The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  She did so, and even though everyone was already leaning over the table, she held up the device.

  ‘I received a letter, with dried rose petals and a picture inside. It shows a woman behind bars. I think that it’s a clue, just like the two heads. He has imprisoned a woman.’

  ‘You know her?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  ‘Yes. Her name is Svenja Moers. I investigated her once. She was suspected of having killed her second husband.’

  ‘I remember,’ Ann Kathrin said, more loudly than necessary.

  ‘Damn,’ Weller said. He spoke upwards, as if Ubbo Heide were floating just below the ceiling. ‘And you also wrote about it in your book.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ubbo admitted, abashed, ‘in the course of the investigation, I even considered it very likely that she was responsible for her first husband’s death as well. But I couldn’t prove it.’

  ‘I’m surrounded,’ Scherer commented, ‘by amateurs!’ Then he pointed to Ann Kathrin’s hand, which was holding the phone hovering over the table like a threat, and asked sharply in Büscher’s direction, ‘Is he leading the meeting via iPhone now?’

  Büscher just shrugged his shoulders. He looked resigned, on the point of throwing in the towel.

  ‘I need the crime scene technicians here immediately. I don’t suppose the guy is so stupid as to leave any usable finger prints behind, but—’

  Rupert couldn’t get rid of the sinew. It kept slipping between his fingertips.

  ‘The letter was posted over in Gelsenkirchen,’ Ubbo Heide noted. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Oh really!’ Weller called out, slightly too enthusiastically, as if the news was a triumph for him. ‘He was at the reading in Gelsenkirchen. I knew it!’

  Prosecutor Scherer made a fist with his right hand and gritted his teeth with fury.

  Rupert spat something onto the table.

  Ann Kathrin immediately gave clear orders. ‘I want to know everything about this Svenja Moers: friends, acquaintances, enemies.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rupert said, running his tongue over his teeth once again, ‘let’s find her, before Ubbo has her head on the breakfast table.’

  ‘I’ll send a picture to your phone. I hope it works,’ Ubbo said. ‘My wife can do it better. Wait a second.’

  Ann Kathrin lowered her hand and placed her mobile on the table, so that the illuminated display could be seen. The phone was still connected. They could hear him talking with Carola.

  ‘I don’t think that he wants to decapitate Svenja Moers,’ said Ann Kathrin. ‘If he did, he wouldn’t have sent Ubbo a picture.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Rieke asked.

  The photo appeared on the display. All of them leaned over the table. Their heads almost touched.

  ‘He’s only bluffing,’ Weller suggested.

  Rupert’s stomach growled as he said, ‘He’ll make her starve.’

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Scherer yelled.

  *

  Agneta Meyerhoff had prepared shashlik with beef and pork, the pieces of fillet separated by onions and peppers. The skewers lay in the red sauce, simmering away and filling the room with appetising scents. She had invited Yves Stern over for a meal. Her husband was still away on business, and they had only been communicating via text message for the past ten days. To make matters worse, he had applied for a job managing a construction site in Dubai.

  Oh sure, that would bring in a lot of money. But she wanted to live right now. She yearned for laughter, tenderness and compliments, and had come to the conclusion that she needed a steady lover rather than frustrating one-night stands. These short sexual adventures hadn’t really been good for her. In the end, she was usually glad just to get it over with and to get rid of the guy quickly.

  Now she was looking for something steady on the side. She still wasn’t thinking of getting divorced, but she needed a man to tide her over during lonely times.

  Yves Stern had flirted hard with her at the evening cooking class. She liked men who were bigger than her, and he had a fine sense of humour, calling the world crazy and signalling that although the situation was hopeless, it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

  His look told her: we’re surrounded by idiots. Let’s run away, Agneta!

  She wore the lingerie her husband had given her for Christmas, but still hadn’t seen on her. She thought it was particularly risqué that Yves should enjoy it before her husband.

