I got up and crossed to a stack of files on a nearby trolley, rooting through for the Emma Gross material. I couldn't find it. I gazed at the nearest shelves heaving with boxes of files and random-looking stacks of paper. Some of them were covered in dust. How many of these files had been touched in the last six months – the last year even? And how many cases, how many nameless victims, had been lost and forgotten about in this room, just because there hadn't been enough media pressure to save them from obscurity, from the endless pressure of the next crime to solve, the next victim to avenge, the next mystery to unravel?
'Hey,' I asked the stenographer, 'do you have the Emma Gross crime scene report there?' I realised I was clicking my fingers at him, realised too that was something I'd picked up from Gennat. He found the file and I stopped clicking my fingers. 'Can you read what it says about the body?'
The stenographer scanned the page. 'Here it is.
Corpse of white female found lying naked, face up on divan. Bruising around neck suggestive of ligature strangulation
– '
'Okay, stop there. Naked?'
'Yep.'
'Thought so. And ligature marks?'
'Yep. Look at the photos.'
I took the crime scene photographs from him and looked at them. Emma Gross, slack-faced and swollen-tongued, surely unrecognisable in death as the young woman she'd been while alive, reclining on the divan, back twisted too sharply for a living person. And naked as the day she was born, if less innocent. Her breasts sagged like empty purses above a chest whose ribs were visible through the skin.
I re-read the transcript in my hand. Two inaccuracies from Kürten. Three if you added the lie about Gross paying at the desk with her own money. That said, these were the only inaccuracies in four and a half hours of cross-examination detailing five murders and Maria Butlies' rape. I gestured at the folder by the stenographer's shiny suit elbow.
'Is that Berg's autopsy report on Gross?'
'Yep.'
I snagged the folder and opened it. Random phrases leapt out at me.
...Cause of death asphyxiation from forcible strangulation with a ligature of at least 5mm in diameter – increased vaginal secretions, facial discolouration and bruising to neck being characteristic symptoms...
...Stab wounds inflicted between thirty minutes and two hours post-mortem. Absence of spatter in crime scene description in relevant incident report supports this conclusion...
'Hey,' I said to the stenographer, 'what does it say in the report there about blood spatter?'
The stenographer looked at his watch.
'Yes, okay, I'm tired too,' I said, 'but come on, this is important. Kürten's confession doesn't fit the facts.'
'What, you think he's making it up?'
'That's exactly what I think. I need to tell Gennat.'
'How can you be sure?'
I flicked back through the photos. Pictures of the chest wounds showed them as clotted but neat. Pictures of the room showed no spatter, a pile of feminine clothes on the double bed. No sign of any night stand. There was a dresser but the photos didn't show a bowl or a water jug. Possible inaccuracy number three/four. My pulse beat loudly in my ears.
There was no telephone down in the basement, so I grabbed the Stausberg file and hightailed it up the stairs to the second floor where Gennat and Ritter were supposed to be briefing the night shift.
When I got there Gennat's corner office was empty, and so was the squad room next to it where they'd moved the map and photographs. I called out, 'Hello,' anyway, feeling a little foolish.
The telephone on Gennat's desk started ringing. I lifted the earpiece from the cradle and leaned down so my lips brushed the mouthpiece. Up close it smelled of stale sweat, or stale saliva maybe, though I didn't want to dwell on that.
'Gennat?' I said.
'Hello? Michael?' said the voice at the other end of the line.
'No, it's Thomas Klein here.' For some reason, I'd put on a posh accent.
'Where's Ritter?' The voice crackled, but I thought I recognised it as Berg's.
'I'm fine, thanks Berg. How are you?'
'Is he there or isn't he?'
'If he was here I'd have passed him to you by now. What do you want?'
'I need to talk to him.'
'Well how's about I take a message?'
There came a sound like Berg was clearing his throat. 'Messages get lost.'
'Do you want to leave a message or not?'
