Manni’s sleep is leaden, a merciful blackout. The jingling of his phone jolts him back to the house where he grew up. Football certificates and photos of his karate teams still hang on the hopelessly petty middle-class wallpaper, along with a Pirelli calendar which once seemed the acme of coolness to his twenty-year-old self. ‘Leave the lad,’ Manni’s father had said when his mother had got worked up about it. As far as Manni can remember, it was one of the few times that Günter Korzilius took his son’s side. Seven o’clock. Manni gropes for his phone. When did he fall asleep? He can’t remember – sometime after his mother had stopped crying. Sleep hasn’t revived him; it’s numbed him. He feels as if he’s under a bell jar.
‘We’ve got the boy,’ Thalbach announces, and without giving Manni a chance to react, he begins to dictate coordinates. Königsforst, pond, dead, Manni notes on the back of the Pirelli calendar, when he has found a pen at last. And directions on how to get there.
‘They have a massive staff shortage problem in Division 11,’ Thalbach says, winding up. ‘People on holiday, people off sick – and this tourist murderer doesn’t show any sign of slacking either. I’ve told Millstätt you can investigate for him – Krieger will join you tomorrow.’
Downstairs, his mother and aunt are sitting in the kitchen, and for a moment it seems to Manni that the two sad figures in black have been sitting there all night waiting for him. They look on in silence as he takes clean plasters out of a drawer and ministers to his knuckles. The breakfast table is laid for three: coffee, jam, honey, rolls, butter and boiled eggs.
‘Sunday breakfast,’ his mother says. ‘Life has to go on. We’re going to church later. Sit down, Manni.’
She hasn’t reproached him, has hardly said a word since he picked her up at the hospital the night before last. She’s only clung to him, sobbing quietly to herself in silent determination. Her favourite sister arrived in the morning and, after a decent period of time had elapsed, Manni slunk off to declare Frank Stadler wanted. It turned out to be unnecessary; the man had come to headquarters of his own accord.
Yes, Stadler admitted, when Manni confronted him with the evidence given by Messrs Snack and the bank statement from his wife. Yes, he had been at the motorway lay-by on Saturday afternoon. He had met a friend there, a very good friend who was in financial difficulty. He hadn’t mentioned it, because he had wanted to protect him – that wasn’t a crime, was it? But he hadn’t seen Jonny; he had nothing to do with his disappearance and certainly wasn’t mixed up in drugs. Did they want to search his house? Not for the moment, Manni replied through clenched teeth and, once Stadler’s friend had confirmed his statement, he had no choice but to let the man walk free. His second interview with Big Chief Petermann proved equally unproductive.
Manni sits down at the breakfast table, rams his knife into a roll, spreads butter on it and cracks open an egg that his mother has hard-boiled especially for him. She prefers hers runny, and her solicitude riles him, although he knows he’s being unfair. Why can’t she just mind her own business and leave him in peace? She watches in silence as he slices the egg, lays it on the roll, adds salt, presses the other half of the roll down on top, and then jumps to his feet and fetches a bottle of orange juice from the fridge. He hadn’t told her that he’d been transferred to Missing Persons; it would only have worried her, and he hadn’t wanted her talking to his father about it. Now he can’t explain to her how important it is that he make the most of this chance to return to Division 11.
‘I have to go,’ he gabbles into the women’s silence. ‘Be back as soon as I can.’
The boy is lying on the shore of a popular fishing pond not far from the shelter where he probably had to look on as his dachshund died of an ecstasy overdose and then had its ear cut off. Manni squats down. The boy’s wet clothes correspond exactly with the missing persons’ report. His wet hair is blond. There’s no doubt that this is Jonny Röbel. He looks strangely peaceful, if you ignore his swollen lip and a shimmering yellow bruise under his left eye – almost as if he were asleep. He certainly doesn’t look as if he’s been dead for a week.
‘We spotted him as soon as we got here,’ says one of the two witnesses. ‘He was floating face down on the water, right up against the duck house. I went straight in and pulled him out – tried to resuscitate him, but it was too late.’ The man swallows. It’s only now that Manni notices the wet hair, the police tracksuit bottoms, and the patrol officer’s jacket draped around his bare shoulders. The man’s own clothes are dripping from the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. On the grass beside the bike is an array of fishing gear.
‘Did you meet anyone on the way to the pond? Did you notice anything?’
Both fishermen shake their heads. The boy, they say, can’t have been more than a night in the pond. Joggers and walkers come this way all the time and the pond is a favourite fishing spot.
The forensics team arrives with Karl-Heinz Müller who is wearing a beret and, even from a distance, smells of suntan oil and lemony aftershave.
‘Did you have to find the boy the day of the boules tournament?’
