Not a breath of air plays in the grass; not even a bird is chirping. High overhead an aeroplane scores a glowing orange wound in the pale, early morning sky. Barabbas won’t be allowed to roam free today. As they approach the woods where the dachshund found his last resting place, Elisabeth checks to make sure she’s clipped the lead firmly to his collar. She had planned to leave Barabbas at home, but then she didn’t have the heart to; he had looked at her so soulfully with his dark eyes and whimpered so pitifully. And perhaps it’s for the best that she isn’t alone with whatever she finds; even an old Alsatian offers a certain amount of protection to a woman who puts almost all her strength into walking upright and keeping her balance.
Elisabeth stops and leans on her wooden stick which is decorated with metal pennants and flags – memories of happier days. Heinrich had bought them and nailed them on. All those hiking holidays she spent with him in the Alps and the Black Forest – all gone now. Earlier in the morning she had walked barefoot over the dewy grass to the strawberries, and it had made her feel like a young girl. How is it possible that she can feel the grass underfoot and the scented red fruits in her fingers just like in the past, when her body has grown so old and wizened? The tragedy is that we are so powerless, she thinks – that we don’t understand creation’s plan. A few wrinkles here, the odd grey hair there – you live with that; you ignore it. And then one day you look in the mirror and see an old woman staring out at you and you’re surprised because your soul is still young; you feel out of place, unjustly trapped in this feeble, wrinkled body. But you can lament and protest all you like – there’s nothing you can do about it.
She hadn’t marked the dachshund’s grave – only smoothed the ground when she was finished – but she finds it straight away, just as she left it. She puts down the bunch of sweet-smelling, salmon-coloured roses from her garden. Rest in peace, little dog.
Was that a sound? Barabbas pricks his ears. Elisabeth peers through the light green foliage. Nothing.
‘Come on, Barabbas, lead me through the woods. Show me what there is.’
The dog looks up at her, beating his tail on the ground. Elisabeth clasps the lead tighter. Goodness, what a fool she is. What does she think she’ll find here? Last night, terrified and drenched in sweat, she had known. Now she has forgotten. Barabbas pulls her between birches, sniffs in bushes, rubs his back against a tree trunk. She lets him guide her, still wondering what on earth she is looking for.
Old car tyres, building rubble, plastic waste, a stained piece of carpet which Barabbas buries his nose in until Elisabeth pulls him away. Laboriously she gropes her way forward. Insects are buzzing now and the sun is starting to beat down through the branches. The usual din of conveyor belts can be heard from the power station. It’s no good; the sense of urgency which had gripped Elisabeth in the night and spurred her into coming back has given way to dull exhaustion. She closes her eyes for a moment. Spots of light dance in the redness; she feels dizzy and leans hard on her stick. There really is no point; she must go home.
Back in the kitchen she gives Barabbas water and eats a few strawberries, glad that her breathing is slowly steadying. Over breakfast she reads the newspaper. The political headlines are as frustrating as ever; Elisabeth turns the pages. People fight each other all the time, almost the world over, destroying themselves and the planet – it’s always been that way; she doesn’t have to read it every day all over again. She scans the local pages for news of the open-cast mine and sighs with relief when she finds none. Her favourites are the cultural pages and the miscellaneous section – just as long as there hasn’t been another disaster anywhere.
Fourteen-Year-Old Missing. The report is at the bottom of the right-hand column and almost escapes her notice. Fourteen-year-old Jonathan Röbel, known to friends and family as Jonny, has been missing since Sunday afternoon. The grammar school boy disappeared without trace from a camp on the outskirts of Cologne. He is 1.63 metres tall, has short blond hair and brown eyes. When last seen he was wearing hiking sandals, knee-length olive-green shorts, a black Puma baseball cap and a red T-shirt. He probably has his wire-haired dachshund with him. The dog answers to the name of Dr D.
Dr D. Elisabeth’s hand flies to her throat and her heart begins to race again. Suddenly she knows what she was looking for. Yesterday evening under the cherry tree, and at night when her back had kept her awake, it had suddenly seemed to her impossible that the dachshund Barabbas had savaged to death had been alone. Maybe it’s a child’s dog? she had thought. But who’s the child? The boy next door still has his little dog; she has checked. Jonathan Röbel, known to friends and family as Jonny . . . answers to the name of Dr D. If you have relevant information, please . . . She reads the report again and again.
But the dachshund in the newspaper can’t be the one from Frimmersdorf Woods, because how could it have got here from Cologne, without its collar, without its owner, with only one ear? No, she can’t provide the police with any relevant information; she has to protect Barabbas. And anyway, who’d listen to an old, forgetful woman like her? Sentimental too – burying a strange dog in a children’s suitcase. A memory flashes into Elisabeth’s mind, teasing and tormenting her. Something in the woods, maybe something she saw or heard on Sunday morning – something palpably close. Elisabeth’s heart flutters. But in spite of her efforts, the memory continues to elude her.
*
The seating alcove in the intensive care corridor is upholstered in a coarse, grubby pink fabric that has seen better days. A Formica table is topped with a vase of artificial flowers on an off-centre place mat. Cheap art reproductions hang on the wall, one of them crooked. It was long past midnight when Manni gave up trying to persuade his mother to leave with him, and she is still here this morning. Something tells Manni she hasn’t moved all night. Her hand lies between his palms, a naked animal, rigid with fear.
‘They say I can’t be with him all the time because he needs to rest.’ Her voice is no more than a whisper.
‘I’m sure the doctors know what they’re doing, Mum. They’re not being unkind; they’re doing all they can to make Dad better.’ Dad – when was the last time he said that? Manni carefully replaces his mother’s hand on her lap and pours coffee out of a china coffee pot into two cups. He puts a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria onto a plate and holds it out to his mother. ‘Come on, Mum, breakfast. You need to keep your strength up.’
With surprising force she pushes his hand away. ‘You have something to eat, Manfred. Coffee’s enough for me.’
He devours two sandwiches and starts on a pain au chocolat. In the cafeteria he had been convinced that he wouldn’t be able to eat a thing and only bought the sandwiches because it seemed sensible. Now that he has begun to eat, he realises how hungry he is. The noises he makes as he chews sound obscene in this corridor with its dimmed lighting, muffled sounds and dimmed, muffled life, but he can’t help it, and his mother seems not to notice.
‘Your father shouldn’t have smoked,’ she whispers, stirring her coffee. ‘In such heat too. He was so red in the face, all afternoon. I warned him. “You’ve already had one stroke,” I said. “Dr Hartmann says you’re not to smoke.” But he wouldn’t listen to me; you should have spoken to him, Manfred.’
The coffee is scalding hot and bitter. Manni puts his cup down on the tray too roughly, and coffee slops over the sugar lumps. Four and a half hours of restless sleep is all he’s had, but at least he’s showered and changed his clothes. A second stroke – they’ve pumped his father full of sedatives now he’s lying in a near coma, there’s no way of knowing whether he’ll open his eyes again. I’ve got to work, Manni thinks. Got to go to headquarters, talk to Bruckner, draw up a plan for the day. Got to be in the lay-by when the dog squad arrives – and it won’t be long now.
