The Killing of Emma Gross
by
Damien Seaman
To mum, whose unflinching support helped make this book a reality.
And to Heisher, who inspired much of it.
Published by Blasted Heath, 2011
copyright 2011 Damien Seaman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.
Damien Seaman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by JT Lindroos
Visit Damien Seaman at:
www.blastedheath.com
ISBN (ePub): 978-1-908688-15-6
Version 2-1-3
Also by Blasted Heath
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The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay
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All The Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith
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Author’s note
Fact and fiction are jealous siblings. They might play nice from time to time, but really they don’t like each other much and delight in ruining each other’s clothes. Try shaping real events into a story of pace and verve sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
Of course, a lot of folks read historical fiction in order to learn something while being entertained. For all I know you might be one of those folks. So I’m not going to lie to you: although this novel is based on the notorious Peter Kürten murders of 1929-1930, I have jumbled up the real events and even cut some of them altogether in the name of artistic licence.
To cover myself – and for those who want to know what really happened – I have included a timeline at the back of this book. To my knowledge, it’s the most detailed and accurate account of the case published in English since 1938. And in case you were wondering, at the time of writing yes, that does include Wikipedia.
Düsseldorf, Friday, 1st March 1929
0.22 am
Detective Inspector Michael Ritter pulled the clasp knife from his pocket and opened the blade with fingers made clumsy by the rubber crime scene gloves he wore. Emma Gross was lying naked on the divan, her hair fanned out in a blonde net over the blue upholstery and dark wood.
Sweat rolled into Ritter's eyes and gathered there. He blinked away the worst of it and left the rest, the discomfort and the saline sting as good a way of keeping sharp as any.
Emma's eyes were closed, at least there was that. She didn't need to see him stab her.
'I'm sorry,' he whispered, for all the good it would do.
He scanned the lock on the door, the drapes pulled shut against the window. Yes, damn it, the door was locked and the drapes were closed. He had to get on with this before it was too late.
He raised his knife and took aim for the area below the woman's left breast, ignoring the squeak of floorboards underfoot. Then he stabbed her.
Her whole body shook, a gurgling sigh struggling from her lips as her head lolled forward. He kept stabbing, not daring to stop until he'd lost track of the number of blows.
After that he did stop, pulling away and giving himself some time for his agitated breathing to return to normal. There wasn't much blood except for what was on the knife – the divan and the floor remained spotless. She'd bled less than he'd expected. There was something sad about that somehow, not that he could explain why.
The woman's clothes were in a loose pile on the bed across the room. He didn't need to touch them: they were fine as they were.
He turned back to the body and moved closer, forcing himself to look. She may have been a streetwalker but she had the right to a little respect. Didn't everyone, at the end?
Anyway, he had to get this right. He counted the stab wounds in the woman's torso and got a half-dozen bunched around the heart, eight or ten more further down in the lungs and stomach. He'd strayed lower than he'd meant to in his urgency – in his panic, if he was being honest, and it would come to something when he couldn't be honest with himself.
The grouping was fine, though. What wasn't fine was the size of the wounds. They weren't broad enough to fit the pattern and he'd have to fix that if he wanted the criminal investigations department to link them to the MO of the Düsseldorf 'Ripper' and call him in to take the case.
He re-inserted the knife into each wound, jiggling the blade from side to side to tear the puckering skin wider.
That done, it was time to wipe the place down. He pulled out a handkerchief and noticed he'd got blood on it, probably from the gloves he hadn't taken off yet. He opened the handkerchief and refolded it to hide the blood away, then he passed it over all the usual surfaces that the white-coated boys would dust for fingerprints.
He folded the clasp knife and put it back in his pocket with the handkerchief. He took a last look around the room and then at sweet Emma's body on the divan where the cleaning staff would find it in the morning.
He opened the door, listening out for movement in the hallway beyond. There was none. Muted sounds of schtupping from one or two of the rooms, but that was to be expected in a place like this where Emma and other beinls took their 'suitors'. The hallway itself was clear.
He turned off the light and left the room, pulling the door to with a click. He left the key inside, the door unlocked, and took off his gloves as he padded down the back stairs to the fire exit and out into the street in the direction of his house and the wife who was waiting there for him.
Düsseldorf, Saturday, 24th May 1930
2.22 pm
1
High pitched, like a yapping lap dog, a woman started reading aloud. I recognised the story from the late morning edition.
Can there be any doubt that this girl has been taken by the infamous Ripper? Does this mass-murderer have supernatural powers to have eluded the efforts of Düsseldorf and Berlin Kripo for so long? How, in this age of the production line automobile and the Graf Zeppelin, of telephones and transatlantic telegram, of wireless radio and cinemas in every conurbation, can such a fiend exist? This is not the slums of Whitechapel forty years ago. Nor is it the wilds of Transylvania. One is tempted to say this must be some travelling rogue of Roma blood, or some other maniac at the fringes of civilised society. Indeed, so great are the crimes, and the fear inspired by them, it is almost as though Vlad Tepes himself has risen from his sarcophagus to terrorise our town. This Ripper, this Vampire, must be caught.
