The Swinging Detective
Page 15
Heike’s sharp sky blue eyes started widening again as she tried to take in Peters’ increasingly manic pleading.
‘You need some rest Captain Peters,’ she said reaching over to plant a peck on his forehead. On cue he depressed the tiny pink gateway leading him towards temporary pain-free bliss.
It must have been just after dawn when another apparition before him first entered the ward. Judging by his relaxed demeanour in the seat at the end of the bed his visitor must have been in the room for some time, watching the patient in front of him, asleep, vulnerable, alone.
Peters knew the man in front of him was for real when he noticed a film of sweat breaking out between the end of his nose and his lips. For a second or two he was seized by the thought that this could be him, at least that was until the intruder spoke:
‘Good morning Captain Peters. I’m sorry to call in on you so early in the day.’
The man was youngish, late twenties possibly early thirties, the arrogance of youth not yet fully flushed from his system. He wore a brown suede three quarter length coat that Peters guessed was Hugo Boss. The orange scarf and fawn coloured polo neck probably were too.
‘You’re not the doctor,’ Peters said in a weak, almost helpless croak.
‘No of course not. My name is Gunther Fest and I have a message from your old comrades in the BND, his old Cold War comrades in what used to be West German Federal Intelligence now the ‘spooks’ for a united nation.’
The BND! Now Peters got it. The spies that once protected the national security of the Federal Republic, who once hunted for Stasi moles placed in the organs of power all over West Germany, now confined to monitoring the squabbling factions of neo-Nazism and the Arab avengers who wanted to hurt people like Irit Weissman. Peters thought about pressing the nurse call bell but Fest continued.
‘For some time now we have been monitoring your investigation into the killer known as “Christopher”.’
‘What do you mean monitoring?’ Peters asked.
‘I mean exactly that but now our interest is, if you like, deeper.’
‘Hold on a minute. The “Christopher” file is a criminal matter, it’s a murder inquiry under the control of the Berlin Polizie.’
‘Maybe not any more Captain Peters.’
‘I don’t see how this is in any way a Federal matter,’ Peters interjected.
‘Oh come now, Captain. You are well familiar with Semtex. I’m sure you came across it on your tours of Northern Ireland. Well our friend has now resorted to the use of the explosive and in our mind that makes it very much a Federal matter.’
The velocity of anger was rising in Peters in parallel with the pain speeding back through his torso, limbs and groin.
‘This is still a criminal murder inquiry under the control of the Kottbusser Strasse Murder Squad,’ the Englishman insisted.
Fest rocked back a bit in his chair and shot Peters a patronising smirk.
‘You must have slept soundly last night and received no interruptions Captain. Last night Semtex was used on a place that you and your team have had under surveillance since this whole thing began.’
‘Boyz R Us!’ Peters kept thinking. He’s blown up Blucher’s shop.
‘That gay sex shop was destroyed last night in an explosion...’
Peters visibly panicked and thought about Riedel ...or rather this wife and two young children, both of them pre-kindergarten age. Fest instantly picked up the worry etched all over the detective.
‘Don’t alarm yourself Captain. There was no one in the premises when the bomb exploded. Your man on the inside was probably sound asleep just like you were at three a.m.’
‘This is still none of the BND’s business. Your job is catching spies and watching terrorists,’ Peters protested.
‘And you don’t think that this was terrorism?’ Fest asked slyly.
‘You don’t imagine for one moment that the BND can ignore bombs going off in German cities. Your man has already killed Mr Erich Tisch with a Semtex triggered device and now he blows up a building. To our mind that is terrorism.’
Fest took a handkerchief out of an inside pocket and started dabbing the sweat-sapped channel across the front of his face.
‘You’re giving him what he wants Herr Fest. That is exactly what he wants.’
‘That’s where you come in, you and your journalist friend from WAMS.’
‘I’m no longer in intelligence. I work for the Berlin Polizei and may I repeat myself – this is a criminal investigation not a case of terrorism.’
The BND officer stood up, leaned back slightly and then rocked forward towards Peters.
‘You will be obliged under Federal law to co-operate if and when we ask you to.
Here’s my card if you need to get in touch.’
‘I’m far too busy for that.’
‘Well let’s lighten your load Captain Peters.’
‘Oh Herr Fest, there is one thing you could do for me?’ Peters asked.
‘What is that?’
‘Lend me a couple of Euro coins. I might slip out later and ring you.’
‘Of course and I won’t take it as an advance payment.’
‘Please don’t’ Peters smiled as the spook dropped a cylinder of bright shiny coins into the patient’s hands.
The instant Fest left the ward Peters knew it was time to go; he needed to see Stannheim as soon as possible; he needed to stop the BND blundering all over a path that was leading him slowly but inexorably towards ‘Christopher’ . Peers too had to stop Heike inadvertently aiding Fest in tracking his man down.