Without waiting for a reply he pulls on latex gloves and begins his first examination of the corpse. As so often, the work seems to lift his mood; he is soon whistling Hildegard Knef’s ‘Let it Rain Red Roses for You’. Experience has taught Manni that it’s better not to pester Karl-Heinz with questions at this sensitive stage. He goes over to the forensics team who are scanning the banks of the pond, although there is little hope that they will find anything of any use. The ground is dry as dust and the wood gets as many visitors as an amusement park. A frogman is preparing to investigate the murky water; maybe the perpetrator was stupid enough to throw something in.
Manni returns to Karl-Heinz. He ought to be relieved, but he isn’t, although it’s not long since he was praying for the boy to be found, dead or alive. That was when the call had come from the hospital. Manni pushes the memory aside. I must drive to the Stadlers’, he thinks. Take them the news of Jonny’s death. There’s no point putting it off.
‘What happened to your hands? Go boxing and forget your gloves?’ Karl-Heinz takes a silver pocket ashtray out of the back pocket of his designer jeans and lights himself a Davidoff. He eyes Manni closely.
‘You don’t want to know what my opponent looks like.’
Karl-Heinz raises an eyebrow.
‘What about the boy? Can you say anything yet?’
‘At a cautious estimate I’d say he’s been dead for between one to three days – but somewhere cool; not in this pond. Rigor mortis is already easing off; there are the first minimal signs of putrefaction, and very reduced lividity – that’s striking.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Could indicate high blood loss – either as a result of severe injuries, which I couldn’t see any sign of – or as a result of internal bleeding.’
‘Internal bleeding – caused by drugs?’
Karl-Heinz knocks ash into his ashtray. ‘I’ll talk about causes after the post mortem. Who’s in charge at Division 11?’
‘I’ve been asked to do it.’
‘Alone?’
‘Judith’s coming back tomorrow.’
Karl-Heinz takes a drag on his cigarette. His expression in inscrutable.
‘See you at the autopsy,’ is all he says.
*
The day they find Jonny, Detective Inspector Manfred Korzilius will look a touch more serious; his voice will be deeper, he won’t try to hold her gaze the way he usually does. He will inform her of Jonny’s death, in appropriately sober words; he will ask her to identify Jonny, like in the crime dramas on TV. She will get up and put Jonny’s torch in her handbag and go with him. She won’t cry; she won’t be able to cry. No matter what the police show her, she’s sure she won’t be able to cry.
Martina Stadler has imagined it all so many times that she is taken aback by the panic that grips her when she really does find herself looking into Manfred Korzilius’s serious face. He lays a hand on her arm, as if to support her, an almost intimate gesture – and why not? she thinks; after all, we’ve been through a lot together this last week. He must have injured himself; the back of his hand is covered in plasters that are already soggy in places, and she thinks she can see pus at the edges.
Frank is in the garden with the children and his parents. Martina sends the policeman into the kitchen where she has just started chopping up potatoes for a salad, and goes out onto the patio where Frank and his father are busy at the barbecue.
‘Frank,’ she says, and can see in his eyes that he knows it’s over.
She turns round and goes back into the kitchen. She hears her mother-in-law’s unnaturally bright voice calling the children. She hears Frank’s footsteps behind her, stiff and reluctant. How strange that she has no urge to lean on him – that she feels closer to the messenger of death than to her husband.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Korzilius. ‘I’m very sorry . . .’
He keeps talking, and Martina listens without really hearing what he is saying, because he is only confirming what she already knows. I must put the mayonnaise in the fridge if I’m going straight to Jonny, she thinks, or it will go off in this heat. Frank’s voice jolts her back to the kitchen.
‘In the fishing pond near the shelter, you say? You found Jonny in the fishing pond?’
‘Yes, why do you ask?’ Manfred Korzilius asks, and Martina realises that something about Frank’s tone has aroused his suspicions. She waits for Frank to say something entirely plausible, like: ‘You’d already searched the pond, that’s why I was surprised.’ She looks at her husband and waits, but he only shakes his head in silence and doesn’t reply.
After being questioned at headquarters yesterday, he had apologised to her for not telling her about the money he’d lent Volker to help him out of a tight spot. He kept begging and begging her to forgive him, and she really had begun to hope. Out in the garden on her own last night, she’d given herself a severe talking-to for distrusting him and betraying him.
The inspector is still waiting for an answer from Frank. She can see it in his eyes; she knows him well now. But she can see Frank’s eyes too and there is growing fear in them – the fear of a cornered animal. The realisation is a shock – another shock – and she bites her lower lip. It isn’t over yet, she thinks. I was wrong; it isn’t over by a long shot. Frank knows something about that pond; he knows something important that he is determined to keep quiet. The twenty thousand euros were only the tip of the iceberg.
*
The storm comes at dawn. Wind whips ash into Judith’s face; the fire has gone out. She gathers up her sleeping bag and throws her rucksack over her shoulder. There are crashings and rumblings in the trees, and the water around the island is seething; nothing can be seen of the stars it reflected earlier. The rain falls suddenly, as if from nowhere, hard and relentless. Judith pulls the canoe up to the rocks behind her, turns it over and makes a roof out of it by wedging the prow into a crevice. She huddles underneath while nature rages and flashes around her. She is powerless; seldom has she felt so much at the mercy of the elements.
