I thought I would never sleep again after hearing that laugh: high, wild, exulting, less an expression of mirth than the cry of some predatory thing. I huddled in my bed with the light on and my mobile phone clutched in one hand, though I did not know whom I would ring, even if the thing that shrieked out its horrid glee were to pound on the door of the flat, seeking entrance. I listened, wide-eyed, and I whispered half-forgotten prayers, but I never heard the voice a second time, though the expectation of hearing it was almost more than I could bear. At length the sustained tension petrified me as effectively as a Gorgon’s glare and I fell asleep in spite of myself.
When I awoke it was seven o’clock and someone was sounding a horn in the street outside the bakery with irritable insistence. I was debating whether to put my head underneath the pillow and try to get back to sleep when I heard the doorbell.
‘Scheisse,’ I said crossly to thin air, and threw off the duvet.
I had no intention of going down and opening the street door in my nightclothes. Instead I went into the living room, opened the window and peered out.
I thought I would find some irate deliveryman standing on the doorstep below, but the first thing I saw was a car parked in the street outside the bakery. It was a battered-looking white Audi, a vehicle I recognized as belonging to Achim Zimmer. My heart sank. He must have jumped the gun and turned up for work without being asked. I wondered why he had left his car there, though. In the next few hours the street would be busy with delivery vans. In fact, there was one behind the car already and, as I gazed down at it, the horn sounded again.
Someone stepped back from the bakery doorway and looked up at me. I saw that it was Herr Hack from one of the shops further down the street.
‘Hey,’ he shouted up. ‘You need to get that car moved.’
‘It’s not mine,’ I tried to say, but he was already pressing the buzzer again.
I closed the window and went to the bedroom, where I hastily dressed. I was not sure what was going on downstairs, but clearly there was going to be no peace until Achim had moved his car. I didn’t bother brushing my hair or cleaning my teeth. I would gladly have gone downstairs looking like a bag lady if it kept Achim at arm’s length.
When I got to the street door, Herr Hack’s face was beginning to assume an alarming hue. He left off pressing the buzzer when he saw me coming and started to tap on the glass door with a fleshy forefinger, as though he would have liked to poke me in the eye with it. The first thing he said when I opened the door was, ‘I should call the police. It’s an obstruction.’
‘It’s not my car,’ I said.
‘It’s parked outside your bakery.’
‘It’s Herr Zimmer’s,’ I said. ‘My father’s assistant.’ Indignation made me bold. I looked him in the eyes. ‘I didn’t park it there.’
‘Move it,’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ I pointed out. ‘I don’t have the keys.’
‘Where is Herr Zimmer?’ demanded Herr Hack. He peered over my shoulder, as though Achim might somehow have concealed his substantial bulk behind me.
I shrugged. ‘He isn’t supposed to be here today.’
‘The car must be moved,’ said Herr Hack with relentless persistence. ‘I need that delivery.’
As if on cue, the horn sounded again behind us.
‘I can’t carry all those boxes up the street myself,’ Herr Hack told me truculently.
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ I said under my breath.
‘What did you say?’
But I had already turned to go into the bakery. Achim would certainly be in the kitchen, so let him come out and deal with this in person. To my annoyance I heard Herr Hack follow me inside, huffing and puffing with indignation as though he had been required to climb the foothills of the Himalayas with a twenty-kilo pack. I pretended not to notice and went to the door which led to the kitchen, hand outstretched to pull it open.
It was locked. That pulled me up sharply. I pressed down the handle and yanked at it again, but it was absolutely fast. Funny. I supposed that Achim had used the back door as usual, but even so he normally unlocked the door to the cafe area. Perhaps he hadn’t come in to work; perhaps he had just come in to pick something up.
Why is his car abandoned outside, then?
There was no answer to that. I turned on my heel, brushed past Herr Hack and went back to the street door to collect my bunch of keys, which was still hanging in the inside lock. I found the kitchen door key, fumbled it into the lock and pulled the door open.
The kitchen was cool and empty. The fluorescent lights were off and the light which came through the frosted windows was flat and grey. The habitual aroma of baking had faded to a stale memory. I thought of crumbs and dust settling.