‘Your father’s so stubborn.’
Your father, your father, Manni thinks. Why doesn’t she say ‘Günter’? Or ‘my husband’? But no, it’s always ‘your father’, as if it were Manni’s fault that there’s this man in her life – as if her son were to blame for her goddam broken marriage to this nasty broken man; as if she had nothing to do with her own husband. Why don’t you just get divorced, Mum? Manni doesn’t know how often he’s asked that, but the question has always gone unanswered. Now another round of suffering has been rung in. But this time that’s her lookout. If you think I’m going to join in this farce and play the grieving son to your grieving widow, you can think again; someone has to keep a clear head and bring in the money. Manni jumps to his feet and brushes the crumbs off his jeans, sending them flying. Some of them land on the table and some on his mother’s lap but, unusually for her, she doesn’t react.
‘I must get to work, Mum. Make sure you get some sleep. I’ll be in touch later.’
*
When the lift comes he feels like an ungrateful bastard, but he elbows the feeling aside, pushes his way in next to a tiny Asian nurse and an empty steel bed and presses ‘Ground Floor’. On the drive from Bonn to Cologne he begins to feel better. It’s early enough for him to have the left-hand lane more or less to himself – just him and a few others who seem to agree that 180 kilometres an hour is a reasonable minimum speed. At headquarters Thalbach praises Manni for the report he wrote yesterday – a good thing he managed to finish it before having to leave for the hospital. The missing persons case is gathering momentum. ‘Where’s Jonny?’ reads the front-page headline in the Cologne Express, beside a heart-rending photo of the boy and his dachshund. The other media have dutifully picked up the story too. They haven’t made such a big thing of it, but enough, with a bit of luck, to provide Investigation Team Jonny with some witness statements at last – from walkers or joggers or whoever else happened to be in Königsforst on Sunday. Somebody must have seen something.
They agree that Bruckner will do telephone duty, and before long Manni is on his way to Königsforst lay-by, a bottle of Coke on the passenger seat, techno in his ears, chuffed that he had enough foresight yesterday evening to secure himself a Vectra so that he doesn’t have to drive the usual heap of junk. It may not glide along quite as smoothly as his own GTI, but still, Manni thinks, thrusting the first Fisherman’s Friend of the day into his mouth, still . . .
The motorway lay-by looks as desolate as yesterday. Mr Snack’s van is all bolted up. But the dog squad has arrived and there’s a van from Forensics too.
‘All right, mate?’ Mike gives Manni a slap on the shoulder. ‘Looking pale. Have a bad night?’
‘Didn’t get much sleep.’
‘New bird?’
Manni forces a suggestive grin. If he ever makes it back to the beer garden, it’s a safe bet that Miss Cat’s Eyes has found some other bloke to make her happy, but his colleague needn’t know that. He looks about him. ‘OK then, what’s the plan?’
Mike scratches his dog behind the ears. ‘We’ve split up into two groups. Six of us are starting here; the others are carrying on by the hut where we left off yesterday. The idea is to meet about halfway.’
Karin from the forensics team beckons Manni over. ‘Looks as if we’ve found some DNA in the hut. Traces of saliva on the straw of an empty drink carton, and some skin particles. Want us to see if we can get a match?’
The likelihood that the DNA is Jonny’s is extremely slim. But if they could prove that the boy was in the hut – maybe even that it was his fear the dog had smelt – they’d be a step further. ‘Go ahead,’ says Manni. ‘What’s the saying? We have to clutch at every straw. Or do you have anything better on there?’
‘Got a few dog hairs that might match.’
‘Get them straight to Karl-Heinz.’
‘He’ll be delighted.’
One of the dog handlers curses loudly; presumably he’s strayed into toilet territory, that strip of land behind the bushes that is so richly manured by Cologne’s open-air freaks. Manni gives Karin a nod and trudges over to the ill-used bushes. Sometimes it’s best not to give too much thought to the ins and outs of an investigation. Who knows how much more shit they’re going to be stirring up in the hours to come.
*
Tim feels as if someone has strapped diving weights to his legs; every turn of the pedals is an effort of will. Last night he dreamt he was snorkelling in the sea but, unusually, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. He lost his bearings; something pulled him deep down, away from the light, and he opened his mouth in a soundless scream. That’s a stupid thing to do under water, of course, but it’s what he did. Then he woke up. His mother was leaning over him and shaking him by the shoulder, because he really had been screaming. He was soaked in sweat and exhausted – and very hoarse.
The nearer he gets to school, the heavier his legs feel. Coming up to the level crossing, he glimpses a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye. The next thing he knows, someone has kicked him so hard in the shin that he almost loses control of his bike.
‘Morning, Rinker, farty old stinker!’ Lukas from Tim’s class cycles up alongside him with a smirk on his face. ‘Told the cops a lot of bullshit yesterday, did you?’
‘Rinker Stinker!’ Somebody laughs. It’s Viktor. Tim feels himself blush. Viktor isn’t in his class, he’s in Jonny’s, so it won’t be long now before the whole school knows his new nickname – he should have guessed that Lukas and his mates would see to it that the whoopee cushion story got around. And no Jonny to spend break with.
Whatever he does, he mustn’t cry now; he mustn’t let anyone see how he feels. Last time he cried they took photos on their phones and were still emailing the pictures to each other and sneering at them days later. Luckily Lukas and Viktor overtake him without paying him any more attention. Tim gets off his bike and bends over as if he’s checking the gears. Other schoolchildren cycle past, and Tim pretends not to notice, fumbling blindly with some wire or other. Whatever he does, he mustn’t let anyone see how he feels – how afraid he is. If he hangs back a little longer, then with any luck he’ll avoid running into those idiots again at the bike stands. Maybe Lukas is already crossing the playground to boast to the other bastards in their class that he let Tim have it just now. Cousin Ivonne will be waiting impatiently for Viktor, and he won’t take any notice of Tim once the pair of them have started snogging. Tim will take his secret path to the science block where they have double physics first thing – one of Tim’s favourite subjects. If he’s clever, he can make it into the lab without bumping into Lukas and Co. first. And this time he’ll make sure there’s nothing on his chair before he sits down.
*
Cathedral, Rhine and police headquarters glide past the windows of the Inter City Express. She’s made it. Judith thinks of Charlotte and wonders what it was like for her – what she felt and thought as she set off on her first big journey.
Maybe also her last, but in tarot the Death card only seldom means physical death. More often it stands for the universal principle of letting go, which is – according to tarot symbolism – the most important precondition for the birth of new forms. All the same, Judith is vaguely unnerved when she remembers the card. But last night, watching the bats from her roof terrace, she had decided that, no matter what the cards might say, she didn’t feel like cancelling the trip to Canada. In the morning she bought a digital camera and a new tri-band phone, and set up a call diversion from her landline so as to be contactable on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Now she’s on her way to the airport.
