The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  Svenja Moerst immediately took up a different position. She felt as if she had hit the jackpot: his mother!

  He was still living with his mother, and she had found her way down here. She’ll free me. She won’t let her son get away with this mess. Dear Lord, thank you!

  The old woman stood there with her walker and looked at Svenja Moers as if she were viewing an expressionist painting. She looked interested and astonished but did not speak. It was as if Svenja wasn’t a person, but a piece of art, an object.

  First humming to herself, she began to sing quietly:

  ‘There was an old woman

  Who lived in a shoe.’

  A chill ran up Svenja Moers’ spine. Was the old lady crazy?

  ‘My name is Svenja Moers. I’m being held in captivity. Do you have a key? Can you help me?’

  The old woman nodded and continued:

  ‘She had so many children

  She didn’t know what to do.’

  Then she rocked back and forth in rhythm, just humming, and tried to turn the walker while dancing.

  Svenja went to the bars and reached out for the old woman. ‘Please help me! Is there a telephone here? Do you have a key?’

  The old woman moved backwards slightly with her walker, as if she were afraid that Svenja Moers would attack her, although there wasn’t the slightest chance of that.

  The old woman tapped out a dance on the floor with her thick, orthopaedic shoes.

  ‘She gave them some broth

  And a big slice of bread’

  She giggled and pointed at Svenja Moers with her long, thin fingers.

  She seemed so friendly.

  ‘She whipped all their bums

  And sent them to bed!’

  ‘At the end of the fairy tale,’ yelled Svenja Moers, ‘it was the goddamn witch that was dead, not Hansel and Gretel!’

  The old woman retreated with a cackling laugh that reminded Svenja Moers of a seagull’s cries.

  ‘No! Don’t! Stay here! I didn’t mean to insult you! Please don’t go! I’m in a dire emergency! This is not all right! Call for help! Bring me a telephone! Nothing will happen to your son, I won’t testify against him, but help me get out!’

  The steel door closed behind the woman and Svenja Moers heard the clatter of the walker.

  Then she began to cry bitterly.

  A psychopath who lived with his crazy mother had converted his house into a prison and put her in it like a plaything.

  One thought depressed her but simultaneously gave her hope.

  Presumably she wasn’t the first. Someone who was so crazy must have drawn attention to themselves. Perhaps there was a chance that the police would get wind of it.

  Surely the second cell wouldn’t be empty forever. Maybe he would get caught attempting to kidnap someone else.

  I have to survive, she thought. Time is on my side.

  But then she tried to think back to every time she had met Yves Stern. Cooking together at the vocational college. The jokes. His deft way of handling a knife while cutting onions.

  No, that man was in no way conspicuous. On the contrary. He seemed to be a normal pleasant man who you would be happy to accept a lift home from. More a gentleman than a pervert. More of a rational intellectual than a psychopath. Possibly a vegetarian, probably voted for the Greens. Yes, that’s how she thought of him. On the outside he was a nice guy who looked after his elderly mother. He certainly didn’t have a wife and children.

  *

  When Ann Kathrin was pulled out of her dreams by her phone’s alarm clock the next morning, she needed a moment to realise the sad reality. Here she was lying alone in a hotel bed. She wasn’t sitting in her beach chair on her balcony and her cat Willy wasn’t winding his way around her legs, purring. Muted light cast bright spots on the wall, moving up and down like something alive.

  Unusually for him, Weller hadn’t left a message, but was simply absent without notice. She assumed he was helping Ubbo to get dressed.

  When she entered the breakfast room she saw a freshly shaved Ubbo Heide biting into a cheese sandwich. He looked clean and was bursting with energy. In comparison, Martin Büscher’s movements were puppet-like. He cracked his soft-boiled egg with extreme precision, his lips pressed together as if he were afraid that something dramatic could go wrong.

  Ann Kathrin took this behaviour as a sign of stress which he was struggling to control. He was plagued by a fear of failure and looked as if he’d barely slept.

