The Killing of Emma Gross (8 page)

The man at my side drew back, his baby blues full of indignation rather than fear. No, not fear, never fear, not for this one.

'Tell them to stay back!' he commanded.

I turned. The
Schupo
cordon behind us closed in, bullet hoses held chest high. Of course, from where they'd been standing they couldn't see what I could. I used the shovel to push myself up and waved at the
Schupo
to keep their distance. It was enough. They shrank back to the edge of the meadow. It was just me and the Ripper, the Ripper and me, for this part of the proceedings. Kürten's blond hair had dried and paled and knotted in the breeze. It was the only real hint of untidiness in his appearance since his arrest. Ever the dapper man about town. He was talking, presumably to me, though I caught only some of his words:

'She was so trusting. Put her arms round my neck when I carried her. Told me all about her family. I wish...sometimes, I wish...'

The girl – Gertrude, her name was Gertrude damn it, and I wasn't going to depersonalise her in death – lay on her front. Although the coat covered her, her bottom was poking into the air and her legs were parted. Five years old, and this man – this excuse of a man justifying himself to me – hadn't just killed her, he'd raped her first.

My heart gave a tug. I thought of my own darling Lilli, snuggling safe and loved in a warm cot, face shining with the happiness she'd never had the chance to know. Prickling salt water stung my eyes. My stomach muscles cramped up so tightly that I had to double up, and I flung a hand across my belly to try and soothe away the pain.

My knuckles were white where I gripped the shovel's handle. I imagined sinking its blade into Kürten's face, cracking open his skull and releasing the evil that dwelt within. Maybe then the pain would go away.

The Ripper smiled at me. 'You want to kill me,' he said. It wasn't a question.

I said nothing. What could I say? The wind cooled the tear tracks on my cheeks and ruffled the bandage on my face.

Finally, I cleared my throat. 'She's not buried,' I said, nodding at the shovel. 'Why did you tell me to bring this?'

'You'll see.' The Ripper's smile deepened as he crooked a finger and beckoned me to follow him still further into hell.

'Wait!' I called.

He stopped and turned back, a puzzled look on his face. I made it to my feet and handed him the shovel.

'Not yet,' I told him.

I knelt beside the girl's body and reached for my satchel. Which wasn't there, of course. Curse Ritter, I'd still not got it back. Of course, my rubber gloves and powder had been inside. I didn't want to contaminate the body but I was first officer on the scene. Duty decreed I file a report on this. I flexed my fingers and gritted my teeth against the stabbing in my gut.

'Do you still have your handkerchief?' I asked Kürten.

He fumbled at his breast pocket but he couldn't get a grip on the material because the handcuffs got in the way. I rose and pulled out the white cotton square for him as he gave a shrug and a smile. I examined the material for contaminants such as blood or phlegm and found none, then I returned to the body. I wrapped the handkerchief around my hand and pulled the coat aside as far as I could without moving the limbs.

The coat caught on something. I pulled harder and it came loose; it had been stuck to the girl's back with dried blood. The blood spread from her left side to her lower back. That told me Kürten had moved her to her current position some time after death.

'It was raining that night,' Kürten said.

Under the green coat, the girl's white knickers were exposed and torn and her buttocks were bared.

'You molested her?' I said over my shoulder.

Kürten cleared his throat. No words came. I looked back at him. He stood with his feet apart and both hands stretched out in front of his face, eyes wide, mouth stretched into a grin.

'I stabbed her with my scissors and I strangled her,' he said. 'With this hand,' his left-hand fingers flexed, 'I kept hold of her throat, while with this one,' his right hand wriggled, 'I felt the...the vagina.' He coughed. He cleared his throat. 'I cleaned them. I cleaned them on the wet grass. The rain...'

I leaned over the girl's head and pushed aside some of her hair. Flies buzzed around us. No maggots had hatched on her yet, so she hadn't been there long. The hair on her crown had dried in the breeze, though around her face it was still damp. The flies settled back on her and I tried to wave them away. Two stab wounds to the left temple. A brown crust the rain hadn't washed off still clung from temple to chin. Her face was red with congestion. Congestion sometimes came from the way a body lay after death, but for that to work in this case she'd have been lying on her front when she bled out. The blood patches I could see told me she'd bled out on her back and been moved to her current position afterwards. That meant this congestion had been the result of throttling.

I couldn't get a look at the girl's throat to check for bruises without moving her. I couldn't do that until someone had sketched her position or called out a photographer. I stood up. I could leave the rest to Ritter and the autopsy.

I crossed to Kürten and took the shovel from him.

'Where next?' I said.

He led, I followed. He stopped at the edge of the woods that bordered the meadow.
Schupo
men surrounded us, some lurking in the meadow, some in the trees. Ritter hadn't kept pace. He and Vogel and the other plainclothesmen were hung up with Albermann's corpse.

Kürten scratched his head.

'Somewhere round here,' he was saying to himself. Then, to me, he added, 'We're looking for a rock, a large flat one. It's poking up through the earth somewhere...around here.'

He took a few paces into the woods. The
Schupo
guys in the trees took the same number of paces back. Kürten emerged from the tree line, counting his steps like a child playing at
Treasure Island
.

When he stopped, I handed him the shovel.

'So, dig around a little,' I said.

He raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. He plucked at his lapels and shook his head. The suit was getting creased and his shoes were caked in mud. So were mine.

'How many people are buried out here?' I said.

He laughed.

'Who are we going to find?' I said. 'Another child?'

'I'm not a monster, Thomas,' he hissed, looking around. 'I'm a man with normal appetites, that's all. Normal appetites denied too long.' He jabbed a finger down at the ground, took a couple of breaths and then ran a hand through his hair. That is, he tried to, but the cuffs didn't make it an easy operation. He mussed up as much as he smoothed down.

