She was sitting on the floor on the far side of the bed with her back to the wall and her knees up. I couldn’t see her hands.
‘Hanna,’ I said.
Her face was a pale shape in the gloom. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ she said.
I made no reply. I was afraid to look at the things in the bed again and afraid to draw another breath of that thick and poisonous atmosphere. Abruptly I turned and stumbled out of the room. When I got to the landing I took great gulping breaths; in comparison with the tainted air in the bedroom, it was sweet and clear here. I staggered to the head of the stairs but I didn’t trust my legs to carry me down them. I sank on to the top step and put my head in my hands.
After perhaps half a minute I heard Hanna’s footsteps behind me and then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ she said.
She might have been talking about something mildly unpleasant, something squashed on the road. I didn’t look at her.
‘What happened?’ I managed to ask eventually, still clinging to the faint hope that there might be some explanation for what I had just seen other than the obvious one – the one that wasn’t just staring me in the face but actually had me by the lapels and was shaking me.
‘You did,’ said Hanna simply.
I felt her sit down beside me.
‘No,’ I whispered into my hands. ‘That – in there – I never wished for that.’
I heard Hanna sigh. ‘You didn’t always know what to wish for,’ she said. Her hand on my shoulder moved to the side of my neck and I could feel her fingertips on my skin, almost caressing me. ‘You still don’t. You don’t know what you need, Steffi. It was me from the start, taking the papers, the ones with your wishes on.’
‘You?’ I said.
The silence between us stretched out so long that when she finally spoke it almost made me jump.
‘There’s no magic,’ she said suddenly. ‘Just like there’s no God. Nobody’s handing out favours to people like you and me. The shy one and the fat plain one. People like my parents and yours, they go to church and pray and think that someone’s listening. Nobody’s listening. There’s only one thing that matters, one thing that can make any difference, and that’s wanting something yourself badly enough. You understand that. I saw it when I saw you making those wishes. I knew you understood.’
I remembered the way Hanna had seemed so excited, the way her eyes had shone, how she had licked her lips so that they gleamed. I had thought it was the thrill of the game, even that it was some twisted dynamic between her and Max. Was it possible that it had really been all about me? Hanna moved closer to me and I felt her hand on my wrist, as light and deadly as the touch of a venomous spider. It was all I could do not to flinch away.
‘It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t guess,’ said Hanna, ‘because now you know. I did everything you wished for, didn’t I?’
She waited.
‘Yes,’ I croaked.
‘Almost everything anyway,’ she said musingly. ‘I didn’t have to do anything to Klara Klein. That just happened. Or if you want to believe in magic, that was it. That was fate. Klara Klein dying, that was what gave me the idea.’
Now her hand slipped right over my hand and she entwined her fingers with mine. I was too shocked by her words to react to her touch. I was thinking that if she said she had done everything I wished, everything except Klara Klein …
Hanna was a little closer to me now. Our shoulders weren’t just touching; I could feel the pressure as she leaned against me.
‘You wished for Klara Klein to die,’ she said, ‘and she did. No magic, just a fat old bag who couldn’t stop stuffing herself with cherry streusel. The only miracle is that she lasted so long. But Max and Jochen and the rest of them … the looks on their faces, the things they said when they thought you’d done it with the curse you wrote. The power to make things happen, that’s the real magic. I saw it and I know you saw it too, because otherwise you wouldn’t have kept on wishing.’
Oh, God, I thought. I was remembering the moment at Rote Gertrud’s house when I had scribbled Kai von Jülich’s name on a piece of paper, my heart thumping with guilty excitement. I had made sure that none of the others saw what I had written because I thought they’d laugh at me. Shy little Steffi with her unrequited crush. And yet my secrecy had been entirely in vain. It had been one of my own friends who plucked the wish from the box and read the secret of my heart.
‘You wrote the letter to Kai,’ I said. ‘How could you do that?’
I felt her shift slightly. ‘You wished for him,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you? I told you, the power to make things happen, that’s the magic.’
‘Not like that,’ I told her.
In spite of my shock I felt actual anger. I remembered Kai’s face looming at me in the car, the way I had hit my head on the glass as I tried to escape his embrace, the painful impact with the ground when I fell out of the car. I had heard the roar of the engine, the sound of gravel thrown up by the tyres, as I had flung myself, bruised and shocked, into the undergrowth, desperate to get away. He’s a pig, I had told Hanna afterwards, and I supposed he really had been: too stupid to question the contents of the note and too brutish to accept that no meant no, whatever had gone before. All the same, it needn’t have happened, that scene in the Tal. We could have carried on with our separate lives, with me yearning hopelessly until he found himself some girl like himself, well-off and arrogant. I need never have stumbled to the witch’s house to curse him, have limped home with my bruises and my torn shirt, to be confronted by Frau Kessel, who had drawn her own monstrous conclusions. It had all started there, with that cursed letter.
