Monday morning. Tired faces. The sky outside the windows of the Division 11 conference room has turned from blue to grey, but the storm that everyone is longing for still hasn’t come; the air tastes of heat and dust. ‘Our returners, Manni Korzilius and Judith Krieger are going to form the core of the Jonny Röbel murder investigation team,’ Axel Millstätt had announced at the start of the meeting, but so far there is no sign of Manni’s old – and new – team partner. A few colleagues had given Manni a nod or a thumbs-up sign, then talk had turned to the tourist murderer – the current state of the investigation; the necessary reinforcements to Investigation Team Tourist. Manni thinks of his mother and her generously laid breakfast table – as usual, he hadn’t lingered. He hasn’t mentioned his father’s death at headquarters. He can’t risk having his work given to somebody else or, worse still, being let off work altogether – not now that he’s so close to being reinstated in Division 11.
The door opens and Judith enters the room. She comes in soundlessly, almost cautiously, but as soon as her colleagues notice her, there is a small commotion. Judith smiles and makes a dismissive gesture like a pop star trying to calm a frenzied audience, but as at a concert, it is some time before calm returns. Judith looks wild. Yes, Manni thinks, there’s no other way of describing her; she looks wild, as if she’s come straight from a bush safari. Her unruly curls are sticking up all over the place, her face has grown thinner and the skin around her eyes is translucent, in spite of her deep tan. She’s wearing combat trousers which look as if they belong in the washing machine, and a black tank top with a rip at the neckline. An orange hoodie is tied around her hips, a rucksack is hanging over her shoulder, full to bursting.
‘Welcome back, Judith. I’m afraid we have to put off celebrating for the time being.’ Unlike Manni, Millstätt seems unsurprised at both the appearance and the late arrival of his erstwhile favourite. Judith nods, drops her rucksack on the needled felt carpet and leans against the wall. She doesn’t look at all sure that she wants to stay.
Twenty minutes later, however, the three of them are sitting in Millstätt’s office. Judith downs a coffee and pours herself another. Her body exudes the unmistakable smell of wood smoke; her fingernails are filthy. Silvery scales are flaking off her tanned, freckled arms. The last time the three of them met was beside a murderer’s corpse in a dank wood last winter. ‘We’ll talk later,’ the head of Division 11 had said. But then Judith had taken leave and Manni had been transferred, and no one had talked – not to him, at least.
‘We have three suspects, then,’ Millstätt says, when Manni has come to the end of his report. ‘Jonny’s stepfather; the head of the Red Indian club, Hagen Petermann; and – a possibility I personally consider well worth pursuing – a perpetrator from the school community. We know that ecstasy was involved, and it is a drug that’s particularly popular with the young.’
‘When will Karl-Heinz have the lab results?’ Judith asks.
‘He’s going to call me,’ Manni replies.
‘It would be better if you got in touch with him,’ says Millstätt.
An order, not, Thank you, Manni, for your report and all the overtime you put in. Manni throws his pen down on the table. ‘I have to go to Forensics anyway; I’ve arranged to meet the Stadlers there.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Judith gets up. ‘I have to start somewhere.’
Axel Millstätt gives them a nod. ‘I’m hoping for rapid progress.’
*
The traffic is at a standstill on Severin Bridge and the heat in town has thickened to a viscous humidity in Judith’s absence. Typical Cologne. Nothing has changed. Manni sits beside her, focusing grimly on the traffic, every cell in his body signalling: don’t touch. For a moment, Judith longs to be working with Patrick again; it seems to her impossible that they’ll never work together again – that there is nothing left of Patrick but a gravestone. There are plasters on the back of Manni’s hand. We’re a team held together by sticking plaster, thinks Judith. We’ll talk later, Manni – when I have somehow managed to shower and change and have a bite to eat; when I’ve read through the files and informed Berthold of the death of his only friend.
The mourning room in the Institute of Forensics is in the basement. Back in the seventies, it must have complied with somebody in government’s idea of interior design and reverence for the dead: black walls that swallow the dim artificial light of the porthole lamps and a faux-religious stained-glass window. There was presumably once a cross on the wall, but it has been removed in a fit of multicultural political correctness to avoid offending non-Christian members of society. Today there is no symbol of hope for any religious community – nothing to distract from the long Plexiglas hood that covers the mortal remains of fourteen-year-old Jonny Röbel, and allows his step-parents to say goodbye to him, grateful that Karl-Heinz and his assistants didn’t take the boy’s face away, along with everything else. In the anteroom, a stretcher is leaning against the wall – ready to be put to use should either of the mourners collapse.
