Huss watched Kellner’s face moving closer to her own. Nearer and nearer it came, the doctor moving with sadistic slowness. She closed her eyes, flinching, her skin crawling as she waited for his hands to touch her, then, suddenly,
‘Florian!’
Schneider’s voice was like a whipcrack. Kellner straightened up and Huss opened her eyes. Schneider had appeared at the top of the stairs, interrupting his deputy. There was a furious exchange of German and then Kellner, with a reddened and enraged face, like a scolded adolescent, bent down, pulled up his underpants and trousers, fastening himself with hasty movements, and then stamped heavily away up the stairs.
Outside, Hinds let out a sigh of relief. He started to examine the long window in great detail. He was a Hinds, breaking and entering ran in the family. The window wouldn’t pose much of a problem.
Schneider walked up to Huss, his face frowning with anger.
‘I must apologize for my colleague. I’ll stay with you until Adams gets back. We are an honourable organization but sometimes I have little say in the choice of my colleagues. I think soon I may have to have a bit of a purge, but that is for another time.’
He started to wander around the room, drumming his fingers on things. Huss could now see he was a man under a great deal of strain. He had a dead body in a freezer and a policewoman bound on a table, a loose-cannon potential rapist and a psychotic minder together with a psychotic dog. And God alone knew where Adams fitted in.
Schneider turned to address her, to explain himself. ‘All I wanted to do was save Germany from the niggers and the Muslims and stand up to the Russians. Save us from ourselves really.’
More walking around, more pushing his fingers through his hair. He turned to her and he had tears in his eyes. ‘I really respect you, DI Huss, and I hate the fact that you’re going to have to die.’
So do I, thought Huss. Part of her, though, was flooded with relief, almost gratitude that he had saved her from Kellner. She thought, It’s like Stockholm syndrome, don’t be grateful, this man is going to kill you!
Schneider’s crocodile tears weren’t helping either. If you feel that badly about it, thought Huss, let me go. Lose this nauseating self-pity, this ‘now look what you’ve made me do’ attitude.
He sat down on a chair near her head, a man unburdening himself, anxious to explain. I suppose he can afford to tell me everything, thought Huss bitterly, since I’ll be taking his secrets with me to the grave.
‘Kellner started it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know at first that he was bankrolling the party by laundering money for the Russian Mafia – that was Georgie Adams’s idea. She has political connections in Germany through the international anarchist movement and it was her idea to use us to launder Russian Mafia money. She approached Kellner as a middle man, I mean woman. She got a cut, we got a cut,’ said Schneider.
So now it’s Kellner’s fault, is it? thought Huss. So it was Kellner’s idea to accept Georgie Adams’s offer of money from the Russian Mafia disguised as party donations, not yours, Schneider. You were too busy formulating policy to worry about the nuts and bolts of party finance.
Schneider continued his self-justifying explanation. ‘We’d charge three euros for every one we took from them, put the money they gave us as party donations through our accounts for tax purposes and reinvest the clean money in their legit businesses.’ He laughed. ‘People assume it’s the big konzerns behind us, industrial backers, but it’s Mafia money. Russian money. And then Hart got wind of it – we were old friends, from when we were kids, we grew up together, partied together, he knew everything about me so she killed him and invented the Al-Akhdaar organization, let the Muslims take the heat, and that was genius.’
He poured himself a glass of water.
Huss lay there immobile, silent, the perfect audience for Schneider. She was like a priest in a confessional and soon she would be bound by more than a vow of silence. She would be dead.
It was undeniably clever. Her respect for Adams grudgingly increased. Who would imagine that a far-right German nationalist party would be financed by Russian organized crime? Who would suspect the anarchists of anything so organized, so capitalist? And then to pin the deaths on the bogeymen of Islam. Even though Al-Akhdaar didn’t actually exist, ISIS sources had claimed the executions as theirs.
‘So we invented Al-Akhdaar and, as you can see, everyone believes us. Why wouldn’t they? And, I’m afraid, DI Huss, that it’s Al-Akhdaar that are going to kill you.’
Schneider was right, it was genius.
‘And then that idiot Hinds somehow stumbled across a connection. He didn’t know Al-Akhdaar were a fiction, but he knew Eleuthera were linked somehow and Georgie was involved. To be honest, we didn’t know how much he did know, that’s why he had to be discredited. No one would believe him as a paranoid murderer.’
Schneider heard voices upstairs.
‘I’m just sorry about you, but at least I can ensure your death will be dignified and painless. I promise I’ll make sure of that. I won’t ask you to forgive me, but I hope now you can see why I acted as I did. I simply had no choice. I will leave you now.’
He turned and she watched his back disappear up the stairs.
I don’t want to die, thought Huss. She could feel tears in her eyes but she refused to shed them.
There was a click as the door shut behind Schneider.
Huss closed her eyes in despair, then shivered as a cold draught blew across her. That was unusual.
She heard a scraping noise. She opened her eyes and turned her head.
Her heart leapt with adrenaline-fuelled excitement. The long, narrow window had opened and as she watched, first she saw a hand, then an arm, then the back of a head as a slim figure of a man squeezed himself through the aperture with agonizing slowness. There was only just enough clearance for his head. Back of head, left arm and shoulder, back and buttocks, leg until he lay along the window ledge. Then he swung round, feet first, still with his back to her. He dropped lithely on to the floor and turned round.
Marcus Hinds. He grinned at her triumphantly. Thank you, God! thought Huss.