The October Man Read online

  It was horrible coffee, but wet policemen can’t be choosers.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do you send your bodies?”

  “Mainz usually,” said Sommer. “Mainz definitely with this one.”

  I called the Director and told her where the body was going.

  “I see,” she said. “I’ll tell Carmela you’ll meet her there.”

  The Director hung up and I told Sommer that we were going straight to Mainz.

  “Right now?” she said.

  “I can drop you off at the station if you like,” I said. “But I won’t know whether this is my case until after the autopsy.”

  “Mainz it is,” she said breezily, but I noticed she immediately called in to get clearance.

  Chapter 2:

  Noble

  Rot

  The trick with a good autopsy is to try and arrange to arrive just as the pathologist is finishing up. That way you get all the pertinent information while it’s fresh without having to stand through all the cutting and gurgling that precedes it. I was aided in this plan by Mainz’s deliberately obtuse one-way system, which gave Vanessa and me a scenic tour of the famous cemetery, the flyover by the train station and a baroque remnant of the city’s main gate.

  “There’s quite a good restaurant there,” said Vanessa. “Or so I heard.”

  It was past lunchtime, but neither of us had suggested stopping for food. It’s best to avoid eating a meal just prior to an autopsy—even when it’s not your first. The smell has a way of creeping up on you and nobody wants to look unprofessional in front of their colleagues.

  Especially a senior colleague such as Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar Ralf Förstner, head of K11, which dealt with homicide, kidnapping and all the other crimes that make interesting television. He was a solidly built man in his late forties with an impressively long, straight nose and thinning brown hair. He met us in the lobby of the main building wearing a good navy suit and a professionally disapproving expression. An EKHK like Förstner doesn’t normally turn up for an autopsy and I wondered which of us, myself or Vanessa, he was there to keep an eye on.

  The Institut für Rechtsmedizin sits on the edge of the walled garden that marks the boundary of the medieval city. The centre itself seemed to have been built out of enormous mud-coloured Lego bricks. Vanessa said there was parking at the back but it was reserved for institute staff who wrote long outraged letters to your superiors if you took their spaces. Sensibly I found a spot on a residential street further up—outside a tanning salon.

  There was a statue on the lawn outside the institute of a woman, hand on breast, looking mournfully upwards as if contemplating the death of a loved one and the amount of paperwork it was bound to cause.

  Cast by Irmgard Biernath, a local artist, Vanessa told me. She knew because she’d once had to write an essay about her.

  The inside had been refurbished recently enough to have lost that horrible antiseptic smell that can build up in old hospitals, but not recently enough to have a pathology lab with a viewing gallery. Instead, the pathology lab was tiled like a Turkish bath, easy-to-mop white tiles on the floor and green-blue ones on the walls. Around the walls there were glass-fronted cupboards, fridges and laminated workbenches, while in the centre stood a pair of very shiny stainless steel tables. On one of the tables lay our victim and a quick look explained why the paramedics had declared him a biohazard.

  He had been a tall, well-built man, going to fat with the onset of middle age. But you wouldn’t be able to say what his skin colour was, because the whole of his body was covered in what looked like short, grey-coloured fur—like the pelt of an animal.

  A growth, I realised, like the one you get on bread when it went mouldy.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” said a familiar voice.

  Because of the declared biohazard we’d all been required to don plastic forensic ponchos over our clothes and to wear gloves, filter masks, eye protection and pull the drawstrings on the hoods nice and tight.

  The voice belonged to Professor Doktor Carmela Weissbachmann, who was the Director’s favourite pathologist. She’d trained in Milan but immigrated to Wiesbaden in the 1980s for reasons I’ve never had explained to me. I doubt Weissbachmann is a real name, but her files are restricted and I know better than to pry too far into KDA secrets. I also almost never see her except in scrubs and a mask, so she was easy to recognise even in full protective kit.

  Plus, judging by the way Förstner and Vanessa were hugging the walls, she was the only one of us happy to be there.

  “What is it?” asked Förstner.

  “A fungal infection of the division Ascomycota,” she said. “It covers ninety per cent of his body but is particularly concentrated at his feet, groin and armpits.”

  “According to our timeline,” said Förstner, “he can’t have been dead for more than three hours.”

  “Then the speed of growth is almost miraculous,” said Carmela, looking at me as she said it. “The growth on the skin is also anomalous. I’m not a mycologist but I believe you only get this formation when the fungus is forming reproductive organs.”

  She poked the subject’s chest to demonstrate the furriness.

  “This is a plant pathogen,” she said. “If it’s jumped to humans it would be a major concern but I do not think that is the case here.”

  Which was a relief to everyone in the room.

  Carmela looked at me again and I think she winked—it was hard to tell through her protective glasses.

  “We’ll get to the reasons for optimism in a moment,” she said. “We found traces of the fungus under his fingernails mixed in with skin cells. We haven’t fully characterised the cells as yet, but there are marked scratches on his legs, abdomen and chest that broadly match the victim’s own hands.”

  I heard Vanessa make a little involuntary “ick” sound behind me.

