Фолькер Кучер - The Silent Death

Suddenly Rath hesitated. The camera was filming a scene by the door. Meisner had just opened it for his wife, and they had started arguing in the door frame. Something else was puzzling Rath, though: the perspective.

The camera must have been positioned exactly where he had just seen Betty Winter hit the deck, right by the fireplace.

‘What the hell is it doing there?’ he asked, and for the second time that morning Dressler looked at him as though he had lost his mind. ‘I mean: what’s the camera doing there? Isn’t that the spot where Betty Winter died? Right in front of the fireplace?’

At that moment, there was a loud peal of thunder from the loudspeakers.

Armed with two reels of film and a screenplay, Rath arrived at Alex at quarter to eleven. He parked the car by the railway arches and took the public entrance, where there were scarcely any officers, only civilians. In the stairwell, the unmistakeable mix of sweat, ink, blood, leather and paper, fused now and then with a little gun smoke from the range, soon returned him to the daily grind. The closer he came to the custody cells in the southern wing the greater the smell of sweat, now mixed with the stench of urine and fear. The Castle, that hulking, formidable building, that vast, complex police apparatus, had swallowed him again, suffocating the feeling of freedom he enjoyed on the streets. Böhm must still be out in Marienfelde with Gräf, but securing the evidence at the lighting bridges would take time. Rath doubted whether they would find much more than the wire and the eyelets, but at least Böhm would be kept occupied, and it wouldn’t hurt to get a few clear photographs. Perhaps the technical experts would manage a reconstruction of the device that had cost Betty Winter her life.

He no longer had any doubt that it was Krempin’s construction, or that the technical whizz had built it to sabotage Bellmann’s shoot. He had known the moment he heard the thunder, but had asked for another explanation from Dressler and his cameraman all the same.

On Friday morning, the main camera had stood exactly where Betty Winter would die only hours later. An ‘X’ marked the spot on the parquet. ‘That’s where we positioned the camera for scene forty-nine,’ Dressler had said. ‘The mark was the same for Betty in scene fifty-three.’

Scene fifty-three was the one they hadn’t been able to finish, and that Victor Meisner had to reshoot with Eva Kröger.

The actor was due at the station for eleven, still ten minutes away. Rath had instructed the porter to send Meisner straight to interrogation room B, which he had reserved moments before. Not the usual surroundings for a routine witness interview – the rooms were normally reserved for breaking down the real hard cases – but Rath didn’t want to show his face in the corridors of A Division.

After his telephone conversation with Gräf, he had given some thought to how he might take the edge off his inevitable meeting with Böhm. The best way was with results: a comprehensive report of his findings thus far in the Winter case. That way he could let Böhm’s reprimand wash over him while he pressed the file silently into the bulldog’s hands. He thought about taking a typewriter home that evening, sticking a few records on and dealing with the paperwork over a glass or two of cognac, uninterrupted by colleagues and superiors.

He reached the interrogation room without meeting a single officer from A Division, or anyone else who knew him. Brenner, for example.

The rat! Using two simple blows against him like that, playing the innocent victim roughed up by a colleague. Rath really shouldn’t have let himself be dragged into it. But… the way that arsehole had spoken about Charly – Brenner was lucky to get off so lightly.

Rath spread the items he had brought with him across the table. He sat down, reached for an ashtray and lit a cigarette. In truth, he was only interested in two or three pages: scenes fifty-three and forty-nine, the two sequences he also had on celluloid. The thunder effect was heavily marked in both, indicating exactly when it should sound. Anyone familiar with the production schedule would know who was due to be standing where and at what time.

Had Krempin made use of that knowledge and, if so, why had his construction failed in the morning but worked in the afternoon? In scene forty-nine the effects lever had triggered the thunder, meaning the wire could only have been connected with the spotlight after this scene. When had Krempin left the studio? The statements Plisch and Plum had gathered didn’t tally. No one, at any rate, had seen him after ten, about the time Dressler filmed scene forty-nine. At that stage, the thunder had still worked; thus Krempin’s construction could only have been activated after this point. So, either the technician was still in the studio and had connected the wire to the spotlight – because, despite his protests, he did have it in for Betty Winter – or someone else had discovered it and used it for their own purposes following his departure. Heinrich Bellmann, for instance. The producer had got over Winter’s death quickly; indeed, it seemed to have brought him more advantages than disadvantages.

Rath would have liked to have Krempin here now, as there were any number of questions he could have asked. For Victor Meisner, on the other hand, who would arrive any minute, he couldn’t think of a single one. That wasn’t quite true. There was one question preying on his mind, but it had nothing to do with the investigation: how could anyone be so unconscionable as to reshoot with the double, the scene in which they had been forced to watch their wife die only two days before? A scene that was frivolous and funny, and completely devoid of tragedy. How could you perform a scene like that after such a calamity?

There was a knock on the door. Rath glanced at the time: five past eleven.

‘Enter,’ he said, and a woman poked her head through the door. It was the grey mouse who had been looking after Meisner on Friday.

‘Good morning. Are you Inspector Rath?’ She didn’t seem to have much of a memory for faces. At least not for his. Rath nodded, and the door opened to reveal Victor Meisner, who seemed even paler than before. Dark glasses made his face appear almost white. The woman led him in by the hand as if he was a blind man being shown to his chair.

‘Good morning, Herr Meisner,’ Rath said. ‘Good morning, Frau…’

‘Bellmann, Cora Bellmann,’ the woman said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to be here for Herr Meisner during this difficult conversation.’

‘That is a rather unusual request,’ Rath said. ‘But in view of the circumstances I am happy to make an exception. Perhaps I can take the opportunity to ask you a few more questions too. You’re the daughter…’

‘…of Heinrich Bellmann. That’s correct.’

‘Your father never told me…’

‘He says I’m to learn the trade by working my way up from the bottom. He doesn’t treat me any differently from the rest of his employees. Worse, if anything.’

‘Please take a seat.’

She pushed a chair over to Meisner, who was gazing into thin air through his glasses, before finding a second chair for herself.

‘Herr Meisner,’ Rath began. ‘It’s very kind of you to make the effort to come here. Now, if you could please remove your glasses. I like to look the people I’m talking to in the eye.’

‘As you wish.’ Meisner’s voice had a cracked hoarseness, as if he needed to accustom himself to speaking again. He took off the sunglasses and revealed two red-rimmed eyes with heavy bags, no longer bearing the slightest resemblance to a youthful hero. It seemed scarcely credible that he had stood before the camera with Eva Kröger in this state. In a comedy! Were actors really able to deny themselves to such an extent? Perhaps they had to, if they wanted to be successful? Or if they had an unscrupulous boss like Heinrich Bellmann?