In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

‘You work in Block Six, don’t you?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Do you want to be questioned by the Fourth Homicide Unit again?’

  The twitch in her cheeks suggests that this isn’t the most enticing prospect. After the moment’s reflection that he allows her she mutters between her teeth: ‘The cock of the walk around here was a Lithuanian. He was a killer, no one dared go near him. Sascha broke his jaw on the very first day. That sorted that one out.’

  ‘Was he put in solitary?’

  ‘Mhm.’

  He sees the room in front of him: a foam rubber mattress with no cover, barred lamps, glass bricks instead of windows, no heaters, nothing you could smash, video surveillance. When one prisoner seriously injures another, four weeks in this hole are the rule. ‘How long?’

  ‘I’d need to check.’

  Pavlik stops and forces Miss Engelschall to do the same. ‘Say to your colleagues: “I didn’t tell him a thing. Smug bastard from the Department, met his match in me.” Anything we say is confidential.’

  Her gaze flickers. ‘He was in there for half an hour.’

  ‘Instructions from above?’

  She nods.

  ‘How often should he have been in solitary?’

  ‘I stopped counting.’

  Pavlik goes on: ‘And how often was he?’

  ‘He was never punished, not once, and no one knew why.’ Every word is furious. ‘For a while he had a fight with a Ukrainian who was a big drug dealer. Eventually he was found dead in the shower. We all knew it was Sascha. No one cared. He just grinned for a week.’

  ‘Did he hang around with Boenisch a lot?’

  ‘Not that I saw.’ She notices his expression. ‘But I never paid much attention.’

  In the fenced-off area in front of Block Six, which looks like a big cage, Pavlik sees the prisoners who are desperate to get back into the warmth. But, red-faced, they have to keep on walking because he has ordered that the prisoners from the second floor must either be locked up again or wait outside until he has inspected Sascha’s cell undisturbed. For most of them the cold is the lesser of two evils. When Pavlik walks past, one of them growls into the snowstorm: ‘Take your time, we’re in no hurry.’

  He follows Miss Engelschall into the building. His phone rings. ‘Hello?’

  It’s Fricke. ‘I’ve got the details you wanted about the cemetery in Cologne. High summer, half-past midday, about thirty degrees, eighty-six per cent humidity, no wind. The roof Holm was lying on was one thousand one hundred and ninety-one metres away from the target, at a height of fifty-five metres. But I don’t think he’s as good as you think.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It took him three shots. The first one hit the guy’s shoulder. He hit him in the temple with the second.’

  ‘Which shoulder? From the back or the front?’

  ‘From the right, from behind.’

  ‘Calibre?’

  ‘.700 nitro express. Crazy, isn’t it? Pretty well blew his head off.’

  Pavlik stops on the stairs. The hairs are standing up on the back of his neck.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Fricke asks.

  ‘Yes. Thanks. See you.’

  He puts the phone away, brings his chin to his chest, hears the crunch of his top neck vertebra, so lost in thought that Engelschall has to call down to him twice, ‘Are you coming?’

  She opens the door. Pavlik has seen a lot of cells in a lot of jails; no two are alike. He has had the opportunity to admire walls papered with nude photographs of the girlfriend, oriental lampshades, bed-covers made of football-club scarves, bottle-top curtains, toilet seats with pornographic pictures, sunsets over the Blue Grotto. Unsurpassed, however, is the plastic parrot that dangled from the ceiling in the Chinese guy’s cell in Santa Fu, endlessly screeching ‘Fucking screw’ at the top of its voice. There are more charming terms for prison warders.

  But he had never seen a cell like Sascha’s. Bare walls, no books, television, radio, not a single personal object. Not even food, a comb, a piece of soap. The bed is unmade, the woollen blanket lies grey and scratchy on the floor.

  ‘Why has it been cleared?’

  ‘It hasn’t. It was like this already.’

  He opens the cupboard. A pair of trousers, a shirt, underwear. That’s all. Pavlik searches through the clothes. ‘How did he pass the time?’

  ‘Ask around. I can name you at least fifteen prisoners who haven’t dared to go in the shower on their own for the last six months.’

