He wrapped a bandage around his arm calmly. It was like a healing ritual. How good pain could feel! Now he was back to reality. No bombs in the night.
He wasn’t defenceless, not helpless.
He could act. He set the pace.
He was in control of the situation.
Perhaps every new situation offered new possibilities. If he really had been mistaken and Heymann and Stern had been innocent, then it was also Willy Kaufmann’s fault. He’d made him his instrument.
How freeing it must be for Ubbo Heide and his team when he took work off their hands, and was now going to bring everything to a great conclusion. It couldn’t be that someone like Kaufmann could get off scot-free.
I’m catching the real culprits while you’re guarding the killers and criminals who Ubbo Heide exposed in his book.
Why not Langeoog? He liked the island, although it was a long time since he had last visited it. His mother was still alive back then.
He would have liked to take the ferry dressed as an old woman, in her honour, but the danger that his disguise was too well known was too great. He smiled. You don’t know all my tricks yet. I’ll surprise you all once more. You’ll be surprised if you’re planning to trick me!
*
Büscher managed to mobilise 104 police officers in no time to protect all the people named in the video and to inform them about the danger they were in. A firestorm was unleashed on the Internet, leading the East Frisia Kripo servers to crash.
Ann Kathrin Klaasen decided the Rupert should work as a waiter on the ferry between Bensersiel and Langeoog.
‘What?’ Rupert asked, incensed. ‘I’m supposed to—?’
Ann Kathrin calmly explained, ‘The culprit was definitely in Gelsenkirchen. We don’t know who from our team he knows, but he’s familiar with all the officers who were involved in Gelsenkirchen. He’ll try to come to Langeoog. At least one of us should be there in case he takes the ferry.’
‘But don’t immediately knock over every old lady who’s trying to spend her holiday on the island,’ Weller teased.
‘We have six people from a SWAT team on board. They’re already on their way to the ferry.’
‘Oh, are they also turning into service personnel?’
‘Sure,’ Weller grinned, ‘and you’ll be the head waiter and boss them all.’
Ann Kathrin remained serious. ‘No, they’ll all be hidden in a room, in full gear. Probably in the engine room or the luggage room. And they’ll only attempt a seizure on your command.’
Rupert liked that. His chest puffed up. ‘So I’m playing the head waiter and the gang is at my command!’
‘Why attempt?’ Weller asked and looked at Ann Kathrin critically. She shrugged her shoulders. Had she given something away with her choice of words? Did she not think that the SWAT team could catch him on the ferry?
Weller rubbed his hands, like he sometimes did while cooking, looking forward to the food. ‘The airfield is easier for us to watch. We’ll catch him at the departures if he flies from Harlesiel.’
Ann Kathrin nodded. ‘Of course, for us it’d be best if he doesn’t even come to the island.’
‘Surely there are more ways to reach the island. Maybe he’ll approach in his own sailing boat or suddenly show up as a surfer or—’ Weller speculated.
Ann Kathrin gestured to Weller not to open up more cans of worms.
‘Yes, Frank,’ she said, ‘we’ll roll the dice and hope to win the game. But we have to take into account that we’re dealing with a very sophisticated killer.’
‘People, I’m telling you,’ Rupert called out, actually proud. ‘He’ll try using some kind of crap disguise to get on the island, via the ferry, in the crowds of tourists. That won’t exactly make it easier for our SWAT team. Unlike him, we won’t risk having bystanders become casualties, and he knows that perfectly well. But maybe I can—’
Rupert stood up and intimated how he would bring a tray to the table as a waiter. The pain caused by his sacroiliac joint made the whole show look somewhat stiffer than he’d hoped.
Before he could continue, Ann Kathrin said, ‘No, please don’t play the hero, Rupert!’
‘What do you mean, play the hero? If he’s sitting in front of me, orders a prawn sandwich and then a beer, then I can bring it to him, put the gun to his head and say, “The three of us think you’re disgusting, and are of the opinion that you should put your hands up now.” ’
‘The three of us?’ Ann Kathrin asked.
