The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Henze pointed to a group of uniformed policemen who were just gathering by the entrance of the ZIB. Then he looked back up the chimney. The woman still swayed back and forth. Always the same movement, as if she herself was part of the light installation. Henze focussed on the topmost neon number. 987. The nine seemed a bit long and slightly askew. Why did it have to be 987?

  “Sometimes she changes the verse to ‘. . . a pocket full of tissues, I kiss you, I kiss you . . .’ ” said Frieling taking off the headphones. She looked at her watch. “We’ve got two hours and nineteen minutes left. Perhaps we should start to organize the blackout.”

  “We’ll wait,” said Henze.

  He didn’t know what they should wait for. For the woman to come back down and admit that it had all been a big joke?

  “Perhaps we should try again to . . .” Frieling stopped mid-sentence.

  A uniformed officer stepped forward and said, “I don’t know her name, but it could be the voice of this woman I checked up on once or twice. If that is really her, she used to hang out with the junkies by the ramparts.”

  “Take a few men and collect everyone you can find over there!”

  The policeman made off. The good thing about Unna was that everything had its place. Even the things that didn’t fit in. Therefore you could be sure to find certain minorities in the city gardens by the former embankment, neatly separated into groups. The gang of Russian Germans met on the benches near the Güldener Trog, the junkies and alcoholics by the war memorial and a bit further down the booze drinking, chaos-seeking youths.

  After only ten minutes the Chief Inspector was presented with four ragged looking men in the foyer of the ZIB, but it took another three minutes before he had made it clear that it would be in their interest to speak. A bald man with sunken cheeks finally acted as spokesman. He said that the woman was Natascha, that he would never forget her voice, that she was a great lass and that the Constable could bet his life on that. No, he didn’t know her surname and – with respect – he and the others didn’t give a fuck about surnames. Natascha had only been with them a few times, last autumn, and with a big belly, but she had never come back with her child, which had probably been better anyway. No, he had no idea whether she had a place to live, but he supposed she had had before and had made good money by the looks of her.

  “Before?” asked Henze.

  “Well, before someone gave her that little brat. I expect she didn’t get any punters any more, not with the big belly.”

  “She would have got some,” said one of the others, “but she didn’t want them no more.”

  Henze asked where she had worked as a prostitute, but the men didn’t know. At least it was likely now that Natascha was known to the vice squad, the youth welfare office or the public order office. Henze gave instructions to find the relevant officials immediately.

  One hour and fifty minutes. The blue neon numbers still glared down from the chimney. Between the number 987 and the black night sky a young woman cradled her baby to sleep. There was no star to be seen, and the sky wasn’t really black. More like some sort of dark grey, tinted with the glow of lights from the city. Henze decided to risk something. He gave the technicians on the directional microphone a sign and shouted “Natascha!”

  He read the neon numbers 337, 610, 987. He cried again, “Natascha, we can’t block off four motorways. Give us some . . .” he stopped. Not only because the crowd behind the barriers began to murmur. It was impossible to negotiate with a madwoman who sat on a chimney, fifty-two metres high.

  The technician said, “She reacted to the name. And instead of singing she is now muttering ‘Shhh, my little one, keep quiet!’ ”

  Henze nodded. He looked up.

  “The numbers on that chimney,” he said. “Every one is the sum of the two previous ones.”

  “A Fibonacci Sequence. A progression of numbers describing development and evolution,” said Frieling.

  “How do you know these things?”

  “Once I’ve . . .” Frieling trailed off.

  Henze’s mobile was ringing. Müller had organized the list of births and had gone through it. Five names were left over, five mums who couldn’t be found. None of those were called Natascha, but that didn’t have to mean anything. Every prostitute had a pseudonym. Henze hadn’t even finished the call, when Frieling hustled a forty-something-year old woman before him. Sticking out under her thin coat he could see her pyjama bottoms.

  “Mrs Rastenau of the youth welfare office,” said Frieling. “She lives round the corner in the Klosterwallgasse. She’s got something for us.”

