No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (5 page)

‘Promise you’ll give a statement to the KrimPol on Bismarckstrasse, Mr Browne.’

She dripped money, but without ostentation. Her jewellery was discreet, her clothing simple but classic; her face and throat showed her age. Most of the pictures on the walls would have been valued at more than Jago’s annual salary.

He started to retrieve the papers he had used for his presentation. The client had three accounts: one in Zürich with Credit Suisse, one with Deutsche in Frankfurt, the third with Jago’s bank. Her money, targeted by the
FrauBoss
, was the stuff from which bonuses flowed.

Jago closed his briefcase. He had given her a brief description of what had happened on the pavement, just enough to account for his appearance and his reason for being four and half minutes late. Where he came from in East London, nobody went to the police to complain of a minor assault. He said softly, ‘Hardly worth it.’

‘But you should.’

‘I’m sure they have better things to do.’

They stood up. There was a trace of perfume about her. Her eyes were watery and had lost youth’s sharp lines. Her hand was on his arm and crabbed fingers clawed a grip on the material. ‘Because you do not wish to be involved?’

He tried to laugh it off. ‘Someone where I used to work, in London, would say when anything went wrong, “I expect worse things happen in Bosnia.” I don’t know much about Bosnia, or what happened there, but it’s what he always said.’

‘Was it at the new pizzeria?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Were they Italian?’

He grimaced.

‘Perhaps you’re an innocent, Mr Browne.’

He still had nothing to say.

‘Of course the police should be involved. You should stand up as a witness, Mr Browne. In Germany, still in living memory, we made an art form of avoidance. Evil flourished and we did nothing. Evil of any sort should be confronted. I am an old lady. I speak out because I have nothing to lose by doing so. For the young it may be different. Perhaps your pride is hurt because you were knocked over. Perhaps you can put the attack behind you because your place of work is on the other side of the city. Can you?’

He worked on the old east side of Berlin and here he was on the old west side. He lived miles from here and might not need to come back. The chance of the
FrauBoss
allowing this client to drift from her orbit was slight. He smiled, as if he was about to leave, but she persisted. He felt her intensity through the grip of her fingers.

‘There was a theologian, Martin Niemöller. He was imprisoned for many years but survived in a camp while many around him were hanged. He was ashamed that he had lived when so many brave men and women had been murdered. He wrote about those who, like himself, did not stand up to evil. When they had arrested the socialists, he didn’t speak out because he wasn’t a socialist. When it was the trade unionists, he did nothing because he was not a trade-union supporter. When it was the turn of the Jews he was silent because he wasn’t a Jew. He wrote, ‘And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.’ That was the big evil, the mature oak. The little evil is the acorn, thriving unnoticed – crime on the streets. Did you see a woman sitting in the little park, as old as myself?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she wore odd shoes? Expensive but not matching?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she see what happened?’

‘Saw the start, then slipped away.’

‘Her father was hanged in the last days of the war, at the Flossenburg camp. Eighteen days later the Americans arrived. The evil consumed her. She says her father would have been better to close his mouth, do nothing, look away, and live to bring her to adulthood. I hope, Mr Browne, that you will find time to visit the KrimPol detectives. The girl won’t. Her elder brother is the manager of the pizzeria. He won’t either. They are Italian and would say they know better.’

He apologised again for his lateness, his appearance, the absence of the
FrauBoss
, then thanked her for her patience, courtesy and the schnapps. He gave her his smile, which was already famous among the investment team (Sales).

The fresh air was bracing. He looked across the square and saw an everyday scene. He had been punched there, a girl had been kicked – and a spider had murdered a fly. For him it was about where he had been brought up, his mother, what had happened to him and to her. Walking briskly, he phoned in and said that all was well with the client. He could see into the pizzeria, where customers were drinking coffee. The man, the girl’s brother, was behind the counter. He checked on his phone for directions.

