I talked, to avoid having to think. 'Well then, I guess I'll have to rely on Frau Stausberg's testimony detailing how you framed her son.' I fired off another quick, silent prayer, this one for Frau Stausberg's recovery, hoping my one votive candle would cover a second prayer.
'She won't talk,' Ritter sneered. 'She wouldn't risk her precious boy getting released.'
'We'll see.'
'Besides, who will prosecute? You think the state's going to expose its police force to more public ridicule by charging one of its own with murder?'
'Gisela isn't
Kripo
,' I said, though he was right again. No one would want to listen to me. No one could afford to listen to me. Gennat had warned me about this, and I hadn't taken him seriously enough.
'Oh wake up, man,' Ritter said. 'As far as the public is concerned, there's no difference. No one is going to derail the case against Kürten by trying the wife of the head of his murder commission. It would leave
Kripo
in tatters.'
And there it was, Ritter's trump card. I'd found my murderer, but there was nothing I could do about it. Pins and needles prickled my hands and feet. I had that giddy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It couldn't all come down to this, he and I and Gisela stuck together in silent complicity forever. Even if I did go ahead and file charges, Ritter would bring up the abortion, and that would mean my instant dismissal from
Kripo
, another blow to the credibility of the Ripper case given how many of the interviews I'd conducted.
I could take us all down together. But no, that was where Ritter's argument became stronger still. From bringing down one man connected to the Ripper prosecution, the department would have to bring down two. It was a simple equation. Convict the Ripper, the man responsible for so many brutal killings, and begin to repair the department's reputation, or convict the murderer of a single, unmourned prostitute and wreck the Ripper case.
Ritter's eyes flitted to the chapel entrance and his mouth dropped open.
The green man stood there, his fedora battered but still perched atop his head, his jagged scar red raw. The window bleached his face fish-white with a seawater tinge and his eyes were black holes glinting from swollen flesh. He clasped his bloodstained claw hammer in his left hand. The shouts of priests and other onlookers in the nave bounced off him like they weren't there.
'Ritter,' the green man said.
'You know this man?' I asked Ritter. 'Who is he?'
'Who am I?' the green man said to me. He trembled as he spoke. From shock, at a guess, and blood loss. Dear God, he looked worse than Frau Stausberg had when the taxi had taken her to hospital.
Ritter's eyes widened. 'Albermann?' he said.
I got a vision of little Gertrude, the blood-soaked girl in the green coat lying on her pile of bricks by the Papendell roadside. So this was her father, his rage more just than mine, and brighter, making my anger at her death seem fraudulent, tainted by my ambition.
The green man rushed me. I hesitated a second too long before bringing up the Luger. He pushed Gisela to the marble floor and smashed my hand aside with his hammer. My middle finger snapped. The pistol clattered off the side of the altar as I screamed. Gisela retreated behind me and knocked over the fire bucket, spilling sand across the marble. I grunted and fell to my knees.
Ritter pointed his Walther at the green man. 'Don't move!' His throat was thick with phlegm and he tried to clear it.
'You're all in on it,' the green man said, staring down at me. He kissed his hammer and whispered something I couldn't make out.
He raised the weapon over my head. I curled up around my broken right hand and closed my eyes.
A gunshot boomed. The green man growled and I opened my eyes. Albermann was running towards Ritter. Ritter pulled his trigger again, and missed. The green man plunged on and flailed at Ritter's face with the hammer. Ritter's pistol fell from his hand.
Albermann swung again and again until the crack of bone gave way to the slap of wet meat. Blood beaded the wall, shining black in the tinted light.
Albermann stopped his attack and now the cries of our audience in the nave penetrated the relative silence. The killer panted, his chest heaving. Blood dribbled down his face and there was no way of telling whose it was, his or Ritter's. I looked around for the Luger. Gisela huddled beside the altar, surrounded by sand. She was running her fingers through it, letting the grains slide off.
'Where's the damned gun?' I shouted. She looked at me blankly.
Albermann hurtled towards us, silent but for his deep breathing and the echo of his footfalls.
The Luger's black grip poked out of the sand. I crawled towards it, my right arm throbbing with pain each time I put weight on it. I heard the man's grunts close behind me. I thrust my left hand into the sand, curled my fingers around the grip and turned to see the hammer swinging down at my skull.
I aimed upwards, squeezed off three wild left-handed shots. One bullet shattered a window. The other two took him in the torso and spun him around. He staggered back towards Ritter's body and sank to his knees, the light through the window turning his earlobes a translucent green.
I pulled the trigger twice more and sent two bullets through the back of his head, splattering his face across the broken glass.
Gennat took my statement in that second-floor corner office at Mühlenstrasse he'd made his own. We were alone, me cradling a half-bottle of cognac the big man had given me while he smoked one of his damn cigars. My broken finger was bandaged to a splint. It throbbed, and the pain was the kind that made you want to throw up each time you moved.
We both sat at the pine table below the window, side by side. Gennat probably thinking it better that we didn't sit facing each other with a stonking great desk between us. Best to avoid the confrontational approach. Top marks that man. Couldn't fault him. Couldn't think all that clearly, either. Oh, dear Christ, what had happened?
Ritter was dead, goddamn it. And what the hell Gisela was going through I couldn't even begin to imagine. Okay, so she'd killed a woman and he'd covered it up and tried to pin it on someone else. And yet...
There was a streaky glass on the table somewhere, but it didn't seem all that important where it was. I had no use for the damn thing anyway. I filled my mouth with cognac straight from the bottle and gulped down the warm liquid.
The window was closed, the air stuffy. I sneezed. Then I sneezed again, wiping my nose on my shirt sleeve. I got that seasick feeling, my head spinning, and I sat up straight, trying to stay as still as I could.