  Ann Kathrin sat down next to the two of them and had a cup of coffee. She wasn’t hungry. She looked around for Weller. Could he have already eaten breakfast? There weren’t any dirty dishes lying around.

  Weller came into the breakfast room at about nine, obviously in a good mood. He was light-footed, and seemed energised, as if a burden had been taken from his shoulders.

  Everyone assumed that Weller had organised a replacement vehicle and that the Chevy would have to be repaired in Gelsenkirchen, but it was parked outside the door in the sunlight.

  ‘Are you expecting us to travel in that?’ Büscher asked angrily.

  Weller nodded. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Won’t it be a bit draughty?’ Büscher asked.

  Weller shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why? I can close the window.’

  ‘It’s already been fixed?’

  ‘Yes of course,’ laughed Weller.

  ‘How did you get it done that fast?’ Büscher asked.

  ‘Sometimes I can do miracles,’ Weller grinned, winking at Ann Kathrin, and she nodded. ‘That’s right. Sometimes he can.’

  *

  Carola Heide waited impatiently for her husband. It was going to be a beautiful, sunny day and she would have liked to take a stroll with him in the park. She thought that they were both in urgent need of fresh air.

  She ran to the door as soon as the bell rang, but they couldn’t be back from Gelsenkirchen so soon.

  The postman handed her a telephone bill and a postcard. It was from Insa, who in her small, spidery handwriting claimed she had fallen in love and was in Venice with her new boyfriend.

  There was also a letter for Ubbo. What looked like an obituary announcement, framed in black, with no return address. Because Carola was in charge of social contacts, wrote birthday greetings and answered all the invitations, she opened the letter without a second thought.

  The letter smelled of roses.

  She used a breakfast knife to open the envelope. They were at the age when their best friends were dying off. She shivered despite the morning warmth.

  But there was no obituary inside the envelope.

  At first rose petals fell out, like the ones she had dried between the pages of books as a child. Then a photograph. There was a woman behind bars. She looked like she was afraid for her life.

  Carola Heide dropped the letter on the table. She needed a glass of water.

  She decided not to call Ubbo at once to tell him what had happened. Stress wasn’t good for his heart and she also feared the call would mean they’d drive back too fast. She wanted to see him first.

  Carola drank two large glasses of tap water and then she went back to look at the picture again. No, she didn’t think it was a stupid prank. This was another message to her husband, just like the decapitated head they had received on Wangerooge. And once again the message lay on the breakfast table.

  She overcame her repugnance and, without picking it up, looked very carefully at the woman in the picture. She had learned that it was important not to disturb any trace evidence.

  No, to her relief, she didn’t know this woman.

  She left everything on the table, clearing away neither the butter nor the honey, nor the jam. She pictured the crime scene technicians walking through her apartment and she didn’t like the thought at all.

  She started cleaning up. But it was as clean and as tidy here as her childhood doll’s house, which she had moved around and cared for on a daily basis, had been.

  ‘Ubbo
, please,’ she quietly said to the window, ‘hurry. Don’t leave me alone with this horror for very long.’

  She felt so deeply connected with her husband that she actually believed he could feel it.

  Whether by a strange coincidence or as a direct result of her thoughts, just at that moment Ubbo said to Frank Weller, ‘Hit the gas, boy. I want to go home. I’ve had enough.’

  They drove non-stop for two hours until Ann Kathrin asked Weller to head for a service area. She had tried to control herself for a long time, but it wasn’t working anymore and her bladder was almost bursting. They had left the Ruhr region long ago and there weren’t so many facilities up north. Weller took the exit for a truck stop. There was a little toilet building, but it was broken and shuttered.

  Ann Kathrin walked a couple of metres into the first trees she saw, and then crouched in the bushes.

  ‘We’ll take Ubbo home first, and then go directly to a briefing,’ Büscher said in a commanding voice.

  Ubbo Heide shook his head, and Büscher was worried that he was planning to participate in the meeting, maybe even lead it. But he said, ‘There’s a café just around the corner from my place. Please take me there first. After something like this I prefer to get my bearings again rather than take too much of this business home with me.’

