If Jonny doesn’t turn up soon, they’ll be late. That’s no big deal for Jonny, but for Tim it will be a disaster. He jumps down off the wall and stares down the street. Quarter to eight – Jonny’s never been this late. Tim gives his mountain bike a kick and swings himself back on the wall. His first lesson is maths with old Dolling. Frau Dolling has it in for him. She gives him the blame for everything and refuses to believe him when he tells her that the stink bombs, spitballs, graffiti and stickers which appear regularly on her desk are nothing to do with him. Old witch, he thinks. Stupid cow. The other day they stole his sandwiches and stuck them to her desk, smearing greasy liver sausage all over the place. Frau Dolling didn’t speak, she was so cross – all white around the nose. For a moment she just stared at the mess, then she marched over to the bin and fished out a lunchbox – his lunchbox – with liver sausage smeared all round the edge. Those Tupperware boxes are too expensive for you to go losing them all the time, his mother had said, writing his name on the lid: TIMOTHEUS RINKER. There was no denying it was his. No one else has such a stupid name. It isn’t fair.
Jonny’s the youngest in his class, but he doesn’t have problems like that, and when Tim spends break with Jonny, the other boys leave him alone. He jumps down from the wall again and stares in the direction Jonny usually comes from on his bike. Come on, Jonny, come on. A year ago, Jonny and he had noticed that none of the others in the chess club were worth playing against, so they had played together more and more, and before long they had started playing outside the club as well. Soon Jonny had let him look after Dr D. for the first time. That was a real accolade, and luckily Tim had got on all right with the headstrong dachshund. He and Jonny have been friends ever since.
Jonny sets great store by friendship. Honest Injun, blood brotherhood, loyalty unto death – those are favourite sayings of his. So why, for goodness’ sake, has he left Tim in the lurch? Tim peers down the street one last time before swinging himself onto his mountain bike. If he cycles quicker than he’s ever cycled before, he might just get there on time. Don’t think, just pedal, don’t think, just pedal, he repeats in his head, as his feet spin round. Don’t think about what’s going to turn up on your desk today. Don’t think about the phone call from Jonny’s dad yesterday asking you if you’d seen Jonny – as if he had no idea where Jonny was. Don’t think about break time without Jonny. Just pedal.
Tim reaches Ostheim, and the bell at the level crossing begins to ring, but he ducks under the barrier at the last moment, skids round the corner and turns in at the school gate, braking so hard that his back wheel comes off the ground. The school grounds are fenced in with thick, square iron railings. Like a prison. Don’t think. Hastily he chains his bike to a free stand. Has the school bell already rung? The classroom door is certainly shut. Tim pushes it open and finds himself looking into the angry face of his teacher. He senses the nervous anticipation of the other children and feels himself shrinking.
‘Sorry-I’m-late.’ Tim bows his head and slinks to his desk. ‘Better not wait for Jonathan today,’ his mother had said with a funny look on her face. But of course his mother doesn’t have a clue about Jonny and Tim and their friendship. Tim drops onto his chair which feels strangely soft, and in the next instant a fart breaks out from under him. ‘Rinker, Rinker, farty old stinker!’ the class jeers and Frau Dolling stares at him as if she’d like to kill him. Heat shoots into Tim’s face; he doesn’t dare move for fear the whoopee cushion might go off again. But he’s going to have to move at some point, because he needs to get his pencil case and exercise book out of his rucksack.
If Jonny really has run off without him, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
*
Monday’s starting as lousily as Sunday ended, Manni thinks, fiddling around with the worn-out ignition of one of the heaps of junk that are sanctimoniously referred to as ‘official vehicles’ on the management floor of police headquarters. The air conditioning doesn’t work either, of course, which means he might just as well not have had a shower; although it’s still early in the day, the sun is beating down on the roof. Recalling the morning’s chance encounter with his ex-boss, Millstätt, does nothing to improve Manni’s mood. Instead of coming to the point at last and clarifying Manni’s allegedly upcoming return to Division 11, Millstätt had only shown his teeth, given Manni an encouraging slap on the upper arm and told him to have a nice day. Hypocritical bastard, Manni thinks. First he fucks up my career and then he grins at me as if he were on my side. Manni bites back a curse.
‘Not your day today?’ his colleague Petra Bruckner asks, a strapping woman in her mid-forties who passes for a children’s expert and has been sent to conduct interviews in the Jonny Röbel case. Jonny Röbel is still missing, and so the machinery has been set in motion; the police are doing their duty, groping about in the dark again, back in the never-ending battle against time. Abduction seems to have been ruled out. Jonny’s guardians have not been forthcoming. There have been no threatening letters or blackmail calls. Searching Jonny’s room yielded little of any use. The boy likes playing chess, is passionate about Native Americans and loves his dachshund. He has no trouble at school and – if his parents are to be believed – none of his friends knows where he is. Are the parents right? Is it true that the boy hasn’t run away, but is lying injured and helpless somewhere in Königsforst? If so, the dog squad will find him.
As arranged, Frank Stadler is waiting for them at the entrance to the grounds at the edge of Königsforst which he refers to as a ‘camp’. He has shadows under his eyes and beads of sweat on his forehead, although the temperature here is more or less bearable compared with the heat in town.
The camp turns out to be a Wild West club. Some clown has written ‘Sioux of Cologne’ on a plank nailed to the entrance gate. Next to the gate is a raised hide with a shooting slit like the lookout in a Wild West fort. Hedges and wooden palisades prevent curious passers-by from peering into the grounds, which are partly planted with trees and bushes. In the middle, three log cabins with overhanging roofs are arranged around a bonfire site. Tree trunks in a circle serve as benches. Manni can think of plenty of ways he’d rather spend his spare time than dressing up as a cowboy or Indian and sitting around on a log, but for anyone into Wild West nostalgia, all this is perfect.
The sound of a diesel engine announces the arrival of the dog squad. As taciturn as always, the dog handlers let the Belgian shepherds out of the trailers. Stadler’s eyes flit nervously to the panting dogs, tugging at their leads. Their muscles are clearly visible beneath their shining reddish coats, their dark ears are pricked.
‘Do you think they’ll be able to find Jonny after all this time?’ Stadler asks.
‘You’d be amazed what they can smell,’ Manni replies, wondering whether Stadler is more worried that the dogs will be able to track down his stepson, or that they won’t. Impossible to know; all Manni can read in Stadler’s face with any certainty is that he is tense and has slept badly. If only he’d tell him when he last saw his stepson.
The first dog handlers head off to the woods. Königsforst is difficult terrain. Dense undergrowth and a lot of brambles make walking hard going, and visibility is bad. They’ve divided the area into grid squares, but even with the dogs it might be days before they find the boy – or are able to say with relative certainty that he isn’t there. Unfortunately the place is also something of a forensic nightmare; day after day, Cologne’s nature freaks descend on Königsforst in their hundreds and thousands, bringing their dogs and bikes and picnic hampers and Nordic walking sticks, not only leaving a vast amount of forensic evidence, but also destroying other people’s in the process. It’s far from idyllic. But Manni doesn’t have time to philosophise about the recreational pursuits of his fellow-citizens. Pointing to the raised hide, he turns to Stadler.
‘I suppose one of you sits up there and looks to see who comes and goes when your club meets here at the camp.’
Stadler nods. ‘During the games.’
‘Who was here last weekend?’
‘I’m sorry, this is all very stressful.’ Stadler wipes his forehead.
‘Can’t you tell me who was here at the weekend apart from you and Jonny?’
‘Well, it was very full. There must have been more than thirty of us. It was nice weather and everyone wanted to meet up one last time before the school holidays. Hagen Petermann, our club manager, always keeps a list.’
‘I’ll need that list. In fact we’ll need the names and addresses of all the club members.’
‘Yes, of course.’ One of the dogs barks and Stadler jumps. He’s nervous, thinks Manni. Maybe that doesn’t mean a thing. Maybe it does. Either way, Stadler’s memory lapses are a problem for the investigation. Thirty people to question – probably more. That takes time. And if anything is forgotten or overlooked, then too bad, because most of the witnesses will probably be jetting off to God-knows-where next week when the holidays begin. Meanwhile there might be a boy in danger somewhere – if he isn’t already dead.
Suddenly Manni’s enthusiasm is back – his iron determination not to give up until he’s got what he wants. He’s going to solve this case. He’s going to restore his reputation. He’s going to save this boy – if it isn’t too late. Manni looks Stadler in the eyes. You’re lying, he thinks. Or at least you know something you don’t want to tell me. You might even be a murderer. Whichever it is, I’ll get you in the end.
‘The dogs . . .’ says Stadler, staring towards the woods. ‘That barking. Have your colleagues found something?’
‘We’ll soon find out if it’s anything important,’ says Manni. ‘Show me where Jonny was the last time you saw him.’
Frank Stadler points to the conical teepees, so realistic you wouldn’t be surprised to see real live Indians poking their noses out from between the flaps.
‘Jonny was supposed to sleep in the middle tent,’ says Stadler. ‘His rucksack was still there on Sunday morning.’
‘And that’s the last place you saw him? Can you tell me when exactly, and what your stepson was doing?’
Stadler seems to reflect. When he finally answers his voice is hoarse and he doesn’t look at Manni.
‘We always split up into cowboys and Indians. Jonny’s an Indian and they had their secret meeting here by the lake on Saturday night. Believe me, I feel guilty about this, but I can’t say for sure whether Jonny was there. I think I saw him here in the afternoon but I couldn’t swear to it.’
‘But somebody must have noticed whether or not Jonny slept in his tent on Saturday night.’
‘That’s just the question I asked the other children in his tent. They said they didn’t think he was there when they went to bed, and he definitely wasn’t there when they woke up. But he could have crept into his sleeping bag after they’d gone to sleep and got up before them, couldn’t he?’
‘Had his sleeping bag been slept in?’
Stadler shakes his head mutely.
*
It is too early for visitors; she hasn’t even had a shower. But Berthold Pretorius seems oblivious to this. He looks more than ever like a crustacean in disguise, his lobster eyes darting restlessly about Judith’s kitchen before attaching themselves to her face.
‘I’ve dealt with the computer.’
‘Already? Yesterday evening I couldn’t even boot it up.’
‘It wasn’t hard to find the problem.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No-brainer. Someone had removed the hard disk.’
‘Maybe the hard disk was faulty.’ She wants a shower and breakfast before she plunges back into the past – into a stranger’s life. She’s not in the mood for talking to Berthold.
But he’s persistent. ‘If there’d been anything wrong with Charlotte’s computer, she’d have rung me. OK, I was away for two weeks in May and there was a lot going on at the company at that time. But she’d have rung me all the same. It’s not like her. It doesn’t add up.’
