The Killing Of Emma Gross

by Damien Seaman

  'What kind of nurse, do you remember?' I said. 'Did she work in a hospital, or in a dentist's surgery perhaps?'

  She shook her head. 'I'm afraid I don't know that. We really only spoke together over a matter of days, detective.' She paused. 'Did you want some coffee?'

  Uli flinched. I was tempted to say yes just for the look on his face.

  'No, thank you Frau Weber. You've been most helpful.' I looked at her husband. 'Sorry to disturb.'

  'Any time,' he grumbled.

  ‘By the way,' I said, 'did you rent the flat here through an agency or with the landlord directly?'

  'Through an agency,' Uli Weber said.

  'You remember which one?'

  'Yes thanks.'

  Frau Weber gave her husband a playful slap and said, 'It was Bauer and Bauer. It's not far down the road here. They have an office on Achener Strasse, on the square. It's a five minute walk. But we see the landlord from time to time too. He stops by if we have any maintenance trouble.' She disappeared through another door.

  'Don't go making a mess in there, you hear?' her husband called out. Then, to me: 'That's my study.'

  I nodded. There was a crash. Herr Weber flinched – he was going to get terrible wrinkles before long if he didn't do something about his flinching – and put down his coffee. He bustled into the study after his wife.

  A few seconds later Frau Weber emerged clutching a compliments slip with a torn corner and handed the slip to me. The printed address read: Herr Dornfelder, 12 Bucherweg, Meerbusch. Meerbusch was a suburban town to the north west of the city on the other side of the Rhine, an area full of charming woodland and exclusive restaurants, as the local estate agents would probably have put it. One of those parasitical moneyed places that skimmed off the sweat of the labour toiling within the city proper, as Du Pont would probably have put it. All a matter of perspective.

  'You sure you don't need this?' I said, waving the slip.

  'Oh no, you take it detective. Anything to help. We have more anyway.' She beamed at me.

  'Where's your local post office, Frau Weber?'

  'Oh, gosh. There's one north on the Achener Strasse. Number sixty or thereabouts, I think. It's a kilometre or so away, I know that. Long street, that Achener Strasse.'

  'How old was Frau Brandt?'

  'Late forties, I would guess. But I'm not that good on people's ages, I'm afraid. She had quite a lot of grey in her hair and she didn't colour it.'

  'How tall would you say she was?'

  'A little taller than me. Not much.'

  'And you're what? One metre fiftyish?'

  'One fifty-four.'

  'What kind of build did she have?'

  Frau Weber chuckled and patted her belly. 'Certainly not like mine. She was thin. Especially in the face. Liked to wear loose clothing though, so it's hard to say for certain. You sure you didn't want any coffee?'

  'Well...' I said. Herr Weber came crashing out of his study and gave me the mother of all scowls. He carried two pieces of something made of dark wood, one piece in either hand. The pieces looked like they used to fit together until a minute or two earlier.

  I declined the offer and left the house with a grin on my face, a little closer to Frieda Brandt, but not much. This Dornfelder was miles away and if I kept shelling out for taxis I'd be broke before dawn. Dornfelder could wait. The letting agency would, of course, be closed until morning, so they would have to wait. All this hassle for the forwarding address of a woman whose connection to Emma Gross I knew nothing about.

  Trudi's hot lead had cooled and I'd run out of excuses. I had to go and check on my captives.

  22

  The coal cellar door hung open on one hinge. The other hinge lay in the courtyard and reflected the half-dozen windows whose lights were burning up above me. Beside the glinting hinge lay pieces of latch and clumps of brick dust. Where I was standing remained dark. I waited several long minutes for my heart rate to slow to normal and then I approached the door.

  I went down the steps and whispered for Du Pont. No one answered. At the bottom of the steps my eyes adapted to the gloom. The low cloud cover of the past few days had gone. The moon lit part of the way. That was enough to see by. The back stalls of the cellar were empty of anything bar the coal they were supposed to hold. Empty of prisoners for sure.