‘I didn’t want it to be like that,’ I repeated.
‘It couldn’t have been any other way,’ said Hanna. ‘You needed to see what he was really like.’
‘Why?’ I almost shrieked. ‘Why did I need to see?’ I pulled away from her, pulled my hand from hers. ‘He nearly raped me, Hanna. I thought we were going on a date and then he just went mad. He hurt me.’
‘He paid for it,’ said Hanna. ‘He cried, you know. He got into that stupid car of his late one night and I was already in the back seat, waiting for him with my dad’s Arminius revolver. He thought I was mad at him for what he did to you. He started saying he was sorry and he didn’t mean it and all this other crap. I made him drive up here and back into the garage, and when he put the handbrake on I let him have it in the back of the head.’
‘No,’ I said, but in spite of my horrified incredulity I knew she was telling the truth. I had seen the evidence with my own eyes.
‘He deserved it,’ said Hanna, as though those three words justified everything. ‘All of them did. Frau Kessel and that fat pig Achim Zimmer. You can’t tell me the town isn’t a better place without them.’
‘You can’t just go –’ I began, but she interrupted me.
‘I did what half the people in this town would have done if they had the guts. When Frau Kessel died, how many of those hypocrites sitting in the church afterwards really felt sorry? They were probably glad their secrets were safe at last.’
I remembered Hanna coming down the Orchheimer Strasse towards me the day they found Frau Kessel. I remembered her taking my arm and saying, You’re unbelievable, Steffi. You’ve done it. You’ve actually done it.
‘You made me think I’d done it,’ I said.
‘We did it,’ she said. She looked at me and her eyes were shining, the way they had that time up at the ruined house. I had thought that look was for Max, but it was not. ‘You wished it and I made it real. Nothing happens without someone wanting it to happen.’
The positive thinking of serial killing, I thought, and for a moment a hysterical laugh threatened to burst out of me. I looked around me at the expensive dullness of the Landbergs’ house and the normality of it seemed more surreal than what I had seen in the master bedroom. I could not imagine how life would ever return to its normal flow after this.
‘What did you do to Frau Kessel?’ I said.
‘I got into her house through the yard at the back. She heard me and came down with a candlestick in her skinny claw, like she was going to brain me with it or something. She said, “Hanna Landberg, what do you think you are doing in my house?” So I showed her the gun and she put the candlestick down, but it didn’t shut her up.’ Hanna shook her head. ‘All the way up the stairs she kept on at me – did my father know I had his hunting revolver, what made me think I could get away with it and a lot more like that. I told her to shut up, but she wouldn’t.’
This didn’t surprise me. I doubted Satan himself and all his minions could have got Frau Kessel to shut up.
‘So when we got to the top I told her to jump over the banisters. It’s a long drop down the stairwell in her house – it would have done the job. But she looked at me and said, “Why don’t you shoot me, Hanna Landberg?” I told her, “It’s going to look like an accident.” So she said, “Well, you can shoot me if you like, but I’m not jumping.” So I pushed her. She screamed, but the moment she hit the floor it stopped. I went down to check, but she was dead.’
The matter-of-factness in Hanna’s voice chilled me to the core. Any desire to laugh hysterically passed away as rapidly as if I had had a bucket of icy water thrown over me.
‘Hanna,’ I said. ‘Achim Zimmer – that was you too?’
‘Of course it was.’ She frowned. ‘I can’t believe you ever thought it was that loser Julius Rensinghof. He’s not capable of planning anything like that. He’s too stupid.’ She sounded offended. ‘He wouldn’t have had the guts either. Two nights I had to come to the bakery. The first time was to see how it could be done.’
I recalled the sounds I had heard downstairs that night after Max had run me to the hospital to see my father. The clank, the slapping sound and then silence. I had noticed that the dial on the cold store had been moved when I went down the next morning, but I hadn’t known why. That had been Hanna, laying her plans and having a trial run.
‘How did you get him to come to the bakery?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘How do you think? Men only think about one thing. If they get a sniff of it, they’ll go anywhere, do anything. I just rang Achim up and offered him a private party in the bakery kitchen. He couldn’t wait to get there, couldn’t even wait long enough to park the car off the street.’ Her lip curled. ‘He really was a disgusting pig. And stupid. It wasn’t difficult to get him drunk. Just a shame it took him so long to become incapable.’