That night, Judith had dreamt of the strange black-and-white water bird. It was swimming on a lake, looking at her with its fiery eyes, as if it had a message for her. Judith had wondered what it was trying to tell her, but had found no answer. In the end she had accepted that she didn’t know, the way you do in dreams, and simply continued to look at the bird.
‘Charlotte’s in trouble,’ says Berthold. ‘You have to help her.’
Why is Berthold so bloody worried? Is it really only because she’s his friend? Judith looks into his watery blue eyes.
‘Who else was Charlotte friends with apart from you?’
‘She’s always thought the world of you, Judith.’
‘Very funny. It’s twenty years since we last saw each other.’
‘No, really, she’s often talked about you. She likes you.’
‘She has no reason to.’ Again Judith has the sense of muffled unreality she felt in Charlotte’s villa. It’s as if she’s stuck in something she can’t understand – as if she’s been conducting a complicated cross-examination and spent hours battling with words which ought to tell you whether someone is guilty or innocent, but hardly ever do.
Charlotte is elusive, thinks Judith. That’s what’s so disconcerting. She has vanished so completely without trace that you’d think she’d never really been alive. Her house with its smell of disinfectant and desolation is like a cocoon abandoned by an insect, or like the sloughed-off skin of a snake. You hold the remains in your hand – maybe even put them under a microscope – but they are mere empty shells, and whichever way you turn them, they reveal nothing about the life which once inhabited them.
‘I’m going to have a shower now and some breakfast, Berthold. Then I’ll see what I can find out about the picture of the loon. Maybe that will get us somewhere.’
He nods hesitantly and holds out his hand. She grips it briefly and sees him to the door.
‘Please, Judith,’ he says. ‘Charlotte is in danger.’
*
When the school bell rings for break at last, Tim stuffs his wallet into his trouser pocket and runs out of the classroom before Frau Dolling or any of the children can stop him. He knows where he can meet Jonny because he’s learnt Jonny’s timetable off by heart – although he’d never admit this to anyone, not even to Jonny. The thought that his friend might feel stalked if he realised how much Tim knows about him is not a pleasant one and he quickly pushes it aside. The important thing is to find him. Tim jumps down the stairs and dashes across the playground to the laboratories. On Monday morning Jonny has chemistry. The first children from his class are already shuffling out, blinking lazily into the sun. Tim presses himself up against the shady wall opposite the science block and keeps his eyes fixed on the door. He knows it’s the only one and that Jonny’s class 9D have German next. Jonny has to come out of that door.
It’s hot, a perfect midsummer’s day. If it gets hot enough, they might be let home early; then they can cycle to the quarry pond with Dr D. straight after lunch. The dachshund looks so funny paddling around with his paws bent, yelping with excitement – like a beady-eyed muskrat. Before Tim was friends with Jonny, he didn’t like going swimming, although he loves water. He didn’t want to go to the swimming pool because of the other children, and he was too scared to brave the quarry pond on his own. But with Jonny it’s different. Last Friday they had used a Lilo as a diving board. Dr D. was the captain and they had taken it in turns to dive as deep as they could and stay under water for as long as possible. It had been exciting, even if they could hardly see a thing through their goggles in the green, weedy water.
For as long as he can remember, Tim has been fascinated by deep-sea life. He collects shells which he catalogues in little boxes in the drawer under his bed. He saves every cent he can spare so that he can go on a diving course when he’s sixteen. He devours every book about the sea he can lay his hands on and is familiar with all the interesting websites on scuba diving and marine life. He has a season ticket to the aquarium. And he likes to imagine he’s a fish. A burrfish, for example – cyclichthys antennatus – which lives in the ocean off the Antilles. The burrfish is unspectacular – small and brown, flecked with black. But when it has to defend itself, it swallows so much water that it looks like a puffy pin cushion covered in spiny prickles. No easy prey.
His cousin Ivonne appears in the door to the science block with her boyfriend Viktor, her blond hair gleaming in the sun, her skimpy top revealing more than it covers, the earplugs of her MP3 player dangling at her breasts. She takes in the playground at a glance, managing, as usual, to look straight through Tim.
‘Come on, you two, get a move on – I want to lock up.’ Herr Mohr, the chemistry teacher, emerges behind Ivonne and Viktor and they set off provocatively slowly, locked together and bursting with self-importance – the coolest couple at Bertolt Brecht Grammar School.
Last year when Tim and Jonny became friends, Tim had worried that Jonny might fall in love with Ivonne, like all the other boys in year nine, and that his cousin would bad-mouth him to Jonny. Tim had of course kept his concern to himself, but when Ivonne started going out with Viktor and Jonny said he didn’t care, he had been very relieved. He still doesn’t understand how Ivonne can worship that idiot Viktor. But that’s her problem, not his.
Herr Mohr is locking the door to the science block. He rattles the handle to make sure it really is shut and sets off towards the main building. And Jonny? Tim’s worry tears him out of his stupor. He rushes up to Herr Mohr, disregarding the other children’s scornful glances.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jonny, Jonathan Röbel. Wasn’t he in your class today?’
Mohr gives him a long hard stare. ‘No.’
‘But . . .’
The X-ray eyes continue to pierce him. ‘But what?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Really? You don’t look as if it were nothing. Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Do you know where Jonathan is?’
‘No, no.’ I must get out of here, Tim thinks. Out – and he begins to run. It’s nobody’s business; he doesn’t want anyone to see the tears that are shooting into his eyes. He runs past the science block, over the field to the hill where he squats behind a bush and looks down on the playground. His mouth is dry and his heart is hammering almost as hard as this morning, when he had pedalled so fast. Where is Jonny? Can he have gone to Radebeul by himself, to visit Karl May, Villa Bear Fat and Winnetou’s Silver Gun? No, he can’t have done; they had planned to go together. Tim had even decided to give up part of his savings for the adventure with his friend. Jonny had held out his hand when he heard that and said, ‘It’s a deal, my brother,’ in that strange, solemn way he’d learnt at his Red Indian club.
Jonny is reliable. Jonny doesn’t let you down; he isn’t like that. So he can’t be in Radebeul. But where else could he be? Suddenly, with a painful, stabbing certainty, Tim knows that Jonny is in serious trouble. In the same instant, a police car turns into the school drive and the school bell announces the end of break. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jonny, nothing at all,’ Tim whispers. But his heart doesn’t stop hammering – boom, boom, boom – and all at once Tim knows why: he is scared, with an awful foreboding fear he has never known before.
*
The thwack of the rotor blades comes nearer until it is unbearably loud. The police helicopter emerges above the treetops and circles the Red Indian camp; the pilot gives a wave and veers off towards Wahn Heath. That’s one way of saying goodbye, thinks Manni. His colleagues spent an hour and a half scouring the terrain from the air, but found neither a fourteen-year-old boy nor a dachshund. Not that that means anything; only very few clearings and paths are visible from the sky. Manni kicks the tyre of the official heap-of-junk Focus. That leaves the dog squad, then, but the sniffer dogs are making slow progress – too slow, when you think that Königsforst is a good twenty-five square kilometres and that a helpless boy might have been lying somewhere in the undergrowth for forty-eight hours.
‘Come on, Nancy, time for a break.’ Kurt, the oldest dog handler, pours water into a bowl and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Bloody brambles. Feels like a jungle camp. All that’s missing is the camera team.’
‘Spare us.’ Manni stares at the map that he has spread out on the bonnet of his car – his temporary control centre. A sniffer dog works for twenty or twenty-five minutes at a time, the dog handlers explained to him. After that it’s relieved of its duties and allowed to recover from the thousands of smells it’s been bombarded with. The problem is that dogs may be bloody good at picking up scents, but they devote as much attention to a jogger or a decaying squirrel as an injured boy. Once they’re done, though, you can be pretty sure that the terrain they’ve covered is clean. And they certainly work more quickly than a human search party.
‘At the narrowest point it’s about two kilometres from here to the A4.’ Manni’s index finger taps a motorway lay-by. They have agreed to begin by searching the area between the camp and the motorway. Perhaps the boy walked to a car park and hitchhiked. Or maybe he’d arranged to meet somebody. If either of these scenarios is correct, and Jonny is lucky, he’ll be right as rain, sitting in a field somewhere with his dog, laughing up his sleeve. But for some reason, Manni is sceptical. This might have something to do with the sense of feverish agitation aroused in him by ten Belgian shepherds and their handlers. Or it might have to do with Frank Stadler’s shiftiness. Two colleagues from patrol drove Stadler home earlier on, because he was only getting in the way. Petra Bruckner accompanied him. She’ll have got hold of a list of Jonny’s friends and the membership list of the Sioux of Cologne Red Indian Club, and by now she’ll be at Jonny’s school. Manni ought to be there too; perhaps one of the children has some information for them. Better not to leave Bruckner to decide what’s of use to them and what isn’t.
Manni folds up his map; the dog squad have their own. ‘How long will it take you to get to the motorway, Kurt?’
‘Hard to say – could take until tomorrow – longer if we cover the entire breadth. Unless the undergrowth thins.’
‘I’m going to drive to the boy’s school now. Call me if you find anything.’
Kurt gives him a nod and Manni bites back a curse as he opens the car door. It’s a bloody sauna in there. Why didn’t he think of winding the windows down? His phone begins to buzz and he takes the call without looking at the display.
‘You father’s started smoking again,’ his mother’s voice complains. ‘In this weather.’
‘I can’t talk now.’
‘Can’t you speak to him?’
‘You know he never listens to me. Sorry, Mum, I really can’t talk now.’
Manni throws a Fisherman’s Friend in his mouth, turns the car and puts his foot on the accelerator. Something tells him that it’s going to turn out to be a bloody long, bloody unpleasant day.
*
The narrow shop front on Maria Hilf Strasse is only a hundred metres from Judith’s flat, tucked away in a nondescript courtyard. ‘ART 4 U – WE PAINT ANYTHING’, it says above the display window where a dozy black-and-white cat with very yellow eyes is lying amid paint palettes and brushes. The shop looks empty, but the door to the street is wide open and reggae music is coming from a ghetto blaster. It smells of turpentine and oil paint and ever so slightly of cannabis. Judith lets the cat sniff her hand in greeting. After breakfast she had written a report, setting down all she knew about Charlotte. It is an old habit of hers to take stock in this way. She had tried to disregard Berthold’s worries and her own hunches, but it wasn’t easy. Experience has taught her how tenacious a hunch can be. The facts are scant. It looks as if the black-and-white bird really is her best lead.
Behind an easel, a shimmering turquoise curtain is twitched aside, and a young man with light blond dreadlocks peeps out.
‘Be with you in a second. Make yourself comfortable.’ He gestures to a round red metal table and some folding chairs, and disappears again. Judith looks at the colourful jumble of pictures on the wall. Animal portraits, abstract geometric shapes, an Alpine landscape, Cologne cathedral – the artist clearly takes his slogan seriously. Judith leans Charlotte’s loon up against the wall and sits down on one of the chairs. Something is over, she thinks. It’s good to be investigating again. It’s good to be out of the flat. The music stops for a few seconds, then trance-like Jamaican rhythms begin to pour out of the ghetto blaster again. It’s like being in an exotic country where the stranger’s first lesson is to learn to forget time.
