The Killing Of Emma Gross

by Damien Seaman

  Du Pont was grinning, the idiot.

  'You realise you've just got me to smear my prints all over this evidence?' I said.

  He waved away my protest. 'You know how many people have handled that at the office?' He squinted at me like he'd just thought of something else. 'Or perhaps what bothers you is the idea that the police lab might find your prints on there?'

  He took the letter from me and rubbed at it with a tissue he'd pulled from his pocket. I was too tired to think of stopping him. Besides which, he was right. If I insisted he left it for lab testing and the lab boys found one or more of my latents, I'd have the devil of a time explaining that one to Gennat.

  'You know I can't talk to you about the case,' I said. I could see now where all this had been leading.

  'I don't need to talk to you about this.' He put the folded sketch map back in the envelope and waved it at me. 'This is self-explanatory. Consider my showing you it more of a heads-up.'

  'You're going to publish the letter?'

  'How could we not?'

  'You'll cause out-and-out panic. Or anger. We haven't filed charges yet. The public might doubt whether we got the right man.'

  'Tom, the anger is already there, due to Düsseldorf Kripo's piss-poor handling of the Ripper case thus far.'

  'How does printing an inflammatory letter help the public good? And anyway why haven't you published it already? You must have received it yesterday.'

  'We didn't get around to opening it until the Saturday edition had gone out.' He paused. 'Do you know that under Comrades Lenin and Stalin the Soviets have come close to eradicating murder altogether?'

  'Oh please.' I took a mouthful of beer. I couldn't feel any sicker, so bugger it.

  'No, it's true. Under Communism, with more equitable distribution of wealth, there is no need to murder. Avarice and greed are things of the past. There you see mankind shed of the dehumanising effects of capitalism.'

  I belched. My stomach ached, and the belch hadn't helped any. That beer wasn't sitting right. Nor was Du Pont, of course. Perhaps he was the problem.

  'I see you haven't disputed the letter's contents,' he said.

  'I thought you weren't going to pump me for information about that?'

  He held up his hands. 'All right, all right. That's true. Let's not get all riled up over nothing. I want to talk to you about something else. The pattern of the Ripper's crimes.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'It's the Albermann child's death that's the key, you see.'

  'The key to what?' I was close to letting rip; my hand was curling into a fist.

  'The key to a grave injustice.' He spoke over my groans of protest. 'No, Tom, not just the department's general systemic incompetence. I'm talking about a deliberate perversion of justice, for nothing more than convenience. And with dire consequences. Little Gertrude's murder for one.'

  I stood up to leave. I riffled through my pocket for some cash. I didn't want this man paying for my drinks if all he was going to do was slander the department and implicate me along with it, or use the girl to try and get a story.

  'It's Ritter,' Du Pont said.

  I ceased riffling. 'What's Ritter?'

  'This injustice I'm talking about. Ritter is the one responsible.'

  I sat back down and waved away the waiter who'd come over to see what we wanted. Maybe Du Pont had something.

  'Yeah,' he said, 'I thought that would get your interest. You heard of Johann Stausberg?'

  I nodded. Not a case I'd had anything to do with, but his arrest and subsequent trial had hogged the headlines for weeks during the previous spring.

  Du Pont went on with his lecture anyway. 'On the 9th February last year they found the body of that eight-year-old girl Rosa Ohliger. You remember that?'

  'Hard to forget.'

  'Right. Strangled then stabbed to death. Body burned with kerosene, right?'

  I sipped more beer. Du Pont pulled out a tobacco pouch and filled his pipe as he talked.

  'Then on the 13th February they found the corpse of Rudolph Scheer. Grabbed round the neck and stabbed to death. Both in the Flingern district, both attacked at night, both stabbed numerous times and both strangled.'

  Du Pont gestured with his pipe to ask if the smoke would bother me. I shook my head and pulled out a cigar. A smoke might help settle my stomach. Du Pont lit his pipe and then struck a second match for me.

