He held me in an unblinking stare. He had me there. I couldn't offer any evidence to expose him without exposing myself and he knew that.
'You do know that high treason is still a crime?' he said, threading his hands together and putting them behind his head.
'Falsifying evidence, too,' I said. 'Look, I'm going to be late for my night shift if you don't let me go.'
'Oh don't worry, I've informed your watch commander as to recent events. He didn't sound particularly surprised.' Terrific. Like the old man needed any more excuses to shit me out when I got back. Ritter leaned forward and indicated the tagged evidence. 'I'll try and piece things together and you go ahead and stop me if I go wrong.'
He pointed at the first envelope. 'According to this letter, on Wednesday the 14
th
Maria Butlies takes the train in from Cologne to look for work here as a domestic servant. She gets picked up at the station by an unsavoury character who tries to have his way with her in the park. Before he can succeed, another man comes along to rescue her and take her to the women's hostel at St Gertrude's. Only, irony of ironies, her rescuer takes her to the woods and rapes her instead. Three days later, she writes to a friend she met on the train to describe the incident. In her statement to you she gives no reason for this odd delay.'
He pointed at the second envelope. The label confirmed that this one held the statement Butlies had given me.
'Now,' he said, 'here's the bit where you might have to correct me. She writes to her friend but the letter is delivered to the wrong woman?'
He paused and looked at me. I wasn't getting out of this without giving him everything I had on my lead.
'That's right,' I said. 'She got the name wrong, apparently. This Frau Brugmann who got the letter thought the rapist might be the Ripper so she handed the letter in at the precinct house.'
Ritter smiled. 'See?' he said. 'This is what cooperating with a police investigation feels like. Not so bad, is it? So, you tracked Butlies down at the hostel. She'd already found her rapist's apartment from her memory of the night he attacked her. Am I right?'
Another pause.
'He took her there for something to eat before taking her out to the woods,' I said.
'Thoughtful man,' Ritter said. Vogel snickered. I didn't like that. Butlies had suffered, and rape wasn't funny.
'You went with Butlies to the apartment house.' Ritter leaned over the table and held up the scissors. The lab boys had scraped off much of the blood for testing. 'Sometime after this you discovered which apartment was Kürten's. You gained entry. Somehow.' He lingered over the last word and raised an eyebrow. 'Where you found these.'
He dropped the scissors back on the tabletop.
'Now why in God's name didn't you come to the murder commission at this point? Or at least notify your watch commander?'
I opened my mouth. I had no idea what words would come.
Ritter cut in before I could think of any:
'You know what this looks like? It looks like you were going to pass this lot onto your Commie friends, is what it looks like.' He turned back to Vogel. 'Wouldn't you say, Vogel?'
Vogel looked up at Ritter, then at me, then back. He shrugged. 'Not for me to say, sir.'
'No, good man, I suppose not.' Ritter turned back to me. 'Well?'
'Well what?'
'The question, Thomas, is what the hell you were planning to do with all of this. Solve the Ripper case all by yourself?' He laughed.
I blushed. 'Hey, it wasn't like I could have done any worse than you. Anyway, I wanted to find Gertrude Albermann before it was too late.'
'And you think I don't?' Ritter bellowed. A few seconds passed while that little flash of anger filled the space between us. 'Come on, Vogel,' Ritter said. He got out of his chair, gathered up the items on the table and went to leave the room.
I couldn't leave it at that. 'Say Vogel, that nose of yours. You used to be a fighter?'
'I boxed for a couple of years in the war.'
And a pretty shit fighter he must've been judging by that drunken monkey shuffle he was passing off as a walk. 'No kidding? Which unit?'
He showed me his tattoo: up close it turned out to be a red number three on a green background, the insignia of the third Jäger battalion from Brandenburg. That explained the accent: Vogel was a farm boy from the fields outside of Berlin.
I judged his weight at around ninety-five kilos. Take some off for being in his prime back in the war, say he was eighty, eighty-five kilos then. That put him at heavyweight – or light heavy. 'You were, what? Middleweight?' I said, with a smile so he'd know I was joking.
He grinned at me. 'Light-heavy, you cheeky bastard. From the look of it, you must've been super-heavy?'
'Middle.'
Vogel pursed his lips. 'Don't know how to tell you this, but you've let yourself go.'
I patted my gut, fingers lingering over the scar. 'I'm still handy. I was
Sturmbataillon Rohr.
'
Vogel whistled, and with good reason. My battalion had been the first shock trooper unit in the German army – hell, the whole damn world. That hand-to-hand trench fighting? We pioneered that. The brass had even had us going up against British tanks with canvas sacks full of stick grenades. And winning. Those tanks hadn't been worth shit against our training.
'Since my unit was the one that trained you Jäger boys up in shock trooper tactics, how is it that I don't remember you?' I asked Vogel.
'Didn't join the Jägers till '17,' he said. 'You must've been invalided back by then for old age.'
Ritter was hovering in the doorway, ripe for another shot. I nodded at him: 'Bucky didn't see much action in the war, did you Bucky? He was navy.'
Vogel laughed. It was a deeper, more natural sound than Ritter's. Ritter glared at him.
'You were at Kiel weren't you, Bucky? When the revolution kicked off?' He shifted his gaze to me and I held it. 'Which side were you on, I wonder, comrade.'
Ritter pulled Vogel out of the room and slammed the door. The lock clicked into place behind them.
I counted aloud until the door opened again. Twenty-some minutes had passed. Vogel dropped off a glass carafe of water and a tin cup. So that last salvo of mine had won me something, even if it was the least of the desires on my list.
'Thanks,' I said. 'By the way, how long's Ritter been trying to grow that godawful moustache?'
We laughed.