Judith looks at Jonny’s relatives – the thin, stony-looking red-haired woman, who keeps running her hand over the Plexiglas, as if she were stroking Jonny’s face, and the handsome man slumped in one of the black upholstered chairs with the metal legs, who looks as if he might need the stretcher at any moment. Between the two of them is an invisible but highly efficient dividing wall. Mined area, thinks Judith, like there used to be between East and West Germany. Frank Stadler is holding back information – maybe he’s the perpetrator, or trying to cover up for the perpetrator. His wife, I would say, is innocent, but there’s something dodgy about her too. We must step up the pressure, Manni had said. Once, Judith would have agreed. Now, more than anything else, she feels tired, and her tired mind is filling with memories – memories of Patrick, the friend and colleague she lost for ever, memories of David, of Margery Cunningham. All of a sudden, Judith isn’t sure it’s right to expect a victim’s relatives to betray one another. And yet it is unavoidable – the dark side of any investigation. If you want to achieve a breakthrough in the name of justice, you have to sow seeds of doubt to make people break their silence.
Margery Cunningham is going to send the German Criminal Investigation Department an official request for administrative assistance, mentioning Judith who has promised to assist in the investigation from Germany. She has promised to investigate David’s past and to search for him; she thinks it unlikely he is in Germany, but Margery Cunningham isn’t interested in what Judith thinks. Unconditional cooperation was the price she had to pay to be flown to Toronto in a small plane, and she had, of course, agreed. But perhaps the price was too high – perhaps she is going to end up paying more than she bargained for.
‘We have some more questions to ask you,’ Manni says in the direction of the snow-white sarcophagus.
The red-haired woman lifts her head in slow motion. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’
Manni shakes his head.
‘And you, Frau Krieger?’
‘No.’
Martina Stadler nods. ‘Of course you don’t. You wouldn’t be here if you did.’
‘We—’
‘You can’t understand what it is to love a child – what it is to lose a child.’
The man on the chair looks like a watchful animal.
‘Having children is an expression of hope,’ whispers Martina Stadler, ‘and a life-long lesson in letting go. That’s what my sister said at Jonny’s christening, when I was made his godmother. And she was right. When I had children of my own, I understood. The first smile, the first tooth, the first step, the first word, nursery, school, sports club, friends. You do what you can. You have your hopes and your fears. And you trust that everything will turn out all right, because there are no guarantees. You want a healthy child and find yourself with a sick one. You want a footballer and end up with a violinist. You learn to accept it, or even come to like it. As long as the children are happy, you tell yourself. You learn to draw your own happiness from their happiness, and it’s as much as you’re going to get back – you certainly won’t get anything you can build on. It’s nonsense to talk of having children.’
Again, Martina Stadler strokes the Plexiglas, leaning over it, looking at Jonny’s face.
‘Letting go. But this isn’t what Susanne meant; she’d never have accepted this, she can’t have meant this. You can’t ask this of parents.’
Abruptly she moves away from the bier.
‘Please go now and leave us alone with Jonny. Maybe we can answer your questions afterwards, when we’re finished.’ She reaches into her handbag. ‘Here, make sure Jonny has his torch with him.’
‘I can’t,’ Judith is about to say, but Manni holds out his hand and gives Martina Stadler an almost conspiratorial nod.
The staccato clatter of a computer keyboard is coming from Karl-Heinz’s office. He waves them in and immediately returns to hacking away at the keys using some ingenious four-finger system. Beside him, a fag is burning down in an overflowing ashtray. Folders, medical reference books and CDs are piled up around his desk. On a shelf, a half-eaten chocolate rabbit and a human skull grin at each other beside Karl-Heinz’s boules.
‘Sorry about the tournament,’ says Judith.
‘Did you have a good time in Canada?’
‘Long story. What should we do with the Stadlers? They’re downstairs in the mourning room and refuse to leave.’
‘Some people need longer than others. Some keep coming back. We’ve seen everything. Leave them. They’re not in anybody’s way.’
Manni lays the torch on the desk. ‘Give this to the boy. It’s against regulations, I know, but do it anyway and don’t ask any questions, OK?’
Karl-Heinz stops typing. He looks as if he’s going to refuse, but then he nods.
‘Do you have the lab results?’ Manni asks.
‘No drugs, no poison.’