Rupert opened his blazer, flashed his holster with his service revolver and grinned, ‘Heckler, Koch and me.’
Weller knew how stupid Ann Kathrin thought it was to show off with guns and was surprised how badly Rupert had judged the situation. Did he really think that he could score points with Ann Kathrin like this? Or was he making a show of himself because in his heart of hearts he was afraid of the situation and hoped that he’d be spared?
‘Just a little more of that, Rupert, and you can be put on file-sorting duty. There’s a huge pile of papers to work through on my desk, and it’s growing all the time. For example, there are some statistics on field service that urgently need to be compiled—’
Rupert played the server, and nodded at her in a subservient gesture. ‘No problem, boss. Got it!’
*
The door opened with a whirr. And that was when her next nightmare began. He was standing there, his left arm bandaged and a piece of the bandage dangling down. He reminded her of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, and he moved towards her in almost a dreamy way. He carried a large pink toiletry bag in his right hand. Large, horn-handled, with silver clasps.
He opened the cell door.
Her heart raced with excitement.
He swung the bag into the room, letting it fly through the air. He closed the door again, stopped in front of the bars, reached behind himself and took a page from a glossy magazine from his jeans pocket. He held it out to her. It showed a woman with her hair in a glamorous updo.
‘Can you manage that?’ he asked. ‘I want you to look classy.’
What does he want, she thought. Am I supposed to make another video, or is he going to let me go?
At first she made an effort to improve his mood. ‘Of course, I can manage that. But something like that takes time, of course. That hairdo is from the sixties, or seventies, or eighties. I haven’t ever had anything like that myself, but my mother—’
‘Mine did too,’ he said, and for the first time there was something that connected the two of them. That made Svenja Moers hopeful.
‘Are you ready to help me? Do your regret your crimes? Do you want to fight on the side of the good guys?’
She nodded enthusiastically.
‘You need a different hair colour. Pick something out! There’s everything in there, from bottle blond to bright red. The main thing is that you look different from how you do now. There are also glasses with plain glass in the bag.’
She opened the bag. The glasses made her think of ABBA concerts although she didn’t know why exactly. They had big frames and dark glass.
‘These would make you look like a fly,’ she said, and he laughed. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘What do you have planned? Why am I putting these on?’
She was afraid she’d gone too far with the questions and would trigger a new fit of rage. But he remained calm.
‘I need you to pass on a message. When you do it, I want you to be wearing this exact hairdo, a pair of glasses and these earrings here.’ He held them up.
‘I-I can’t wear earrings because of an allergy,’ she said, her voice showing her fear. ‘I would like to wear earrings, but my ears swell up, I get a sore throat, it itches like mad, and then—’
He acted as if she hadn’t understood him. ‘I said I want you to wear these earrings.’
He held out the earrings with his right hand, through the bars. She took the earrings and looked at them. They were round, made of gold, and there was a sm
all black jewel in the middle of each of them. There was nothing remarkable about them. She asked herself if these were the earrings his mother had worn.
‘Show me if they look good on you, or I can bring you different ones.’
‘I-I don’t have holes in my ears anymore. They’ve closed up. I haven’t worn earrings for over thirty years. Like I said, I have an allergy—’
‘Then we’ll just have to pierce your ears. It doesn’t work without earrings.’
‘Maybe I could wear clip-ons,’ she suggested. ‘If we put a different clasp in the back, then—’
He pulled a face. ‘Clip-ons could fall off – you could simply pull them off,’ he demonstrate, pulling imaginary clips from his ears, ‘and throw them away.’
‘I wouldn’t do that!’
‘I don’t have a piercing gun, but I do have a leather punch. You know,’ he pointed to his belt, ‘I always have to tighten it. It’s hard to get a belt in the right size.’
‘No, please!’ she said.
‘Go ahead and start dyeing your hair. I’ll get the leather punch. That’ll give us nice, even holes.’