The train leaves Cologne behind and accelerates to a speed of 300 kilometres an hour; the landscape begins to fly. Judith puts her iPod plugs in her ears. She needs the right music for the beginning of her journey – not too slow, certainly not too melancholy – something powerful. She tries out a few things and decides on Patti Smith’s Horses.
At Frankfurt Airport she checks in and makes sure that her return flight will get her back to Cologne in time to start work and that she can reschedule it and fly back earlier if need be. In a newsagent’s she buys a paper and a historical novel called The American Woman, which seems appropriate. Her business-class ticket allows her to wait in the lounge. She puts a wafer-thin tuna sandwich and olives on a paper plate and treats herself to a vodka and orange. Just before her flight is announced, she rings Manni. He sounds terse, harassed, as if she’s caught him jogging. He’s probably working up a sweat in the brambles, looking for his missing boy.
‘I’m going to be away until Sunday evening,’ she says. ‘If anything happens at headquarters in the next few days that I ought to know about, will you give me a ring?’
‘You looked pretty tanned to me. I thought you’d just been on holiday.’
‘Roof terrace.’
Manni says nothing.
‘Will you ring me?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Canada.’
‘Your school friend.’
‘Yes. Will you ring me?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
She can’t ask for more. It was probably unnecessary for her to inform Manni anyway. She’ll be back before anyone can miss her.
Her flight is announced and she switches off her phone. She feels young and free as she presents her ticket to the smiling air hostess at the counter.
*
Canada. Manni doesn’t have the time to think about Judith Krieger’s latest escapades; no sooner has he put his phone back in his pocket than it begins to buzz again. He looks at the display: Number withheld. Please, not Mother.
‘We think we may have something,’ says Kurt, who is combing the area around the hut. ‘Nancy’s going crazy again, like the dog in the hut yesterday. And there’s a baseball cap hanging on a nearby bush. Might be the boy’s.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Near the hiking trail to Rath.’
Shit, that means the far side of the Red Indian camp, away from the motorway. Is he going to have to abandon his lay-by theory? It looks very much like it. Even after three hours, they haven’t found any sign of the boy or his dachshund near the lay-by. The operating company employees claim not to have seen anything, and Mr Snack (who really did open his van at ten on the dot) has nothing illuminating to say either. Did he notice anything on Saturday? He sold more drinks than usual – hardly surprising in this crazy heat. Manni glances at his watch. It’s already midday; he needs to go and interview the head of this Red Indian club who is, Petra Bruckner tells him, back from a business trip to Holland. But first it looks as if Manni’s going to have to fit in a little jog through the woods – the very thought of it makes his Nikes smoulder. Nancy’s going crazy like Arco yesterday. What, for Christ’s sake, is going on in this wood? A panic-stricken boy. A mutilated dog. Or is this some fantasy they’ve pieced together? The hot, dry air bites his throat. Too much ozone, Manni thinks; it’s more than a man can bear.
The black baseball cap emblazoned with a leaping big cat is hanging on a bramble a little way off the path. It looks new, just like the one Jonny’s parents said he was wearing. How did it end up in the brambles? Did Jonny roam this way, and if so, why? Did he throw the cap away or lose it? Or did someone else throw it in the brambles? But who?
‘This is where Nancy went wild.’ Kurt gestures to a spot just beneath the cap, where investigative technician Karin is hard at work. She puts a piece of bark into a plastic bag and looks at Manni without removing her mouth protection. ‘Could be blood here on the bark.’
Has the perpetrator marked the crime scene with Jonny’s cap in a rather macabre manner? Manni swallows. And whose blood is it? The boy’s or the dog’s?
‘I’ll get it to the lab as soon as I can,’ says Karin, as if she can read his mind.
‘Nancy’s pulling that way,’ says Kurt. ‘So presumably the scared person, whoever he was, went that way too.’
Away from the motorway, then. Rather than narrowing down the search radius, they’re going to have to extend it. What happened in this bloody wood? A murder, Manni thinks. The boy was murdered. He doesn’t know why he is suddenly so sure, but once the thought is there, he can’t shake it.
Forty minutes later he’s parking his Vectra in the yard of Petermann Construction Company on the outskirts of Rath. Sand, gravel and a variety of cobbles are piled up in heaps at the end of the access road. An adolescent boy with bleached hair vanishes between bulldozers and forklift trucks that are sitting abandoned in the midday sun; no one else is around. Hagen Petermann has an office on the ground floor, which looks as if it’s been expensively fitted out, if not exactly tastefully. Pale blinds keep out the view of building material in the yard; a carved totem pole leans against the wall behind an enormous and immaculately tidy desk. Petermann is a well-toned man of about fifty, fairly tall, like Manni. For a moment he looks Manni straight in the eyes – the scornful gaze of a boxer confident of winning. Then he lowers his eyes to take in Manni’s jeans, sweaty T-shirt and dusty Nikes.
‘You don’t mind if I make myself a little more comfortable?’ Without waiting for Manni to reply, the big chief takes off his mocha-coloured jacket, loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his short-sleeved silk shirt.
Arsehole, thinks Manni, but only gives a slight nod and lets Petermann direct him to a table where an efficient secretary has set out coffee, mineral water and biscuits.
‘Awful story. I hope you find Jonny soon.’ Petermann’s voice no longer sounds quite as arrogant. ‘Great boy.’ Manni pulls his notepad out of his trouser pocket and unfolds the membership list of the Sioux of Cologne. At some point on Saturday afternoon, probably at about 4 p.m., Jonny went into the woods – several of the would-be Indians have made statements to that effect. Jonny’s stepfather left the camp at around the same time. But unlike Jonny, he returned in the early evening. It’s time somebody came clean at last.
‘Herr Petermann, when and where did you last see Jonny Röbel on Saturday?’
‘You don’t beat about the bush.’ Criticism? Respect? Manni can’t make up his mind. Petermann’s voice is toneless. He pours out coffee and water and pushes a tray holding a milk jug and sugar shaker in Manni’s direction.
‘The boy’s missing. I don’t have much time.’ The boy’s dead, Manni thinks. But so far that’s only a hunch.
‘Let me think.’ Petermann reaches for the milk jug. A plump gold signet ring adorns his left ring finger. Out in the yard the bulldozers are waking from their afternoon nap with a low rumble.
‘In the morning I played golf. I got to the camp at about 1 p.m. Frank and Jonny were already there,’ says Petermann.
‘And the dog?’
Surprised, Petermann looks up from his coffee cup. ‘The dog too, of course.’
What comes next Manni already knows off by heart, because the witness statements are all the same. The club members made themselves at home at the camp, gathered wood for the bonfire, chatted, hung out, played fistball, got the tents ready for the night. One group left to go swimming and returned at about six. No one really took any notice of what Jonny was up to. Blah, blah, blah.
‘How did you spend the afternoon?’
‘I was at the camp, apart from a short walk at about five.’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
Petermann hesitates. ‘Walkers, joggers.’