When the storm is over, Judith releases the canoe into the water. The food she brought with her is all gone, and her hope that David might return has evaporated. If Judith continues to sit around next to Charlotte’s mortal remains waiting for rescue she will go mad. She jabs the paddle into the water and suddenly thinks of her father who set off bravely into the unknown over thirty-five years ago and froze to death in Nepal, depriving his daughter for ever of the chance to remember him. All that is left of him is a photo from which he looks out at her with her eyes – another dead person who is bound up with her and shapes her life. There are so many – her father, Patrick, Charlotte too now, in a way, and of course all the dead people she comes across in her work on the murder squad. There must be some reason for her bonds with these dead people. But beyond that, there must also be some reason to live.
Back on the other shore, Charlotte’s tent appears unscathed. Yesterday Judith had read about loons in her books – lonely birds, unexplained relics of an age-old era; shy birds that need water to fish and fly, but have to come on land to propagate their species, although they are ill-equipped for this by nature and at the constant peril of their enemies; ancient birds that need the solitude of a cold northern lake and are content to rely on their song to assure themselves of the existence of others of their kind on other lakes.
Gavia. There are five species. The main range of the largest, gavia immer, known in German as the ‘ice diver’, is northern America. ‘Ice diver’ – perhaps it was this name that caught Charlotte’s fancy; the notion of a hidden life, an other-worldly life, deep down under the ice at the bottom of a cold lake. But loons can’t survive under the ice, because they need air to breathe.
Strange birds, Judith thinks – solitary, shy, forgotten by evolution. Perhaps Charlotte had felt similar, a stranger wherever she went – at school, at university, even at home, where there was a place for her dolls and her parents, but none for her. But what happened here in the wilderness? Was she forced to acknowledge that she didn’t belong here either? Is that why she is dead? What part did David Becker play? And Terence Atkinson? If it hadn’t been for Atkinson, Charlotte would never have travelled to Canada. She had loved him, and it was presumably her love that had set her dreaming of studying loons. Did Atkinson kill Charlotte? Did David Becker? And why had she never put up a fight? Or had she put up a fight, but lost nevertheless, like a loon that comes too close to mankind and ends up choking on a fishing hook – or loses its bearings trying to escape in a semi-frozen lake and suffocates under the ice, oblivious to the cold?
Bloody hell, now I’m coming over all sentimental, thinks Judith. I’m letting my imagination run away with me instead of concentrating on the facts. She leaves Charlotte’s camp behind her without going ashore again. Yesterday she had carried out another thorough search; without criminal technicians to help her, there’s no more she can do, neither for Charlotte nor for herself. Somehow or other I’m going to get out of this place, she promises her old school friend. Then I’ll find Becker and Atkinson, and even if I can’t head investigations here in Canada, I won’t give up until I know what happened to you. This time I won’t let you down. She paddles past the camp and steers the canoe back to David’s log cabin. Perhaps she overlooked something there that could help her.
Soon the sun is gaining strength, dispersing the clouds and veiling the surface of the lake in a golden mist. It is, in its chilly way, indescribably beautiful – a sublime, self-sufficient beauty that holds no comfort.
The log cabin is exactly as Judith left it. She searches it once more, meticulously, doggedly, increasingly angrily – and again, fruitlessly. Her plane to Germany took off an hour ago. Her last chance to be back at headquarters on time is a flight to Düsseldorf that leaves Toronto at 6.30 p.m. She has another ten hours – not enough.
Restlessness and anger drive her outside onto the jetty. She walks to the end and looks back. A few hundred metres behind the log cabin the ground rises slightly – why hadn’t she noticed before? Judith pushes her phone into her pocket, checks that the shotgun is loaded and hangs it over her shoulder. The forest is dense; brushwood tears at her sodden trousers.
Judith fights her way through the undergrowth. After only five minutes, she can no longer tell whether she’s walked in a straight line away from the cabin, or in a pointless loop back to the shore. She keeps stopping, bending back branches, examining her phone’s display, noting with satisfaction that the ground really is rising. Then she comes out into a boggy clearing and, as if by a miracle, a tiny signal bar appears on the top left-hand corner of her display, auguring reception.
The battery is almost flat; one bar will have to do. What promise the buzz of a ringing tone seems to hold. But instead of Margery Cunningham’s voice, there is only white noise. Judith tries again with the same result. She has no choice but to speak her message into the void, asking for help, trying to describe where she is. She sends the same message in the form of a text.