‘Hi, I’m Piet.’ The man with the dreadlocks puts a tray down on the table and extends a hand covered in silver rings. ‘Cup of tea?’ Without waiting for a reply, he fills two gold-rimmed glasses and pushes one towards her. ‘Green tea with fresh mint – the best thing in this crazy heat. It’s a Moroccan recipe.’
‘Thanks.’ Maybe this is what I’m looking for, Judith thinks – an exotic country, another world. Maybe I should have gone abroad instead of spending my last weeks of leave on my roof terrace and by the Rhine, drinking beer and playing boules. She sips the strong, refreshing tea and watches the young man’s slender fingers busy themselves with a packet of a tobacco. The past few months have been tough. She had taken voluntary leave of absence to spend some time in her own personal hell, and whenever she had thought she couldn’t take any more, she had found herself sinking lower still.
She had sat in a circle of chairs and thought: this has nothing to do with me. These people have nothing to do with me. What’s the point? But she was wrong, of course. Sitting in that circle of chairs she had learnt endurance. She learnt to cry and be angry. She got to know herself. She got to know the others. And one morning she had woken up and found that the grief she had felt for her lost friend had vanished, and with it her despair at the pointlessness of his death, her frantic search for a meaning. Instead she felt something new – something she hadn’t been looking for and certainly hadn’t expected to find; suddenly she was hungry for life.
Piet lights his cigarette. Judith stretches out her legs and rolls one for herself, then savours the blend of smoke and peppermint on her tongue. I wouldn’t mind staying here, she thinks – chatting to Piet, watching him paint, stroking the cat. She wonders what Charlotte made of Piet – a woman who seems to have spent her adult life alone with her dolls and her sick parents, meekly accepting of her mother and father’s definition of the meaning of life. Berthold is right, she thinks; Charlotte is in danger. How could it be otherwise? She lifts Charlotte’s picture onto her knees so that Piet can see it.
‘Did you paint this?’
He blows smoke up to the ceiling and nods. ‘Strange bird.’
‘Great picture. Who did you paint it for?’
‘You know her, don’t you? You have her picture.’
‘I knew her once. Now I’m looking for her. If we’re talking about the same person.’
‘Frau Simonis. She wouldn’t tell me her first name.’
‘This woman?’ Judith shows him the photo of Charlotte and her father hiking. ‘She’s older now.’
The artist takes his time, turning the picture into the light. Then he nods.
‘Charlotte Simonis,’ say Judith. ‘Tell me about her.’
‘I don’t know her.’
Judith smiles at him. Piet has sensual lips and dreamy eyes. Maybe she should kiss him – or at least ask him if he’d like a game of boules with her. Later, when the heat dies down. Nonsense, she thinks. A young artist with dreadlocks is no kind of solution. She clears her throat and sits up straighter.
‘Did you talk to her when she commissioned you to paint this? Did she come here?’
‘Yes, of course. But she didn’t say much. Somehow she was just as weird as her bird – kind of shy and mousy. But she had a real thing about this bird. She kept dropping in to make sure I was painting it right – every detail had to be perfect, the copy had to be absolutely identical to the original. She was obsessed about that – made a big deal of it on the phone, even before she came here. She didn’t relax until she could see that everything was turning out the way she wanted.’ He grins. ‘Customers! And you said you’re looking for her?’
‘What was the original?’
Piet’s face darkened. ‘I’m being really dense. That’s why you’ve come.’
‘What do you mean? What happened to it?’
‘I lost it. That’s not like me, I swear. Your friend was livid. I ended up having to take a hundred euros off the price just to calm her down a bit. And even months later she’d ring every so often and ask if I hadn’t found her postcard.’
‘But you hadn’t.’
‘No, it was lost for two years. But a few weeks ago my fridge broke and I had to pull it out – and what did I find behind it?’
‘The postcard?’
Piet nods. ‘I tried to get in touch with her straight away. But she’d given me a phone number at the uni, and apparently she didn’t work there any more. They gave me her private number, but no one picked up – and I don’t have her address.’
Judith doesn’t want to kiss him now; she has other things on her mind. She leans forward and looks Piet in the eye. ‘I need that postcard.’
‘Hang on a second. She’s my customer. Here I am talking away and I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Judith. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know a lot myself. But this postcard could help me find my old friend. I think she’s in trouble. Come on, Piet. Let me have a look at it, at least.’
‘Are you a detective, or what? You make it sound like a whodunnit.’
‘It’s really important.’ She won’t let him look away.
‘All right then, just for you.’ Piet vanishes behind the curtain and re-emerges with the postcard which he holds out to Judith. ‘Ontario’, it says above the loon. Piet really has done a good job; the painting looks like a photocopied enlargement of the postcard. ‘Dear Charlotte, One day we’ll make it come true, Terence’, someone has written on the back in bold black ink. Canada, Judith thinks. Charlotte went to Canada to make some dream come true with a bloke called Terence, and this curious bird has something to do with it. She feels a tingling on her skin, a tingling familiar to her from earlier investigations. It’s a good sign. It’s a warning.
*
The look the policewoman gives Tim reminds him of Frau Dolling. Her mouth smiles and her voice is friendly, but her eyes are keen and furtive. Her colleague looks all right, with his Nike trainers, faded jeans and blond chin-length hair, but he just sits there; he hasn’t said a word so far. Tim wishes he could disappear, like a baby clownfish between the tentacles of a sea anemone. When Finding Nemo was on at the cinema, Tim, of course, went to see it. And sure, it was a great film, an exciting film. But he knows from the books he’s read that real clownfish are cleverer than Nemo. Real clownfish don’t leave their host anemones, so they can’t be attacked by predators. Anemones sting; the poison in their tentacles can even harm humans, but it doesn’t bother clownfish, because they’ve grown up with it. In fact, when danger looms, clownfish pinch their host anemones, making them spread their tentacles over them in protection and discharge even more poison. Tim suppresses a sigh. He desperately wishes he had a protective anemone. Even more desperately, he wishes that his friend Jonny would come back from wherever he is – safe and sound, like silly Nemo.
‘So you’re friends with Jonny?’ says the policewoman, who was introduced to Jonny as Detective Inspector Bruckner. The headmaster had come to fetch Tim in the middle of a lesson and brought him to this empty classroom because the children in Jonny’s class had said that Jonny and Tim always spent break together.
‘There’s no need to be frightened, Tim.’ The policewoman makes eyes like a predatory fish.
‘I waited for Jonny this morning,’ says Tim. He knows his voice is too quiet, but there’s nothing he can do about it.
‘But he didn’t show up.’
‘No.’ He can’t tell this predator woman about Radebeul and give Jonny’s dream away. The policewoman shoots a rather sour look at her colleague and raises questioning eyebrows. He nods almost imperceptibly, props his elbows up on the table and looks at Tim. ‘Was there anyone Jonny didn’t like? Had he got into any fights recently?’
Tim shakes his head.
‘When did you last talk to him?’ The policewoman’s voice cuts between them. No excuses – that’s what that means. We have the power, so do as we tell you. The policeman in jeans makes a gesture as if to brush his colleague away. She purses her lips.
‘Friday evening.’ With horror Tim realises that tears shoot into his eyes as he recalls their afternoon at the quarry pond. Dr D. had looked so funny. Tim had given him one of his liver sausage sandwiches. They had dived and lain in the sun, and Tim had shared his latest deep-sea facts with Jonny, and told him about fish that are better at camouflaging themselves than humans. ‘Just wait,’ Jonny had said. ‘They’ll soon leave you alone. Believe me, Tim.’
‘Tim?’ the policeman in jeans says, unexpectedly friendly. ‘What happened on Friday?’
‘We went swimming,’ Tim whispers, ‘with Dr D.’
‘And at the weekend?’
‘Jonny was away with his dad.’
‘At the Red Indian camp.’
Tim nods.
‘Was he looking forward to it?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so?’
Believe me, Tim, I’m not lying, they’ll soon leave you alone. It’s as if Jonny were standing next to him, repeating the words. They’ll soon leave you alone. It had sounded so nice – so definite. It had sounded so unlikely. But Tim had believed Jonny all the same. Because he wanted to. Jonny’s optimism was Tim’s sea anemone. But he can’t tell that to the policeman. His nasty colleague would hear it too – so would the headmaster. And the headmaster would tell Jonny’s parents and Tim’s parents and his teachers – and soon Frau Dolling would know and his classmates would get wind of it, and everything would get worse and worse. They’d call him a traitor, a sneak, a toady, a mummy’s boy, an arse-licker. And, this time, there would be no Jonny to come to his rescue. This time Tim would be on his own.
The policeman’s phone rings. He answers brusquely, but a moment later his body tenses up.
‘I’ll come right away,’ he says.
‘Have they found Jonny?’ Tim doesn’t know where he gets the courage to ask this. The question is suddenly there and it sounds like a scream.
The grown-ups look at him in surprise.
‘No.’ The policeman in jeans gets up. ‘Bye, Tim. We’ll carry on talking later.’
*
At a kiosk Manni buys a litre bottle of Coke and a Snickers. His phone jingles; he stares at the display. His mother again. He rejects her call. He drinks the Coke in long draughts as he drives the official rust bucket back to Königsforst. The cold liquid and sugar combined with his anticipation at what the dog handlers are going to show him give him a refreshing kick. His mood is further improved by the thought that Bruckner is staying at school for the time being. Something about that woman annoys him intensely.
The sunlight glitters on the dog team vans which are parked on the Sioux camp grounds. Mike, a wiry, sandy-haired dog handler whom Manni knows from karate competitions, comes over as soon as he spots him. Mike’s dog, Tarzan, moves in sync with him as if the two of them were welded together.
‘I’ll take you there.’
They walk in silence, side by side, first on a broad footpath, then on a narrower, uneven bridleway which cuts through the woods. After about twenty minutes they come to an open strip, and it isn’t long before they see their colleagues, sitting on a pile of logs outside a hikers’ shelter. A bird caws overhead and then vanishes into the green canopy with a beating of wings. One of the sniffer dogs yelps. The hum of the motorway can be heard in the distance. Manni plants his right foot on a thick log and looks about him.
‘You’ve found something?’
One of the dog handlers points at the shelter.
‘In there. Arco was almost uncontrollable.’
‘And what—?’
‘Can’t see anything. But something happened in there, and it wasn’t anything nice.’
‘Shame Arco can’t talk.’
‘He can talk. Just not our language.’
‘And what does he say?’
‘Dogs can smell stress,’ Mike says. ‘When someone’s really scared, they give off a certain scent – “butyric acid smell”, it’s called.’
