To Clear the Air

by Mechtild Borrmann

  Later, when he comes into the kitchen after taking a shower, Brigitte has already had her breakfast.

  “Another flock of wild geese has just arrived.” He takes Brigitte’s face in his hands and kisses her on the forehead. “Nearly four thousand miles behind them. Without an engine.” He beams at her.

  “Peter, can you do some shopping today? I have to go to Düsseldorf.” She pours a mug of coffee and looks at the clock. She has tied back her thick blond hair. Nevertheless, she runs her right hand behind her ear, as if pushing back an annoying strand.

  “I think so. What do we need?” He reaches for the bread. “What are you doing in Düsseldorf?”

  She comes back to the table with a slip of paper. “Here’s a list.” She jingles the car keys in her coat pocket. “I’m going to a conference.” She kisses him on the cheek. “See you later.”

  He hears the door click shut. “On a Saturday? What kind of conference is that?” he calls after her, but she is already outside. Suspicion burrows into his mind, like a worm in an apple.

  When the telephone rings, it is already eleven o’clock. He is standing at the door to the terrace, staring unseeing into the garden. His coffee has been cold for hours. On the way to the telephone, he remembers: he agreed to take Achim Steeg’s place on call for a few hours that evening.

  Chapter 11

  He drives along the narrow asphalt road. The gray sky hangs low. In the distance, it leans even farther down and swallows up the tips of the poplars on the horizon.

  He sees the cars from afar: Joop van Oss’s classic Mercedes, two police cars, and the VW minivan from Forensics. Kurt Bongartz’s Volvo is there too.

  Van Oss comes over to him as he is getting out of his car. “Hey,” and then, “I hate this.” He shoves his hands deeper into the pockets of his red windbreaker. “I can’t handle dead people lying out in the open.” He kicks the tire of Böhm’s Mitsubishi with his toe. “They always look as if they’ve been thrown away.” He kicks the front tire again.

  Böhm takes the young Dutchman’s sleeve and pulls him away from the car. “Come on, let’s sit in your car and talk about it, okay?”

  Van Oss hesitates a moment, then grins broadly. “Ach, I’d rather not. Besides, that’s not a car, it’s a tin can with a roof.” They walk along the narrow road to the edge of the field. “Forensics found a wallet with ID in his coat. His name’s Gietmann. Werner Gietmann, sixty-eight years old, married, building contractor and farmer. The farm over there belongs to him.” Van Oss extends his arm to point out an elongated redbrick building. Light-colored new buildings spread from it on the sides and back, as if to protect it against attacks from the hinterland. “Achim is over there, talking to the wife.”

  Böhm raises his eyebrows, and long, straight grooves form across his forehead. Van Oss chews his lower lip in embarrassment.

  “Joop.” Böhm looks at him over his steel-rimmed glasses. “That should be your job.”

  “He said right away that he would do it.” Van Oss shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker. “I can’t do that kind of thing. Besides, we make a good team. Achim doesn’t like being with dead people, and I don’t like being with the relatives.” He looks tensely across the fields. “Other than that, we don’t know anything. It wasn’t a robbery, though. Gietmann had four hundred marks in his wallet.”

  They climb over the red-and-white police tape. The field’s clay soil is damp, the top layer saturated.

  “The doc doesn’t want to do anything until you’ve seen him.”

  Böhm greets the two patrolmen with handshakes. “Who found him?” he asks Van Oss.

  “A couple from the town. They were on their way to Nijmegen.”

  Böhm stops and looks at him hard. “On foot?”

  “No, in their car.”

  Böhm turns and goes back to the road.

  Van Oss stares at him in disbelief. “What now?”

  Böhm waves him over. “Joop, come over here and explain something to me.” They stand next to each other on the narrow road. “From here I can’t see that there’s something on the path. And I’m standing up. How can someone who’s passing in a car see it?”

  Van Oss nods with satisfaction. “I can explain.”

  Bongartz joins them. “Get on with it, Peter. It’s Saturday. I want to go home to my sofa.” The word sofa is lost in an attack of coughing. His round face and bald head turn red as he wheezes and gasps for breath.

