The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  Michael Jansen climbed into a light-blue BMW, equipped with huge loudspeakers.

  Did you get the beautiful car in return for your false testimony? Or were you dumb enough to do it for free? As a favour? You never know when you’ll need him again.

  The rain eased during the drive to the castle gardens, but luckily there weren’t any annoying female joggers around. Perhaps he hadn’t presented himself well enough on his Facebook page.

  They were alone in the park, running next to each other for a while, as if they had known each other for years. They didn’t say a word, but each was listening to the other’s breath, and their feet were in sync as their shoes hit the rain-soaked ground.

  Now he ran a little slower, remaining two strides behind Michael Jansen. It would have been easy to ram the dagger into his back. But he didn’t think much of cowardly methods such as that.

  He called his name. ‘Michael Jansen?’

  Jansen turned around in astonishment. The two looked each other in the eyes. Michael Jansen saw the blade, but couldn’t believe what was in front of him.

  His first attempt to push the knife into Jansen’s neck failed as Jansen bent back, stumbled, and fell into a puddle. He threw his arms up, flailing like a bug that had fallen on its back and couldn’t get backup.

  ‘You can have my money! I have a bank card. I can take money out. I—’

  ‘It’s not about the money, you idiot! You protected a killer and rapist with your false statement!’

  He severed the aorta with one clean cut and the rainwater in the puddle mixed with blood. Michael Jansen struggled hard, trying to get up despite the four-or five-centimetre cut in his neck. A stab to the heart ended it and Michael Jansen died with his mouth wide open.

  Wiping the blade on the leg of Jansen’s tracksuit leg, he cleaned his hands in the puddle and pulled out a playing card. He hoped that it would cause the desired panic throughout the entire police force. He shoved the card into Jansen’s mouth, but it fell back out.

  I can’t have that, damn it! He pushed the card deep inside Jansen’s mouth, and then pressed against his head and chin, as if he were a nut cracker.

  He looked left and right to check they were still alone in the park. Then he took two pictures on his phone and walked away back the way they’d come, passing the cedar that Michael Jansen had praised on his Facebook page.

  *

  Ann Kathrin stood by the flipchart and wrote down what was known about the killer.

  Weller, Rupert, Sylvia Hoppe, Rieke Gersema and Büscher pitched in energetically, not unlike a group of nerdy schoolkids, observed Ann Kathrin.

  ‘Now we’re going to pull together everything the killer knows about us, because this will ultimately lead us to him. Very few people have this information.’

  ‘He knows Ubbo and his daughter, Ubbo’s current book and details in the next,’ Büscher began.

  Ann Kathrin wrote ‘Insa and Ubbo’ and drew a red circle around the names.

  ‘He knows his way around computers, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to do the thing at the publishing house,’ Weller said.

  Ann Kathrin wrote ‘computer specialist’ on the wall and drew a circle around that too.

  ‘Maybe I should take a crack at Wilhelm Kaufmann,’ Rupert suggested. ‘You always put on the kid gloves.’

  ‘He belongs in our group of suspects,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘but we can’t let that restrict our vision.’

  Marion Wolters opened the door without knocking and spoke into the room. What she had to say couldn’t wait. ‘The Oldenburg police found a jogger in the castle gardens with his throat cut. It’s Michael Jansen.’

  Ann Kathrin had been just about to write something down. As the marker fell from her hand it made a squeaking noise and left a long line down the paper.

  ‘Presumed or clearly identified?’ asked Weller, who didn’t want it to be true.

  ‘His car was parked only a couple of hundred metres away. He had his ID with him. There’s no doubt. And he has a playing card in his mouth.’

  Weller felt sick. He jumped up, hitting his knee hard against the edge of the table. There was a clattering that sounded like a gun shot.

  ‘That wasn’t funny!’ Weller yelled.

  Marion agreed with him. ‘It really wasn’t!’

  Ann Kathrin was breathing heavily. She was thin-lipped and pale. ‘I only talked about Jansen here in this room. How we would find a witness with his throat cut.’

