‘Come in, Martin. If you are not going to take over you might as well tell me how your headless horsemen are coming on.’
Stannheim was wreathed in cigarette smoke which had stained his hair, lined his face, cracked his skin, discoloured his teeth and blunted his appetite.
‘I’m afraid it’s got nothing to do with the corpses from the Havel, sir. think.’
Peters handed over the DVD Blucher had left for him.
‘It was given to me by one of my best sources, sir. Another murder. And this time captured on film.
Four
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: A wake up call
Fraulein,
Please take a moment to read the link below. By the way - I have always admired your work.
www.thewrath.com
She had been bitten too many times before. Cranks confessing to crimes never committed. Perverts sending in pictures of their penises captured on Polaroid. Conspiracy theorists warning of Jewish-Bolshevik plans to unleash World War 3 from German soil. Heike Numann had her fill of the time-wasters and the weirdoes. It was Monday morning and all she wanted was to roll back into bed and sleep through the morning.
It was just as she was about to leave for lunch near Checkpoint Charlie when the computer beeped again. It was from the same address as her earlier ‘wake-up call’.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: the wrath
Fraulein, this is just a reminder that you should click on the link below. Do it before someone else gets the scoop.
www.thewrath.com
Instantly Heike Numann was sniffing an exclusive - what were the bodies of the two headless corpses found in the Havel all about? And she could never resist the allure of the magic word scoop. It was her solemn duty. As one of the first wave of female crime reporters on a national paper Heike drove herself beyond the point where others around her would never cross. She sacrificed weekends away with friends, disappointed and eventually ditched lovers, rarely took holidays, paid few visits to her parents at their home near Bonn, hardly had the time to read a novel anymore and had even abandoned her weekly trip to the cinema.
She clicked on the web link, it opened, and what played out on her screen turned her stomach.
The volume turned down to zero. Another hooded man, otherwise fully naked, handcuffed to a chair directly facing the camera. There was a figure in black, the face unexposed, carving his captive to pieces with a sword. Blood was splattering the camera until the tableau of terror was obscured. Yet there was still no sound. The lens was wiped down and the man in the chair passed out. The hood was ripped off to reveal an unconscious specimen. His attacker was standing still, reversing the blade behind his body and then the weapon then frozen behind the swordsman’s shoulder. Finally the killer swung it around in an arc severing the head in one clean, savage swipe. The film dissolved and a symbol appeared on screen. A badge. A stout man in a toga, a staff in a river and a child on his shoulders.
She wretched and didn’t make it in time to her bathroom. There was a green, viscous pool on her carpet. It had travelled down her nostrils as well as her throat. The membranes inside her nose were stinging. She could not speak or barely breathe. Shortly after came the freeze, her blood chilling, she was overcome with cold, shaking and shivering as if she had been doused in ice.
She couldn’t look, at let alone touch the computer. She sat in the corner of her living room on her honkers staring into space.
It took her half an hour to make the call. No, it would be easier if he came around to see her. Yes, she didn’t want to talk about it. Not now. Later. Much later. He could look for himself.
Across Berlin another recipient of Christopher’s wrath had just closed the link. He too had just shared Heike Numann’s experience.
From Kottbuser Strasse by U-Bahn it took Martin Peters fifteen minutes to reach Heike’s apartment. They had known each other for about three years after meeting at a Christmas drinks party organised for the press by the Berlin Polizei Media department. Peters had asked her to lunch in Sale E Tabacci, a favourite Italian haunt for journalists, politicos, architects and lawyers just a few yards from Koch Strasse U-Bahn and around the corner from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It became a monthly regular rendezvous, Heike extracting snippets of information on cases and crimes from the English detective with the impeccable manners and a comical German accent. He had provided her with the barest details about the headless horsemen first and the mystery surrounding their identities. She had been good to her word and kept it out of the paper, at least until he gave her the nod.
He was met at the apartment door in Schiller Strasse by a tear stained, pale, still shaking Heike. On entering the flat she pointed back to her workstation and the computer, which was constantly bleeping. Peters went over, sat down in the seat in front of the screen and used the mouse to click on a new mail.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: wrath revealed
Well, Fraulein, I hope that wasn’t too distressing. But it’s time the People out there got to know me a bit better.
‘What does this mean, Heike?’ Peters called out across the room.
She was trying to light a cigarette, her hands trembling unable to torch up. Her voice was quivering.
‘Read the previous one...I’m sorry, watch it.’
Even before Peters opened the mail he had a sinking feeling.
But this one was different. The face wasn’t to be revealed until after the fatal blow had been administered. This time life was to be extinguished before exposure. His stomach lurched too at the sight of the severed head held up for a second to the lens and tossed away and then the dissolve to the symbol that Heike had recognised immediately.
‘It’s Saint Christopher,’ she murmured, ‘He is crossing the river holding the baby Jesus.’
She was getting her voice back slowly, composing herself as she slid upwards along the wall.