Time passes, precious time. The phone remains silent; the signal bar quavers and dies – and with it, Judith’s hope. She stumbles back to the log cabin and lights a fire to dry her wet clothes. She eats pumpernickel from David’s bag of provisions, makes instant coffee, rolls herself a cigarette. Soon, even that will no longer be possible; her tobacco supplies are running out. She tries to fight back the panic that grips her at the thought, throws wet wood on the fire, cocks the trigger on the shotgun and shoots into the air like yesterday, because even the most pointless act is more bearable than sitting around doing nothing. The shot echoes and dies away, leaving her alone again. Perhaps somebody will hear the shots at some point, or see the smoke. Perhaps Margery has got her message and is already on her way. But it is extremely unlikely.
*
‘The person you have called is unavailable right now,’ says an artificial female voice in nasal tones. Manni cuts the connection. Judith clearly has better things to do than take his calls. He considers leaving a message on her landline, but decides against it. If she wants anything, she’ll get in touch; he knows that from experience. And he’ll see her tomorrow anyway.
He arrives in Rath and parks at the entrance to Petermann’s Construction Company. The house at the edge of the property is a swanky monstrosity with an oriel tower; the big chief evidently regards his private property as a kind of showpiece. Drive, front wall, steps, façade and the path that leads around the house to an extensive garden – everything is plastered with all manner of material from the construction company, not necessarily to the advantage of the overall aesthetics of the place.
‘It’s Sunday – I was just about to leave for the camp,’ Hagen Petermann complains, but he ushers Manni in with a patronising gesture. Manni drops onto a black leather sofa while Petermann’s wife puts mineral water on the glass coffee table before retreating to the garden. There, a pale-blue pool is spotlighted by the midday sun, and a fat, maggot-white marble cherub trickles water onto the surface.
‘We’ve found Jonathan Röbel. He’s dead,’ says Manni, pushing aside the thought of Miss Cat’s Eyes, which has gripped him, entirely inappropriately, at the sight of the swimming pool.
‘My God,’ says Petermann. ‘Dead?’
‘He was found by fishermen in a pond, not far from your camp.’
‘Drowned?’
‘We won’t know until the autopsy. Where have you been in the last twenty-four hours, Herr Petermann?’
‘Are you suggesting I did it?’
‘I’m only doing my work, trying to form an impression.’
‘It was our summer party at the camp yesterday evening. I was there with my wife Monika until about one. After that we were here.’
‘And your son?’
‘Viktor too.’
‘The whole time?’
Petermann gets up and looks down at Manni. Manni suppresses the impulse to get up too. Instead, he leans back, trying to look relaxed, although he is anything but. He’s going to have to question all the would-be-Indians again, check alibis, wait for Forensics to comb through another section of land, wait for another hot lead to materialise. And then there’s Jonny’s autopsy. Manni looks Hagen Petermann in the eyes.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that Viktor and Jonny were in the same class?’
‘They weren’t friends. I didn’t think it was important.’
‘I must talk to Viktor.’
For a moment it looks as if Petermann is going to contradict him, but he gives a curt nod and leaves the living room. Manni looks out of the window at the pool where Petermann’s wife is now swimming lanes, her head craned up out of the water, presumably to protect her hair-do and sunglasses. Discreet gold jewellery flashes at her throat, very much in keeping with her overall style; Monika Petermann is a typical representative of that species of women who marry powerful men in order to shine at their sides – tanned, thin as a mountain goat, deeply and drearily perfect.
Petermann returns with his son in tow – an adolescent with the swagger of a reality TV star. He is taller and older than Jonny, his hair streaked with peroxide. Puberty, Manni thinks. How I hated it – the embarrassment, the secrecy, the permanent struggle for recognition. And yet there was no time more exciting.
‘The inspector has some questions for you.’ There is a new sharpness to Hagen Petermann’s voice.
‘I’d like to talk to Viktor on his own.’
‘Let’s sit down.’ Petermann’s tone brooks no contradiction. Hesitantly, Viktor perches on the edge of an armchair, avoiding all eye contact with either Manni or his father.
‘What do you know about Jonny, Viktor?’ asks Manni.
‘Why would I know anything about him?’
‘He was in your class.’
‘So?’
‘Viktor.’ Petermann’s voice is like a knife. A steep line has appeared on his forehead. He doesn’t like his son, thinks Manni. He despises him. Or am I so rattled that I see my own story everywhere?
‘Jonny wasn’t in my gang.’ Viktor is still staring at the floor.
‘Whose gang was he in then?’ Manni leans forwards.
‘No idea.’
‘Tim Rinker.’
Now Viktor looks at Manni for the first time. Unnerved? Taken aback? Angry? Before Manni can decide, Viktor’s eyes are on the carpet again.
‘Tim Rinker was friends with Jonny,’ Manni repeats. ‘Who else, Viktor?’
He shrugs.
‘Why wasn’t he friends with anyone in your class? Why wasn’t he friends with you?’
