The Killing of Emma Gross (6 page)

Raised voices echoed down the hallway from the end corner office. One of the voices was Ritter's. I grinned at the thought of his being angry and then I thought of him turning that same anger on me and my fists clenched.

Ritter, yelling: 'He's not trustworthy enough. You've seen the file!'

We reached the corner office and stopped. Through the open door I got my first glimpse of Gennat's pudgy red face. He wore a small pair of reading spectacles and his moustache bristled as he sucked on a cigar. No doubt this was where Ritter had got the inspiration for his ill-conceived experiment in facial hair.

Gennat spoke through a smoke cloud: 'We don't have any choice in the matter.' His thick accent shone through: a real
icke
Berliner.
I hoped I'd be able to understand him okay.

I tried to dredge up what I knew about the man, but that was nothing, pretty much. He had an unrivalled case clearance rate and was popular with the non-Marxist press. So what did that mean? He wasn't above forcing a few confessions, he liked publicity and he enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

He'd had a hand in solving that messy Fritz Haarmann business in Hanover back in '25 mind, so he knew his stuff when it came to mass-murderers.

Vogel knocked.

'Enter!' Gennat called. He waved us in and beamed at me. Ritter stood with a coffee cup in his hands, his face just as red as the chief inspector's, I was glad to note. Ritter clocked me looking at his moustache, raised his cup to his lips and looked out of the window.

Beneath the window was a small pine table bearing a scorched metal coffee pot and a sugar bowl alongside a typewriter and a stack of files.

'This the fellow?' Gennat asked Vogel. Vogel nodded and Gennat came over and shook my hand. His palm was damp and warm. A glimmer of shock lit his face, presumably at the sight of my wounds.

'Now then,' he said, 'Kl...er, Thomas, is it?' He didn't wait for me to answer. 'I'm not one for politics when public safety is at stake. I hope we can agree on that?' He was using the word 'politics' the way political people do, as a slur on the politics of others. I hoped he was trying to fool me and not himself.

Gennat's glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. The lenses magnified his soft brown eyes. I pumped his hand again and murmured a yes.

'You, er, want someone to fix up your face?' Gennat asked, removing the spectacles. The temples had left indentations above his ears. 'Bandages and so forth.'

All of this dancing around the maypole was chafing at my patience. 'May I ask what all this is about?'

'He wants to know what it's all about,' Gennat repeated, as though mid-way through a press conference. I glanced around to check for hidden press men, but the audience comprised just me, Vogel and Ritter. 'Fine quality in a detective, sir. Fine quality.'

He replaced his spectacles and gestured to an empty chair. The room was crammed with rows of chairs facing a map of greater Düsseldorf tacked to a cork board on the far wall. A dozen or more red pins adorned the map, half of them clustered in the south-eastern suburbs. A series of pencil-drawn circles rippled outwards at half-kilometre intervals from an epicentre in Mettmannerstrasse: Peter Kürten's apartment building.

I picked up the chair Gennat had indicated. I turned it round to face him and I sat.

'Well,' I said, 'it's just that the city does pay me to clock in at eight pm. I fear you may be forcing me to deprive it of my services if you keep me around too long.'

Gennat leaned on the edge of a paper-strewn desk. There was a black telephone and an open personnel file in his way. The ear piece hanging in the cradle made the phone look top heavy. Sure enough, when Gennat moved it aside to better accommodate his ample buttocks, the phone toppled. He slammed the ear piece back in the cradle, lifted the phone with both hands and deposited it on the other side of the desk.

I got a glimpse of the file. That was my photograph in there. They'd been discussing me, then. I didn't like that. But if that was true then why was the idea of it making my heart pump faster?

Gennat hitched his charcoal grey trousers at the knees, took a puff of his cigar and blew smoke rings through small lips. The smoke stank of wet autumn leaves. I hoped he wasn't going to offer me one of those cigars, because I'd have had to say no and that would have got our burgeoning professional relationship off to a terrible start.

