The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  Her thoughts slowed and her movements became laboured. She felt as if she were sitting on a mass of chewing gum and had to fight the sticky resistance with every movement.

  There was a mirror mounted over the basin but she hardly dared to look in it. She barely recognised herself. The pitiful person in the mirror had split lips and deep, black circles under her eyes. This woman had hardly anything in common with the fun-loving Svenja Moers she once had been. Her hair was stringy and greasy. Her eyes glazed over.

  She felt like spiders were crawling over her face. She could feel their little, twitching legs but there was nothing there when she wiped her hand over her face. Still the feeling remained: spiders were creeping over her face, her forearms and the backs of her hands!

  She was disgusted by herself. Simultaneously, the pressure in her bladder became unbearable; and a logical remedy for both emergencies came to her .

  She had once given a presentation at the vocational college on how urine was once used as an elixir. Sick people used to drink their own urine. The Book of Proverbs supposedly gave evidence for this.

  She didn’t plan on giving him a show so she ripped off the bed sheet, crouched in a corner between the bed and a wall, draped it over herself like a tent and peed into the tooth mug.

  Greedily, coughing and gagging, she drank the warm liquid and felt relief.

  She would have preferred to stay under the sheet. There at least she would be safe from his gaze and the cameras, but here it was even stuffier and the tiles on the floor were as hot as the stone she had once eaten crispy roasted duck from at Jade Garden, the Chinese restaurant in Emden. Only now, she was the duck.

  When she couldn’t take it under the sheet anymore and had fled from the tiled floor back onto the bed, the door opened with a whirr.

  He stood there smiling like an extremely friendly waiter. In his left hand he carried a tray bearing a glass with ice cubes and beside it a little bottle of Coke Zero. He had even thought to include a slice of lemon.

  He lifted the bottle with some ceremony and poured the fizzy drink into the glass. A bubbling and hissing sound filled the room.

  She stared at him, tooth mug in hand.

  Perhaps she would be able to throw the cup through the bars and hit his head. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would show him that she still wasn’t finished.

  ‘Do say if you’re thirsty,’ he laughed. ‘Am I correct in assuming that the lady is watching her figure and reducing sugar intake? Diet Coke? Coke Zero? Or is being slim no longer of importance?’

  ‘What do you want from me, Yves?’ she asked. ‘I thought you had a crush on Agneta Meyerhoff.’

  His mouth twisted as if the thought of Agneta Meyerhoff nauseated him, and he returned the empty Coke bottle to the tray, holding it as if he were an experienced waiter and didn’t have the slightest problem balancing a loaded tray in a tight space. He raised the full glass, clinked the ice cubes close to his ear, then drained it in a single gulp.

  Belching with pleasure he said, ‘Well, that was tasty. But you apparently have something better.’

  *

  Carola Heide and Holger Bloem arrived at almost the same time. Carola had bought a large basket full of fruit and vegetables. Slowly, she needed to get back to normality. There should be fresh food and she wanted to bake her own bread. She had even bought a new cookbook from the display next to the checkout. She wanted to familiarise herself with vegan nutrition. The thought of meat made her nauseous and she would eat vegetarian for the forseeable future. This was from someone who had always loved eating chicken, for whom an evening barbeque in the garden with friends had a magical effect. And someone who preferred a hearty meat sandwich to a layered cream cake.

  She knew that the head on her breakfast table had changed her life fundamentally and she attempted to view the shock as an opportunity, a chance for a new, perhaps better life.

  She liked Holger Bloem because he was a loyal and reliable man who acted rationally, even in difficult situations, just like her husband.

  ‘What are you two up to?’ she asked.

  Holger and Ubbo didn’t even have to exchange glances to come to an agreement. Carola shouldn’t know about it.

  Ubbo laughed. ‘Well, we’re off to make a splash in the Aurich nightlife. Grab a couple of drinks, visit a couple of strip clubs, and who knows, maybe we’ll invite a couple of cute girls to spend the weekend in Paris with us.’