It sounded no less hysterical the second time around, in both senses of the word. My coffee tasted of ash. I let the cup clatter down on the table and I laughed, throat raw with cigar smoke and lack of sleep. Raw like the pulse in my left eye, the grit floating across my vision every time I went back to staring at the Church of St Rochus across the traffic-filled square.
I glanced at my watch instead. Five minutes to go. If Peter Kürten turned up at the church as promised, that is. If he turned out to be the Ripper – as he claimed – and not just a common rapist with delusions. And barring any intervention from the good Inspector Ritter, officious arschloch that he was. All I needed was for him to turn up and ruin this arrest. Granted, it was his case and not mine, but this was my lead. Besides which, a girl's life was at stake. We didn't have time for personal squabbles over this one.
There was no way Ritter could've heard about this meeting though. Well, not unless Sergeant Schütz had
raided my desk back at the precinct house after Kürten's wife had gone. Goddamned klepto-careerist muschi at the best of times, that Schützie. It would be just like him to go digging around and then try to brown-nose his way into Ritter's affections with my interview notes. I shouldn't have left them in that drawer. It was going to bother me, the threat of Ritter blundering in.
'Excuse me?' The lap dog spoke, this time with the hint of a warning growl. Oh yes, that was right. I'd laughed at her, hadn't I, or at least at the story she'd been reading.
I turned my head in the direction of her voice. She turned out to be a woman with a creased brow sitting behind me at a dark polished table just like mine, except that her table wasn't as far out on the pavement. She held her newspaper close to her body, black earrings swaying in time to the movement of her head. The earrings were jet, onyx, something like that, heirloom quality. They went with the fur-trimmed hat, the forty or so years she wore in the lines on her face. Next to her sat a white-haired older woman dressed in a fur-lined brown coat. What I was looking like I didn't want to guess, though there'd be some purple flesh under my brown eyes and a dark day's stubble on my chin.
I drowned my smoking cigar stub in the coffee I couldn't finish. My gut bubbled and stomach acid lashed the back of my throat.
'Responsible journalism, eh?' I said. 'Where'd they get that vampire rubbish from?'
The woman who'd spoken to me blushed and set her mouth in a thin line.
'It says he drinks his victims' blood,' she said, stabbing a finger at the page.
I wanted to laugh again. 'Well, then it must be true.' I turned back to the church tower dominating the square and I tried to ignore the gigantic Christ on the cross suspended from the stonework. What was it about Catholics that drew them to the suffering? The church sprawled out behind the tower in a succession of domes in the old Roman style, despite the building being just thirty years old. Behind me, the women mumbled to each other, something I didn't catch.
Another check on the time. Two minutes to go and still Kürten hadn't turned up. Leastwise, he wasn't waiting outside the church door and I hadn't seen him go in. Maybe he'd changed his mind, or he'd never intended to give himself up at all. A hot needle of pain jabbed at my bowels and I rubbed at the belly scar from where the regimental surgeons had pulled shrapnel out of my intestines back in March of '18. They'd had to take some of my insides out too and sometimes – like now – I felt the loss.
A yawn shook through me and I groaned through clenched teeth, stretching the tension out of tender shoulders and trying to take my mind off the gut burn. The paper rustled behind me:
We can only take solace in the wisdom of Chief Inspector Gennat of Berlin Kripo, who is, after all, one of Europe's foremost experts on the mind of the mass murderer. We remember his words in November when he joined the case and described the London Ripper as a mere beginner compared with his Düsseldorf disciple, and when he added that no such case has been known hitherto in the whole of criminology. This is a sobering message. Yet if we accept it as true then we can take DCI Gennat's other comments as such also, that he and his men are even now searching for what he called “the one mistake every criminal makes in the course of his career, and which in the end is bound to lead to his capture”. We hope and pray that this Vampire makes his mistake sooner rather than later, before the blood of innocent little Gertrude Albermann is spilled too.
'Albermann?' I asked the woman, scraping my chair legs on the pavement to get her to look up from her reading.
She hesitated before clearing her throat: 'The name of the missing girl.' She cast her eyes down at the paper, that blush of hers gathering in the hollows of her cheeks.
I covered my head with the sweat-stained homburg I'd been resting on my knee. 'You think this vampire drank her blood too?'
She covered her mouth with a gloved hand. Her white-haired companion hissed something about manners. Ah, bad manners, a true crime against society. Never mind the abduction and possible murder of a five-year-old girl. No, never mind small matters like that.
I smiled and touched my hat brim, got to my feet. I dropped a pile of coins next to my cup and struck out across the square.