‘Strangers, then?’
Again the almost imperceptible hesitation. ‘Yes, strangers.’
‘Did you talk to anyone?’
‘No, nobody.’
‘See or hear anything out of the ordinary?’
‘There was a dog that barked for quite a long time, almost hysterically. It was rather unnerving. Some dog owners have no control over their pets, I’m afraid.’
A dog that was having its ear cut off. Manni whips out his pen.
‘When was that precisely?’
‘I didn’t look at the time, but I was on my way back. So before 5.30.’
Half an hour’s walk – not enough time to kill a boy and his dog and get rid of them.
‘What do you mean by “hysterically”?’
Petermann raises his eyebrows questioningly.
‘Did the barking sound aggressive? Is it possible that the dog had injured itself?’
‘I don’t know. It was yapping. Pretty nerve-shattering, and it went on for a long time.’
‘A big dog or a little one?’
‘I’m hardly an expert, but I’d say it was on the small side.’
Dr D. Suddenly Petermann seems to realise what Manni’s driving at and, for the first time, something like genuine feeling flashes out from behind the slick façade.
‘You think it might have been . . . But why would it have barked so loudly?’
‘There are indications that Jonny’s dog was injured.’
‘Injured?’ asks Petermann.
‘Is there anyone at the camp who doesn’t like the dog?’
Petermann spreads his arms, revealing impressive biceps. ‘I’m well known for my dislike of dogs.’
‘Did you hurt Jonny’s dachshund?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Who else could it have been?’
‘How am I to know? I’m sure it wasn’t anyone from the club.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I know the members. We’ve been meeting up for years, we—’
‘Could Jonny have injured his own dachshund?’
‘On purpose? Jonny? No way, no, definitely not.’
‘Who’s he friends with at the club?’
‘The teenagers often do their own thing; you’re best asking them. But I’d say Jonny’s more of a loner. He likes to play the scout in our games. Spends hours roaming around the woods. He’s happiest doing that.’
‘Loners often have enemies.’
‘Not Jonny, no.’
‘What’s his relationship with his stepfather like?’
‘Good. Of course they sometimes have their differences. It’s natural at that age. You know what adolescents are like.’ Petermann looks at Manni as if trying to work out whether Manni might not still be one of those hormone-troubled creatures himself.
‘So Jonny and his stepfather had rows. What about?’
‘What about? The usual – bedtime, washing hands, cleaning teeth. Whether the dachshund’s allowed to beg at meals.’
‘And is it?’
‘Frank thinks it shouldn’t. Sensible, if you ask me. Dogs are unhygienic and have no business at table.’
Interesting, thinks Manni, very interesting. He must find out where else Frank Stadler believes dogs have no business to be – and what Jonny thought of it. Thinks, he corrects himself – present tense. It’s still quite possible that the boy is alive. His phone begins to buzz. K-H Müller, the display tells him. Manni makes an apologetic gesture to Petermann and takes the call.
‘Karl-Heinz. Hello.’
The forensic pathologist comes straight to the point: ‘One of the numbers has been eaten away; one could be a five or a six, I’m not sure, and another looks like a one, but might also be a seven. I’ve arranged for a DNA test, but if you ask me, the likelihood of a match is very high. It’s the right breed too, so I think you can reasonably assume that the ear is from Jonny Röbel’s dachshund.’
‘Thanks, Karl-Heinz, that’s great. I’ll look in on you later.’
Petermann has been watching Manni with his scornful boxer’s eyes. Manni returns his stare for a moment before resuming his questioning.
‘You were saying Frank Stadler was sometimes annoyed by his stepson’s dog?’
‘Oh no, that’s not what I meant to say. You misunderstood me.’
‘Really?’
‘Listen, Frank didn’t hurt Jonny’s dog. I’d be willing to swear to that.’
*
It is Tuesday. Usually, Jonny would be coming back from school at about this time. He has double PE last thing Tuesday, so he’s always especially hungry when he gets home and Martina always makes pasta. Marlene and Leander have already eaten, two brave little soldiers, doing their best to believe Martina and Frank when they tell them that all’s well. Frank’s left to take them to his parents. Martina feels bad because it’s such a relief to have them out of the house. Shouldn’t she be watching over her two remaining children like a broody hen? But she doesn’t have the energy. She can’t face calling her own parents either – keeps putting it off. Her dead sister’s son – how can she possibly tell her parents she didn’t take care of him? What a battle she fought, back then, to get guardianship of Jonny. She really must ring her parents. Jonny’s picture is all over the papers. The local television station is going to broadcast an appeal from her on the evening news. Jonny, come back, we love you. How hopeless it all is.
Martina goes to the kitchen window. Although she knows Jonny’s mountain bike is in the garage, she still hopes to see Jonny cycle up to the house, one hand on the handlebars, the other hastily pushing his MP3 player into his trouser pocket so that Martina doesn’t notice he’s ignored her ban and listened to music on his bike. He’d lean his bike in the drive, Dr D. would bark happily (he always dashed to the front door long before Jonny came into sight), Jonny would throw his rucksack down in the hall, stroke Dr D. and say something like, ‘Mm, smells yummy, Tini’– and all would be well.
The pot plants on the windowsill have wilted, the paper chicks the kids made in nursery at Easter – and which Martina isn’t allowed to throw away – are faded and grubby with little finger marks. She takes up Jonny’s torch and switches it on. The beam has grown yellow and she feels a pang in her chest when she sees that. Or is she imagining things? She cups her hand in front of the light. Is it fainter or isn’t it? And what if it is? It has nothing to do with Jonny and whether or not he’s all right. ‘Stop it, it doesn’t mean a thing,’ she says out loud, but she doesn’t believe herself, and hurriedly switches it off again.
A car draws up outside the house and Korzilius, the blond inspector, gets out. Martina’s body is set in motion and she opens the door to him, the pang in her chest sharper. She can see from the way he looks at her that she must stink. She should have done as Frank said and had a shower, put on clean clothes. She draws the woollen scarf tighter about her shoulders and presses her arms to her body. Frank manages to keep functioning – to remain calm and down-to-earth and sensible, and be there for the kids. How does he do it? And how does he manage to comfort her, even when all she does is berate him, like yesterday evening?
‘Can we sit down?’ the inspector asks. ‘Is your husband here?’
His expression – he knows something. She’s afraid of falling into an abyss, into a black hole. ‘Jonny . . . Has anything . . .? You’ve . . .’
The inspector takes her by the arm. ‘No, we haven’t found your son.’ He propels Martina towards the kitchen.
‘Frank’s taking the kids to his parents’ house.’ Her teeth are chattering now and her knees are jelly again. Unresisting, she lets the inspector direct her to the corner bench. He opens the fridge, takes out a carton of orange juice, finds a glass. ‘Drink this.’
The smell of Martina’s fear fills the room. The inspector sits down opposite her and waits for the trembling to subside.
‘The dachshund – Dr D.,’ he says, ‘Jonny brought it with him when he moved in with you, didn’t he?’
