“Lovely to meet you, too,” Victoria replied, in a voice that sounded worryingly sincere.
“Er, there is something else before you go,” I told Freddy, raising my voice to snap him out of the spell he seemed to be under. “Who exactly
is
your employer, if you don’t mind my asking? Or is that something you can’t trust me with, either?”
“Oh, I can tell you now, I suppose.” He ambled toward me and I returned his bat and ball to him. “The truth, Charlie, is that I work for the British embassy in Berlin.”
A gust of air escaped my lips. “The British embassy? But wouldn’t that make your chief exec—”
“The ambassador? Yes, Charlie, I’m rather afraid it would.”
FIVE
So I was stealing on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. And I was royally screwed. The first apartment on Freddy’s list had been worse than a dud. It had offered me a choice view of a murder. A murder I’d been drawn into. And so far as bad omens went, I didn’t think they could get much worse.
The atmosphere in the nearby café-bar where Victoria was waiting for me certainly didn’t help. The place was as quiet as a morgue. I guessed the rain had kept people away. Either that or the young guy behind the bar needed a radical new business plan. He was talking in a relaxed, companionable way to his only other customer—a woman who was sitting on a high stool at the counter. The way she was leaning forward and interacting with the guy made me think they were a couple.
The guy looked up and frowned as I stood dripping in the doorway, the wind and the rain sweeping in from behind me. I closed the door against the breeze, then inclined my head toward Victoria, and he curled his lip and returned to his conversation.
Victoria was sitting at a table beside the rain-lashed window, staring at the lighted screen of her mobile phone. She had two drinks in front of her. A red
Berliner Weisse mit Schuss
for her—a kind of light beer with raspberry syrup, served in a shallow glass with two straws—and a sparkling mineral water for me. I peeled off my sodden mackintosh and hung it on a nearby stand, being careful to make sure my collection of picks and probes didn’t fall out onto the floor. Then I smoothed my wet hair away from my forehead, dried my hands on my trouser legs, and dropped into a chair across from Victoria.
“You’re an idiot,” she said, without looking up at me.
She was right. I
was
an idiot. I should have been long gone by now. Far away from the neighborhood. But I got the impression she was talking about something altogether different, and I didn’t have the energy for it.
I glanced outside through the sign that had been etched into the window glass. It had to be almost five minutes since I’d called the emergency services. Where were they?
I fumbled in my jeans pocket for my cigarette pack and flipped back the soggy lid with shaking hands. I stabbed a cigarette into the corner of my mouth, struck a flame from the book of matches in the ashtray on our table, and sucked hard.
“Did you hear me?” Victoria asked, still focused on her mobile. “I said that you’re an idiot.”
“I heard you,” I told her, and vented a weary lungful of smoke. “And believe me, I’m not in a position to argue.”
I took a sip from my water. Another rule.
Don’t drink when you’re on the job
. But the rule didn’t account for my nerves being on edge, so I scooped Victoria’s beer toward me.
“Hey!”
I slurped on one of the straws. Then I pulled a face. The beer was sour and the raspberry syrup was sweet. It wasn’t a combination that worked for me.
I nudged the glass away, drew raggedly on my cigarette, and looked out above the limbs of a nearby tree toward the offending apartment window. The closed blind was still illuminated from behind. I drummed my nails on the scarred wooden tabletop. It didn’t help in the slightest.
“Don’t you want to know why you’re an idiot?” Victoria asked me.
I checked my watch. Time was ticking on.
“Charlie.” Victoria kicked my shin under the table. “Will you pay attention to me?”
I coaxed some more fumes from my cigarette and scowled at her over the lit embers. I was still scowling when I heard the first distant strains of a siren. I pricked up my ears and returned my attention to the dark and rainy street. The siren grew louder. It drew closer. I could feel Victoria looking pointedly at me. I raised my clammy palm, hushing her before she began. There was more than one siren. I was sure of it now. The keening was dissonant and out of time. It merged into one long wail.
Victoria lowered her phone. She turned in her seat and stared out through the window, tracking my gaze.
