The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  ‘Seen superficially, yes,’ Ann Kathrin said. ‘But he uses this to live out his sadistic impulses. All these justifications aim to legitimise what he does. He wants recognition, even praise from us, particularly from Ubbo Heide. He thinks he’s doing our work, and even better than us. At any rate, we know him, and he knows us. He has been frustrated by us more than once. He’s probably very intelligent and plans meticulously. So we’re looking for a man who was passed over for promotion. Someone who thinks he belongs in the front row and was thrown on the scrapheap. Someone who doesn’t feel like he’s taken seriously.’

  Rupert raised his arms as if he were turning himself in. ‘OK, you guys, you got me, I give up!’

  ‘Shut up, Rupert!’ Weller hissed. ‘This isn’t a laughing matter!’

  Something inside Weller rebelled against Ann Kathrin’s analysis. She’d taught him that you should always take your feelings seriously, and that’s exactly what he did now. ‘That might all be the case, Ann. But why should he be from our ranks, even from this building? Can’t it just be some kind of justice fanatic who’s read Ubbo’s book and is a little obsessed and considers himself the . . . What did he call himself?’

  ‘Executioner,’ Sylvia Hoppe whispered, looking like someone other than her had said it.

  ‘Executioner!’ Weller scolded. ‘A person calling himself that must have a screw loose. We’d notice if one of us had lost his marbles, right?’

  Sylvia Hoppe whispered in Rupert’s direction. ‘Which puts you back in the game!’

  ‘Hopefully in prison they will cut the free time and the educational courses he hates so much,’ Rupert railed.

  Rage was causing a powerful energy to build in the room.

  Ann Kathrin got serious. ‘He simply knows too much internal information. For example, where Ubbo goes on holiday.’

  It wasn’t easy for Weller to humiliate his wife in front of everyone, but he still said it. ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Ann. For example, there was a feature on Ubbo Heide in the Harlingerland paper. Almost a whole page. There he talks about his favourite island and that he loves sitting on Wangerooge looking at the sea and that he’d written the last pages in his book there and . . .’

  Weller fished the folded newspaper article out of the inside pocket of his jacket and smoothed out the paper on the table. ‘This picture here was taken in his holiday cottage. Here you can see the sculpture honouring the seafarer up on the esplanade. With a little spatial awareness, you can work out exactly which apartment the picture was taken in. Ubbo became a public figure by writing that book. Don’t be mistaken, Ann. I googled him yesterday and within half an hour I’d found out more about him than in the ten years we worked together.’

  Ann Kathrin acknowledged Weller’s objection and said, ‘The boys from the lab need to examine the letter and envelope for micro-traces. DNA on the adhesive surface and so on.’

  ‘You’re out of date,’ Rupert ridiculed. ‘These days no one licks stamps. They’re self-adhesive.’

  Ann Kathrin motioned at the letter. ‘But not the envelope, Rupert.’

  ‘You think he’s so stupid that—’ Rupert waved her away without finishing the sentence and made a face like he’d just licked an adhesive strip himself. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes at some point. Even more so if he feels as superior as this scumbag clearly does,’ she continued. ‘The paper has to be tested for impressions. Sometimes things like this have been used as a pad beforehand.’

  Büscher agreed with Ann Kathrin. ‘In Bremerhaven we once had a kidnapper who’d written his Christmas cards before the note. With warm greetings to his mother and siblings. He was very surprised when his doorbell rang.’

  The door opened, right on cue, and Ubbo buzzed in in his wheelchair. No one except Ann Kathrin had expected him so soon. Everyone made space for him as a walkway to the table with the letter formed.

  No one said a word. Even ‘hi’ would have been too much in the circumstances.

  *

  As he listened to them, he could picture their faces exactly. If he closed his eyes, it was as if he were in the room, in Aurich police station on Fischteigweg, in the conference room on the second floor.

  Ubbo Heide’s voice was serious but clear. ‘I rue the day that I got the idea to write this book. I have pulled the plug on the second volume of course. My publisher has twenty-six thousand pre-orders and they’re going crazy. But I said that I didn’t want the book to appear under any circumstances.

