If my flight down the hill had been ignominious, it was a thousand times worse riding back to Bad Münstereifel on the back of Julius’s boneshaker. I had to sit sideways on the rack at the back, hanging on to Julius to stop myself falling off whenever the bike went over a bump. At the Werther Tor I had to dismount, as two of us riding over the cobblestones would have been too much for the aged machine. I walked the last few hundred metres, muttered my thanks to Julius and vanished into the bakery before he could say anything.
The light on the answering machine was blinking. I pressed the button and listened to my mother’s exasperated voice asking where I was. At least she sounded irritated and not upset, I thought; that boded well for my father. I slipped my mobile out of my pocket and realized that it was turned off. No wonder she sounded annoyed. I went slowly upstairs, hanging on to the banister.
The very first thing I did when I got inside the flat was call my mother, willing the news to be good. She told me that my father was a little better, that the doctors were cautiously optimistic that he would pull through after all. ‘No thanks to you,’ she added tartly. ‘Disappearing like that.’
I remembered my wish, written out carefully under the others’ watchful eyes, and thought that perhaps she was wrong, but I did not react. Instead I said that I would take the bus to the hospital as soon as I could and rang off.
Then I went into my room and looked for somewhere to hide the torn envelope with its precious contents. In the end I stuffed it under my pillow. After that I went into the kitchen and poured myself a tall glass of mineral water. My flight down the hill and the uncomfortable ride home had left me hot and thirsty.
I raised the glass to my lips and, as I savoured the coolness of the water, my mind slid back to the ruin in the woods, to the urgent, distorted faces of my friends, to the moment I had burst out of the undergrowth on to the path and almost run right into the figure standing there. Julius. I stopped drinking, almost choking on the water. Drops ran down my chin. My stomach seemed to do a lazy roll, as though I were in an aircraft that had banked suddenly.
Why hadn’t I seen it before? In that moment, when I had recognized Julius, all I had had on my mind was the driving need to push past him, to escape. I hadn’t thought about what I was seeing. A tall, dark figure with a shock of flaming red hair.
I recalled the day Hanna and I had visited the witch’s house – the panic we had felt at the glimpse of someone moving among the distant trees, someone with that unmistakable bright coppery hair like the flame at the end of a torch. Panic, that was the word. We had looked, we had assumed, we hadn’t waited for a chance to see the figure more closely. We had run for it, as though the Devil himself had been at our heels. Now I put a new interpretation on what we had glimpsed. We had seen Julius that day, not Rote Gertrud. Which meant …
It really wasn’t coincidence I ran into him. He goes up there a lot.
It made sense, in a horrible kind of way. What else was there to see on that side of the valley? Walkers kept to the main track. The diehard local-history freaks might seek out the Teufelsloch, the cave they called the Devil’s Hole, but that was on the other side of the river. I knew from talk in the town that there was even a gruesome kind of tourism associated with the cave, thrill-seekers wanting to see the place where the last victim of the town’s one and only serial killer had been found. But there was no reason for anyone to go into the woods on the other side of the valley, not unless they were looking for Gertrud’s house. Ergo, Julius had been on a similar mission to our own, and it was simply down to luck that we had not met each other at the ruins themselves.
There’s only one reason anyone goes there, I thought, and then came a second thought hard on the heels of the first: Unless … he hasn’t been making his own wishes at all, he’s been reading mine.
I put the glass down on the draining board, not trusting myself to hold it for another moment. In the two seconds it took me to cross the kitchen my legs felt as though I were walking on spindly stilts and my injured ankle threatened to buckle. I dropped into a chair and put my head in my hands, as though trying to ward off a fainting fit.
No, I thought. Not possible. But already my imagination was streaking ahead like a greyhound pursuing a hare. I saw Julius walking through the forest – perhaps the first time he really had just been out for a walk – and coming on the ruined house. I saw him stepping inside, over the jumble of broken stones and rusting beer cans and mossy branches. Surveying the scarred walls. His gaze falling upon something half concealed in the drift of leaves on the floor. The carved box. I saw him pick it up, his face creased with curiosity, and open the lid.
OK, I told myself. It’s possible that he has read every one of your wishes. I clenched my fingers in my hair, grimacing at the thought. It’s even possible that he was the one who took your wishes out of the box … assuming he recognized your handwriting. But – and this was the nub of it – he can’t have made them all come true. It’s impossible.
I thought about Klara Klein, lying dead in her locked house. Heart attack, everyone said. There was no sign of anyone breaking and entering, at least not until Herr Wachtmeister Schumacher broke down the door.
Maybe someone scared her to death. She was old, she was titanically fat, she was all alone in the house. What would it take? A few raps on the window – a threatening phone call?
Stop it, I told myself. This is ridiculous.
Julius’s face came into my mind, the sharp cheekbones, the dappling of freckles, the warm brown eyes with an eternal question in them. I tried to imagine him terrorizing someone to death, or pushing an old woman downstairs, and I simply couldn’t do it. All the same, I mistrusted myself. Killers didn’t get away with things by being obvious maniacs; they were plausible, likeable even. That was how they got away with it.
There’s no way Julius has ten thousand euros to give away. There was no denying that; if he had, he wouldn’t still have been going about on that decrepit old bicycle.
No matter how much I thought about things, I could make no sense of them. I could dream up some tortuous route by which someone – Julius – might have made one or other of my hastily scrawled desires come true, but then the sheer impossibility of anyone granting all of them would hit me. I recalled the moment when Kai von Jülich had strolled into the bakery, with all the easy arrogance of wealth and good looks, and leaned towards me over the counter, relishing my name in his mouth like some gorgeous delicacy. There was no way anyone else could have made that happen.
I might have sat there all afternoon, going over every eventuality with the feverish persistence of a cryptographer trying to crack a particularly labyrinthine code, had the shrill ringing of the telephone not interrupted me. It was my mother, contrarily asking me to bring a change of clothes for her and whether I had left yet.
Packing my mother’s things for her did me good. The moving about brought me back to myself, as stamping brings life back to feet numb with cold. I looked at my watch and realized that the bus would be leaving from the station in fifteen minutes. As I locked the front door behind me and went downstairs with the bag, my head was full of my father and how I would find him. When I let myself out into the street I was calculating whether there was time to stop off at the florist’s.
Julius and the many masks he might be wearing had not gone from my mind; rather, it was as though I could hear a muffled conversation in the room next door: Could he possibly … How could he have …
I looked at my watch and began to walk, the ache in my ankle a distant nagging.