“What’s happening?” she asked, white-faced. “Did somebody see you?”
“More like the other way around,” I told her. “And keep your voice down, can’t you?”
The young guy behind the counter and the woman had stopped talking. They’d turned their heads in the direction of the sirens.
Victoria huddled over the table toward me. “Are they coming here for you?” she asked, in a strained voice.
“Nope,” I whispered back. “I’m the one who called them.”
“You? Are you mad?”
I shrugged. “Like you said, I’m an idiot.”
I stubbed out my cigarette as the vehicles the sirens were attached to careened around the corner at the end of the street. The shrieking din made me shudder. Occupational hazard. Emergency sirens always have that effect on me.
There were two cars and a van. The cars were silver hatchbacks with green flashes along the side and blue lights on top. The word
Polizei
was branded on them. The van was bright orange, with tinted windows. It was an ambulance. Blue bulbs popped and flashed and twirled on its roof.
The vehicles slewed to a halt in the middle of the slickened road. Doors opened. Men and women emerged into the rain. The police were wearing blue uniforms and peaked caps, their trousers tucked into heavy black boots. The ambulance crew sported red jumpsuits with reflective strips. There were two of them and they ran around to the rear of the van and hauled open the cargo doors. They removed a stretcher on collapsible legs and wheels, and hurried away through the puddles in the direction of the apartment building.
But I wasn’t focused on them. I was looking up through the rain and the pulsing blue lights at the second-floor window. The light behind the blind had gone out. The guy must have heard the sirens approaching. He must have guessed they were coming for him.
“Will you please tell me what’s going on?” Victoria hissed.
I hesitated. The guy from the bar and his companion had moved across to stand by the door. They were paying close attention to events out on the street, but I was pretty sure the noise of the wind and the rain would mask anything I might say.
I watched the police and the ambulance crew hurry inside the building, and then I spoke to Victoria from the corner of my mouth, my voice hushed, eyes fixed on the darkened apartment window. I gave her the short version. It was enough to bring her up to speed.
“My God,” she cried, when I was finished. “Do you really think she’s dead?”
“I don’t know, Vic. I hope not.”
But really, I didn’t believe that she had a chance. How long could it take to strangle a person? Two, maybe three minutes? Perhaps a lot less. The guy had gotten started before I’d even spotted them. And then there was the delay while I made the call. The wait for the emergency services to arrive.
“You did the right thing,” Victoria assured me.
I didn’t say anything to that. Part of me wished that I was a better person. That I’d intervened directly. And part of me wished that I was a lot more ruthless. By contacting the police, I’d compromised myself
and
my assignment.
“Did you find what Freddy was looking for?” Victoria asked.
I shook my head and fired up another cigarette. I would have felt a lot better if I’d found the mysterious item. Yes, it would have meant less money for me, but less trouble, too. If the police traced my call, they’d be likely to contact Daniel Wood, because they’d assume that he was their witness. And if I’d only discovered the damn secret object in his apartment, then he might have guessed why somebody had been inside and there was an outside chance that he’d elect to keep his mouth shut about my visit. Now, though, there was nothing to stop him from talking to them. There was a risk that the police would begin to question who could have made the call. Witnesses might come forward. It could be that someone had seen me loitering near the building. It could be that my description would be circulated.
I didn’t like it. It was messy. And messy was never good, particularly when it came at the beginning of what had the potential to be a long night of larceny.
My cigarette wasn’t helping. I wasn’t sure what would. Part of me wanted to leave the bar and get moving to the next target on Freddy’s list. But I also wanted to know if the woman was alive or dead. I wanted to know that her attacker had been caught. And I didn’t imagine it would be wise to leave the bar right away. The young guy and his companion might become suspicious of me.
“What do we do?” Victoria asked.
“We wait,” I told her. “And meantime, you can text Freddy. Ask him for the next address.”
We didn’t wait long. After a couple of minutes, the light came on behind the blind in the apartment. Five minutes after that, the light went off again and the first police officer emerged onto the street. She was joined by a short, balding chap in a brown jumpsuit. The guy was twirling a set of keys in his hand. I guessed he was some kind of live-in janitor and that he must have helped the police access the apartment.