  'Okay, the third one was a prostitute killed at the end of February, yes?' I said through a cloud of my own cigar smoke. 'And Johann Stausberg was the guy the department put away for all three killings. That's where you're going with this?'

  Du Pont nodded and drank more beer between pipe puffs.

  'But Stausberg wasn't arrested until months later,' I said.

  Du Pont nodded. 'April, to be exact. He tried to strangle two young women with a rope. They survived to testify. Witnesses were involved. Open and shut. Then Ritter intervened and decided the strangling method was similar enough for him to try and close out the Ohliger and Gross murders, for which he'd been lead investigator on the relevant murder commissions.'

  'Stausberg confessed to Rudolph Scheer's murder as well as Ohliger and Gross, if I recall.'

  Du Pont snorted. 'Scheer wasn't Ritter's case. That was just an added extra for him. As you no doubt also recall, Stausberg, besides being an epileptic with a temper and memory loss problems, is, and was, a half wit. I don't imagine it's very difficult for an experienced interrogator to get someone like that to confess to anything.'

  So what? Ritter pushed a confession to clear his in tray? Nothing to get excited about yet. Du Pont had more though, I knew he did.

  'No comment,' I said.

  'Fair enough.' Du Pont grabbed my arm again. 'But try this. Four months after Stausberg was arrested and put away in Grafenberg Asylum, two young girls, foster sisters, were killed in Flehe. You want to guess how?' He pointed at me, expecting an answer.

  'Strangled and stabbed?'

  He wagged his pointing finger. 'Right. And the afternoon of the very same Sunday on which the two girls are found, what should happen?'

  Guessing games weren't my thing, but he'd got me by the nose. 'Another murder?'

  'Rape and attempted murder. Gertrude Schulte, twenty-six-year old domestic servant – '

  'What, no vital statistics?'

  He ignored me. 'It was her afternoon off. She accepted the offer of a stranger to escort her to the outdoor market at Neuss. He was a pleasant enough looking chap, this man, name of Fritz Baumgart, only when they got to a meadow within hailing distance of the market place, this Baumgart forced Schulte to the ground and tried to get her panties off. When she resisted, he stabbed her. Thirteen times. She survived to give a description of her attacker. You know what Baumgart looked like?'

  'I've a feeling I'm about to find out.'

  'I've a feeling you already know. Neat blond hair, oiled, with a parting, a pencil-line moustache and a smart suit. Blue eyes and a tooth missing, here.' Du Pont bared his small, even teeth and pointed to his right upper jaw. 'Sound like anyone we know?'

  'Kürten.' I flicked ash into the glass ashtray between us on the table. If Du Pont was right, then Ritter's forced confession had led to the prosecution of the wrong man and allowed Kürten to carry on killing. 'What's your point?'

  'You know what my point is. I can see you've made the connection.'

  'There's no proof linking Kürten to the murders that this Stausberg is supposed to've done. Not in what you've told me, anyway.'

  'Just tell me one thing,' Du Pont said, 'and I'll leave you alone. How did the Albermann child die? Was she strangled and then stabbed?'

  I blew cigar smoke at the ceiling and I drank some beer.

  'Before I say anything,' I said, 'are you going to hand that letter to the department after you publish tomorrow?'

  Du Pont rolled his eyes. ‘Was she killed the same way?'

  Finally, I nodded and said, 'You know I can't tell you anything a
bout an ongoing investigation.'

  He smiled and slapped my shoulder. 'That's all I needed to know,' he said.

  He left me alone in the bar and it was ten minutes before I realised what an operator he was. Gennat hadn't released Kürten's name to the press yet, and Du Pont had got it out of me without my even noticing. He hadn't known Baumgart's real name, he'd just fed me Baumgart's description with the assumption – correct, as it proved – that if it matched the suspect I'd think he knew that suspect's name. Or maybe, and I was clutching here, maybe he'd got the name already from one of his other sources, and had just needed me to confirm it. Whichever way it was, I was in for a night of heavy indigestion. The ache in my gut got worse.

  9

  My night time tummy ache was just the beginning.

