‘So you are from the police. They’ve been questioning us about that character upstairs all day already.’ He also made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like police officers.
I gave Hanna a look intended to tell her to keep her mouth shut. ‘As she said: a private detective, not a policeman. And I don’t know what character upstairs you mean. I’d simply like to know if you and the rest of the staff found there was a shashlik skewer missing at midday.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I found a skewer like that stuck in my car tire just now, I have a racist neighbour who often plays tricks like that on me, and I found out by chance that he was eating here at midday. I don’t want to see him in jail, I’d just finally like to pin something on him to get him to stop.’
‘Racist neighbour?’ repeated the waiter, looking at me more closely.
‘He’s Turkish,’ explained Hanna, and I wondered if a daughter of my own would say that in just the same way.
The waiter said, in a distinctly more friendly voice, ‘Okay, yes, there was a skewer missing at lunchtime, but I can’t imagine it was your racist neighbour who nicked it.’ He grinned a little uncertainly.
‘Why not? Can you tell that just by looking at someone?’
‘No, nonsense.’ He hesitated. ‘He was a nice guy, that’s all. Left a good tip too — if he’d wanted to sabotage your tire he wouldn’t have nicked the cutlery to do it from the restaurant, I’m sure of that.’
‘Can you describe him?’
The waiter looked at me for a moment. He doesn’t like policemen, I remembered.
‘Well, like I said, a nice guy. Age … sort of around fifty, I’m not so good at judging that kind of thing, comfortable clothes — like a professor or a nice teacher.’
‘Are there any?’ asked Hanna cheekily, and the waiter smiled at her. Then he went on, ‘Anyway, man, we have so many customers in the middle of the day I can’t notice everyone in detail, certainly not for a stupid fifty-cent skewer.’
‘May I ask you something?’ I took one of my business cards out of my jacket pocket. ‘If you see him again, will you call me at this number?’
Taking my card, he glanced at it suspiciously. ‘I thought this was about your neighbour? You can meet him any day, right? And like I said, the character I’m talking about wasn’t the sort to stick skewers in car tires.’
‘You could be wrong. We’ve already agreed that you can’t tell that kind of thing just by looking at people. Anyway, I’d like to confront my neighbour here in your café with the shashlik skewer that was sticking in my tyre. Of course he won’t admit anything, but maybe it would give him a bit of a fright, and he’d leave me alone for a while.’
Then I put my hand in my jacket pocket again and paid for our thirteen-euro-eighty bill with a fifty-euro note. ‘The change is for you so that you won’t forget to call me.’
Surprised, he took the note and looked at my business card again. ‘All this shit with your neighbour must really matter to you.’
‘Any idea how much a new car tire costs?’
He nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll call you. But like I said, I don’t think …’
‘Never mind that. Just call me if you see him.’
When we had risen from our table, Hanna said ‘Byeee’ to him with a shamelessly long stare, and the jaw of the waiter roughly six years her senior dropped for a good moment. Shameless, but entirely innocent. I thought of Marieke and Valerie de Chavannes, and suddenly I understood why you would want to have a calculating old bastard killed if he exploited that mixture of shamelessness and innocence in your own daughter.
As we loaded my bike into the car boot, I said, ‘Hey, suppose we ring your mama and ask if I can invite you to the cinema? There’s a new Leo DiCaprio film.’
‘Oh yes, I’d love that. My classes start late tomorrow morning.’
Chapter 8
Three days later Octavian called and told me that Abakay was denying everything. His friend Volker Rönnthaler had been visiting and he, Abakay, had left the apartment briefly to buy cigarettes. He returned to find Rönnthaler lying dead on the floor, and a man of Mediterranean appearance had attacked him without warning, kicked him and then tied him up and gagged him. He claimed to know nothing about the ‘Autumn Flowers’ file, saying someone must have planted it on him — someone who obviously wanted to destroy his life, probably the man who had attacked him and murdered his friend.
‘Our computer expert can only prove that someone was interfering with the ‘Autumn Flowers’ file on the day of Rönnthaler’s murder, and I assume that was you.’
‘How about the list of girls’ names that had the pseudonyms from ‘Autumn Flowers’ attached to it?’
‘Also saved on the desktop by itself. Was never sent or received. It really does look like someone planted the file and the list on him.’
‘And what about the girls themselves? Have you looked for them and found any of them?’
‘Without surnames? Only one. I sent the photos to child social services, and there was a reply about Lilly. Her father’s under observation: he’s a violent alcoholic, and Lilly has turned up at school with bruises a couple of times. The family lives in Praunheim. I’ve visited them. Lilly says she doesn’t know Abakay, never set eyes on him. However, I’ll go and see her again on her own. The old man was standing there the whole time, and the girl’s obviously afraid of him. Anyway, not a situation in which a fourteen-year-old would admit to meeting older men.’
‘In Praunheim. A Roma family, by any chance?’
‘No idea. Why?’
‘Just wondering. How about the heroin in the kitchen?’
‘Also planted on him, Abakay says.’
‘And who, in his opinion, is furious enough with him to stage such a show — murder, computer manipulation, drugs and the rest of it?’
‘Hmm, well, he has two theories. For a start, he thinks his photos of the wretched state of things in Frankfurt will scare off potential investors in the city and thus infuriate the owners of buildings and land.’
‘Come off it.’
‘Yes, well. For instance, he published a series about the Gutleut district in the Rundschau, and in fact there really were some complaints to the editorial offices. You know the area well enough — run-down and close to the city centre, and building owners there have been waiting for years for the complications to be resolved and for a Starbucks or Häagen-Dazs or some such outfit to buy a place and set the ball rolling.’
‘And kill someone on that account? Because of photos of beggars smoking. Have you recently taken to giving your suspects some grass to smoke while you interrogate them? What’s the second theory?’
‘That it’s to do with his uncle.’
‘The religious guy?’
‘You know him?’
‘I heard that he has an uncle who preaches in a mosque, that’s all.’
‘Hmm-hmm, Sheikh Hakim. Pretends to be crazy with talk of the holy war and so on, but as far as we know that’s just for show and to take in idiots. Or maybe he does believe it, but he certainly believes in making money too. We suspect him of being big in the heroin trade, but we’ve never been able to prove anything. Abakay says he hasn’t had anything to do with his uncle for a long time. But one of the phone calls he made from remand prison was to Sheikh Hakim’s secretary.’
‘What did he want the secretary to do?’
‘Get him a lawyer.’
‘And why would anyone kill Rönnthaler on account of Sheikh Hakim?’
‘Abakay thinks it’s a message: See what we could do to your nephew. This time we just killed the first guy we came across in his apartment and gave your nephew a good kicking in the balls, but next time … well, something along those lines. They couldn’t get at Hakim himself. He always has bodyguards with him, his house is a fortress with garden walls two metres high, barred windows, CCTV cameras and God knows what else.’