  “Don’t hang up, Müller,” Henze said into his mobile.

  “I’ve just been dealing with the loss of custody in this case,” Mrs Rastenau said. “It’s absolutely impossible for the poor child to grow up with a drug addict prostitute, don’t you think? It needs . . .”

  “What’s the mother’s name?”

  “Daniela Trochowski,” said Mrs Rastenau.

  “Hold on a minute!”

  Henze asked into the phone whether there was a woman with that name on the list.

  “Yes? I want everyone there! Get into the house somehow and pump the neighbours for information!”

  They had a name, they had an address and now at least they’d got half the story from Mrs Rastenau.

  Daniela Trochowski was not indifferent towards her child. Quite the opposite, she desperately wanted to keep it. She swore she did everything for her little Marc, her darling boy, and she really meant it, but she couldn’t cope. Hour after hour the neighbours had heard the baby cry when the mother was out getting drugs, or when men came to the flat, time and again different men. She had behaved completely unpredictably towards the youth welfare officers. When suffering from withdrawal symptoms she could get violent or cry and collapse in a corner of the room. Although the doctor from social services hadn’t been able to detect any life threatening signs, he had found indications that little Marc had been neglected, and that was enough to withdraw custody legally. The decision had been made ten days ago, and since then neither mother nor child were to be found anywhere.

  Until, that is, she had appeared on the chimney of the Linden Brewery and had yelled down to turn off all the lights in Unna and its surroundings. Henze asked himself why she hadn’t demanded restoration of custody. He turned to the technician at the directional microphone.

  “Is she still talking to the little one?”

  The technician nodded and said, “Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks . . .”

  “I know the words,” said Henze.

  “It’s driving me mad,” the technician said. “Always the same idiotic rhyme, and every time she reaches the part at which the cradle falls, I shut my eyes, but it’s no good. I still see the child falling, like I’m hallucinating, and then I open my eyes once more when she begins again with ‘Rock-a-bye baby’ and the same thing again and again. I know she can only have been at it a few minutes, but it feels like days and weeks have passed and . . .”

  “Get someone to replace you, man!” said Henze.

  “One hour and eighteen minutes,” said Frieling. “I’ll try and get through to someone from the social services. They should hold themselves in readiness.”

  “She won’t kill her own child,” said Henze.

  “I’ll also get them to prepare the road blocks,” said Frieling. “Just in case.”

  Henze’s mobile rang again. Once again it was Müller.

  “The landlady, Mrs Reitz, is opening the flat for us now, but she doesn’t want to come in with us, because Daniela Trochowski is supposed to have Aids.”

  “Aids?” Henze signalled to Frieling. The woman from the youth welfare office was standing in the foyer of the ZIB and stared through one of the portholes in the floor.

  “Mrs Reitz had the locks to the flat changed immediately when the girl vanished with her child ten days ago,” said Müller.

/>   Henze could hear Mrs Reitz protesting in the background. Then she was on the phone herself.

  “Listen, Chief Inspector, I’m not a monster, honestly, but I’m not so wealthy either. A good tenant moved out because of her, and Mrs Trochowski herself hasn’t paid a cent for three months. I told her: go to the social services. A single mum will surely get support, you only have to fill in a form. But she refused . . .”

  Frieling had come back.

  “No HIV,” she whispered.“At least none that the youth welfare office know of.”

  “. . . she said she’d cope somehow,” Mrs Reitz continued. “And she said she had always managed to get by on her own and that she’d pay the rent later, every penny of it, but she never did.”

  Then Müller was back on the phone and said, “We’re not done with the flat yet, but there is a note on the pinboard with the phone number of a Max Trochowski. Seems to be in Bavaria somewhere.”

  Henze dialled the number immediately. He looked at his watch. They had fifty-seven minutes left to go. At last a sleepy man’s voice could be heard at the other end. Henze introduced himself and asked, whether the man was related to Daniela Trochowski in Unna.

