I slipped into the garage between the silver Mercedes and the wall, keeping as much distance as possible between myself and the red sports car. I could see almost at once that there was a door at the back that led to the house. I thought that I could make myself cross the few metres to that door and try the handle. I pressed the cloth of my shirt tightly to my nose, moving as quickly as I could and praying that I would not throw up again. I reached the door, pressed the handle down and rather to my surprise it opened easily.
The interior of the house was dark. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, thankful to have its wooden panels between me and the garage with its expensive sarcophagus. I stood where I was for perhaps half a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness, and I became aware that the air in the house had a taint that was all too familiar. I listened too and once I heard something in the distant reaches of the house, perhaps in the attic or cellar, that might have been a scuffle or a creak, but that was all. It could have been something or nothing. If Hanna was inside the house she was keeping very quiet.
I was in a hallway, I now saw. I began to move cautiously down it, slowing to peer through each open doorway. There was no sign of any living thing in the house, nothing to suggest any immediate threat, and yet everything I saw impressed me with a sense of wrongness. I noticed an ugly little telephone table piled high with unopened mail. I passed the Landbergs’ large kitchen with its brown wooden fittings. The shutters were only half down and in the half-light I could see that every work surface was cluttered with dirty crockery, cartons and jars. I went into the living room and found a pair of neatly folded reading glasses lying on the glass-topped coffee table next to a copy of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that was weeks old.
I went back into the hallway. Once again I stood and listened, but all I could hear was a faint ticking, the sound of some household appliance crooning to itself. I looked up the stairs at the dim reaches of the landing. I was aware of that smell again, the one that was always there in the background. After a while you got used to it, but sometimes you’d catch a whiff of it again and realize it was still there, sweet and ripe and foul, as though the whole house were some gigantic diseased lung exhaling rot with every breath.
Reluctantly I set my foot on the bottom stair. There was a faint creak as I put my weight on it. Then I climbed slowly up, stopping on every third step to listen. The house seemed to be empty, so why did I have that feeling of strained expectancy, as though someone or something was up there waiting for me? It was a relief when the first-floor landing finally came into view and I could see that it was empty.
The air was fouler up here. All the doors on the landing were closed, so the only light came from a little glass panel overhead. In spite of the expensive decor – the thick patterned rug, the paintings on the walls, the large Chinese vases full of dried flowers – the upper floor was a comfortless place. The sprays of desiccated flowers made me think of a funeral parlour.
I noticed almost immediately that one of the bedroom doors had been efficiently if crudely sealed with strips of silvery duct tape which ran along all the door frame. There was no key on the outside. I tried the handle but the door wouldn’t budge.
Some small and animal part of my brain was telling me that I didn’t want to go in there anyway, that I didn’t want to see what was in the room, that I definitely didn’t want to know what was making that smell which clung greasily to everything. In defiance of its increasingly urgent voice, I made myself check the door again, but it really was locked.
I went to the next one, and tried the handle; it opened easily. Inside, the shutters were up and the room was full of light. This was clearly Herr Landberg’s study; it had his heavy personality stamped all over it. There was a very large desk, as solid and unfashionable-looking as its owner, with an expensive padded leather office chair behind it and a grey metal filing cabinet to one side. The walls were adorned with photographs of Herr Landberg and his shooting-club friends, all stoutly upholstered in hunting green and baring their teeth at the camera, and little wooden shields with the body parts of animals attached to them: horns and skulls and the occasional stuffed head, the eyes staring glassily across the room. I took all of this in at a glance, but the thing that really caught my attention was the metal gun locker bolted to the wall. It was wide open, as though inviting passers-by to help themselves to one of Herr Landberg’s well-maintained rifles as casually as taking a cigarette from the pewter box on his desk.
The other thing I noticed was the second door to my right, a door which almost certainly connected with the sealed room. The door was standing open and from this angle all I could see was a strip of flowered wallpaper and the heavy folds of curtains. Judging by the deep shadows, the shutters were most of the way down. I stepped a little closer and now I could see that all around the door frame was the same silvery duct tape, only it was puckered here and there where the door had been wrenched open.
The sickening smell of decay that pervaded the house was boiling out of the sealed room in waves. This was the putrid core of it. I knew what I would see – what I had to see – before I went to the bedroom door, but still the sight of it almost rendered me incapable of action. Both of them were in there, in bed. Frau Landberg – recognizable by the dry nest that was what remained of her bouffant dyed black hair and the frilled nightdress she wore – was lying on her back under a counterpane that was a Rorschach pattern of dark and sinister stains. I thought that she had probably died there where she lay, with her eyes staring up at the glass chandelier until they filmed over and finally sank back into her head. Herr Landberg, however, appeared to have put up a fight. There were splashes and streaks of dried matter all over the floor on his side of the bed. I suspected he had managed to get out of bed before he was struck down and had lain on the parquet floor, gazing up at his destroyer, as the life pumped out of him. Then the killer had heaved the corpse back into the bed and pulled the covers up to his chest, leaving the two of them surrounded by the trappings of their affluence, like an entombed Pharaoh and his queen.
I had known that the house must contain a chamber of horrors like this one ever since I saw Kai von Jülich’s car in the garage, but it was still a paralysing shock to see the two bodies lying there in their miasma of tainted air. A terrible sound escaped me, the dusty sound of the last strut supporting known reality giving way. I heard an answering groan and it was then that I realized for the first time that I was not alone.