  KILLER REVEALS SITE OF LATEST MURDERS,

  TAUNTS POLICE INCOMPETENCE

  was the scoop that took up pages one, two and three of the Monday morning edition of Volksstimme, complete with a fuzzy reproduction of Kürten's sketch map and a lot of padding. My guest appearance came on page 5:

  HERO COP NAMES KILLER,

  BELIEVES JOHANN STAUSBERG INNOCENT OF MURDER

  When even a hero is scared to speak out on wrongdoing within the police department, the people know something is rotten in Düsseldorf Kripo.

  When that hero is Detective Thomas Klein, who, over the weekend, arrested the man police are naming as the mass-murdering Düsseldorf Ripper, the people know our legal system is corrupt indeed. And when colleagues can christen such a man 'Doubting Thomas' for his courage in voicing the truth behind closed doors, well, it makes you want to hang your head in shame.

  But what truth could be so incendiary as to make a hero look over his shoulder?

  Over a beer in a neighbourhood bar, Klein glanced furtively around before revealing the identity of the man he arrested on Saturday as 47-year-old married man and Mettmannerstrasse resident Peter Kürten.

  This is the man who mailed us his letter taunting the police and public over his abduction and killing of five-year-old Gertude Albermann last Friday night.

  Yet, unbelievably, the death of poor Gertude has brought to light an even more sinister secret.

  'It's her death that established the pattern,' Klein told me, his eyes haunted with the prospect of being overheard and reported to his superiors.

  'She was killed by a combination of strangling and stabbing, just as in the cases of Rosa Ohliger, Rudolph Scheer and Emma Gross back in February of last year. The method of killing is the same, but there's also the fact that Rosa Ohliger was eight. Even the most hardened killer will still balk at the prospect of murdering a child, so we have to consider the possibility that these cases are not separate, as we previously thought.'

  The people of Düsseldorf are fortunate to have this brave champion of truth and enemy of capitalist corruption to speak for them. Unfortunately, few others in the police department share these traits with Detective 'Doubting Thomas' Klein.

  For, as Klein went on to tell me, 'The problem is, many of those involved in the Ripper case now were involved in the previous murders, and they're not going to be keen to admit what a mess they made of things last year.'

  Indeed, the people might even ask if the man arrested Saturday was really the Ripper, as claimed.

  For readers and other comrades with long memories will recall the similar fanfare that attended the arrest of poor Johann Stausberg. Police arrested this gentle giant and charged him with the aforementioned murders of Ohliger, Scheer, and Gross in April last year.

  It was only by the narrowest of margins that Stausberg was judged mentally incapable of standing trial under paragraph fifty-one of the German criminal code, and sentenced instead to a term of enforced treatment at Grafenberg Mental Asylum...

  Gennat tore the newspaper from my hand. He shook it in my face and hurled it at Vogel. Half the pages fluttered to the floor. Vogel stooped to pick them up as Gennat kicked over a couple of chairs.

  'Why is there no space in this room!' he thundered.

  No one answered him.

  Ritter turned around from tacking a photograph of a set of house keys to the cork board. Blow ups of the unknown vic filled the space to one side of the city wall map, pics of Albermann the other. Two new red pins on the map marked the Papendell crime scenes.

  A man I didn't know sat in the chair behind Gennat's desk. The man unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket and put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was middle-aged with a paunch and brilliantined blond hair surrounding a patch of shiny scalp at his crown. He'd been sitting there when I'd arrived with Vogel.

  Gennat reared back at me, nostrils flaring. Coffee stained his jacket.

  I needed to get my retaliation in first.

  'He told me he wanted to show me the letter, that was all.'

  'What were you doing even talking to him in the first place?' Gennat shouted.

  'I told you we couldn't trust him,' Ritter said, nodding at me before turning back to his photographs. 'Once a Commie bastard...' I wanted to take his little red pins and nail him to the goddamned cork board. If there was any truth to Du Pont's accusations, I wanted to do a lot worse, because it meant Ritter was responsible for Albermann's death after all.