She nods.
‘Your husband, Frau Stadler. One of the witness statements suggests he wasn’t too pleased about the dog coming to live with you. Is that true?’
Frank had hated Dr D. from day one. He couldn’t bear the way the dachshund dug up the flower beds and did his business on the lawn. He had fumed inwardly whenever Jonny brought the dog to the table and petted it on his lap. But he had kept a grip on himself – for her sake and because the boy was so traumatised.
‘We were none of us happy at that time,’ Martina explains with an effort. It had felt like drowning: The pain’s too much to bear. The babies are getting a raw deal. I can’t get through to Jonny – and what passion there was between Frank and me has gone. And then there’s that bloody dog, getting under our feet and looking at us with his big doggy eyes, because he’s gone and shat on Frank’s lawn again – and no end in sight. That’s how it was, but she can’t tell that to this fresh-faced young man. He wouldn’t understand; he doesn’t know what pain is.
‘Of course not,’ says the inspector – as if he has any idea how much unhappiness death can wreak on a family. ‘But your husband doesn’t like dogs, does he?’
‘He got used to Dr D. Why are you asking, anyway?’
‘I’m sorry, Frau Stadler. It looks as if somebody injured Jonny’s dog – mutilated it. We don’t know for sure yet, but we have found an ear in Königsforst which is almost certainly one of your dachshund’s ears.’
The darkness returns. Somewhere a husky voice says, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s not possible.’
‘I’m afraid it is. As far as we can tell, the dog licence number tallies with the tattoo in the ear. We’ll know for certain when we’ve done a few tests.’
Such darkness. She can’t bear it. She jumps to her feet, sways, staggers to the sink and vomits orange juice and bile over the dirty pans.
The inspector is behind her immediately, holding her steady until the retching stops. She wipes her mouth with kitchen paper – she must get out of here. Her body is set in motion again. She totters into the hall, through the living room, and onto the patio where the heat hangs heavy under the awning. The inspector follows close behind.
‘Please, Frau Stadler, I know this is hard for you, but we need you to help us. Who might have done such a thing – cut off Dr D.’s ear?’
Martina shakes her head dully. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Oh God, the poor dog. And Jonny! Oh my God, Dr D. mutilated – I can’t bear it.’
The inspector waits until her desperation has subsided, then he starts on the nasty questions again. About Jonny’s friends. About potential enemies. About Frank and Jonny. About Frank and Dr D.
‘Find him, rescue him!’ she yells in the end. ‘But stop torturing us. We’re Jonny’s family, for God’s sake, his family. That means sticking together, even when things don’t go the way you want, taking the rough with the smooth. We haven’t hurt Jonny!’
The inspector looks at her – searchingly, as if he were weighing things up.
‘Has your husband told you where he was on Saturday afternoon?’
Martina stares at him, unable to reply.
‘I can see that you love Jonny,’ the inspector says after a while. ‘But are you sure your husband feels the same way about your nephew?’
‘Get out of here, clear off,’ the strange, husky voice whispers. Martina waits for it to say more: I’m quite sure Frank loves Jonny as much as I do. Or just: Of course he does. But however hard she tries, she can’t force herself to say the words.
*
A free afternoon. It’s so hot that chess club has been cancelled. Tim’s mother is frying in the sun in a deckchair, her white straw hat with the tissue-paper flowers covering her face.
‘I’m going.’
‘Have fun, Timmy,’ the hat replies in a flat, vacant voice. No ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When are you coming back? ‘How are you?’ His mother doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s the way she is when she has her moods. Tim pushes his bike out of the shed. Sometimes he hates it when his mother retreats into a world of her own, but at least it’s better than when she follows him around, being neurotic.
He rides to the quarry pond, chains his mountain bike to a birch and tiptoes along the path to the lookout point. Across the way is the steep sandy path you have to slide down if you want to get to the beach. Down below it’s packed. Lilos, towels, cool boxes, and hordes of tanned people. Squeals of excitement and snatches of music drift up to him from the turquoise water – that, and a whiff of sun cream. Tim kneels down behind a bush and raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes. A scout has to be invisible, Jonny told him. A scout is someone who is there and yet not there. He finds out all he needs to know about his enemies – often more than they know themselves. Then he’s ready to act.
Slowly and intently, Tim observes faces and bodies. A few girls from his class in Day-Glo bikinis. His cousin Ivonne, lighting up a cigarette – if her mother knew. And there in the water, a short distance away from the others, are Viktor and Ralle, toting cans of beer, debating something. Or are they arguing? Tim watches them for a while – a shame he can’t lip-read. He lowers the binoculars. What are they doing here? They’re usually at the swimming pool. He hadn’t really felt like swimming anyway, without Jonny, but now sliding down the sandy slope is out of the question. And Lukas and his posse are bound to be at the pool.
Tim unlocks his bike and cycles around aimlessly for a bit. He’s on his own again. They’ll soon leave you alone, Jonny promised him last Friday. What had he meant? He hadn’t wanted to let on and now Tim might never find out. Tears shoot into his eyes and he blinks them away. Jonny and his secrets – other people’s secrets, his own secrets. Jonny the scout.
At a kiosk, Tim buys an ice cream. He sits down on a bench and peels off the wrapping. The ice is stickily sweet and cold on his teeth. It tastes horrible, and he shouldn’t really be snacking between meals because it makes you fat. But he finishes it anyway. No Dr D. to help him any more. Who are the enemies Jonny was watching? He never told Tim, and Tim always assumed that all his talk of friend and foe was something to do with the Red Indian camp. But what if it wasn’t? Lukas and the others are right, he thinks: I’m useless, I’m a failure. I don’t even know who my best friend’s enemies were. They’ll soon leave you alone. Jonny wasn’t as blockheaded as Tim; he was genuinely interested in Tim. What happened last weekend at the Red Indian club? Did Jonny do something stupid? Did he get too close to one of his enemies? But who is this enemy? And what has he done to Jonny?
All at once, Tim knows what he has to do. He swings himself onto his bike and pedals fast and furiously so that he can’t change his mind. He doesn’t stop until he reaches an empty factory building. He knows Jonny sometimes sneaked off here, because he watched him. He watched him secretly – secretly and guiltily, because he should have trusted his best friend, and instead he was always making sure he wasn’t going behind his back. But Tim never followed Jonny into the building; he was too scared to do that. Scared of the dark factory hall, but more than anything, scared Jonny might see him. Mummy’s boy, arse-licker, Rinker Stinker, Lukas jeers in his head. Chicken. Going to pee his pants.
Tim hides his bike in a clump of bushes and skirts the side of the building the way Jonny always did. There are graffiti and tags sprayed on the brick walls and jagged window panes glint in the sun, sharp as sharks’ teeth. A rusty iron door stands ajar; Tim squeezes through into the factory hall. It’s gloomy inside – filthy. Enormous cable drums are scattered about the floor, pieces of railway track, indefinable machine parts, rubbish. What did Jonny do here? Why did he come and hang out here? Tim crosses the hall. In the far corner, someone has made a kind of snug: three old sofas, a crate serving as a table, more graffiti on the wall. A full ashtray, half-burnt cemetery candles in red plastic holders and empty bottles suggest that people meet here. There’s even a ghetto blaster, a bong, and a rusty iron stove.
