On Monday morning I had college again and so it must have been on Tuesday or Wednesday that I heard what had come of my wish. I was working in the bakery as usual. It was shortly after nine in the morning and there were no customers in the seating area yet, but a succession of people had dropped by to pick up filled rolls to take to school or to work with them.
Even before the police car appeared I heard the siren; it was a warm morning and the windows were open. The car came out of a side turning further up the street, blue lights flashing, and turned towards the south end of the town. A couple of middle-aged women who were standing chatting on the bridge turned to watch it go.
In that moment I knew. I took automatically the coins a customer was holding out to me; I was already moving round the counter, trying to get a better look, drawn as though by magnetism to the bakery window.
The blue lights were still visible at the far end of the street. As I watched, the police car veered to the right, vanishing behind the old brewery, and I knew that it was heading up the Orchheimer Strasse. I thought I could already detect a subtle change in the daily routine. The flow of pedestrians was moving south towards the Orchheimer Tor, the great gate set in the medieval walls which surrounded the town, instead of northwards towards the railway station. Something was happening.
I wove my way through the tables to the bakery door, which was propped open, and stepped out into the street.
Slow down, I told myself. Don’t make people look at you. Don’t give anyone a reason to suspect. My heart was thumping so wildly that I was afraid I might faint. I forced myself to walk slowly.
When I reached the Salzmarkt, where the Orchheimer Strasse began, I saw little groups of people moving up the street in the direction of Frau Kessel’s house. Some of them went hesitantly, as though ashamed to be seen nose-poking; others were openly hurrying to get a better view. I could see only one person who was coming the other way, striding out against the flow: Hanna. She saw me and speeded up. When she reached me, she swung around, taking my arm, and began to walk with me, back the way she had come. She leaned over and spoke into my ear in a rapid whisper.
‘You’re unbelievable, Steffi. You’ve done it. You’ve actually done it. I just can’t believe it.’
Her words confirmed what I had already guessed, that Frau Kessel was dead, that someone had discovered her body. All the same I felt a dizzying lurch in my stomach. The skin on my face and my bare arms felt hot. As I let Hanna lead me up the street I was expecting people to turn and stare at me, to point the finger. There she goes, she’s the one …
But nobody took the slightest notice. When we got to the top of the street they were standing there in a ragged semicircle by the police car, their faces turned to the front of a building we all knew well: Frau Kessel’s house. On one of the wooden timbers which ran horizontally across the front of the house were the words God protect this house from evil, picked out in white paint. The irony of this was wasted on the onlookers, whose gaze was riveted to the policeman who stood, grim-faced, by the open front door.
The mood was sombre. I can’t believe that there were many in the town who had any affection for Frau Kessel, but everyone knew her. No doubt if they examined their consciences quite a few of her fellow citizens had wished her dead on any number of occasions. But to wish it was one thing; to see the wish translated into reality was quite another. Whispered rumours rippled through the crowd like seismic shocks. I could pick out isolated words. Dead, said someone. Murder, said someone else.
I was beginning to feel very hot indeed, as though I was running a temperature. The atmosphere suddenly seemed suffocating. I was breathing in as hard as I could, sucking in the warm air, but I didn’t seem to be getting enough oxygen. The edges of my vision were dappled with little dark spots. I swayed on my feet.
‘Steffi?’ said Hanna’s voice close by. I felt her hauling on my arm.
There was a little pavement cafe close to Frau Kessel’s house. Hanna dragged me over to one of the metal chairs and made me sit down. I put my elbows on the tabletop and rested my head in my hands.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Hanna in a low voice. I felt her hand touch my shoulder. ‘Steffi?’
I shook my head, hiding behind the strands of fair hair which fell across my face. I didn’t want to look her in the eye, not yet. I knew what she was thinking, I could hear it in the urgent tone of her voice. She was afraid that I was going to give something away, that someone would notice me collapsing and get suspicious. I thought that if I managed to keep looking down at the pattern of scratches on the tabletop and avoided everyone’s eyes I had a better chance of holding myself together.
Eventually I began to feel a little calmer. I thought I might not faint after all, although I still had a slightly queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Hearing the sound of an engine, I looked up in time to see a car with fluorescent stripes down the sides and the word Notarzt emblazoned on the bonnet edging slowly through the Orchheimer Tor. The emergency doctor had arrived.