  He kneels down and knocks against the skirting board. ‘Has the cell been inspected?’

  ‘No one dared.’

  Pavlik unscrews the tap from the wash basin. Nothing. He straightens up and pats down the mattress. Turns the bed on its end and inspects the hollow legs with the torch from his phone. Sticks his finger into one of them and pulls out a little piece of paper.

  On it is written: It is the start of your journey.

  The paper is yellowed, folded countless times, the handwriting sharp and spiky, every letter an exclamation mark. Pavlik knows straight away that Holm wrote the words. It must have been a long time ago, perhaps even a message that he sent his brother in Barcelona. The text is beyond reproach, no warder could possibly have objected to it. And yet Sascha hid the piece of paper. What journey did Holm mean? Pavlik senses that it might be important.

  ‘Pia, how much longer is this going to take?’ a man’s voice squawks from Engelschall’s walkie-talkie.

  ‘No idea,’ she says.

  ‘When was he locked up today?’ Pavlik asks.

  ‘Just before eight.’

  ‘Our guys got him out of the cell two hours later. Did he have any visitors in between?’

  She shrugs and looks past him.

  ‘Have a think, Miss Engelschall. If you or your colleagues don’t cooperate with us, we’ll have a word with the prisoners who worked here. One of them is bound to have seen who you opened the door to.’

  She still doesn’t reply. ‘Engelschall – the sound of angels. Such a pretty name. It would be a shame to land you with a disciplinary procedure.’

  ‘Maske was in there for five minutes,’ she says. ‘When he came out again he was drenched in sweat.’

  *

  Things can get cramped in a boss’s office six metres by six, if you’ve got four Federal Police officers in there apart from the boss himself, inspecting the PC, viewing files and correspondence. In the outer office, the secretary sits terrified in the corner while two other policemen turn everything upside down all around her.

  Pavlik had met his colleagues outside the prison before asking to be shown Sascha’s cell. To be sure that the director couldn’t be warned by phone, one of them stayed by security until the others turned up at Hans-Peter Maske’s door.

  When he enters the outer office, Tom Döbler comes over to him. They’ve known each other for ever, since police academy. At some point Döbler realized that searches were the thing he was good at. He could find a contact lens in a bottle bank.

  ‘How’s it looking?’ Pavlik asks under his breath.

  ‘There are only two files on Sascha Holm on the two computers,’ Döbler replies quietly. Six months ago an email confirming that he’d been admitted, and today a note about him being transferred to you. That’s it. Otherwise you mightn’t know he’d ever been here.’

  Pavlik isn’t surprised.

  ‘But I’ve got something else.’ Döbler hands him a scrap of paper. ‘Over the last month he called this number three times. No conversation lasted more than a minute.’

  Pavlik looks at the nine-digit number.

  ‘A military satellite phone. You can forget the idea of locating it,’ Döbler says.

  ‘How did you get Maske’s phone data from the company?’

  ‘I know someone who works there. We sorted it out unofficially.’

  ‘If anyone complains about the Federal Police, you can send them to me,’ Pavlik says. They exchange a grin. ‘Have you got any ema
ils for me?’

  ‘I’ve already printed them out.’ Döbler leans across the desk and hands him Sascha’s transfer papers which have just been sent from the Senate’s Justice Department because Helmchen insisted. Pavlik flicks through them and browses the most important passages.

  In the next room Maske is yelling: ‘I demand to be allowed to make a phone call! You have no search warrant, this is unheard of!’

  Pavlik walks to the door. ‘Hello, Mr Maske, sit where you are. The Federal Prosecutor obtained a search warrant from the judge.’ Maske shrinks. ‘There is a temporary protocol, the formal decision will be coming in by fax at any moment. I’ll come back to you.’ He closes the door before Maske can say anything, reaches for a chair and sits down straddling it opposite the secretary. ‘My name is Müller. Will you tell me yours?’

  ‘Margot Burri.’

  Pavlik is good at spotting dialects. He locates the slight singsong of the Rhineland in the woman’s voice. ‘How long have you worked for Mr Maske?’

  ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘Ah – then you were his secretary in Cologne?’

  She nods anxiously. But there is also a hint of a sense of power from being guard dog to a man in charge of seven hundred officers and six hundred and fifty prisoners.