  ‘And I,’ Weller groaned, ‘said I bet he would have a playing card in his mouth.’

  ‘Yes,’ Büscher nodded, ‘I was there, damn it.’ Then he continued, ‘Either it was one of us, or someone’s listening in on us.’

  Weller had difficulty staying conscious. Vertigo made him sit down again and he wondered how Ann Kathrin could stand up giving clear orders. ‘I want specialists in here immediately to check the room for bugs.’

  ‘And the whole building while they’re at it,’ Büscher added. ‘Then we need to look after the brother, Werner Jansen, immediately. He needs police protection, and we need to pick up Volker Janssen.’

  ‘We’d all do better to keep our mouths shut,’ Weller yelled at Büscher’s, ‘before he uses our next bright idea against us!’

  Ann Kathrin nodded, but said, ‘He won’t go after either of those two now. I think he’s banking on one of them giving in and confessing.’

  ‘I think Charlie Thiekötter has one of those devices you can use to find and neutralise bugs,’ Sylvia Hoppe said.

  Rieke Gersema held her glasses tightly with both hands. ‘We’re finished if it gets out that the killer has been getting his information directly from the police station in Aurich.’

  ‘He is too, if we could only get our hands on him,’ Rupert said and slammed his right fist into his left palm.

  *

  Ubbo Heide had asked Ann Kathrin to bring some files to him at home. This was breaking all the rules, but they were beyond that. All they wanted was to catch the killer. And under no circumstances did she want to dispense with Ubbo’s expertise.

  Büscher had come along, uninvited.

  Ubbo’s wheelchair stood in the hallway. They were sitting in the living room – Ubbo like a wise old man in his wing chair. Oddly attractive. There was a look in his eye, such a wise gaze that it touched Ann Kathrin deeply.

  It looked as if they were working here to be more comfortable, but in reality they needed to get out of the police station as they were now working under the assumption that they were being listened in on.

  They didn’t know who was doing it and how. But it seemed perfectly obvious.

  Martin Büscher heard a commotion in the kitchen and went over to Carola Heide to make himself useful. His wife had always said that he hadn’t been very helpful with the housework – but only after the divorce – and he’d learned his lesson.

  He didn’t like this whole thing at all. They were working in someone’s home and not the police headquarters. But he’d still come because as long as the bugs hadn’t been found in the police station, continuing to discuss the case there was just too risky and gave him stomach pain.

  Büscher had a thought that was constantly turning over in his mind, something he hardly dared to voice. Could the executioner be Rupert, that macho idiot? He had been there in every one of those meetings. He had a rudimentary and archaic idea of the rule of law, and wasn’t one who liked long debates. Instead, he preferred to take drastic measures and then apologise later if he was wrong.

  There were two files lying open on Ubbo Heide’s lap. He appreciated digital files and the images that could give a 360-degree view of a crime scene while sitting at a desk, but there was nothing better than a paper reference file. He was just old school like that.

  He patted the paper. ‘Ann, so it’s like this: whenever we really close a case – sometimes only years later – in the end we often find that the solution was in the file all the time. We just didn’t see it.’

  ‘Bec
ause we interpreted things incorrectly?’ she suggested, but he shook his head. ‘No, because we didn’t look closely enough. Because we overlooked things. Because our vision was obstructed by the chaos of everyday life.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘we’re simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. How can I filter out exactly what’s important to us from among those seven thousand pages?’

  He smiled gently. ‘Only your intuition can help there, my dear, not a computer. Instead of constantly producing new files, we should read what we already have carefully, so we can ask the right questions. But one thing is clear: we know the killer. Later we’ll say: of course it was him! Who else could it have been? How could we have missed that?’

  Ann Kathrin needed to tell Ubbo Heide something. It was difficult, but this was exactly the right time. ‘Ubbo, when you received the package on Wangerooge the sender was listed as—’

  Ubbo finished her sentence: ‘H. TAO. From Hude.’ H. TAO.