  “I’m the father. Why? Is something the matter?”

  Henze hesitated. He said, “Your daughter is threatening to kill her child.”

  There was a silence.

  “Mr Trochowski?”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Mr Trochowski.

  “I’m afraid I am. Daniela is threatening to kill her son.”

  “Her son?”

  To kill? He should have asked. Incredulous Henze said, “You didn’t know that Daniela has been a mother these six months?”

  “I’m on my way,” said Trochowski. “Tell me where . . .”

  “Mr Trochowski, you didn’t know?”

  “We didn’t have much contact,” he said slowly. “Especially over the last three years since I remarried. I told Daniela that I’d always be there for her. Any time. She’d only have had to pick up the phone. Even in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have minded. But she’s always had a will of her own . . .” he broke off, then said, “Let me speak to her.”

  “We can’t get at her,” said Henze.

  “I’ll leave for Unna directly,” Mr Trochowski said.

  Too late, Henze should have replied. You should have done that years back, he should have said. He said, “Please do, Mr Trochowski!”

  The number of onlookers in Massener Street hadn’t diminished. An old lady craned her neck from an illuminated window on the first floor. Her head projected a huge pale shadow onto the asphalt by the police barriers. The technician on the directional microphone hadn’t got himself a replacement after all. Henze turned to him.

  “Is she still speaking?”

  “Non-stop. Nursery rhymes, counting-out rhymes, lullabies,” said the technician. “But I’m beginning to wonder what is the matter with that child. We haven’t heard a sound from him for hours.”

  “Perhaps he’s asleep,” said Frieling.

  The technician shook his head.

  “I have two little kids at home myself. I’m telling you, you’re glad when at last there’s some peace in the evening. You read them a story or sing to them, but when they finally drop off you don’t keep singing for two hours.”

  Frieling looked at Henze. Henze looked up to the rim of the chimney.

  “She doesn’t really have a child up there. She’s just pretending,” said the technician.

  If that was true, where was her baby then? Henze pulled his mobile from his pocket to call Müller once more, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was a pensioner in a green hunter’s jacket accompanied by one of the uniformed officers.

  “I’ve recognized the voice,” the pensioner said proudly.

  Frieling was visibly annoyed with herself for having forgotten to cancel the search for the woman’s identity. She said, “Thanks, but we already know . . .”

  “I’m absolutely certain,” the pensioner interrupted. He didn’t seem to want to go without having had his five minutes of fame. “Yesterday I came across the woman at the West Cemetery . . .”

  “When?”

  “The West Cemetery is only a hundred metres from here,” said Frieling.

  “For goodness’ sake, talk!” said Henze to the pensioner.

  His name was Egon Kuballa and he belonged to a group of volunteers who took turns in guarding the cemetery. On his shift the night before, Kuballa had come across Daniela Trochowski, who had spread her sleeping bag behind one of the gravestones. Of course not just anyone could come along and use the cemetery as a free campsite, but the woman had seemed so forlorn that Kuballa, had turned a blind eye and let her stay the night.

  “And her child?”

  “She was on her own,” said Kuballa. “There was no child.”

  “What did you speak to her about?” asked Henze.

  “Nothing significant really, she was a bit confused. At first she said the cemetery was wonderfully peaceful and a moment later she thought it dark and creepy. She wanted to know who lay buried there, so I told her a few family histories. Even that we bury old bones that are sometimes unearthed in town. Always strictly ecumenical with a Catholic and an Evangelic minister, because you never know what denomination the body belonged to.”

  “And the woman? What did she say?”

  “Not much. Although, wait a minute, there’s one question I remember that kept me thinking. Whether I thought grief can save a soul. I said perhaps, but that she should really ask the minister.”

  Henze and Frieling didn’t need any more words to understand. Daniela Trochowski’s escape to the cemetery, her confusion, her thoughts on grief and salvation, the fact that the child was nowhere to be found – everything indicated the boy was dead.