Tim’s heart is pounding. Is it possible he got Jonny so wrong? Did Jonny come here to meet some gang Tim knew nothing about? What did you think, Rinker Stinker? That Jonny likes you and takes you everywhere like his dog? Tears prick Tim’s eyes. He kicks the stove in frustration and then gives a yell of pain; he’d forgotten he was wearing sandals. He drops onto one of the sagging sofas to nurse his toe. Crybaby, Mummy’s boy. Serves you right.
In the factory hall it’s cooler than outside – cool and quiet. The pain gradually subsides and Tim can think straight again. What did Jonny do here? He surely didn’t come here to sit on the sofa and smoke the bong. Or did he? Tim scans the hall again, trying to take in every detail, like a true scout. The stove door is open; that’s the only thing that’s changed. He kneels down to close it, because a good scout leaves no trace of his presence, and he sees something inside – something that doesn’t belong there, something familiar. Tim reaches in and pulls it out – Jonny’s knife, his sheath knife with the red leather strap studded with glass beads. Only on Friday they had used it to cut Tim’s liver sausage sandwiches. Why did Jonny put his knife in the stove? Where’s the leather sheath Jonny wore on his belt? And, most important of all, when did he bring the knife here if he was in the Red Indian camp? None of it makes any sense. Tim goes over to one of the murky windows and holds the knife to the light. The blade is stained with something reddish brown. It looks like blood.
*
‘Some of the blood in the bush where the baseball cap was hanging was from a dog, some was human,’ reports criminal technician Karin Munzinger, whose surname, these days, is the same as that of her colleague Klaus.
‘Was there much blood?’ Manni looks up from his notepad.
‘Not a lot. And all in all we found more animal blood than human blood.’
So perhaps it isn’t the crime scene after all, Manni thinks – just another mystery. But who can say, as long as they don’t have a clearer set of clues. Strangulation, suffocation, poison – there are plenty of ways of killing a person without shedding blood. The question is, whose is the human blood?
‘How long . . .?’
‘By tomorrow afternoon – the day after tomorrow at the latest – we’ll know whether or not the blood is Jonny’s – and his dog’s.’
Tomorrow or the day after – of course – nothing in this case is fast-moving. Manni pushes a few strands of damp hair behind his ear. Karin sits down and stretches out her legs. The electric desk fan at the head of the conference room puffs stale warm air into their faces with a low hum. Manni plunges a hand into the bag of gummy bears contributed by Bruckner. The yellow ones are his favourites – always were. When he was at nursery, his mother had baked him a chocolate birthday cake decorated with gummy bears. Someone else had got the slice with the yellow bear and Manni had cried. His father had clouted him one. He called it ‘toughening the lad up’.
Petra Bruckner studies the map of Königsforst they have hung on the wall. The Red Indian camp, the lay-by, the shelter and the place where Jonny’s cap was found are marked in yellow highlighter. Bruckner stabs three red and four blue flags into the adjoining areas.
‘So far no one has reported seeing Jonny accompanied by anybody. The red flags mark the spots where witnesses claim to have seen Jonny and his dog. Blue is witnesses like Hagen Petermann who heard barking at around 5 p.m.’
‘No one saw the boy just outside the hut?’
‘Not so far. But it’s striking that the witnesses who say they heard the barking were all relatively close to the hut.’
Manni joins Bruckner at the map. ‘This red flag here isn’t far from the lay-by, which would put it outside Jonny’s area of movement.’
Petra Bruckner nods. ‘That’s a borderline case – an elderly gentleman who saw a boy, but couldn’t say for sure whether his T-shirt was red.’
‘Maybe he’s colour blind.’
Bruckner nods thoughtfully. ‘That’s one possibility. I’ll ask him. Timewise it would more or less fit. All the other witnesses say it was after 5 p.m. when they saw Jonny or heard the dog. But this one here’ – she taps the red flag – ‘claims he saw the boy at around 4 p.m.’
‘In which case, after leaving the camp, Jonny would have gone first to the lay-by and then to the hikers’ shelter.’
‘The only question is why? And what happened next?’
‘Someone cut off the dog’s ear. With a weapon we haven’t yet found. Then the pair of them melted into thin air.’
They exchange weary glances. Manni swipes the last of the yellow bears from the bag as they work out how to proceed. Frank Stadler must be more closely monitored. The neighbours need questioning. The Sioux of Cologne need to be tackled again, especially the teenagers. Big Chief Petermann is presumably not the only one to have noticed that Stadler couldn’t stand his stepson’s dog. The danger is that Stadler turns out to be innocent and they end up plunging the family even deeper into disaster. But what alternative do they have? A solitary walk in the woods isn’t exactly a solid alibi. Maybe they need to be tougher with Stadler – summon him to headquarters, hold him on remand. But on what grounds? They can’t even say with any certainty that Jonny is dead. Hang on in there, Manni thinks. That’s all we can do. If Stadler has a skeleton in his closet, he’s bound to make a mistake sooner or later.
It is also to be hoped, of course, that more witnesses will come forward – that the boy has been seen with another person. So far, the interviews Bruckner has carried out at the boy’s school have been as fruitless as all the other lines of enquiry. The statements from Bertolt Brecht Grammar read as if Jonny had spent his school hours in a separate orbit from his classmates. The boy was universally respected, but solitary. He was highly intelligent, and had even skipped a grade. That boy from the chess club, Manni thinks – Tim or Tom – several teachers and witnesses had described him as Jonny’s best friend, and it’s true, he was clearly shaken by Jonny’s disappearance. But then why didn’t he make a more helpful statement? I must talk to the boy again tomorrow, Manni thinks. Tomorrow. Today I must look in at the Institute of Forensics and at the hospital.
The dregs of oxygen being swirled around the room by the fan are now so thin that eyes are beginning to droop. Last night was too short, Manni thinks. The day’s passed too quickly and we haven’t got anywhere. I can forget about going back to Division 11. He reaches for the remote control and turns on the local news. After seven and a half minutes, the anchorwoman switches off her smile and asks her viewers in serious tones to pay particular attention to the search for a missing boy. Martina Stadler appears on the screen. She must have showered after Manni left. Her reddish-brown hair is tied back in a glossy but maternal pony tail, and she has at last changed out of that sweaty green sundress and put on an ironed white blouse. She’s beautifully made up too, apart from her tear-stained eyes, but they give the appeal precisely the dramatic authenticity it requires to grab the attention of viewers jaded by too many bad crime series.
