Mörderische Stille (2016)

An angler pulls a man’s body from the North Sea off the coast of Wilhelmshaven. Inspector Holzer and his assistant, Amal Catack, begin investigating. First, they must identify the man, whom nobody seems to know. He was beaten and stabbed before being sunk, wrapped in a sailcloth and weighted down. It turns out that the man, a Dutchman named Ruud Achtermaat, used to be a soldier and served in Kosovo. Since sailing instructor Kühnert was also stationed in Kosovo, where he pursued war criminals as a member of the KSK, he may have been involved. However, he has an alibi and now leads an orderly life with his deaf wife, Elena, and daughter, Sabin. When a family friend, Miro Pupic, a Kosovo Albanian, is shot dead by a sniper soon afterward, it could point to an act of revenge. Kühnert tells Holzer that Achtermaat may have contacted a former friend from the war, Gerd Heider, who runs a shady international security company nearby. But Kühnert says he has nothing to do with Heider anymore; they avoid each other. In the course of their investigation, Holzer and Catack discover that Achtermaat raped a woman in Kosovo and was suspected of running brothels for the stationed NATO soldiers with local pimps. But at the time there had not been enough evidence, or the women had not testified. It later emerges that, back in Kosovo, Kühnert filmed Heider and Achtermaat raping Elena. To avoid putting Elena and Sabin’s lives at risk, he sold the film to Achtermaat. Achtermaat presumably intended to use it to blackmail Heider. Holzer finds the SD card containing the film in an apartment Achtermaat had rented. With his wife’s help, Kühnert manages to lure both Heider and Holzer onto his boat. When a confrontation breaks out, Kühnert throws Heider overboard; Holzer also falls into the water when the boat makes a sudden, violent movement. Kühnert saves Holzer and leaves Heider to the sea. In the subsequent interrogations, Kühnert and his wife, Elena, each independently confess to killing Achtermaat. But since both are right-handed, while the murder was committed by a left-handed person, their confessions cannot be true. They are trying to protect someone. Holzer knows that Sabin is left-handed; she must have committed the murder. However, Holzer does not arrest her, but lets her and Elena set off on a voyage in their sailboat.