“It was sent to the lab,” she said. “But they won’t be open at this time.”
I suggested that she might as well go straight home and we could have an early start the next morning. Judging from the tone of her reply it had never occurred to her that we were going to do anything else. Before she hung up she did ask why the mobile phone was important.
“It might tell us what we’re dealing with,” I said.
I got in to the Post Office at seven, having paused in the hotel breakfast room just long enough to fill a plastic bag with bread rolls, croissants and those tiny cinnamon rolls which you only get in three star hotels. Unfortunately Ziegler was at the station even earlier and wanted a meeting which, because she was a Polizeihauptkommissarin and Vanessa and I were lowly Kriminalkommissare, meant we had to haul ourselves up two storeys to her office.
She told us that they’d traced the remaining members of the Good Wine Drinking Association and asked if I wanted to interview them first or would I prefer for K11 to get on with it.
“Given we’ve already had two deaths,” I said, “we should contact them as soon as possible and bring them here for an interview. We need to establish a basic timeline for the crucial association meetings and alibis for two deaths.”
Ziegler tapped a fingernail on her desk. She also had one of those fancy desks, I noticed, that had an electric motor to raise or lower it so she could work standing up. Although why anyone would want to do desk work standing up has yet to be adequately explained to me.
“And what happens if one of them is a practitioner?” she asked, proving that she’d taken the time to ask her contacts about the KDA and what it does. “Won’t that be dangerous?”
I was about to say not really, but I remembered Vanessa’s notion that perhaps Jason Agnelli had been magically compelled to drink the fermented grapes against his will. As a result of that thought, I spent the next hour writing a safety protocol for interviewing potential practitioners. This involved interviewing in pairs, and ensuring that one colleague is always placed behind the subject and has fast access to a CO2 fire extinguisher.
“A fire extinguisher?” asked Vanessa.
“For distraction,” I said. “It’s hard to cast a spell when somebody sprays one at your head. A bucket of iced water is even better, but they tend to be a bit conspicuous in the normal policing environment.”
While I’d been occupied with that, Vanessa had waded through the two boxes of material that constituted the 1982 investigation into the disappearance of Heinrich Brandt. Occasionally she muttered to herself and made a note.
“You can tell they definitely knew about the attempted rape and the shooting,” she said after a while. “But the lead investigator had obviously been told to leave it out of the report.”
“Frau Stracker did say her grandfather had a friend high up in the police,” I said.
“Judging by the careful absences in these reports that friend was Polizeidirektor or above,” said Vanessa and went back to her reading.
We were approaching the stage when one of us would have to go for a second coffee run when Vanessa said she had found something.
“The investigators thought Heinrich Brandt might have obtained a second car,” she said.
The car officially registered to his name and address, a brand new VW Polo, was found parked on the Niederstraße just short of where it was crossed by the railway bridge.
“It’s obvious that they think Brandt waited in his car that morning for Jacky to walk past, but of course they can’t say that because they’re not supposed to know about the attack,” she said.
They’d searched the car and Heinrich’s residence in the south of the city and found no indication that he had returned there after the attack. But early on the first morning after the attack on Jacky, a patrol had been sent to investigate a burnt out vehicle on the Markusberg. This was another Polo, only an older model that been deliberately set on fire—although the fire investigation officer claimed that they couldn’t find any trace of an accelerant.
It’s not that hard to set a car on fire—you can do it with a lighter and a strategically placed firelighter—but the expert was adamant the seat of the fire had been in the driving seat and that it looked like a Molotov cocktail had been thrown in the front. Only without the cocktail.
If I’d been there in 1982 this would have raised a definite alarm. But back then my parents were still arguing about deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons or maybe getting down at the local discotheque—or possibly both at the same time.
The security services were briefly involved in case it was terrorist related, but quickly lost interest. As would the officers investigating the Heinrich Brandt case, if a bloodied shirt hadn’t been found close by the burnt out car. This led the investigators to trace the car’s serial number, through the manufacturer and ultimately to the car’s current owner, who had reported it stolen the afternoon of the shooting.
“From Quinter Straße,” she said. “Which is in Quint.”
Which was the built-up area to the east of the Stracker winery—across the railway tracks.
Neither of us could work out why the investigators connected the shirt and this particular car, until we found the top page of a forensic report that had been misfiled in the wrong folder. There was no sign of the rest of the report.
“This file has been sanitised,” said Vanessa.
“Looks like it.”
From what we had, we were able to determine that it had been a man’s blue, pinstriped shirt with extensive bloodstains. And bullet holes.
I’d already called Wiesbaden, who’d confirmed that the lead pellet was indeed a 9mm round but whether it had been fired from Grandfather’s P38 was impossible to determine without the pistol. I’d also asked Elton and his Special Circumstances crew to dig up that section of the vineyard on the off chance Heinrich was buried under it, but they’d found nothing.
“Okay,” I said. “Heinrich Brandt, having been shot and wounded somewhere in the torso, somehow staggers out of the basement, down the hill, across the railway tracks, steals a car. Drives it somewhere else, dumps it, sets it on fire…”
“Possibly using magic,” said Vanessa, jumping, I thought, to conclusions.