Manni approaches the shelter, a simple square hut, open on the path side, with a low sloping roof and benches along the inside walls. It’s empty.
‘OK, show me what you mean.’
‘Arco!’
The Belgian shepherd dog races into the shelter. In a corner of the hut he stops and makes a whimpering sound which soon gives way to a growl. In spite of the stifling heat, Manni breaks out in gooseflesh.
‘OK, so there was someone sitting on the bench in the corner feeling scared? And you’re sure Arco hasn’t made a mistake?’
‘Dogs have 247 million smell cells. We humans have a bare five million.’
‘Maybe it was an exhausted jogger?’
‘Arco would react differently then. He only makes a sound like that when he can smell panic. Terror.’
‘So it might have been our boy, in danger.’
‘Yes.’
‘But we can’t be sure.’
‘I’m afraid the dogs can’t tell us as precisely as that.’
Someone in panic, Manni thinks. Let’s assume that’s what it was – that it was Jonny Röbel sitting here in this hut. Why was he scared? What happened to him here? Did he call for help? Did anyone hear him? And what about his dog? Manni squats down and peers under the corner bench. Leaves, chewing gum papers, a drink carton, half a rotten apple. No boy, no dog. No blood, as far as he can tell. Manni gets up and leaves the hut, pulling out his phone.
‘We need Forensics. And please keep out of the hut from now on.’
‘Why do you think we’re waiting outside?’
‘OK, off you go, then. Let’s treat this shelter as a crime scene. Focus on the surroundings. If there’s any sign of the boy or his dog, or of a crime, I want to hear about it. And we’d better send for the other dogs.’
Manni rings Forensics and puts them in the picture. He spreads out his map on the log pile and gives them directions, describing the most direct access route. For the time being he has forgotten the afternoon heat hanging heavy between the trees; the dog squad, too, are throwing themselves into their work again. Will they find anything? Will Manni soon be turning over the investigation to the murder squad? Before he can resume puzzling over his boss’s caprices, he hears a shout from one of the men. Kurt is kneeling in the undergrowth not far from the shelter, holding Nancy by the collar. Manni sprints over to him. Something is lying in the leaves in front of the dog – something small and furry and nondescript, reeking of decay.
‘At first I thought it was just a dead squirrel or a large mouse,’ says Kurt. ‘But it’s something else.’
Manni takes a stick and turns the furry thing over. Scavengers have clearly been at work on it. The stench intensifies. The lower side of the furry thing is less hairy. Manni bends down closer and feels the Snickers curdling in his belly. The thing has neither head nor arms nor legs. There is a shimmer of blue.
‘A tattoo,’ Kurt says matter-of-factly. ‘The blue thing, I mean. Could be a dog licence number.’
Manni nods. ‘Could be a dog’s ear.’
‘Certainly isn’t a mouse. Wire-haired dachshund, did you say? It’s the right size and colour.’
‘But Nancy didn’t find anything else – just this . . . ear?’
Kurt shakes his head. ‘Nothing so far, I’m afraid.’
He must find out whether Jonny’s dachshund had a tattoo in its ear and, if so, he must take this stinking, half-eaten, furry thing to Karl-Heinz Müller in the Institute of Forensics and ask him to compare the DNA with the hairs in Jonny’s dog basket. Manni thinks of Martina Stadler – of the fear in her eyes. Do you have any idea who might have cut off your son’s dachshund’s ear? An impossible question, until he is absolutely certain that this thing really is part of Jonny’s dog.
‘The forensics team should be here any minute.’ Manni straightens up and looks across at the shelter. What the hell happened here? Who would torture a dachshund? Or was it already dead when its ear was cut off? Let’s hope so, Manni thinks. Let’s hope so. Not that it makes much difference, because either way the act of mutilation would have been quite enough to arouse panic and despair in a fourteen-year-old boy who loved his dog more than anything in the world.
*
Again Charlotte’s villa is threatening to stun Judith into a dull stupor. ‘Gavia immer, common loon,’ she reads in an ornithological handbook, ‘found mainly in Canada and North America.’ There are two English reference books on birds in the study and a folder of academic articles on the subject, but nothing personal belonging to Charlotte or her father – and certainly not to a man named Terence. The folders which once contained Charlotte’s Ph.D. notes (or say they did) are now empty. But Judith finds a list of university telephone numbers and makes an appointment with a Professor Wolfram, Charlotte’s former supervisor. Reluctantly he agrees to meet her later in the day. For the first time in months she misses her warrant card.
On the way to the university she buys a bottle of water and stops off at Melaten Cemetery. In a florist’s shop at the gate, she buys a bunch of snapdragons. There is something hopeful about the flowers, even if they are beginning to hang their heads by the time Judith reaches the familiar grave and arranges them in a vase. Judith rolls herself a cigarette. She has come here a lot in the last six months. She thinks of her ex-boyfriend Martin – Martin of the spicy pasta sauces and unwavering sympathy, who now has a job in a hospital in Erfurt. He was polite enough to ask her to go with him, but they both knew it wouldn’t work out. He had always been telling her to go and visit Patrick’s grave. By the time she got round to it, it was too late to save their relationship, but for some reason the hours in the cemetery have given her strength. Now, though, something has changed again – she can feel it, even if she can’t put her finger on it. She stamps out her cigarette and picks up the butt. The stone angel next to the birch tree smiles at her as if to say goodbye.
Clusters of indolent students are sunning themselves on the university lawns. The campus atmosphere recalls the glossy images of Ivy League universities. Happier with higher education is the message, but inside the alma mater the lecture halls are as hopelessly overcrowded and shabby as in Judith’s day, and the professors clearly haven’t changed their strategy of coping with the hordes of students, but continue to cut themselves off from the masses. Although the grey-haired secretary seems happy enough to show Judith into Charlotte’s supervisor’s inner sanctum, Judith has a funny feeling that the search for Charlotte is going to be tough.
‘Charlotte Simonis, a sad case.’ Hans-Hinrich Wolfram, professor of zoology at the University of Cologne, waves Judith to a wooden chair in front of his cluttered desk and pokes around impatiently in a meerschaum pipe. He’s a scrawny homunculus of about fifty with intelligent eyes, thinning reddish hair and a goatee.
‘Why sad?’ Judith asks.
‘A talented scholar – no question – and then she went and scuppered all chances of a career.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Do you know how many students get funding to do a Ph.D. here?’
‘Very few, I presume.’
The professor nods, as if she’s an exam candidate who’s given the right answer. ‘Charlotte Simonis stopped coming in. In the middle of term.’
‘Why?’
Wolfram fiddles with his pipe. ‘To be honest with you, I never understood.’
‘But she must have given some reason.’
‘Her mother got cancer.’ A spray of saliva lands on one of the stacks of paper that cover the professor’s desk.
‘You didn’t believe her?’
‘Her mother had cancer. Is that a reason to chuck everything in?’ He gestures towards the dusty metal shelves, groaning under the weight of academic tomes and papers. ‘Her father was horrified too.’
‘Wilhelm Simonis.’
‘A first-rate geneticist, highly gifted.’
‘You knew him personally?’
‘A highly esteemed colleague of mine.’
‘Maybe he asked his daughter to care for her mother.’
‘I told you, he was horrified.’
Maybe he lied to you, Judith thinks. Maybe you didn’t notice, because you didn’t want to accept that your hard-working assistant was more interested in doing her father’s will than in doing a Ph.D. But even if that was the case, what did it tell her about Charlotte’s disappearance? For a split second, Judith sees an adolescent Charlotte before her, cowering along the grimy school corridors as if seeking cover from snipers. She sees herself as a schoolgirl, pretending she hasn’t noticed. And now here she is in Charlotte’s former place of work, poking around in her life. What right does she have to be here?
She recalls the loon in her dream. Its red, unblinking gaze was a message – but what kind of message? A warning? A reproach? A cry for help? I don’t know, Judith thinks – it was only a dream. But the concern she feels for Charlotte; her old fear of coming too late; the oppressiveness of the deserted, impersonal house – those are real. Get a grip, she tells herself. But Charlotte has forced her way into Judith’s thoughts like a recently discovered member of the family – perhaps a half-sister she hadn’t known about. You can’t get rid of relatives like that once you’ve found them; there’s no going back – no getting away from them. Once they’re in your head they’re there to stay, because however much you may dislike the idea, they are inextricably bound up with your own identity.
Judith suddenly realises that she has been silent for too long. The professor is rummaging through a pile of folders. He doesn’t want to talk to Judith, he doesn’t want to wait for her questions and he certainly has no desire to talk about Charlotte – that is patently obvious. But she can’t let that deter her; she has to fathom Charlotte’s secret, if only so that she can stop having to think about her. She leans forward a little, determined to regain the professor’s attention.
‘Did you ever see Charlotte and her father together?’ The pipe bobs up and down in the corner of Wolfram’s mouth as he leafs through papers with growing impatience. ‘Of course I did. The institute isn’t exactly big.’
‘What was their relationship like?’
‘Neither of them wore their hearts on their sleeves, and they kept their private lives to themselves.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Listen. You told me you were worried about your school friend. I really don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve by delving into the past like this. Wilhelm is dead.’
‘So their relationship was not untroubled.’ Judith was once famous for her interrogation techniques. Now she feels the old power stirring. The words come easily.
The professor realises that something has changed. He blows a furious cloud of pipe smoke into Judith’s face. ‘Wilhelm was a luminary – highly eloquent, highly charismatic – a star, as they say nowadays. And his daughter was . . .’
‘An ugly duckling?’
‘You could put it like that. Quiet. Hard-working. Talented. But without any of Wilhelm’s charisma.’
‘Did that make it hard for her here at the institute?’
‘No.’
‘Did she argue with her father?’
‘They did once have an academic dispute.’
‘What was it about?’
Wolfram looks pointedly at his watch. ‘This really is going too far. Let’s say that Wilhelm would have preferred it if his daughter had devoted herself to genetics or biochemistry rather than zoology.’
‘But she stuck to zoology.’ Judith isn’t prepared to let him off the hook yet.
He darts a glance at her.
‘What was her area of research? What was her Ph.D. on?’
‘Behavioural research. The social structure of rats – although she was a highly gifted morphologist.’
‘Morphologist?’
‘In layman’s terms, she was extremely good at dissecting and preserving animals.’ The professor gives a thin smile, revealing a row of yellowing teeth.
‘Was she interested in water birds?’
He looks at Judith in surprise. ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Gavia immer – common loon. Does that mean anything to you in connection with Charlotte Simonis?’
‘That was later.’ He pushes a pile of papers into a worn briefcase, looks at his watch again and gets up.
‘Later?’ Judith shows no sign of preparing to leave. Perhaps he’ll simply walk off and leave her here. But she has a feeling he’ll want to protect his documents from her.
