The Türmer Ledger

Chapter One: The Body in the River

The rain had been falling on Berlin since Sunday, thin and grey and patient, the kind that did not so much fall as settle. It filmed the windscreens of the cars along the Landsberger Allee. It made the flat facades of the eastern blocks look like they had been rinsed of colour.

Leo Brecker parked outside the forensic institute in Mitte at ten past nine on a Tuesday morning and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, listening to the wipers.

He had been told at 06:40, by a colleague who had heard it from someone at the police press office, that the body pulled from the Spree near the Oberbaum Bridge the previous evening had been identified as Werner Brugmann. Seventy-one years old. Retired federal official. No suspicious circumstances.

Leo had put the phone down, showered, shaved, made coffee he did not drink, and then discovered he had put his shirt on inside out.

He went in through the side entrance. The duty pathologist was a small, brisk woman named Dr. Eichel, who had known Leo for six years, mostly through the tedious business of identifying bodies that turned out to have nothing to do with the security of the Federal Republic.

"You're not next of kin," she said.

"There's a daughter. She's coming this afternoon. I worked with him for eleven years." He showed his identification, the laminated card of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Berlin liaison office. "I'd like ten minutes."

Eichel looked at the card, then at Leo's face, which had not been slept on properly.

"Ten minutes," she said.

The room was cold and smelled of disinfectant and something sweeter underneath. Werner Brugmann lay under a sheet on a stainless table, and when Eichel folded the sheet back to the collarbones Leo felt the floor of himself drop a little.

Werner had aged, of course. Three years since Leo had seen him properly. The heavy jaw had gone slack, the white hair was flattened wet against the skull. The river had done its work: the skin was pale and pulpy, the lips dark. But the face was still recognisably the man who had taught Leo, in the winter of 1991, how to read a personnel file the way you read a poem — for what had been left out.

"Cause of death?" Leo said.

"Drowning. Provisional. He went in alive." Eichel consulted the clipboard without needing to. "Water in the sphenoid sinus, foam in the airway. Blood alcohol zero point one four. Insulin-dependent diabetic, some evidence of poor management. No defensive injuries. There's a contusion on the left temple consistent with striking the pier or a bridge support during the fall."

"Fall."

"Or jump. He was seventy-one, widowed eight months, drinking. The report will say suicide." She said it flatly, without cruelty. "I'm sorry. He was your friend."

"He was my section head." Leo heard the correction leave his mouth and disliked himself for it. "He was my friend."

He stood and looked. He had learned from Werner himself: don't look for what you expect; look at everything, slowly, and let the wrong thing come to you.

It came to him at the wrists.

"May I?" he said, and lifted the sheet an inch further without waiting.

The hands were swollen. The skin of the forearms was mottled with the marbling the water brings. But at each wrist, an inch above the joint, there was a band. Not a bruise exactly — the drowned do not bruise the way the living do. A narrow zone of compressed tissue, three centimetres wide, paler than the flesh around it, with a fine crosshatch pattern along the edges where something woven had bitten in.

Both wrists. Symmetrical. The same width on each.

"What's that?" Leo said.

Eichel came around the table. She looked for perhaps four seconds.

"Post-mortem artefact," she said. "He was in the water twenty hours. There was a shopping trolley and about forty metres of cable in that stretch. Debris pressure."

"On both wrists. At the same height."

"It happens."

"Does it happen with a weave pattern?"

Eichel's mouth thinned. "Herr Brecker."

"Is it in the report?"

"The report isn't written."

"Will it be in the report?"

She put the clipboard down on the trolley beside her, and for a moment something moved behind her eyes that Leo would think about for weeks afterwards — not guilt, but the tiredness of a person who has already had a conversation she is not permitted to repeat.

"The findings are consistent with self-inflicted death," she said. "That's what the report will say, because that's what the findings are consistent with. I have four more today. Your ten minutes are up."

"Two more," Leo said. "Please."

She hesitated, then walked to the door and stood there with her back half-turned, examining the corridor, which was empty.

Leo took the camera out of his coat pocket. It was a disposable one, cardboard, twenty-four exposures, bought at a petrol station on the way in because a small unreasoning part of him had known since 06:40 that he would want a picture of something. He had not known of what.

He photographed the left wrist from above and from the side. He photographed the right. He photographed the temple contusion, and the hands, and the face, because the daughter would be told not to look and one day might want someone to have looked properly. The flash was harsh in the cold room. Eight exposures. He wound the little plastic wheel between each, and the ratchet clicked like an insect.

"Enough," Eichel said from the door.

Leo put the camera away and drew the sheet up over Werner Brugmann's face himself, which was a thing he had no right to do, and did anyway.

"When is he released?"

"Thursday. Direct to the crematorium in Baumschulenweg. It's in the file — he left instructions, apparently. No burial."

"Instructions with whom?"

"With the funeral director. Prepaid." Eichel shrugged. "People plan."

Out in the car park the rain had thickened. Leo sat in the car with the engine off and the windows greying over, and did the arithmetic that would become, over the following seven weeks, the organising principle of his life.

A suicide by drowning who binds his own wrists.

A man who telephones his old subordinate three times in September and leaves no message.

A man whose cremation was arranged and paid for before the coroner had finished with him.

Leo Brecker was forty years old. He had a desk on the fourth floor with a view of a courtyard, a rating of "reliable, unspectacular" in his last personnel review, an ex-wife in Potsdam he telephoned every Sunday at six, and a son who had recently begun answering the phone in a voice Leo did not recognise. He wrote threat assessments that were read, if at all, by people who had already decided what they thought.

He was not a field officer. He had never in twenty years drawn a weapon, followed a car, or told a serious lie to anyone but his wife.

He started the engine.

There was a photograph on the wall of his flat, taken at a Christmas party in 1994, in which Werner Brugmann had his arm around Leo's shoulders and was laughing at something that was almost certainly obscene, and Leo, twenty-nine and sober, was laughing too because Werner was laughing.

Werner had said to him once, in the corridor outside the registry, with the particular seriousness that came over him when he had drunk exactly two glasses of wine and no more: *Everyone in this building is protecting something, Leo. The trick is finding out what. Half of them are protecting the constitution. The other half are protecting themselves. And a few — a very few — are protecting an arrangement.*

Leo had asked what he meant by an arrangement.

Werner had smiled and said, *Ask me when I'm retired.*

He had retired in 1999. Leo had never asked.

He pulled out into the traffic on the Hannoversche Strasse, and the wipers dragged their small grey arcs across the glass, and somewhere behind him the sheet lay over a face he had known.