2

A woman behind a reinforced glass panel had told him, via a microphone and loudspeaker, where he should sit but not how long he would have to wait.

When Jago Browne had got dressed that morning in his attic apartment, he had not considered that he would spend hours on a hard bench in a police station on Bismarckstrasse. Where he had been brought up, Canning Town in east London, the closest police station had been on the Barking road, a formidable red-brick fortress. He had never entered it, although half of the kids close to where he lived had. He supposed that, there, a waiting area existed like this one. It smelt of urine and disinfectant. When the door onto Bismarckstrasse opened, a gust of cool air dispersed it briefly.

He was with two girls, about twenty, both probably tarts. One cried convulsively and the other comforted her. There was a fidgeting junkie, who tried to make conversation with an elderly man, who was muttering about a lost dog. A stream of men and women came to the counter, offering ID cards – they were clocking in as a bail requirement. There was graffiti on the walls – not clever or witty. Jago assumed that it was
verboten
to scribble on the walls but the woman behind the barricade couldn’t do much about it. It was a
Rauchen Verboten
area too, but there were small burn marks on the linoleum.

Police officers hurried through the waiting area. Some came off the street and tapped a code into an inner door; others came from inside and headed for Bismarckstrasse. They had in common, entering or leaving, a reluctance to glance at the flotsam waiting on the benches. He supposed that a pistol in a holster, a truncheon and a gas canister gave the officers confidence to ignore him and those around him.

The man who might have lost the dog was the first to break. He stood, shouted abuse at the woman beyond the glass, aimed a kick at the end of the bench and left. Jago might have followed – he nearly did. Then the woman called him forward. His spirits soared until she pushed a sheet of paper through the grille and told him to fill it in, then bring it back to her. Why had she waited forty-five minutes to do that? He had requested to see a detective following an assault and a possible instance of extortion on the square two streets away. He took the paper. He had asked Elke at the bank to tell the
FrauBoss
that he was running late.

Heavy stuff from the client and he wondered if he believed any of it. It could all have been fantasy: hangings, Jews, camps, odd shoes worn by an old lady. The spider was real death. He couldn’t quite decide whether the client had been playing with him. He started on the form: name, address, work, complaint.

He was Jago Browne. Born 1989. His mother was Carmel. Her parents were semi-lapsed Catholics from the western edge of Belfast and had left in 1972 at the height of sectarian disturbances in the hope of finding a less traumatic life. One daughter, the apple of her parents’ eyes. Just after her eighteenth birthday she’d gone to Cornwall with her two best chums for a week’s camping. Might have been the draught cider, or ignorance or an act of rebellion: a one-night stand with a deck-hand off a Penzance–Newlyn trawler. A one-night stand followed by a one-morning stand that had drifted into a one-afternoon stand. She’d thought his name was Jago, but it might have been Jack. Anyway, ‘Jago’ was Cornish and she had fastened on it once the sickness started in the mornings. Her parents had pretty much dumped her, couldn’t cope with their little jewel dropping their hopes and aspirations in the shit. That was his mother, and home was a council flat in a part of London where few wanted to be housed – Canning Town – but she was lucky to have a roof over her head. She was a fighter – and wanted love. Dave was the boyfriend who gave her a brother for Jago, and Benny had provided the sister. Neither Dave nor Benny had lasted long. She was a single mum, with three kids and a maisonette, within a bullet’s reach of the Beckton Arms. That was Jago Browne, and they didn’t need his childhood history or his education.

His flat was built into the roof of an apartment block in the Kreuzberg district, between the Landwehrkanal and Leipzigerstrasse, with an entry on Stresemannstrasse along which the old Berlin Wall had run. His workplace was a bank – the section dealing with private wealth management and advising on investments – in the old east sector, out beyond Alexanderplatz and the great tower. The boy from a sink estate in Canning Town had made it into the stellar world of international banking via a school that believed in merit, a university in the north-west, where he’d worked his brain raw, a merchant bank in the Bishopsgate area of the City of London, and on to Berlin. How had he done it? People liked him. Those who had stumbled across his path thought him ‘worth a punt’ or had felt good after giving him ‘a helping hand’. He would have said that he’d been in the ‘right place at the right time’ so he was on a two-year exchange with the bank in Berlin, and a German youngster was coping with life in Bishopsgate. He added the bank’s name to the form he was completing.

