The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (11 page)

I never break into a property that’s occupied unless I absolutely have to.

Hmm, well, let’s see, there was a very good chance that this apartment would be occupied. First, by a corpse. And second, by a murderer. And there was no way I could convince myself that I absolutely
had
to break in. I certainly wanted to. I was curious. I was concerned. But I wasn’t compelled to do this. It was my choice. An act of free will. And no doubt, a pretty foolish one.

I always knock before I enter.

Er, not this time. Forgive me for sounding like a wuss, but if I was going to drop in on a cold-blooded killer in the middle of the night, I didn’t intend to let him know a whole lot about it. It would be rude, for one thing. Oh, and a trifle dangerous. Because if the guy had killed once, he might be inclined to do it again, and I wasn’t keen to play the role of his second victim.

So I was going to be quiet. I was going to be stealthy. I was going to be all those things that a really great burglar is supposed to be.

Except smart, perhaps.

Rainwater dripped from my overcoat and tapped out an irregular rhythm on the floor. The tempo was much slower and less erratic than the beat of my heart. I sucked in a deep breath. I wished I was sucking on a cigarette instead. I popped open my spectacles case, removed the necessary tools, and stooped down toward the dead bolt lock in the middle of the door.

Believe me, it takes a lot of practice to really excel at picking locks. Most of the time, you can’t possibly see what you’re doing, so you have to learn to feel for the slightest variation in the tension being transmitted through your torsion wrench. A tiny drop in resistance from the locking cylinder lets you know you’re on the right track. Unfortunately for me, the arthritis in my fingers had deadened my sensitivity to a small degree. The change was only fractional—perhaps not something a doctor could quantify—but I’d become increasingly frustrated by it during the past few months.

As a result, I’d started to rely a little more on my hearing. I’d taught myself to listen intently for the tiny, giveaway click of a lock pin shuffling into position. I was listening harder than ever tonight. I was hearing click after click after click, and for once, I didn’t welcome the sound. Maybe it was my nerves. Maybe it was the silence in the corridor. But I could swear that every time a tiny brass pin jinked up and hunkered down exactly where I wanted it to, it sounded about as loud as a man clapping his hands right next to my ear.

I told myself to calm down. Inside the apartment there’d be all kinds of ambient noise. The hum of electrical appliances. The settling of water in pipes. The percussion of the rain against the windows. And, perhaps, the soft, even breathing of the killer I was hoping to avoid.

At last, the final pin fell into position. I wedged the dead bolt lock open, turning my attention to the snap lock. It was cheap and highly susceptible to being shimmed.

In the movies, actors often use a credit card for this trick. It’s not something I recommend. For one thing, it never works—the type of plastic used to make credit cards isn’t flexible enough to do the job—and for another, it risks destroying your credit card. The better option is to invest in a proper shimming device from a decent locksmith supply company. I’d done exactly that, which explains why I had a set of five sheets made from a particular type of plastic known as Super Mica. The sheets are approximately the size of a playing card and are graded according to varying degrees of strength and pliability, but there was no need for me to experiment on this occasion. The first sheet eased the latch back readily enough, and as soon as it retracted, I prodded the door open with my foot.

There was no response from inside. No shouts of protest. No slamming of doors or sudden attacks. No light, even. The interior was in darkness. I planned to keep it that way.

Very carefully, I swung the door open just wide enough to be able to slip through, then I retrieved my burglary tools and moved inside.

I stayed very still, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I didn’t want to bump into anything—least of all a corpse. So I kept waiting. I stayed patient. And before very long I could see pretty clearly.

And what I saw rocked me to my very core.

FOURTEEN

I found myself in a large, open space. I guessed it was what would pass for the living room. But there was no living going on. No furniture. No belongings. Nothing at all.

The air was chill and tasted stale. I got the impression the apartment hadn’t been lived in for a long time. But of course, it was only an impression, and I wasn’t about to risk my neck on it. True, the room was completely bare, but maybe whoever lived here was a fan of extreme minimalism. I was going to have to check the rest of the apartment to be sure. I was going to have to wade into the darkness, my hands in front of my face, my body braced to react in case somebody jumped out at me. I couldn’t use my torch. Shining my penlight would be like painting a target on myself. And I already felt very exposed. I had nothing to hide behind. Nowhere to shelter.

