Schreiber's Secret (37 page)

“We hardly see Franz any more, Herr Edwards,” said Fräu Brandt. “He last turned up about nine months ago.”

“Can you tell me something about him?” said Edwards. “I believe he had been fostered since an early age and that you were his final foster parents?”

“Oh dear,” sighed Herr Brandt in obvious discomfort. “I’m afraid Franz was a very disruptive child. He was intelligent but he was traumatized by his experiences in early childhood. He was extremely moody. Very friendly one moment and very aggressive the next. I’m afraid to say ...” The old man looked at his wife.

She sighed deeply. “You might as well tell him, Oskar.”

“Franz left our home at sixteen, Herr Edwards,” said Oskar Brandt. “He usually visits us once a year for a few hours. The last time he came was about nine months ago. I don’t think his real father would want to meet him.”

“Why not?” The Englishman was intrigued.

“Franz has peculiar views ...”

“We’re Christian Democrats, you see,” interrupted
Fräu Brandt.

“Perhaps we were not strict enough,” said her husband. “Franz mixed with the local riffraff. He came to hold strong fascist views and his opinions became even more hardened after reunification. I’m afraid the boy always idealized his real father while hating his mother for abandoning him. Franz believed his father was a hero for Führer and Fatherland who had died alongside Hitler in the bunker. I think maybe you should not tell his father this.”

There was only one thought racing through Mark Edwards’ mind: Like grandfather, like father, like son. “Do you have any photographs of Franz?”

“Only these,” said
Fräu Brandt, extracting a small photo album from the drawer of an old oak dresser. “I’m afraid they’re not very good. They’re only from when he was a child.”

Edwards flicked through the album. The photographs must have been taken with an old box camera. They were very fuzzy and gave no clue as to the man’s present appearance. “What does he look like now?”

Herr Brandt shrugged. “Tall. Thin. Clean-shaven. Pretty ordinary-looking, really.”

Edwards rubbed his chin in disappointment. “Thank you, Herr and
Fräu Brandt. You have been a great help. Here’s my telephone number in London. If Franz should make contact again, kindly ask him to call me.”

Oskar Brandt lifted himself wearily from his chair. He looked firstly at his wife and then at his guest. “There is one other thing, Herr Edwards. I don’t know whether it will help you. When you mentioned that his real father was terminally ill, it rather threw me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is all rather sad,” said
Fräu Brandt.

“It happened about a year ago,” Oskar Brandt continued. “An elderly lady claiming to be Franz’s mother came looking for him. We were a bit hesitant with you before because, you see, she too said she was suffering from a terminal illness and that she wanted to see her son before she died.”

“What was her name?” asked Edwards. It had to be the Gertrude Bill Brown had mentioned in his letter.

“She said her name was Gertrude Vimmer. She said her husband, Fritz, had recently died. She said she had nobody else in the world apart from her son. She gave us a sealed package and then asked if she could write a letter to her son. It must have been a long letter. It took her a full half-hour to write and she seemed distressed. She sealed the envelope and asked us to give both to Franz when he next visited, which we did, of course. He turned up three months afterwards. It was very sad. He went as white as a sheet when he read the letter. He didn’t say another word. Just took the package and left.” 

“Did Fräu Vimmer leave an address?” asked Edwards, trying to unscramble his brain.

“Yes, here it is,” said
Fräu Brandt, flicking through her phone book. “We tried telephoning her after Franz came round, but her number was out of order. Now where is it?”

Edwards gripped the side of the dresser until his knuckles blanched.

“Yes, here it is ... Berlin. Charlottenstrasse 33.”

“Hold on there,” bellowed Fred Higgins. “Don’t all push and shove. First come, first served.” The court attendant had never seen anything like it. At least one eager beaver had been outside the entrance to No. 1’s gallery since the early hours. The trial that seemed to have caught the whole world’s imagination was causing a nightmare for one Frederick Arthur Higgins. He was thankful at least that there were no family members of the accused or the victims staking their claim to prime positions. Indeed, the only person who had had special permission to enter before anyone else was the man whom he had seen giving evidence during the trial, the one
they said resembled the defendant. The man had said that the view had been too restricted for him downstairs. Well, thought Higgins, he now had the best seat in the house. Front row in the gallery. It was surprising how those old codgers bounded up the stairs when it came to the end of a trial.

Some twenty feet below, and opposite the gallery, Danielle Green sat fidgeting nervously with her pager. Mark had caught her on her car phone as she was driving into town and had explained breathlessly how he was following up a hot lead which necessitated flying to Berlin. He had assured her that he was safe and that there was nothing for her to worry about. He had warned her not to mention a word to anyone. But she was worried. She had recognized
a hesitancy in his voice which told her he was hiding something.

Danielle had telephoned Dieter Müller earlier from home to ask how he was feeling. The professor had told her that his illness had been diagnosed as a severe form of gastroenteritis. He said that however desperate he was to see the conclusion of the
trial, the bug had laid him out completely.

As the dénouement of the trial approached, the chief feature writer of th
e
Mail on Sunda
y
had never felt so alone

Never had Mark Edwards wished a flight to be over more quickly than the one he took from Düsseldorf to Berlin’s Tegel airport. In a little over an hour he was in a taxi headed for the Charlottenburg district near by. The adrenalin began pumping as he neared his destination. He was hoping against hope that Gertrude Vimmer was still alive; that she knew the whereabouts of her son; that she or he might be able to clear up the mystery of the address in the killer’s note, C-street 33.

“Here it is,” said the driver, pulling up outside a small townhouse. “Number 33.”

The reporter’s pulse raced. There was a “for sale” notice outside the property. He paid the driver and walked up to the green-painted front door.