  Böhm shakes hands with him. “Hi, Kurt. You’ve got it bad, I see.”

  “Yes.” Bongartz is still breathing heavily. “And if you don’t call in sick they call you in, regardless of the harm it might do.” He rummages around in his jacket pocket and finds a tissue. “That Zippe woman in dispatch, she told me straight: ‘You’re down as available, and I haven’t seen a sick note.’” He turns away and blows his nose loudly into the little white tissue. “I gave her a piece of my mind, the cheeky cow. I said, ‘Since when do I have to tell the receptionist I’m sick? And has she ever heard of exceeding her authority?’”

  Böhm wonders which of the new officers got chewed out this time.

  “They didn’t see the body, just his stick on the road.” Van Oss runs his hand through his hair.

  Böhm looks around inquiringly. “What stick?”

  “Forensics are working on it. But I can show you where it was.”

  Böhm sees the small black sign with the white number 12 at the edge of the road.

  “Come on, man. You can do that later,” Bongartz grumbles. “I mean it. I’m feeling absolutely terrible.”

  Böhm looks out across the landscape. Slowly he turns on his own axis, trying to ignore the people and cars.

  Why here? Chance or intent? Was it a coincidence that you came here, or did you come on purpose? Why this man? Chance or intent? Did Gietmann happen to be here, or did he choose to come here? Did the two of you agree to meet? Why did you leave his stick by the road? Chance or intent? Did you fail to see it? Were you in a hurry?

  He takes a deep breath and follows Bongartz.

  The track is divided into two bare ruts left by tractors and a grass-covered central strip. The dead man is lying on his right side in the leftmost rut. His head, with its thick gray hair, is resting on the strip of green. His hands have been tied behind his back with a hemp cord. His right leg is outstretched, the left bent. If he were held upright, he would be a runner in midsprint.

  His loden coat is open at the neck and has been pulled down his arms. Most of it lies bunched behind the body. Nothing but the bound hands and the pool of blood seems to hold his coat back and prevent him from running.

  “He bled to death. You don’t get such a flow of blood when someone’s already dead.” Bongartz moves among Forensics’ little numbered signs. “The arteries were skillfully cut open, but not enough. He died slowly.”

  “Slowly?” Böhm waits. He is waiting for the dead man to jump up and run away. “How slowly?”

  “Hours.” Bongartz supports his back with his hands and stands up laboriously. “Either a bungling fool at work, or a really nasty story.”

  Böhm looks at the knots binding the hands. Why was this done to you? Chance? Or did you do something to someone? Did you know him? “Do we have photos?”

  Van Oss nods. “Lembach did that first, before he did anything else.”

  Bongartz fiddles with the dead man’s trousers.

  Böhm turns away. For him, this is and remains the moment in which the victim’s dignity is taken away. To this day, he refuses to witness this procedure. Here, in the presence of strangers, the man’s trousers are taken down, his buttocks are spread apart, and his temperature is taken. Böhm knows exactly when he can turn around again. “How long?”

  “Not long.” Bongartz turns the dead man over onto his front and pulls up his pullover and undershirt. He examines the marks where the body rested and nods with satisfaction. “Yes, that fits. About eight hours.” He starts packing up his tools. “He also
has a big lump on the back of his head, and that he got while he was still alive. It’s full to bursting with blood.” He waves to the two men from the funeral parlor to come over. “Bag him up and bring him into town, but be careful. If you so much as touch one of these little numbered signs, we’ll report you for destruction of evidence.”

  Böhm looks at them. It is not two men, but a man and a woman. She is wearing a gray woolen hat. He smiles at her. “He’s under the weather. He’s not normally like this.”

  The woman does not react. Two thin cables creep out from beneath her hat and disappear into the collar of her dark-gray sweatshirt.

  Böhm swallows. She is listening to music.

  “Can we undo the cord?” The man points at the bound hands.

  “Yes, no problem.”

  The woman kneels and deftly unties the knotted cord.