  ‘And if he becomes head of the Justice Department in the Senate, will he take you with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is the mistake in my last question?’

  She looks at him, baffled. Mrs Burri’s face might appeal to a middle-aged man with a weakness for jerkily painted lips that are used to passing on instructions in an entirely humourless way. Her skin is heavily powdered, her hair-do a helmet, not a strand out of place.

  ‘The mistake is this: Mr Maske will never hold that position. He will be going to jail for a very long time, and not as a director. Is it worth putting your pension on the line for that?’

  A drop of sweat digs a groove in the powder. ‘I haven’t done anything!’

  ‘Sascha Holm terrorized Block Six from day one. Why is there no correspondence about that, no memos, not the smallest piece of paper?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me no warder ever called this office and asked Holm for a meeting with the director? Never sent an email? Never complained he hadn’t been subjected to any penalties?’

  ‘Mr Maske dealt with such matters verbally.’

  ‘Is that normal? Did he do that with other prisoners too?’

  ‘No,’ she whispers in a small voice and rubs her thumb over her fingernails, painted with colourless varnish.

  A fax arrives. ‘Were you present at any of those conversations?’

  She shakes her head.

  He looks at her ring. ‘You’re married. Children?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘You have something to lose. The only thing I have to lose is my patience.’

  Her eyelids twitch. ‘Once,’ she admits.

  Döbler comes in with the fax. ‘Here’s the warrant.’

  ‘Mr Maske will be delighted. Please be so kind.’

  Döbler goes into the next room.

  Pavlik addresses the secretary again. ‘When was that, and what was it about?’

  Every word is another farewell to her beautiful, freshly renovated office in the Justice Department. ‘A few months ago we had a dead Ukrainian in Block Six. Two warders said Sascha Holm had threatened the man. It was something to do with drug deals. Mr Maske asked if they had any proof of Holm’s involvement. They said no. He told them not to speculate about the Homicide Unit, it wasn’t house policy.’

  ‘And they just stuck to that?’

  The voice grows quieter. ‘They were given special leave and transferred to Access Control.’

  ‘This morning we requested the personal files of the officers in contact with Sascha. Where are they?’

  ‘I’d need to check whether—’ She breaks off when she sees Pavlik frowning. ‘Mr Maske says I’m to stall you.’

  He stands up. ‘Tell that to my friends from the Federal Police. They’ll do it in writing. That’s our house policy.’

  He walks into the boss’s office. The files fill three cardboard boxes, and the PC is packed away as well. Maske sits alone at the conference table, hands in his lap, eyes fixed on the wall as if he were seasick in a violently rocking pedalo on the open sea, staring at a point on the horizon to keep from throwing up.

  ‘Are you OK so far?’ Pavlik asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Döbler says. ‘Do you still need us?’

  ‘The secretary’s statement needs to be written down, ideally by you. And have two men ready to arrest Mr Maske here.’

  ‘Timo, Karsten, you take charge of that,’ Döbler says to his colleagues. Then to Pavlik: ‘I assume you’ll want to have a little chat with him first.’

  ‘Yes.’ He taps a Lucky Strike against his lighter, waits till everyone is outside and the door is closed, lights it and looks around for something he can use as an ashtray. The vase of chrysanthemums that Maske got for his promotion will do the trick. He throws the flowers in the bin, puts the vase on the floor and makes himself comfortable at the head of the table.

  Eva Askamp – Eva Askamp – Eva Askamp.

  An announcement on the loudspeaker rattles against the window. ‘End of break.’ Maske’s sallow skin stretches over angular cheekbones. ‘Do you think I’ll allow myself to be intimidated? I’m not answering any questions without my lawyer.’

  Pavlik doesn’t even look at him. He picks up Sascha’s file and opens it. For the next ten minutes he is absorbed in his reading, underlining certain passages, making notes, tapping ash into the vase, while Maske gradually goes to pieces. At last Pavlik looks up. ‘I don’t want to bore myself with your lies. Let’s do it like this. I tell you what we know about your connection with Holm and his brother, and then I’ll ask you a question. Just one.’