Under ‘complaint’, he put, ‘To report extortion and criminal violence’. It was almost eleven o’clock. It would take him the best part of an hour to get across the city and its former dividing line, beyond Karl-Marx-Allee and to the top of Greifswalder Strasse. By the time he got there the whole morning would have gone. In the section, they all worked like beavers at the direction of the
FrauBoss
, and Elke had been back on his mobile to ask when they should expect him – as if he had a criminal’s tag on his ankle. He pushed the sheet of paper through the grille. A uniformed woman took the girls to a side room.

Jago continued to wait. Earlier it had seemed a good idea but the excitement had palled. In Canning Town no one made witness statements. His act of defiance was to get out a cigarette, not light it but roll it between his lips. He’d give it five more minutes.

On an upper floor of the station, in a pinched office, a picture on the wall faced his desk. Each time he looked up it was straight ahead, there for him to feast on. The sun was at its height. The sea was pure blue. The beach was golden, and not many of the pebble banks showed. Bikini-clad girls lay on multi-coloured towels, stood on the sand, or among the slight waves. He had taken the photo himself. He gloried in it, bathed in its warmth. It made the greyest, coldest day in Berlin a little more acceptable.

He was an investigator, had passed the ‘detective’ course run by the national police college, was in the KriminalPolizei, but would never allow himself to be promoted to sergeant. If he looked away from his screen and ignored the picture, he had the window to look out of. There was a courtyard and a glimpse of the sky – it had clouded over, wasn’t raining yet but soon would be. The picture was his joy . . . He sighed, then allowed himself a brief smile. Manfred Seitz, investigator of the KrimPol based at the station on Bismarckstrasse, smiled infrequently when others might see him do so. Sometimes in the presence of his wife, not often . . . He was given the shit by those who ran the KrimPol section that dealt with organised crime in that part of Berlin. He was a dinosaur. Most of them were young enough to be his kids but they had the status of ‘sergeant’ or ‘lieutenant’ and could instruct him on his duties, which events he should follow-up. He fielded the rubbish and was kept at a distance from any work that might offer a step up the promotion ladder. He didn’t complain . . . There was a bank worker in Reception, with a scarred face, a foreigner reporting ‘extortion’. No one was dead, and there had been no hospital admission. It was for him to handle.

Fred – everyone used the abbreviation – sipped the coffee he had brought to work in his Thermos. He did not patronise the canteen, thought it tiresome. He brought his own sandwiches, which Hilde made for him while he showered each morning – he went to the station before she left for the infant school – so he could avoid the gossip and back-biting at the lunch tables. He had been Fred to his parents and at school in the Baltic city of Rostock, and when he had joined the police. . . . His children used it – the daughter in Zürich and the son at college in Dresden. He thought it suited him, that it matched his appearance.

It was a quiet morning. The ‘kids’ had made arrests the previous day, Kurdish pickpockets, and were still celebrating. Fred Seitz was at that stage of his career – within three years of retirement – when he was too junior to appear before the cameras or brief the press, and too old to appear in court as a witness on whom a conviction that could lead to advancement might depend. He was in a rut. A last glance at the sea, the beach and the bikini girls. His screen showed a new report from a Nature Conservancy group handling the parkland to the east of Lübeck, across the estuary. His pipe was on the table with sweet-smelling ash in the cold bowl. He killed the screen, hitched his jacket onto his shoulder and closed his door. The kids were around a central table in the work area but did not want him in their midst so he had been awarded the partitioned small room as an office, space that should have gone to a team leader.