  ‘If you read it backwards, it spells OATH. That made me take another look at your book, Ubbo, and you—’

  Ubbo’s lower lip quivered as he formed the words. ‘I wrote: “I swore an oath not to let the two of them get away, but I wasn’t able to definitively prove they were guilty of killing Steffi Heymann. The trial became a catastrophic defeat for our entire team of detectives. I even blamed myself. Sometimes I lie awake at night and think that it shouldn’t have happened to me.” ’

  He quoted almost perfectly from the book. It was easy for him to remember because he’d frequently read aloud from this chapter at events. But he’d never made the connection with the name ‘H. Tao’ before.

  He leaned over to Ann Kathrin. ‘As I’ve been saying!’ he said.

  She just looked at him.

  ‘Well!’

  ‘What should I say?’

  ‘He’s fulfilling my oath!’

  Carola Heide came in from the kitchen with a tray. She was enveloped by a cloud of scent: East Frisian tea, peppermint and apple cake.

  Büscher returned to the living room with Carola. He carried the teapot and the tea warmer. Carola enjoyed having this gentleman around, but Ubbo seemed a little annoyed at his presence. He would have preferred to talk to Ann Kathrin alone, but couldn’t really send away her boss.

  Büscher tried to understand the relationship between Ann Kathrin and Ubbo Heide. Sometimes he almost got the impression that there was something intimate going on between the two of them, but at others it was more like a father–daughter relationship. Either way, it was not like that of any normal former boss and employee.

  ‘OK,’ Carola said, ‘enjoy and take your time.’

  She deposited the tray.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ubbo Heide said, ‘we should drink the tea with cream and sugar this time.’

  Carola stared at him and asked herself if he was serious. ‘Not with peppermint leaves?’

  ‘Dribble the cream anticlockwise,’ he said, ‘to turn back the clock. We may find some answers to our questions in the past, not the future.’

  Carola shrugged her shoulders. She knew that her husband liked to wax philosophical if he wasn’t making progress in a case.

  The sugar was crackling in the cup when Carola said in passing, ‘A journalist from Gelsenkirchen has already called twice today. She wants an interview with you, Ubbo. I tried to shake her off, but she—’

  ‘Silke Sobotta from the Stadtspiegel?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Carola answered, ‘that was her. She was ill when you were in Gelsenkirchen and—’

  Ubbo waved her away, as if he didn’t want to hear about it. ‘I already gave her colleague an interview. That lanky young man.’ Ubbo thought for a second but couldn’t think of his name.

  Ann Kathrin helped him out. ‘Kowalski.’

  Ubbo nodded in thanks.

  ‘Perhaps you should call her back,’ Carola suggested.

  Ubbo Heide shook his head. ‘No, everyone wants to know why my new book won’t be published, and what that has to do with the case. We really have more important things to do.’ He leafed ostentiatiously through the file, as if searching for an important passage.

  Carola lowered the teapot and apologised with emphatic gestures. ‘But I told her that she could call again. She had such a nice voice. I simply couldn’t get rid of her. I always have your back otherwise, but I’m not a secretary, damn it, and recently it’s been—’

  The phone rang.

  ‘That’ll be her. I did agree.’

  ‘Go on, answer it,’ Ann Kathrin said to Ubbo reassuringly. ‘You don’t have to speak for long.’

  Disgruntled, Ubbo accepted the telephone and answered sullenly. ‘Hey. Heide here. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?’

  Ann Kathrin tried the tea while Ubbo attempted to fend off Silke Sobotta.

  ‘I really don’t have any time, Ms. Sobotta. As much as I’d like to talk to you, I don’t feel well and am in the middle of an important conversation. And I already did an interview with your colleague, Mr Kowalski. Didn’t that get published?’

  The answer hit Ubbo like a sucker punch.

  ‘I don’t have a colleague named Kowalski and we haven’t published an interview with you. This man has to have been from another paper, but he’s certainly not from Gelsenkirchen because I know the reporters here.’

  Ubbo and Ann Kathrin looked at each other questioningly and she immediately used her iPhone to Google Kowalski, but couldn’t find a journalist by that name.

  Ubbo pictured the scene. The tall, gaunt man hadn’t even introduced himself as a reporter from the Stadtspiegel.