He disappeared through the door. It closed behind him with a hiss, reminding her of the mouth of a monster in a horror movie she’d watched with her first husband, who’d liked that kind of thing.
She collapsed, crouching on the floor in front of the bed, and squeezed her hands into the backs of her knees. That’s the way she had sometimes sat as a girl, when fear of the big, incomprehensible world grabbed hold of her.
*
Ann Kathrin was astonished to see how Büscher and Ubbo Heide exploited their old contacts with the criminal justice system with perfect coordination, within minutes making possible complicated things that would normally have required many forms and official channels. It was almost a sublime feeling to watch them handle these things on the phone.
Minutes later, they had all the papers they needed to pick Wilhelm Kaufmann up from the detention centre.
Neither Büscher nor Ubbo had needed to raise their voice to get it done.
Ann Kathrin tried to learn from them how you held your nerve with all that red tape and got what was necessary.
‘Ultimately,’ Ubbo Heide said to her, ‘all these rules and laws are made by people and interpreted by people. We always have to make sure that they fulfill their function. The laws are made for people, not the other way around.’
The tin of mints was now located in Ubbo Heide’s former office, with North Sea Radio turned up loud.
Ann Kathrin picked up Willy Kaufmann personally in Lingen. He was lying on his bed, her gun under his pillow when she entered his cell.
First she drove to the police station on Wilhelm Berning Strasse. There were two specialists waiting there who would wire Wilhelm Kaufmann.
‘Tomorrow,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘we’ll take the first ferry from Bensersiel to Langeoog.’
Wilhelm Kaufmann stood there, his upper body naked, and bandaged as if he had a broken rib. The first microphone was under the bandage. A second was in one of the buttons on his jacket, and there was a third in his shoe.
‘You got the injury,’ Ann Kathrin said, as if giving him a back-story, ‘while struggling with Birger Holthusen. That’s plausible.’
‘Is the mic on his shoe picking up what I’m saying?’
‘No idea. But if you have to warn us that you don’t have your jacket anymore, and the one on your ribs isn’t working for some reason, then you can just pull off your shoe and let us know where you—’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Kaufmann assured her, and he sensed that there would be a fourth transmitter somewhere that she hadn’t told him about so he couldn’t trick her and get rid of all the bugs.
He drank water from a bottle. He was very thirsty. He kept on running his tongue over his teeth and puffed out his cheeks as if to gargle the water.
‘Tomorrow morning. And where will I stay the night? In my home in Brake?’
‘That’s up to you, of course. But we suggest that you stay at the North Sea Hotel Benser Hof in Bensersiel, opposite the marina.’
Kaufmann whistled. ‘That’s a four-star hotel. Can I assume that the tax payers are footing the bill?’
Ann Kathrin smiled. ‘Yes, and in this case they’ll even pay for a suite.’
‘Will you stay by my side?’ he asked.
‘No, but there will be four local police officers watching over you. They have rooms on the same floor and there’ll be a squad car in front.’
‘Great. And how’s it labelled? “Caution, we’re protecting a child murderer?” ’
‘No it’s undercover.’
Wilhelm Kaufmann laughed. ‘Sure. Get Your Bricks on Route 66. One of Peter Grendel’s vans, then no one will realise that you’re behind it.’
‘Nope. Theo Hinrichs, Buttforde.’
Kaufmann nodded. ‘Theo’s travelling cake shop.’
‘This is a tourist area. No one will be suspicious. The vehicle looks like it’s waiting for its next tour.’
‘The police officers will eat jam doughnuts and apple turnovers until they’re silly if Theo leaves any in there,’ Kaufmann joked. ‘But why will we be taking the first ferry? Do you think he’s already over there?’
‘We can’t rule that out. He could have taken an air taxi from Norddeich, from Harlesiel, or even from Bremen.’
‘You need an ID to get onto a plane.’
‘But I still think he’ll take the ferry. The Langeoog III has space for eight hundred passengers. Someone like him will feel safer there than in a cramped plane, where he might not be able to escape.’