  Maske’s pedalo is lifted by a mighty wave, flies over the crest and crashes down on the water again.

  ‘Twelve years ago you were the governor of Ossendorf Prison in Cologne. You authorized the release of the prisoner Artur Bedrossian, even though he was under arrest. And—’

  ‘His father had died,’ Maske interrupts. ‘Permitting him to attend the funeral was a matter of decorum.’

  ‘Don’t use big words with me. Bedrossian was liquidated at the cemetery. We know it was Holm. I’m sure you were paid very well.’ Maske tries to cut in again, but Pavlik raises an eyebrow. ‘I’ve told you the procedure. If you prefer, we’ll pass you over to the Federal Police, where you and your lawyer can have some fun going through the evidence.’

  Maske says nothing.

  ‘You’re wondering how we’re going to prove that you received payment,’ Pavlik continues. ‘Very simply: while we’re talking here now, there are officers in your house. If you have any foreign bank accounts, we will get access to them. We’re interested in receipts from twelve years ago. If you were paid in cash, we will examine any large payments that you made over the next few years for the source of the money. I’m very confident about that.’

  Maske smiles faintly.

  ‘I can’t say exactly how many deals you did with Holm; we’ll see. But one thing we do know: you played a part in his brother’s transfer to Tegel. When he made the application in Barcelona, no one objected. They were all delighted to get shot of him. But the Justice Department in Berlin hesitated. As I can understand very well, because the documents that came in from Spain include a summary of Sascha’s prison career. Even if we may assume that the Spanish left half of it out and played down the rest, we are still left with the picture of a man who would be flattered to be called a psychopathic killer. So what did the Justice Department do? It asked for your opinion. You worked tirelessly for the transfer. Hang on, where’s that passage I like so much? Oh yes, here it is: “Especially on the grounds of the prisoner’s social prospects in terms of his girlfriend I consider the transfer to Berlin to be a very sensibl
e course of action. I have already had a conversation with the young woman to assure myself in person of the genuineness of their relationship, and am persuaded that such is the case.” Well, fine, far be it from me to judge your prose style.’ He snaps the file shut. ‘This woman was murdered by Holm today. As were three of our men. But then you know that already. He called you at eight and told you to go to his brother and tell him right away. That phone call is documented.’

  Maske rests his hands on the table. They are shaking.

  ‘Let’s leave aside the question of whether you received a new payment for your services over the last six months, or whether you acted out of fear of Holm. What we do know is: you have covered up every crime that his brother has committed here. It’s down to you that a whole prison cringed before him. We can prove that one. You’ve certainly abetted the murder of Melanie Breuer. I don’t know what you pay in legal fees, but no lawyer in the world is going to get you out of this one.’

  Maske’s face is white as ocean foam.

  Pavlik’s phone rings. ‘Yes?’

  It’s a Federal Police officer. ‘We’ve turned Maske’s place upside down. We’ll have to go through his financial papers in detail, but it doesn’t look as if we’re going to find anything. We’re heading off.’

  As he thinks, damn, he flashes his broadest grin across the table, hangs up and says: ‘My oh my.’

  Maske’s pedalo goes under.

  ‘Now I’m going to ask you the question. Think carefully about how much the answer is worth to you. For me, it could be worth a conversation with the Federal Prosecutor’s office. If I try really hard, I might be able to get you seven or eight years rather than life. It’s not a promise, just a vague possibility, you’re so deep in it. And if you think your lawyer may get you a better deal, you’re mistaken. He would advise you to kiss my feet.’ He looks at the man who has instilled fear in so many. ‘Do you know where Holm is headed?’

  Pavlik sees that Maske has never wished so devoutly that he could give the right answer.

  But he whispers: ‘No.’

  26

  The first thing she hears is her heart. It is beating calmly and evenly, and brings to an end a dream that she will not remember. Her tongue moves slowly along her teeth, feels nothing. She wants to bite her lip, but can’t open her mouth, something keeps it glued shut. Her eyes hurt. She doesn’t feel cold. Her clothes aren’t wet, they feel strange on her skin. When she moves her head, her neck scrapes against something rough. It smells burnt. The surface beneath her vibrates. They are moving.