‘In my opinion, and I have been doing this job a long time, the nature of these injuries leads me to conclude that they were sustained shortly before the boy fell. Since discovering them yesterday afternoon, I’ve been trying to imagine what could have happened, and…’
‘Fortunately, it isn’t your job to draw conclusions,’ Lange said, realising straightaway that he had made an error. The pathologist seemed mildly peeved as he continued.
‘Take my words as a discreet attempt to spare you the use of medical terminology that would mean nothing to you,’ he said, looking at Lange like a professor eyeing his most unworthy student. ‘Anyway, assuming the boy’s fingers weren’t beaten by a hammer shortly before his death, which, I must say, seems unlikely…’
‘…then someone else must have broken his fingers,’ Lange finished the sentence. All of a sudden he was wide awake, the fear of macabre jokes or unpleasant sights a distant memory.
‘As you said. It isn’t my job to draw conclusions,’ Schwartz replied, ‘but it looks like someone stamped on his fingers pretty hard. Perhaps even struck them with a blunt instrument. The poor boy lost his grip. With breaks like that, no one could have held on, it’s just not physically possible.’ Lange began to understand why the pathologist hadn’t wanted to put it in writing.
‘You’re saying that in all likelihood we’re not dealing with an accidental death…’
‘…but with a murder. Correct.’ Schwartz cleared his throat. ‘That’s what I’d call it when someone is sent flying from the fourth floor.’
‘And it looks like the perpetrator is a policeman…’
‘That’s your conclusion, not mine.’
15
‘Anyone else without a ticket?’
Charly showed the walrus-moustached conductor her monthly pass as the house fronts of Warschauer Strasse flitted by outside. The tram was squeezed tight with people on their way to work.
As usual, she had packed a book for the journey. Heymann’s Principles of Criminal Law lay open on her lap, but she had too much on her mind to read. She preferred to look out of the window and think. Gereon’s mood at breakfast!
She had only half listened to his story. His car had been wrecked by vandals in Wedding, and then he had had to get it towed to a garage in the middle of the night. She hadn’t understood a great deal, only that it was his excuse for coming home so late without calling, and for being unable to drive her to work. She’d had to leave early as a result. Though the S-Bahn took barely twenty minutes to reach Warschauer Bridge, she had to take the tram the rest of the way, the 90, which stopped at every letterbox.
The secret still burned inside of her, even now when she was alone again. She had thought he would notice something in her expression at breakfast, that something in her eyes would give her away, but he was consumed by anger over the car. She hadn’t even said anything about the riots at the university, so wary had she been of straying anywhere near the subject. Her plan had been to talk things through over a glass of wine, but he had kept her waiting so long she’d ended up going to bed. Now she was almost glad. What could she say to him when she wasn’t even sure what she wanted herself?
Yesterday, Heymann had asked to speak to her in person, had even sent a car, and she had travelled to the university full of nervous anticipation. What could be so important that her former professor would send a chauffeur to pick her up?
The atmosphere was hostile when she stepped out of the car onto Dorotheenstrasse. People were demonstrating again, loudly and in the form of songs: Die Fahne hoch, the Nazi party anthem. A few Communists tried to combat it with The Internationale and the result was a dreadful cacophony. She managed to make it to the building’s north entrance unscathed, but the demonstrators had spread here too. Students in brown shirts tore messages and signs from the noticeboard and the few who tried to intervene, by no means all Communists, had been clubbed to the ground. The Nazis had brought batons.
By the time she reached her favourite professor’s office, fighting had broken out below too. Heymann had stood at the window, shaking his head in disbelief. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität as the scene of such political vulgarity was simply too much for the old Prussian. Things were getting worse, especially in the legal faculty. You could almost assume that any first semester student would be a Hitler acolyte, and the younger they were, the more fervent. The brownshirted students didn’t shy away from violence, they thrived on it. Student unrest was how the papers described it.
She had been so unsettled by the commotion that she didn’t understand the professor’s request at first. Half a year, and he wanted her? She had asked for a few days’ thinking time, and still had Heymann’s reaction echoing in her ears. ‘Don’t take too long, Fräulein Ritter, opportunities like this don’t come around often.’
She couldn’t keep Heymann waiting long, she knew that, but nor could she agree without speaking to Gereon, and thinking it over some more herself. The truth was, she had other plans. Her goal had always been a senior role in the Prussian Criminal Police. That was the reason she had taken up her legal studies, and why she had knuckled down and crammed like anything after flunking the state examination. Failed was the terse judgement of the exclusively male board of examiners, no further explanation given. Half a year later she had overcome that hurdle, albeit without distinction. Satisfactory. The main thing was that she had passed.
The electric train crawled out of the shadows of the Ringbahn Bridge onto Möllendorfstrasse and overtook a swarm of cyclists pedalling uphill; the army of workers on its way to the Lichtenberg factories. Seeing them she remembered how much she enjoyed holding down a regular job. She had felt the same way at Alex, where she had worked as a stenographer in Homicide and earned money to pursue her studies. Against that was the year she had spent almost exclusively at university, hunched over her books… Suddenly she wasn’t sure whether Heymann’s offer was quite as attractive as it sounded. On the other hand, it would provide her with opportunities she could never dream of otherwise, certainly not as a woman, if she were to continue stubbornly with her legal preparatory service.
Make your mind up time, Fräulein Ritter.
Meanwhile, the tram had reached Normannenstrasse. She snapped Heymann’s book shut. Why was she so scared of discussing all this with Gereon? Because she knew it was about more than just these six months? It was about what would happen to them. That was it. Not that it made her feel any better.
16
Her eyes blinked and searched for him, as they had almost every morning since they met. His face was the first thing she saw, sitting fag in mouth, gazing into the new day. It felt all the more painful knowing he was gone, that he would never again smile and ask ‘Breakfast?’ and hand her a cigarette.
Suddenly, daylight filtered through the clouded windowpanes and made them seem dirty and grey. The day before her felt as bitter as the taste of night lingering on her tongue.
Alex sat and pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders. In Flat A there was no blanket or sleeping bag to wrap herself in, and there was a strong draught besides. They had only used it in emergencies, or when they couldn’t find anywhere better, but she didn’t like sleeping here. There was far too much rubbish, shards of glass crackled underfoot, to say nothing of the rats, who were becoming more brazen. Barely a windowpane was intact and, on some nights, depending on which way the wind was blowing, you could hear the cries of the animals from the stockyard, their one final act of rebellion before death.