And no time to lose.

I left the front door ajar. It wasn’t what I’d normally do, but this whole situation was a long way from normal, and if I needed to flee in a hurry, I didn’t want anything to get in my way.

I sneaked across the timber flooring to an open doorway in the facing wall. I poked my head inside. This room was even darker. But it was still and silent. And when I squinted and peered very hard, I couldn’t make out a thing.

It was the same with the next room along.

The same again with the room after that.

The apartment appeared to be unoccupied. I began to relax. There was a switch on the wall near my shoulder, and I flipped it down and nearly flipped completely out. The switch was for a bathroom, and when the lights came on, an extractor fan came with them. The noise was sudden and unexpected and very loud. It damn near gave me a heart attack. But my panic was short-lived. The bathroom was as vacant as everywhere else. Just a toilet and a sink and a bath. No towels. No toiletries.

Quickly now, I paced back across the living room, closed the front door and powered up the main ceiling lights. The room seemed bigger in the glare of the recessed bulbs. I returned to the bedrooms and found a built-in closet in one of them. I slid the doors open. Empty. There was one more room to explore. It was on the opposite side of the apartment. I turned the light on in there, too, and discovered an unused kitchen. There was a fine layer of dust on the countertops. Enough to suggest the place had been empty for a couple of months, minimum.

The barren state of the apartment didn’t surprise me a great deal. Berliners take
everything
with them when they move out of a place. I’d even heard one expat complain that he’d rented an apartment without taps and power sockets. So it was perhaps a little unusual that the ceiling bulbs were still here, along with the Venetian blind in the living room window. The blind was closed. And it looked awfully familiar.

I moved across just to be sure. There was a plastic rod on one side, and I twirled it until the slats rotated into a horizontal position. I parted them with my fingers and peered outside into the darkness and the rain.

I scanned the blurred apartment building opposite, tracking upward from the main entrance until I found the window to Daniel Wood’s apartment. I checked my bearings. There was no mistake. I was standing where I’d seen the blond woman strangled.

But there was nothing to suggest a murder had taken place here. No signs of a struggle. I suppose it would have been difficult to leave any evidence behind. There was no furniture to topple over and no ornaments to upset. And strangulation was a pretty tidy way of killing someone. No awkward bloodstains. No wayward bullet holes. If the place had looked this abandoned when the police had arrived, then it was little wonder they’d left so soon.

Had they dismissed my call for good reason? Could I really have made a mistake? I’d been in a high-stress situation when I’d looked out the window. I’d built up a lot of frustration. A lot of nervous energy. And I was a guy with a pretty creative mind. A mystery writer, no less. Someone who spent his days describing heinous crimes and his nights committing them. Had I let my imagination run away with me?

I closed the blind and turned to consider the room. Why would a murder occur in an empty apartment? What would bring two people here?

I was still asking myself that question—still shaking my head at the senselessness of it all—when I happened to spot something down on the floor. A simple thing. Utterly unremarkable, in fact. But I experienced a tingle when I saw it. A trembling in my throat. I dropped to my knees and lifted the item between my gloved finger and thumb. It was a long, curling strand of blond hair. There were more strands on the honey-toned floorboards. Five or six, at least. And they were collected together in the exact spot where I’d seen the woman being throttled.

I took a moment to collect myself. Then I popped the strand of hair inside my spectacles case. I don’t know why exactly. It proved something to me, but it wouldn’t prove a great deal to anyone else, and I wasn’t about to go to the police and demand that they analyze it for DNA.

One thing seemed obvious to me now. The killer must have moved the blonde’s body. He must have done it right away, clearing out of the apartment before the police arrived and hiding somewhere until they left. Then he’d made his escape.

