‘Yeah, Hans, I’m pretty sure you were here then.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Sergeant. I just don’t remember it.’
Gruber nodded, stepped to the outer office door, and called out to the clerk. ‘Would you bring me the logbooks from 1932 up to now?’ The clerk soon brought a stack of thick green ledgers and dropped them on his desk with a thump. Gruber spent the rest of the day with his door closed, scanning the columns of dates, names and signatures, moving his index finger slowly down one page and then down the next. That evening he turned off the light in his office later than usual, and locked his office door. ‘Goodnight, Hans,’ he said.
‘Goodnight, Sergeant.’
Normally, when Bergemann wanted to speak to Willi, he used circuitous means to make contact. But this was different. Bergemann had made a serious error, and Willi and Lola were in danger. He left the office and headed for the Mahogany Room. Lola saw Bergemann at the far end of the bar. She headed for the door that opened on to the alley where they met.
The following morning Gruber came to the office early. Bergemann was already there. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Sergeant?’
‘Not yet,’ said Gruber.
‘You know, last night I was thinking about what you said. I think I do remember that woman, the redhead looking for Geismeier. As I recall, I even tried to follow her. By the time I got outside, she was gone. Do you remember that?’
Gruber grinned at Bergemann. ‘Here, Hans.’ He dropped the stack of ledgers on Bergemann’s desk with a resounding thud. ‘See what you can find.’
‘Oh, c’mon, Sergeant. I’ve got two new cases …’
‘Boo hoo,’ said Gruber. ‘Poor overworked Hansl.’ He went back into his office and closed the door.
Bergemann found the ledger page with Lola’s name and address. He briefly considered removing the page or rendering it illegible, but that was a foolish idea. Maybe he could somehow use Lola’s logbook information – name, address – to get ahead of Gruber. If he could do the interview with Lola, even if Gruber were present, he might manage to control some of the damage. Maybe with luck he could turn this whole episode into a dead end.
He knocked on Gruber’s door and handed him the ledger. ‘Here she is, Sergeant.’
Gruber’s eyes went straight to her signature; he had seen it already the day before.
‘You want me to track her down?’ said Bergemann.
‘Never mind,’ said Gruber with a grin. ‘We’re already on it.’
Corpus Delicti
Two schoolboys spotted a woman’s body bobbing face down amidst sticks and other debris against a bridge piling. Once the police pulled her from the water it became obvious that she had been savagely murdered. She had countless stab wounds up and down the entire front of her body. She was young and had been dead for several days.
Gabriella Mancini, seventeen years old, had been reported missing by her parents two weeks earlier. When Bergemann showed them a photo of the dead girl’s face, they both began to cry. After some difficult questioning, they admitted that Gabriella had left school at fifteen, had worked as a nanny for a short time, but more recently had been working as a prostitute. She still looked in on her parents every week and gave them part of her earnings. ‘She was a good girl,’ said her mother between sobs.
Gabriella had been found some distance from Pfortzheimgaße. But the spring rains had been heavy this year, and the Isar was running high and fast. She could easily have been washed that far down stream. Lili Marlene burst into tears as she confirmed that Gabriella had been one of her girls. ‘She was just a child,’ she said. ‘Girls come and go; I just assumed she had moved on.’ She paused and thought back to the earlier case of her robbed clients. ‘My God, was it Jacky Prinz?’
‘No. He’s locked up,’ said Bergemann. ‘Anyway, it’s much too early to know about suspects. We’re in the very early stages of our investigation.’
Sergeant Gruber went pale when Bergemann told him that Gabriella was one of Ingeborg Lützmann’s girls. This thing could screw up his life even more than it already was. At least I didn’t know her, he thought. He went into his office, shut the door, and spoke to someone on the phone.
‘I want you to take over this case, Hans,’ he said a little later. ‘And make it your number one priority. A dead girl in the water can really spook the public.’
From the coroner’s report and the circumstances, Bergemann concluded right away that this was not what was normally called a crime of passion so much as a crime of rage. The savagery with which Gabriella had been killed – the coroner counted over fifty stab wounds, mainly in the breast and pelvic area – led Bergemann to wonder whether there might have been similar killings elsewhere in the city. Bergemann sent out a query to surrounding precincts. He heard nothing back for a long while, until one day a Detective Prager from the Nineteenth called. ‘We had a case like this back in ’thirty-five, a young prostitute stabbed multiple times. Really butchered. Twenty years old. She was found in an alley, near our station, actually.’
Bergemann wondered why he had not heard about that case until now. Prager couldn’t say. He had expected that his Sergeant would send out queries, but for some reason he never had.
‘What’s the status?’ said Bergemann.
‘Still an open case,’ said Prager. ‘But a cold one.’
‘Did you turn up any suspects?’
‘A bunch. Mostly customers of hers. They all had alibis.’
‘Where was she found?’
Detective Prager named the street. ‘An alley not far from the whorehouse she worked at.’
‘Any evidence at the scene?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So, where are you now with the case?’
‘Understaffed,’ said
