Chapter 11
February 29, 2024 at 10:22 AM
The small room, soaked in the frosty air and winter wind, was lit by a few lamps that stood against the walls. Large cabinets with many folders stored and lain there for long were covered with dust over time. A wooden desk littered with folders and papers stood somewhere in the corner. The owner himself was sitting pensively in an armchair, twirling a pen with no ink in it.
Adler Schiller was waiting for Wieland and Ehrman, who were reaching him through the snowdrifts and the winter wind, which was raging particularly hard today. His subordinates were preparing the office for their arrival. Adler commanded which documents to put away, which ones to put in the cupboard, the others should have been taken to the archives nearby. He rarely came into the office when he started working with Ehrman and Wieland. Life had changed, but not dramatically. Adler only came back from my thoughts when there was a knock on the door. Sitting up straight and setting aside his pen, he allowed guests to come in.
“Wieland, Ehrman!”, he exclaimed. There was a note of joy in his voice. After weeks of being on a bit of a hiatus he was eager to start again.
“Yes, Adler, it's hard to get to you. You've got snow shovelling going on,” said Wieland, taking off his gloves and coat. He sat down on a chair and rubbed his palms together to warm himself.
“Tell me, Wieland,” Ehrman questioned grudgingly, “why are we meeting at Adler's? What happened to your office? It seemed a little more convenient in terms of location to me,” Ehrman continued to look at the office, shaking off his boots. “It was much easier to get there, the atmosphere was brighter too.”
“Ehrman, I told you, I'm having the floors replaced. In order not to breathe dust and dirt, I suggested that we move our general meetings to Adler’s. It's very cosy, by the way. Did you furnish the office by yourself?” he gave Adler a sidelong glance.
“Yes, all by myself,” the man said proudly. "Thank you. I cleaned this place up during the holidays. There wasn't much to do anyway,” Adler stopped smiling and made an indifferent face. Wieland instantly reacted to that.
“Really? You mean I wasn't the only one bored at home, huh?”, playfully muttered Wieland. Adler shook his head.
“And what exactly have you been doing?”, Ehrman sniffed his nose, shifting his gaze from Adler to Wieland and back again. He could not wait to find out the details of their lives. During all the time they had been working together, they had become friends and it was kind of sad to go on holiday.
“Well, I had a fight with my wife over Christmas, it was so serious that today she finally moved in with her mother,” sadly said Adler, thinking back on that night and all the days that followed.
“Seriously? Is it that bad?”, Wieland propped his head up with his hand, trying to sympathise with Adler. Wieland realised that arguments with his wife usually did not end well.
You’d better not ask. She called me late yesterday and said she'd go to file for divorce because I don't give her the time. And how can I when I'm at work all the time? I wanted to spend the holiday nights with her, but she kicked up a fuss,” Adler leaned back in his chair.
“Well, what can I say? I just took my wife as far as possible, to her stepmother's house. She asked me to. Actually, it was to my advantage, but it was still boring sitting at home.”
Ehrman, lighting a cigarette and listening to the conversation between the two of them, began to tire, they looked like two old men who had outlived their lives and had gathered to talk about their problems.
“Look, can we leave this competition of who has the worse marriage?”, Ehrman interrupted them, Adler and Wieland looked at him unhappily.
“Yes indeed, Wieland, let's not upset the newlywed, he still has a long way to go. Right, Ehrman?”, Adler said with a sneer in his voice.
Ehrman only snorted, rolling his eyes. Letting out a puff of smoke. Adler pushed back the top drawer and pulled out an ashtray, handing it to Ehrman, who took it graciously.
“Yes, how was the wedding?”, Wieland, turning to Ehrman, said with falseness in his voice.
“It was fine. We had a celebration with her relatives, mine aren't too keen on that sort of thing,” he muttered with faint optimism. He was getting annoyed with all this talk about women.
“Well, the important thing is that now you're not free either,” said Wieland with joy in his voice.
Ehrman smoked, letting the smoke out of his mouth. His mood today was foul and dreary. The view from Adler's windows looked out onto the road, where cars were driving along. Their engines were whirring.
“By the way, has anyone started thinking about the Wilhelm’s murder case yet?”, Ehrman asked the logical question, turning casual conversation to business so as not to prolong the pause.
“Yes, I have,” Adler pulled a folder from the far drawer of his desk and opened it, turning it around to Wieland and Ehrman so that they could see it too, then he held it out to them. Both put it between them.
“So, what we have,” Wieland began to speak. “We have the fact that Ingrid and Wilhelm worked together, however, we don't know what they were responsible for. We can also assume that they were killed by the same person. Reason for Ingrid's murder is that she wanted to escape. Reason for Wilhelm's murder is that he might have known the killer. Or he himself also wanted to escape,” finished Wieland.
An unpleasant sound was heard, furniture was being pushed upstairs, Adler sighed tiredly. It annoyed not only him, but Wieland and Ehrman as well.
“Is it always like this in your building?” sceptically said Ehrman. “Wieland, it was quieter, much quieter at yours,” grudgingly continued Ehrman.
“No, not always,” Adler glared fiercely in his direction. “It's just that the new chief of criminal investigation is settling into his new office.”
