A Time To Every Purpose Read online

  “For we need your help to turn and turn and turn again. Amen.”

  “Fire!”

  The four rifles fired in one single explosion of sound that echoed and rumbled around the concrete compound. The squad members relaxed their aim as Chef Oberaufseherin Reid stepped beyond them and over to the bodies on the ground.

  She walked forward and went to Terrance Baxter, bent down and checked the pulse in his carotid artery. Nothing.

  She stepped over him to check on his wife. No pulse.

  The women with the Italian sounding name had fallen sideways. It made it slightly easier to access the artery but Mary didn’t really have to. The bullet had gone high, straight through the woman’s forehead. Dead centre and her eyes had been frozen open in shock and terror. But it was in the regulation book that she had to check the pulse and so she checked the pulse. Nothing.

  She moved to kneel next to the leader of the group, or at least the one whose house it had been, Thomas Dunhill. He lay still and quiet but again she followed the rules and leant over him to check that he was dead. As she reached her hand to his neck she almost fell backwards when he opened his eyes and looked directly at her. She jerked upright and fumbled at her holster.

  “I forgive you,” he said in as strong a voice as he could manage.

  “Fuck you, I don’t need your forgiveness!” Mary spat back at him. Her gun wouldn’t pull clear from the leather flap that held it securely in place. She glanced down at her side and then beyond as she noticed blood was spreading around the prisoner on the concrete. She looked closer at him and saw that he had only been hit in his shoulder. She glanced back at the rifle detail and thought, ‘How the fuck could a trained rifleman miss centre mass at that range? Their lives are misery for the next month.’ She half smiled as she began to think of the shitty jobs she could have them do as a punishment for sloppy marksmanship. Her thoughts were interrupted by the wounded man speaking again.

  “I love you, my friend,” he said.

  “I’m not your fucking friend and your love is worth fuck all. You don’t even know me you prick. How the fuck could you love me?” Mary flung the words at him but the man, this Thomas Dunhill, just looked at her in a calm and serene way. She looked back down at her sidearm and finally managed to release the pistol. She brought it up and shifted the iron sight until it fell squarely in the middle of his forehead and began to squeeze the trigger.

  “I love you for who you are,” he said and closed his eyes.

  Mary’s finger froze. Her hand trembled slightly.

  “What did you say?” she managed to whisper. The man’s eyes reopened and he looked at her.

  “I love you for who you are,” he repeated it, softer than before. “God loves you. He is inside you. He dwells in you. I love you for who you are.” He gave her such a warm and beguiling smile.

  “You don’t know me. You can’t love me.” She held his gaze but her eyes narrowed.

  “Of course I can love you… Our Lord teaches me to love you… You are His creation… Sent to do His will,” he spoke in shallow, panted snatches as his breath began to catch on the pain in his body.

  Mary felt a rising tide of anger. She spoke through gritted teeth, “Really, his will? So, he wants me to kill you. How’s that working out for you?” she put her foot on to the wound in Thomas’s shoulder.

  “He has His reasons,” he gasped.

  “Ma’am? Is everything alright?” It was Oberschütze Williams and he had begun to walk forward to her.

  “It’s fine, stand still!” she ordered.

  “You were saying you loved me?” she pressed harder on his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Thomas drew in a gulp of air and grimaced against the pain, “and I will, no matter what you do, for I believe you are His instrument.”

  “You little prick, you’re nothing to me. Don’t say you love me you conceited piece of Turner shit.”

  Thomas looked up at the woman’s face and noticed the hurt in her expression. “I love you for who you are,” he said it softly and watched as her gun hand fell to her side and she looked away, seemingly immersed in a memory of some other time and place. As he watched this woman he felt the true force of his belief and he relaxed his head onto the cold concrete. He noticed the wetness of his blood on his hair. He watched her memories play through her eyes and then she seemed to refocus. She looked back at him. Her face, momentarily lightened and youthful, changed again. Her eyes stared into his. He knew it was over.

  “Do what you must. Though you know it not, you do it for Him. My God will not forsake me. Through Him I forgive you,” he said quietly with his last breath.

  Mary forgot the regulations about firing into bodies on the ground. In a haze of intense emotions rekindled by his words, she fired four times into his body. She stayed looking down at the ground for a long moment and his dead eyes held her gaze.

  She shouted without turning round, “Oberschütze Williams, get your team inside, get your weapons cleaned and be in my office in fifteen minutes, your marksmanship is pathetic. And send the cleaners out here. NOW!” she almost screamed the last word. Williams and his squad checked the safety catches on their weapons and hastened away. Mary holstered her pistol and tried to compose herself. She was shaking. Her mind could still hear Thomas’s voice, truthful and caring, ‘I love you for who you are.’

  She had killed before. Countless times before in the previous seven years. She had started in the Service as a Wärterin back in 2013, not so much as a calling but because it was a steady job. It offered her a decent wage and she could choose where to serve with a fair amount of certainty. She had to admit that when the careers officer in school had gone through the various roles open to women she had been struck by the uniform. Black suited her. But she hadn’t been a silly teenage girl thinking that a uniform was a reason for a job.