  Carola let the boys have their joke. She liked that Ubbo was trying to get back to the sunny side of things.

  ‘That’s what men always say when they go off to drink lattes and talk about their prostate problems. Right?’ She smirked.

  Ubbo and Holger winked at each other briefly, then Holger pushed the wheelchair to the door.

  Ubbo protested, ‘I can drive my Harley myself.’

  ‘Let me push,’ Holger said, ‘then I can get used to working a walker.’

  Carola called after them, ‘In case you girls can’t cook and would rather eat with Mother, I’ve bought enough!’

  They’d barely made it to the street when Ubbo burst out, ‘Thanks for coming so quickly, Holger. My colleagues can’t know what we’re doing here.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re asking of me?’ Holger asked. ‘I don’t enjoy abusing Ann Kathrin’s confidence.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Ubbo admitted. ‘I just don’t want to upset the apple cart and put all the machinery in motion too soon. It’s possible that all this is just a figment of my imagination. Of course, I’ll inform the authorities if my suspicions are correct.’

  ‘And leave the investigative work to them?’ Holger demanded.

  Ubbo nodded. ‘Yes, damn it. But now please take me to Yves Stern on Steinweg.’

  The house on Steinweg didn’t look good. No one was investing money here to keep the place in shape. It was a building where a group of people were just trying to make as much money as possible without spending anything.

  Yves Stern lived on the fourth floor.

  ‘There’s no lift,’ Holger said. ‘I’d like to carry you all the way up, Ubbo, but I’ve had a slipped disc before.’

  ‘I know.’ Ubbo said with a smile, ‘I only need to know if he’s alive. Just go up, ring the bell, and snap a picture of him, so we can be sure.’

  ‘Won’t he think it odd that there’s suddenly someone in front of his door taking a picture of him?’

  Ubbo showed him his phone. ‘Can’t you do it on the sly with something like this? The kids all do it at the bus stop. You think they’re texting but in reality they’re filming the girls getting on and off the bus.’

  ‘Really? I hadn’t noticed that.’

  ‘Yep, Holger, you see the world from a different angle if you’re in a wheelchair.’

  Holger tried to return to the subject at hand. ‘So I’m just supposed to determine whether or not he’s alive?’

  ‘I need one hundred percent certainty.’

  Holger Bloem rang the bell but no one opened the door. Half-broken, the intercom dangled against the wall from three wires. It was quite possible that the bell didn’t work at all. However, the main door on the ground floor opened with ease, and he walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  Holger Bloem immediately felt that something wasn’t right. There were three apartments, one of which appeared to be empty. The door was open and there were boxes inside. It looked as if someone had tried to pull off the wallpaper and then had given up in the middle of the job.

  There was a blue doormat diagonally in front of the door to Yves Stern’s apartment with the tip stuck under the door. White lettering that spelling the greeting Hello had turned blackish grey and the ‘o’ was no longer legible.

  Holger Bloem knocked and the door opened a crack. Holger dialled Ubbo Heide’s number and held the phone to his ear. ‘So he clearly isn’t rich. I don’t think he’s home but the door’s ajar.’

  ‘Go inside and take a couple of pictures,’ Ubbo Heide said, and Holger replied, �
��The head of the East Frisia Kripo is suggesting I break into an apartment?’

  ‘The former head. And it’s trespassing at most. A good lawyer would make self-defence out of it. Can’t you smell fire? Don’t you feel an urgent need to check that nothing bad has happened?’

  ‘I’m proud to be your friend,’ Holger said, ‘but believe me, Ubbo, I wouldn’t want to be your enemy.’

  Holger Bloem felt a surge of adrenaline and his heart was racing as he pushed open the door.

  The mat under the door only offered slight resistance and Holger stood in an apartment where it was very clear a struggle had recently taken place.

  ‘Either this place is a real mess or two people were in a massive fight here, or probably both,’ he said and took a couple of pictures.’

  An armchair was overturned and the table was diagonal to the sofa. It looked as if someone had jumped up from the sofa, pushing aside the table and then fallen over the armchair in an attempt to flee.