When Gennat spoke, it was clear he'd decided to ignore my concerns regarding my night shift duties. 'What it's about, Thomas, is we've been sweating your Herr Kürten for the last,' he checked the wall clock and mumbled under his breath for a second, 'seventeen hours, give or take. Or at least, we've been trying to, haven't we Ritter?'

Ritter turned from the window. He declined to answer. He stood stiff-backed, making a point of not sitting while I was in the room. Christ, how I wanted to laugh in his stupid fluffy face.

'That is to say, Ritter has tried.' Gennat's voice was a rumble from the sternum that soothed as much as it unsettled. 'Vogel has tried. Hell, even I've tried.'

Gennat got to his feet and threw his arms wide, another theatrical gesture for the gallery. He'd be declaiming Goethe at this rate, God help us. 'He won't talk, it's that simple. Won't talk to me, won't talk to Vogel, won't talk to your precious Inspector Ritter.'

He pointed at Ritter who still said nothing. Instead, Ritter ran his tongue over his teeth in a way that made his top lip bulge and emphasised his overbite. The circles under his eyes went deeper than the day before. Could it be that he'd got less sleep than me? Had Gisela even managed to drag him home last night after I'd left her? Was he feeling jealous at our getting reacquainted? I did hope so.

Gennat slapped a hand on my shoulder and brought me back to the matter at hand.

'Kürten won't talk to anyone, Thomas, you understand me?' he said.

It was a message I'd have had a hard time missing. I opened my mouth to say so and he added:

'Anyone except you.'

Thirty minutes later, Ritter escorted me down the hall. Half an hour with Kürten's file wasn't long enough. After Gennat had got a girl in to bandage up my cheek I'd had maybe twenty minutes to read the thing, and if there was a more convincing argument for sterilising the criminal classes I'd yet to see it.

1897 saw Kürten's first conviction for theft at age fourteen. He'd stolen from the foundry where he'd worked as an apprentice sand moulder with his father. He'd then spent eighteen of the following thirty years behind bars, and his rap sheet heaved with arson and rape.

'Just get him talking,' Gennat said when he gave me the file, 'and Ritter can take care of the rest.'

Damned if I was going to leave it at that. We could spend all day talking and only just scratch the surface. And spending all day talking to Kürten was not a pleasant prospect. Those scant fifteen minutes we'd spent together in the Church of St Rochus would have done me. Albermann had to be the priority. As far as I knew she was still out there somewhere and we still didn't know where.

Ritter halted beside a door and said, 'Look familiar?' He opened up and ushered me inside.

It was the same interview room where Ritter had interrogated me. Nice touch, that. But then, there were only two in the whole building. There was a difference today, though. Today four chairs encircled the table. Kürten sat in the one facing the door, picking at his fingernails. His suit jacket was buttoned tight and his shirt collar had rubbed his neck red raw. In the chair to his left sat a stenographer with a pad. The stenographer wore a grey suit and the dark circles round his eyes supplied his face with its only colour.

Kürten smiled at me. There was a gap in his upper right jaw where one of his molars should have been, a detail I noticed now only because that had been in his file too.

'Thomas!' he said. He got out of his chair and extended a hand. I hefted the file to show him why I couldn't shake it. He pulled the hand away and ran it through his hair, which had begun to lose its shape. He pulled out the chair next to him and bid me sit down before returning to his seat.

'Are they treating you all right, old chap?' he said.

The women I'd offended at the pavement café the day before came to mind. I wondered how they'd react if they knew that their fiendish vampire had such good manners. And if I'd wondered at how a man such as this might have convinced so many women and children to go off with him, here was the answer. Manners went a long way, especially with certain kinds of romance-novel reading domestics and ageing spinsters: the lonely, the unloved. When our morbidly polite society was full of such people all crying out for a little charm then a little charm was all it took.

'I'm your warm-up act.' I sat in the chair Kürten had prepped for me and pointed over my shoulder at Ritter.