Martina Stadler clasps her hands together as she speaks, and her voice is soft and trembling. ‘Help us!’ she ends, ‘Jonny, if you hear this, please get in touch. Come back to us – we love you.’ She tries to say something else but she’s choked by tears, and a hard cut takes viewers back to the news studio and the still-serious anchorwoman, who is standing in front of a photo of Jonny and Dr D. She reads out the official missing persons report and the dog licence number appears in an insert. ‘It looks as if somebody cut off the wire-haired dachshund’s ear, perhaps to prevent Jonny’s dog from being identified,’ the anchorwoman explains. Wow, Manni thinks, our press department did a good job; that was actually coherent for once. If this yields some usable evidence, we might make some progress at last.
*
‘You were good.’ Frank steers the car along the Rhine embankment to the Zoo Bridge. ‘I’m sure someone who saw Jonny and Dr D. will come forward now, and it’ll all turn out all right.’ He reaches for Martina’s hand.
‘No, it’s too hot.’ Martina pulls her hand away. Nothing will turn out right; she feels it with every cell in her body. Even her TV appeal can’t change that. She turns her head and looks out of the window. Lightly clad people are strolling under the plane trees by the river and she hates them for their cheerfulness. Then it occurs to her how easily the so-called ‘tourist murderer’ could strike again, and however vile the thought is, it consoles her more than Frank’s words can. You were good. As if she’d auditioned for a part in the theatre. As if she were being assessed. How revoltingly tasteless.
Are you sure your husband loves Jonny as much as you do? Korzilius’s question is still reverberating in her head. All day long she has tried to ignore the echo. When Korzilius left, she washed up the vomit-filled pans, had a shower and finally got round to ringing her parents, dropping hollow, meaningless phrases down the line into the dumb horror at the other end. Then Frank came home and they ate side by side in silence, waiting until it was time for him to drive her to the television studio. And all the time she tried not to hear the terrible question in her head.
But now that Frank has dropped her outside the house and gone on to pick up Marlene and Leander, the question is so loud she can no longer ignore it. Martina crosses the lawn to the far end of the garden and straddles the swing in the old walnut tree, as innocent as a little girl in an Astrid Lindgren book. She clutches the rope and swings gently.
Are you sure your husband loves Jonny as much as you do? And if he doesn’t? Now, at last, she allows this second question to take shape. How often has she discussed such scenarios with her colleagues at the after-school care centre? How often have they suspected a father or stepfather of abusing his child while the child’s mother shut her eyes to what was going on? Up to a point, of course, it was understandable that the mother turned a blind eye to the facts, on the principle of ‘what shouldn’t happen, can’t happen’. Because if the suspicion should prove justified, it leads into a hole that is deeper and blacker than can be endured by anyone who loves that person. But you have to protect your children, Martina always said. Maternal love should be stronger than a woman’s love for a man, stronger than her desire, more important than her own satisfaction. Time and again she had ended the discussions in these terms, not noticing how self-righteous and arrogant and blind she was. Of course, as soon as it’s your own life that’s at issue, nothing is that straightforward or clear cut.
Martina doesn’t have to get out her records or the many leaflets from the youth welfare office and the Child Welfare Association to recognise the truth. She knows it’s often outsiders who are the first to see the signs, and that their suspicion is almost always confirmed. She knows that male relatives and family friends constitute a not insignificant threat to the children in their care. Her mouth is dry; she feels cold again. In the days – or was it weeks? – before Jonny went missing, he had seemed depressed, more reserved than usual. Why hadn’t she got him to confide in her? He’ll come to me when he’s ready, she had told herself – he always does. She notices that she’s beginning to tremble. Would I have acted the same way if Jonny had been my own child? What am I shutting my eyes to? And who is Frank, the man I think I’ve loved for eleven years? Had he also been acting differently in the weeks before Jonny disappeared? Why can’t he tell me where he was when Jonny went missing? And why didn’t he ring me up, at least, when he first began to suspect something? He said he didn’t want to interrupt the drama workshop I’d been looking forward to for so long. Ridiculous.
Martina tries to imagine Frank kicking the dachshund, torturing it, cutting off an ear, perhaps even killing it – a kind of delayed revenge for his damaged lawn. She tries to imagine Frank torturing Jonny, raping him, abducting him, killing him. But she can’t, and when she realises that she’s making an effort to conjure up such images, another rush of coldness courses through her body. What’s going on? What’s happened to us? How low have I sunk? Not only do I no longer trust my own husband’s capacity for love, I even suspect him of murder.
‘Mummy, where are you? We’re ba-ack!’ Marlene and Leander come running into the garden. Martina heaves herself off the swing, as slow and stiff as an old woman.
‘I’m in the garden. Come here, my sweets!’ Her voice sounds too high, but there’s nothing she can do about it. She kneels in the grass, spreads out her arms and forces herself to smile.
*
His father is in a room of his own now, a shrunken outline under sterile sheets, dwarfed by a stand hung with plastic pouches. From one of the pouches medication drips into a transparent tube that vanishes beneath the duvet; another is half filled with a yellow liquid – urine. The constant beeping and humming of the monitors is louder than the sick man’s breathing – if he is still breathing. Hesitantly, Manni pulls the door shut behind him. It’s hot and stuffy, and the curtain at the window dims the evening light to semi-darkness. His father lies motionless, his eyes closed; another tube coming from his nose is connected to a machine that pumps oxygen into his lungs. Manni walks to the foot of the bed, stubbing his toe on one of the wheels, and sending the bed crashing into the wall. His father doesn’t stir. Manni had bought a box of brandy chocolates and a bottle of orange juice in the hospital cafeteria; now he realises how pointless that was.
Still, he deposits his gifts on the table at the window, resisting the temptation to pull back the curtain and fling open the window – to suck fresh air into his lungs or, even better, to jump out into the park below. On the bedside table are flowers that could only have come from his mother’s garden, and a family photo taken on the day when Manni was promoted from the vice squad to the murder squad – Manni and his mother standing behind his father’s wheelchair, his mother beaming with pride, Manni more serious, and his father’s gaze fixed on a distant point behind the photographer. Manni leans over the bed. Apart from a bit of stubble and some broken veins on his cheeks, his father’s skin is like wax. His eyes remain shut.
From the car, Manni rings his mother, glad that she is no longer sitting in the hospital corridor in a state of paralysis, but has driven home to look after her garden and the two cats. Her voice sounds flat; they talk trivia.
‘Kind of you to pay for the private room,’ she says as they’re saying goodbye. Manni feels too tired to confess that kindness doesn’t come into it; if anything, it was an attempt to buy himself a clear conscience.
A little before 9 p.m. he manoeuvres his GTI into a parking space outside his flat. No new witnesses have come forward since Martina Stadler’s television appearance, but the questions remain: Where is Jonny? Is his stepfather a murderer? What happened to the dachshund? At home, Manni slips off his Nikes and tosses newspaper and junk mail into the paper recycling box. He opens the window and breathes in the warm, exhaust-laden air. His fridge contains three bottles of Coke and half a carton of UHT milk, and there are two pizzas in the freezer. What has happened to Jonny Röbel? Manni performs a few mae geris, yoko geris and a skilled ushiro mawashi against the sandbag. He must go to karate training more often, or he can forget his second dan. His fists deliver a flurry of tsukis. He has to find this boy. But right now he needs a break.