Gennat grimaced and looked up from his notes.
'You have no idea why Herr Albermann attacked you?'
I swallowed another mouthful of the cognac. I had a couple of unhealed cuts on my inside lip that I'd picked up from somewhere. They were on their way to becoming mouth ulcers, and the drink made them sting, brought tears to my eyes.
Gennat shuffled in his chair, spectacles perched on the end of his nose and his forehead wrinkling.
Oh yes, he'd asked me a question.
'Sorry Ernst, what did you say?'
'Never mind. What were you doing with this?'
He put Albermann's Luger on the table in front of me. I reached for it and he made no move to stop me. The dark powder that came off in my hands when I handled it told me why: they'd dusted for prints already.
'Albermann brought it with him,' I said.
'Yes.' Gennat flicked back through his notes. 'Yes, you said that, didn't you? Yet somehow, despite his breaking your finger, you managed to take it off him and shoot him in the back of the head.'
I drank more cognac and he flipped his notes back to the front page. The pencil-marked paper crackled under his fingers.
'What about Frau Stausberg?' I said. 'Is she going to be all right?'
The door opened and Vogel entered the room. He caught Gennat's eye and shook his head, then he approached me, leaning over and looking down. If he was trying to be threatening he was making a good fist of it.
'Couldn't get any sense out of her, chief.' He was talking to Gennat but looking at me.
I held my bottle out to him. He batted it away as he knelt down to gaze into my eyes. I put the bottle down on the table and clasped my hands together in my lap.
'Except she keeps talking about someone named Lilli, about killing her. Over and over again. Just that. You wouldn't know anything about that now, would you, comrade?'
Gisela. He'd been getting Gisela's statement. I didn't envy him the task. I was going to shake my head, but I was fairly sure that was a move that would end with me decorating Vogel's shoes with my stomach contents. Okay, they were shitty shoes, but still.
'No,' I said.
The silence dragged and Vogel didn't move a millimetre, so I tried a bit more.
'I don't know what she's talking about. She's had a hell of a shock though. And in her own church like that.' I slurred my words.
Vogel held my gaze for a long time.
'Yeah, what I thought too.' He turned to Gennat. 'Better get a doctor in to see her now, chief. That's about all we can do for her, I'd have thought.'
Gennat waved him off. 'Call Berg. He'll probably know the right person.'
Vogel left the room, closing the door behind him.
'Frau Stausberg is still in a critical condition, Thomas,' Gennat said. 'The doctor I spoke to an hour ago thinks she could live, but she could have sustained some brain damage. It's too early to tell.'
How many people had died or lost their loved ones because of me and my investigation? Because of Ritter's goddamned cover-up? The thought made me shudder.
Gennat took a deep drag on his compost-scented cigar.
'You were lucky,' he said.
'Lucky?' This was supposed to be some kind of bad joke, perhaps. Gennat's face, shrouded in smoke, was unreadable.
A scream rent the air, piercing the walls of the building. Sounded like Gisela's voice, but all ripped up and ragged, like her brain had just registered the loss of her husband, of the man she'd always loved that little bit more than she had me. Even while she'd been sleeping with me behind his back.
And to think I'd bought her those earrings.
'I think maybe you found what you were looking for,' Gennat said. I must've looked blank or puzzled for a moment because he added, 'At lunch the other day? Come on, don't tell me you don't remember now, surely? I think maybe you found out who it was, didn't you? Who killed that
beinl
.'
'No.'
He smiled and it wasn't a nice smile. He raised his notes and put them on the table, pushing them away. He held up his pencil and put it in his breast jacket pocket with a flourish.
'Come on,' he said, 'you can tell me.'
'When did you say you were leaving?'
He watched me holding myself still and then he clapped his hands and let loose a full, for-the-gallery laugh.
He checked the wall clock, then his watch, and then he got up out of his seat. 'Yes, you were lucky my friend. Lucky. I tell you, you were born to this life. And you don't even know it. You had any sense, you could get a promotion out of this.'
'Promotion?' My brain was too numb to take in what he was saying. He hadn't just said that, surely?
'Think about it, my boy.' He stabbed the air with his cigar as he crossed to the door. 'We can't have Albermann's ID leaked to the press. There must be a cover-up, and a hero to draw the flack. There's only one of you that survived.' He pointed at me. 'And you know everything. More than enough to cake the department in shit for months to come if they don't treat you right. Plus there's an inspector's post going free, I hear.'
He winked.
'Don't go anywhere,' he said. As if I could, feeling as sick as I did. 'I'll be right back to wrap this up.'
He left the room, closing the door on a hallway that buzzed with conversation, hurried footsteps, a couple of ringing telephones – the everyday sounds of a busy criminal investigations department. I stared out of the window. The view took in the cobbles of Mühlenstrasse.
A promotion. Could it happen? If Frau Stausberg came out of the hospital brain damaged and if Gisela kept riding the crazy train, then maybe it could. Maybe I could come through this with some credit.
I'd solved my little murder case after all, and some kind of justice had prevailed, no one could deny that. Emma Gross had been avenged, and in the only way possible. A death for a death, on the QT. Just between us and our maker, so to speak.
Hell, who was I to deny opportunity if she came knocking?
I had a lot to learn from Gennat, even now. Especially now, as I tried not to think about having killed Gertrude Albermann's father.
Ten minutes or so went by and an open-topped armoured car pulled up to the main entrance. The car disgorged blue-coated
Schupo
bearing bullet hoses. The car's engine ticked over as the
Schupo
men vanished beneath my line of sight and into the building. Flashbulbs popped.