I did my best not to think about it, about how Hanna had persuaded Achim to take his clothes off, had kept on pouring out the vodka until he could no longer put his ugly desires into practice, couldn’t ward off drowsiness, couldn’t find the cold store’s emergency door release. Had it been sufficient for Hanna to leave the cold store and close the door with Achim inside, then turn the dial to its lowest setting, or had she had to lean on the door, listening to his feeble thumps, his muffled calls for help growing fainter and fainter?
‘Oh, God,’ I said.
I was sick with horror, but Hanna looked at me and saw squeamishness.
‘He got what he deserved, Steffi,’ she said, and there was a gentleness to her tone that was worse than the venom I had heard in it before. It was the blandness of milk laced with a tasteless poison. She moved closer to me and her hand was on my shoulder again, as though she wanted to reassure me. ‘Why do you feel bad about it? He deserved it.’ Her hand moved to my hair, stroked it. ‘You’re so …’ She stopped, and I thought that she had been going to say weak but decided that it was too harsh a word.
She said nothing more, but she put her arm around me. For a moment I thought confusedly that she was trying to comfort me, or seek comfort herself. Then I felt her face against mine and realized that she was not trying to comfort me, that this was not the reassuring embrace of a friend with a friend.
I was not so green as to die of shock at the idea of being kissed by another girl, but I knew now what Hanna had done and I would as soon have let myself be sucked dry by leeches. The hands which were clasping me had pushed Frau Kessel to her death; the lips which were seeking mine had lured Achim to his end. She’s the witch, I thought, and I put up my hands and pushed her away.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
‘We belong together, Steffi,’ said Hanna. Her eyes were gleaming.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ Hanna’s face contorted into a scowl. ‘Julius Rensinghof? Is that why?’ She reached for me again, trying to grasp my shoulders as though she wanted to shake some sense into me. ‘I told you, he’s a loser. Why do you still think you need him?’
I looked at Hanna, at the ugly expression on her face, and at last I understood. Jealousy. What she felt about Julius had nothing to do with him being a loser and everything to do with him being a rival.
‘I know better than you do what you need, Steffi,’ said Hanna. ‘You don’t need him.’
‘You can’t make me wish him dead by putting a piece of paper in a box in Gertrud’s house,’ I told her.
‘You wrote it,’ she said.
‘I wished for him to leave.’
‘You wished him dead first.’
‘I thought he was the one doing everything. I just wanted him to stop.’
‘He wouldn’t do all the things I did for you, Steffi,’ said Hanna. She was trembling. ‘I did everything you asked. Everything.’
‘I didn’t want this!’ I shouted. ‘What about your parents, back there?’ I pointed wildly at the bedroom door. ‘I didn’t wish them dead. I didn’t even know them, Hanna!’
‘They were in the way. They’ve always been in the way. I couldn’t do anything, living here in one crappy room and doing a crappy job. They had money and the big house and the car and they never did anything with it. My dad just paraded around in his stupid hunting gear and my mother, God, she spent all her time cleaning the house. She did the inside of the shutters with a toothbrush, can you believe that? I was such a disappointment to them. Nothing better than a Hauptschule qualification, nothing to boast about with their friends from the shooting club. They never gave me anything. It was like starving, spending my whole life like that. And then that night we all went up to Rote Gertrud’s house for the first time … You wished for something and it came true, and I saw the power that you had, the way it changed how we all looked at you. We’re two halves of one whole, Steffi, two sides of one coin. That’s the magic, not some rubbish in a ruined house in the woods full of beer cans and piss.’
Hanna turned her eyes towards me and they were full of savage brightness. I was terribly afraid that she would try to kiss me again. The stink of death hung over her. I would as soon have pressed my face to the bloody remnants on a butcher’s block. I began to think too that perhaps my situation here was precarious. Someone who could talk so calmly of killing people she had known for most of her life was not the sort of person you wanted to be shut up in a lonely house with, whether they said they had done it all for you or not. I was well and truly in the labyrinth now, and the question was whether the monster at the centre would let me leave.
We did it, Hanna had said, with her eyes shining, and that, I thought with a sick feeling, was the crux of it. Hanna saw us as we, not as two separate people, she and I. If I broke away, told her I didn’t want any part of the offerings she had brought me with bloody hands, it would be as bad as a hare breaking cover and darting in front of a greyhound. Still, it was not possible to turn to her and say, It was a good thing that you did, even as a lie. All my life I had been shy. People had talked for me and at me. They had made assumptions about what I wanted, even from my own life. I was sick of it, sick of being a blank screen on to which other people projected their thoughts, their dreams, their own capering demons. I shook off Hanna’s clutching hands.
‘No,’ I said.