  She knew the real attraction was the sense of control it offered. A control so missing in her own life. She wanted to get far away from home. She had closely guarded skeletons in her personal closet. Skeletons that she had wanted to purge and getting into the Service offered her a vehicle to do it.

  Her beauty had been with her since she was a little girl. Her father was a physically strong man, a welder and fabricator at the Middlesbrough steel works. Her mother; a stay at home alcoholic. Mary had been the youngest of three girls, a surprise late addition to the family. Her two elder sisters left the house as soon as they had been old enough to travel independently. Janey was somewhere in Spain and Kasey was just somewhere. She knew why they had left, not then, but later. She had been only nine when Janey left and eleven when Kasey came to see her in her room late on an August night.

  “Mary. Mary, waken up.” The girl had eased the golden hair from her younger sister’s face and held her close.

  “Mary, I’m sorry but I won’t be here for you.” Kasey had half spoken, half sobbed the words. Mary had just looked at her sleepily.

  “Be strong Mary, survive, like Janey and I. Survive. I love you. My beautiful little sister, I love you for who you are. Never forget that.” Then she had left.

  Mary knew that was the last time anyone had said ‘I love you’ to her and truly meant it. Until Thomas Dunhill tonight.

  When Kasey left her room Mary had gone back to sleep. When she woke in the morning she was effectively an only child. Her father took her for the first time two weeks later. He continued to come to her room for the next seven years. Her mother did nothing although Mary was convinced she knew, had always known, what was going on under her roof.

  Her father simply said that if Mary told anyone about what they did together then he would be taken away and her mother would be taken away and they would be killed and it would be her fault. Mary would be at fault. Mary would be to blame and no one would ever love her or forgive her or allow her to live. She would forever be known as the girl who killed her parents. He was almost prophetic.

  So she had kept quiet. For seven years she had not mumbled or screamed or
cried out. She fell asleep sobbing quietly after her father would leave her room. She stayed quiet in school. She was studious. She kept all her emotions inside herself and she slowly lost her ability to feel, because the feelings hurt. She compartmentalised her life. She loved no one and would not let anyone in school become close to her. She wouldn’t bring people home after school because her mother might be drunk. She wouldn’t bring people home at weekends because her father would be there and he would be jealous. Later he would go into a rage and hurt her more than normal.

  She left for the Service on her eighteenth birthday. The life she was leaving behind was sealed in a box in a part of her brain that she never needed to visit again. Yet it sat within her every day. After her basic training she asked to be assigned to Harrow rather than be near to her childhood home.

  She knew her looks attracted the attention of the senior commanders. Sex was not an emotional response with her. So she used it as a tool to curry favour.

  She was promoted to Rapportführerin four months after arriving at Harrow and promoted again to Erstaufseherin a little over a year later. During the 2015 purges instigated by the new Führer, Joseph Adolf, she led the main reception squads and thrived in the command role as the concrete compound fully processed two hundred prisoners per day for almost two months. That had been the last time the roller door entry points had seen the men and women split up and the full mechanisms of the KZ compounds kicked into motion. The prisoners stripped of their clothing, given their camp uniforms, tagged with the purple circles that marked them as Turners, or the inverted triangles that marked out the other categories of prisoners. Housed in the prefabricated dormitories, fed and kept alive until Mary and her staff could finish the record keeping so important to the Reich. During that time, when the incumbent was forced to take leave due to the stress of the job, Mary had been selected to fill the temporary role of Lagerführerin and led the detachments that ensured the enemies of the strong were exterminated and disposed of quickly.

  The things she saw and the things she did were added to little secure compartments inside her mind and never looked at, examined or questioned. She was capable of operating with no impact on her conscience for that too was tucked away in its own dungeon.

  As the end of May 2015 approached and the number of incoming prisoners was slowing to a more traditional norm of twenty to thirty a day she learned that her mother had died in a pool of her own vomit whilst her father had been out at work. With her access to the security reporting systems she wrote an allegation of paedophilia against her own father and sent it to the north-east headquarters of the Reich Security Division. She followed it with a fraudulent command authorisation that instructed him to be sent, not to the northern holding centre in Bradford, but to Harrow. She was present at his arrival into the centre.

  When her father stepped into line in the secondary roll call area of the facility, she personally pinned the pink triangle onto his shirt and smiled sarcastically at him. As she leant near to him to whisper that she was going to make his stay as miserable as possible he tried to grab her arms. The compartment in her mind, where he had been for so long sealed, popped like a jack-in-the-box and her anger and fury poured out. She threw him off, pushed him backwards and kicked him in the chest, sending him sprawling.

  Her protection squads went to move forward but she yelled at them to stay where they were. The commotion drew the attention of a VIP Reich Ministry tour that was reviewing procedures. Their close protection detail tried to shield them from whatever potential threat was arising, but Reichsminister Joyce stood atop the steps looking over the roll call area. He watched as this beautiful woman drew her service pistol and emptied the entire magazine into the prisoner.