“Possibly,” I said. “Not everything that’s unexplained is caused by magic. Then he strips off his shirt and vanishes—again.”
“Again.”
“And this happened on the Markusberg?”
“At the Mariensäule.”
“Which is where?”
Vanessa led me over to the office window and pointed.
“Over there,” she said. “At the top of the ridge.”
Across the river the ground rose steeply enough to shake off any buildings and revert to forest. At the top was a slender tower topped with a statue of the Virgin Mary. A horrible suspicion came over me—that if I’d just taken a moment to notice the thing when I drove into town on the first day, I might have saved myself a tremendous amount of time and effort.
“I think we should go and have a look,” I said. “But first we’re going to need a bottle.”
“What for?” asked Vanessa.
“Because we need to talk to Kelly again. And to do that we need to set you up with a play date with our irrepressible little river spirit.”
“Why me?” asked Vanessa, who was learning to be commendably suspicious.
“Because she likes you,” I said.
In the end we couldn’t find a glass bottle, so we had to use an empty plastic Fanta bottle instead. I left the location of the play date to Vanessa, although I cautioned her to avoid sites too close to the river. Once that was decided, Vanessa wrote an invitation on some pink notepaper she found at the bottom of one of her desk drawers. We specified a time that afternoon.
“Do you think she’ll turn up?” asked Vanessa.
“Morgane seemed very keen. I’m just hoping that Kelly is feeling protective enough to turn up as well,” I said.
We took Vanessa’s vehicle, which turned out to be a brand new Dacia Duster, and stopped off on the Roman Bridge to throw our message in a bottle into the river—but only after we checked that nobody from the council was watching.
After the defeat of Napoleon, Trier—along with the rest of the Rheinland—was handed over to the Kingdom of Prussia, as a reward for Blücher saving Wellington’s arse at Waterloo. Being ruled over by a bunch of land-obsessed Protestant aristocrats was bound to cause tension. Resistance to rule-by-Junker manifested itself in a number of ways, not least by building a monument to the Virgin Mary three hundred metres up a sandstone ridge so that it overlooked the whole city.
There was nothing about it in the dossier, but Catholic monuments, especially in the West, were often overlooked by the Ahnenerbe.
“Why do you think it’s so significant?” asked Vanessa, as the Dacia laboured up an insanely steep lane through the woods.
“It has to do with the way magic works,” I said.
“And how does it work?”
I don’t normally explain the details of magic to colleagues outside the KDA. Apart from anything else, it always sounds so absurd when you say it out loud.
“We don’t actually know what magic is,” I said as we reached the top of the ridge and entered the eerily quiet village of Markusberg. “But we do know some of the things it does. It’s like Isaac Newton and gravity.” This was the analogy the Director used when she was explaining it to me. “Newton didn’t need to know how gravity functions in order to work out that big masses attract each other over distance.”
“Well, if you knew how it worked it wouldn’t be magic, would it?” said Vanessa.
I squirrelled that one away to impress the Director with later.
Beyond the village the road ran below the brow of the ridge into cool forest shadows and five hundred metres along there was a forlorn little bus stop, a parking area and steps leading up to the monument.
“This is where the burnt-out car was found,” said Vanessa.
We parked and walked up through the trees. I explained magic was generated by the environment, but it tended to build up around what the Director calls Markante Orte: distinctive places or prominences. Places or objects that stand out. In nature this can be old trees or rivers or rock formations.
“But where it really seems to accumulate,” I said, as we got to the top of the steps, “is around man-made structures, the older the better. Castles, churches, old houses and, of course, great big ornamental columns on the tops of hills.”
The case in point—forty metres of neo-gothic sandstone with the Virgin Mary at the top adorned with a halo of small stone spheres. Not that we could see the spheres from our lowly position at the base, but presumably God would be pleased with this view.
The column had originally been a pinkish brown, but the years had pocked and weathered it into a grey-green with patches of lichen mottling the lower sections in an interesting pattern. Graffiti was etched into the stone up to shoulder height. There was an iron door which led, Vanessa explained, to a staircase up to a viewing gallery. But it had been closed for over a hundred years.
“People used to throw themselves off the top,” she said.
“Isn’t that a bit theologically unsound?”
“It would be a lovely view on the way down.”
“I’m going to check for residual magic,” I said.
“How do you do that, exactly?” asked Vanessa.
This is something I’m actually encouraged to teach to appropriate non-KDA colleagues. The rationale being that the more police who can tell a real infraction from random vandalism, animal cruelty or student pranks, the fewer wasted trips valuable KDA assets have to make. Since I am usually that valuable asset, I heartily approve of this approach.
I told her to stand close to the wall, put her palm against it and close her eyes.
“Try not to think about anything specific,” I said. “Let your mind float freely.”
I expected her to say something clever. I did, the first time the Director told me to empty my mind. But Vanessa stood very still, her breathing slow and even.
I put my own hand on the wall.
“You know when you’re lying in your bed on the edge of sleep?” I said. “And you see random images and hear sounds?”
