The Berlin Spies by Alex Gerlis

Author:Alex Gerlis [Gerlis, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Studio 28
Published: 2018-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Düsseldorf, West Germany

August 1976

She was questioned by two men, and at first she’d found it hard to distinguish between them, especially in the over-lit windowless room and with so little sleep and her nerves stretched to breaking point. Both looked to be in their forties, though possibly younger. Both were tall and skinny and wore glasses, and both had fair hair cut in a severe military fashion. They didn’t play the ‘bad cop, good cop’ game either, which she’d been told to expect.

But after a while she found she could tell the difference. The one who called himself Franz seemed to have a cold and spoke so quietly that at times she had to lean across the table to catch what he was saying. The other one, Konrad, had a hint of a Bavarian accent and seemed bored, as if he had more important people to interrogate. But whenever she tossed back her head and ran her fingers through her long blonde hair and smiled, looking directly at them, Konrad was the one who responded, looking her up and down, sometimes even smiling in return – though not in a pleasant way.

They were in the basement of a police station in Düsseldorf where she’d been taken after being arrested three days previously. Franz and Konrad had turned up the day after her arrest and, as far as she could gather, they weren’t police. Her guess was that they were the security service, the BfV, which she didn’t need telling was ominous.

‘Sabine, you were observed entering an apartment in Ratinger Strasse in the Altstadt district on no less than eighteen occasions over the past two months: that is almost once every three days. From that apartment last Thursday, two men and one woman were observed leaving at six thirty in the morning and departing on motorbikes. Two hours later, the industrialist Heinrich Albrecht was shot dead as he left his car after arriving at his office in Wuppertal. The gunmen escaped on motorbikes. The registration plate on at least one of those bikes corresponds to the plate on one of the bikes that had sped away from Ratinger Strasse two hours earlier.’

Silence: silence for quite a long while. Franz and Konrad seemed to like silence.

‘I have told you already: I was nowhere near Altstadt last Thursday, nor Wuppertal for that matter. You know I have an alibi. I had an appointment at the University Hospital on Moorenstrasse at eight forty-five that morning, minutes after Albrecht was shot. You can’t get from Wuppertal to Düsseldorf in fifteen minutes.’

‘You may well smirk, but I can tell you that this is no joke for you. Tell me, Sabine, what do you think of the shooting of Heinrich Albrecht?’

‘I don’t have an opinion.’

‘Really?’ It was Franz speaking, and she had to lean close to hear him. ‘A prominent and respectable industrialist, a family man, a stalwart of his local church…’

‘And a Nazi.’

‘He served as a soldier in the war. There was conscription Sabine.’

‘He helped

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.