‘Sure?’
Karl-Heinz folds his arms in front of his chest and eyes Manni with the expression of a hungry hawk.
‘We can rule out the possibility that master and dog went tripping together.’
‘Maybe not the youth scene after all,’ says Judith.
‘Shit.’ Manni pops a Fisherman’s Friend in his mouth. ‘I’m beginning to get sick of all this.’
*
It isn’t over. They’ll be back with their questions. Elisabeth walks slowly around a house that seems changed, alien. Carmen was hard at work all weekend, tidying, cleaning and washing – even tackling Barabbas, who now smells of camomile shampoo, his coat glossier and silkier than it’s been for a long time. She picked the cherries too, and the beans and strawberries, and she and Elisabeth pickled gherkins together and drank ‘cold duck’ on the terrace in the evening – white wine with sparkling wine and lemon, like when Heinrich was alive. Sometimes it’s nice to have company, Elisabeth thought. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to think about moving, Mother?’ Carmen had asked. ‘Frimmersdorf is so far away and there’s a nice old people’s home in Cologne.’ Elisabeth hadn’t been able to reply; she had started to shake. ‘It’s all right, Mother, it’s all right. You must get better first.’ The concern in Carmen’s voice had hurt Elisabeth – far more than her daughter’s constant impatience, far more than the scrutinising looks she gives her as soon as she thinks she isn’t looking. She kept asking her mother how she could think of staging this grotesque Gothic drama with a dead dachshund. ‘Why, Mother?’ It would all come out in the end, that much was clear.
Now Carmen is back in Cologne. Soon she’ll be opening up the travel agent’s where she makes customers’ dreams come true, taking a break every so often to peer at herself in the tiny mirror above the basin and dab at the worry lines on her forehead with a powder puff. I robbed her of her weekend off, Elisabeth thinks, with a pang of guilt. I shouldn’t have made such demands on her.
She fills a glass with tap water. Drink, Mother – it’s no wonder you keel over if you don’t drink in this crazy heat. A lot of old people die of dehydration, so please drink; I don’t want to lose you. Almost a declaration of love – unusual for Carmen. Elisabeth forces herself to finish the glass. Why does she feel no thirst when her body needs liquid? Why can’t she rely on it any more?
She didn’t tell Carmen what Barabbas had done. She didn’t tell the young blond inspector either. The Alsatian looks at her, raring to go, like the morning they found the dachshund in the wood. She tries to remember – the power station, the wood, the hope she had felt, because the day had seemed so young and innocent, so full of possibility. Then Barabbas had run off and she had heard that awful growling. Why hadn’t the dachshund barked – or at least whined? Would two dogs meet without making a noise? Or had she simply failed to hear it?
Elisabeth remembers the man – a figure she saw and yet didn’t see; someone she thinks she knows, but can’t identify. She wishes she were young again, brave enough to take risks with no fear of the consequences, but she’s a deaf old woman with memory lapses, who buries dead dogs in suitcases and has started seeing ghosts – it won’t be long before someone declares her of unsound mind.
Elisabeth goes out into the garden. She slips off her Birkenstocks and feels the tickle of bristly summer grass beneath her feet; for a split second, she is a young girl again, leaping barefoot over the dew-soaked meadows to the henhouse to feed the chickens. Barabbas nuzzles up alongside her and they walk together to Elisabeth’s favourite spot under the cherry tree. Slowly. One step at a time.
They’ll be back. She knows they will. What she doesn’t know is what she’s going to tell them.
*
The detached house where Tim Rinker lives with his parents has a deserted air to it, and even after several rings at the bell, no one comes to the door.
‘Coffee,’ says Judith when they’re back in the car. ‘Coffee, a roll and tobacco. Please, Manni.’
Pale rings have formed under her eyes, as if the colour were gradually being drained out of her face. The intense smell of wood smoke she gives off is mingled with sweat.
‘Haven’t slept for a long time,’ she mumbles. ‘Came straight to headquarters from the airport.’
Manni spots a kiosk that promises to fulfil all his colleague’s desires. He stops the car. He’d like to go to sleep and forget everything; watch Miss Cat’s Eyes in a garden; glide past green dykes in a houseboat; escape to a peaceful foreign country, where there are no crying mothers, no dead fathers, no children being beaten to death. Judith returns with her mouth full. She drops onto the passenger seat and drinks her coffee with closed eyes.
‘If our perpetrator is a schoolkid of Jonny’s age, how did he get the dachshund to Frimmersdorf without a car?’ asks Manni.