'You know, for a treacherous Commie bastard you're not so bad,' Vogel said.
I gave him a lazy salute. 'Did Kürten talk yet? About the girl, I mean.'
He shook his head. 'Drink up. And just hope no one's pissed in it.'
He smiled as he shut the door. Piss or no, I was in no state to be squeamish. I gulped down a couple of cups and then forced myself to stop. I sniffed at the carafe, a useless gesture given the state of my nose. I poured a third cup and sipped it, deciding firstly that Vogel had just been having his little joke, and secondly that comedy was not his forte. Police work either, based on what I'd seen of him so far, how openly contemptuous of Ritter he seemed to be. Not that I was going to complain about that, but it was hardly professional. I kept to one cup every five minutes or so. Five cups later, Ritter and Vogel returned.
Ritter went over my story, wanting the details of how I'd got into Kürten's apartment, my attempts to track Kürten and his wife at their places of work, how it was that Frau Kürten had dropped by to see me. All of this took another half hour at least but I could tell we were winding down and Ritter was getting ready to chuck me back into the street. When we'd finished, he slapped his hands on the tabletop.
'Okay, Vogel, that'll do.' Vogel left the room. Ritter loitered at the door: 'You can go, Tommy-Boy. But try and derail my investigation again and you'll regret it even more than you do now.'
'If Albermann is dead because of this delay then you're the one who'll regret it. Trust me on that.'
Ritter slammed the door on me, then Vogel came back to sign over my possessions and escort me out. Didn't much fancy hitting the street the way I was, so after signing for my things I pointed down the hallway.
'Bathroom still this way, is it?'
The bathroom was dark when I went in and flicked the light switch. The bulb flickered as it warmed up, exposing the cobwebs clinging to the corners of the room. I passed a row of lavatory stalls on my way to the bank of porcelain sinks beside the
pissoir
trough on the far wall.
I ran cold water from the tap on the first sink I came to. The pipes chugged and spat out brown gobs of water for a few seconds before the flow stabilised and came out clear. I leaned down and drank until my belly began to ache from it. Even then my mouth still felt dry. I took a look at my ruined face in the mirror while I plugged and filled the sink.
The door creaked open behind me and Vogel appeared in the mirror.
'What, you don't trust me not to steal the towels?' I said. Fat chance: there were no towels, just bare towel rings.
'You know she's most likely dead already, don't you?' he said.
I didn't need to let on that I'd been thinking the same. I'd failed Gertrude Albermann and my guts were going to ache like hell tonight with the thought. I knew my watch commander wouldn't go for it if I asked for a transfer onto the Ripper case. Ritter wouldn't go for it either. But I had to do something.
In my reflection, brown scabs ringed my nostrils and bruises haloed both eyes. I splashed my face and winced as the sink water blushed pink.
'The Albermann girl, I mean,' Vogel said.
I turned around. 'Every minute we've lost here has made it that much more likely, yes.'
'What makes you think you care so much more than the rest of us?'
Good question. It wasn't something I wanted to talk about.
'Listen to me Klein,' Vogel said, 'there's nothing you can do to help. If you try, you'll just get yourself deeper in the shit, and that won't do that little girl any good either.'
Was he trying to help me, one ex-army boxer to another? Or was it a simple warning not to get in the way? Either way he was right, damn him. I couldn't think of anything I could try that wouldn't make things worse or end up delaying the investigation. But shit, if Albermann
was
dead...
'You think I deserve this kind of abuse?' I dabbed the cut in my cheek. Christ, was something still in there? I turned back to the mirror for a closer look.
'Depends what you did. I never met a man yet who wasn't guilty of something.'
'Including you?'
The thing was that I did deserve that kind of abuse. Sleeping with Gisela Ritter had been a bad move true, but there was more to it than that. I poked at the inside of my cheek with my tongue. Then I poked a little at the outside with a finger until the blood welled thick and ruby red. That was a lump in there, all right. I squeezed at it until I had to cry out with the pain and something plopped into the water. It was a piece of church masonry. I tried to wash the blood from my cheek but it kept on coming.
I went into a lavatory stall and noticed Vogel had left the room and shut the door. I grabbed a handful of toilet paper, went back to my sink and dampened a wad to stick to my cheek. As there were no towels, I patted moisture from my forehead and chin with what remained of the paper, avoiding my injuries.
When I exited the bathroom, Vogel was waiting in the hallway. He led me out to the street in silence, nodding hello to the plump brunette in the cotton summer dress by the door who was smoking a cigarette and humming a tune I recognised all too well.
'The Eroica Symphony?' I said.
The woman turned to me. Okay, so her hair was shorter – and darker, of course – than I remembered, and she'd put on some weight. But I should have recognised her sooner considering I'd just been trying so hard not to think about her. Besides, that extra weight had only added to her curves, and I'd always been a fan of those. Clearly it was going to take more than wishes to keep the past at arm's length.
'Waiting for anyone in particular, Gisela?' I said. 'I believe I'm free for the rest of the night.'
She exhaled cigarette smoke. 'It's after midnight, Thomas.'
Hmmn, frosty. But she wasn't fooling me. 'I'm just getting started.'
'Yeah, you look like it.'
'What did you do to your hair?'
'This is my natural colour.'
'I liked you as a blonde.'
'My husband suggested changing it.' She looked me up and down. If the wounds on my face concerned her, she didn't show it beyond raising a pencilled brow above those chocolate brown eyes of hers. 'I prefer it now.'
'Funny, you didn't used to do everything your husband said.' I had to get that one in, but she managed to ignore it.
'You two know each other?' Vogel said, looking at me. Maybe that was a little click behind his eyes too: him working out what the problem was between Michael Ritter and me.
Gisela fiddled with a string of wooden rosary beads.