‘About three years ago.’ A point for Judith. The professor lowers his scrawny bottom onto the corner of the desk. ‘Frau Simonis came back to teach at the institute on a temporary basis after her mother’s death. She supervised morphological experiments.’
‘And dissected loons?’
‘That’s just what she didn’t do.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Gavia immer.’ Another spray of saliva. ‘A stray specimen turned up in a reservoir near Düren. Very unusual. Charlotte Simonis and some of our students watched it for days. But the bird died. They brought it here and Charlotte was supposed to direct the morphological examination. But she refused point blank – said it went against nature. Another Ph.D. student took over. The report will be knocking around somewhere, I’m sure. Ask my secretary.’
‘And Charlotte?’
‘That was her last day at the institute.’
The professor is suddenly determined to leave his office. Judith leaps up and bars his way. ‘So she left over a dispute.’
‘It was the second time she discredited herself as a scientist. She wasn’t interested in staying on.’
The professor wriggles past Judith, opens the door and holds it open for her.
‘How did Charlotte’s father react? Was he disappointed? Angry? Sad?’
The professor jams his briefcase under his arm. ‘If you really want to know, he laughed.’
‘You mean he laughed openly at his daughter? Here at the institute?’
‘I really don’t have any more time.’ The professor quickens his pace; it almost looks as if he’s running away.
‘Who’s Terence?’ Judith calls out after him.
She can tell from the way his shoulders stiffen that he knows the name. But he hurries on down the corridor without stopping. She catches up with him as he’s pushing open the glass door to the staircase.
‘Terence from Canada. Does the name mean anything to you?’
The professor sprints down the stairs.
*
Wolfram’s secretary is called Irene Hummel. She gives Judith a look that makes it clear she isn’t prepared to sacrifice a second of her precious time for a stranger. But her steely-grey no-nonsense attitude melts into almost schoolgirlish enthusiasm when Judith mentions the name Terence.
‘Terence Atkinson,’ she breathes. ‘Such a charming man. A brilliant academic, but very sensual too – everyone was a little in love with him.’
‘What about Charlotte?’
‘Yes, Charlotte was in love with him.’ Irene Hummel nods vigorously. ‘Insofar as such a shy person could be said to be in love.’
The next few minutes prove productive. Irene Hummel turns out to be a keen observer of the Institute of Biology and its staff. Judith discovers that Terence from Toronto was a frequent visitor to the Simonis household and that, like Charlotte’s father, who had invited him to Cologne for a year, he was a geneticist. But he had also been a passionate nature lover, fond of regaling his colleagues with stories from Canada involving bears, beavers, elks and loons. He’d had a particular weakness for loons.
‘Do you think it possible that he invited Charlotte to Canada?’ Judith holds out the postcard to Irene Hummel.
She examines the picture and studies the back with a frown. Then she shakes her head.
‘One day we’ll make it come true – that can mean anything or nothing, can’t it?’
‘It isn’t very specific. But combined with the image of the loon, I think it might be a kind of promise.’
‘Terence was very polite,’ Irene Hummel observes.
‘You think he didn’t mean what he said?’
‘I’m sure he wanted to be nice, no doubt about that.’
Nice, Judith thinks. A young and charming colleague, a protégé of Charlotte’s father. What exactly did being nice entail? How serious was it? And, above all, how did Charlotte interpret his niceness?
The secretary gets up and plucks a photo off the pinboard behind her.
‘That’s Terence,’ she announces, pointing to an extremely good-looking dark-haired man, as if the picture made any further questions unnecessary.
*
In spite of his efforts to hide it, Martina Stadler can sense the restlessness buzzing around Inspector Korzilius like a swarm of hornets. It’s a new restlessness and her body reacts to it immediately with a shudder. They’ve found him in the woods, she thinks, drawing the loosely knitted shawl tighter about her shoulders – her winter scarf which she got out of the coat cupboard last night when she could no longer cope with this biting cold which is gnawing at her body. She couldn’t bring herself to crawl into bed with Frank, to take refuge in his arms, his robust warmth. She looks at her husband’s face and it seems to have changed over night; it is more angular – harsher, somehow. He’s hiding something, and the police have noticed. They’ve been out in the woods all day long – with their dogs, Martina thinks, and the thought makes her shudder. Please, God, don’t let the inspector say something’s happened to Jonny. Please, I couldn’t bear it.
She places the torch carefully on the kitchen table, offers the inspector a seat, pours him a glass of water, asks if he’s hungry. He says he isn’t, but she opens the fridge all the same and stares into it. It requires an inordinate amount of strength to shut it again, because she knows that once that’s done, she has no choice but to join him at the kitchen table and endure what she doesn’t want to endure.
‘Please, Tina, I shouldn’t think the inspector has much time.’ Frank’s voice is deep and familiar, and so controlled it makes Martina want to scream.
She walks towards the table, but can it be called walking? Her knees are like jelly; her feet so cold she can’t feel them. The chair makes an ugly scraping noise on the floorboards when she pulls it out, but she doesn’t care. She sits down and clasps Jonny’s torch with her cold fingers, resisting the urge to try it out again to see if it’s still working. It is her link to her sister’s son, the boy she learnt to love as if he were her own child, but who was also so much more than that – a living memory of his mother Susanne, a consolation.
‘I’d like to know whether your son’s dog has a licence number in its ear. You know, one of those tattoos,’ says Detective Inspector Korzilius. He really is nervous; his leg is jiggling under the table.
‘Yes, Dr D. has a licence number,’ says Frank. ‘Why, have you found him?’
‘It will make it easier for us to identify him if we do find him.’ The inspector fixes his eyes on the glass of water. He’s like Frank, she thinks – he’s hiding something.
‘I want to know what you’ve found in the woods.’ Martina’s voice is shrill; she sees the men flinch. She can’t help it.
‘We will let you know, of course, as soon as there are any developments in the investigation.’ This time the inspector looks at Martina, but it does nothing to reassure her; the pity she thinks she can see in his eyes surges through her body in another sudden shiver.
‘We’ve rung up all the animal shelters – Dr D. isn’t there.’ Frank talks to the inspector as if Martina weren’t there.
‘Can you look up the licence number for me?’
‘Of course.’ Frank jumps to his feet.
‘Saturday afternoon,’ says the inspector as soon as Frank has left the kitchen. ‘So far none of the Sioux of Cologne have made statements suggesting that Jonny was in the camp after 3 p.m.’
‘So he didn’t sleep in the camp?’
‘No. At any rate not in the Bear Clan tent where he’d left his rucksack and sleeping bag.’
Cold – such cold and such fear. Jonny’s been out alone for two nights now. Her knuckles are all white from clutching the torch. No sleeping bag, no jacket, no light. All alone. It’s not right. It’s not possible. There must be some explanation – some solution, some salvation.
Frank comes back. Without a word, he places Dr D.’s dog licence on the table. The inspector glances at it, and his look is inscrutable. Finally he stops jiggling his foot and looks at Frank.
‘Herr Stadler, where were you between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Saturday?’
‘Here and there at the camp and a bit in the woods.’
‘No,’ says the inspector. ‘You weren’t at the camp.’
The day is like lead. It weighs down Elisabeth’s arms and legs, melts to a gooey mass in the heat and runs down her back, sending spasms of pain through her body. It gushes into her veins, thickening her blood and threatening to slow her breathing and hamper her movement. As evening approaches, she heaves herself up from the kitchen sofa and drags herself out to her chair under the cherry tree. Barabbas doesn’t leave her side, as if he scents disaster looming – as if to protect her from something. Elisabeth sits down on the grey, weather-beaten armchair and musters all her strength to fondle her dog’s neck. The Alsatian lays his muzzle on Elisabeth’s knees with a slight sigh and closes his eyes. He still trusts me, she thinks. He’s forgotten what I did to him. My dog, my companion, my friend. She sends a silent prayer of thanks to her Maker.
It is very quiet; only the sound of the blackbirds overhead, squabbling over the cherries. No one came to cover it in netting this year. Next weekend, Carmen’s supposed to be helping to pick the fruit, but Elisabeth decides not to remind her. If the worst comes to the worst, the cherries will just have to rot. Hiding things from her daughter over the phone is one thing; Carmen in the flesh is quite another, and Elisabeth doesn’t feel up to seeing her cold-eyed daughter scan the house and its ageing occupant for signs of decrepitude.
Don’t think of Carmen – not now. And don’t ever tell her what happened yesterday. She must keep quiet at all costs; she must protect Barabbas. But her memories persist – flickering silhouettes dancing before her eyes, teasing her, tormenting her. Barabbas rolling in the dirt. His sudden absence. A noise Elisabeth can’t interpret – a noise she isn’t even sure she heard. And something else that she saw and yet didn’t. Then nothing – only terrifying blackness and no Barabbas – and finally his hunched back and ears, that awful throaty growl. The dachshund, savaged to death. Without a collar, without an owner, one ear missing. Scabbed blood, where the ear should have been, but no bite marks; a clean cut. A fly trying to feed on the dog’s eye.
Time creeps on as Elisabeth’s thoughts run wild. Barabbas is asleep on the grass, his head resting on her left foot. How familiar he is to her – how gentle – how innocent. And yet he killed. But Elisabeth feels no hate; only fear. She feels no disgust; only regret that she didn’t keep a closer eye on him – and that she beat him. It’s always the humans, she thinks – always the humans who are responsible for the real atrocities. Who cut off the dachshund’s ear? Who left it to its fate in the woods in that mutilated state? Or perhaps it wasn’t alone after all? The thought fills her with an anxiety she doesn’t understand. She groans. Tomorrow she’ll go and make sure the dachshund can rest in peace – make sure she hasn’t overlooked anything. Elisabeth shuts her eyes, begging God to give her strength.
*
The traffic on the road to the Severin Bridge is slow as the setting sun beats down through the open roof. Judith puts on the tuneful jazz of East German duo Friend and Fellow in an attempt to calm her nerves. Millstätt has summoned her to headquarters, which might be a good sign – but then again, it might not. I want my job back, thinks Judith. I don’t want him to transfer me. She lights a cigarette and tries to concentrate on the music, but it’s no good.
Her afternoon has been spent doing routine work. She talked to Charlotte’s gardener and cleaning woman, and to several neighbours, but found out nothing new. She read through Irene Hummel’s photocopies over latte macchiato in a pavement cafe. She paced the villa again, trying to conjure up the images painted for her by Professor Wolfram and his secretary. An ugly duckling in the shadow of her father – hard-working, but without real ambition, timid and reclusive. And a charming young man who told her stories of another world, a frequent visitor to the house until he disappeared back to Canada and sent her a glimmer of hope in the form of a postcard. Then one day a real loon had turned up in a reservoir near Düren. It must have seemed to Charlotte like a message from Atkinson – no wonder she didn’t want to dissect the bird. Instead she had honoured the Canadian scientist’s memory by commissioning Piet to paint the loon – and presumably she had continued to dream of being an ornithologist at Atkinson’s side all the time she was nursing her father. Then Wilhelm Simonis died and his thirty-nine-year-old daughter dared to hang the sacred painting in his study. And she flew to Toronto; that has been confirmed by a travel agent round the corner from the villa. The return flight was booked for 25 June, but Charlotte let it expire.