Viktor shrugs again, and Manni isn’t able to get much more out of him, in spite of – or more likely, because of – his father’s increasingly irritable admonishments. Did Jonny have a girlfriend? Was he popular? Unpopular? More shrugging – no, dunno. Did Jonny take drugs? Does anyone at Bertolt Brecht Grammar take drugs? Of course they do, Manni thinks, but how is Viktor to admit it with his father sitting next to him? Again Manni recalls his own adolescence, how he had lied to his parents, never telling them what he felt or did – and how, in an astonishingly short space of time, that had come to feel perfectly natural.
Not long after his fourteenth birthday, his world and his parents’ world had drifted apart; they became the inhabitants of two separate planets, side by side and yet alien to one another. Now part of one of those planets has burnt out, before Manni could visit it – before he could even make up his mind whether or not he wanted to visit it. He suddenly finds himself in a world where decisions have consequences and ‘too late’ really means too late. He’s known that for a long time, of course, but it has suddenly become real.
Who was Jonny really? Manni still can’t find a full answer to this question. But he has to, urgently, if he is to catch Jonny’s murderer.
‘Frank Stadler met a friend last Saturday,’ he says to Hagen Petermann. ‘Volker Braun. Do you know him?’
‘Vaguely. He was in the club until a year ago.’
‘Why did he leave?’
Now Petermann senior shrugs his shoulders in an unintentional parody of his son, whose own recalcitrance had caused him such intense annoyance only a moment before.
‘Volker had bought a house, I think,’ he says at length. ‘He did all the renovation work himself – he didn’t have time any more.’
‘So you don’t know anything else about Volker Braun, although he was in your club? How long was he a member, by the way?’
‘Four years. But we have more than fifty active members; I can’t be good friends with them all.’
‘Did you see Volker Braun last Saturday when you went for a walk in the woods?’
‘I’ve already told you I didn’t see anyone I knew.’
Viktor raises his head again and for a moment father and son look each other in the eyes. But if this silent exchange of glances conveys a message, Manni can’t decode it.
‘Where were you last Saturday, Viktor?’ he asks.
‘At a mate’s.’
‘Not at the camp?’
‘No.’
‘Or in Königsforst?’
A quick glance at his father. ‘No!’
‘Tell me what you did, you and your mate.’
‘Nothing. Just hung out.’
‘Where? What’s your friend’s name?’
‘Tell the inspector, Viktor,’ Petermann senior says. ‘And answer in complete sentences, please.’
‘We went to Ralle’s.’ Another sidelong glance at his father, who is pressing his lips together as if to stop himself from saying anything.
‘I need his full name,’ says Manni.
‘Ralf Neisser.’
‘A boy from your school?’
‘He lives nearby.’
‘Does that mean yes or no?’
‘Ralle’s not at Brecht.’
‘Viktor has friends at the grammar school too, of course,’ Hagen Petermann puts in. ‘He has a very nice girlfriend for instance, Ivonne Rinker, who’s in his class. You saw her on Saturday evening, didn’t you, Viktor?’
For the first time, Manni has no trouble interpreting the glance Viktor gives his father – he looks as if he’d like to gag him. ‘Yeah,’ he mumbles after a while.
‘Ivonne is Jonny’s best friend’s cousin, is that right?’ Manni asks.
For a moment Viktor looks Manni in the eyes again, cold and wary. Then he stares at the glass coffee table and shrugs again.
‘Yes. So?’
He’ll have to find another way of tackling Viktor, without his parents or teachers. He must find some way into the world of the schoolchildren if he wants to find out anything about Jonny and solve this case. If he fails, there will be a disaster, another disaster. Manni doesn’t know why he is suddenly so sure of this; he only knows he isn’t wrong.
*
Strawberry cake with whipped cream. Chocolate gateau. The smell of coffee. The clatter of crockery. But the familiar voices of the adults are less cheerful than at the usual Rinker get-together – more subdued. It’s because of his friend Jonny – Jonny whom he trusted and believed in; Jonny who abandoned him and is now dead. Tim stares at the slice of strawberry cake on his plate; it looks as if it’s growing larger by the minute, swelling like a blowfish that’s trying to intimidate its attacker. Only that Tim doesn’t feel like an attacker; he feels empty, as if he, too, were dead. But Jonny’s knife, like a last goodbye, is still in with the sea urchins in the box under Tim’s bed, because he’s too cowardly to use it.
‘You aren’t eating anything, Timmy.’ His aunt strokes his head and slaps a dollop of whipped cream onto his plate next to the cake. ‘There, that’ll help it slip down nicely.’
Obligingly, Tim pokes his fork into the cake and pushes a piece into his mouth. All at once it seems to swell to a sweet, choking mass, and Tim wishes he had Dr D. there – Dr D. who used to love licking up cream and ice cream with his wet, rough tongue. He feels his Cousin Ivonne looking at him. Since Tim and his parents got here, she hasn’t let him out of her sight, staring at him whenever she thinks nobody’s looking. Snake, Tim thinks. Snake in the grass. You play the perfect daughter, serenade your dad on the piano and act all nice, but you can’t fool me; I know what you’re really like.