'So?' I said. 'Who is it? Who have you buried out here, Peter?'

'My dear chap, I really don't know. She didn't tell me her name and I didn't ask.' He unbuttoned his jacket. 'Tell me, do you still have any of those cigars?'

I ignored him and dug into the loam. The grass roots knotted the wet soil into lumps and made it hard to break through.

'Can you pass me my handkerchief then?' he said, pointing to the scrap of material I still had in my hand. 'I need to blow my nose.'

I still didn't answer.

'Give me my handkerchief or I'll walk away,' he shouted.

'Go ahead,' I told him. I nodded at the
Schupo
. 'See how far you get before they riddle you with bullets.'

He smiled. Giggled, even. 'They wouldn't.'

'And why not?' I said. 'We've found Albermann. You've given us more than enough now to be sure of who you are. The public would just love to read of your violent death.' I pointed at the blue coats surrounding us. 'And they'd just love to be the cause of it.'

The breeze picked up. It had a cold edge to it. The clouds hovered fat and dark overhead. If we were going to find something I wanted it to be before the weather broke.

Kürten wiped his nose on his shirt cuffs. He watched me slam the shovel into the earth a couple of times. Voices drifted to me on the wind and I looked back in the direction of the factory. Ritter and Vogel had come up to the
Schupo
cordon and were talking to the squad sergeant.

How much of this was on Ritter? Would Gertrude still be alive if he hadn't got in the way?

'You don't like him, do you?' Kürten said. He nodded at Ritter.

I shovelled more clay earth out of the hole. This far down, it was more tightly packed.

'Come on,' Kürten said, 'you can tell me. I'm a good listener.'

'Yeah, I'll bet.' I kept shovelling, trying to ignore the fact I felt closer to this bastard than to any of my so-called colleagues. After all, Kürten was responsible for my return to police headquarters. He didn't care about suspected Communist sympathies and more importantly, he didn't like Ritter either. I had to keep telling myself that he'd killed the girl, not Ritter; Ritter had just made it easier for him, he hadn't done the deed.

'Did you love your cousin?'

'What?' I didn't pause in my work. My back ached with every stroke now. I didn't want to stop for fear I might not have the will to start again.

'She died beautifully, you know.'

I was grunting, sweat running down my back and making my shirt stick.

'Aren't you going to ask me why I did it?' Kürten said.

'Did what?'

'All these...things I did. The murders. The rapes. You know...'

With that, I did pause. I stabbed the shovel into the earth and leaned on it. My arms shook, my shock trooper days feeling a long way off. Didn't I want to ask why? Didn't I want to know? The man in handcuffs wiped his running nose on his jacket sleeves and I knew there was nothing to know.

'There's no answer you can give me that I would understand,' I said.

I hefted the shovel, sending a hot wave of pain down my spine. I pushed down into the loam. The blade struck something hard and slid off.

Good Christ, had I hit bone? Searing stomach acid rose to the back of my throat. I choked it down.

I shook creases out of the handkerchief I was holding and smoothed it between my palms. I got down on my knees. I pushed soil away from the misshapen lump, dug beneath it with my hand and pulled upwards. The bone came loose and I fell backwards.

The bone turned out not to be a bone at all, but a large flat rock.

'This the rock you were talking about, Peter?' I asked him.

He grinned as he nodded.

'So we're close now, yes?'

The nearest
Schupo
crept forward. A shout from Vogel brought them up, but they didn't retreat. Kürten didn't notice their approach, or affected not to. The hole in the ground transfixed him.

I went at the ground with the shovel once more. The adrenaline in my blood from the digging was beginning to ease the back pain. I dug out two more spadefuls before the shovel hit another rock.

'
Gott in Himmel
, Peter,' I said, 'there's a lot of rocks in this meadow. No wonder they don't plough it.'

With bare fingers I gripped the rock and pulled. This one felt like it was covered in soft plant roots or decomposing grass. It came out with ease, plopping out of the loam, my fingers tangled in the roots. It was light for a rock. The surface texture on the other side was smooth, slippery, like it was coated in wax. A chunk of the wax flapped loosely around a narrow base as I brushed at the earth. I turned the rock around.

Two sunken eyelids met my gaze. Something black and shiny crawled from under the left eyelid on lots of legs. I dropped the head in the hole, scrabbled out and retched in the long grass, Kürten laughing all the while.

This time when the blue coats rushed towards us I didn't try to stop them.

Someone was hanging around outside my apartment building when I got back from Mühlenstrasse at seven pm.

He was wearing a shapeless brown overcoat and a workman's cap against the chill evening. He was smoking a pipe, clasping the end between teeth that reflected the street light through his dark beard. He looked familiar. He saw me and waved.

'Hello Tom,' he said, shoving himself off the lamp post he'd been leaning on. The voice did it.

'What can I do for you, Du Pont?' I asked.

'More a case of what I can do for you, I'd have thought.'

I wasn't too interested in Du Pont's favours. It was one of said favours that had got me into trouble over my non-existent Red Front contacts all those months ago, and right after the Prussian interior ministry had issued a blanket ban on all Red Front activities. All the excuse Ritter had ever needed to start spreading rumours.

'Still talking in riddles,' I said. 'Whatever it is, can't you find someone else to deal with it? I've been burned enough handling your information.'

Du Pont squinted at me. 'What the hell happened to your face?'

I unlocked the front door, crossed to the mailboxes on the blue-and-white tiled wall. Du Pont followed me into the foyer. I unlocked my mailbox. It was empty.

'Popular as ever I see,' Du Pont said. He held the front door open and tapped out his pipe. Then he put the pipe in his hip pocket and let the door swing shut.