‘I’ll ring this Atkinson – and the Canadian police too, if that’s what you want,’ Judith had suggested to Berthold.
‘No, you must fly to Canada,’ he had replied. ‘I’ll pay.’
‘You’re crazy,’ she had said, hanging up.
She reaches the district of Kalk and parks near the Cologne Arcades shopping centre. Vacant-faced teenagers, styled according to the norms of MTV, hang about outside this consumer temple which has been conjured out of thin air on the site of the chemical plant that was once the area’s main employer. No one put a stop to this cynical bit of urban development. Two barefoot drug addicts cower on the steps, oblivious to everything going on around them, trapped in their own wrecked worlds.
There are new receptionists in the lobby at headquarters; they call Judith’s department to make sure she works there before waving her through into the area of the building closed to the public, where Division 11 has its offices. Judith hasn’t been here for six months, but everything is familiar: the squeak of the glass door as it clicks shut behind her, the sound of her footsteps on the stone floor, the slight shudder of the lift as it approaches its destination. She enters the combination code and pushes the door to Division 11. The code, at least, hasn’t changed, and the smell, too, is the same mixture of burnt coffee, cigarette smoke and paper dust. Somebody has overdone the aftershave. It is oppressively hot. The air conditioning is evidently unable to cope with the record-breaking summer. Something flutters in Judith’s stomach. She didn’t have lunch, and it’s almost evening.
‘Judith!’ Axel Millstätt comes out into the corridor, a stack of manila folders under his arm. ‘Go on in – I’ll be with you in a moment . . . Got to get this off.’
Millstätt’s office is generously proportioned and immaculately tidy. Nothing personal on the walls, only a street map stuck with plastic flags and a magnet board covered in duty rosters, lists of phone numbers and information on current investigations. Two glasses and a bottle of mineral water are set out on a table. Judith goes over to the magnet board. An African of unknown identity has been stabbed by an equally unknown offender and left to bleed to death. A fifty-one-year-old banker’s wife from the upmarket district of Hahnwald has been literally boiled to death, probably by her husband. Investigation Team Tourist is hunting desperately for a serial killer who is targeting tourists in the city’s historic centre. On the eleventh floor of a tower block in Ehrenfeld a semi-decomposed corpse has been discovered; everything points to death following excessive alcohol consumption with no third-party involvement.
‘Not a lot’s changed, as you can see,’ says Millstätt, coming into the room.
Judith turns round. ‘Yes, the usual madness. At least we’re unlikely to be made redundant.’ She hopes she sounds calm and businesslike.
‘They do their best.’ Millstätt smiles unpleasantly. ‘Last week I had some idiot from the ministry who stuck around in my office for hours, gassing on about synergies he’d like to see promoted here. I’m afraid I couldn’t help him.’
‘Although you were dying to, of course.’
Millstätt gestures to the table. ‘Sit down. You’re looking good, Judith.’
‘Thank you.’ She puts the results of her official medical examination on the table. ‘I’m in good health too.’
Millstätt’s chocolatey eyes wander to the envelope, but then fix on her face.
‘Officially . . .’
‘And unofficially.’ She sounds like an overeager schoolgirl; she can’t help herself. She didn’t come here to talk about her appearance; she wants her job back and that means convincing Millstätt that she can be trusted again. That crazy moment when she and Manni arrived too late in that bloody forest clearing suddenly seems like yesterday. It was then that Millstätt had transferred Manni, although she had begged him not to. But he was hardly going to listen to her, was he? Not after she’d messed everything up and applied for leave.
‘Quite a few of your colleagues are buggering off on holiday next week, two are off sick, and there’s no shortage of work. So don’t expect to be eased in gently or anything.’ Millstätt is still looking at her searchingly, as if he were weighing things up.
‘I don’t need easing in gently.’ Again she has spoken too hastily. She forces herself not to lower her eyes. What does he see when he looks at her? An unstable element or someone worth backing? Impossible to tell. She thinks of the truths bandied about in the circle of chairs: You can’t control everything in life; you can’t deny your feelings. Accept, let go, forgive yourself. It was always the same, always incredibly banal. She forces herself to hold Millstätt’s gaze. I want to come back, she thinks. You’re right, I wasn’t sure for a long time; I ran away. But that’s over now. Believe me, it’s over.
Suddenly, Millstätt’s expression relaxes and, with an offhand gesture, he tosses the medical report into a filing tray behind him, as if to get rid of it once and for all. But of course it doesn’t work like that, she thinks, half an hour later, when she’s standing alone in the lift, pressing her forehead against the cool metal wall. Division 11 was once home to her; being a murder investigator had given her life meaning. Then, when Patrick was killed, death became intolerable to her. She thinks she’s over that now; she’s coming back. But that doesn’t mean she can carry on as if nothing’s happened. Not all her colleagues have as much confidence in her as Millstätt – and even with him she’s on thin ice.
Her phone signals a text message as the lift descends with its familiar jerkiness. Judith stares at the display in disbelief: ‘Booked flight Frankfurt–Toronto tomorrow 1.05 p.m. Business Class. Open return. Call me, Berthold.’
*
Manni pulls his office door shut behind him and hurries along the stuffy corridor to the stairs. He needs something to eat. He needs a break. He can’t put it off any longer; his stomach is rumbling, his head feels dull. He wishes he could drive home and have a shower and change his sweaty clothes; his nylon trainers are unpleasantly tight after dashing around the woods all day, but a proper break is out of the question. First he must go through the lists and interview notes that Bruckner left on his desk. He must get hold of Karl-Heinz Müller at Forensics and somehow get across to him that the analysis of what he thinks is a dachshund’s ear can’t wait, even if there isn’t a corpse to go with it. He has reports to write. He has to check the latest missing persons reports; he has to think about his interrogation of the Stadlers – and then there’s his mother who won’t leave him in peace. At some point he’s going to have to find ten minutes to call her, not that the prospect of plumbing the depths of her broken marriage to his obstinate, wheelchair-bound father is an alluring one.
He leaps down the last steps to the ground floor, sprints towards the exit and crashes into a woman who must have come out of one of the lifts without looking right or left. Something clatters onto the floor and smashes. A phone, Manni realises – he must have knocked it out of the woman’s hand. She emits a savage curse and squats down to examine the damage.
‘Shit, fuck, sorry, I really didn’t . . .’ Manni bends down too and picks up a piece he identifies as the battery. He holds it out to her. The woman brushes unruly reddish curls out of her tanned face and looks at Manni. Really, he thinks, this is all he needs – a touching reunion is the last thing he has time for. But there’s nothing he can do about it – it’s Krieger.
‘Judith!’
‘Hello, Manni.’ She gets up, fragments of phone in her left hand. ‘If my address book’s gone, I’m done for.’
‘May I?’ He reaches out his hand, cursing himself because he has no time for this – but then again, he did almost mow her down.
She hands him the pieces and smiles – once, he seems to remember, a rare event. In fact, he thinks, she looks altogether different – younger, positively attractive. It isn’t just the tan, which makes her complexion more regular and her freckles less noticeable; it’s something to do with the way she carries herself, something in her expression. She’s lost weight too and her clothes accentuate this – a tight black spaghetti top, a semi-transparent blouse, loose, sand-coloured trousers and Jesus boots. Her toenails are varnished black, which looks peculiarly sexy. Suddenly he realises he’s staring at Krieger and that she’s noticed. He swiftly turns his attention to her phone.
‘When did we last see each other?’ It’s as if she can read his thoughts. ‘Anyway, a lot’s happened since. I’m coming back next week.’
Manni pushes the cover flap onto the back of the phone. Nothing seems to be missing or damaged, and he holds it out to Judith. Suddenly he is uncertain how to phrase the question he wants to ask, but again she answers before he’s found a way.
‘Division 11. I’ve just been to see Millstätt.’ She takes her phone, switches it on, taps around on it and gives a sigh of relief. ‘Looks good. Thanks for the repair work. Can I buy you a drink – or are you in a hurry?’
‘I was on my way to get a bite to eat.’ Manni’s too hungry to come up with an excuse and, besides, it’s not her fault he was transferred. In fact, he’d heard that she put in a good word for him with Millstätt, so he can’t blame her for what happened. Even so, just seeing her opens up the old wounds. Stop it, man, just stop it, self-pity won’t get you anywhere. He quickens his pace instinctively. If he hurries, if he does a good job, if he finds this boy, dead or alive, and doesn’t make any mistakes this time, maybe Millstätt will let him come back. And if he gets in Judith Krieger’s good books, that would at least give him a line to Division 11.
His colleague walks beside him in silence and after a few minutes they come to Dimitri’s Grill in Taunusstrasse. Manni orders a kebab ‘with everything’ and a large fizzy apple juice; Judith orders Greek salad and mineral water. She’s on a diet, thinks Manni. Maybe she has a new boyfriend. He brushes aside the thought of Judith having sex. Dimitri has put blue-and-white folding chairs and tables from IKEA out on the pavement; they’re seriously uncomfortable, but at least they’re in the shade. Manni downs his juice in one draught, orders another and stretches out his legs. The pressure behind his forehead subsides, which is a good thing because Dimitri’s sirtaki music is wailing out onto the street, and Dimitri himself, as oblivious as ever, is whistling along to it as he saws strips of meat off the spit. The no-hopers and losers typical of the district shuffle past, shell suits apparently a compulsory fashion item for them even in the middle of summer.
As Judith and Manni eat, they talk about this and that, both making an effort to avoid the controversial topic of disciplinary transfer, and not to let the pauses get too long. Judith, Manni realises, isn’t happy about being allowed back to Division 11 when he’s still at Missing Persons, although she doesn’t say so in so many words. She tells him she’s spending her last days of leave tracking down a missing classmate who seems to have disappeared in Canada. In return, Manni outlines his hunt for Jonny Röbel. It does him good to get even a fraction of his thoughts off his chest, and Judith’s precise questions and her way of listening to him make him miss the work in the murder squad. Stop it, man. They order Greek coffee and get the bill and Judith insists on treating him. Then they say goodbye in a side street, where Judith unlocks a dark blue 2CV and fiddles around with the roof. Her retro fetish, of course – he’d almost forgotten, but it goes perfectly with the painted toenails. He recalls her seventies record collection, which he inadvertently sampled on his only visit to her flat, at a time when the one-time star investigator of Division 11 was at her lowest ebb and he was still convinced he had everything under control and Millstätt on his side.