  He took some more pictures and sent them straight to Ubbo, because he could imagine how impatient he was getting sitting in the wheelchair downstairs.

  ‘There are even spots of blood on the edge of the table,’ Holger said. ‘I don’t think I want to look any further here. This is more of a case for your crime scene techs.’

  ‘OK. Orderly retreat, Holger. Don’t touch anything.’

  ‘That instruction’s a little bit late.’

  Holger Bloem hadn’t any idea how fast he could get down the stairs. He tried to read Ubbo Heide’s reaction to the news from his expression.

  Ubbo looked petrified.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Holger asked.

  ‘Now we call Ann Kathrin and confess.’

  *

  Playgrounds were dangerous for him. Almost as bad as the children’s section at the public swimming pool.

  He loved the littlest ones. He had no interest as soon as they could speak in complete sentences. But the smaller they were, the more difficult it was to get close to them undetected. The preschoolers were practically always under supervision, very infrequently moving alone, hardly ever far from home and were watched over by parents, guardians, preschool teachers, or – most dangerously – critical grandparents. Grandmas and grandpas could become unpredictable monsters when someone approached their grandchildren. Some retirees even looked like they were armed.

  First Basic Rule: forget the little girls who are out and about with grandpa!

  Elder siblings were ideal. He had an easy job of it with pubescent teenagers, who were annoyed because they had to watch their spoiled brothers and sisters. He could talk to them about music. He was always downloading the newest hits to his iPhone.

  Pimply kids could be bought off with cigarettes. They thought it was cool that he listened to them. He addressed them properly and acted as if he considered them grown up. It was good for them, strengthened their self-confidence. They felt included and were too self-obsessed and inexperienced to realise that the focus wasn’t them, but rather their younger siblings.

  He’d fallen for that angelic boy in Störtebeker Park in Wilhelmshaven.

  Marco’s fourteen-year-old sister Lissa had the little rascal on her hands for several hours each day, and that had led to her losing touch with her friends.

  By then he’d heard the whole boring story twice. How the great guy from her class that all the girls were crazy about – Patrick was his name – wasn’t going out with her anymore. Instead, he was with that bitch from Käthe Kollwitz School.

  He’d helped Lissa get a little free time. They had gone to the miniature railway together and had crossed the pond on a raft. By then other regulars assumed he was Marco’s father.

  He didn’t want to backslide. He was attracted to girls, not boys, and convinced himself that this wasn’t the beginning of something new. This wasn’t dangerous, just something to take his mind off the real game – the one he wasn’t going to play anymore.

  He often talked to himself, calling himself ‘Odysseus’ because he felt as if he were tied to the ship’s mast while the Sirens’ songs drove him crazy. That’s how much he pined for them. But he couldn’t allow his ship to get too close to the cliffs. Otherwise he would inevitably be smashed into pieces.

  That’s why he kept his distance from little girls and tried to ease his suffering by being close to the boy. Marco was balm for his burning. His angelic blond hair. The skin soft as peaches. If he were a girl . . . but luckily he wasn’t. So harmless . . .

  Anyone seeing them would be more likely to suspect he had something planned with the older sister than with the boy.

  He had to be careful. He couldn’t trust people. Not even himself.

  *

  Büscher was astonished to see how casually Ubbo was brought back into his old office and that he moved around as if it were still his.

  For his part, Büscher stood next to the window, feeling out of place.

  Ann Kathrin, Weller and Holger Bloem were completely focused on Ubbo Heide. Even Holger Bloem, who was actually a journalist and had no business being there, if you asked Büscher, seemed to belong there in his own way. Much more than he did himself, Büscher thought.

  He was waiting for someone to try to send him away and had already visualised how he would react. Should he leave the room with apologetic gestures or make it into a show and clear up a couple of things?

  ‘Where’s the map that always used to hang here?’ Ubbo Heide asked, pointing to the white spot on the wall.