I ground my cigarette into the ashtray as the ambulance crew appeared. But something was wrong. The two paramedics weren’t carrying a loaded stretcher. And they weren’t in a hurry. They exchanged words with the police officer and the janitor. There was a lot of shrugging and eye-rolling and pouting. They all looked a little disconsolate. A little resigned and world-weary. Then the ambulance crew waved a jaded farewell and ducked their heads and ran out through the rain to return the empty stretcher to the back of the ambulance. They shut the cargo doors and climbed up into the cab and killed the blue emergency lights. The driver swung the van around and drove away up the road at a leisurely pace.
“I don’t get it,” Victoria said.
“Me, either.”
The rest of the police officers emerged from the building and congregated with the janitor in a knot by the front door, sheltering from the rain. The rain hadn’t let up at all. It was pounding down hard, hammering on the police cars and the drenched tarmac, blasting against the plate glass of the bar window.
“Charlie, there are four police officers in that doorway.”
“I can count, Vic.”
“Only four showed up.”
“I know.”
“So who’s up there with the killer? Who’s with the victim?”
Nobody, apparently. And things were about to get even worse. Three of the officers split away and ran through the rain to the police cars. They cut the emergency lights, and one of the units drove off in the same direction as the ambulance. The other car pulled into a parking space farther up the street. Meanwhile, the lone female officer in the doorway of the apartment building was using the radio clipped to her uniform, her mouth lowered to the speaker. The janitor twirled his keys alongside her. Then he gestured with his thumb and disappeared into the apartment building.
Inside the bar, the young guy and the woman returned to the counter.
“They didn’t find her,” I said, as if I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “They can’t have.”
“Maybe they went to the wrong apartment?”
“No.” I shook my head. “The light went on in the right window.”
I looked at the darkened window once more. It gave nothing away. No hint of understanding. I didn’t like it. Not even a little bit. A sick, grievous feeling was coiling inside my gut. It was the sensation of knowing that something bad had happened and being powerless to do anything about it.
I could feel an itch in my fingers. The itch was telling me to go and check for myself. To walk confidently across the street and breeze right inside the apartment building, past the sheltering police officer. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. Perhaps even right a terrible wrong.
Victoria’s mobile emitted a high-pitched beep. She consulted the screen, then showed it to me.
“Message from Freddy,” she said. “The next address and the name of suspect two.”
I read the information for myself. Absorbed it. Nodded to Victoria. Neither of us mentioned how Freddy had added a couple of kisses to the end of his text.
“Get your stuff together,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
SIX
Back into my cold, wet mackintosh. Back into the slanted rain and the driving wind. Heavy raindrops tapped me on my head and shoulders, like a hundred tiny fingers trying to get my attention. My attention was elsewhere. It was focused on the unlit window. It was penetrating the glass and prying open the closed Venetian slats and taking a good look around inside the murder apartment.
I could picture the blonde. She was just as shapely as before, but she was lying on her side on the floor of a small back bedroom. She looked like she’d been dropped there from a great height. Her legs and arms were splayed, her hands were unfurled, and her throat was badly swollen. Her skin was discolored, mottled with bruising and the livid imprints of hands and fingers and thumbs. Her mouth was wide open, her lips peeled back over gums and teeth.
Behind her, the tall, faceless killer had his ear pressed to the closed door of the bedroom. He was listening very hard for any sign that the police might return. Would he try to get away? Did he plan to dispose of the body? Would he turn himself in?
“… listening to me.
Hey!
” Victoria’s elbow jabbed me in the side. I grunted and snapped out of my reverie. “I
said,
which way are we going?”
I hooked my hand through her arm and hauled her roughly off the pavement into the road. She had an umbrella open above us. The wind caught it and I grabbed her wrist and helped her to tilt the umbrella into the breeze. The canvas shook and trembled and buckled. I listened to the splash of my footsteps on the soggy tarmac. The click of Victoria’s heels in the dampness.