At last coffee is over. Ivonne says goodbye, all sweetness and smiles, and leaves to help a friend with her homework. She throws Tim a warning glance, as if he were thinking of grassing on her. As if that would get him anywhere. If there were any doubt at all, they’d believe Ivonne rather than him every time.
The grown-ups are now opening a bottle of sparkling wine and clinking glasses. Tim can sense that they’re dying to talk about Jonny – about Jonny and Ivonne and Tim. Adult talk.
‘Why don’t you go up to Ivonne’s room and listen to a CD if you’re bored, Timmy?’ his aunt suggests. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’
The others nod and smile. Tim knows how desperate they are to get rid of him.
He gets up and goes to the loo, where he sits on the toilet lid and listens through the tilted window to the chinking glasses and increasingly animated conversation. At last they begin to talk about their worries, in those strained voices that say: life is hard, but we’ve got the measure of it.
‘. . . Tim’s so sensitive, takes everything to heart . . . and now Jonny’s death on top of everything . . .’
‘Awful, simply awful.’
‘. . . hope his troubles at school don’t start up again . . .’
‘Ivonne’s been all right since she started at the new school, thank goodness . . . but it was so stressful before – always crying because she thought the other children didn’t like her.’
‘. . . ah well, it did get out of hand in the end.’
‘. . . good thing it’s over.’
‘Tim’s OK now too. Practically went down on his knees to us, begging us not to tell the police about it – says they don’t bully him any more.’
Ivonne’s room is enormous, much bigger than Tim’s. She has a four-poster bed, a white lacquered dressing table with a three-way mirror, an expensive stereo – even her own television and DVD player. Tim examines the CDs: Silbermond, Robbie Williams, Pink – girls’ stuff. A magnet board above the desk is hung with photos: Ivonne, Viktor and Ralle, arm in arm; school journey snapshots of the whole class, with Jonny looking pensive at the back; Ivonne in the middle of a gaggle of girls, laughing loudly, the most beautiful girl in the school.
It used to be different. She and Tim were always in and out of each other’s houses and told each other everything. They’d been close, and Tim had been delighted that Ivonne was moving to his school. But the girl who walked onto the school playground after the summer holidays was not the cousin he knew; she was a cool, feisty girl in trendy clothes who treated him as if he didn’t exist, as if the hours of shared confidences had never happened. Tim spots another photo from the same school journey, half hidden behind a postcard of a horse – Ivonne and Jonny. Ivonne is in profile and Jonny is looking at her as if she were a very special, very precious thing – as if he were her boyfriend. Jonny, you traitor.
The noise of a phone jolts Tim back to the present. Ivonne has forgotten to take her mobile with her; Tim finds it in the pocket of a pair of jeans lying on the floor next to the four-poster bed. Cautiously, he picks it up. It’s stopped ringing, and the display tells him that the call was from Ivonne’s voicemail – a new message. Tim goes to the window – the adults are on their second bottle of sparkling wine. He creeps to the door of the bedroom, opens it and listens out. All is quiet – no sign of Ivonne coming back early to collect her forgotten phone. Should he or shouldn’t he? Tim’s fingers have begun to press the keys even before he’s made up his mind. He clamps the phone to his ear, his heart pounding.
‘Hey, babe, where are you?’ It’s Viktor’s voice. ‘I’m waiting for you. And listen, if anyone asks, I was with you last Saturday night, OK? My old man will freak out otherwise. You know how much he hates Ralle.’
Vik – big, cool Vik – is scared of his dad. The discovery is so overwhelming that Tim has to sit down. Voicemail messages, received texts, sent texts – he clicks his way deeper and deeper into the world of his cousin, until he no longer feels quite so powerless. They’ll soon leave you alone. Perhaps Jonny is right in spite of everything; perhaps there is a way. But then Tim finds the pictures. Confronted with his shame, he hears their voices again, imagines Ivonne looking at the pictures, commenting on them, laughing at them – laughing at Tim’s humiliation. He recalls the way she had looked at him earlier. How can he ever look her in the eyes again? He clicks on ‘Delete’, a laughable attempt to undo the shame. Crybaby. Arse-licker. Rinker Stinker. What a small dick.
Tim pushes the phone back into Ivonne’s jeans pocket. How many phones are there at school? How many of his schoolmates have already seen those pictures? How many are yet to see them? Nothing is ever going to change for him. Jonny lied; he had no power. But now that Tim realises it at last, it’s too late.
*
Fortune is followed by misfortune, life by death – and then everything begins all over again, only different, maybe even better, at least for those who can believe in it. But belief plays no part in the life of a detective superintendent whose day-to-day work is called ‘corpse processing’. Judith lights a cigarette. Another five cigarettes and then her tobacco supplies are exhausted. They lie in front of her, ready rolled. Five cigarettes. Five small eternities of idle waiting. On the Death tarot card the black skeleton is cutting through puppet strings with its scythe – strings tying it to something that is obsolete and must be left behind. Is Charlotte’s death a beginning? And if so, the beginning of what?