With the body? I wasn’t sure. The girl I’d seen had struck me as kind of slim. Petite, even. And sure, the guy who’d attacked her was taller than average, but moving any kind of body was no easy task. And even supposing he was physically equipped for it, a lifeless corpse wasn’t the kind of thing you could take on the S-Bahn with you. Did that mean he’d brought along a car? A van? Maybe. Or maybe he’d stashed the body somewhere close by, ready to return for it later. Or never.

I decided to check a few obvious places on my way out of the building, but there weren’t many available to me. I walked the second-floor corridor and I didn’t find any utility cupboards or laundry rooms. Every door led to an apartment. That only left the elevator and the stairwell. I called the elevator, just to be sure, and I waited impatiently for the doors to part on an empty compartment. I waited for them to shuffle closed again and then I returned to the stairs. I went up a level and checked the corridor above. It was exactly the same. Then I headed down to the ground floor and scouted around in the entrance vestibule. There was a blank door on the far side of the elevator. The camera that had filmed me coming in was pointing in the opposite direction, toward the main entrance. There was no other security that I could see.

I scurried across to the door, fumbling in my coat pocket for my spectacles case. But I had no need for my picks. The door was unlocked. An overhead light flickered on, and light bounced off bare cinder-block walls and a set of metal shelving units. A line of communal washer-dryers were butted against the wall, alongside a wall-mounted ice dispenser with a metal bucket beneath it. The bucket was half filled with melting ice. There was a large chest freezer in one corner. A couple of bicycles propped against the wall. A few boxes scattered around.

There was no dead blonde.

I lifted the lid on the chest freezer and a haze of frosty air escaped. I wafted it aside and peered in at a world of ice and frozen groceries labeled with conspicuous nametags. No frozen corpse.

I dropped the lid and checked my watch. It was 3:30
A.M.
At least half an hour until the first S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains would start up again. I wasn’t in the mood to wait. One of the bicycles was a man’s mountain bike. It was very nicely engineered. The front forks were fitted with some kind of suspension system, there were at least twenty-one gears, and when I lifted it to turn it around and wheel it toward the door, I found that it weighed just a little more than a feather.

I allowed the door to fall closed behind me and then I scanned the vestibule one last time. There were no other possible hiding places, but a bank of metal mailboxes were set into the wall facing me, and seeing them made me think of something else. A small point but important perhaps. I let myself out into the rain and walked my new bike across the drenched road to the apartment building on the other side of the street.

The foyer design was pretty similar. There was an alcove entrance door, an elevator, a stairwell, and a set of mailboxes. But there was no security camera and no electronic locking system. I picked the door lock without a great deal of trouble—I’d had a lot of practice during the past few hours—and I snuck inside and paced across to the mailboxes. There were no names attached to them. Just numbers. But I knew the number of Daniel Wood’s apartment, and defeating the cheap lock on his mailbox was simplicity itself.

There were a couple of glossy flyers inside, but only one item that interested me. It was a folded piece of notepaper, and when I straightened it out, I found that it was branded with the crest of the Berlin police. Someone had scrawled a Biro note in a neat, slanted script. I had a pretty fair idea who the message was from, and my German was good enough to confirm my suspicions. It had been written by a “POK’in Fuchs.” “POK” was short for the rank of
Polizeioberkommissar
and adding
in
denoted a female officer. The message had been penned by the policewoman who’d followed up my emergency call and it asked Mr. Wood to contact her regarding the serious incident he’d reported by telephone.

I wasn’t surprised that the note hadn’t been picked up just yet. Wood had gone out for the embassy function in his car. He would have returned the same way, gaining access to his apartment via the parking garage and the elevator. He would have had no reason to check his post because he wouldn’t have been expecting any new mail until the morning.

I scrunched the note up and popped it into my coat pocket. Then I stepped out into the rain, fired up a cigarette and jammed it in the corner of my mouth. I straddled my new bike and puffed contentedly as I pedaled away in the direction of the river. It was raining persistently. I was going to get very wet. But I didn’t altogether mind. Cycling always reminds me a little of my time in Amsterdam. It would be a pleasant enough way to amble home through the sodden, lonely streets, and it was a wonderful way to think.