Blind ermittelt - Tod im Palais (2024)

Alex Haller and Niko Falk are at a concert in Vienna’s Votive Church, where Alex runs into an old acquaintance, Regens Wimmer, the head of the Vienna seminary. At the same time, a body is found that may be the missing seminarian Wimmer told Alex about. Since Wimmer has asked Alex directly for help, Chief Inspector Laura Janda brings him into the investigation. It quickly becomes clear that the seminarian who went missing is the man who fell from the roof—the body is Paul Seidel. A closer search of Paul’s room turns up two bags of party clothes. A sticker on one of the shoes points to Gomorra, a techno club run by the Brohnstein family, which includes Fanny Brohnstein, who performed as a cellist at the concert in the Votive Church two weeks earlier. The club shares the Brohnstein Palace with an art gallery. Alex and Niko go to take a closer look and meet the artist Zoë, who is supported by the family through a sponsorship program and is able to pursue her creativity in a studio in the palace. The two investigators, however, are chiefly interested in speaking with Fanny’s brothers, Johannes and Felix. Footage from the club’s surveillance cameras shows Alex and Niko that on a certain night Paul Seidel left the club carrying a backpack, even though he was not seen with one when he entered. The brothers claim Fanny is not at home, but Niko returns without warning and speaks with her. Beforehand, however, he takes a photograph showing all four siblings with their governess, Therese Gregoritsch. The eldest brother, Max, went missing after a mountaineering accident twenty years ago. At the viewing, where Paul’s mother is supposed to identify her son, it becomes clear that the dead man is not Paul Seidel but Tobias Kramer. The two had switched identities because Paul did not want to disappoint his mother, since he did not want to enter the seminary, and because an arrest warrant had been issued for Tobias Kramer. In another conversation with Wimmer and the housekeeper, Katharina Tiller, it emerges that donation money has been stolen. Alex and Niko then take another look at Paul’s—or, as they now know, Tobias’s—room, and Alex finds a sketch that appears to show a floor plan. They suspect it is of the basement of the Brohnstein Palace, but a further visit there fails to confirm their theory. Not long afterward, it becomes clear that Tiller had “borrowed” the donations to deal with an urgent problem. Kramer discovered this and blackmailed her. At the same time, Niko encounters Fanny outside the Votive Church just after she has been to confession. In a highly emotional conversation, Fanny confesses to the murder, then runs distraught in front of a car and is seriously injured. She is treated in intensive care, where Niko sneaks in to see her. During his visit, he notices numerous scars on the unconscious Fanny. The doctor treating her, assuming Niko is her brother, asks him what caused her many childhood fractures. Alex asks Zoë for help, but realizes that she is lying to him during their renewed search of the basement, and that the room indicated by the floor plan must be there. Meanwhile, Niko visits the Brohnstein children’s former governess, Therese Gregoritsch. She makes it clear to him that Max bullied and tormented his siblings, especially Fanny. The motive for Tobias Kramer’s murder now slowly comes into focus. He had blackmailed not only Katharina Tiller but also the Brohnsteins, having found the bones of the murdered Max after planting a microphone in the Votive Church’s confessional and listening in on Fanny’s confession. During the police questioning of Johannes and Felix, it emerges that Fanny finally wants to confess to murdering her brother Max, but Johannes tries to prevent her from doing so. After a physical altercation in which Kramer demands even more money, he falls from the roof. Johannes leaves him there. Zoë then suffocates him. Because she is very close to Fanny, Zoë wants to protect her, as Fanny is dependent on sedatives, after Fanny told her about the blackmail. On the night of the murder, Zoë follows Johannes onto the roof and watches everything. Finding Kramer badly injured, she asks him where the bones are. She then suffocates him and hides the bones inside one of her artworks. After Alex nearly jeopardized his friendship with Niko in the previous episode, the two grow close again in this one. Over the course of the story, Alex is distraught that he is slowly losing his memory of what Kara looked like—his great love, who was killed by a car bomb eight years earlier. A little later, he tries to draw Kara, and then, somewhat melancholically, decides to make a portrait of Niko with pen and paper as well.