Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

It was little more than a show for Gennat, a case in which the worst you could do was make yourself unpopular at Alex. Buddha didn’t have to alienate any of his favourites, but could observe how the assistant detective from Hannover had developed this past year.

The interrogations hadn’t been nearly as bad as Lange feared. Even uniform knew what details were essential for the purposes of a statement. You didn’t have to squeeze it out of them. Everyone had cooperated. No stalling, wisecracks or protests, so that Lange already had more or less everything he needed. It just had to be written out neatly and filed away. In a few days, he’d hand over the file to the public prosecutor, who would draw things to a predictable close.

It looked like there was no blame attached to the operation command. The KaDeWe intruder had recklessly tried to escape down the store front and fallen in the process. These things happened.

‘One less for us to worry about,’ a few colleagues had said in the canteen. Lange saw things differently.

A human life was a human life, and the deceased from KaDeWe looked like he was still a child. They still hadn’t identified him. The operation commander, a young police lieutenant, regretted the fatal incident more than anything and had been so full of remorse that Lange almost had to comfort him. No wonder: it was a lot of responsibility for someone so young. Lieutenant Tornow wasn’t even two years older than Lange, and the assistant detective had no idea how he would have coped in the circumstances.

Then, yesterday evening – Lange had already packed his things and was about to leave the office – Dr Schwartz had telephoned. It was this call that would haunt his dreams. ‘I need to show you something,’ the pathologist said. ‘Could you come to Hannoversche Strasse early tomorrow morning? Best before the start of your shift.’

So here he was standing on the steps of the yellow-brick building with a queasy feeling in his stomach and an increasing sense of regret that he had eaten breakfast. At the top of the stairs, just outside the entrance to the morgue, he hesitated. Until now he had always visited the building with a companion, usually an investigating officer, which gave him the opportunity to stand to one side and not look too closely. Now, however, he had to go in and face whatever awaited him behind these walls, aside from a cynical doctor and dissected corpses.

The porter nodded as he showed his identification and entered the tiled surrounds of the morgue.

Lange had been racking his brains over why Schwartz had asked for him in person, rather than simply delivering the forensic report through internal mail. By now he could have been at his desk in the Castle, reading it over quietly with a cup of coffee before pinning it to the files. The boy had fallen from the fourth floor and died. Did it make any difference what bones he had broken, which internal organs he had damaged? Wasn’t it enough for the information to be in the files? Why did the investigating officer need to look himself? Perhaps Schwartz just wanted to show him his own little tunnel of horror, to shock the green assistant detective. A number of colleagues had said the pathologist enjoyed playing such tricks on young officers.

Lange pushed the swing doors of the autopsy room, eyes fixed on the floor and mentally preparing himself to see some freshly severed limbs or heads, a dissected abdomen or, at the very least, an open thorax. The worst thing he had ever seen in the morgue was a head whose skull-pan had been neatly detached, making the deceased seem like one of those clay beer steins displaying Bismarck’s countenance, the lid made up of a spiked helmet you could lift when you drank. Lange had managed to look away, but this time he was the investigating officer.

At last he dared to look up and was surprised. No chamber of horrors. There was a corpse on the autopsy table, but it was covered by a sheet. The pathologist hadn’t even fetched any disgusting samples from his selection – his canning jars , colleagues called them – to put on display. Dr Schwartz sat at his desk making notes. When he saw Lange, he stood up and stretched out a hand.

‘Ah, there you are. Also an early riser?’

‘Out of necessity.’

‘My assistant has just made coffee. Would you like some?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you no, or thank you yes.’

‘Thank you no.’

‘Shame. You’re missing out on the best coffee in Berlin. Strong enough to wake the dead, they say. Pity they can’t drink it.’

Lange met the pathologist’s tired quip with a shy smile. Schwartz, who hadn’t batted an eyelid, pushed him towards the corpse. ‘I wanted to show you… how can I put it?… something a little odd. I can’t mention it in the report without having spoken to you first.’

‘It wasn’t the fall that caused his death?’

Schwartz shook his head. ‘No, there’s no doubt about that. He sustained such serious injuries upon impact that the internal bleeding filled the thorax. The poor boy choked on his own blood. Or more precisely: drowned.’

Lange swallowed.

‘How old was he then?’

‘Very young. Somewhere between fourteen and seventeen at a guess. But that isn’t why I summoned you.’ Schwartz grabbed a corner of the sheet, and Lange feared the worst, but the pathologist exposed only the deceased’s right hand. ‘That,’ he said, pointing towards it, ‘is the big surprise.’

Lange glanced down. No one finger seemed normal; instead each was unnaturally contorted, swollen and displaying all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Breaks to the index, middle and ring fingers,’ Schwartz said. ‘The whole hand covered in haematomas and contusions.’

‘So? He fell onto the pavement from the fourth floor.’

‘He didn’t sustain these injuries in the fall. The left hand is similar, but not nearly as bad.’

‘If it wasn’t the fall, then what?’

‘That is precisely the question, and I’m afraid it isn’t so easy to answer. Or, put another way: if you accept the most obvious answer, you could be in serious trouble.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow, Doctor.’

‘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.’