‘My father gave me a Saint Christopher medal the morning I left for Berlin five years ago. He told me the saint would protect me in “that place”. He spoke as if I was just about to walk into the Valley of Death.’
‘You’re in it now,’ as Peters replayed those final macabre moments of the second condemned man’s life.
‘St. Christopher’s wrath,’ Heike whispered.
Peters knew she was slowly recovering because she was already thinking in headlines. Already at work. Planning her next big story. And he knew he had to stop her.
‘Heike, I have to ask something of you,’ Peters spoke in a faked softer tone. He moved over to where she still leaned against the living room wall. Peters noticed that her entire flat was covered in papers, ring binders, files, reference books, discarded printer cartridges, Dictaphone tapes.
‘Heike, I have to ask a favour.’ She just stared into space.
‘I want you to keep this to yourself. At least until we find out who we’re dealing with here. Whoever he is he wants to be talked about and a bit more famous than just for 15 minutes.’
She was back in the room again, on earth, re-engaged, Peters’ plea snapping her out of her semi-catatonic state.
‘You have to be joking Martin. That mail was for me alone. You have no right to stop me. No right.’
The detective was filled with panic. He had to put her off, at least for now. He had an image of Stannheim in his mind now, barking at him, throwing down a copy of WAMS onto his desk in the Kotbusser Strasse, the lurid headlines, the wrath of St. Christopher. Peters knew only too well how dogged she could be in pursuit of a story even when the story was him! When they first dating he had told her early on about the apparition that now haunted him on the U-bahns.It was after a panic attack when Heike enticed him onto underground the line going east towards Pankow one evening. Peters saw her, the destroyed side of the face leaning on
Heike’s shoulder, the good eye winking at him, that knowing sinister smile that forced the detective off out of his seat and towards the door at only the first station from when they had boarded at Alexanderplatz. He marvelled at Heike’s chicanery especially the way she tried to convince him that by telling his story of what about what happened that summer morning in Belfast in the same year that The Wall fell it would be his personal therapy; it would help him cope with the trauma. He had stopped her then writing about what he had done for Queen and Country , and now he needed stop her again.
‘Heike, maybe we can do a trade?’
‘A trade? What have you got that’s a better story than that?’ she gestured towards the computer.
The two headless cadavers thrown up by the Havel flashed across his brain.
‘The two cadavers in the lake. There’s something we haven’t released yet.’
Her hands had steadied now, she was lighting up her cigarette at last, listening intently for the offer that was coming.
‘There was something odd written on their bodies. Their right arms to be precise,’ Peters said.
Heike’s eyes widened, What exactly?’
‘Kursk and Kharkov. Two battles from the Second World War.’
‘Big deal Martin. How could that be a new lead?’
‘Because they were written in Russian.’
The expression instantly changed on Heike’s face. Peters realised he now had a trade.
‘Russian? So that means a Mafia killing. It’s a gangland double murder, isn’t it?’
Peters interrupted: ‘No Heike. Let’s not get carried away here. Just because it’s Cyrillic writing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Russian gangsters. Be careful.’
‘I’ll be careful, Martin. Don’t patronise me. I’ve just watched a man hacked to death on my computer and you’re telling me not to write about it. I’ll do it for you Martin but don’t tell me how to write my stories in my paper.’
He walked back to the workstation and sat down. ‘I’m going to forward this to my own mail back in the station. Radio silence won’t be forever Heike. You can have the story once I consult with the brass back in HQ.’
Pressing the send button to his own address, Peters then shut down the computer and swivelled in the chair towards her.
‘Heike, I have to go and report this. Will you be alright? Is there anyone I can call to be with you?’ Peters realised instantly he had delivered an insult.
‘What kind of wimp do you think I am?’ she snapped. ‘I’m perfectly fine on my own.’
‘Good. I’ll call you later. Maybe you can take to me to lunch at Sale and put it on expenses. I’ll probably have more information on the headless horsemen by then.’
‘Martin?’
‘What?’ Peters replied softly.
‘That’s the second time in five minutes you have patronised me.’
Five
In the summer the lake would have been packed with bathers, in the grim hiatus between winter and spring it had always been the perfect spot for espionage. Teufelsberg. The devil’s hill. The location of Peters’ first intelligence triumph.
It was where Blucher had placed the photographs in a dead drop in the year of ‘Die Wende’. They were grainy stills of a customer poring over that section of ‘Boyz R Us’ with the collection of portraits of young boys’ faces including the iconic one of the pubescent kid on the front of the U2 album. The subject captured on Blucher’s hidden CCTV cameras was a member of the SED-West Berlin, the DDR’s Trojan horse inside the free western citadel.
