Ostfriesensühne (2022)

Chief Inspector Ann Kathrin Klaasen is currently in a psychologically fragile state. The murder of her father, which took place 15 years ago, is weighing so heavily on her that her colleague Frank Weller urges her to seek professional help. When she arrives at the doctor’s office, Klaasen initially thinks she is hallucinating: in the waiting room, an elderly woman has a photograph of her father in her handbag, together with a woman Klaasen does not recognize. Klaasen speaks to the woman, Gertrud Klocke. She tells her that the man in the photograph was the fiancé of her late daughter. A few days later, when Klaasen goes to visit the woman at her retirement home, she is found lifeless on her balcony. The inspector searches her room for possible clues and finds a hidden mobile phone. When she presses redial, someone answers and asks, “Mom?” To Klaasen, that can mean only one thing: Isolde Klocke is alive. According to Klaasen’s research, Isolde had been a police sergeant in Emden and had worked undercover alongside Klaasen’s father. When Klaasen searched for the woman in the police computer, the middlemen were alerted and silenced Gertrud Klocke. Klaasen’s boss refuses to hear any such conspiracy theories and sends her on vacation. That does not stop her from investigating anyway. She tracks down the hotel where her father and Isolde Klocke regularly stayed and learns that Isolde supposedly drowned one day, but her body was never found. According to information from Klaasen’s boss, her father had been investigating a Gelsenkirchen human trafficker undercover. Klaasen contacts one of his associates, Beukelzoon, who is supposedly living a new life under a witness-protection program, but nevertheless agrees to meet her. He tells her about the human traffickers’ methods, which the undercover officers had to go along with in order not to jeopardize their cover. However, Klaasen now has to hear that her father supposedly grew increasingly fond of his role and eventually led a criminal double life of his own. Unfortunately, this account matches what a criminal has implied: Klaasen’s father had planned the bank robbery in which he was killed, and was then murdered by his gang members because he wanted to keep everything for himself. Klaasen makes contact online with Mila, a victim of the human-trafficking ring who supposedly “owes” it to her father that she ended up where she is now: in prostitution. Having now heard from a third source that her father was not the upright policeman she remembers, Klaasen is devastated. Then Isolde Klocke gets in touch with Klaasen too, wanting to talk to her. Just as she tells Klaasen that the bank robbery was only a cover, Klocke is shot dead by a professional killer. It is now clear that someone within the police force still does not want the truth to come out: files have disappeared, and now a second person has been murdered. Klocke had a key to a bank safe-deposit box on her, which Klaasen takes, but she does not know what to do with it. Shaken by Isolde Klocke’s cold-blooded murder, Klaasen’s colleagues reopen the Karl-Heinz Heidrich case. The celebrity lawyer Heiko Käfer is a recurring key figure, and a man named Friedhelm Stenger also seems to be involved. Klaasen tracks Stenger down in Gelsenkirchen and talks to him. Thirty minutes after her visit, Stenger is dead. Only then does Klaasen realize that she has been the tool of a killer, leading him to the Klockes and now to Stenger as well. She no longer wants to chase him; she wants to wait for him. She heads to Heiko Käfer, who has set up a love nest at his weekend home for his dubious sexual practices. The plan works, but the killer shoots both Käfer and his sexual partner. Beukelzoon confronts Klaasen, intending to make her take the blame for his murders. When she realizes he is her father’s killer, she summons all her strength and shoots him in the leg before he can react. Klaasen is relieved that her father had not gone over to the other side after all. Ultimately, he had to die because of the evidence he had collected against the human traffickers. He had kept it in a safe-deposit box. His adversaries tried to get hold of those documents through the bank robbery, but failed.