  One of the back wall slats was snapped in two and the scarf and the belt had vanished along with the two men. A scrabbling noise came from behind me. I twirled round, my hand going for the pocket with the Luger in it. But there was nothing to see. No one there. Rats or something, most likely.

  I turned back to the slats. There was nothing of use there, certainly no clues as to where they might have gone.

  Great, so now I had an angry Commie reporter and a mystery thug with a broken wrist out roaming the streets. Well, Du Pont was a talker. If they'd gone off together, there was no way he hadn't got some information out of the green man. Or so I hoped. Even that slender hope would come to nothing unless I could track down Du Pont.

  I returned to the steps, hand on the Luger in my pocket in case of ambush. I trod on something soft. I raised my foot and looked down. I'd stood on Du Pont's flat cap. I squatted and picked it up. It was still damp with Du Pont's saliva. I dropped the cap and wiped my hands on my trousers.

  I hated to think what Du Pont might decide to write about me next. I had to find him. I went out to the street and through the alley to the main road where I managed to get hold of a cab after a twenty minute wait.

  'Volksstimme offices,' I said. And then I tacked on a 'please', because God help you if you upset the cab drivers in this town.

  He pulled away without having to ask for the address. Ten minutes later he parked up outside the building. I paid him, swearing that would be the last taxi I shelled out for that night.

  The Volksstimme offices occupied the first floor of the four-storey building, where the absence of lamp light suggested business was done for the night. Ditto the silence coming from the basement printing presses. Light spilled onto the pavement through the plate glass window of the bar on the ground floor where, by contrast, the night's business was just getting started.

  On the inside of the bar windows the staff had pasted a mock-up of the last edition to go out, blown up to poster size.

  KRIPO IGNORE EVIDENCE, INSIST ON GUILT OF STAUSBERG,

  the headline read.

  I entered the bar without bothering with the rest of the story, though I noticed it didn't carry Du Pont's byline.

  Chatter filled the bar, every table crowded with boisterous groups. One couple at a round table next to the toilet door were an exception, two young women holding hands across the table, fingers entwined between tall glasses of coffee topped with cream. They gazed silently into each other's eyes, two women in the same room with nothing to say. What were the odds?

  I went to the bar. A young man dressed in black and sporting patchy blond whiskers came over. He sized me up before smiling a smile I would have sworn was genuine. There was I, a cop in a Commie bar, and this was the first person all day who hadn't taken me for a bull as soon as clap eyes on me. Still, he couldn't have been more than twenty years old, if that. Time yet for life to grind him down.

  'What happened to your face, friend? Trouble with the bulls?' he said. When the word 'bulls' left his lips, he came off like he was mimicking the dialogue in some gangster picture.

  'You could say that,' I replied. I ordered a coffee. 'Du Pont about?'

  'Who? Andre?' the young guy scratched his beard. 'Haven't seen him all evening. Or Ruth either, for that matter.'

  'I've got a scoop for him if he wants it,' I said, wondering who the hell Ruth was.

  'Well, I suppose he must be staying home tonight.'

  'Where's that?'

  The young man narrowed his eyes and didn't say anything. If there was a time for him to make me then this was it. He scratched his beard, dislodging white flecks that settled on his dark pullover.

  I
leaned in and made a show of glancing around, checking for bulls.

  'This is dynamite stuff,' I said. 'Links in with the Stausberg story, you know? He's going to want this pretty bad. But I can understand you being cautious.' I made a show of getting ready to leave. 'I mean, I can always peddle this stuff to someone else...'

  'All right, all right,' the guy said, pouring coffee from a large steel urn into a cracked cup. 'Jesus, you sound just like him.' He handed me the cup and said, 'Two blocks over. Go out the door, turn right down the side of this building the two blocks, then turn right. It's number twenty-one, on the right. He's got ADPont on the door, like that.'

  The guy even wrote ADPont out for me on a pad and handed me the slip of paper. I took a sip of coffee and struggled to swallow it. I stayed there for a few minutes and forced down another couple of scalding, weak mouthfuls. As soon as the blond man turned his back I left.

