The following day was Saturday. In the middle of the morning the silence in the flat was broken by the sound of the street doorbell. I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of orange juice and staring out of the window at the brilliant crimson flowers in the window box at the side of another building. Ten thousand euros, I was thinking, and the enormity of it was too much to comprehend. Ten thousand euros and a dead man in the cold store of the bakery. It was a mystery I couldn’t fathom, with no solution that I wanted.
I wasn’t expecting anyone and at first when I heard the bell I was inclined to ignore it. But whoever was outside was pretty determined. The bell went again and again, an irritable buzzing that was hard to ignore. I drained the glass of juice, put it down on the table and went to investigate.
As I walked through the deserted bakery I could see the shape of someone standing at the door, the bright summer sunshine rendering them a silhouette. The buzzer sounded again, insistently, and I clicked my tongue in annoyance. I couldn’t imagine what the caller wanted; the CLOSED sign was up, the lights were off and the bakery didn’t just look shut, it looked positively dead, with no chance of an imminent resurrection.
I unlocked the door, pulled it open and found myself face to face with a woman perhaps ten years older than I was, with light brown hair in a short gamine crop. She was dressed a little more formally than the majority of summer visitors to the town, in a dark skirt and blouse. She looked as though she was on her way to a christening or a job interview. She was holding a bundle close to her. I looked more closely and realized that it was a baby, just a few months old, with a fluff of hair so blond that it was almost white.
The woman looked at me with an expression that was at once hopeful and curiously timid. I found my annoyance evaporating. I almost wished that I had freshly brewed coffee and apple strudel to offer her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as kindly as I could, ‘but the bakery’s closed until further notice.’
I would have shut the door, but the woman didn’t show any sign of turning away. She just stood there, with her arms around the baby and one finger gently stroking the fluffy little head, and looked at me.
‘My father’s in hospital,’ I said. ‘There isn’t anything, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re Stefanie Nett,’ said the woman, and the way she said it made it sound as though this was a breathtaking discovery.
I didn’t reply. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I wondered whether she had come, not in search of refreshment or somewhere to sit with the baby, but to see the bakery itself or, worse still, to see me. Like everyone else in the town, I was aware of the ghoulish tourists who came and pointed out the house where Bad Münstereifel’s serial killer had lived a decade before, and who tramped up and down the Eschweiler Tal looking for the place. I wondered whether this innocuous-looking mother was in fact the vanguard of a new set of sensation-seekers come to gawp at The Bakery of Horror or even The Girl Who Found the Body.
‘You are her, aren’t you?’ said the woman. ‘Stefanie.’
‘Yes,’ I said involuntarily, and then immediately, ‘No.’
I began to close the door but the woman was too quick for me. She couldn’t put out a hand, because both her arms were around the baby, but she put out a foot instead and suddenly her shoe was jammed in the door. I couldn’t push any harder without hurting her. For a moment I considered simply turning tail and fleeing into the back of the bakery, but then the woman spoke again.
‘Don’t you recognize me, Stefanie?’
‘No,’ I said, but the question gave me pause. I relaxed the pressure on the door and the woman pushed it open with her elbow. Once she was inside the bakery she looked at me expectantly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She was turning the baby around to face me. It was very drowsy; the little eyes were closed, the soft cheeks pink.
‘Say hello to Auntie Stefanie, Theo.’
Still I looked at them both dumbly. Auntie? I was thinking. I’m not anyone’s aunt. Maybe she was simply being twee, trying to fabricate a connection between us. Did I know her from somewhere?
Perhaps she mistook my perplexed expression for something less friendly. There was a slightly hurt tone in her voice when she said, ‘This is your nephew, Theo.’
I stared at her open-mouthed, as I finally grasped what she was telling me.
‘I’m Magdalena,’ she said.