Shortly after receiving the pictures Peters hauled the communist agent in to the British Army’s HQ near the Olympic Stadium. He was offered a choice: Work for him or see his name in print and disgrace on the pages of ‘Bild’ or ‘BZ’. He would then be arrested by Berlin vice, arraigned before a court charged with possessing paedophile material. A journalist by his Stasi legend for ‘Neues Deutschland’, their West Berlin correspondent, the agent chose instead to be in the pay of two masters rather than none and ultimately jail. Military intelligence had dug through into another passageway of the decaying regime beyond the Wall and another agent compromised within its allies on his side of the divide. The spook started working for Peters and became an invaluable if somewhat short-lived source.
Lothar Blucher’s sacred duty was to believe in nothing. ‘Anti’ was his only ideology. He was never for but always against. Thus, anti-communism before the ‘Turn’ came easy to him. It also came with lost territory: the Bluchers claimed lineage back to the rescue of the British at Waterloo, the Prussian general whose cavalry had made that final decisive charge slicing through the lines of Napoleonic troops. The imagined blood-line could be traced to those lost territories to the east. Peters always remembered that Blucher never referred to Gdansk by its Polish name; for his original source in Berlin it would always be Danzig. This was what they shared in common: Two sons from the evacuated eastern lands, one with his roots in East Prussia, the other the child of a reluctant Sudeten.
There was a bench by the lake and beside it the waste-basket where Blucher had left those first incriminating photos. Sixteen years later Peters’ informer had chosen a reunion at the very same spot in line of sight of the earth mound where the American listening post used to be. There were rumours of a new hotel and conference centre from where the Yanks used to eavesdrop into the east.
Blucher was already seated, wrapped up against the elements in a black crombie coat, wine-dark scarf and an incongruous Russian winter hat complete with the flaps pulled down to protect his flabby, cauliflower ears. Sharp jets of freezing breath were emitting from Blucher’s mouth as he gulped down air, wheezing and coughing.
‘A sentimental journey, Herr Peters. Please sit down.’
Peters observed his oldest source in Berlin. He wondered if Blucher was about to have a heart attack.
‘Don’t tell me you walked all the way through the Grunewald to get here, Lothar?’
‘Certainly not. Anika is parked over there. I try to avoid public transport.’
‘What’s the problem? Panic attacks on the S-Bahn?
The informer shuffled his huge frame along the wooden bench.
‘Not so much the panic attacks. It is that word “public” I don’t like. I fear the general public and tend to avoid them if possible.’
For a man who made his money out of other people’s perversions this sounded like a strange thing to say. Because he revelled in being in the know over the private tastes of his customers, which he would from time to time share with Peters.
‘Why here Lothar? Get to the point.’
‘Well it’s better than that place you frequent every Saturday. By the way, do your bosses know you are a swinger?’
Get to the point.’ Peters was wearying of Blucher’s games.
‘Someone sent me an email….’ before Blucher could finish Peters butted in.
‘Of someone having their head chopped off.’
Blucher looked stunned.
‘It’s alright, Lothar. It was sent to a friend of mine as well, a journalist. I’ve seen it too.’
The informer took out a handkerchief from the crombie and wiped off the sweat gathering along his forehead.
‘Why was it sent to me? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m next.’
Peters said nothing. This time around he wanted to encourage Blucher’s fear.
‘You’ve got to give me protection. This is where I made you. This is where I got you your man. This is where you pay me back.’
The detective waited pausing for Blucher to reach the edge.
‘You aren’t saying anything? ? You’ve seen the video. He cuts off his head. He slashes him to bits and to pieces. And you say nothing!’
Peters stood up, bent over and touched his toes. Then he reversed back upwards and cracked his fingers, the sound of gristle and bone grinding together made Blucher wince in the seat. Blucher was made all the more uncomfortable by the metallic pecking of a lone m
agpie at the foot of the tree behind the bench.
‘Damn, violent birds,’ Blucher complained. ‘Are they bad luck in England too?’
‘Only unless you don’t say ‘Good Morning’ and ask them how their wife is doing?’ Peters replied.
‘The English truly are mad, Herr Peters. You talk to magpies in the trees. And you are the maddest of all. You have said nothing and you have seen those images. My life is probably under threat here and all you can do is say “good morning” to a bloody bird. I could be next in the firing line.’
A smile flashed across Peters’ face as he watched Lothar squirm under the pressure.
‘And you saw them too. An old acquaintance perhaps, or maybe a loyal customer, being hacked to death in front of the camera. He wasn’t a hostage in some Baghdad stink-hole, was he Lothar? You knew him.’
His informer was holding his head in his hands now, on the verge of sobbing, not for the man whose death he had witnessed in cyberspace but only for himself. For Lothar Blucher, the director of ‘Man Everyday’, his one and only porn movie, a gay take on the Robinson Crusoe story, a castaway character with an exotic partner for each day of the week, cared for no one but himself and the fulfilment of his pleasures, which extended to him taking a bit part in the film as the English sea captain who rescued the hero and his new friends from the desert island. Martin Peters could never fully warm to his old source and felt no guilt for applying further pressure to the exposed nerve.
The Swinging Detective Page 3