  “It grew on him while he was still alive?” asked Förstner.

  “That seems to be the reasonable conclusion,” said Carmela.

  For a certain value of reasonableness, anyway, I thought.

  “So what was the precise cause of death?”

  Förstner was far too experienced to be sidetracked from the fundamentals—starting with how.

  “He asphyxiated due to an obstruction of his lungs by fungal growth,” said Carmela.

  This time I made the “ick” sound. Fungus growing in his lungs had cut off his air supply. This, I realised, was going to be worse than the thing in Saxony that ate dogs. Still, there was always a slight chance this was a nice simple medical horror and nothing to do with me.

  I let Förstner ask the detailed questions. Carmela couldn’t say how long the infection had taken to kill him. There was a condition called invasive pulmonary aspergillosis that acted in a somewhat similar fashion but that took days or weeks and was mostly associated with people with weakened immune systems. According to the tests that Carmela had rushed through the labs, there was no sign of HIV or AIDS and the subject’s immune response seemed normal. Since the cause of death was unprecedented here, Carmela couldn’t help with the time of death.

  “The initial results from the environment samples are negative for this particular fungal pathogen,” said Carmela. “But I’m waiting for confirmation from Wiesbaden.”

  Who was the next of the detective’s big three questions, but there hadn’t been much to help identify the body. He’d been a well-fed white European, probably in his forties, blue-eyed and brown-haired. They planned to shave the fungal infection off his face so they could get a suitable image of him.

  They had found a tattoo on his upper right arm and already shaved that clean for a photograph. An assistant showed us the picture on a tablet—a stylised laughing face with a bunch of grapes woven into its curly hair.

  “Quite fresh, if I’m any judge,” said Carmela. “It was done some time in the last three months.”

  I heard Förstner give a little grunt of satisfaction. A face and a fresh ta
ttoo weren’t much, but they were the sort of leads you could throw resources at and get results. Most detective work, as my father loves to point out, is about the application of correct procedure in quantity.

  “Yes,” Uncle Stefan always added. “Just like digging a ditch—the trick is to make sure you’re the one standing to one side with the clipboard.”

  “I think that just leaves your assessment,” Carmela said to me. “I thought the lungs?”

  The assistant wheeled a metal trolley forward, with the organs presented in a stainless steel bowl like the dish of the day.

  The lungs had been incised and splayed open to expose their interiors. I’ve seen lungs before and a healthy specimen is supposed to be a nice pale pink like the inside of a prawn. These were slimy and lumpy and off-white with fungus. I reluctantly leaned forward until my breath mask was nearly touching the pale, fuzzy surface and closed my eyes.

  And there it was. Unmistakable amongst the real smells of disinfectant and decay, the wriggling, pulsating push of green things growing and this time a breath of warm air that was heavy with turned soil, and behind it a half-musical, half-discordant note like a violinist scraping their bow down the strings.

  I straightened up and stepped away.

  “Do you want to check the body?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you confirm the infraction?” Carmela asked for the record.

  I said I did.

  Förstner snorted quietly. As a senior colleague he probably had a better idea of what an infraction involved than Vanessa. When the assistant thankfully took the lungs away Vanessa asked whether the exact type of fungal infection had been identified.

  “Botrytis cinerea,” said Carmela, which meant nothing to me.

  “Noble rot?” said Vanessa. We all turned to look at her, and Carmela gave her an approving nod.

  “Very good,” she said.

  I’d had enough of potentially biohazardous corpses, so I waited until we were in the anteroom and stripping off our protective gear before asking Vanessa what “noble rot” was.

  “It’s used in wine production,” said Vanessa.

  “Locally?” asked Förstner.

  “I think so,” said Vanessa.

  “How is it used?” I asked.

  “They allow the grapes to become infected in the fields,” said Vanessa. “And then harvest them at just the right moment. Occasionally they infect them deliberately.”

  “People like fungus wine?”

  “It produces a particularly fine, sweet wine,” she said. “If you do it right.”

  “You seem to know a lot about wine,” I said, which got a chuckle from Förstner.

  “Vanessa is our wine specialist,” he said.

  “So you’re a wine lover,” I said.

  Vanessa blushed.

  “There’s a great deal of crime in our area associated with the industry,” she said. “Equipment thefts, vandalism, trespass. That sort of thing.”

  “Ordinary policing,” said Förstner, putting the emphasis on “ordinary”.

  Despite my admiration for Förstner’s ability to insult both of us at the same time, my brain still finally managed to flag a crucial piece of information from earlier in the conversation.

  “You said they occasionally deliberately infect the grapes with the noble rot,” I said. “Do you know how?”

  “No,” said Vanessa. “But I can find out. Are you thinking the victim was exposed accidentally?”

  “It’s a place to start,” said Förstner, before I could say anything. “Why don’t you two pursue that angle while we try to identify him.”

  Strictly speaking, since this was now a KDA investigation, the locals didn’t get to tell me what to do. Not even an Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar. But I’ve always found it expedient to let the local police believe they’re in control as much as possible—it saves time and effort. My time and effort, obviously—not theirs.