  Gennat loosened his tie and crossed to the window. He burped. 'Damned coffee.' He leaned on the table beneath the window with its typewriter and coffee cups. He slammed his palm down and the whole table rattled. One of the cups fell to the floor. The handle smashed off and skittered away.

  'Damn it man!' He whirled round to face me again. I stood at attention, pulling my shoulders back as far as they'd go. 'You told him Kürten's name!' The veins in Gennat's neck stood out thick and blue. 'Give me one good reason why I shouldn't have you drummed out of the department for this.'

  Because you're a goddamned Berliner and don't have the authority? 'Because you need me to talk to Kürten again.'

  'Do I? And why would I let you do that? What's to stop you leaking what he says to the entire bloody press corps?'

  I took a gamble based on Gennat's public persona, guessing it was an inflated version of the kind of man he wanted to be: 'You want the case cleared up as soon as possible, all the questions answered. Because that's the kind of investigation you like to run.'

  'You'll need more than flattery to get out of this mess,' Gennat growled.

  'Look,' the blond man said. 'You know what these newspaper reporters can be like. Especially the Marxists. Always looking to find fault, to criticise. It's how they operate.'

  'Your point is?' Gennat said.

  'My point is how easy it is to be fooled by these people.' Who the hell was this guy? My fairy Godfather?

  Gennat pointed at me. 'He should never have spoken to the man in the first place.' He faced me. 'Did you really go for a beer with him, like it says?'

  The thing about lying, of course, is to lie as little as possible. Easier to remember the lies you've told then.

  'Yes,' I said. I hung my head and sighed.

  'Oh, now he's hanging his head and sighing,' Gennat said to the blond man. 'He'll be saying how bloody sorry he is next.'

  I swallowed down my apology.

  'I have a suggestion,' the blond man said. 'You'll have to call a press conference with the public prosecutor tomorrow anyway.'

  'Yes?' Gennat said.

  'The press are bound to ask questions about this.'

  'Yes?'

  'So put Thomas up there to tell them the truth himself. Which is that he never spoke to this man, never revealed the name, whatever you want him to deny. Won't that be penance enough?'

  It certainly would. The thought alone was enough to shake my sphincter loose. My fairy Godfather was morphing into the big bad wolf right before my eyes. I opened my mouth to say something.

  Gennat spoke over me: 'Vogel, draft a wire to Dr Scheikert. Get him down here, now.' Gennat burped again. 'And I want approval before it's sent,' he shouted at Vogel's disappearing back.

&nbs
p; I decided to remain standing. As it was, no one had invited me to sit. The blond man in the double-breasted suit was smiling at me. Did he know me? He drained the cup in his hand and put it on the desk, then leaned back and crossed his legs, took out a cigarette case and started playing with it.

  Ritter said, 'We don't need someone to come all the way from Berlin.'

  Gennat plucked an envelope from his desk. I thought at first it was the one Du Pont had shown me the night before, but this one was a different shape. Gennat brandished the envelope at Ritter. 'And how do you explain this?' he rumbled.

  'How about the fact that we've received over a hundred letters since the beginning of the month? Never mind how many we've had over the last year...'

  Gennat placed chubby fingers behind his ear. 'What was that, Ritter? Incompetence, you say?'

  Ritter rolled his eyes. Gennat crossed the room in a couple of strides, his gut sending stacked chairs squeaking across the floor boards. He clicked his fingers in Ritter's face until they were nose to nose.

  'And what do you think the papers would do if they found out our man had written to us months ago with the location of the mystery body? And that, not only had we done nothing to act on this information, we didn't even know we had it!'

  'I'm not the one leaking information to the press,' Ritter said. 'Chalk that one up to Doubting Thomas over there.' His lips twisted into something resembling a sneer.

  Gennat removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He smoothed the thin brown bristles on his upper lip.

  'We don't know for sure whether Kürten wrote that letter,' Ritter said, pointing to the envelope still in Gennat's hand.