Kürten frowned at him. Ritter ignored the last empty chair and loomed across the table. 'Where were you Friday evening, say between five pm and nine pm? You know, the time when you were abducting Gertrude Albermann? Around then.'

So much for my plan. Kürten half-shrugged, looked at me and rolled his eyes. The eyes were cornflower blue in the morning light. Prussian army blue. The blue of Queen Louise's mythical flight from Napoleon, of the lamented – or was that lamentable? – Kaiser Bill and his withered left arm. The blue of withered machismo.

Ritter squatted beside Kürten's chair. His lips brushed the prisoner's ear.

He bellowed: 'We have a witness who can place you with the girl! So where is she?'

'Who? The witness? I have no idea.' Kürten tittered, pleased with his joke. He kept those twinkling little cornflowers on me. 'Why is this man shouting? Why is he talking to me, even?' He addressed the stenographer. 'I believe I was quite specific. No one but Detective Klein.'

Ritter reached across the table and grabbed Kürten's tie. He pulled Kürten out of his chair and across the table, the points of the blond man's shoes scraping the table top.

'Where is Gertrude Albermann?' Ritter said.

Kürten's eyes went flat. His mouth twisted in a look of – what? Anger? Disgust? It wasn't fear. Though I despised him for what he might be – a killer of women and children – I admired his composure, his balls in opposing Ritter. The thought came to me out of nowhere and I tried to feel shocked about it. I tried really hard.

'Tell me where she is!' Ritter shouted.

Kürten stuck out his front teeth and gnashed at the air. Ritter threw Kürten at the nearest empty chair, the one Ritter had declined to use.

'Play us all you want,' Ritter said, heading for the door. 'But you'd better give us something soon so we know you are the Ripper.' He shot me a look, pulled his handkerchief and covered his lips with it. 'And not just another deluded old fool.'

He left, slamming the door shut behind him. The stenographer hadn't so much as raised an eyebrow at all the commotion.

'Did you get all of that okay?' I asked him.

'Yes sir, thank you.'

'Good, cause I don't know how I'm going to follow that bravura performance.'

'Sir? Did you want me to get that down as well?'

'Never mind.'

Ritter's questioning confirmed that no one had stumbled across Albermann's body yet, so she could still be alive. Probably his claim about a witness was so much horse shit, otherwise they'd have thrown a lot more at Kürten before bringing me in. Kürten's response told me that the direct approach wasn't going to work. Maybe Gennat had been right when he'd emphasised the need to get him talking first.

'Yeah you feel it now,' Kürten said, still squatting on the floor. He looked at the door as though Ritter were still there, or listening on the other side. Which, for all I knew, he was. 'You feel that?' Kürten cried. 'You feel the fear? You feel it now?'

He got to his feet. He pinched the seams of his trousers and tried to flick out the creases. He gave me a small, embarrassed kind of smile, picked up the chair he'd knocked over and sat so that now he faced the window.

I reached for the steno pad and tore off the top couple of sheets. I dropped Kürten's file on the table and jiggled at it to see which leg was the shorter. I folded the paper three times and jammed it under the errant leg. I leaned on the table. Still some give there, but that was as good as it was going to get.

The file said Kürten was born in 1883 but he didn't look forty-six years old, not to me. And from what I'd read none of the surviving victims had thought him any older than his mid-thirties. Murder kept you young, it seemed. If he was the Ripper, I reminded myself. That's what we still had to prove, he and I, if we were going to find that missing five-year-old.

'The fear?' I said.

'They treated me like a dog,' Kürten said.

'Who did?'

He didn't hear me. 'No, worse than a dog. With their fettering and their solitary and their work details.' He tapped a forefinger on the table, as though rehearsing his day in court. 'Well, you beat a dog often enough, eventually you get bitten.' He turned to the door. He yelled, 'Bitten! You feel it? You feel it now?'

This wasn't going anywhere. I rubbed my left eye, forgetting it was bruised. Pain flooded that side of my face and I had to blink back tears.