  Although his ability to remember names was diminishing, Ubbo could remember faces, conversations and situations even better than he used to. ‘I practically put the words in his mouth, damn it. He’d only introduced himself as Kowalski and said “I’m here to interview you.” Then I assumed he was from the Stadtspiegel. I even told him that Ms. Sobotta was ill. Weller didn’t believe him at first, hadn’t wanted to let him through. He was excellently informed, had read my book and—’

  ‘Damn it, Ubbo,’ Ann Kathrin said, ‘you gave the killer an interview!’

  Ubbo said, ‘And Weller was right! The killer was in Gelsenkirchen.’

  ‘That means,’ Ann Kathrin deduced, ‘that we have a picture of him. We can put a warrant out with a picture.’

  Ubbo lifted the phone back to his ear. ‘Ms. Sobotta? You have to keep our conversation completely confidential. You just gave us a critical lead. But please, we have to keep it to ourselves. You can have your interview, as long as you want. I’ll pay for your trip to East Frisia, and we’ll put you up at a first-class hotel. Just not now. And please don’t say a word to anyone!’

  She instantly recognised the explosive nature of the situation, promised to keep her lips sealed and he ended the conversation.

  ‘I believe we can count on her,’ Ubbo said Ann Kathrin.

  She tried to summarise what they had. ‘We all know what he looks like, how he moves, we certainly have pictures of him. We’ll issue a warrant for him.’

  But Ubbo raised his hands defensively. ‘Not so fast, Ann, not so fast.’

  He beckoned her closer, as if she were at the end of the street, and not in his living room, just three metres away. He wanted to whisper something into her ear, but before he did so, he gestured to his wife to turn on the radio.

  Carola instantly understood and did as he desired.

  The local station Radio Lower Saxony was playing old songs. Ubbo Heide gestured again, asking Carola to turn it up louder. Only then did he whisper in Ann Kathrin’s ear. ‘I know where he gets all his information. He gave me a tin of mints. From Bochum. I had them with me in my wheelchair. I bet there’s a—’

  ‘A bug.’ The word slipped from Ann Kathrin’s lips and she immediately held a hand in front of her mouth.

  Büscher, who had been listening as well, stepped into the middle of the room and raised both hands. He motioned Ann Kathrin and Ub
bo Heide to stop talking. He took the file from Ubbo’s lap and wrote on the back of a piece of paper. This is our chance. If he’s really listening to what we say, then we can lay a trap for him.

  Ubbo and Ann Kathrin read it, looked at each other, and Ann Kathrin gave a thumbs up.

  Ubbo did the same.

  *

  There hadn’t been anything for quite some time, just static and a crackling noise. He worried the battery was dead or the bug had been discovered. He wanted to be there now, know what was going on.

  Being among them, unseen, that got him into the zone, giving him this wonderful feeling of omnipotence and superiority.

  He pictured their reaction to the playing card in Michael Jansen’s mouth and to the piece of silver fox fur between David Weissberg’s teeth. Would they finally understand that he was the one making their secret dreams a reality? Would they finally support him? Finally join in with him as the righteous executioner? Could the great clean-up now begin?

  He was making good progress with Svenja Moers. She appeared to have understood that she was responsible for all of her own, reprehensible deeds. She ate and exercised with gusto.

  He was playing with the idea of training her to become a fighting machine. He’d seen an American movie where a beautiful young woman who had committed a crime was turned into a killing machine. Perhaps it could still be possible with Svenja Moers. Then she could be let out of the cage from time to time so she could carry out a job for him. It was becoming more and more difficult to find new disguises. At some point they would see through all his masks and costumes, and unfortunately he couldn’t change his size. If only he could become a small, fat man – just for the day.

  Perhaps he’d direct the strikes from a chair at some point. Like a guru. A man on high ensuring the country became worth living in again. So that people no longer needed to be afraid to go out at night. With a dozen determined men and women – willing to do anything – he could create a country where only the criminals would be afraid because they would be pursued mercilessly like wild animals being hunted. No one would mourn this endangered species.