‘Good question.’
A young perpetrator or an adult? They toss ideas back and forth, but arrive at Bertolt Brecht Grammar no further on than before. Still, at least Judith opens her eyes at last. She pulls a face when she sees the grimy, several-storeyed seventies monstrosity and the steel railings.
‘Imagine having to go in there every morning.’
‘What’s so bad about it? It’s only a fence.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, doubtfully.
The staffroom is on the first floor, overlooking the playground. Filing cabinets line the walls; a jumble of thermos flasks, mugs, lunchboxes, apples and piles of marking litter the scuffed tables, and a vast pin board is plastered with timetables, break-duty rosters and notices about trade union agitation. News of the schoolboy’s death has already got around; the handful of teachers sitting out free lessons are talking in hushed tones.
‘Tim Rinker,’ says Manni. ‘Where can we find him?’
One of the teachers gets up and disappears into the corridor. After a while she returns with the headmaster, a man of about sixty whose round face is scored with worry lines.
‘Tim Rinker didn’t come to school today. Absent without an excuse, apparently. I can’t get hold of his parents, but I’m sure they’ll be in touch – the Rinkers are an exemplary family.’
Exemplary, whatever that means. Manni wonders how to proceed. Judith goes over to the window. The sill is dotted with pot plants in various stages of decay, but Judith seems not to notice them; she is peering out at the playground through the murky glass.
‘No money,’ says the headmaster, running a nervous hand over his hairless scalp. ‘The windows are filthy, I know. But our cleaning budget is utterly inadequate. We can’t even afford to have the classroom floors swept once a day.’
Judith doesn’t move.
The headmaster sighs, a well-rehearsed sigh that must come in useful in meetings when decision-making is dragging out. ‘We’re short of money all round. Why do you think Germany always comes out at the bottom of all the league tables? Not enough teachers, not enough books – certainly not enough computers. This grammar school was supposed to embody the social democratic hope of universal education, but the reality . . .’
‘The reality . . .?’ asks Manni.
‘Most of the kids here come from Brück or Rath or Königsforst, not from Ostheim or Merheim.’
‘You mean they’re from wealthy homes.’
‘Well-off at least, yes. But don’t go thinking that means the parents are prepared to cough up. The way they see it, it’s up to the state to sort out education, and if anything goes wrong, the school’s to blame – or politics.’
‘Bullying,’ says Judith, out of the window.
The headmaster shakes his head. ‘It’s never easy when people have to get along with one another. But bullying? No. We’ve developed a code of honour at our school – worked on it together, students and staff. Respect is our guiding principle. We have mediators, project teams, campaign days . . . We were even awarded a prize for our initiative. I regard it as absolutely out of the question that Jonathan Röbel . . . that the perpetrator is from this school.’
‘I thought you had no money and were desperately understaffed?’ says Judith from the window.
The head blushes. ‘You have to set priorities.’
‘What’s the drugs situation?’ Manni asks.
Another practised sigh. ‘Teenagers experiment with everything; things were no different in our day. But we certainly don’t have a drugs problem at this school.’
Of course not, thinks Manni. This is the island of the blessed – not an urban grammar school built by some crazy social engineer a few decades back in the no man’s land between wealthy neighbourhoods and working-class districts that ought to be called Doleville.
The school bell rings for break. Teachers pour into the staffroom, noise floats up from the playground. Judith still hasn’t moved.
‘The big ones bully the little ones; the sporty ones bully the unsporty ones; the kids with bad marks bully the kids with good marks, or vice versa,’ she says to the window. ‘They always find some reason. There’s always someone bullying someone else. Nothing’s changed.’
Manni joins her. He sees clusters of older schoolchildren in a huddle, clusters of younger children playing tag. A teeming, screaming, jostling, cavorting mass – a school playground like any other.
‘Were you popular at school?’ asks Judith.
What a stupid question. ‘Dunno. Just normal.’
‘Maybe you can’t see it,’ she says softly.
‘Can’t see what?’
‘The hierarchy.’
‘Hierarchy?’
‘There are the kids in the centre, who are like magnets. Then there are the ones who worship them, who are in their sphere of influence. Below them you have the kids who defer to the rules at a safe distance and get left in peace. And, last of all, you have the misfits who are all alone, cowering with their backs to the wall.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the head intervenes. ‘All that’s perfectly normal. Let’s go to my office.’