“Like daydreams,” she said.
The best practitioners, the Director once told me, are those that can dream with their eyes open.
“Yes,” I said. “But don’t try and influence it.”
“Right.”
I put my own hand on the rough sandstone of the column and asked Vanessa what she could see or feel. There was a slight breeze on my face and the rustle of leaves all around, the smell of damp grass and a faint whiff of urine where someone or some dog had decided that the monument was too good a lamppost to pass up.
I let it all drop away.
“I can smell smoke,” said Vanessa. “And weird triangular patterns—like a kaleidoscope.”
Neither were coming through to me.
“Anything else?”
Vanessa’s voice took on a strangely distant tone. “Despair,” she said. “Terrible despair.”
That was definitely there. A suicide—or possibly the aggregate of many suicides—the sudden deaths cementing the emotion into the stones.
“That’s vestigia,” I said. “Try and fix in your mind how that sensation differs from the earlier ones.”
“This is difficult,” she said.
“If it was easy,” I said, “everybody would be doing it. Now what else?”
I could feel something underneath the despair, a now-familiar squirming unclean sensation like the feel of maggots wriggling across my skin.
“Somebody’s watching us,” said Vanessa.
“No, that’s not it,” I said.
“No,” said Vanessa. “We’re being watched from the trees to our left. Young man, wearing a cap and a blue padded jacket.”
“How long has he been there?”
“A couple of minutes,” said Vanessa. “Shit—he’s seen me looking.”
“We might as well introduce ourselves, then,” I said.
We peeled off the column and I saw him. A pale face broken by a screen of green leaves, a worried expression under a black baseball cap, a padded jacket, skinny jeans and trainers. A teenager, I thought, although old enough to have finished school.
“Hello, can you help me?” I said, and he turned and bolted down the footpath running north from the Mariensäule.
“Get the car,” I shouted to Vanessa and took off after him.
The young man ran with a beautifully relaxed gait and was so light-footed that he barely disturbed the leaves that covered the path. He was also, I couldn’t help noticing, pulling quickly away.
I conjured a tangle-foot and threw it at his legs. But I’d left it too late—the spell only has an effective range of five metres at most, and the young man had a lead of ten metres now. I swore and dug in, but I was wearing my street shoes and they kept slipping on the leaves and soil.
On my left the ground fell away in an almost vertical drop towards the city and the river. To the right, a steep wooded slope ran down to the road. I heard an engine start up and risked a look to see if I could spot Vanessa in the car.
Fatal mistake—my left toe hit something under the leaves and I spent the next five or six strides flailing my arms to stay upright. By the time I’d regained my balance the young man had opened up his lead by a further couple of metres. I really would have been better off in bare feet.
Then he made his own mistake, turning to see whether I was still behind him. I stopped and bent over with my hands on my knees. He stood, staring back at me, his eyes wide as he fidgeted from foot to foot.
I didn’t need to feign being out of breath, but I exaggerated my gasping to put him at his ease. I heard what I hoped was Vanessa’s Duster pass by on the right—I couldn’t look to confirm without tipping Running Boy off.
>
Once I estimated that Vanessa was far enough ahead, I straightened and gave him a cheery wave.
“I just want to talk,” I said.
And he was off again.
He got about ten metres before Vanessa stepped out from behind a tree, caught his arm and spun him around so that his own momentum landed him on his back. He held his hands up as if fearing an attack, but Vanessa simply grabbed his right arm and flipped him over on his front. Then she grabbed his other wrist and brought it behind his back as well, although she held off handcuffing him.
When I finally jogged up to them, we took an arm each and lifted the young man to his feet. I could feel him trembling under my hand and he was breathing hard. I also noticed that his cap had stayed firmly on his head despite his tumble. I looked closer—it was fastened much tighter than could be comfortable.
“Take off the hat,” I said.
“No, no, no,” he shouted, and would have backed away if Vanessa and I hadn’t had a firm grip on an arm apiece.
“Schhhh,” I said. “Calm down. We’re all special here.”
The young man hesitated at my emphasis on “special” and looked wildly from my face to Vanessa’s before his shoulders slumped and the tension drained away. I relaxed my grip enough to allow him to remove his cap. He’d grown his blond hair long and shaggy but there was no concealing the two brown lumps situated above the hairline. Carmela had once explained the difference between horns and antlers to me, but I couldn’t remember enough to tell which these were.
“My God,” said Vanessa, and the young man flinched and gave me a reproachful look.
“You said you were special,” he said.
“We are,” I said. “But some of us haven’t learnt good manners yet.”
The young man looked at Vanessa, who gave him a brief professional smile.
“My name is Tobi,” I said. “My friend here is Kriminalkommissarin Vanessa Sommer, but you can call her Vani for short. What’s your name?”
“Gunter,” said the young man. “Gunter Hirsch.”
I told Gunter he could put his hat back on, which he did gratefully. It obviously calmed him further. Once we were sure he wasn’t going to bolt again, we let go of his arms and de-escalated from potential arrest to good-citizen-helping-the-police. They teach us to do this in training and it mostly works.
The October Man Page 10