  “She’s singing again,” the technician said from behind. His voice was monotonous as he repeated the words, “How beautiful the morning star shines/ full of the mercy and truth of Our Lord . . .”

  “The chorale by Philipp Nicolai,” said Frieling.

  “This morning at seven o’clock I went back,” Kuballa said. “She was gone already. Only her sleeping bag still lay behind the grave. And I was rather angry with myself for not having chased her away, because quite plainly she had dug around in the earth. That’s vandalism!”

  “No,” whispered Frieling.

  Henze longed for one of his nightmares from which he could awake. He summoned a couple of officers and sent them to the West Cemetery to examine the grave Mr Kuballa would show them. They were to dig, even with their fingernails, until they found the body of a baby boy.

  “Surely she wouldn’t have murdered her own child.” Frieling wiped a hand across her eyes.

  “Why else should she bury the body in secret?” asked Henze.

  The street-lamps dipped Massener Street into a yellow glow, behind the shop windows the goods were set in an advantageous light, some windows were lit, others were dark, and above the roofs of Unna loomed the church tower, illuminated by blue spotlights. Henze and Frieling stood outside the ZIB, motionless and in silence, until the mobile rang.

  “Nothing,” said the policeman on the other end. “Someone has been digging here, yes, but there is nothing.”

  “Dig deeper!” said Henze.

  “We’re already into solid ground.”

  “Keep going all the same!” Henze ordered. “And search the area!”

  A tiny, ridiculous glimmer of hope emerged that little Marc could still be alive after all, but Henze couldn’t believe it. Maybe miracles had happened in the past, but not nowadays. Not in Unna and not in a job like his. No, the child was dead. His own mother had murdered him. And all of a sudden Henze knew where he was. Up there, where chorales, which he would never hear again were being sung to him.

  Henze looked up the chimney, saw the blue neon 610 and above that the 987. He asked himself which number one would have to write next into the murky sky. Above the rim
of the chimney, above the black figure who sat on it and cradled a bundle on her lap. Henze added the numbers in his head.

  “1,597,” he said. When Frieling gave him a questioning look he added, “That’s the next number in the Fibonacci Sequence.”

  “1,597,” said Frieling, “that’s also the year in which Philipp Nicolai wrote the chorale ‘How Beautiful the Morning Star’.”

  Frieling twitched the corner of her mouth. She was not only a good policewoman. Henze glanced at his watch.

  “We’ve still got twenty-one minutes,” said Frieling. “And everything’s ready.”

  “What’s the use now?” asked Henze.

  “She’s going to jump,” said Frieling.

  “She’s going to jump no matter what,” said Henze.

  Frieling looked up the chimney. Fifty-two metres to the top.

  “Okay then,” said Henze, and Frieling began.

  It was only afterwards that Henze actually realized how everything had happened. At this point, he did not realize that Frieling had phoned the people from public services and the clergy. He did not hear the traffic warning on the radio, announcing that all the motorways around Unna had to be blocked due to a bomb threat. He didn’t know that the traffic police had shut down all the major arterial roads and encouraged honest citizens to park their cars at important junctions to stop any sort of traffic. He wasn’t aware that Unna’s organizations, from the shooting club Hemmerde to the stamp collection club Am Hellweg, from Amnesty International to the evangelical church choir, drummed up their members via telephone chains. And he didn’t see that in the centre of Unna dozens of volunteers made sure that not even a lighter would be flicked at minute zero.

  Henze just stared into the dark sky above the chimney and imagined how more numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence would grow up into the night. He added them furiously in his head, 1,597, 2,584, 4,181, bigger and bigger numbers, higher and higher up, 6,765, 10,946. He didn’t even notice how the people of Unna came streaming in, from Massener Street, from Rembrandt Street, from the West and Northring, all gathering by the Linden Brewery, 17,711, 28,657, how they were filling up the square until not the smallest piece of asphalt could be seen from above, 46,368, how the members of the evangelical church choir positioned themselves in strategic places and memorized the text, 75,025 . . .