  ‘You mean,’ Rupert said, ‘you don’t want to give the culprit any more material?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t want to be responsible for there being any more victims.’

  ‘But we’ll get him, Ubbo, before he’s murdered his way through your entire book,’ Weller interjected.

  He blew smoke rings and sent them to the ceiling like signals. He got back into the zone when he listened to them.

  What amateurs you are, he thought.

  Büscher tried to take the lead but his voice betrayed the fact that he had nothing, absolutely nothing under control.

  ‘So should I assume that the perpetrator will simply work his way through the book? Isn’t that a bit too obvious, people?’

  Weller interrupted him. ‘The Steffi Heymann case is the book’s opening chapter.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ Büscher argued, ‘Svenja Moers doesn’t come until chapter three.’

  ‘Right,’ Ubbo Heide said, ‘because the suspect from chapter two died three years ago.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Rupert cursed. ‘What a fucking mess!’

  ‘Yes, you can say that again. If I only I hadn’t written that book!’

  Rupert had always thought reading books was stupid and now felt validated.’

  ‘But that means,’ Weller said, ‘we can set a trap for him with the fourth suspect. The culprit in chapter four is—’

  ‘No,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘that’s too simple. He’s expecting that. The whole time I’ve had the feeling that this man knows exactly what we’re doing, as if he’s listening to us here, sitting at this table, and laughing at us.’

  That’s exactly what I’m doing, he thought, and took a drag, deep into his lungs.

  ‘He’s not just working from the front to the back,’ Ubbo Heide said. ‘He’s selecting his victims based on a different principle.’

  ‘Which one?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  ‘He’s only taking the cases where Willy Kaufmann was involved.’

  ‘But that was just in these early cases,’ Ann Kathrin pointed out. ‘Svenja Moers and Heymann. Kaufmann wasn’t even on the force after that.’

  ‘Right,’ Ubbo Heide said, ‘but in the last case in my book—’

  ‘The homicide in Syke?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly.’

  ‘The woman was raped and then murdered. What does that have to do with Wilhelm Kaufmann?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  Ubbo Heide coughed, and it seemed to the culprit as if the cough was caused by his cigarette smoke. He waved his hand and would have liked nothing more than to apologise to Ubbo Heide. Then he kept on listening.

  ‘The victim was his niece. His sister’s daughter. He really annoyed his colleagues at the time. He tried to get involved in the investigation and initiated private research. He was desperate to catch the killer, especially as that could also redeem him so he could return to the police force. For his colleagues on the case it was a complete nightmare. I was sent there at the time because we had had a similar case in Bensersiel, where the woman had survived. She was able to describe the attacker, but—’

  ‘Yes. We all read your book, Ubbo,’ Weller said.

  There was a bang, as if someone had smacked the table. He imagined that Ubbo Heide was that person, but then Ann Kathrin’s voice was so sharp, as if she were yelling directly into his ear. ‘Why the hell didn’t we know anything about that?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t a suspect, just a relative of the victim.’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, how come?’ Rupert asked, ‘And why isn’t that in the book?’

  Weller groaned. ‘There aren’t any names at all in the book, you idiot! Maybe you should read it.’

  ‘Is it required reading now? Rupert asked.

  ‘Yes, damn it, it’s practically part of the file.’

  Büscher sounded almost whiny. ‘And what was the name of the guy you suspected back then, Ubbo?’

  ‘The victim from Bensersiel gave us a clear description and we could have caught him, but then two friends gave him a bulletproof alibi. His poker buddies.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t surprise me,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘if we soon find all three with their throats cut.’

  Weller nodded in agreement. ‘Yes, and with cards in their mouths.’

  He started to roll a new cigarette. It’s not such a bad idea, he thought, and pictured the astonishment in the Aurich police station if he did exactly what they’d just suggested.

  But then he smiled and said, ‘You will all be surprised. I’ll shock you all. I’m very good. I’m sure you won’t be expecting my next move.’

  ‘I want,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘Wilhelm Kaufmann to be under surveillance round the clock. And everyone from that poker group as well.’

