The man at my side drew back, his baby blues full of indignation rather than fear. No, not fear, never fear, not for this one.
'Tell them to stay back!' he commanded.
I turned. The Schupo cordon behind us closed in, bullet hoses held chest high. Of course, from where they'd been standing they couldn't see what I could. I used the shovel to push myself up and waved at the Schupo to keep their distance. It was enough. They shrank back to the edge of the meadow. It was just me and the Ripper, the Ripper and me, for this part of the proceedings. Kürten's blond hair had dried and paled and knotted in the breeze. It was the only real hint of untidiness in his appearance since his arrest. Ever the dapper man about town. He was talking, presumably to me, though I caught only some of his words:
'She was so trusting. Put her arms round my neck when I carried her. Told me all about her family. I wish...sometimes, I wish...'
The girl – Gertrude, her name was Gertrude damn it, and I wasn't going to depersonalise her in death – lay on her front. Although the coat covered her, her bottom was poking into the air and her legs were parted. Five years old, and this man – this excuse of a man justifying himself to me – hadn't just killed her, he'd raped her first.
My heart gave a tug. I thought of my own darling Lilli, snuggling safe and loved in a warm cot, face shining with the happiness she'd never had the chance to know. Prickling salt water stung my eyes. My stomach muscles cramped up so tightly that I had to double up, and I flung a hand across my belly to try and soothe away the pain.
My knuckles were white where I gripped the shovel's handle. I imagined sinking its blade into Kürten's face, cracking open his skull and releasing the evil that dwelt within. Maybe then the pain would go away.
The Ripper smiled at me. 'You want to kill me,' he said. It wasn't a question.
I said nothing. What could I say? The wind cooled the tear tracks on my cheeks and ruffled the bandage on my face.
Finally, I cleared my throat. 'She's not buried,' I said, nodding at the shovel. 'Why did you tell me to bring this?'
'You'll see.' The Ripper's smile deepened as he crooked a finger and beckoned me to follow him still further into hell.
'Wait!' I called.
He stopped and turned back, a puzzled look on his face. I made it to my feet and handed him the shovel.
'Not yet,' I told him.
I knelt beside the girl's body and reached for my satchel. Which wasn't there, of course. Curse Ritter, I'd still not got it back. Of course, my rubber gloves and powder had been inside. I didn't want to contaminate the body but I was first officer on the scene. Duty decreed I file a report on this. I flexed my fingers and gritted my teeth against the stabbing in my gut.
'Do you still have your handkerchief?' I asked Kürten.
He fumbled at his breast pocket but he couldn't get a grip on the material because the handcuffs got in the way. I rose and pulled out the white cotton square for him as he gave a shrug and a smile. I examined the material for contaminants such as blood or phlegm and found none, then I returned to the body. I wrapped the handkerchief around my hand and pulled the coat aside as far as I could without moving the limbs.
The coat caught on something. I pulled harder and it came loose; it had been stuck to the girl's back with dried blood. The blood spread from her left side to her lower back. That told me Kürten had moved her to her current position some time after death.
'It was raining that night,' Kürten said.
Under the green coat, the girl's white knickers were exposed and torn and her buttocks were bared.
'You molested her?' I said over my shoulder.
Kürten cleared his throat. No words came. I looked back at him. He stood with his feet apart and both hands stretched out in front of his face, eyes wide, mouth stretched into a grin.
'I stabbed her with my scissors and I strangled her,' he said. 'With this hand,' his left-hand fingers flexed, 'I kept hold of her throat, while with this one,' his right hand wriggled, 'I felt the...the vagina.' He coughed. He cleared his throat. 'I cleaned them. I cleaned them on the wet grass. The rain...'
I leaned over the girl's head and pushed aside some of her hair. Flies buzzed around us. No maggots had hatched on her yet, so she hadn't been there long. The hair on her crown had dried in the breeze, though around her face it was still damp. The flies settled back on her and I tried to wave them away. Two stab wounds to the left temple. A brown crust the rain hadn't washed off still clung from temple to chin. Her face was red with congestion. Congestion sometimes came from the way a body lay after death, but for that to work in this case she'd have been lying on her front when she bled out. The blood patches I could see told me she'd bled out on her back and been moved to her current position afterwards. That meant this congestion had been the result of throttling.