  *

  Svenja Moers was looking for some way of measuring time. Not knowing if she had been imprisoned for days, weeks or months was having a disastrous effect on her. She needed something to orient herself in time other than his sporadic visits. She decided to at least catch a glimpse of his watch. He wore a watch, if she remembered correctly.

  He stood in front of her seemingly satisfied. He was surrounded by an irresistible scent, as if he’d just come from a snack bar. There was a smell of freshly roasted chicken.

  He held up a bag, waving it so that it rustled, as if the half-chicken inside was crispy but still alive.

  ‘Yum. I brought something to eat. Looks like you have enough to drink. Have you been a good girl? Do you have anything to tell me?’

  Yes, he wore a watch. But she couldn’t read the face. And now she hardly cared about the time; after all, she didn’t know what day it was. Only that chicken was important. Oh, how she wanted it! Meat. Protein. Energy.

  She played her card immediately. ‘I had a conversation with your mother.’

  He was astonished. ‘Would you look at that! With my mother?’

  ‘Yes. She was with me. We got on really well.’

  She tried to read from his face how he felt about this. She hoped he would care. Did he, like most boys she knew, want to present himself positively towards his mother? Not to look foolish in front of her, not be despised or judged by her? Regardless of how crazy the old lady was, she could be Svenja’s trump card. Her lifesaver.

  ‘I told her that you’re a good son, Yves, and that we are just playing a game. Prison guard and prisoner. I don’t think your mother has much understanding of S & M crap. Open up now, and let me out. We can work this out. We’ll keep it all to ourselves. I told her that I’ve always liked you and only signed up for the cooking class so I could see you.’

  He didn’t react. He just stood there motionless and held up the bag with the roast chicken. Her mouth filled with saliva and Svenja Moers swallowed.

  ‘Your mother would surely be happy if we cooked for her together. What do you think of that? Let’s be a proper little family. I think it would be good for the old lady.’

  He didn’t use the hatch in the bars but just dropped the bag. It burst and grease ran out.

  ‘What kind of goddamn slut are you?’ he said as he turned around and disappeared behind the steel door.

  Svenja Moers knelt next to the bars and reached her arm though them, stretching out her fingers for the chicken bag.

  *

  Marion Wolters tidied her hair and redid her smudged lipstick in the ladies. She practised the Rupi song, which had recently been rehearsed with the East Frisia police choir. It started with the line:

  ‘Super-duper, Rupert,

  Rupert goes at it like Superman,

  He’s his own biggest fan.

  Super-duper, Rupert’

  There were several verses, and several female colleagues had contributed ideas of their own. Marion Wolters lilted,

  ‘A specialist at livin’ large

  If you ask him, he’s in charge.’

  Then someone in a cubicle behind her flushed.

  Marion was startled and imagined Rupert was in the ladies and had listened to her. Hadn’t the gents been closed recently because of problems with the pipes?

  But then she was relieved to hear Sylvia Hoppe’s voice. She carried on:

  ‘What’d they do without that cat

  They’d have no one to laugh at.’

  Both women laughed. They didn’t yet know when and how they would present the song, if they ever did, but that didn’t matter. First and foremost it came down to enjoying singing and creatively processing the everyday stress and frustration that working with macho men entailed, as the police psychologist Elke Sommer put it.

  *

  The meeting in the Aurich police station had only just begun. Scherer, the prosecutor, was taking part to get a sense of where things were, which is why Weller didn’t dare let him in on the heroics. The way Scherer had sat down on his chair suggested there was a storm brewing.

  Rupert had something stuck between his front teeth that was driving him crazy. It felt like dental floss or sauerkraut. He kept bumping against it with his tongue.

  Weller carefully read aloud the number plates that Marion Wolters had already started checking.

  Prosecutor Scherer cleared his throat. ‘Um, so have I got this right? Everyone who attended some random author’s reading in Gelsenkirchen should be identified?’

  ‘No,’ Weller said, ‘this was Ubbo Heide’s reading.’

