On the way out to the pit for the last time the dark peeled away and dawn shone on the memory of that first meeting with his saviour. He had sat enthralled listening to Wallen’s slow plodding words.
‘He was my best friend. He will always be my best friend.’
Wallen stirred the sugar through his coffee relentlessly. His fair hair was still thick in clumps though with sparse areas like a well-worn walking track, his eyes were tired and his skin grey. They were in a little café just a street from the railway station, a cheap place where the smell of toast and cooked ham hung in the air, and there was a greasy patina on the check plastic tablecloths. The majority of the customers were men in vinyl jackets that had been long soaked in cigarette smoke and whose razors had not quite done the job on cheeks and chins. It had been an impulse decision to ring from Munich. The tournament was over and the rest of his party were spending their last day sightseeing but he felt he could not let the chance pass. Wallen had offered to come to Munich but he thought he would like to see Hamburg so they arranged to meet here.
Wallen’s face adopted its natural line of concern and missed opportunity.
‘I was so shocked about your father. I should have tried to contact your family years ago but I was scared. Not just for me, I had a young family. I’m not a brave man. After I tried that first time with the police, I was worried Donen would know I’d tried to talk. For years I ran. And then when I stopped running I couldn’t find an address for your family. Finally I rang the police and pretended to be an old colleague of Pieter’s and somebody found that Manchester address.’
Yes, that made sense. He would never forget the day the parcel arrived with the letter.
‘I bought that t-shirt for myself but never wore it. I know it was too big for a young kid but I thought one day you can wear it.’
‘I still have it. I never took it out of its wrapping. And the letter of course.’
He was alone at home reading Harry Potter, a boy similarly deprived of family by evil, when the parcel finally arrived.
‘At first Hilda didn’t want me to write back,’ he said. The coffee was too strong for him. He sipped it and put it down.
‘I can’t blame her. I was a druggie, not then, but before. I’ve got hep C to show for it. Anyway, I’m glad you did.’
They talked for a long time. About family at first: Wallen in detail describing his own kids and wife, then, asking about his schooling, and Hilda and her second husband. The proximity of the train station meant they could squeeze the juice out of every detail before he climbed on his return train to Munich.
‘And you’re a sportsman too?’ Wallen’s eyes crinkled over the rim of his cup.
‘We came third out of seven.’
‘I never made any team, hopeless. Pieter would have been proud.’
‘Tell me about him.’
Wallen recounted how they met, how he didn’t have much to do with him at first, how he had saved Pieter Gruen once and how Pieter had in turn saved him from something much more pernicious than a group of skinheads.
‘The whole operation could have come crashing down because of me. He put his own life in danger to tell me to clear out. He trusted me. And the worst part is, sometimes I fear—at the end—he might have thought it was me.’ Wallen shook his head bitterly.
Hours had passed. Shifts of diners had come and gone.
‘Do you know exactly what happened to him?’
‘As I wrote you, the man they called the Emperor killed him. I heard that from a very reliable source.’
‘Is it true they chopped him up with a chainsaw?’
Wallen did not want to meet his eyes. ‘Yes.’
Donen himself had cut Pieter Gruen to pieces while he was still alive.
‘The man who told me this heard it from one of the men who was actually there, one of the Emperor’s bodyguards, a man named Klaus. I couldn’t live with this image of my friend Pieter. I am a coward at heart and I tried to blot it out but I could not and eventually I went to the police. They did not believe me. You understand after that I had to disappear too. Once Donen knew I was prepared to talk…’
‘If I knew that I would track him down and kill him myself.’
‘Do you have any photos of Donen?’
‘No. He was too careful. And back in those days it wasn’t like now with cameras in phones. But if the cops thought they had a photo of Donen they were wrong.’
It was on the train on the way back to Munich that he looked at his reflection in the window and promised he would track down those men and kill them no matter what. He was pragmatic about it though. He was sixteen. First he had to complete his schooling, and he had to prepare himself, be ready to give up his own life. But in the years that took, his desire never wavered. Every arrow he shot was through their hearts, every math problem he solved, the mystery of how to find them, every sentence he wrote, part of their obituaries. There could be no future until the past had been dealt with to his satisfaction, however long that took. And now here he was on the other side of the world and finally it had been done and his life could restart when Donen’s ended.