A quarter of an hour later, showered and changed, he is stepping into the jumble of voices and clinking glasses of the beer garden. He buys himself a wheat beer at the bar and fights his way between the tables of tanned people all talking at each other. He still feels restless – burnt out and keyed up at the same time. The gravel crunches underfoot. He usually likes the sound, but now it seems to mock him.
Then he sees her – the blond hair, the silver hair clip, pale top, jacket tied casually around her hips. She is sitting on the wall alone, with her back to the beer garden. Beside her is an empty glass. A waitress carrying a heavily laden tray passes Manni and he snaps up another customer’s beer, stilling the waitress’s protests with a hefty tip.
‘I’ve brought you a refill. May I?’ He holds out his prize to Miss Cat’s Eyes and gestures to the wall beside her.
She looks up at him. He thrusts the beer glass a little closer. ‘I wanted to buy you one the other day, but unfortunately I had to leave.’
‘I’m about to go.’
‘Just one beer. The night is young.’
Up on the railway embankment an Inter City Express glides past, the windows a single strip of light above the park. A half moon hangs in the dark blue sky.
‘First a beer. And then Paris,’ says Miss Cat’s Eyes. ‘Or Amsterdam.’ She takes the glass and clinks it against his. ‘Sit down and we’ll have a beer, if that’s what you want. But none of that “You’re-the-woman-of-my-dreams” stuff, please. I’ve had enough of cheesy chat-up lines that end in a quickie and a “See ya, babe” before the night is out.’
‘No problem.’ Manni sits down next to her and takes a big gulp of wheat beer. Then another. A few seconds later, his brain is functioning again. What did she just say? She’s fed up with chat-up lines? Or was it quickies?
She looks at him. A smile plays in the corners of her mouth; her cat’s eyes glint.
‘Mean, eh? Takes the wind out of your sails.’
‘Well . . .’ Another gulp of beer. ‘I prefer slowies myself.’ Great, Manni, unbelievably original. The woman seems to come to the same conclusion; she looks at her beer glass as if wondering whether it would make a good missile. Manni continues quickly.
‘If you ask me, I’d go for Amsterdam.’
‘Aha. And why?’
Green, greeny blue, blue? It’s too dark to tell what colour her eyes are. But her lips are nicely curved and her breasts – bloody hell, get a grip. What was the question? That’s right, Amsterdam.
‘The canals,’ says Manni, ‘the boats. Imagine . . . a houseboat . . . this summer . . .’
‘Cruising along a dyke in one of those houseboats is like gliding over a meadow; you’d think a herd of cows might come on board at any moment.’ She talks dreamily, without looking at Manni.
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘I did it once.’
They clink glasses again and sit in silence, watching the strips of light from trains that might be going to Amsterdam and the display of flashing neon on the glass façade of Cologne Tower in Media Park. A boat, a breeze, and Miss Cat’s Eyes on deck in a bikini – or, better still, without. For the first time in days, Manni begins to relax. He finishes his wheat beer and signals to a waitress.
‘No more for me, I must be going.’ Miss Cat’s Eyes swings her long legs purposefully over the wall and gets up. ‘Bye, stranger.’
Manni wants to protest, to persuade her to stay – at least ask her what she’s called. But before he can say anything, she’s vanished into the throng.
*
It’s a big country. Big and empty. The minutes pass, but far below there is nothing but green, broken only by the sparkle of enormous lakes. I must be crazy, Judith thinks – crazy, deluded, a raving lunatic – if I think that down there, in those vast tracts of emptiness, I can find a woman who doesn’t want to be found – a woman I don’t even really know. She turns away from the aeroplane window and orders coffee from one of the eager flight attendants. The plane took off late; it’s evening in Cologne now, and in two hours they’ll land in Toronto where it is afternoon. Both seem unreal. It’s as if she has lost all sense of time since setting off on this journey – as if she’s at odds with her biological clock.
Five hours later, Judith is being guided through Toronto by the navigation system of a fiery-red hire car. In the rear-view mirror the glass tower blocks of Canada’s most populous city glow in the evening light – the glittering metallic building blocks of a giant child. High above them, the tip of the CN Tower pierces the sky.
Professor Terence Atkinson’s secretary had laughed loudly when Judith had asked where an ornithologist might go to watch common loons. ‘Loons! Those birds are everywhere.’ But the secretary did tell Judith that Charlotte had visited Professor Atkinson several times at the institute in May. ‘A colleague from Germany, right?’ Of course Professor Atkinson had been pleased to see her. Then the German woman had stopped coming, the vacation had begun and, just like every year, Professor Atkinson had left for his holiday house on Georgian Bay with his wife and children and boat. Cozy Harbour the place was called – that much information, at least, Judith had managed to coax out of the secretary. A tiny flyspeck in an expanse of rugged green next to a big light blue patch – that’s what it looks like on the map Judith buys at a filling station.
She drives north, obeying the navigation system which she has fed with the coordinates of Cozy Harbour. She has left the sprawl of Toronto behind her, and now the landscape is dominated by fields, woods and gently rolling hills. Nothing to detain or distract – only wide-open countryside, and the odd farm here and there. Night is approaching; the light is soft. The pungent smell of a dead skunk drifts in at the half-open window. Judith stops at a coffee shop called Tim Horton’s, where she eats a sandwich and buys a big cup of takeaway coffee, although her stomach seizes up at the prospect of yet more caffeine. She smokes a cigarette in the car park and goes on her way. Darkness is coming fast now and the driving is more strenuous; the lights from the oncoming cars dazzle her. The only radio station that doesn’t tail off into white noise after a few minutes plays country music. But Judith forces herself to keep going until the headlamps of the oncoming traffic are on the point of blurring. Then she follows the neon sign of a motel into the blackness off the highway.
The room smells of disinfectant, like Charlotte’s house in Cologne. It contains the bare minimum and, although it’s a no-smoking room, it’s done out in depressing greys and yellows reminiscent of cigarette ash and nicotine. As if to taunt Judith, the crooked frame with clouded glass above the bed holds a print of a loon. She has a shower, wraps herself in a sheet and sits on the wooden veranda with a bottle of beer from the minibar. The neon sign flickers and occasionally the sound of traffic drifts across from the Trans-Canadian Highway. There are three cars in the parking lot in front of the low building, but there is otherwise something unreal about the scene, as if Judith has landed in one of those Edward Hopper paintings, where the human figures are dwarfed by architecture and landscape.
Judith opens the bottle of beer and rolls herself a cigarette. Perhaps Charlotte spent the night in the very same motel – although it’s about as likely as winning the lottery. The air caresses Judith’s naked skin like a lover. She smokes and listens to the darkness until she’s so tired that she no longer minds the smell of disinfectant in the room. Her last thought is of the Death tarot card. She wonders why a black skeleton with a black scythe should have a positive meaning. Then she falls asleep.