‘Just a moment,’ says Manni, because he is suddenly interested in the children’s patterns of movement. Where would Jonny the scout have stood, Jonny the loner, who perhaps saw something he shouldn’t have seen, who put up a fight and lost? And what about his friend Tim, who always looks as if he’s about to burst into tears? At the edge, Manni thinks; Judith is right. Tim is the kind who stands at the edge. Jonny might have been one of the inconspicuous ones. Or at the edge like Tim, but hidden from view – whatever that might mean for the investigation.
Manni spots blond-haired Viktor, and has to concede again that Judith’s theory works. Viktor is clearly a magnet. He is sitting on the uppermost step of the atrium, in full view of everyone, a blonde girl in his arms – presumably Tim’s cousin Ivonne. A few boys are fidgeting on the steps beneath them, lapping up Viktor’s words like hungry puppy dogs. And now another peroxided adolescent is walking towards the group, stronger-looking than the other kids, self-confident in a different way. Viktor abandons the girl as soon as he spots him and the two boys climb the escarpment above the atrium together. The newcomer seems agitated about something and is talking insistently to Viktor.
Manni turns to the headmaster. ‘Who’s the blond boy over there above the atrium with Viktor Petermann?’
The headmaster shakes his head. ‘A mate of Viktor’s, as far as I know. He isn’t one of ours.’
‘Ralf Neisser?’ Manni asks. ‘Known as Ralle?’
The head looks at him in surprise. ‘Yes, I think so.’
Manni runs off on an impulse. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps it’s nonsense, perhaps Judith’s theories have messed with his mind, but he has the feeling that he needs to confront Ralle right this minute, that Ralle is the key – an important witness in the Jonny Röbel case, and maybe even more. Maybe a perpetrator. The boy Viktor was with when Jonny went missing. The boy Viktor’s father doesn’t like.
He reaches the playground just as the bell is announcing the end of break. Hordes of children surge towards him; by the time he has fought his way through to the atrium, Viktor and Ralle are gone. There is only a fat pigeon, attacking the remains of somebody’s sandwich.
‘Maybe we’re wrong and Jonny didn’t see anything in the woods; maybe he saw something here at school,’ says Judith, who has followed Manni unnoticed. ‘There are paths all over the place in these bushes. Heaven for a boy who likes playing Red Indians.’
Until the enemy appears, thinks Manni – whoever the enemy might be. But what about the motorway lay-by and Frank Stadler’s secret meeting? What happened in the shelter? And how does Viktor’s father fit in? He was in the woods too the afternoon Jonny went missing. Once again, the myriad facts only raise new questions. Manni’s headache is back, throbbing at his temples.
‘We must talk to Tim Rinker,’ he says. ‘He knows something. He must know something.’
He leaves another message on the Rinkers’ answering machine, asking them to call him, urgently. He rings the hospital again, where a harassed nurse assures him that Tim’s father is still operating. Open-heart surgery – it could take hours. The patrol car outside Forensics has no news either; neither of the Stadlers has left the building so far.
‘Let’s drive to headquarters,’ Judith suggests. ‘Or do you think Tim’s—’
‘No.’ Manni knows, even as he says it, that it sounds too abrupt, too loud.
Hope. It’s a foreign word to him.
*
Martina hadn’t thought Jonny would look so peaceful – almost happy, as if he were asleep in bed, watched over by Leopold the glow-worm, Dr D. snoring at his side. He has her brother-in-law’s face, and something of her sister’s too – even a touch of her own. He lies there beneath glass, pale, his eyes closed. Jonny died – no, Jonny was beaten to death like a mangy dog. Jonny is dead, for ever.
She ought to cry and scream and beat her fists against this horribly sterile glass dome separating her from her stepson – from her godson whom she failed to protect, in spite of her baptismal vows. She ought to cry and scream and flail about – anything to ease the clamp on her chest, if only a little.
But she can’t or won’t, because she knows that what comes afterwards, when the steel clamp has been loosened, is worse still, even harder to bear. It is the steel clamp that enables her to stand in this awful black catacomb and muster strength for the children who are left to her – innocent children. They need her because they have lost their adored big brother, who was always there for them, as far back as they can remember. They need her because they are even less able to make sense of this loss than she is.
She strokes the Plexiglas dome. She can’t stop.
‘Martina,’ says Frank. ‘Please, Tina. Let’s go.’
‘I can’t leave Jonny alone. It’s so dark here. So cold.’
