The Killing of Emma Gross (9 page)

I ignored him and tramped up the wooden stairs opposite the mailboxes. The stairs creaked under my weight. Du Pont followed me up, the two of us creating a chorus of off-tempo creaks and echoes.

'Hey,' Du Pont said, 'don't think I'm not grateful for what you did for me. There's not everybody would stick their neck out for an informant the way you did. You know, a bombing –'

'What the hell do you want, Du Pont?'

We'd reached the top of the stairwell. To my right was the WC. At the end of the landing, beyond Effi Schneider's closed door, was my room.

'That's what I been trying to tell you, Tom,' Du Pont said. 'I'm looking to pay you back for protecting me the way you did.' He was a chubby man underneath his heavy proletarian clothes and he was out of breath from climbing the stairs.

I walked along the landing to my room, hoping Effi might be in so I could ditch this guy. Effi's apartment remained quiet as we walked by.

'You know, if you dropped all the faux proletarian duds you might be able to make it up and down stairs that bit easier,' I told Du Pont.

'Your concern touches me,' he said, removing his cap.

I put my key in the lock and the door swung open without my needing to unlock it. Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that. Seemed like Effi had too. The door crashed into the bedstead. I turned on the light and the bulb threw restless shadows around the room. I couldn't face tidying the mess, but if I didn't do it now then maybe I never would.

'Ritter still taking it out on you?' Du Pont said. He tugged my arm. I shrugged him off. 'Let me take you out for a beer, Tom. You need it. I mean, look at you. Look at all this.'

I entered the room and started picking out dirty clothes, throwing them onto the bed.

'As you can see,' I said, 'I've a few chores to do. I don't have time for your nonsense. I'm tired as it is. I've had a hell of a day.'

'Yes, up at Papendell, right?' Du Pont said.

I paused with my arms full of clothes.

'What did you say?'

Du Pont grinned. 'You heard me.'

'How did you know about that?'

'Let me buy you a beer and I'll tell you.'

The bar was dark and warm, a welcome relief from the cool breeze sweeping the streets. Hints of cooking fat and stale beer permeated my swollen sinuses. We found a table in a corner away from the draught at the door. Someone came to take our order and Du Pont asked for a couple of pilsners.

We made small talk until the beer arrived. That is, Du Pont made small talk. My mind kept wandering until I was seeing torn panties and blood-caked little faces everywhere. And Ritter, leaning back in the interview room needling me over withholding evidence when all he'd had to do was let me at Kürten from the start and then at least we could have found the girl earlier. At least that.

Du Pont grabbed my right arm. I glared at him but he was looking at me with concern. Damn guts playing up again; must've shown on my face.

'So come on Tom,' he said, 'what did happen to your ugly mug? Is it anything to do with this St Rochus church arrest yesterday?'

'Christ, Du Pont, is there anything you don't know?' I frowned and shrugged him off. No way was he getting anything out of me today, not after what had happened.

'You know, I often ask myself the same question. Great reporter as I am, I feel kinda sad for everyone else that I'm so far ahead of the game.'

I snorted. He was doing a good job of being the right guy to take my anger out on.

'Not forgetting, of course, that without you I probably wouldn't even be around any more,' he said.

The beers arrived and Du Pont drank half of his down. I couldn't face mine. I felt sick, had done ever since Vogel had driven me back to Mühlenstrasse from the Papendell meadows.

'How did you know I was in Papendell?' I said.

Du Pont put down his glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

'Elementary, my dear Watson. First, the mud on your shoes is characteristic of the light loamy earth we get up there in the meadows this time of year.'

He paused to take another drink. I waited. He took longer over his drink than was strictly necessary and after a few seconds it occurred to me he was waiting for me to respond. I sipped my beer instead. He wanted something, so let him work for it.

'There's also this,' Du Pont said. He reached into an inside pocket of his coat – which he was still wearing despite the heat, though he'd unbuttoned it at least – and pulled out an envelope. He passed it to me.

The envelope was addressed to the editor at the
Volksstimme
and postmarked
Düsseldorf
,
24.5.30
. Inside was a folded piece of thick, waxed paper. I pulled out the paper and smoothed it flat. It was covered in scribbles and sketches.

I turned it around and looked at it from several angles before I worked out it wasn't sketches so much as a single sketch, a map. At the top was a wavy line drawn in pencil. Above the line the word
woods
appeared six times. Below the line was the word
field
scribbled twice. Between the second
field
and the wavy line above it was an
x
. Below that the word
meadow
was written three times above a thin double-line which seemed to represent the Papendell road and bisected the map from bottom left to top right. At the bottom left end of the pencil road were the words
Murder at Papendell
. Bottom right of the paper was another squiggly line surrounded with more cramped writing. I had to tip the paper to catch more lamp light so I could make out what was written there. The first part said,
In the place marked with a cross a corpse lies buried
. Under the squiggle it read,
The body of the missing Gertrude Albermann lies beside the wall of Haniel and Lueg
.

Du Pont was grinning, the idiot.

'You realise you've just got me to smear my prints all over this evidence?' I said.

He waved away my protest. 'You know how many people have handled that at the office?' He squinted at me like he'd just thought of something else. 'Or perhaps what bothers you is the idea that the police lab might find
your
prints on there?'

He took the letter from me and rubbed at it with a tissue he'd pulled from his pocket. I was too tired to think of stopping him. Besides which, he was right. If I insisted he left it for lab testing and the lab boys found one or more of my latents, I'd have the devil of a time explaining that one to Gennat.

'You know I can't talk to you about the case,' I said. I could see now where all this had been leading.