  Büscher gulped. ‘I took it down.’ Büscher was glad he hadn’t chucked it away but instead had placed it, folded, in the desk drawer from where he now took it and hung it back on the wall. Its corners had holes from the drawing pins. It felt like a defeat, considering Ubbo Heide didn’t make any mention of it. Instead, Ann Kathrin asked him, ‘So you think that Yves Stern is the second corpse?’

  ‘We should consider it,’ said Ubbo Heide. ‘Yves Stern and Bernhard Heymann were friends. They’d frequently given each other alibis. Maybe true, maybe not. We couldn’t ever prove anything.’

  Weller chimed in. ‘Yves Stern was your main suspect for a while in the Steffi Heymann case.’

  ‘Yeah. I’d found something in his life that—’

  Ann Kathrin looked at Weller. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Well, I read Ubbo’s book about his cold cases; reading is fundamental.’

  ‘At first I’d thought that Yves Stern was covering for Bernhard Heymann, maybe even helped him a little. At any rate, he was on Langeoog when Steffi disappeared. And then there were suspicious things in his story. Another child close to him had also disappeared. He was an elementary school teacher in Hanover. That must be where he met his wife.

  ‘A girl from the first grade had disappeared back then. Nicola Billing. The child was missing for a long time. There were no ransom notes, nothing. Our colleagues spent months stumbling in the dark.’

  ‘And he had something to do with that?’ Büscher asked the room brusquely, basically to demonstrate he was still there.

  Ubbo Heide waved him away. ‘No, no, people, that’s not how it was. It’s also possible that we wronged him greatly. But it certainly looked suspicious that a second child close to him had disappeared. Nicola Billing’s corpse was found in Lake Maschsee six months later. At the time I may have been a little,’ Ubbo Heide chose his words very carefully, ‘insensitive in the way I led the investigation. At any rate, the parents caught wind of it.’

  Ubbo Heide wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He was shaking, if Ann Kathrin wasn’t mistaken.

  ‘Of course people thought he was guilty and Stern found himself in a nightmare. He lost his job and—’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Weller said, ‘and now someone has decapitated him and sent you the head?’

  ‘That’s the way it seems,’ Ubbo Heide said, looking at his knees.

  ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  ‘My parents,’ Ubbo
Heide said, ‘raised me in the faith that there’s a God and a Devil. By now I’m not so sure if God exists. But the Devil surely does.’

  Ann Kathrin wasn’t satisfied with Ubbo’s statement. ‘That doesn’t answer my question of why?’

  Büscher felt uneasy. Everything seemed to be drifting off into a kind of philosophical conversation. In his experience, this had little to do with the everyday reality of police work. Although he considered it wasted time, he was silent and listened.

  ‘Evil basically doesn’t really exist in its pure form. I’ve only come across it very infrequently, in total sociopaths who want to see other people suffer. Usually true evil is dressed up as something good, logical, consequential. Only very seldom does someone evil really want to be evil. Many do the work of the Devil while believing in goodness.’

  ‘You define evil as a mistake?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  Ubbo Heide raised his hands as if he had to form the words in the air. ‘No, as faulty reasoning. Even I myself have caused evil. I was, if you will, the Devil’s henchman.’

  Weller let out a stilted laugh. ‘Hah! You of all people! If everyone was like you the world would definitely be better.’

  ‘I’m sure Sophie Stern is of a different opinion. She believes I destroyed her husband, ruined their reputation and their marriage, and she’s probably right about that. When I wrapped up my investigation the smear campaign against them continued but I had led the way.’

  Holger Bloem had been listening quietly the whole time, practically motionless. Then he asked, ‘And now you think someone finished the job?’

  Ubbo Heide spoke through pursed lips. ‘Two people who are connected with unsolved cases are dead. I led the investigations back then. We shouldn’t ignore that.’

  *

  Rupert was enjoying questioning this witness for two good reasons.

  First of all, the young lady was exceptionally attractive. She was exactly his type, although during the entire conversation he was asking himself why he was so fascinated by her, and if he had a type at all.