  Van Oss grimaces, shaking his head. “Is it sexist of me to think this is no job for a woman?”

  Böhm raises his eyebrows and nods. “Yes, it is.”

  Lembach and his team are absorbed in their work by the side of the road. From a distance they look like beekeepers searching for a lost swarm.

  Van Oss stands beside him without saying anything. Silence. Even the ever-present crows are not calling. Suddenly, he sees it. “Where are his shoes?”

  “Lembach is still looking, but he suspects the killer is wearing them.” Van Oss points at the sketches where Lembach has documented all the places he found footprints. “Or rather, that the killer was wearing them when he went about his business here.”

  Without taking his eyes off the dead man, Böhm calls over to Bongartz: “Do you know when it rained last night?”

  “No. But certainly after midnight.” Bongartz is already on his way back to the car.

  Van Oss and Böhm walk over to Lembach. “Do you have anything?”

  Bernd Lembach is standing, hunched over, in a narrow drainage ditch between the field and the road. He is wearing rubber boots that reach halfway up his thighs. “So far nothing, but we’re a long way from being finished.” He straightens up and examines the object he has just found in the mud. The rusty shaft of an umbrella. “Well, now.” He throws his find onto a small pile by the side of the road. His collection already includes punctured soccer balls, a bike rack, rusty beer cans, and several other items.

  “Can’t these farmers clear their ditches at least once a year? At this rate, we’re going to have to order a dumpster when we finish.”

  Van Oss grins at him. “Why are you throwing it on the side of the road? Throw it the other way, into the field. That way the farmer will have to deal with it.”

  Lembach puts his hands on his hips, thrusts out his broad belly, and looks at Van Oss. “You have some bright ideas, don’t you? When the farmer complains, can I send him to you?”

  Van Oss shrugs and raises his eyebrows. “The farmer won’t complain, Lembach. The farmer’s dead.”

  Böhm is thinking about Gietmann. “The shoes, Bernd. Do you think they’re still here?”

  Lembach leans down and plunges his hands back into the brown water. “We’re looking for them, but to tell the truth I have a nasty feeling we’re not going to find them. Neither the shoes nor anything else.” He pulls out a moldy tennis ball and rolls it back and forth on his palm. “I can’t explain it, but something here doesn’t feel right.”

  Böhm stares into the ditch and nods thoughtfully. The smell of standing water rises to his nostrils.

  Van Oss crosses his arms over his narrow chest. “For me too it seems—how do you say?—desperate.”

  Lembach and Böhm look at him.

  “Desperate?” Lembach nods. “Yes, maybe that’s it.”

  Chapter 12

  Böhm gathers the initial information and his thoughts together on the computer. A single file, consisting of separate sections with headings like Victim, Witnesses, Connections, and so forth, contains everything that has anything to do with the case. All the thoughts that come to him, all the comments his colleagues have made. Notes like these have often helped him when an investigation is at a dead end and nobody knows how to start afresh. When he first joined the department, his colleagues had smiled, but since then his files have become useful, and there have been imitators.

  The ancient coffee machine on the little table by the door gurgles its last few drops into the pot. Making the coffee is a first step, but finding a clean mug in this department is the true art. Böhm crosses the hall into Achim Steeg’s office and helps himself to one of the mugs there.

  When it comes to dirty mugs in his office, Steeg has no rival. His record is eighteen. When his colleagues complained, he placed an order the following day: a dishwasher, according to him, was essential to workplace harmony.

  Steeg approaches him in the hall.

  “Hello, Achim.” Böhm points at his cup. “I was just retrieving my mug from your office.”

  Steeg’s broad shoulders hunch, and his short neck momentarily disappears into the collar of his black T-shirt, over which he is wearing a smoke-gray woolen jacket. From October 1 through March 31, he wears this jacket. From April 1 on, he appears in a beige linen jacket. Steeg does not make decisions like this dependent on the weather. Steeg lives by fixed rules. “Yes, no problem. Help yourself.”