  A two-minute schlep took me to Du Pont's building, where I pressed his buzzer on the outer door. The nameplate gave the apartment number as three, fifth floor. The door clicked open and I took the stairs at a trot.

  Du Pont's apartment door was open when I got to the fifth. My hip ached and I was out of breath. I pushed open the door to the refrain of a trembling female voice:

  'Andre? Andre, did you lose your keys again?'

  The girl standing in the apartment hallway in a clinging night dress opened her mouth in a neat, round 'O' when she saw me. She was young enough to've still been in school, though her bosom suggested that, if so, she'd be getting a lot of attention from her male classmates. Freckles dotted her face. Her hair was dark and thick and tangled with interrupted sleep.

  'You must be Ruth,' I said.

  'Who are you?'

  'I'm a friend of Andre's. He's not here, I take it?'

  'No.' Ruth vanished through the nearest doorway and re-emerged with a blanket across her shoulders.

  'Damn. I was hoping he would be. I haven't seen him since just before lunch.'

  'You saw him at lunchtime?' Her eager tone told me the last time I'd seen him was more recent than the last time she had.

  'More or less. What about you?'

  'Well, he got up about six and he was gone before I left for lectures.'

  'You haven't seen him since?'

  'No. It's not like him to stay away like this.' She sighed and snorted, all at once. 'Well, of course it is like him to stay away like this. This is exactly like him, but not without sending me some kind of message to let me know where he is.'

  'So you don't know where he is?' I said. She shook her head. What if something had happened to him? What if the green man had killed him or kidnapped him or something? Okay, so Du Pont had betrayed me for a good story and what happened to him I could care less about, but what might he write about me if he was released, or if the green man had tried to kill him, and failed?

  I rubbed my eyes, forgetting about the bruising yet again. The pain shot through my skull and woke me up some.

  'Do you have any cognac?' I asked.

  'Of course. This way.'

  Ruth led me to a living room. The room measured ten metres by ten, the floor done out in parquet and scattered with rugs. Two large couches faced each other on one side of the room, a long oak dining table and chairs filling the other side. Behind one of the couches was a chrome and glass drinks trolley piled high with bottles. Ruth selected one that was full of dark honey-hued liquid. She poured a healthy dose into a snifter and handed the snifter to me.

  I gulped half the drink and then sat on the corner of the couch by the trolley. The cognac warmed my throat and made me gag at the same time, which was some measure of the day I'd had. Through the windows, church spires and a couple of taller apartment buildings provided most of the ingredients of a good view. And was that the roof of the town hall in the Altstadt a little further off, lit up by street lamps? Not a bad place, this. It put my shitty single room to shame. If this was how Communists lived, bring on the revolution.

  'Do you think something's happened to him?' Ruth said, breaking my cognac-induced trance.

  'I do,' I said, before I'd given myself time to think it over. I could've kicked myself for the look of worry that crossed the girl's face. 'You been seeing him long?' I asked. 'We've known each other a good while, but he never mentioned you.'

  'A year,' she said, pouring a drink for herself. 'Just over.' She drained her glass and then clutched it close. I got up and took the glass from her, poured her another drink and gave it back. She put some effort into trying to smile, but the effect was all effort and no smile. Killer dimples, though.

  Brown eyes, of course.

  'You don't suppose...' she began. 'Look, I don't want to go to the police about this, but I'm worried, and you're a policeman, and here you are looking for him. Would you find him for me?'

  'I'll do what I can.' I finished my drink and set my glass down on the trolley. I went over and ruffled her hair before leaving the apartment. I'd wanted to kiss her on the cheek or something, but she'd looked so young that it hadn't seemed right.

  I couldn't help wondering how a slob like Du Pont had ended up with such a knock out.

  23

  There were four hospitals on the city side of the river. Two were out east, in Grafenberg. The medical academy research and teaching hospital lay south, at the very edge of the city's Bilk district. The nearest and smallest of the four hospitals, St Vincent's, was a half hour walk north to Derendorf. It didn't take me long to decide where to go. I headed north.