A droning noise, deep and unnatural. An aeroplane. It comes as such a surprise that Judith doesn’t immediately react. Then she leaps up, puts wood on the fire and runs onto the jetty. She looks up at the sky and sees the silvery belly of the plane low over the lake; she waves and yells. Two men are sitting in the cockpit. Not David; strangers. The aeroplane heaves to, the engine falls quiet, the door swings open. One of the men jumps onto the jetty and ties up the plane. Another figure comes into view in the cockpit, a small figure with blond curls, who jumps onto the jetty in one easy bound.
‘Are you OK?’ asks Superintendent Margery Cunningham in her nightclub singer’s voice, the steep line between her eyebrows the only indication that her trip into the wilderness is no Sunday outing, and that she is not amused by Judith’s attempt to go it alone. She tells Judith she had begun to worry even before her cry for help. Judith’s hire car had been outside David Becker’s house for days and there was no trace of Becker himself.
‘He brought me here and then disappeared,’ says Judith. She feels pain as well as anger, saying it out loud for the first time, but all that will have to wait. As soon as she reaches the end of her account, Margery Cunningham radios for reinforcements and makes clear that she regards Judith as the chief witness in her investigation into the unsolved death.
‘I know I ought to stay, but I have to fly back to Germany this evening. I’ll help with the investigation from there as best I can,’ says Judith, when they reach Charlotte’s island. ‘Please, Margery.’
For a long time it looks as if her Canadian colleague isn’t going to reply. Without a word, she follows Judith to the place where Charlotte’s mortal remains are lying. Without a word, she crouches down. It’s only after carefully examining everything that she looks up at Judith, as if weighing the matter – a cherub in a checked shirt.
‘Terence Atkinson has admitted that he got Becker to bring Charlotte Simonis here. It seems she was stalking him. His wife, understandably enough, was frantic. But he swears that he didn’t hear from Charlotte after Becker brought her here.’
‘He once picked her up at the motel.’
‘They went out to eat. Afterwards he took her back to the motel. There are witnesses.’
Margery gets up without taking her eyes off Judith. ‘We have to find David Becker.’
Briefly, Judith feels again the warmth that had surged through her body when David touched her hand, when he gave her that look that was so familiar but already spoke of parting.
‘You have to help us find Becker,’ says Margery Cunningham. ‘Any detail you can remember might be important.’
Warmth, all that warmth. The contours of a stranger’s body against her own – a body that seemed made for her, that kept her grounded, comforted her, promised happiness. The smell of salty skin, the sight of the stars, the feeling of being able to overcome time. The feeling of being able to overcome everything. Don’t forget this.
‘You have to cooperate,’ Margery Cunningham says.
‘I know,’ replies Detective Superintendent Judith Krieger. Two bitter-tasting words.
*
Karl-Heinz Müller wasn’t going to pass up the chance to lead the autopsy; he seems to have got over his disappointment at missing the boules tournament. Forensics have finally released the boy and now he and the two assistant doctors are going about their work with unusual gravity. Manni looks on, fighting back the memory of his father, the pouch of urine hanging at his bedside, the bubbles of whitish saliva in the corners of his chapped mouth, the words that cannot now be taken back.
The external examination is complete: only slight lividity on the right-hand side; no knife or bullet wounds; no strangulation marks – and the x-rays have already shown that there are no freshly broken bones. Naked, pale and faintly yellow, Jonny Röbel lies on the steel table looking almost unscathed, except for the bruises on his arms, legs and chest, that yellowy-brown shiner on his left eye, and the cut lip which looks as if it had begun to heal before Jonny died. Where did he get all those bruises? Had Jonny the scout, Jonny the fighter for justice, got into a punch-up before his death?
Karl-Heinz is busy at the boy’s ribcage.
‘Think of his relatives,’ Manni murmurs, ridiculously, because a post mortem is subject to its own rituals, and peeling off the skin, opening up the body, removing the organs and stripping the corpse of its secrets is the whole purpose of it. Karl-Heinz gives Manni a long, hard stare, and Manni forces himself to grin. It is a small miracle to him that Karl-Heinz manages to stitch the bodies up at the end of every autopsy and leave them looking more or less presentable. He has no choice but to trust once again to the forensic pathologist’s skills and to try to forget Martina Stadler. The air conditioning hums softly and Manni has the feeling he has never left, although it’s more than six months since his last autopsy. The beautiful Darshan was little more than a child too. Like then, Manni feels as if he has lost touch with the real world. Day gives way to night, and summer to winter, but down here in the basement of the Institute of Forensics, there are only steel tables, tiled walls, strip lighting and drains. Down here there is only the whirr of bone saws, the clatter of metal instruments, the Latin jargon spoken into the microphone by the pathologists, the soft squeak of rubber soles on the grey tiled floors.