  For a long time, Böhm was annoyed by Steeg’s manner, seeing it as a provocation. At some point he understood that Steeg simply had no sense of the effect he had on other people, nor of how he should behave with them. He is not a bad police officer, but he is sometimes inclined to act alone, and it has twice led to disciplinary proceedings. Van Oss is the only one who openly likes him, and he never tires of defending him.

  “Did you go and see the relatives?”

  Steeg presses a page from the newspaper into Böhm’s hand and goes into his office. He calls back to Böhm: “Top left. Read that first. I’ll be right over.”

  The thin paper is folded to letter size. It contains the death notices. At the top left, in a black frame about four inches by three in size, with a plain cross on the left-hand side, one reads:

  Life comes to an end, but memory is forever.

  Werner Gietmann left us on March 9, 2001.

  Böhm reads the lines over and over. He unfolds the newspaper and looks for the date: March 10, 2001.

  Steeg enters, an unwashed cup in his hand, and pours himself some coffee. “So? Digested it yet?”

  “Where did you get this?”

  Steeg sits on the edge of the desk and blows cautiously on his coffee. “The family was talking about it when I arrived. Frederike Gietmann, the daughter, lives in one of those trendy developments nearby with her family. She found the announcement. She was over at her mother’s because she wanted to know whether relatives were involved.”

  Böhm stands up to get some milk. “Is the coffee too strong for you?”

  “No. Too hot.” Steeg looks into his cup. “When I arrived, Frau Gietmann had just told her daughter that her husband hadn’t been home that night.” Steeg runs his hand through his brown crew cut. “I showed her my ID and she just broke down.”

  “Didn’t Frau Gietmann worry? I mean, when an old man is out all night . . . ?”

  “No, that happened all the time. The daughter says the old man liked a good night out, and he’d spend the night in town. Besides, he wasn’t that old.”

  “Sixty-eight.”

  Steeg’s coffee has finally cooled down enough for him to be able to drink it. He takes a big gulp. “Anyway, the case is as good as solved. He made a serious mistake with that announcement. We’ll catch him before dark.”

  Böhm stands at the window and looks out at the market square. Why can’t he share Steeg’s optimism? Why is he so sure the killer is anything but stupid? Böhm watches the last vegetable stall being dismantled. Suddenly, his stomach churns. Shopping! He was supposed to do some shopping.

  He grabs his leather jacket and runs out. “Five minutes, Achim,” he calls from the hallway. “I’ll be ba
ck in five minutes.” He reaches the vegetable seller at a run. The shopping list is still sitting on the kitchen table.

  Chapter 13

  As he stows the shopping bags in the trunk of his Mitsubishi, he feels a sense of satisfaction. He probably has not bought anything on Brigitte’s list, but he has fresh tomatoes, eggs, radishes, basil, potatoes, and iceberg lettuce. The mozzarella, the two nice steaks, and the California merlot were from the mini-supermarket on the corner. At least they won’t go hungry.

  Out of the blue, his heart starts racing, and the worm in his head comes back to life: a conference on a Saturday. Maybe she won’t come back.

  He closes the trunk, pushes his glasses up onto his head, and rubs his eyes. Brigitte has never avoided arguments. He was the one who stayed away from conflict. At home, at least. She wouldn’t just stay away.

  When he enters the Serious Crimes corridor, Steeg’s and Van Oss’s office doors are wide open. He gives a brief wave into both rooms to show he is back. His colleagues are both on the phone.

  Böhm sits at his desk and picks up the death notice.

  What do you mean by this? Is this announcement for the relatives or for us? What kind of a text is this? “Life comes to an end, but memory is forever.” What are you remembering?

  You were taking revenge, weren’t you?

  Steeg is the first to appear in his doorway. His optimism is undimmed. He slaps his hand against the door frame. “The announcement was uploaded from an Internet café in Duisburg. It was paid for with a credit card and verified against the identity-card database.” He drops into the chair opposite Böhm’s desk. “It was submitted on Friday, March 9, 2001—yesterday, in other words—by a Frau Gisela Mischak, of Duisburg.” He beams at Böhm. “Our colleagues in Duisburg are taking care of it.”