He rang three times and then peered through the letterbox. It was clear that the place was empty. Then something caught his eye. He noticed the next-door neighbour peeping out from behind a curtain. Anything was worth trying now, he thought.

The curtain returned quickly to its normal position as Edwards approached the house. He rang twice before an old woman’s voice cackled from behind the door. “What do you want?”

I’m looking for Fräu Gertrude Vimmer,” he shouted back. “It’s very urgent.”

The wait seemed interminable before the door creaked open. A frail old lady stood before him, her wispy white hair unkempt and her face a map of wrinkles. “It won’t help any more if it’s urgent, young man,” the woman said in a surprisingly firm voice. “
Fräu Vimmer is dead. She died about ten months ago.”

Edwards knew he was staring failure in the face. “Can you tell me something about her, madam. You see, I’m a lawyer representing a distant relative who wanted to make contact with her.”

The old lady hesitated. She looked him up and down. The man seemed personable enough, and a lonely widow needed company occasionally. “You’d better come in,” she said. “But I can’t talk for too long. I have to go out.”

“That’s fine. Just a few minutes will do. My name is Mark Edwards and, as you can tell by my accent, I’m from England.”

She led him into the morning room. There was a strong smell of cinnamon, which reminded Edwards of the biscuits Danielle’s mother loved to bake. He sat in a chair opposite the old lady.

“You know,” she said, “you’re the second man coming round here talking about being a relative or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, shortly after Gertrude died, there was this chap who came knocking on my door. Said he was her son. I looked at him hard. And you know something, I think it may have been him.”

Edwards realized that the woman had obviously recognized Franz. “What did he look like, Fräu ...?”

“Haas.”

She then proceeded to give a description that matched that given by the Brandts.

“Did he leave a contact address or telephone number?” Edwards’ heart began to quicken.

“No, he just said it didn’t matter anymore. He knew what he had to do. The way he said it was a bit eerie. ‘I know what I have to do,’ he said.”

The Englishman sighed deeply. He was so near, and yet so far. “Tell me, Fräu Haas, did you know his mother well?”

“Did I know her well?” she replied wistfully. “Gertrude was my best friend. We were neighbours ever since I was a newlywed just after the war. She was living with a man. A terrible man ... maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”

“No, please go on. Please, Fräu Haas.”

“He was a real Nazi, that one. An SS man. He used to beat her up something rotten. I hated him. Thank God, he left her after only a few months. Thank God, she eventually married again and led a reasonably happy life. Then, last year, Herr Vimmer died and she got the cancer. It was all over in weeks. The pair of them.”

“What was the name of the first man she lived with?” the reporter asked, his mind racing.

“Schreiber. Hans Schreiber. And I hope he comes to a sticky end. If he’s still alive.”

“But I was told Gertrude and Hans were married.”

“Yes, that’s what everyone thought. You know, it was a bit of a stigma then to be living with someone. You’d have thought people would have had enough on their minds with all the devastation.”

“What happened to her son, Fräu Haas?”

“Oh, he came along about nine months after Schreiber left. It was such a pity.”

“What do you mean?”

“Poor Fritz Vimmer just couldn’t take to the boy. He was a good man, but he couldn’t accept another man’s son. It was one of the reasons they didn’t get married. Not until she agreed to put Dieter into care and ...”

“Dieter?”

“Yes. His first name was Franz but she always called him by his second, Dieter.”

Edwards suddenly felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What was Gertrude’s maiden name, Fräu Haas?”

“Müller. Why?”

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

“What’s wrong, Herr Edwards? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

Edwards knew he had to act quickly. He withdrew a hundred-marknote from his wallet and thrust it into the old lady’s hand. “Thank you, Fräu Haas. May I use your telephone?”

“Of course,” she said, “but ...”

“No, you keep it,” he said. “How do I reach directory enquiries?”

Within less than a minute, Mark Edwards was through to the Faculty of History at Heidelberg University.

“No, we don’t have any professor by the name of Dieter Müller here,” the Dean told him tetchily. “The only Dieter Müller I’ve heard of is a guy who pretends to be a professor. He’s a right-wing revisionist involved in neo-Nazi activities. The man’s a maniac.”

At the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Pilkington was already well into his summing up.

“... The
prosecution have said that Henry Sonntag is Hans Schreiber. That is part of the evidence; it is not the offence. He is not charged with being Schreiber. He is charged with murder ...”

Danielle suddenly felt the vibrations of her pager. Her heart skipped a beat as she realized it had to be Mark. She unclipped the device from the belt of her grey striped suit and read the simple message. “Ring Berlin 66 22 53 immediately.”

The court ushers hated any toing-and-froing during a judge’s summing up. Fortunately, she was at the edge of the reporters’ bench and was able to slip away without causing too much bother. Already armed with a bunch of phone cards, her fingers trembled as she dialled the number.

“Hello, Dani.”

“Hello, dar ...”

“Now listen, Dani,” he cut in. “Listen to me carefully. Where’s Müller?”

“I-I don’t know,” she stammered. “I rang his home this morning and he told me he was too ill to attend court. Why? What’s happened?”

“Dani, you’re not going to believe this, but Dieter Müller is Hans Schreiber’s son.”

“What!”

“Listen. He’s also a rabid neo-Nazi over here. He’s crazy. I’m sure he’s behind Brown’s murder. He also tried to have me murdered – for God’s sake don’t worry, I’m okay – but I just don’t know why he’s done all this. There’s a lot more, but I can’t go into detail. Nothing makes any sense yet.”

“What shall I do, Mark?” She fought to control the trembling in her voice.

“Get hold of Webb. Tell him all this. Tell him to find Müller. Whatever he does, he must find Müller.”