  She’d slipped Yves a note with her phone number and invited him over for a meal. Once, during the cooking class, he had snidely said that he’d prefer spicy shashlik to the miso soup with wakame seaweed, tofu, enokitake and green onions. He also wasn’t really convinced by the instructor’s claims about the bioactive substances isoflavone and saponin, which supposedly alleviated menopausal symptoms and could also prevent breast cancer.

  Today she wanted to pamper him with shashlik, the new lingerie, and if he liked that sort of thing, she was even prepared to perform a belly dance. She’d learned how to do that at an evening class last year. He’d always stared over her way during the ‘Killer Tummy Training’ class when she did her sit-ups. She was exactly his type, she knew it. It’s just he wasn’t a world champion when it came to flirting. Not really shy, but reserved in a pleasant way. Not at all a suburban Casanova.

  She was annoyed that he’d neither accepted nor declined. He just left the invitation hanging in the air, as if it hadn’t been verbalised, or as if he hadn’t understood.

  At the same time, she liked playing with the possibilities. Of course Yves Stern would come. She was certain. There was just one question remaining: would she have her way with him before the meal or afterwards?

  *

  Ann Kathrin Klaasen had delegated all the tasks. Svenja Moers’ friends and work colleagues were taken on by Rupert, Sylvia Hoppe and Schrader. Weller checked all the phones and telecommunications.

  Klaasen took on the house in Emden herself. Alone. She wanted to get an impression of the person before the crime scene technicians changed the scents with their sprays and tinctures, making the atmosphere in the apartment unreadable. Yes, for Ann Kathrin it was if an apartment had a soul, and too many people and too much equipment chased away that soul like the northwest wind chased away the banks of fog off Norderney.

  The place turned out to be a house in Emden’s canal district with an overgrown front garden. There were brimstone butterflies, large tortoiseshells and painted ladies in the rose bushes and summer lilacs. Everything was so full of life. Insects were buzzing. Ann Kathrin concluded that a woman lived here who cared little what the neighbourhood thought. Between the well-tended front gardens, her little house looked like the gate to a jungle. Ann Kathrin thought it was thoroughly pleasant.

  A white butterfly fluttered into her hair and got caught. She stood still, breathing gently until it flew away.

  Yellow, salmon-pink and red roses big as fists surrounded the house like a magical protective wall planted by hippies. An overgrown arch of roses led to the front door. Ann Kathrin felt dizzy when she went through the gate. She stood still for a second and took a deep breath. She already felt better by the time she reached the front door.

  The locksmith skillfully opened the door in seconds and only needed a signature from Ann Kathrin Klaasen.

  She looked in the postbox. Inside there was a telephone bill and an ad from the German Automobile Club. The local paper was in the pigeonhole.

  Ann Kathrin went into the house alone. Sometimes the hair on the back of her neck had stood up when she entered homes where a crime had taken place. That wasn’t the case here. The horror, the terror was not hanging in the air. No smell of blood and fear. The air smelled stale and musty and she would have liked nothing more than to open a window. But there was no rotting smell.

  There were roses fighting for their lives in one presumably homemade vase. In another there were droopy gerberas. The petals had already fallen. There was a dried, half-peeled orange on the living-room table in a bowl next t
o the grapes, which still looked quite good. So Svenja Moers had quickly eaten half an orange, but abandoned the other half to go somewhere.

  And it was there that she had been snatched by the culprit, Ann Kathrin thought. It’s unlikely that Svenja Moers had been taken from her home. Unless he knew her well and she went along voluntarily. At any rate, there wasn’t a struggle here.

  Ann Kathrin found the orange peel in the compost bin in the kitchen. So Svenja Moers had had time to leave her home in good order.

  The teapot wasn’t completely empty, and someone – presumably Svenja herself – had blown out the tea candle before it had burned down completely. Ann Kathrin estimated that there was still enough wax to burn for ten, maybe even twenty minutes.

  So she didn’t seem to have been in a hurry.

  And lipstick on the teacup.

  Ann Kathrin opened the refrigerator. Three jars of organic yoghurt. A bowl of raspberries. Cheese, wrapped in aluminum foil. Brie. Gouda. Appenzeller.

  Washed carrots in the vegetable drawer, ready to eat. One bitten.