I couldn't get a look at the girl's throat to check for bruises without moving her. I couldn't do that until someone had sketched her position or called out a photographer. I stood up. I could leave the rest to Ritter and the autopsy.
I crossed to Kürten and took the shovel from him.
'Where next?' I said.
He led, I followed. He stopped at the edge of the woods that bordered the meadow. Schupomen surrounded us, some lurking in the meadow, some in the trees. Ritter hadn't kept pace. He and Vogel and the other plainclothesmen were hung up with Albermann's corpse.
Kürten scratched his head.
'Somewhere round here,' he was saying to himself. Then, to me, he added, 'We're looking for a rock, a large flat one. It's poking up through the earth somewhere...around here.'
He took a few paces into the woods. The Schupo guys in the trees took the same number of paces back. Kürten emerged from the tree line, counting his steps like a child playing at Treasure Island.
When he stopped, I handed him the shovel.
'So, dig around a little,' I said.
He raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. He plucked at his lapels and shook his head. The suit was getting creased and his shoes were caked in mud. So were mine.
'How many people are buried out here?' I said.
He laughed.
'Who are we going to find?' I said. 'Another child?'
'I'm not a monster, Thomas,' he hissed, looking around. 'I'm a man with normal appetites, that's all. Normal appetites denied too long.' He jabbed a finger down at the ground, took a couple of breaths and then ran a hand through his hair. That is, he tried to, but the cuffs didn't make it an easy operation. He mussed up as much as he smoothed down.
'So?' I said. 'Who is it? Who have you buried out here, Peter?'
'My dear chap, I really don't know. She didn't tell me her name and I didn't ask.' He unbuttoned his jacket. 'Tell me, do you still have any of those cigars?'
I ignored him and dug into the loam. The grass roots knotted the wet soil into lumps and made it hard to break through.
'Can you pass me my handkerchief then?' he said, pointing to the scrap of material I still had in my hand. 'I need to blow my nose.'
I still didn't answer.
'Give me my handkerchief or I'll walk away,' he shouted.
'Go ahead,' I told him. I nodded at the Schupo. 'See how far you get before they riddle you with bullets.'
He smiled. Giggled, even. 'They wouldn't.'
'And why not?' I said. 'We've found Albermann. You've given us more than enough now to be sure of who you are. The public would just love to read of your violent death.' I pointed at the blue coats surrounding us. 'And they'd just love to be the cause of it.'
The breeze picked up. It had a cold edge to it. The clouds hovered fat and dark overhead. If we were going to find something I wanted it to be before the weather broke.
Kürten wiped his nose on his shirt cuffs. He watched me slam the shovel into the earth a couple of times. Voices drifted to me on the wind and I looked back in the direction of the factory. Ritter and Vogel had come up to the Schupo cordon and were talking to the squad sergeant.
'You don't like him, do you?' Kürten said. He nodded at Ritter.
I shovelled more clay earth out of the hole. This far down, it was more tightly packed.
'Come on,' Kürten said, 'you can tell me. I'm a good listener.'
'Yeah, I'll bet.' I kept shovelling, trying to ignore the fact I felt closer to this bastard than to any of my so-called colleagues. After all, Kürten was responsible for my return to police headquarters. He didn't care about suspected Communist sympathies and more importantly, he didn't like Ritter either. I had to keep telling myself that he'd killed the girl, not Ritter; Ritter had just made it easier for him, he hadn't done the deed.
'Did you love your cousin?'
'What?' I didn't pause in my work. My back ached with every stroke now. I didn't want to stop for fear I might not have the will to start again.
'She died beautifully, you know.'
I was grunting, sweat running down my back and making my shirt stick.
'Aren't you going to ask me why I did it?' Kürten said.
'Did what?'
'All these...things I did. The murders. The rapes. You know...'
