Фолькер Кучер - The Silent Death

Rath sighed. Plisch and Plum, as the inseparable duo were known at the Castle, were hardly the most ambitious investigators at Alex, which was probably why Böhm kept foisting them on him. Henning briefly tipped his hat as Rath squeezed into the back seat. Long, sturdy wooden poles and a cumbersome-looking crate meant he barely had any room.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘The camera,’ Henning said. ‘Shitty Opel can’t fit it in the boot!’

‘It would have fit in the murder wagon!’

Henning shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘Böhm needs it.’

‘To drive to Aschinger, or what?’

Henning gave a deliberate laugh, as was expected of an assistant detective when an inspector cracked a joke. No sooner had Czerwinski reclaimed his place in the passenger seat than his partner stepped on the gas. The Opel performed a screeching U-turn and switched to the oncoming lane, banging Rath’s head on the roof hinge. As the car turned into Joachimsthaler Strasse, he thought he could just make out Kathi’s red winter coat in the rear-view mirror.

The studio was situated near the racetrack. Henning parked next to a sand-coloured Buick in the courtyard. Gräf had hurried over, spurred on by the prospect of working on something other than Isolde Heer’s suicide. A death in a film studio. Perhaps they would run into Henny Porten.

The studio rose a short distance from the road and looked like an oversized greenhouse, a glass mountain that seemed out of place in the midst of the bland industrial Prussian architecture surrounding it. A long brick wall lined the site, with a police officer from the 202nd precinct standing guard so discreetly it was barely possible to make out his blue uniform from the road.

‘This way, gentlemen,’ he said when Rath showed his badge, gesturing towards the large steel door. ‘Your colleague is already inside.’

‘What happened?’ Rath asked. ‘We only know there was an accident.’

‘An actress copped it in the middle of filming. That’s all I know.’

Behind Rath a panting Henning struggled under the weight of the camera. The officer opened the steel door and the slight assistant detective manoeuvred the camera and its bulky tripod through. Rath and Czerwinski followed.

Inside, they couldn’t make out the enormous windows that moments ago had made the building seem like a palm house. Heavy cloths hung from the ceiling and the walls were covered in lengths of material so that Henning had to take care not to come a cropper. There were cables snaking every which way over the floor.

Rath moved carefully through the cable jungle and looked around. The place was crammed with technical devices: spotlights on tripods, in between them a glazed cabinet reminiscent of a plain confessional. Behind the thick yet spotlessly clean pane of glass Rath discerned the silhouette of a film camera. A second camera stood on a trolley with tripod, this time enclosed in a heavy metal casing with only its object lens peeking out. Next to it was a futuristic-looking console with switches, pipes and small, flashing lights, on which there lay a pair of headphones. A thick cable led from the console to the back, where a set of thinner cables connected it to a kind of gallows from which hung two silvery-black microphones. Expensive parquet, dark cherrywood furniture, even a fireplace – it looked as if an elegant hotel room had got lost and wandered into the wrong neighbourhood. There were no cables on the floor of the set.

The cluster of people seemed just as out of place amidst the elegance: scruffily dressed shirtsleeves alongside grey and white workers’ overalls. The only person wearing respectable clothing was dressed in a tuxedo and sitting apart on one of the folding chairs between the tripod spotlights and cable harnesses, a blond man sobbing loudly into his hands. A young woman in a mouse-grey suit leaned over him, pressing his head against her midriff. The crowd on the parquet floor talked quietly among themselves, as if the stubborn claims of the flashing warning sign above the door still held. Silence , it said, filming in progress .

Rath squeezed behind Henning, past a bulky tripod spotlight and onto the set. The assistant detective dropped the heavy camera stand onto the floor with such a crash that everyone looked round. The crowd parted and when Rath spotted Gräf next to two officers he understood the quiet, why the most anyone dared to do was whisper. Dark green silk glistened by Gräf’s feet, the folds almost elegantly arranged, as if for a portrait, but in reality shrouding the unnaturally hunched body of a woman. Half of her face had suffered scorched skin, raw flesh, seeping blisters. The other half was more or less obscured, but hinted at how beautiful the face must once have been. Rath couldn’t help but think of Janus, of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The blonde hair, perfectly coiffed on the right-hand side, had been almost completely burned away on the left. Head and upper body glistened moistly, the silk clinging wet and dark to her breast and stomach. A heavy spotlight pressed her upper left arm to the floor.

Gräf made a detour of the corpse to get to him.

‘Hello, Gereon,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘Nasty business. That’s Betty Winter lying there.’

‘Who?’

Gräf gazed at him in disbelief. ‘Betty Winter. Don’t say you don’t know who she is.’

Rath shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’d need to see her face.’

‘Best not,’ Gräf swallowed. ‘The spotlight caught her square on. It fell from up there.’ The detective gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Comfortably ten metres, and the thing’s heavy. Apart from that, it was also in use. It would have been scorching.’

Rath craned his neck upwards. Under the ceiling hung a steel truss, a network of catwalk grating to which entire rows of different-sized spotlights had been attached. In between were dark lengths of cloth like monotonous, sombre flag decorations. In some places, the heavy fabric hung even lower than the lighting bridges it partially obscured. Directly above the corpse was a gap in the row of spotlights. Only the taut, black cable that must have still been connected to the mains somewhere above indicated that anything had ever hung there.

‘Why do they need so many spotlights?’ Rath asked. ‘Why don’t they just let the light in from outside? That’s why film studios are made of glass.’

‘Sound,’ Gräf said, as if that explained everything. ‘Glass has bad acoustics. That’s why they cover everything. It’s the quickest way to turn a silent film studio into a sound film studio.’

‘You’re well informed!’

‘I’ve just spoken to the cameraman.’

The spotlight that had struck the actress was much bigger than those CID used to illuminate crime scenes at night. The steel cylinder’s circumference was at least the size of a bass drum. The power cable had barely checked its fall, let alone prevented it. Only the lagging had slowed it, with the result that in some places naked wire was exposed.

‘And this hulking brute has the poor lady on its conscience?’ Rath asked.

Gräf shook his head. ‘Yes and no.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘She didn’t die immediately. The spotlight practically roasted her, especially as the connection hadn’t been cut and the light was still on. And her partner was standing right beside her…’

‘The heap of misery in the smoking jacket?’

‘Yes, Victor Meisner.’

‘I think I’ve heard of him.’

Gräf raised his eyebrows. ‘So you do go to the cinema?’

‘I saw him in a crime film once. He spent the whole time brandishing a gun, rescuing various women.’

‘He was probably in rescue mode just now too. Only instead of a gun he used a pail of water. They’re everywhere here, because of the fire risk. Anyway, it seems he gave old Winter a massive electric shock. At any rate she stopped screaming right away, and all the fuses tripped out.’