I cleared my throat. ‘Achim?’ I said, moving further into the kitchen. There was no reply. Now I had a view of the back door, I could see that it was closed. There were no keys in it.
Where is he?
I was aware of Herr Hack’s stout figure in the kitchen doorway. His outrage was not sufficient to carry him over the threshold of that holy of holies, but all the same he was almost visibly throbbing with the desire to give Achim a piece of his mind. I was not sorry that he was here. Herr Hack was profoundly irritating, with his red face and his jabbing forefinger, but for some reason I was glad not to be alone. I had an uneasy feeling, a swarming sensation in my gut which recalled the frantic and miniature activity of an overturned ant heap.
Something’s wrong.
I rounded the end of one of the metal units and something caught my eye, a flash of colour against the dull grey of stainless steel. There was a tall clear bottle with a bright crimson label standing on the metal surface. Vodka. What’s that doing here? I stretched out my hand to pick it up, but then I thought better of it. Without thinking, I rubbed my hand on the leg of my jeans, as though I had sullied it simply by reaching for the bottle.
There was someone in here last night, I thought, but the realization gave me no relief. If someone had broken in for the hell of it, intent on a little drunken mayhem, they wouldn’t have left the place in this pristine condition; things would be broken or disarrayed. I shivered, remembering the wild laughter I had heard in the darkness of the small hours. I could make no sense of it, but I was beginning to be afraid.
I continued my cautious exploration of the kitchen, all the time acutely conscious of that incongruous bottle standing there like a sentinel. What did it mean? I had my eyes on the far end of the kitchen, scanning it for anything which might give me a clue. I wasn’t looking down and so I almost stumbled over something that was lying in the middle of the tiled floor. I looked down and then I stared.
It was a shirt. I was pretty sure it was a man’s shirt and, as I looked at it lying there, with the arms pulled inside out as though someone had tugged it off in a hurry, I recognized it as one I had seen Achim wearing. It wasn’t a work shirt, it was a loathsome patterned thing that even a clothing bank would have spat out.
So Achim has been here, I told myself. So what? Maybe he came in, changed into his baker’s whites and then … disappeared? It didn’t make sense.
‘Hurry up,’ grunted Herr Hack from the doorway, as though finding Achim and getting him to move the car were simply a matter of increased effort on my part.
Now I was moving about the kitchens more quickly, my glance darting from the bare worktops to the tiled floor and back again. There was something else on the floor, half hidden behind the leg of one of the units. A man’s shoe, lying on its side. I stopped, gazed down at it and felt a cold prickle of apprehension.
Achim might have changed his shirt here and forgotten the old one, but he wouldn’t leave one shoe behind.
Suddenly I understood, quite clearly, that Achim was dead. The curse had fallen upon him, just as I had wished. Except that now I would dearly have loved to have taken it back. Klara Klein dropping dead of a weak heart in her villa up in Mahlberg or Kai von Jülich vanishing into thin air, that was one thing. Hunting for a corpse in the very building where I lived and worked was quite another.
Dread welled up inside me, black and suffocating. Every pace which took me further through the kitchen might reveal something that I desperately didn’t want to see. I remembered tales I had heard from the other girls who worked in the bakery, and from students at the college: the man who had committed suicide when drunk by plunging himself head first into one of the industrial mixers, the body that had been found charred to the bone in an oven. I cringed at the thought of having to see anything like that, of being the one who found it, and yet I kept on moving. How could I explain to Herr Hack that I thought Achim was lying here dead somewhere, because I had wished it? Sick with apprehension, I pushed myself on. There was nothing to do but keep looking.
I thought that the shelves of the big oven were too low for a person of Achim’s bulk to be squeezed inside, and besides, when I laid a trembling hand on the door, it was absolutely cold. Still, it was only the consciousness of Herr Hack’s accusatory gaze fixed on my back that made me open it. I looked at the empty shelves and bit my knuckle to stop myself from crying out.
‘What are you looking in there for?’ called out Herr Hack irritably. ‘How could he be in there?’
I said nothing. I closed the door again.