'I don't need to talk to you about this.' He put the folded sketch map back in the envelope and waved it at me. 'This is self-explanatory. Consider my showing you it more of a heads-up.'

'You're going to publish the letter?'

'How could we not?'

'You'll cause out-and-out panic. Or anger. We haven't filed charges yet. The public might doubt whether we got the right man.'

'Tom, the anger is already there, due to Düsseldorf
Kripo
's piss-poor handling of the Ripper case thus far.'

'How does printing an inflammatory letter help the public good? And anyway why haven't you published it already? You must have received it yesterday.'

'We didn't get around to opening it until the Saturday edition had gone out.' He paused. 'Do you know that under Comrades Lenin and Stalin the Soviets have come close to eradicating murder altogether?'

'Oh please.' I took a mouthful of beer. I couldn't feel any sicker, so bugger it.

'No, it's true. Under Communism, with more equitable distribution of wealth, there is no need to murder. Avarice and greed are things of the past. There you see mankind shed of the dehumanising effects of capitalism.'

I belched. My stomach ached, and the belch hadn't helped any. That beer wasn't sitting right. Nor was Du Pont, of course. Perhaps he was the problem.

'I see you haven't disputed the letter's contents,' he said.

'I thought you weren't going to pump me for information about that?'

He held up his hands. 'All right, all right. That's true. Let's not get all riled up over nothing. I want to talk to you about something else. The pattern of the Ripper's crimes.'

'What are you talking about?'

'It's the Albermann child's death that's the key, you see.'

'The key to what?' I was close to letting rip; my hand was curling into a fist.

'The key to a grave injustice.' He spoke over my groans of protest. 'No, Tom, not just the department's general systemic incompetence. I'm talking about a deliberate perversion of justice, for nothing more than convenience. And with dire consequences. Little Gertrude's murder for one.'

I stood up to leave. I riffled through my pocket for some cash. I didn't want this man paying for my drinks if all he was going to do was slander the department and implicate me along with it, or use the girl to try and get a story.

'It's Ritter,' Du Pont said.

I ceased riffling. 'What's Ritter?'

'This injustice I'm talking about. Ritter is the one responsible.'

I sat back down and waved away the waiter who'd come over to see what we wanted. Maybe Du Pont had something.

'Yeah,' he said, 'I thought that would get your interest. You heard of Johann Stausberg?'

I nodded. Not a case I'd had anything to do with, but his arrest and subsequent trial had hogged the headlines for weeks during the previous spring.

Du Pont went on with his lecture anyway. 'On the 9
^th
February last year they found the body of that eight-year-old girl Rosa Ohliger. You remember that?'

'Hard to forget.'

'Right. Strangled then stabbed to death. Body burned with kerosene, right?'

I sipped more beer. Du Pont pulled out a tobacco pouch and filled his pipe as he talked.

'Then on the 13
^th
February they found the corpse of Rudolph Scheer. Grabbed round the neck and stabbed to death. Both in the Flingern district, both attacked at night, both stabbed numerous times and both strangled.'

Du Pont gestured with his pipe to ask if the smoke would bother me. I shook my head and pulled out a cigar. A smoke might help settle my stomach. Du Pont lit his pipe and then struck a second match for me.

'Okay, the third one was a prostitute killed at the end of February, yes?' I said through a cloud of my own cigar smoke. 'And Johann Stausberg was the guy the department put away for all three killings. That's where you're going with this?'

Du Pont nodded and drank more beer between pipe puffs.

'But Stausberg wasn't arrested until months later,' I said.

Du Pont nodded. 'April, to be exact. He tried to strangle two young women with a rope. They survived to testify. Witnesses were involved. Open and shut. Then Ritter intervened and decided the strangling method was similar enough for him to try and close out the Ohliger and Gross murders, for which he'd been lead investigator on the relevant murder commissions.'

'Stausberg confessed to Rudolph Scheer's murder as well as Ohliger and Gross, if I recall.'

Du Pont snorted. 'Scheer wasn't Ritter's case. That was just an added extra for him. As you no doubt also recall, Stausberg, besides being an epileptic with a temper and memory loss problems, is, and was, a half wit. I don't imagine it's very difficult for an experienced interrogator to get someone like that to confess to anything.'

So what? Ritter pushed a confession to clear his in tray? Nothing to get excited about yet. Du Pont had more though, I knew he did.

'No comment,' I said.

'Fair enough.' Du Pont grabbed my arm again. 'But try this. Four months after Stausberg was arrested and put away in Grafenberg Asylum, two young girls, foster sisters, were killed in Flehe. You want to guess how?' He pointed at me, expecting an answer.

'Strangled and stabbed?'

He wagged his pointing finger. 'Right. And the afternoon of the very same Sunday on which the two girls are found, what should happen?'

Guessing games weren't my thing, but he'd got me by the nose. 'Another murder?'

'Rape and attempted murder. Gertrude Schulte, twenty-six-year old domestic servant – '

'What, no vital statistics?'

He ignored me. 'It was her afternoon off. She accepted the offer of a stranger to escort her to the outdoor market at Neuss. He was a pleasant enough looking chap, this man, name of Fritz Baumgart, only when they got to a meadow within hailing distance of the market place, this Baumgart forced Schulte to the ground and tried to get her panties off. When she resisted, he stabbed her. Thirteen times. She survived to give a description of her attacker. You know what Baumgart looked like?'

'I've a feeling I'm about to find out.'

'I've a feeling you already know. Neat blond hair, oiled, with a parting, a pencil-line moustache and a smart suit. Blue eyes and a tooth missing, here.' Du Pont bared his small, even teeth and pointed to his right upper jaw. 'Sound like anyone we know?'