With that, I did pause. I stabbed the shovel into the earth and leaned on it. My arms shook, my shock trooper days feeling a long way off. Didn't I want to ask why? Didn't I want to know? The man in handcuffs wiped his running nose on his jacket sleeves and I knew there was nothing to know.
'There's no answer you can give me that I would understand,' I said.
I hefted the shovel, sending a hot wave of pain down my spine. I pushed down into the loam. The blade struck something hard and slid off.
Good Christ, had I hit bone? Searing stomach acid rose to the back of my throat. I choked it down.
I shook creases out of the handkerchief I was holding and smoothed it between my palms. I got down on my knees. I pushed soil away from the misshapen lump, dug beneath it with my hand and pulled upwards. The bone came loose and I fell backwards.
The bone turned out not to be a bone at all, but a large flat rock.
'This the rock you were talking about, Peter?' I asked him.
He grinned as he nodded.
'So we're close now, yes?'
The nearest Schupo crept forward. A shout from Vogel brought them up, but they didn't retreat. Kürten didn't notice their approach, or affected not to. The hole in the ground transfixed him.
I went at the ground with the shovel once more. The adrenaline in my blood from the digging was beginning to ease the back pain. I dug out two more spadefuls before the shovel hit another rock.
'Gott in Himmel, Peter,' I said, 'there's a lot of rocks in this meadow. No wonder they don't plough it.'
With bare fingers I gripped the rock and pulled. This one felt like it was covered in soft plant roots or decomposing grass. It came out with ease, plopping out of the loam, my fingers tangled in the roots. It was light for a rock. The surface texture on the other side was smooth, slippery, like it was coated in wax. A chunk of the wax flapped loosely around a narrow base as I brushed at the earth. I turned the rock around.
Two sunken eyelids met my gaze. Something black and shiny crawled from under the left eyelid on lots of legs. I dropped the head in the hole, scrabbled out and retched in the long grass, Kürten laughing all the while.
This time when the blue coats rushed towards us I didn't try to stop them.
7
Someone was hanging around outside my apartment building when I got back from Mühlenstrasse at seven pm.
He was wearing a shapeless brown overcoat and a workman's cap against the chill evening. He was smoking a pipe, clasping the end between teeth that reflected the street light through his dark beard. He looked familiar. He saw me and waved.
'Hello Tom,' he said, shoving himself off the lamp post he'd been leaning on. The voice did it.
'What can I do for you, Du Pont?' I asked.
'More a case of what I can do for you, I'd have thought.'
I wasn't too interested in Du Pont's favours. It was one of said favours that had got me into trouble over my non-existent Red Front contacts all those months ago, and right after the Prussian interior ministry had issued a blanket ban on all Red Front activities. All the excuse Ritter had ever needed to start spreading rumours.
'Still talking in riddles,' I said. 'Whatever it is, can't you find someone else to deal with it? I've been burned enough handling your information.'
Du Pont squinted at me. 'What the hell happened to your face?'
I unlocked the front door, crossed to the mailboxes on the blue-and-white tiled wall. Du Pont followed me into the foyer. I unlocked my mailbox. It was empty.
'Popular as ever I see,' Du Pont said. He held the front door open and tapped out his pipe. Then he put the pipe in his hip pocket and let the door swing shut.
I ignored him and tramped up the wooden stairs opposite the mailboxes. The stairs creaked under my weight. Du Pont followed me up, the two of us creating a chorus of off-tempo creaks and echoes.
'Hey,' Du Pont said, 'don't think I'm not grateful for what you did for me. There's not everybody would stick their neck out for an informant the way you did. You know, a bombing –'
'What the hell do you want, Du Pont?'
We'd reached the top of the stairwell. To my right was the WC. At the end of the landing, beyond Effi Schneider's closed door, was my room.
'That's what I been trying to tell you, Tom,' Du Pont said. 'I'm looking to pay you back for protecting me the way you did.' He was a chubby man underneath his heavy proletarian clothes and he was out of breath from climbing the stairs.
I walked along the landing to my room, hoping Effi might be in so I could ditch this guy. Effi's apartment remained quiet as we walked by.