My own footsteps sounded unnaturally loud as I continued my tour of the kitchen. I looked at the great bowl of the dough mixer and knew that I must peer inside. I clasped my hands tight across my stomach as I went to it, as though I could hold back the nauseating fear which roiled in my gut. I was thinking about what would happen if you really did put someone inside it, and whether it would be possible to make the kitchen as clean and sterile again afterwards as it now was. Wouldn’t the walls and the ceiling be painted red, or drying brown, with the blood that sprayed out of it? You could spend not hours but days trying to clean it all up, to find every tiny drop and spurt that had splattered everything around it. It would probably get into all the tiny places in the machinery, glue up the mechanism. A tiny strangled noise came from my throat. I went right up to the mixer and forced myself to look inside.
Nothing. The interior was clean and dry, as though it had never been used. There was not so much as a sprinkling of flour in it. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it all out in a sigh.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Herr Hack impatiently. ‘Is he here or isn’t he?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said in a tight voice.
I swung around to face him, a stout, florid, double-chinned bully, inflated to bursting point with his own righteous indignation. Framed in the doorway at the other end of the kitchen, he might have been a million miles away. He still thought this was about a parked car obstructing the street. I knew it was about murder.
Outside the bakery, the delivery truck driver began to sound the horn again, repeated blasts that would soon have everyone on the street out of doors and looking for the source of the noise. I imagined them all cramming themselves into the kitchen doorway alongside Herr Hack and realized that I had to do something. I began to walk back towards him, trying to form the right words in my head before I tackled him. Achim clearly wasn’t here, I would say, so it was not the bakery’s problem. Or …
As I passed the thick metal door which led into the cold store I suddenly stopped walking. It was only a tiny thing and I might not have noticed it had my nerves not already been in a state of painful sensitivity. The pointer on the temperature dial outside the cold store had been moved. That faint pale triangle was visible again at the top of the dial, where the tip of the pointer normally was, and the pointer itself was in the six o’clock position.
I caught my breath. I had never seen the pointer in that position before. Theoretically the temperature in the cold store could be lowered right down to minus thirty degrees centigrade, but we never needed to store anything at that sort of temperature, and as far as I knew, we had never tried putting the setting down that low. I stepped up close to the dial and saw that it was indeed set to minus thirty.
No, I thought. I looked at the door, which was at least four centimetres thick, and suddenly it looked less like the anonymous door of a cold store than the entrance to a mausoleum. I reached for the handle, then hesitated.
There’s an emergency release inside, I thought. It’s not possible to get trapped in there. I grasped the handle, turned and pulled. Ponderously, the door swung open, revealing the interior.
The side walls of the cold store were lined with metal racks, which were stacked with trays of uncooked rolls, cartons containing pots of fresh cream and other perishables. The back wall was bare and propped up against it was Achim. He was stark naked. The skin which was normally pink and white was now so pale that it had assumed a greyish tint. His head was thrown back, resting in the angle between the rack and the wall, and his mouth gaped open as though one final scream had escaped with the curl of mist that had been his last breath. I thought there were clusters of ice crystals around his mouth, but I did not want to look more closely. The great pallid, hairless bulk of the body reminded me of nothing so much as the bloodless carcass of a slaughtered pig.
Little incoherent sounds were coming from my throat. I wanted to look away, to shut out the sight of the body sprawled there, but my treacherous eyes were taking in every detail, storing them in whatever mental catacombs served as the repository for nightmares. The bluish lips. The way the body was huddled, as though Achim had tried vainly to preserve the last warmth that was fading with the ebbing of his life. The white hand, rigid and inert as a clump of coral.
There was another bottle on the floor of the cold store, I noticed: the same type as the one on the surface in the kitchen. Clear glass, red label. And there was the other shoe, wedged underneath one of the metal racks.
‘What’s going on there?’ said Herr Hack’s voice close behind me. His impatience had finally overridden his qualms about trespassing.
I turned a stricken face to him, but I could find no words to describe what was inside the cold store. I simply stood back to let him see. He shot me a glance that plainly showed that he thought I was a fool and then he looked into the cold store.
‘Lieber Gott!’ said Herr Hack.