'Okay, okay. Tell him we need to talk about Johann Stausberg.'
'What? Why?'
'Hello?' he said.
'Hello?'
'Hello? Can you hear me?'
'Yes I can hear you. Can you hear me?' I said.
'Of course I can hear you,' Berg said.
'Sounded like a bad connection just then. What's all this about Stausberg?'
'Well I really can't say. That's why I need to talk to Michael. I've a message from the director at the asylum that might have some bearing on the case with Kürten.'
'Where are you now?'
'At the morgue. I'm half way through our mystery woman.'
'Stay there. I'm on my way.'
Reading and making notes on the move was a great way of finding out just how bumpy the city's tramlines were. Ten jittery minutes with the Stausberg file gave me enough to think Du Pont had been right to blame Ritter but it didn't give me enough to knock the good inspector off his perch.
2.4.29: Stausberg attacks 16-year-old Erna Penning. Throws rope around neck. She fights him off. Later IDs him from photo as her attacker.
3.4.29: Stausberg attacks 30-year-old Frau Flake on her way home from work. Throws rope around neck and drags into the bushes. Couple of witnesses disturb Stausberg, who runs off. Flake lives to testify.
5.4.29: Stausberg brought in: 20 years old, blond, broad shouldered, one metre ninety centimetres tall, hare lip, speech impediment, and a history of epilepsy leading to angry outbursts and memory loss. Confesses. Flake witnesses ID him from line-up. Charges of assault filed with public prosecutor.
So far, so competent. But then along came Ritter:
7.4.29: Stausberg transferred to Mühlenstrasse. Ritter takes over and interrogates suspect re: open murders of Ohliger, Scheer and Gross. Stausberg confesses and Ritter files murder charges with PP.
No wonder Ritter'd been so hostile that morning: solid case until he'd got hold of it. All the mistakes had been his. This was getting good.
I read Stausberg's statement on Emma Gross:
I had gone to the station to look for work. A woman was walking in front of me. She was a whore, I could tell by her clothes. That made me angry and I wanted to hurt her. I snatched at her. She said we should go to a hotel she knew nearby. I agreed because then I could attack her in private. We went into the room and I strangled her. It was dark. We hadn't put the light on. She was naked. I gripped her breast and stabbed her first in the head. Then I went on stabbing. I stabbed into the heart.
When the woman was lying on the divan I didn't stab any more. That is quite certain. That is not a lie. Then I listened a bit, to see if she was still breathing. And then I left her lying there. I went home. At home I washed the blood from my coat. My mother asked me where the blood came from. I said from my nose.
The next day my mother read about the murder in the papers. That evening she asked me whether I had done it. I answered, “Yes, I certainly did it”. My mother told me to keep my mouth shut.
I checked the date and time on the statement: taken by Michael Ritter at ten thirty am, 7
th
April 1929. I flicked to the statement of Stausberg's mother, again taken by Ritter at headquarters, this time on the 9
th
April. Every false move bearing Ritter's signature. Better and better. I skipped to the relevant bit:
He came home around midnight that night. He woke me up when he entered the apartment. I went to the kitchen. He was washing his coat in the sink. I saw the water in the sink was red with blood. I asked him where the blood had come from. He said he had had a nose bleed. I thought nothing of it until the next day when I saw the reports of the murder in the press. Johann can be such a violent boy. I have seen his terrible temper before. When I came back from work I asked him if he had done the things in the newspapers and he looked at me and said, 'Yes, I did it'. I will never forget the moment he told me that. I panicked. I told him to keep it to himself, not to tell anyone, and to try and forget all about it. But he couldn't do that. He couldn't fight his restless spirit inside and he attacked again. That's when I knew I had to reveal what he'd said.