‘New car?’
‘A small fit of nostalgia. A thirty-ninth birthday present to myself.’
‘Very nice. But weren’t they green and white?’
She blushes a little, but smiles. ‘I had it repainted; it isn’t a service vehicle.’
Service vehicles. It’s past 7 p.m. and he’s in with a chance of landing something that doesn’t look as if it’s ready for the scrap heap. That decides him. The deskwork can wait and he can make phone calls from the car. He’ll go and check out the motorway lay-by before it gets dark, and find out whether there’s a negotiable path from there to the shelter where fourteen-year-old Jonny Röbel maybe looked on in blind horror as some heartless bastard cut off his dog’s ear. Is Frank Stadler capable of such brutality?
On Saturday afternoon Stadler was away from the camp for longer than he claimed – that’s the upshot of their interviews with the other campers. But a solitary walk does not in itself constitute a crime; after all, plenty of the Sioux of Cologne, including Big Chief Hagen Petermann, say they were out alone in the woods. And neither Stadler nor any of the other amateur Indians has a previous conviction. What happened in Königsforst? Manni asks himself for what must be the hundredth time. The terrain around the hut is extremely hard going, full of scrub and brambles; the dog squad hadn’t found any more leads when they knocked off. The lay-by, Manni thinks. I should have insisted they check that too. The boy and his dachshund must have gone somewhere; they can’t have vanished into thin air. Maybe someone drove off with them – in which case we can turn over every stick in Königsforst and we still don’t have a chance in hell of finding anything. Or perhaps there was no crime and the boy simply hitched a ride somewhere?
His ex-team partner gets into her retro banger. The engine jerks to life with a shallow-chested cough and she waves and chugs off, a snatch of seventies rock drifting out of the folding roof to him in goodbye. When does she get back in Division 11? What was it she said? In a week? Can he solve the Jonny Röbel case by then? Can he save the boy? And what if Jonny is dead – will Detective Superintendent Judith Krieger start back at work with Manni’s investigation file on her desk? Manni digs a Fisherman’s Friend out of the packet and crunches it between his teeth, the hotness numbing the inside of his mouth, vying with Dimitri’s garlic sauce. The heat hangs heavy on the asphalt, and the other passers-by drag themselves along like zombies, but Manni quickens his pace.
*
‘Where were you on Saturday afternoon?’ Martina Stadler asks in a husky, whispery voice that even she finds sinister. Somehow, in all its monstrous unbearableness, the day has passed. She is doomed to wait. Jonny is alive – she can feel that – but all is not well with him; he’s in danger and she can do nothing to save him. No one seems to know a thing; no one seems to have a clue where Jonny is. Marlene and Leander spent the afternoon at Frank’s parents’, but to avoid unnecessary worry, she and Frank decided the children should come home to sleep. Frank went to fetch them and they forced themselves to act out a semblance of ordinary life, telling the little ones that Jonny and Dr D. were only on holiday. Supper, play, bath, bedtime story – the usual ritual. Never had it required so much strength. Never had it seemed so meaningless to Martina. And almost as soon as the kids were in bed, that blond inspector had come round and asked his awful questions.
Frank is sitting motionless at the kitchen table, staring at the wooden top which is covered with smears of tomato ketchup and soft cheese. He isn’t listening to her, isn’t answering her, shut off in his own world. Where’s Jonny’s torch? There, on the windowsill. She must take more care of the torch – it’s the least she can do. Martina feels the metal between her fingers; every ridge, every groove, every scratch is so familiar to her that she would find this torch blindfold from among a whole collection of torches. That would be sure to fascinate Jonny – Hey, Tini, you could go on You Bet! That would be cool. It’s almost as if she can hear his voice.
‘Frank, please, I have to know. Where were you on Saturday afternoon? What were you doing?’
Now he looks at her, as if from very far away, his eyes bloodshot.
‘You were there when I answered the inspector’s questions. Isn’t that enough for you?’
‘In the woods, you were in the woods. Alone in the woods. But why?’
He doesn’t bat an eyelid, although this strange voice, which is apparently hers, is screaming at him.
‘Please, Martina, the children are asleep.’ Matter-of-fact. Controlled.
‘The children! What do you care about them? It isn’t as if you looked after Jonny!’
She knows at once that she’s gone too far. She let him provoke her with his calmness; the words came flying out of her mouth before she could stop them and now she wants to take them back, suck them in again, because she can’t bear the look on Frank’s face as he gets up, slowly, dangerously slowly, as if in shock. Martina presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
‘That’s what you think, eh? That it’s my fault?’
She shakes her head – left, right, left, right – like a string puppet gone crazy.
‘Maybe you should ring that inspector and tell him you don’t believe me either – my own wife. Maybe it would be best if you had me arrested straight away.’
‘No, Frank, no.’ Her head’s still moving back and forth; she can’t stop it, and now she’s beginning to tremble too. Her damn words, her damn tongue – faster than her brain, and offensive and wounding. She can’t bear it – not this too, on top of everything else. She’s so cold.
Then Frank takes a step towards her, a lurching movement, and she feels his arms around her, picking her up, staggering back to the bench with her. He lowers himself back down, still clinging tightly to Martina, and she curls up on his lap, huddles up in his warmth, hides in his arms, and he presses his face into her hair – her man, her darling man, who knows what’s going on inside her, who forgives her – and she cries on his shoulder, cries all the tears she has been holding back to spare the children. And for a second, a millisecond, she draws something like courage out of this new-found tenderness and it seems to her impossible that anything could have happened to Jonny, or that Frank, her wonderful, gentle, kind-hearted husband and the father of her children, should be in any way involved. Because she loves him.
*
Judith’s flat still holds the heat of the day. She fills a glass with tap water, rolls herself a cigarette and goes out on the roof terrace. Swifts shoot out from some of Cologne’s oldest buildings into the pale purple sky, strangely in sync with one another, as if at a secret signal. Judith props her elbows on the railing and watches them as she smokes. When she first read Berthold’s text message, she was too taken aback to feel anything. Then she had felt anger at his presumption. And a moment later there had been Manni to think about. She’d been wanting to get in touch with him for ages, but the time had never seemed right. In a way, then, it was serendipitous that they’d bumped into each other. They’d have met at headquarters next week anyway – and who knows what she’ll be dealing with by then. She only hopes it won’t be the missing boy, because that would only exacerbate Manni’s wounded pride.
They had both done their best to act normal in the Greek joint where her ex-colleague is clearly a regular – and that was about as much as you could expect of them for the moment, as long as Manni hadn’t been moved back to Division 11. I’ll do what I can for you, she promises silently. The trouble is I’ve lost my good standing and don’t know if I have a chance of recovering it.
She stubs out her cigarette on the railing, wipes off the ash with her finger and resists the urge to roll herself another fag straight away. The moment before Millstätt threw her medical results into the filing tray – that millisecond of uncertainty – had made her realise something she hadn’t previously confessed to herself. She wants her job back, and although being afraid is a bad idea in the circumstances, she is terrified. She is terrified of failing again. That makes her vulnerable.
She goes back inside. The painting of Charlotte’s loon is lying on the living room floor, its red eyes staring up at Judith, strangely astute, as if it knows something she has yet to find out. Charlotte hadn’t cancelled or rescheduled her return flight from Canada; she had let it expire. Berthold is right, of course. Considering that Charlotte’s life is ruled by bad luck rather than good, it would seem entirely justified to make an enquiry or two on the other side of the Atlantic. Is anyone missing Charlotte? It looks as if Berthold Pretorius is the only one – a depressing total for almost four decades of life. But what right have I to judge her? Judith thinks. How many weeks would it have been before anyone broke down the door to my flat when I was at my lowest ebb? And why? Because they missed me? Or because the neighbours were bothered by the nasty smell and the overflowing letterbox?
Yes, she had thought of killing herself. That is one truth. But the other side of the same truth is that she didn’t do it. ‘Charlotte thought the world of you,’ Berthold had told her. But Judith hadn’t liked Charlotte. Although she had felt a certain solidarity with her at school, she had rebuffed her attempts to make friends, just as she had later rebuffed so many other attempts to get close to her. She and her brother were constantly uprooted as children, because her father was forever trying his luck in a new town and it had never seemed safe to make friends. Patrick had been an exception; Judith had never kept him at a distance. After his brutal death, though, she had shut herself off from the world again, just as she had done as a teenager. No closeness, no pain – that was her logic. But that is not only arrogant; it is also cowardly.
Maybe it’s time to head off. Maybe she’s already left it too long. She goes to her bureau and leafs through Irene Hummel’s photocopies again. Detail-obsessed academic jargon, so aloofly objective as to be almost brutal. The common loon on the lake near Düren had swallowed a fish hook which had ‘lodged in its upper pharynx’; the line had become entangled around the bird’s foot so that it was unable to catch fish or preen and oil its feathers. Charlotte and the other students could only look on helplessly as it starved to death. A creature of the wilderness, unable to survive the wild, thanks to the carelessness of man. All a bit much, thinks Judith. But it probably came to be the only truth Charlotte knew.
Judith tries to imagine Charlotte in those dank December weeks three and a half years ago, shoulders hunched in a parka, stiff fingers holding binoculars to eyes that were too far apart for her to have been considered a beauty. What did she feel? That, of course, was not recorded; the report only provides a matter-of-fact statement of what she did. When it was clear that the loon was unable to feed itself, Charlotte Simonis tried to rise above the laws of nature and the golden rule that scientists should let nature alone. She called the fire brigade, who attempted to catch the loon with the aid of a speedboat and a net. But in spite of its weakened condition, the bird repeatedly escaped the firemen’s clutches to dive into the bottomless lake. ‘The bird repeatedly dived deep into the lake and swam approx. 80m lengths, surfacing only briefly to breathe,’ the report observes. ‘Its energy reserves were unexpectedly high after at least 5–6 days without food.’ Ten days later, Charlotte found the bird lying dead on the dry shore. ‘The loon apparently made its way onto land to die.’
Judith pushes the report aside and gets up. Something propels her up; something about this report is as oppressive as everything in Charlotte’s life. What did she feel when she found the dead bird? Judith goes back out onto the roof terrace and stares up at the sky. She walks over to the bench, but doesn’t sit down. Charlotte had refused to dissect the bird; according to Irene Hummel, she’d been completely hysterical. It had been the end of her career and her own father had laughed at her for it.
Suddenly Judith remembers what it was like at school – all that whispering and laughing. The handful of teenagers who mercilessly decreed what was tolerated and what scorned, bullying anyone who didn’t conform. The look on Charlotte’s face when they laughed at her. The way she withdrew inside herself. How had she managed to endure it? And what had she done when it all got too much for her?