He remembered from basic training how to hook up a casualty to a drip and used the knowledge in reverse to disconnect himself from the machine that had been shooting morphine into his body. Peters took the track suit bottoms, T-shirt and a hoodie he had been wearing when he was attacked, the top and trousers crusted with congealed blood, out from his locker and dressed quickly. Glancing up towards the clock on the wall he noticed it was half past six and instantly thought of Miriam. He had less than h§our to catch her before she came off night shift. She could drop him where he needed to go, all he had to do was to get to a public pay phone and ask the ‘Blue Angels’ cab company for driver 42.
When she finally arrived about 40 minutes later at the Charite’s front doors Miriam at first thought Peters looked like one of the down and outs who scoured the city’s hospitals at night for a chance to sleep in casualty to ward off the freezing cold. Yet when she got out of her cab, Miriam saw that it was her lover, shaking and shivering and for the first time, vulnerable.
‘I’m sorry to have called you at work,’ he said apologetically as she helped him into the back of the cab.
‘Don’t ask what happened. Not now. Just get me to the “Boyz R Us” sex shop.’
Miriam turned around to stare at Peters.
‘Don’t worry I’m not a secret customer. It’s the place that was blown up the night before last.’
‘Wouldn’t you be better heading to Heer Strasse instead?’ Miriam said.
‘No. No. I don’t want to hold you up. Haven’t you got to take Ayse to school in an hour.’
‘Martin please don’t play the martyr! Do you need anything else?’
‘Yes your mobile phone. I have to call someone.’
He summoned Angi to meet him outside Blucher’s shop while on-route Miriam stopped at an all-night chemist near the west end where he bought the strongest pain killers on sale behind the counter just as the last dregs of the morphine were wearing off. When the cab reached the cordon thrown around ‘Boyz R Us’ Miriam pulled up.
‘Shall I call tonight Martin? I’d really like to.’
‘Me too but I’ll be no use to you or indeed any woman. My cock’s....’
She held up her hand to stop Peters’ in his tracks.
‘There’s no need. We can have a bath together and you can tell me all about your latest adventure. ‘ Miriam blew him a kiss as she sped off eastwards towards h
er husband and daughter over in Kreuzberg.
Before him stood a pile of rubble from where Blucher once ran his porn mini-empire. Amid the debris behind a white strip of tape and four crash barriers were burnt fragments of glossy genitalia, a collage of semi-charcoaled cocks and orifices. In a skip to the left of where the doors used to be were stacks of relatively undamaged magazines, boxes of DVDs and a pyramid of dildos and even a giant glass fist still incredibly intact.
A couple of green coats stood guard, each casually holding Heckler & Koch machine guns pointed towards the ground. Between them stood Angi, puffing on a cigarette, stamping her feet in protest against Siberia’s return, her cheeks aflame with the morning chill. One of the uniforms looked irked at Peters’ presence and told him to clear off. Angi went over and whispered into his ear and the cop then saluted. Peters felt a swelling in his loins as he watched Angi’s black gloved hand lift the cigarette and slowly take it in and out of her mouth. He told himself that he deserved the shooting pain which started that instant to ignite across his groin.
‘Do you have anything to drink Angi?’ he whimpered.
‘I’ve a flask of coffee in the car. What the hell are you doing here anyway? I was coming to you later with your mobile to the hospital. Did the doctor say it was ‘Ok’ to discharge you?’
‘Bollocks to that Bavarian ponce. I signed myself out. Just get me the coffee I’m in agony here and need to wash down these pills,’ Peters begged.
She crossed the street and pulled open the front door of the uniforms’ car. On return to Peters she produced a small steel flask for him. He winked, knocked back the tablets and then gulped down the coffee.
‘Thanks Angi. You’re a life saver. Now, who would blow up a nice establishment like this?’
‘Forensics say it was plastic explosive, probably Semtex.’
‘I know. I know,’ Peters protested.
‘So we can assume it was our friend. Do you know by the way that ‘Mothers Against Paedophiles’ have pitched a tent outside the station? There’s a woman in it threatening to go on hunger strike.’
Peters tried to repress a laugh but failed, the effort of it starting off another spasm of pain, this time all across his torso. He tried to focus hoping that the medication he took really was ‘fast acting.’
‘Jesus poor old Stannheim must be having a fit every morning. I almost feel sorry for him.’
‘Me too sir. There’s a couple of other things that are sending his blood pressure through the roof...maybe yours too,’ Angi said while rubbing out her fag on the street with her gloriously inappropriate purple stilettos.
‘I’m a big boy now Angi, you can give it to me straight.’