The man put his hand on the phone, took it off, pressed it to his ear and dialled a number, the phone upstairs instantly rang. Adler in a gruff voice immediately ordered it to stop. The private, judging by the voice on the other end of the wire, was very nervous and immediately obeyed the order. Adler put the phone down and continued Wieland's thought.
“We also know that Wilhelm was helping Ingrid. It is possible that he was the one who got her the documents. He's been in contact with Norwegian prisoners. And he's also connected to the jewellery case,” finished Adler, twirling the pen in his hand again, relaxing his shoulders, then tensing them again.
“What else was found at the murder scene besides gold? In his house there were your staff, Adler, as far as I recall,” Ehrman leaned back relaxed in his chair and began to remember what had happened before the New Year and Christmas.
“There were a lot of transported goods, sofas, rugs et cetera. It’s just a small part of what I think he has. Right now Wieland's department are running everything through to see if it's contraband or not. A letter was also found. It was in the bedside table.”
There was a knock on the door, Adler said to come back later.
“You should be nicer to them,” Wieland admonished him. Adler waved it off, silently saying that's what they should do. With his other hand Adler handed over the letter to Ehrman.
“Most likely it’s written by foreigners, judging by the perfect handwriting,” Adler pointed to the perfect letters on the paper and stretched.
“And where did it come from? Have you been able to find out?” Wieland swallowed his saliva at the question, Adler gave a negative answer.
“Not yet. We need to find out exactly who Wilhelm was working with. There are many countries, it's impossible to say exactly where they were shipping the goods to. But judging by the letter, maybe it was from a nearby country. I think they were just a crossing point,” Ehrman put his hands on the table and lied down with his chin on the table. Adler with Wieland looked at this perplexedly, while Ehrman quickly went up and sat up straight.
“There's too much variation,” said Ehrman, rubbing his eyes. “There are a lot of countries and a lot of paths.”
“We'll have to split up,” Wieland thought about how to get this done as quickly as possible. Every day counted.
“Wieland, we need to figure out what to look for first. We don't even know roughly their system. Even if we go to ask for help from someone, it's stupid to go to other units without understanding what we want to find,” Adler corrected him, sighing. “No matter how much you want to cut down on time, getting things done in the shortest amount of time isn't going to work.”
“Yes, you're right. Adler, we need to find that chain. I think Germany was a staging point.”
“Why are there such sudden thoughts?” Ehrman stood up and walked over to the window, beyond which birds were hopping on the branches.
“Because, my friend, Germany is a strategic centre, you can go anywhere from there almost immediately.”
“Maybe they were transporting goods to America or Scotland,” Ehrman opened a small spare book and wrote down his guesses there.
“Hardly Scotland,” Adler scribbled with his fingers. “Why would they go there? It's too far away. Only as a final destination, but that's unlikely, it's a small country. Who needs to smuggle anything there? America...”, Adler made guesses in his head. “It might be America. A land of opportunity, there are people who can buy and pay for the goods, a lot of fools live there.
“They're not fools,” Ehrman snarled, Adler hit his nerve.
“They are,” Adler repeated his thought. “People who couldn't be fit in their own country, won't be able to build a normal state on a foreign land. Especially that far away from home. They don't know life at all. Besides, they can only steal something from others.”
“Gentlemen, enough!”, Wieland intervened in the argument between Adler and Ehrman, realising that if the two were to break up now, it would be to their disadvantage.
“Alright, let's end our argument,” they both agreed, the room felt silent, broken only by the shouts in the corridor and the stomping of the soldiers.
“Or maybe to Britain,” added Wieland, scratching his chin. “Either way, more countries need to be found. They for sure have plenty of staging points and several countries to escape to without leaving a trace if anything happens.”
“Yes, you're right,” Ehrman moved away from the window and sat down in the chair in his former seat. “It's not the letter that we should be looking at, it's the fact that they all were involved.”
“We'll have to check all the countries, it'll take a lot of time, Wieland,” warned him Adler.
“We'll have to find as much information as we can. I think we'll have several versions, but we'll have to check all of them,” added thoughtfully Wieland.
“Maybe we'll even find someone else, or maybe we'll find out who wrote the letter,” Adler pointed a finger at him.
“It's quite unlikely, the black marketers have fast communication between each other, they've already found out we're digging for Wilhelm . But here's what's unclear. If Wilhelm was at the crime scene, why wasn't he killed immediately, if even he was confronted by the killer?”, Ehrman shifted his gaze from the papers to the tapestry hanging behind Adler.
“Because two bodies at once is too much. Besides, they figured Wilhelm wouldn't tell on them, so maybe he didn't know anything,” made his guess Wieland.
“Or maybe they were counting on the fact that he and Ingrid weren't that close, so he wouldn't expose himself to save his own skin.”
“And when we called him in for questioning, they realised that he'd expose everyone soon. So they decided to kill him,” finished Wieland.
“Maybe he realised he had to get out himself, but he couldn't. He was killed while trying to escape,” Ehrman put his pen away and stood up, putting on his coat, about to leave. Wieland bade Adler a brief farewell, while Adler himself called his assistant and asked him to connect him with the archive.