The crowd parted to let him through. I sat and watched him enter the house, without sharing any of the sense of anticipation that hung over the assembled watchers. I knew that there was nothing he could do for Frau Kessel apart from issue a death certificate. Still, I watched and waited like everyone else, feeling nauseous and guilty and strangely triumphant, and then guilty again, because I was pleased that someone had died.
Not died, I reminded myself. She had been killed. I fought down that sick feeling, a sensation which threatened to turn itself into actual vomiting. The unpleasant thought occurred to me that if I actually threw up here, in the street, on this bright sunny morning, it would only confirm the rumours about me. Frau Kessel didn’t need to be here in person, catching people’s sleeves and muttering in their ears; morning sickness, people would say to each other with significant looks.
A ripple ran through the crowd as the emergency doctor reappeared at the front door. He was a stolid-looking man, robust and square-shouldered, with a heavy-featured face that revealed little emotion. I guessed that whatever he had seen in the house, he had seen the like a thousand times before. He spoke quietly to the policeman, and his gaze flickered over the little groups of onlookers assembled outside the house, but he was giving nothing away. He went back to his car and got inside. Then, with the doors safely closed, he began to speak to someone on a mobile phone. An almost audible sigh of disappointment ran through the crowd.
I did not trust myself to stand up yet, so I stayed where I was and did my best to look as though I was not fighting to keep my breakfast down. The policeman standing outside Frau Kessel’s house was Herr Wachtmeister Schumacher, I saw. His partner, Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, was still recuperating after the heart attack he had had at Klara Klein’s house. Herr Tondorf had a certain authority about him, despite his age, and if there was something he thought you didn’t need to know he would have you turned around and walking off down the street with an amiable goodbye on your lips before you even realized you had been dismissed. Schumacher, on the other hand, was well known as a spineless creature. Frau Kessel, when she was alive, could have extracted information from him as easily as scooping a Weinberg snail out of its shell with a sharp-pronged fork. People were starting to converge on him and already his hands were up in a helpless don’t ask me gesture. I felt almost sorry for him, in spite of my own preoccupations.
‘Scheisse,’ said Hanna close by my ear, and I looked around.
Julius Rensinghof was coming across the street towards me. The sunshine turned his hair into a blaze. Despite the early summer warmth he was wearing a long black coat which only accentuated his lanky build. His face was serious.
‘What do we need him for?’ muttered Hanna. She had been leaning over me, but now she straightened up and turned away, as though she did not want to face him.
I sighed, wishing that I could have turned away myself, but not daring to. Innocence has no reason to hide its face. I did my best to look him in the eyes.
‘Steffi, are you OK?’ was the first thing he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘Why?’
‘You don’t look so good.’
‘I’m … fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just … ’
‘This?’ He cocked his head towards the crowd standing outside Frau Kessel’s house.
‘No,’ I said, too quickly and a little too loudly. ‘I had to get up really early, that’s all. Dad needed me to help in the bakery. I only had about three hours’ sleep – I probably look like death.’
Shut up, I warned myself. You’re babbling. I lapsed into silence, which was just as bad. It stretched out between us, a gulf ready to be filled by any number of interpretations.
Julius leaned down towards me, ignoring Hanna. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
I knew there was no way I could tell him what I had done, what had been going on. And yet I very nearly did. It was the way he asked me. He didn’t speak to me as though I were still ten years old, as my parents so often seemed to do. He didn’t speak to me as though I were a hopeless innocent either, as Max always did. And somehow I had the feeling that if I told him what the matter really was, if I told him about the witch’s house and the curses and the fact that it was my fault that Little Klara had died with her face in a plate of cherry streusel, he wouldn’t look at me the way Hanna did, as though the whole thing was some kind of gripping soap opera. Julius sounded as though he genuinely wanted to be sure that I was all right.
But there was something about Julius that made me feel even sicker about Frau Kessel’s death than I already did. It wasn’t just that he sounded as though he genuinely cared. It was the fact that he always seemed to see the best in me, to see something which others missed altogether. He remembered me singing at school and he thought there was a real possibility that I might stand up in front of strangers and sing to them too. He believed in me more than I believed in myself. I thought that when Julius looked at me he saw my better self, saw all that I could be.
But I knew that better self didn’t exist, didn’t I? I wasn’t the person he thought I was, the shy girl trying to work up the courage to do what she wanted to do. I was a person who lurked about in the dank ruins of a place that no one in their right mind would visit, putting curses on people. I was either mad or dangerous, and I wasn’t even sure which myself.
I ignored the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I made myself look at Julius, made myself look straight into his brown eyes and hold his gaze.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘There’s nothing wrong at all.’