Of course I'd known the name of the Albermann child: I'd read the same story two hours earlier. I was about to meet the man who might have abducted her.
***
I scanned the street in front of the church door three times to be sure, but no one was there who matched the description I'd been given. I took a deep breath and pushed my way inside.
Sunlight filled the church, diffused and softened through two rows of tinted windows. Sweet spices hung on the still air. The door banged shut and a man hunching in the nearest chair turned and tutted. I tracked his gaze to the top of my head and removed my hat.
A choir of voices floated above the rumble of organ accompaniment. Deeper voices, then higher, then both together for several bars. I wasn't familiar with how and when Catholics prayed so I scanned the service times listed in the vestibule. The Eucharist should have finished by now, and there were no further services scheduled until after five pm. Must've been choir practice. I recognised the tune, but not its title or the composer. The music smothered the sounds of street traffic from outside, but only the way that smog smothers an industrial town. The car engines and horse hooves were still there underneath, nagging at my senses.
I walked between varnished pews and marble columns to the pulpit. Halfway up the walls, marble and gilt gave way to black brick that went the rest of the way to the domed ceiling and swallowed what natural light made it up there. I circled the nave, passing open chapels and a cluster of curtained confessional booths. No sign of him among the loners or small groups huddled in prayer; my stomach muscles cramped, drawing a gasp through my clenched teeth. Maybe Kürten and his wife knew nothing about the missing child and they'd just been playing me for a fool.
As I was about to come full circle to the tower where I'd come in, I glanced into the last chapel. Through the widely-spaced bars, a man knelt at an iron frame of small votive candles arranged before a solid marble altar. He touched a match to a candle wick, blew out the flame and dropped the smoking match onto a mound of at least a dozen others. His hair shone like oiled gold where the light caught it. He matched the victim's description of Kürten, from the neat parting combed into the hair to the bland symmetry of his facial features and the pencil-line moustache. I entered the chapel and stood behind him.
'Are those for all the people you say you've killed?' I said, nodding at the spent matches.
He turned to me. His eyes were supposed to be blue, but there they reflected the wine-bottle green of the chapel windows. He smiled and gestured at the stock of unlit candles. 'I fear there are not enough here for all of them,' he said.
He got to his feet and brushed dust from the creases in his dark suit. Behind him, a splash of red drew my eye: a fire bucket filled with sand huddled next to the altar.
'You got my wife's message, then,' he said. 'I was beginning to wonder.'
I'd got the message all right. The woman who'd delivered it had been a shivering mess of smudged eye make up and traces of snot gumming her upper lip by the time she'd unburdened herself in my office. And she hadn't been a looker to start with.
I stepped forward, ID in hand. 'Peter Kürten, I'm arresting you on suspicion of the rape of Maria Butlies on the evening of Wednesday the 14th May.'
'For a rape?' He giggled. The sound bounced off the walls and I was glad of the choir for cover.
Despite Frau Kürten's statement, I had a hard time believing this was the Ripper. The damn woman had only been repeating what her husband had told her, after all, when he'd confessed to her. She might have felt duty bound to believe him but I didn't.
He raised an eyebrow. 'You're alone?'
I didn't respond.
'No pistol?' he said. 'No hand cuffs? You can't think me much of a threat.'
'Do you intend to be?' I said. In truth, I was annoyed that I'
d left my equipment satchel at my apartment. Along with my diverse powders, plates and test tubes, the satchel held Maria Butlies' statement, a letter she'd written to a friend describing her rape, my set of cuffs, and a pair of blood-caked scissors I'd picked up while searching Kürten's home.
'Mind if I see that?' Kürten held his hand out for my ID. I came closer but kept hold of the document as he read it. 'Thomas Klein?' The words came out as a breathless whisper. His sea-green eyes moistened. He clasped his hands together and glanced past the altar to the glittering mosaic of some bearded saint on the wall behind it. 'Oh this is too good! You are a cousin? Her brother, perhaps? Christine was my first, you know.'
I wanted to ask who Christine was but I knew better than to interrupt.
He grabbed my shoulder. There was a scar on his right cheek. None of the Ripper's surviving victims had mentioned that, but then it was so small I'd noticed it only now, up close. It probably wasn't the first thing a girl recalled about being raped or stabbed. The scar didn't put him out of the running.
'Her blood...it...gurgled, and dripped on the mattress. Spattered my hand.'
He showed me the hand, splaying the fingers for me.
'My God, she must have been only – what? – ten years old at the time. She bit my hand when I throttled her, the little minx.' He smiled at the memory and closed his eyes. He moved his hand from my shoulder and aped the act of throttling, his cheeks darkening. A lock of thick hair came loose from its pomade and dangled over his creased forehead, nostrils flaring above his thin moustache. 'So when she stopped struggling I penetrated her. Her genitals, I mean. With my fingers, you understand?'
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