Shit. Stausberg's confession was vague: no mention of strangling, and more blood than the crime scene photos allowed for. But it was plausible because of his epilepsy and his bad memory. And his own mother's testimony was pretty damning support for Ritter's case. I checked my notes again. The file also confirmed what Du Pont had said about the boy's epilepsy and quick temper. Maybe Ritter hadn't forced a confession at all; maybe Stausberg really had killed Emma Gross and then decided to lay claim to a couple more murders for good measure.
The only way to know for sure would be to talk to Johann Stausberg myself.
***
I pushed through a set of heavy double doors, wood sheathed in steel. Beneath an oversized anglepoise lamp, Berg had his forearms immersed in the open chest cavity of his autopsy subject. Beside him was a steel trolley for his instruments. Behind him, two bodies lay on steel racks stacked like bunk beds against the white tiled wall. White sheets covered the bodies. Another sheeted body lay on the dissection slab parallel to the one Berg was working on.
Berg looked up from the corpse on his slab. With a white rubber-gloved hand, he lifted his horn-rimmed glasses so he could see who I was.
'Just in time,' he said.
The chill of the room emphasised the hot pounding in my head. I had to get him to reveal what the asylum director had said if I could.
'Here, put some of these on and give me a hand,' Berg said, nodding at an airtight glass jar filled with more gloves. I approached the stainless steel slab, my shoulder brushing the bucket of the grocers' weighing scales that hung from the ceiling.
'Where is everybody?' I said.
'They've been working since six o'clock this morning.' He nodded over his shoulder at the bodies behind him as though they were sleeping morgue attendants. 'So I sent them home.'
'What about you?' I took some thin rubber gloves from the jar.
'Talc is on the shelves there,' Berg said. His glasses dropped back across the bridge of his nose as he leaned over the body. He took hold of a scalpel and dug back into the chest cavity.
I made some space for the Stausberg file on shelves crowded with coloured glass bottles and jars. I picked up the talcum powder, powdered a pair of the gloves and pulled them on.
'Here,' Berg said. 'Hold this.' He handed me a sac of rubbery flesh. 'Empty it into that.' He pointed to a steel bowl beneath the curved water tap at the slab's raised end. 'So, did you get anywhere with Kürten?'
I upended the sac over the bowl. A thick substance with the consistency of tar dripped out.
'No, you have to squeeze it.' Berg mimed something like milking a cow. 'Gently though.'
I held the top end with one hand and squeezed down the length of the sac with the other. Air rippled out with a flatulent rasp. Now I was glad of my blunted sense of smell. More liquid came out, along with a damp grey lump.
'Hmmn.' Berg prodded the lump with the blunt end of his scalpel. 'You mind taking a few notes for me on this?'
I didn't mind doing anything that would take me away from squeezing the crap out of human organs. 'How much do you remember of the Emma Gross murder?' I said.
'A great deal, given that I re-read my report this morning before going to see Gennat. Has Kürten told you when he killed this one?' He tapped the contents of the steel bowl. 'We're going to struggle with this.'
The corpse's skin bore a pale waxy sheen dotted with brown blotches. The head wasn't attached to the spine of course, thanks to me, and it seemed to loll on the table. Berg had removed the top of the skull and emptied the cavity and I took a sharp breath at the sight.
Berg chuckled. 'Don't worry about it, Thomas. I've seen officers of the law commit worse acts of disrespect than yours.'
'That wasn't...' I stopped myself from lashing out and changed tack: Berg was one of the few bigwigs who hadn't acted like I was a major ball ache. Probably best to keep him sweet, especially since I was there to get information out of him. 'Seems well preserved,' I said. 'Kürten said she'd been in the ground since last summer.'
'It's the loamy earth, mostly. Lack of air, lack of worms, slowed decomposition no end. Also, you see this wax-like texture to the skin?'
I nodded.
'Adipocere. It's an effect produced by certain bacteria that break down the tissue. Converts all the fatty acids to this.' He chuckled again. I wondered what he was laughing at, then decided it probably wouldn't help to know. 'Helps us by preserving the wounds as though they were made yesterday. Which reminds me: what's the good word on time of death?'