'I don't remember now,' she said. 'A week or so after I'd done the procedure on Emma.'
'And what did he say to you exactly?'
'He said to forget all about Emma Gross and what I'd done for her. Otherwise he'd kill me.'
'That didn't make you suspicious when she died?'
She latched onto the sides of the bathtub and clawed her way upright. 'Mister, I make my living by breaking the law so I can get my daily fix. If I don't come across something suspicious on an average day, I know I'm going to get the sweats all night. Now will you leave me alone?'
'Gladly.'
'Just promise me something will you?' Her voice sounded sleepy.
'What?'
She clasped my hand and squeezed. 'Promise me you'll get the bastard, okay?'
I squeezed back. I retrieved my belt and left the pharmacy. There was no point hanging around, and my mind was boiling with the idea that maybe Ritter had killed Emma Gross because she'd aborted his baby. But why agree to have a baby with a streetwalker? It still didn't make sense.
Then a thought hit me. Those kids at the playground near Frau Stausberg's place, they'd spoken to Ritter when Ritter had asked them about Johann Stausberg. According to the file, Ritter had interviewed Frau Stausberg only at headquarters, not at her home. And Ritter had interrogated Johann Stausberg only at headquarters, not at his home. Once Ritter got the case he'd conducted it all from Mühlenstrasse.
So why had he been talking to some kids in the neighbourhood about Stausberg? When I'd talked to the blond kid, I'd just assumed Ritter's presence was connected to the complaint the kid's father had made. But what was a plainclothesman doing dealing with a
Schupo
matter? And even if that was the reason he'd been there, why had none of this made the Stausberg file?
I needed time. I needed space. I needed to think, and I needed to cleanse my head of the dark memories floating around within. Christ, maybe it was just sleep I needed.
I wasn't going to get any of that though. More than all of it, I needed answers, and if I stopped now I might never get them.
Frau Stausberg opened her door and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes, but I'd had enough of her crocodile tears. I pushed into her room, got a chill down the back of my neck from the draught coming through the window crack. No sunlight could find its way into the room even then, at midday. The apartment building across the way blocked it.
She closed the door, tightening the belt on her threadbare dressing gown as she walked past me and sank into one of those dog-eared easy chairs of hers. There was a glass in her hand. She lifted the glass to her lips and drained the clear contents with a grimace. Blankets lay crinkled and unmade on the bed.
'I knew you'd come back,' she said, husky-voiced.
'Tell me about Ritter,' I said, husky-voiced to match. I hadn't moved since she'd taken her seat. 'He came to see you before Johann strangled those women, didn't he?'
The woman nodded.
'Tell me,' I said.
She plucked a bottle of schnapps from the floor under the chair, where I hadn't seen it, and refilled the glass.
'I went to see him yesterday, after you left here,' she said. She slurred her words, the effect akin to the way her son talked while sober.
'Who, Ritter?'
She shook her head, spilled some of her drink. 'My goddamned son. He's gone backwards, retreated inside his head. Thanks to you and that damned doctor and all your damned meddling.' She drank off her schnapps. Some of it dribbled out of the corner of her mouth and she caught the spill on the back of her hand.
I waited her out.
'He hasn't spoken since you went to see him,' she said. 'He won't talk. Not one word. And that...Michael Ritter...his promises were worthless.'
I went up to her and knelt at her feet.
'He came to you before Johann attacked those women in April. Didn't he?' She looked away. 'What did he promise you?' She frowned at me. 'Ritter. What did he promise you?'
'He promised that my Johann would be well cared for in the asylum. That he'd be happier there than he ever could be. Out here.'
She flung an arm in the direction of her cracked window, then she heaved herself out of the chair and stumbled to the window. She flipped the catch and swung the window open. The breeze ruffled her hair.
'What did you do, Frau Stausberg?'
'I just opened the window,' she said. She looked out and added, 'Oh, that man's there again.'
'What man?'
I crossed to the window. The grey net curtains flapped about my face. I batted them away as best I could, and ended up clutching them in my hand to stop them obscuring my view of the street.
'There.'
She was pointing at the corner where her street intersected with the main road. An auto drove past, followed by a truck.
'What man?' I said again.
'Oh you won't see him now, he's gone again. The one with the funny green hat and the scarf. Though he's not wearing his scarf today. Too warm, I suppose.'
I pulled her back from the window. She tumbled to the floorboards and took me down with her. I landed on top of her.
'You've seen that man before?' I asked her, the tip of my nose touching the tip of hers. Schnapps laced her breath.
'Once or twice,' she said.
'Who is he?'
'I don't know. We've never spoken. I've just seen him, is all.' She shoved at my chest. 'Get off, will you?'
Her gown had come open and my elbow rested on her exposed right breast, what there was of it. I stood and patted down my clothes.
'Sorry.' I helped her to her feet and looked away while she rearranged her clothing. Her body was younger than her face, the skin firmer.
She slunk back to her easy chair. I stayed at the window, standing back a little so I couldn't be seen too easily from down in the street. That damned green man again. What did he want with Frau Stausberg? Or with me?
Frau Stausberg retrieved her glass and poured herself another drink.
'Did you want some coffee?' she said, resting the full glass on the arm of her chair. She was quicker than I expected. Maybe all that schnapps had oiled her joints, or maybe I was just too damn slow. Whatever it was, she got all the way to the door and had it halfway open before I got hold of her arm. I held it tight as she tried to pull away. There was iron in those thin muscles, even while she was full of drink and close to mental collapse.
'Tell me about Ritter,' I said.
