When the doctor drove up in his car the old woman was hunched on the bench beside the house. The police officer who had stayed behind with her husband had told her that she couldn’t go in until his colleague was back with the murder squad. The doctor spoke to her kindly, felt her pulse and gave her an injection, and then told her to wait there, he would send a message to her neighbours and they would look after her. She couldn’t go into the house until the investigating team had done their work, and that would be best for her at the moment anyway. She should think of staying with friends or relations for now, he said, at least until everything was cleared up. She sat there, looked at him and nodded.
Then he went into the kitchen. The policeman and Johann Zauner were sitting at the table. The policeman jumped up when the doctor came in and said good afternoon, but the old man sat where he was, never moving from the spot.
The next thing he noticed was the remains of a mid-morning snack still on the table. A glass of water, half full, a piece of bread with a bite taken out of it, some smoked meat and cheese. The knife lay beside the plate. Later he would point this, in particular, out to the public prosecutor’s office. He was to say:
‘Johann Zauner was sitting beside the two bodies lying on the floor, not moving. He had made himself a snack in the middle of all that chaos, he wasn’t letting anything spoil his appetite even though his grandson was lying there in his own blood, dying. He didn’t care at all about the boy. Or about his daughter lying on the sofa with her skull smashed in.’
He would go on to say, in his evidence, ‘Although Johann Zauner is a devout Catholic and a member of the Third Order of St Francis, he is a cold, unemotional man, for how else could he sit beside the dead bodies eating?’
*
The doctor had only just arrived when the murder squad’s vehicles also arrived outside the house. One of the police officers told Zauner to get dressed so that he could go to the police station with them. But when he made no move to do as he was told, they took him away just as he was. They led him to the car standing outside the house.
From the evidence of the former member of the police force Josef Weinzierl, eighteen years after the events concerned
I’d joined the police back then, but I soon realized it wasn’t the job for me. So when my father died suddenly of blood poisoning, and my elder brother never came home from prison camp in Russia, I chucked it all in and took over the butcher’s shop my father used to keep.
I was there when the daughter and grandson of Zauner the cottager were found dead.
And I was the one left alone for quite a while with the old man out there.
I did look more closely at the young woman’s body when Irgang had left. I was young at the time, and inquisitive, the way you are at that age. I wasn’t scared, and the sight didn’t give me the creeps. If a person’s dead then they’re dead. Nothing to be done about it.
I must say she was a good-looking girl, that Afra. Had a lovely face and thick dark hair, very striking. She sent the lads crazy. And you may well think that didn’t suit the bigoted old man. One bastard in the family was enough for him. The way she lay there you could almost have thought she was asleep. Only you didn’t want to look at her hands, they were all scratched. She must have defended herself with all her might. Her fingernails were bloody, and some of them broken off, and she had a deep cut between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.
And the kitchen was in a right mess! Broken china all over the floor. There was a little hoe lying half under the sofa, like someone had tried to push it right under with his foot.
I told Zauner to stay put on his chair, but I didn’t need to, he sat there the whole time anyway. Just staring straight ahead of him. Two or three times he said something, sounded like ‘Nothing to be done now,’ and ‘Two birds with one stone.’ What he meant by that I’ve no idea, because when I asked him he didn’t say.
After I’d looked around a bit I sat down too, and we both waited.
There was a jug of water on the table, and two glasses. And a plate and a bread-knife as well.
When I have to wait time goes so slowly, and then I always get hungry. I’ve been like that since I was little. I get low blood sugar, and that brings on a headache and I can’t think properly. So I always have something to eat with me. But it was outside with my bike. I knew I shouldn’t really let the old man out of my sight, but I was so hungry. I couldn’t stand it no more. I told Zauner to go on sitting there while I nipped out to get the bag with my sandwich from the bike. I was ever so quick, it didn’t take three minutes.
When I got back in, old Zauner was gone. I said to myself, now you’ve gone and done it, letting a murderer get away from your very first crime scene.
I turned and went back into the corridor, but then I saw the door to the bedroom was open. He was in there. I went in on tiptoe. Very quiet like, so’s he wouldn’t notice me watching him. The old man was kneeling beside the bed searching in the bedside table. I looked a little, sideways, and I could see he had a purse in his hand. And a box of letters on the floor beside it. Looked like he was either going to get it all out or put it back specially. First I was surprised, then the scales kind of fell from my eyes. Hey, I says to myself, the cunning old devil, he’s laying a false trail. Trying to pretend there’s been a robbery with murder here.
That made me furious, so I shouted at him to go and sit down again and look sharp about it.
‘You just get back on that chair,’ I shouted at him, and he jumped and went back into the kitchen, not another squeak out of him. Then he stayed sitting there, he didn’t dare do nothing else.
I picked up the money and the papers and gave them to our colleagues from the CID.
Then I sat down at the kitchen table with him again and unpacked my snack. I got two bites of it and then Dr Heunisch arrived. Couldn’t go on eating then, what would it have looked like? Then all at once it went very fast. Almost as soon as the doctor arrived so did the CID men.
Even then I knew I wasn’t going to stay on in the police, and a few months later, even before the case came to court, I chucked it all in, like I said. No one never asked about my snack, no, why would they?
Oh, I almost forgot one thing. When I was out there with my bike, old Zauner’s wife arrived. I told her very sternly not to go into the house, I said she’d better sit down outside for the time being. It wouldn’t be long, I said, and it wasn’t. Then our CID colleagues had to tell her that her daughter was dead and her grandson too. No, she didn’t get to hear of it from me, not that I can remember.