  ‘Yes,’ Büscher groaned. ‘And I get to worry about how I’ll get the personnel and the resources, and best of all, keep everything secret.’

  ‘Right,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘that’s exactly what we thought.’

  *

  Ann Kathrin Klaasen and Ubbo Heide retreated to Café Philippe so they could talk without being disturbed. There wasn’t much going on there. When Ann Kathrin walked through the door she had the feeling she was falling through time back into the seventies. Ubbo Heide really liked the place.

  They sat down at a corner table and ordered plum cake and coffee. Ann Kathrin opened the conversation. ‘You don’t trust anyone in the force at the moment, do you?’

  Ubbo nodded grumpily, and simultaneously shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s always a step ahead of us, Ann. I pretty much could have told you that the number plates in Gelsenkirchen wouldn’t be any help, as original as I thought Frank’s move was. This man knows exactly what we’re doing – he wouldn’t park nearby. He knows where the surveillance cameras are, and he knows that we’ll be checking. We won’t get anything from the letter either. If there are clues, he will have planted them to confuse and mislead us.’

  ‘So he’s one of us after all?’

  ‘Everything inside me resists the idea. But I’m certain that this is someone that we’ve trained ourselves.’

  ‘We’ll stick close to Willy Kaufmann from now on,’ she said, and pressed her hands together, as if to demonstrate that.

  Ubbo Heide placed his hands on the wheels of his chair. ‘He’s already in the know,’ he boomed. ‘He wants to play with us a little until he gets bored and our attention slips. And then he will—’

  Ann Kathrin’s seal started barking even before the waiter had brought the coffee. With a single, fluid motion, she lifted her phone to her ear and answered it. The connection was very good.

  ‘The good news first. We have twelve people for the round-the-clock surveillance,’ Frank Weller said. ‘Four per shift.’

  ‘And the bad news?’ Ann Kathrin asked.

  ‘I wanted to invite Kaufmann in for a conversation. I thought we’d bug his place during the talk. But he isn’t answering his landline and his mobile tells me that he’s unavailable at the moment. We can’t even locate it, he’s turned the thing off.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ Ann Kathrin said. She wanted to end the conversation, but then she sensed Weller wanted to say something else.

  ‘Ann, I’d actually prefer to put out a warrant for him.’

  ‘No, then he’ll be warned. He’ll be looking to get close to us, and if we get to his next victim soon, then we can grab him there,’ Ann Kathrin said.

  Ann Kathrin ended the call, placed the phone on the table and looked at Ubbo Heide.

  Ubbo hadn’t heard Weller, but deduced from Ann Kathrin’s words. ‘They’ve already lost him?’

  Ann Kathrin nodded.

  She’d ordered two pieces of plum cake without whipped cream, but they came with cream. Ubbo said Ann Kathrin could eat his portion too. She didn’t want to, highlighting the fact that she’d put on weight, but at the same time, spooned a large proportion of the cream into her coffee. She watched as the floating island of cream slowly dissolved.

  Ubbo Heide weighed his words carefully. ‘The fact that you can’t get hold of him doesn’t mean anything. He’s from a different generation, Ann. Just like you and me. But he’s even more critical of the digital age. He wrote memos by hand, didn’t even want to use a mobile phone while on duty because it drove him crazy that he could be tracked. Apparently he read George Orwell at school. He was always afraid of the surveillance state.’

  ‘Like everyone who has evil intentions,’ Ann Kathrin chimed in, but Ubbo didn’t accept that.

  ‘No, Ann, it’s a real danger. There are cameras everywhere and everyone with a phone in their pocket has their own Stasi tracker. It’s not just criminals who are worried. It could also be the beginning of the end of our freedom.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Ubbo,’ she said, ‘but at this moment I’d prefer it if we knew where he was.’

  ‘The first thing he’ll do is go after Volker Janssen.’

  ‘The rapist?’

  ‘The presumed rapist, the one our witness from Bensersiel identified. The justice system exonerated him back then, but he had some trouble from a women’s group. They sprayed “rapist” on his car and his front door, and kept following him with their hate. He deserved it. Then he moved to Achim.’

