Josef Gunther – “The Night Deposit”

 Josef Gunther – “The Night Deposit”

Josef Gunther preferred the early hours. In the quiet of the Berlin district office he kept a small electric kettle and a tin of the same strong coffee he had drunk as a young uniformed officer. The call came at 4:17 a.m.: a branch of the Volksbank in Wedding had been entered through the service alley. The night safe had been forced; the amount taken was modest—enough to hurt the branch manager’s figures, not enough to make the national papers.

Gunther arrived while the forensic team was still photographing the lock. The damage was professional but not elaborate: a hydraulic spreader and a knowledge of the exact model. No alarms triggered, no cameras covering the alley. He walked the block twice. On the second circuit he noticed the light still burning in a first-floor flat above a closed bakery. The tenant, an elderly man named Hoffmann, opened the door in a dressing gown and said he had heard the metal on metal around half-past two but had thought it was the municipal recycling lorry that sometimes came early.

Hoffmann also mentioned, almost in passing, that his grandson had been staying with him for a week. The boy—twenty-two, recently dismissed from a locksmith’s apprenticeship—had left before dawn, saying he had an early shift. Gunther found the grandson at the S-Bahn station with a rucksack that contained the spreader, a change of clothes, and an envelope addressed to the branch manager. Inside the envelope was the exact sum taken, plus a short note: the manager had refused to reopen the grandson’s mother’s savings account after an administrative error had frozen it for three months; the money had been needed for her medication.

Gunther took the boy in. The charge would be burglary; the note and the returned cash would be entered as mitigation. He sat with Hoffmann for another twenty minutes while the old man made more coffee, then walked back to the station under the grey light that was already lifting over the rooftops. The figures would balance by the end of the week. The rest, as usual, would be left to the court.