She let go of the door. It swung to, though it didn't click shut. She leaned into me as I steered her back to her chair and pressed her glass into her hand.
'He even took to visiting me every month,' she said. 'Checking how my boy was getting on at the asylum, if everything was okay, if I needed help. Went so far as to lend me money once or twice, when the rent was getting tight, you know?' She snorted. 'Blood money.' She took a drink.
'What for?' I returned to the window. There was still no sign of the green man – or any other kind of man – in the street below.
'I'm sorry?'
'Ritter was the one who fed Johann the information for his false confessions, wasn't he?'
Children's squeals drew my attention. A grubby gang of them sprinted along the pavement outside, trying to outrun a delivery van. The van honked its horn.
The street sounds somehow deepened the silence between us. I'd asked my question and now I waited for her to answer. I went through the rigmarole of lighting another cigar, though I knew my throat wouldn't be able to stand it. I'd got as far as touching a flaming match to the tip when she spoke again.
'He came to do a deal.'
'What sort of a deal?'
'We made it look like Johann killed those people and Ritter guaranteed Johann would get sent to Grafenberg.'
I blew out the match and perched the cigar on the window sill. I circled the chair. The woman was grinning, her glass hanging heavy in her fingers like she would drop it again at any moment. 'He told us what to say,' she licked her lips, 'and we said it. He told my Johann what to do and he did it. Ritter'd found out about Johann's fondness for rope, you see.'
'This was in March?'
She nodded.
This was the evidence I needed to start building up a case. 'You'll need to testify again,' I said. 'To give me a new statement.'
Her dry laughter stopped me dead as I went behind her chair. She beat at her flat chest with an open palm, and this time her glass did fall. It rolled towards the door, leaving a trail of spilled alcohol.
'
I
framed my son,' she said. 'How could I possibly testify against Ritter without risking jail for myself and risking that my boy be released? With no one out here to care for him? Just how long do you think he would last on his own? No.' She shook her head, stooped to retrieve her bottle. 'No, there's no way out of this for me.'
'We could prove coercion.' I reached over the chair to take the bottle from her. 'Say he tricked you into going along with it.'
'For a year?'
'His visits. They were his way of checking up on you, seeing that you kept on doing what he wanted.' I returned the schnapps bottle to the floor and leaned both my arms on the back of the chair. God, I was tired.
She moved to the door and bent down, reaching for her glass. The door opened and clipped the glass, knocking it away.
The green man paused in the doorway, the sight of Frau Stausberg crouching so close seeming to put him off. But then he raised the claw hammer in his left hand and swung it at the prone woman's head.
I didn't have time to think. I picked up the chair I'd been leaning on and I hurled it at him.
Frau Stausberg's skull crunched and she gave a cry. The green man stumbled under the impact of the chair, but not for long. He gathered himself and ran at me, the woman's blood slicking his hammer head. I went for the pistol in my pocket, but I rushed it and the pocket twisted around my fist so that I couldn't shake loose. My knuckles had swollen from punching the bathroom wall in the pharmacy.
The green man raised his hammer, then surprised me by dropping it. Stupidly, I watched it fall as he drove his right fist into my stomach.
My gut exploded with those familiar stabbing pains multiplied several times over. My body was trying to double up and wasn't giving my brain any say in the matter, only I couldn't fold up like I wanted because the green man was in the way. I leaned on him like an exhausted boxer and dry-heaved.
He got me round the throat and pushed me back until I was hanging over the sill of the open window at my back. The breeze ruffled my hair. Shit, he was trying to push me out. A few seconds more of this and my cringing innards would be decorating the street below.
Parts of me were catching at the sill, stopping me from falling. I jabbed at his eyes, at his adam's apple – anything vulnerable.
He stepped back, holding me in place one-handed while he scrabbled for his discarded hammer. Good Christ, was he going to hammer me off the sill? The thought jolted me. I latched onto his jacket lapels and pulled myself back into the room. He twisted to try and throw me off. Some part of my brain registered that now he was between me and the window. I kicked down at the floorboards and managed to get some purchase, then I pushed him as hard as I could.
He hit the sill and went over, his grunts turning to a cry as he disappeared from view. I hugged the floor and waited for my head to stop spinning.
When my head was done spinning I went over to Frau Stausberg, trembling as I did so. Blood dribbled down the side of her face and neck from a tear at the top of her skull; it ran into her eyes. The wound was swelling already. She rubbed at it with her fingers. I knelt and cradled her head, trying not to press too hard in case the bones were broken.
'Don't move,' I said.
She spoke, her words slurring beyond recognition, her blood soaking into her dressing gown. Oh, sweet Jesus, she couldn't die. Not now, not when I was so close to a solution. She was my only real evidence against Ritter and if she died the case against him died too. The door was still open though, and that gave me the chance to do something.
'Frau Wenders!' I shouted. I snagged the door with my foot and pulled it open all the way. 'Frau Wenders!'
Footsteps echoed up the stairs. Frau Wenders entered the room, wearing an apron over her dress as she had been on my last visit. She stopped when she saw Frau Stausberg struggling in my arms.
'Get the police,' I said.
Wenders' mouth hung open.
'Go out and call for the police, woman! Quickly!'
'What happened?'
'Here, give me your apron.' I held out a hand.
Wide eyes drawn to the bleeding woman in my lap, Wenders complied, untying her apron strings without looking at what she was doing and then passing the apron to me.
'Damn it, will you fetch the
Schutzpolizei
or not? And an ambulance. Now!'
She jerked back into life and ran down the stairs. Her shouts rebounded through the open window as she went out into the street. Fine pair of lungs on her, that one.