Wilhelm Kaufmann pointed to Ann Kathrin. ‘You think exactly like them, Ms. Klaasen. As a detective, you’re the worst thing the criminal world could imagine. The ferry goes almost every hour. Believe me, Ms. Klaasen, he won’t take the first one, he’ll go when there are a whole lot of tourists on board.’
*
He’d even given her two painkillers before he did it, but now it wasn’t just her ears burning, the pain went all the way to the roots of her hair. The left earlobe just wouldn’t stop bleeding.
He was clearly sorry. He stammered, ‘Well, an ear sure isn’t a leather belt. But there’s no other way. Or do you think it’d be better to use a nail?’
The hairdo wasn’t big enough for his taste. She asked herself what he meant exactly, and he explained to her. ‘It’s not firm enough! It has to look almost structured, glamorous, you understand? You’re supposed to attract people’s attention.’
These words – attract people’s attention – made her forget the pain. He was actually planning to let her out into some kind of public place, however that might be defined. He wasn’t doing this for himself and his own pleasure. It wasn’t about a new clip that needed to be filmed. No indeed. She was going to be leaving this prison!
‘I want them all to look at you, understood? You’re supposed to move your hips like Marilyn Monroe. The wives should pull their husbands closer, afraid you’ll seduce them. You should look like a man-eater! Do you have it in you? Find it!’
‘But why?’ she dared ask him.
‘They expect to see either me or a feeble old lady with a walker. No one is imagining an eighties vamp in a mini skirt.’
But he’d found one.
*
Rupert wore the Heckler & Koch in his holster under the fake blue uniform jacket of a maritime waiter. He was below decks and, he thought, it was rather humid. He wished he could take off the jacket and leave the white shirt unbuttoned. He wasn’t wearing the stupid, black bow tie Büscher had offered him.
‘Waiters don’t need stuff like that in East Frisia,’ Rupert had claimed.
Rupert was enjoying his job as the ferry cast off because there were four very cheerful young women seated at a table inside. They weren’t wearing any more clothing than absolutely necessary for this sunny day. It truly wouldn’t have been an easy choice if Rupert were forced to pick between them.
&
nbsp; They waved to him and he went over immediately.
‘Hey. What can I do for you?’ He asked.
The one with the spaghetti straps wanted a glass of bubbly – dry, nice and cool.
‘I happen not to like the taste of warm Prosecco!’ she laughed.
Her friend, who was wearing an orange T-shirt that was far too tight, wanted a rooibos tea and a piece of cake without whipped cream, and the cake only if it didn’t contain any gelatin.
‘Sure,’ Rupert said, ‘vegetarian apple cake, so to speak,’ and beamed at her.
She felt understood.
The redhead with the hook nose and the sharp, promising gaze ordered a coffee with milk and emphasised, ‘But from the espresso machine, please, not filter coffee. I can’t stomach it!’
The one in the striped summer dress wanted a hot boiled sausage with double mustard. ‘But you can keep the roll. And give me a slightly fizzy mineral water, without ice and no lemon.’
The one with the spaghetti straps called out. ‘Oh, you with your low carbs, Miriam! In that case, I’ll have the roll!’
Rupert walked over to the bar and wondered to himself which one of them would scream the loudest in bed.
He was genuinely unsure if he’d be able to deal with those young things when the chips were down. When was the last time he’d had a thirty-year-old in bed? But never mind, they were feisty, looked great and he had fun letting his fantasies run wild.
Many of the guests were standing at the bar, trying to order beers and brats.
Rupert couldn’t really recall the girls’ order. His new colleague behind the counter pointed to the pad. ‘You wrote everything down, right?’
Rupert didn’t react. His colleague took the notepad and looked at it. It read: The one with the striped dress is named Miriam.
‘Well great,’ the waiter said.
Rupert turned round and let his eyes scan the room. He didn’t mind that the other waiter wasn’t happy with his work. He had another job to do. And with a little luck, he would become a hero in front of those four ladies and arrest a serial killer.
The Oath Page 40