Judith goes back to the living room and turns on her laptop. It doesn’t take her long to find the biology department of the University of Toronto and a telephone number for the Criminal Investigations Branch of Ontario. It’s midday in Toronto, a good time to make a phone call. But it’s university vacation and Professor Terence Atkinson is on holiday with his family in their cottage in the Northern Lakes; that’s as much as his secretary is prepared to reveal. And the police ask Judith for a rather more specific query, ideally in the form of an email and even more ideally in the form of an official letter. Judith clicks her way around the world of her Canadian colleagues for a while longer. Laughing young people of all ethnicities advertise work in the police force. One of the sites looks as if it’s been programmed by amateurs; the white Canadian flag with its red maple leaf flashes in welcome beside the slogan ‘Ontario – Yours to Discover’, and below, the insignia of the local police authorities are set out as if in a children’s sticker album. You’d think there was no crime in Ontario.
Judith turns the computer off; she’s getting nowhere. All of a sudden she feels restless, inert, trapped. A wave of anger surges through her, and the thought of flying to Canada and getting out of her stiflingly hot flat is appealing – leaving behind her memories of the past and her fears for the future, falling out of time, dancing out of step, if only for a few days. Why not?
She switches on her phone. Eight calls from Berthold Pretorius – entreaties, flattery, promises, concern. But all that is beside the point; she owes Berthold nothing. It’s Charlotte she owes – and maybe also herself. The loon is still looking at Judith. She stares back and rolls herself a cigarette before ringing Berthold. If he books her a return flight that gets her back to Cologne in time to start work next week, she’s going to be jet-lagged on her first day back at Division 11.
*
The Königsforst lay-by is like all motorway lay-bys – ugly, dusty and loud. Grotty picnic benches, litter bins, a honeycomb brickwork toilet building and a snack van, shut up for the night, with a few high tables – that’s all there is. Two dozy lorry drivers are sitting on fold-out stools next to a truck with Russian registration plates, eating bread and butter and tinned sardines and drinking tea. A businessman in a smart suit swings himself out of a black BMW Z4 and bounces energetically over the heated asphalt to the loo. Not a bad idea – Manni follows him. Inside, the stench of piss assails his nostrils, although for a public toilet without an attendant it looks really quite decent. Dim strip lighting, and everything done in stainless steel – toilets, urinals, basins, soap and towel dispensers; even the mirror, which reflects Manni’s face as a wan blur. Nothing doing here. Anyone frustrated by traffic or life would have to work it off elsewhere.
Manni scoops cold water onto his face and pulls a paper towel out of the dispenser. There must be someone who fills up the towels and cleans the loos. Behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas rawlplugged to the wall, a sign gives the name and phone number of the operating company. Manni makes a note of both on his pad. Bit of a long shot, but you never know – maybe a cleaner saw the boy or his dog. But the snack van is probably the better bet for potential witnesses. Manni leaves the toilets and walks over to it. Mr Snack – Open daily from 10 till 6, it says on the closed hatch. Manni props his elbows on one of the high tables and looks about him. Yup, you get a pretty good view from here – with any luck Mr Snack will be able to confirm that for him at ten tomorrow. And now?
His jingling phone saves him from having to decide. It’s Karl-Heinz Müller – at last.
‘The forensics team have left a rotting hairy thing on my table and told me you’ll get in touch, but I’m still waiting.’
‘I tried to ring you. But first it was permanently engaged and then no one answered and your mobile was off.’
‘I guess you’re right. New boss, new rules. No mobiles at the post mortem, no cigarettes – he’ll probably ban breathing next.’ Karl-Heinz snorts with such fervour that Manni thinks he can smell the smoke from his inevitable Davidoff down the phone. ‘So tell me why you want me to branch out into zoology?’
‘The dog squad should have left a comparative sample with you – dog hair. And a dog licence.’
‘Yes, they have.’
Karl-Heinz is a great bloke and extremely kind, Judith had once said. You just have to know how to handle him – and that means making him feel that you’re completely fucked without him. Time for a bit of humility, then, Manni thinks.
‘Listen, Karl-Heinz, I know I should have told you in person, and I can imagine you’ve got a lot on at the moment . . .’ Manni swallows. A lot on – like investigating the tourist murders which are keeping Division 11 busy and panicking the municipal powers-that-be, for whom murdered tourists are nothing short of a PR disaster. Manni, meanwhile, is worried about missing dachshunds. ‘. . . But I need your help all the same, and I need it as quickly as possible. You might be able to help me save a boy’s life.’
That’s laying it on a bit thick, but it seems to do the job. Karl-Heinz sighs. ‘No corpse – just this furry thing, which definitely doesn’t belong to a boy.’
‘I think it’s a dachshund’s ear. There’s something blue on one side, which might be a tattoo; perhaps you can find out whether it’s the same number as on the dog licence. The comparative sample is from the basket of the dachshund we might be dealing with.’
‘I can’t manage that today. As I said, your offering isn’t exactly fresh. And a DNA test takes time.’
A man in silly novelty boxer shorts heaves himself out of a Golf, bestows a withering look on the toilet building and trudges over the unkempt grass past the picnic benches. At the edge of the wood he stops and pees into a bush.
‘A peeping Tom!’ says Manni.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean you; I was just thinking out loud.’ Where there’s something to peep at, there are peeping Toms – that’s a rule Manni learnt at the vice squad. Had the boy been a peeping Tom? Hardly. But maybe he’d crossed paths with one. The open-air pisser gives his pride and joy a shake, packs it away in his boxer shorts, wipes his hands on his ample backside and trudges back to his car. The dog squad must search all this first thing tomorrow. Right now there’s just enough light in the sky for Manni to see how long it takes to get from here to the shelter.
‘It would be great if you could find the time to squeeze in this ear or whatever it is. If you managed to decipher the tattoo, we wouldn’t need a DNA test,’ he says into the phone.
‘That’s for me to decide.’
‘Of course, I only meant—’
‘I’ll get back to you.’ With a grunt that could, with a bit of goodwill, be interpreted as a ‘Bye’, Karl-Heinz ends the call.
The scrub where the driver of the Golf had relieved himself is stunted and withered. Behind it, well camouflaged by further bushes, a path leads once around the lay-by, between the edge of the wood and the grass – a peeping Tom’s paradise. There’s no one around, although heaps of dried shit, tissues and a shrivelled condom suggest that the driver of the Golf is not the only one to spurn the public toilets. What’s so great about doing your business in the woods? And who would want to fuck next to a heap of shit? Treading carefully, Manni walks once around the car park. No sign of Jonny or his dachshund.
In the woods it is getting dark. Manni finds a path leading roughly in the direction of the shelter, looks at his watch and trots off. Something pricks his forehead, then his arm. Bloody mosquitoes, he thinks. Sweat trickles through his hair and down his neck, making his skin itch. In the last six months he’s grown his hair collar-length, because the women like it. But perhaps this concession to fashion wasn’t such a good idea – not in summer anyway. And it was probably a stupid mistake to come here. He’s sacrificed his evening just because of some vague hunch. He could have showered and got changed; he could be sitting in the beer garden with a wheat beer. He might even have seen Miss Cat’s Eyes again, and who knows, maybe she likes his haircut. When did he last have sex? A long time ago. Too long. Somehow the opportunity hasn’t arisen. Things haven’t gone well lately.
He comes to a hiking trail, checks his map and takes a right. Not far to go now. About twenty minutes all told from the car park to the shelter. His phone begins to jingle again, cutting through the silence.
‘Your father!’ his mother’s voice shrills. ‘He’s in hospital. You must come straight away, Manfred. He’s dying!’
*
Her father’s face smiles at her. Her real father, not the man she calls Father, not the man whose name she shares, the man who married her mother when she was four and whose meteoric banking career, Judith feels, looking back, made her childhood seem like one perpetual move. Settling in, saying goodbye, starting over. The man in the simply framed black-and-white photo which she hung over her kitchen table a few months ago knows nothing of all that moving house. He died in 1969 – froze to death in the mountains of Kathmandu where he had gone with two friends, former law students, like him, in search of enlightenment. Judith stares at this man of whom she has no memory – Hans Engel. She knows from other photos that she has his eyes – grey irises edged with turquoise; her curls and freckles are her mother’s. What kind of life would she have led as Judith Engel? A mellower one? A more pleasant one?
However things had turned out, Hans Engel would not have been the head of the family, because her parents were already divorced by the time he died in Nepal. Wanting security, her mother had refused to follow her wayward husband into a Berlin commune with little Judith; like so many of his generation, Hans Engel had thought such places offered an escape from the rat race. He had wanted to improve the world, and exploring it had been a first step. Not his fault that he died in the process, thinks Judith. Not his fault. And certainly no reason to be scared of a long-haul trip, even if it is my first.
It is almost midnight. The washing machine is finished; she carries the wet clothes out onto the roof terrace and pegs them out. In the bedroom she packs her rucksack. Only five days. She goes back into the kitchen, takes a bottle of beer out of the fridge, puts it back again, goes into the living room, takes the tarot cards down from the shelf.
She came across the cards when she was investigating in an ashram in the late autumn during her last case. She had been in a bad way at the time and the leader of the ashram, a slippery fellow called Heiner von Stetten, had almost done for her with his cards. Judith shivers at the memory, in spite of the heat. Queen of Swords, von Stetten had called her. Mask Ripper. Seventy-eight cards – so many answers to a single question. Hocus-pocus, she had thought – all pure coincidence. Later that winter she had decided to prove that the cards were meaningless. But whatever probability theory might say, she had found herself picking the same symbols, over and over: Cruelty, Defeat, the Tower.
She had experimented obsessively. Hoping to disprove the mysterious laws of the cards, she had bought books, combed the internet, launched what was almost an investigation. But in the end she had been forced to accept that the tarot conveyed its own truth, its own wisdom. Not always – but too often for it to be dismissed as mere coincidence.
The cards slide back and forth with ease between Judith’s hands. Her eyes closed, she spreads them out in a fan on the parquet. The tarot doesn’t answer yes or no; open questions are the key, and the better the question, the clearer the answer. Without opening her eyes, Judith sits and waits for a question to come to her. ‘What will I find when I look for Charlotte?’ It’s a good question; she can feel that in her belly, in her chest. She breathes steadily in and out, then lets her left hand travel over the fan of cards from left to right, her eyes still closed. When you ask the cards, you have to let your feelings guide you; you have to trust your intuition. You must accept that there is something inexplicable, but nevertheless there. Judith runs her fingers along the cards, feeling the smooth surfaces, the sharp edges. They are all the same – and yet not the same. One of the cards suddenly feels warm. Judith pauses, letting her fingertips drift a little way to the left and then back again. She isn’t mistaken; the card is hot. She pulls it out, hesitates a moment, then opens her eyes and turns the card over.
A black skeleton holding a black scythe. The message is simple – almost ludicrously banal.
‘What will I find when I look for Charlotte?’
‘Death.’