‘Okay then. The last victim of “Christopher” was a bit different from the others.’
‘In what way?’ Peters inquired, already fearing the answer.
‘For a start he had no association with this place or what’s left of it. We checked him out and yes, Ulrich Vogts had a record.’
‘Go on.’
‘But it was a record different from the others, the friends of Oskar Beer who by the way is still enjoying Kottbusser Strasse’s legendary hospitality, in fact he refuses to leave.’
‘As I said before Angi– go on,’ Peters butted in impatiently.
‘Vogts did have convictions for sexual offences against children but his were for little girls. The TV scene Heike showed you on her mobile phone, we had it doctored by the techies. It’s a girl having sex with several men. It’s very vague but there is no doubt, it was a child.’
Peters suddenly wondered why ‘Christopher’ had gone to the trouble of blowing up Blucher’s place. After all there was no connection between Vogts and the shop, he must have singled him out using newspaper archives and the web, just like all the others. ‘Boyz R Us’ was just a convenient way to track down and link up with the boy-abusers.
‘Sir, there’s something else, something Bauer spotted.’
‘Bauer?’
‘Believe it or not, yes. He traced the roots of all the men targeted so far. They all had one thing in common...besides being a bunch of perverts.’
‘Which was?’ he said, happy now that he could feel the effects of the painkillers working on him.
‘Which was that they all came to Berlin after 1989. And they all came from different parts of what we used to call West Germany.’
His guard was down; he was letting his thoughts slip out.
‘Colonisers. He sees them as colonisers. The worst kind of colonisers.’ Peters said out loud.
Angi knitted her brows to signal her incomprehension.
‘For him it really is war! He’s on a crusade Angi. Listen, can you get one of the uniforms to drive me to Heer Strasse?’
‘Sure. You need to get some rest at home.’
‘Balls to rest Angi. Come and pick me up in two hours and take one of those photo-fits with you. And don’t tell Stannheim. Tell him instead I won’t see visitors, just in case he turns up with flowers and grapes at the Charite. Try and get a pool car.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’ll be heading back east once I get cleaned up and changed.’
‘Where are we going sir?’
‘To see your papa.’
Twenty Five
To: heike.numann@msn.com
I know they are listening. I know they have you tracked. So I will be brief.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
It’s not my choice!
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Of course not. They have been watching over you long before this campaign began.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
Don’t be absurd, this is not the DDR.
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Are you being deliberately naive as well as provocative?
They would not be doing their job if they weren’t eavesdropping on people like you Fraulein. But let’s not argue. There is little time.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
I’m outside, in the open air, using my Blackberry.
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Nice try. I really don’t think we should meet up....yet.
I’m only calling in to ask for that number you offered, the one belonging to the detective.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
Why do you want to speak to him?
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Nice try again. Yes, you can mention that in your article this Sunday if you like, that I’m talking to the guy hunting me down.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
Ok.
To: heike.numann@msn.com
As for the why, well let’s say I’m intrigued.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
I don’t quite understand, intrigued?
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Because we were once soldiers, fraulein. As you already know I carry out my research meticulously. I’ve been reading up on Captain Peters. It seems that he and I were opponents before. There’s a neat circle to all this.
To: christopherwrath@msn.com
Elaborate...please.
To: heike.numann@msn.com
Let’s just say we were both equally interested in the fate of a traitor, one who your English friend managed to save in time. Just as the swords were approaching. And now the swords are approaching for me. They are getting closer. Just text the number, his handy preferably. Brevity is safety. Good bye.
The instant he logged off Heike’s own mobile rang, it was Mannfred Stannheim calling her.
‘Heike, why on earth did you pass on Martin’s number to that maniac?’
She was angry as Stannheim had no right to tell her what to do.
‘Because he asked, that’s why,’ she snapped back.
‘I sincerely hope you don’t print that this weekend. If the public learn that our SIO is having mobile chats with a serial killer Martin will have a picket outside his own door.’
Heike Numann felt an invisible, suffocat
ing weight bearing down on her as she sat hunched over the park bench in the Tiergarten trying to keep warm in the later winter morning chill. It wasn’t just the pressure from Stannheim tightening around her chest but the clawing demands of her news desk hungry for more copy on the killer ‘Christopher’’ but also her raging internal conflict about Martin Peters, and rhe inexplicable loyalty she still felt she owed her old lover. Numann sensed Stannheim knew this and would use it against her to blunt her determination to get thes scoop!
She composed herself before replying to Stannheim.
‘If you put it like that Mannfred I suppose I don’t have a choice. I wouldn’t want to be ruining your top boy’s career now.’
Stannheim’s voice mellowed: ‘Our murderer is playing a game, Heike. He’s going to mash up yours Martin’s head too.’