collaboratively been able to confirm a match.

With the owner of the Wartburg 353 having since passed away, the hypothesis which the German Interpol had formed was impossible to prove, yet for all that was utterly convincing just the same. As I had surmised, Duggan had decided the only way they might be able to shake Millwood for good was to escape behind the iron curtain. The Wartburg had most probably been bought rather than stolen, the deal enacted informally, without the requisite paperwork,and had no doubt involved a wedge of bricklayer's deutchmarks which was disproportionally thick to the vehicles true value. They'd been headed to Dresden perhaps, East Germany's second largest city after Berlin. A place where maybe, just maybe, a pair of westerners might hope to fit in, carve out some kind of mildly acceptable life for themselves. Swept along by fear and desperation, by a love for each other of an intensity which is difficult for most of us to comprehend, they'd rolled out of Berlin, ventured ever further east.

Millwood must have only been a matter of hours behind them however, his rage even more relentless and all-consuming than even they'd been able to imagine. He too had flashed the requisite bundles of foreign currency to the East German guards, with similar swiftness been able to procure himself a vehicle. The second car-buying Englishman in the Lindenstrasse district in the same day. Perhaps he was told the make of the car Duggan and Holloway had driven off in. For a few extra deutchmarks had even been informed of the licence number.

Whatever the case, he found them there in that small town car park just off the main road to Dresden. Found them  asleep in the cramped confines of the Wartburg, knocked out by all the miles they'd travelled, the constant wearying stress. And in that moment he sensed an opportunity. The perfect crime...

After soundlessly unscrewing the cap of the petrol tank, he'd struck a match, tossed it inside. Managed to fling himself away from the resulting explosion just in time. Screeching his hastily acquired vehicle all the way back to East Berlin, he'd flashed a few more bundles of deutchmarks, re-entered the west.

Headed then back home to Nottingham. Lived out the rest of his regrettable life a free man.

*

"You were right, ispettore," reflected Nuzzo solemnly across the dining table. His hand reached for the bottle of Tuscan red, poured us both a second shot. "It seems you have a habit for it. Being right."

I took a sip, winced back the sting. "Only half right," I corrected. "Eastern Europe, yes. But I never imagined..."

Nuzzo gave a grim nod: there was no need to complete the sentence. He too took a sip of his grappa, then a second, as if the alcohol might help him make sense of it all.

"It must have been the guns," he mused. His unfocused gaze suddenly itensified, met my own. "The brothers. It must have been the guns they argued about."

Yet I wasn't so sure. "I remember what Sarah said when I'd visited her in Nottingham," I countered. "That with the base of the firearms operation being his childhood neighbourhood, and still being close to his and Lee's old contacts there, it seemed improbable that Sean hadn't been in the know all along." There was something I wanted to add, but aware of the tidal wave of scorn it would provoke I hesitated a moment before doing so. "And in any case, what about the third shadow?"

A flattened, vertical hand went shooting up from the table. "The third shadow! Still you talk about the third shadow!" His voice boomed more loudly than I had ever heard it before, enough so for him to turn a worried glance in the direction of the bedroom corridor. His mother had finished the washing up by this point, had taken herself off for a post-lunch lie down. "Kids, I say you," he resumed at a half whisper. "It was just kids."

Like the old lady, I too felt bloated and distended, craved nothing more than to collapse myself into a horizontal position for a while. My mind was racing though, screeching round corners, ramming its way along previously unexplored avenues. This latest development, the tragic fate which had awaited the brothers' father and his new partner, what significance did have for the case? After all, hadn't the whole thing been like this from the very get-go? A string of assumptions which would eventually be proven false, provoke a radical shift in our thinking. Wasn't this just yet another example?  Lee Bracewell hadn't taken refuge with his father in eastern Europe, we knew that for a fact now. Not only that but - taken together with the now credible witness account of Rocco Quaranta - the news from Germany seemed to strongly suggest that we weren't dealing with some alcohol-fuelled fraternal argument which had got tragically out of hand. That something far more nebulous and sinister lay behind the events of that late-August night.

I recall the moment clearly; recall that relentless ticking of the wall clock, the pleasant lingering burn of the Tuscan red on my tongue, the commander's still defiant expression across the table from me. My mind whirring with things that had been half-forgotten, half-buried, half-dismissed. A sudden alignment, a crackling of cerebral wires. The fog clearing, something bleak and shocking emerging into view.

I hunched forward in my seat, forearms propped against table top. Fixed Nuzzo with an earnest gaze.

"What if the reason we haven't found Lee Bracewell is because he's buried somewhere too?"