  So...magic, said Vanessa, after we’d done the obligatory and involuntary spin around the historic centre of Mainz and got back on the A60, heading for Trier.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So…magic,” said Vanessa again, obviously trying to compose a sentence that would make her sound like a police officer and not a ten-year-old fangirl. “So…magic is a real thing.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But it isn’t like Harry Potter, is it?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re driving a Volkswagen,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “You think Harry Potter would drive a Mercedes?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Vanessa. “If he drove anything it would be a Ford Anglia.” Which meant nothing to me—I thought the boy wizard rode a broomstick.

  “So what is real?” asked Vanessa with disturbing enthusiasm. “Vampires, werewolves, dwarves, fairies—elves? There have to be elves.”

  “Trolls, yes,” I said. “The rest? It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated?”

  “There are things, and people, you can apply some of those labels to,” I said. “But it’s not like the fairy tales.”

  “I hope not,” said Vanessa. “Those tales are horrible. Especially if you read the originals.”

  In my experience, unless someone wants to get into the details right away, there were always two more questions. Vanessa didn’t disappoint.

  “What about aliens and UFOs?” she said.

  “Not my department,” I said.

  “No?”

  “There’s a secret branch of the Luftwaffe that deals with all that.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If it was a secret I wouldn’t know about it—would I?”

  “Oh,” said Vanessa. “But you’ve never…?”

  “No,” I said. “Not aliens.”

  Then Vanessa asked the second question everyone asks.

  “Aren’t you worried I might tell someone or go to the media?”

  “In the first instance,” I said, “you’re a colleague. And in the second, even if you were so unprofessional as to go to Bild—who’d believe you?”

  Vanessa fell silent as she thought this through. Her personality, I felt, was enthusiastic and spontaneous and these thoughtful pauses were a learned response. Thinking before you act is one of the requirements of a good investigator, and she was definitely ambitious.

  This could be a problem later, I thought. If she starts getting too enthusiastic.

  I asked how she ended up specialising in wine-related crime in the hope it would get her off the subject of magic.

  “You know how it is,” she said. “Somebody had been stealing equipment from a number of small wineries in the area. They assigned me the case just after I joined the Criminal Police so I was determined to solve it quickly and make a good impression.”

  And had ended up making herself team wine expert, which meant any case involving the wine industry short of murder got assigned to her.

  “But never mind that. I want to know if you’ve met fairies and elves,” she said.

  That’s the trouble with talking to the police—we’re trained to be hard to distract.

  “I’ve seen evidence that they exist,” I said. “But it’s all on a need-to-know basis.”

  As neither of us had eaten since breakfast, I finally managed to get Vanessa off this subject by turning off the main road at Argenthal and having a very late lunch. While we were finishing our coffee she got some replies as to which vineyards were producing botrytised wines using the noble rot.

  “There are a couple, but one stands out,” she said. “Used to be famous for it, but the winery closed down in the nineties.”

  “But?” I asked, because I was getting the hang of KKin Vanessa Sommer.

  “Restarted wine production five years ago and—” she paused for dramatic effect—“owns the vineyard on the slope above the dump site.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “The current
registered owner is Jacqueline Stracker,” she said.

  October being a busy time in the vineyards, we found Frau Stracker in the family fields that lay further up the ridge that overlooked Ehrang. These at least had the advantage of being merely steep rather than dangerously precipitous. She was a tall woman in her mid-forties with a beaky nose, thin lips and long light brown hair dragged back into a practical ponytail. She was dressed in an army surplus waterproof jacket, jeans and gumboots, the better to direct her workers around the vines. The weather had cleared while we’d been away and the vineyards were olive and yellow in the last of the evening light.

  Jacqueline Stracker gave us the traditional look of weary outrage that you always get from someone who thinks they don’t have time for this shit—whatever this shit happens to be. But she knew Vanessa by reputation and so handed over work to her foreman, a young Turkish guy in a denim jacket, and answered our questions with exaggerated patience.

  Yes, she was aware of the police investigation on the edge of her land.

  “I wondered what all that fuss was about,” she said. “So early in the morning.”

  I asked when she’d become aware of the police activity and she gave me a suspicious look.

  “When we started working that field in the morning I could see something was going on. It seemed serious. Did someone die?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Vanessa.

  When investigating a death it’s always useful to get that into the conversation as soon as possible. Witnesses take you far more seriously, and potential suspects often give themselves away.

  “Were you working that field the previous evening?” I asked.

  “Not yesterday evening,” said Frau Stracker. “We were harvesting the vines in the western fields over there.”

  She pointed and explained that they were harvesting the fields where they could use a mechanical grape picker. The vineyard above the crime scene was too steep for that and would have to be picked by hand.

  I knew Vanessa was going to ask if any of the workers had been down in the field, but I stepped in before she could. That was exactly the sort of work that Förstner would be taking care of—or more precisely, whoever EKHK Förstner assigned to the job just as soon as he’d checked his shift roster. My role was to surf the normal police investigation and spearfish the unnatural as I went gliding past.