  Two bottles of Prosecco. One was open, and there was a silver spoon poking out of the top. Ann Kathrin smiled. Her father had also tried this method of keeping opened sparkling wine from going flat.

  A chopping board in the sink, a knife and a coffee cup. ‘Langeoog – Holiday Has a Name’ was printed on its side.

  For a moment Ann Kathrin’s thoughts went back to the island, to their aborted holiday on Langeoog. She saw Weller sitting in front of her, how he had eaten his beef in the Seekrug restaurant with an almost remote expression on his face. He seemed like he was on drugs. He had told her about the cattle that lived on Langeoog all year long and were only taken away from the island to be slaughtered. The owner, who he even knew by name, supposedly even accompanied his cattle on the ferry and rode with them to the mainland so they wouldn’t be so afraid.

  Later she even had to view the herd of cattle with Weller, and he wanted to be photographed with them.

  When this is over, she thought, we’ll go back to the island and finish our holiday. Then she remembered that her suitcase was still in Strandeck, the hotel next to the dunes.

  Ann Kathrin slowly moved towards the bedroom. Enviously, she estimated that the divan bed looked like a king size. She and Weller slept on a narrower mattress.

  To the left of the bed there was a bottle of still mineral water. The bed was rumpled. Bright, soft bed sheets. A summer meadow. Cornflower blue wallpaper. On the bedside table there was an open book about a diet that promised dropping ten pounds per month without starving.

  In the bed, next to the pillow, a novel about someone unlucky in love. Ann Kathrin didn’t know the author.

  Nearby, a small bookcase held romantic novels and erotic literature.

  There were only designer labels in her wardrobe. No cheap items, but nothing excessively ostentatious. Cashmere sweaters. Silk tops. Lots of cream and maroon. More skirts and dresses than trousers. Svenja Moers wasn’t the type to wear jeans.

  As well as women’s clothing, Ann Kathrin found a tapered man’s shirt, size 16, with a red wine stain, and a pair of briefs.

  So she had a lover. He didn’t live with her, but he’d left a dirty shirt and his briefs behind. So he had to have spare clothing here.

  She looked around again and found another tapered man’s shirt between Svenja Moers’ blouses. In the bathroom there were three soft toothbrushes, light-blue, yellow and pink. And then a dark blue one with hard bristles. Two kinds of toothpaste. Many creams and feminine scents, no aftershave. One lady shaver, but no man’s razor.

  Ann Kathrin felt sure he was married or at least seeing someone.

  She went back into the living room and looked at the bookcase there. Many specialist books and popular science. Two dozen diet and fitness advice books, a couple of books about astrology. Svenja Moers’ sign was clearly Cancer; there were three books about that sign.

  Many legal reference books and self-help books about how you could save your money from the anticipated economic crash and the impending hyperinflation. No one who was truly poor was concerned with questions like that.

  Then an entire bookshelf of poetry: Rose Ausländer, Hugo-Ernst Käufer, Ringelnatz.

  Watercolours on the walls. Coastal landscapes. Animals in soft colours. Each picture was A4-sized and glazed. Every picture bore the initials S.M.

  Ann Kathrin pictured a woman who paid attention to her body and liked to surround herself with nice things. She had been widowed twice and had possibly had a part to play in the deaths. At any rate, her losses hadn’t harmed her financially. Instead, she had profited significantly. She practised painting and pottery. She was full of zest and had visitors. At night she read romantic novels and erotic literature in her big bed. She was possibly a little embarrassed by these books and had other, more presentable literature in the living room.

  She had left the house or was lured out.

  Ann Kathrin looked at the pile of newspapers. The local paper from Emden. The second to last issue.

  She probably bought a daily every once in a while, maybe only on Saturdays. Or someone regularly emptied her letter box, Ann Kathrin thought.

  A Cosmo. An East Frisia magazine. An underwear catalogue. A booklet summarising the courses offered at the vocational college.

  Ann Kathrin leafed through it. Two classes were circled. An exclamation mark beside the ‘Cook and Sport’ class.