Karl-Heinz interrupts his muttering and straightens himself. ‘No water in the lungs.’
So he didn’t drown. Manni clears his throat. ‘Any sign of drugs?’
‘We’ll have to wait for the results from Toxicology.’
More waiting – of course. Manni’s mouth is dry. His last Fisherman’s Friend has dissolved and he has forgotten to stock up. He didn’t have lunch or afternoon coffee at his mother’s and he’s not at all sure he’ll make supper – a post mortem takes time and he was stupid enough to promise Martina Stadler she could see Jonny again afterwards. He had rung his mother earlier in the day and mumbled his usual apology into her silence: ‘Work, Mum, you know how it is. It’s really important. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’m sorry.’
Karl-Heinz points at a half-moon-shaped bruise under Jonny’s ribs.
‘That might be a shoe print.’
Carefully he measures the bruise, then peels off the skin, layer by layer, handing it to his assistant to preserve. ‘Haematoma, internal bleeding,’ Manni hears; the rest is medical jargon. The scalpel opens the abdominal cavity; Manni sees only stinking, black-red blood, but Karl-Heinz whistles a few bars of Queen as if he’s just won the lottery.
‘Massive internal bleeding,’ he says eventually. ‘That would explain the underdeveloped lividity.’
Internal bleeding. Manni leans on an autopsy table that is not in use, while Karl-Heinz and his assistants poke about in Jonny’s body, cutting and lifting out organs to be weighed and measured. Internal bleeding – what does that mean? Is it possible that Jonny Röbel wasn’t actually murdered – that he died of some illness? But then who threw him in the pond? Where was he before he died? It seems clear that he hasn’t been dead for much longer than forty-eight hours.
‘There’s half-digested food in his stomach – possibly mincemeat and tomato sauce,’ says Karl-Heinz. ‘Spaghetti Bolognese, or perhaps a hamburger. I’ll send a sample to the lab.’
Poison? Drugs? Wait and see is the order of the day. Manni goes and stares into the bloody abdominal cavity. He feels his own stomach turn over.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he says. The three men in green overalls are so engrossed in their work that they don’t even notice him; they set the saw to Jonny’s skull. In the toilets on the first floor, Manni splashes cold water onto his face, soaking the plasters on his hands and making his knuckles throb. His face looks green under the strip lighting. He goes outside and stares at the gravel bed planted with bamboo – the Japanese garden that Karl-Heinz has repurposed as a boules court. Such a lot to do – he must write reports; he must put Martina Stadler off until tomorrow; he must evaluate the information he has to date, draw up a list of priorities, and get a foothold in the investigation so that Millstätt and Judith don’t push him to the wall tomorrow. He suddenly remembers the old lady who found Jonny’s dachshund – he should have questioned her ages ago. Then there’s his mother to attend to, the funeral to be organised. It’s all too much.
‘Two-stage splenic rupture!’ Manni hadn’t noticed Karl-Heinz coming to stand next to him.
‘Two-page splenic what?’
‘Two-stage, if it’s all the same to you. Splenic rupture, which is to say a torn spleen. And two-stage means that the first injury happened considerably earlier than the massive bleeding we found in the abdominal cavity.’
‘A torn spleen – how do you get one of those?’
‘Pretty easily – by being hit or kicked. Doesn’t even have to be particularly violent. A splenic rupture is a typical fighting injury.’
‘And it’s fatal?’
‘It’s the two-stage aspect that’s the problem. The spleen tears, but the bleeding remains inside the organ to begin with. The injured person may not even notice anything, and the injured spleen becomes a kind of time bomb. Eventually it tears again, blood flows into the abdominal cavity – a lot of blood – and by then it’s usually too late.’
‘So the day of the injury needn’t be the same as the time of death,’ Manni concludes, looking thoughtful.
Karl-Heinz nods. ‘Injury and exitus can be several hours or even several days apart.’
‘So Jonny could have been hit in the woods on Saturday but not died until Thursday or Friday?’
‘Indeed!’
‘Where was he all that time? What was he doing? Why didn’t he ask anyone for help?’
‘He certainly ate something, about eight hours before he died. And some of the bruises look as if they weren’t inflicted until later.’
‘He was hit several times?’
The forensic pathologist lights another Davidoff from the glowing butt of his last. ‘Yes. And somebody kept his corpse cool before throwing it in the fishing pond.’
‘Somebody kept Jonny Röbel captive and abused him,’ says Manni. ‘Somebody with access to a cold store.’
‘Needn’t have been a proper cold store. Only somewhere cooler than outside.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’ll put pressure on the lab – maybe they’ll find something else.’ Müller stubs out his cigarette and disappears back into his inner sanctum. Jonny Röbel’s dog was killed with drugs. Jonny was kept captive and tortured. Where? And, more importantly, who did it? Manni doesn’t have a fucking clue.