  ‘To Achim?’

  ‘Yeah, to Achim. Similar behaviour to Heymann and Stern. Anyone who has been pilloried so publicly tries to start again somewhere new – looking for somewhere to hide.’

  At first Ann Kathrin hesitated to say it, but then she burst out. ‘Ubbo, you’re acting as though you wouldn’t mind if he snatched Janssen and brought him to justice.’

  ‘Yes, damn it, I’d like that. But I know that it’s not OK. Now don’t pin me down like that, Ann. Don’t be so hard on me. We have to stop this criminal and defend the rule of law, even if the system sometimes seems weak or unjust to us.’

  Ann Kathrin sipped at her coffee, returning it carefully back to her saucer without making the slightest sound, and said, ‘I don’t think he’ll go for Janssen first.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He sent us that terrible confession from Svenja Moers. He’ll try to put Volker Janssen under such pressure that he also confesses.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I assume first he’ll get one of the poker players who covered for Janssen. That way he can give him the biggest scare possible.’

  ‘You mean he’ll execute one of the false witnesses so that Volker Janssen will confess himself?’

  Ann Kathrin nodded. ‘He’d surely rather be punished for rape than lose his head.’

  She wrote down the name Volker Janssen. Then she circled it with her pencil.

  ‘What are his witnesses’ names?’

  ‘Werner and Michael Jansen.’

  ‘Are they his brothers?’

  ‘No. His name is written with a double s and the other two with only one. Or vice versa, I don’t remember anymore. At any rate, they’re brothers, but not related to Volker.’

  *

  It felt good to eavesdrop on Ann Kathrin Klaasen and Ubbo Heide in Café Philippe. Ubbo sympathised with him after all. It was music to his ears.

  And the tip from Ann Kathrin wasn’t so bad. Maybe, he thought, I could scare that scumbag so much that he’ll run to the police and confess. That’d be a victory! He smirked. Maybe you have some more good tips in store for me, Ann Kathrin!

  He laughed. In the end it’d be like with that secret tax CD. Although there are complaints that it’s not right for the state to purchase da
ta stolen from a Swiss bank, masses of goddamn tax dodgers hand themselves in, become remorseful and pay for fear of discovery. But they don’t even know if their names are on the CD. If we put the fear of God into these people, then they’ll all confess, take the lesser of two evils, and save their pitiful lives by begging for mercy.

  I can already picture you on the front line with me. You, Ann Kathrin and me – what a team we’d be!

  *

  Rupert was standing in the queue at the supermarket when his phone rang. He had a case of beer and a bottle of whisky in his trolley – everything that a man like Rupert would need when giving up smoking.

  Manni, his old buddy, who he loved to prop up the bar with in the Mittelhaus pub, kicked him when the phone rang.

  Rupert briefly looked over at Manni, and then answered.

  Agneta murmured in his ear with a husky voice. ‘Hey, my stallion, how’re you doing?’

  Rupert was afraid that the other people in the queue would hear Agneta’s voice and he coughed to cover the sound.

  ‘Oh, I hope you haven’t caught a cold. I thought I’d kept you warm enough.’

  Rupert kept on coughing.

  ‘I hope you’ll come again tonight. I’m an expert in a couple of things you’re not familiar with and I’d like to pamper you a little.’

  Rupert tried to find a neutral tone. ‘I’m working on a homicide right now. We’re all under a lot of pressure. I can’t make it tonight.’

  ‘Didn’t you like my shashlik?’

  Rupert didn’t know what’d been hotter, the shashlik or Agneta. But it’d be impossible to say that now.

  ‘Didn’t you like it?’ she probed.

  ‘Well, of course! But I—’

  ‘I think I’m in danger! You told me that he could come and get me next! I thought you’d protect me?’

  ‘I can try to get police protection for you, but I don’t know if—’

  ‘I don’t want any of your deputies! I want you! Don’t you care at all that you’re putting me at the mercy of the killer? My husband’s away on business, he’d protect me otherwise. But—’

  ‘Well, as I said, I’m hot on the heels of the murderer here. We’re really close to catching him and—’