  Bingo, Ann Kathrin thought. She sat down on the leather chair, which was turned away from the television, as if it wanted to demonstrate to its owner that she should be more interested in books than in TV programmes.

  Ann Kathrin called Weller. ‘She was taking evening classes. I want to know what and—’

  Weller interrupted his wife. ‘The last time her phone was registered was on Wednesday just after eight o’clock, and guess from where.’ He answered his own question. ‘At the old vocational school!’

  ‘I need a list of all the people who were in classes with her.’

  Weller said gleefully, ‘I went through all the drivers of vehicles who were at Ubbo’s reading in Gelsenkirchen.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘What is it, Ann?’

  ‘I don’t want to lose her, Frank. We can’t make any mistakes. This woman is still alive. I can feel it.’

  ‘There’s only one connection between Svenja Moers, Stern and Heymann: Ubbo investigated all their cases and wrote about them!’

  This wasn’t new information for Ann Kathrin, but the way Weller said it, it sounded like a revelation.

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  Weller leafed through Ubbo’s book, although he knew the sentences by heart. ‘Listen to this: I was really committed to putting her between bars, but I failed. I was convinced of her guilt, but I couldn’t prove without a shadow of a doubt she committed the murders. I never forgave myself and hope that she hasn’t found her next affluent husband by now.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Ann Kathrin groaned. She felt sick, tired and ill.

  ‘Yes, Ubbo wrote that. In the book he only called her the rose princess. Someone has found out her name. That wouldn’t be too hard if you had access to newspaper archives or our police computers, for example.’

  ‘Rose princess?’

  ‘Because she supposedly loved roses and always gave her men roses.’

  ‘I feel sick,’ Ann Kathrin said and getting up she walked into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  *

  Ingo Sutter was on his way to Svenja Moers. As always, there was doubt mixed with anticipation when he was on the A28 approaching from Oldenburg. Should he really risk splitting up with his Heike? He knew she could be a hellcat. A merciless warrior was hidden underneath the disguise of a charming wife.

  She knew about his secret accounts in Switzerland. She had accompanied him twice to Zurich. They had stayed at Hotel Scheuble in the Niederdorf neighb
ourhood. Alarmed by the state of Lower Saxony’s purchase of a CD containing data on Swiss bank account holders who had supposedly been dodging taxes, he had withdrawn all his money and deposited the amount in Swiss francs in a safe. As he had explained to Heike, it came down to saving taxes, not getting interest.

  The tax investigators got most of their tips from resentful and cheated spouses who wanted to take revenge. He could see his Heike doing something just like that. There would be meetings with lawyers and trials awaiting him instead of a new, free life with Svenja. Pretrial detention and maybe even a real prison instead of nights of love in good hotels with a view of the sea.

  He thought of sports stars who had been caught for tax evasion. He surely didn’t have to fear such a media circus, but in Oldenburg he was a well-known businessman, a member of his congregation’s parish council and on three other boards. He had repeatedly been photographed as a member of the Lions Club when presenting generous cheques to organisations for people with disabilities.

  He had his freedom and his good reputation to lose, not just money. Regardless, Svenja was worth it. He was a completely different person with her. He felt free, better, healthier. He told her the old stories, and for him it sounded as if he were telling them for the first time. He was rediscovering his own life with her.

  There was a bouquet of roses on the passenger seat. Red and white long-stemmed roses that smelled fantastic, just what she loved.

  Yes, damn it, he wanted to live with her, and just like every time he made that decision on his way to her, he hit the gas and drove twenty, if not thirty kilometres over the limit, depending on how strong his will for change was. In the end, not much was left except a ticket that reminded him of how powerful his resolve must have been.

  Usually it cost twenty to thirty euros, as much as a good meal at his favourite Italian restaurant or the feeling of being full.

  *

  Ingo Sutter wasn’t irritated by the fact that the door was ajar. After all, the date had been set for a long time.

  He stepped through the arch of roses and sprinted the final few metres to the open front door. He pushed it open, shouting with glee, and hoping he would find her ready for love. He whinnied like a horse and called, ‘Here’s your stallion, you wild mare!’