'You know, if you dropped all the faux proletarian duds you might be able to make it up and down stairs that bit easier,' I told Du Pont.
'Your concern touches me,' he said, removing his cap.
I put my key in the lock and the door swung open without my needing to unlock it. Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that. Seemed like Effi had too. The door crashed into the bedstead. I turned on the light and the bulb threw restless shadows around the room. I couldn't face tidying the mess, but if I didn't do it now then maybe I never would.
'Ritter still taking it out on you?' Du Pont said. He tugged my arm. I shrugged him off. 'Let me take you out for a beer, Tom. You need it. I mean, look at you. Look at all this.'
I entered the room and started picking out dirty clothes, throwing them onto the bed.
'As you can see,' I said, 'I've a few chores to do. I don't have time for your nonsense. I'm tired as it is. I've had a hell of a day.'
'Yes, up at Papendell, right?' Du Pont said.
I paused with my arms full of clothes.
'What did you say?'
Du Pont grinned. 'You heard me.'
'How did you know about that?'
'Let me buy you a beer and I'll tell you.'
8
The bar was dark and warm, a welcome relief from the cool breeze sweeping the streets. Hints of cooking fat and stale beer permeated my swollen sinuses. We found a table in a corner away from the draught at the door. Someone came to take our order and Du Pont asked for a couple of pilsners.
We made small talk until the beer arrived. That is, Du Pont made small talk. My mind kept wandering until I was seeing torn panties and blood-caked little faces everywhere. And Ritter, leaning back in the interview room needling me over withholding evidence when all he'd had to do was let me at Kürten from the start and then at least we could have found the girl earlier. At least that.
Du Pont grabbed my right arm. I glared at him but he was looking at me with concern. Damn guts playing up again; must've shown on my face.
'So come on Tom,' he said, 'what did happen to your ugly mug? Is it anything to do with this St Rochus church arrest yesterday?'
'Christ, Du Pont, is there anything you don't know?' I frowned and shrugged him off. No way was he getting anything out of me today, not after what had happened.
'You know, I often ask myself the same question. Great reporter as I am, I feel kinda sad for everyone else that I'm so far ahead of the game.'
I snorted. He was doing a good job of being the right guy to take my anger out on.
'Not forgetting, of course, that without you I probably wouldn't even be around any more,' he said.
The beers arrived and Du Pont drank half of his down. I couldn't face mine. I felt sick, had done ever since Vogel had driven me back to Mühlenstrasse from the Papendell meadows.
'How did you know I was in Papendell?' I said.
Du Pont put down his glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
'Elementary, my dear Watson. First, the mud on your shoes is characteristic of the light loamy earth we get up there in the meadows this time of year.'
He paused to take another drink. I waited. He took longer over his drink than was strictly necessary and after a few seconds it occurred to me he was waiting for me to respond. I sipped my beer instead. He wanted something, so let him work for it.
'There's also this,' Du Pont said. He reached into an inside pocket of his coat – which he was still wearing despite the heat, though he'd unbuttoned it at least – and pulled out an envelope. He passed it to me.
The envelope was addressed to the editor at the Volksstimme and postmarked Düsseldorf, 24.5.30. Inside was a folded piece of thick, waxed paper. I pulled out the paper and smoothed it flat. It was covered in scribbles and sketches.
I turned it around and looked at it from several angles before I worked out it wasn't sketches so much as a single sketch, a map. At the top was a wavy line drawn in pencil. Above the line the word woods appeared six times. Below the line was the word field scribbled twice. Between the second field and the wavy line above it was an x. Below that the word meadow was written three times above a thin double-line which seemed to represent the Papendell road and bisected the map from bottom left to top right. At the bottom left end of the pencil road were the words Murder at Papendell. Bottom right of the paper was another squiggly line surrounded with more cramped writing. I had to tip the paper to catch more lamp light so I could make out what was written there. The first part said, In the place marked with a cross a corpse lies buried. Under the squiggle it read, The body of the missing Gertrude Albermann lies beside the wall of Haniel and Lueg.
The Killing Of Emma Gross Page 6