  Scherer looked like he was about to vomit.

  Weller continued, ‘We’ll check their alibis and—’

  ‘Oh no,’ Scherer said and erupted, ‘you won’t do that.’

  Büscher was looking for a way to move away from this dicey topic. He leafed through a file.

  Ann Kathrin smiled at Weller. She thought he was putting up a good fight against the prosecutor, who she felt more frequently slowed things down than moved them forward.

  Scherer spoke spitefully in Weller’s direction, finger raised. ‘We’re short on everything. We have neither the personnel nor a rational, tenable reason. This bears no relation to an efficient investigation, Mr Weller. Would I be right in saying it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack?’

  Rupert said nothing and hoped that the lightning bolts wouldn’t hit him. Also, he was afraid that whatever was stuck between his front teeth would dangle out of his mouth while he was talking. He continued to play with it with his tongue.

  Then Büscher did something that Ubbo Heide had never done. He tapped his water glass with his pen. The sound immediately gave him everyone’s attention. Ubbo Heide would have relied on his voice.

  ‘We should,’ Büscher said, ‘direct our attention towards Wilhelm Kaufmann. After all, he didn’t get kicked out because of some trivial charge.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, we know. He really wiped the floor with Yves Stern back then,’ said Ann Kathrin.

  Büscher leaned forward. ‘But that’s not the only reason he was sacked.’

  ‘What?’ asked Ann Kathrin, and Büscher was all too happy to avoid the row between Weller and Scherer escalating. He made an effort to have a good relationship with his colleagues, but it was also really important that he had a constructive relationship with the prosecutor.

  ‘There were rumours that he manipulated files and made extenuating evidence disappear.’

  Rieke Gersema groaned and clutched her forehead.

  ‘Rumours?’ Ann Kathrin pressed. ‘No one gets suspended because of rumours.’

  Büscher pocketed his pen and took a sip from his
glass of water. He wanted some thinking time without offering too much of a target.

  ‘There were very specific accusations. He was never legally convicted, but—’

  Ann Kathrin formulated a question. ‘Did he attack Yves Stern to get him to talk or not?’

  Weller whistled. ‘That’s the ticket, Ann! I think Kaufmann’s our man.’

  Scherer bristled. ‘It’s not Christmas, Mr Weller, and you’re already writing your wish list.’

  Ann Kathrin went straight in to bat for Weller. She couldn’t stand those cockfights. Counting with her fingers she said, ‘This is not just a wish list! First of all, Wilhelm Kaufmann knew exactly where Ubbo Heide was at the time in question. Second, he was familiar with Heide’s fondness for Wangerooge. Third, there’s a direct connection between him, Ubbo and the two dead men. Fourth, Wilhelm Kaufmann was in Reichshof when the keys to Ubbo’s car disappeared.’

  Weller was pleased by Ann Kathrin’s contribution. ‘And he was at the reading in Gelsenkirchen.’

  Büscher nodded, but Scherer exploded. ‘Gelsenkirchen, Gelsenkirchen! What the hell? You’re barking up the wrong tree! Ubbo Heide had a reading there. So what? No one cares!’

  At that very moment the seal in Ann Kathrin’s phone started barking. Scherer thought the ringtone was as stupid as Weller’s ‘Pirates Ahoy!’ Annoyed, he looked up at the ceiling. Then he held up his phone and showed that it was on silent.

  ‘Hadn’t we,’ he scolded, ‘agreed to mute our phones during the meeting?’

  Rupert emphatically agreed with Scherer and looked under the table to check that his phone was also on silent. At the same time, he tried to remove the damn sinew from between his front teeth. Now he didn’t care if the others were looking or not. Ann Kathrin provoked everyone’s displeasure with her telephone conversation.

  She made a sweeping gesture across the table, indicating that everyone should be quiet. Then she said, ‘Yes, Ubbo?’

  ‘Is everyone there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Frank, Martin, Rieke, Prosecutor Scherer and Rupert.’

  ‘Put me on speakerphone,’ Ubbo demanded.