‘We have to go back there,’ said Max.
‘No,’ said Izabela and I simultaneously.
Hanna said nothing, but I saw her looking at Max as though she were appraising him.
We were sitting on a wooden bench opposite the ice-cream parlour – at least, we three girls were sitting on the bench; Timo and Jochen were sitting on the low stone wall which ran along the side of the River Erft, and Max was on his feet, pacing restlessly up and down as usual. He looked like a general addressing his troops – or, I thought, taking in his tigerish grin, like an evangelist just getting into his stride.
I wondered whether Max had been so sanguine when he first heard the news of Klara Klein’s death. If he had been shocked, he had recovered by now. Looking at the nervous energy he was expending, the way he was almost buzzing with it, I understood something quite clearly: this was the best thing that had happened to Max in ages. He was not going to let it go.
In the warm sunshine of a spring evening, with early tourists wandering past, it was hard to believe that our night-time visit to Rote Gertrud’s house had been anything but a piece of tomfoolery, and yet a tiny sliver of doubt remained in all our minds, a doubt which created a kind of dark excitement in the pit of the stomach. Max was thriving on that excitement, like an engine running on high-octane fuel.
I knew that Max, like me, was never going to get out of Bad Münstereifel. He had an indifferent Hauptschule qualification and a future all mapped out for him in his father’s car dealership on the edge of town. And yet Max had this unquenchable conviction that there must be something more, that there must be excitement and drama and danger, and that he should be in the middle of it, the hero of the story.
Now he had stopped in front of the bench and was hanging over us like a vulture on a branch. ‘Look,’ he was saying, ‘it’s a coincidence, right? It’s probably a coincidence. So no harm done. Little Klara was probably going to bite the dust anyway. But –’ his eyes widened and he spread his hands out, encompassing us all – ‘suppose it wasn’t a coincidence?’
‘Max –’ began Izabela, but there was no stopping him.
‘Suppose Rote Gertrud did have something to do with it? We’d be mad not to try it again.’
‘We’d be mad to mess with it,’ grumbled Timo at my right shoulder.
‘Scared?’ said Max in a mocking voice, looking at Timo with raised eyebrows.
‘Of course not.’ Now Timo sounded nettled. ‘It’s just a rubbish idea.’
‘You are scared,’ said Max, and his grin widened.
I listened to the pair of them arguing with each other, but my mind was elsewhere, back in that evening when I had trudged down from Gertrud’s house in the dark, slightly drunk and sick to the stomach, promising myself that I would never go up there again. I was thinking about the box we had left lying in full view on the decrepit floor of the house – the box with a note in it, a note in my handwriting. Again, common sense told me that nobody could trace the note back to me, but then I began to imagine ways in which they might be able to. Suppose someone had seen Max’s car in the Eschweiler Tal? Suppose that same person was one of the other visitors who had undoubtedly been inside Gertrud’s house, leaving a trail of beer cans and food wrappers behind them? I was still not sure whether I could get into trouble of any sort, even if someone positively identified my handwriting. I imagined that the note could be seen as some kind of death threat, not that we had posted it in Klara Klein’s letter box or anything. All the same, I thought I would feel a little happier if I could retrieve the note and tear it into little pieces. Maybe burn it, to be sure.
‘I think we should go,’ I said suddenly, and they all turned to stare at me.
‘You see?’ said Max triumphantly. ‘Even Steffi’s got more guts than you have.’
Jochen slid off the wall. ‘OK, let’s go.’
‘Now?’ asked Hanna.
‘Why not now?’ said Max. ‘Or do you want to wait until it gets dark?’
Nobody answered that. Max pulled the car keys out of his jeans pocket and hefted them in his hand so that they jingled together. ‘Come on, then.’