  St Vincent's turned up negative for Frieda Brandt's employment records or admissions of men matching Du Pont's name or description. So, where next? The coal cellar had been closer to Grafenberg, but the academy hospital was closest to Brandt's old address. It was a question of priorities. I thought of Ruth's sleep-tangled hair and freckles and struck out east. Hell, I had all night. What else was I going to do? Sleep? Grafenberg was only forty-five minutes away by foot from Derendorf anyway, half the distance of the southerly option.

  When I got to the Grafenberg woods, I took the Bismarkweg through the trees to the hospital complex rather than stick to the main road. My watch told me it was four am. The night air felt warmer than it had for weeks, and the wind had died away completely.

  The bushes rustled ahead of me. No breeze meant something was moving about in there. These woods had been one of Kürten's play areas. How many victims would it turn out that he'd raped and killed among those trees? How many other Kürtens were out there doing the same right at that moment?

  I emerged from the trees, my face bathed in moonlight. The hospital complex spread itself before me, perhaps a score of buildings dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tall brick structures comprising their own village: the march of modern progress against the fairy tale nightmares of the pre-modern age. Civilisation amid the forest.

  A sign at the front gate pointed out the main reception not twenty metres away, in one of the largest of the hospital buildings. I went up a short flight of steps and pushed through the revolving door.

  My shoes squeaked on the shiny flooring. I flashed my ID at the nurse, or receptionist, or whatever the hell she was on the front desk. She wore sombre office clothes, so she probably wasn’t a nurse. There was a faint medicinal smell in the air. Off to the left was an area full of open seating where a knot of patients sat reading magazines. One of them shuffled in her seat while another one raised a fist to his mouth and coughed.

  'I'm looking for a man who might have been admitted here earlier today,' I told the woman at reception. 'Well, technically any time between yesterday and this morning, I suppose I mean. You know what I mean, right?' She nodded. 'Good. Name of Du Pont, Andre Du Pont.'

  'Can you be any more precise about the time?' the woman asked. She had a deep, calm voice that failed to match the permanent scowl on her face.

  'Anytime from one pm yesterday. That's as precise as I can manage.'

  'What injuries did he have?'

&n
bsp; 'I don't know.'

  'Missing persons, is it?' she said, reaching for an admissions folder in the filing cabinet next to her chair.

  'Pretty routine, but he's a possible witness and I need to interview him.'

  'Well, I shouldn't think we would allow you to trouble him at this time of the morning.' She flashed me a brief smile. 'That's if he's here. Let me see...'

  She flicked through paperwork. There looked to be a lot of it. 'Couldn't be any more precise, could you?'

  'Sorry.' I shook my head and tried to look sympathetic.

  'I mean, that's over twelve hours...Oh, here we are.' The surprise in her voice matched the surprise I felt.

  'No, really?' I said.

  'Yes, looks like. Andre Du Pont. Lives in Stadtmitte?'

  'That's right.'

  'Okay, let's see. Picked up on Grafenberger Allee, admitted to A&E at three-thirty yesterday afternoon. Multiple bruises, minor cuts, it says on this form. Some kind of difficulty talking, like he was drunk or something.'

  'Drunk?'

  'Well, those are just the initial notes, you understand. Looks like he's sustained quite a battering.'

  'Thank you. Where would he be now?'

  'P ward, according to this.'

  'P for Placid?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Don't worry. Just a bad joke. Which way is P ward?'

  The woman pointed to a series of signs tacked to a nearby wall. P ward was signposted to the left, past the open waiting area. I scanned the signs for indications as to where employee records might be. As I'd expected, there wasn't a sign for that.

  'Before I go, I'm also looking for a nurse called Frieda Brandt. She's about one metre fifty to one fifty-five in height. Slim build. In her late forties. Greying hair.'

  The woman shook her head. 'I don't know everyone here. I tend to work nights more often than not, but that's not a name I recognise.'

  'Do you have an employee records department?'

  'It'll be all locked up this time of night.'

  'And who do I speak to to get the key?'