  At Joyce’s request she had been introduced to the Minister and later that night became his mistress. A role she was perfectly designed for. She wanted no commitment, she was discrete and she was never going to cause problems for the Minister with responsibility for all GB Custody Centres.

  Five years later she was Chef Oberaufseherin of the Harrow facility. She expected, in the course of time, to be the first woman Kommandant of a Konzentrationslager in the Reich.

  Mary Reid’s life was on track and she had maintained control of the monsters in her mind. She had locked them away and ignored them. Until Thomas Dunhill had forgiven her and truly loved her as she shot him. Now, as she continued to stare down at his body, she felt a new emotion. One she didn’t know how to deal with. She felt a deep, sorrowful guilt in her heart. A tear fell from her cheek and into his blood.

  Chapter 6

  The cafeteria facility within the Todt Laboratories was on the second floor of the main reception building. During the normal working day the twenty tables were almost constantly occupied with a flow of administration and science officers. But, on a Sunday evening the security personnel would use their small kitchen on the ground floor whilst the on-duty science teams, six-storeys down in the laboratories, would not come up above ground until the end of their shifts. With no likelihood of customers there were never any cafeteria staff on duty at the weekends. But the vending machines were still capable of dispensing plastic coffee.

  Leigh and Heinrich sat opposite each other in the darkened room lit only by the over-counter neon strips that bounced a silvery light off the stainless steel counter tops. Since he had spoken to her on the steps into the building they hadn’t uttered another word. They had walked in silence, Leigh following him as he led her through the security barriers that blocked the entrance, across the open foyer, up the main stairway and into the empty cafeteria. She had nodded when he indicated the coffee machine, picked up a handful of saccharin sachets, two wooden stirrers and took a seat at the windows that overlooked the building entrance.

  Now they sat facing one another over the coffees and she still didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure!” she glared at him. “About an hour ago I got a phone call from you, a member of the Allgemeine-SS, Special Investigations and Security Directorate. That would mark you out as one of only, what? Twenty-five, less, people in the Reich with that security level? I’m told there’s a problem with an experiment but instead you bring me into the cafeteria. Your rank and your phone call and your ruse to get me here, for I assume it was a ruse, would make me think I am about to be whisked away for interrogation. You know? I think I’ll be seeing the other side of the security apparatus that I’ve often worked for. But, as soon as we’re alone you tell me you knew my parents and that you miss them too. So, am I alright? I don’t know Heinrich, you tell me. What’s going on?” she finished and took a breath, then another that turned into a sigh.

  Heinrich sipped his coffee and grimaced before setting his cup back on the table. “It’s complicated would be a trite statement now, wouldn’t it?” he smiled.

  Leigh looked at him without returning the smile. “Yes, it would Heinrich, yes it would.”

  “Okay, well, I was posted in here on Wednesday from Senior Staff College. You were on leave and I figured that you had taken the week off to go home to Cambridgeshire.”

  Leigh looked at him with a frown.

  “The anniversary of your parents?” Heinrich said.

  She nodded.

  “So, I needed to talk to you as soon as I could. Waiting until tomorrow was not an option as there would be a lot of people around and Sundays would appear to be quiet,” he said as he cast his eyes around the empty room to reinforce his point.

  “But why?” Leigh asked. Her mind was racing. If this was an interrogation it was nothing like she had prepared herself for. It could just be a masterful stroke on the part of this member of the Gestapo or he could be, however remote, genuine. But genuine what? He knew her parents, so what? She held her judgement and waited.

  “I had to make it look like the full weight of my office was being brought to bear to resolve a problem in work, hence the stiff and formal phone call, the car and the escort, but t
he reason was to get you in here to talk, unobserved. I couldn’t just drive round to your apartment.”

  “Unobserved? We’re in the most open room of the whole facility Heinrich. How is this unobserved?” she almost spat the words at him and realised she was angry and something much more worrying. She was frightened. She tried to calm herself.

  “Because this is one of only three rooms in the whole facility above ground that isn’t monitored or wired. People think they’re in the privacy of their own offices but they aren’t. Small spaces are easy to bug. Cafeterias are open spaces and people don’t talk about anything they shouldn’t when they’re in here. They fear being overheard. That plus all the coming and going make an audio surveillance on the place almost impossible,” he said it with a confidence that came from knowing his subject. “Even given the systems we have now we don’t have the resources to make it worth our while. People just don’t betray themselves and talk in unguarded ways in areas where they don’t feel safe. So, ironically, we’re sitting in the safest place in the complex.” Heinrich paused and looked at her.

  “None of the labs underground are monitored. There aren’t even cameras in there because of the classification of the work we do. So we could have gone there,” she countered.

  “Yes, but to get underground we have to go past monitored and manned security posts. That means a timestamp of our coming and going. I’d rather not be logged.”

  She tried to hold his eyes but the unexpected feeling she had had in the car returned and she looked down at her coffee cup.

  “Okay, so why do you want to talk to me Heinrich? What would make you think that I have anything to discuss with you that couldn’t be spoken about in the full glare of daylight and in the company of my colleagues. Even if you did know my parents why all the cloak and dagger drama? What is it you want from me?” she spoke the final sentence with strength in her voice.