‘He’s safe where he is.’
Safe. Martina turns round and meets her husband’s eyes. She gets a fright; he’s lost weight and his haggard cheeks are dark with stubble. Or is she mistaken? She tries to remember what he used to look like. A man who was strong enough to carry her. The memory seems like an illusion.
‘I went to the parish hall on Friday afternoon,’ says Martina. At last she speaks the words that have been threatening to choke her for days.
Frank doubles up, burying his face in hands she once never wanted to let go of and now can’t bring herself to touch.
‘The discussion group was good. But after a while I’d had enough,’ he whispers into his hands. ‘I didn’t want to talk any more. I just wanted a few hours to myself every week.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’
A bitter sound escapes Martina – an unsuccessful attempt at a laugh, she realises, as Frank continues to speak.
‘Then Volker came up with the fishing idea – just sitting around waiting. Usually just me, sometimes the two of us. Sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun. No noise, no colleagues, no children, no demands.’
‘Fishing.’
‘I should have told you, of course I should. But I didn’t dare. I thought you’d get me to take the children.’
‘Fishing!’
‘I know it wasn’t fair of me; you need time to yourself too and you’d had to sacrifice your drama course . . .’
‘Where?’ It’s more of a scream than a question, because she knows the answer even before Frank stammers his innocence. She must believe him; it must be some awful, cruel coincidence that they found Jonny there of all places – that they found him in the pond where he goes fishing.
‘A coincidence, or someone trying to frame me. But it wasn’t me, Tina. It wasn’t me.’
She turns back to Jonny, lets Frank keep talking, blocks him out. She thinks of the twenty thousand euros that went missing. She tries to remember their Friday evenings. Frank must have talked to her when he got home. Sometimes, at least, they must have spoken about the group, when the children were in bed, the evenings when they hadn’t put the television on straight away, too exhausted to talk.
‘Please, Tina!’
She hears Frank get up – a faint scrape of metal chair legs on the floor. She turns round, making him freeze mid-movement.
‘You’re lying,’ she says.
*
Judith’s old desk has been given to someone else, and Millstätt sends her to the intern’s room. It’s a dark cubbyhole at the end of the corridor, but at least she doesn’t have to share it with anyone; it’s too small for that. Manni, too, has to decamp temporarily and installs himself at the desk usually occupied by Holger Kühn, who is on holiday. Manni’s old desk, in the same office, has been taken over by Ralf Meuser, the ‘rookie’, who has hung the wall behind him with framed landscape photos of the Scottish highlands. Judith half expects Manni to protest and insist on hanging his trophies and club pennants in their old place, but he simply gives the rookie a nod, drops onto Holger Kühn’s desk chair and switches on the computer.
This is not the time for niceties. They must get down to research. So far, no one has carried out an in-depth background analysis of the main suspects, and there is a lack of solid evidence and motives all round, although Manni has been working more or less 24/7 on the case, following up even the most tenuous leads.
Judith pours herself a cup of coffee – black because the milk’s gone off; certain things don’t change in Division 11, even if the people come and go. She opens the window of her new office; beyond the slip road, behind office blocks, she thinks she can glimpse the Rhine. River and sky are both grey, but there’s still no sign of rain or cooler temperatures. She pushes aside the pile of reports on the Jonny Röbel case, boots up the PC and rolls herself a cigarette. She logs into her email account, finds the promised email from Charlotte’s dentist and forwards the X-rays to Canada. With only a click or a few hours on the plane and you’re in another world – whether you can cope with that is another question. It is said that when the first railways were built, the Native Americans would sit down next to the tracks after getting off the train, to let their souls catch up with them. Cut the ethno-kitsch, Judith. That isn’t going to get you anywhere.
She gets up and finishes her cigarette at the window. Two time shifts in six days, nights of fitful sleep out in the open, and now no sleep at all for over twenty-four hours. Cologne seems unreal to her. She’s lost ground contact. She isn’t here; she’s somewhere else. She finishes the coffee, which doesn’t wake her up – only quickens her heartbeat and dries out her mouth. She goes to the loo, runs cold water over her wrists, splashes water onto her face, puts her mouth under the tap and drinks.
Back at the computer, she calls up the Federal Central Criminal Register and then the police information system. Hagen Petermann has no previous convictions, nor does his son Viktor or Jonny’s stepfather. She googles ‘Hagen Petermann’ and finds his construction company in several electronic directories; his contracts include work for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Red Indian club also has its own website, designed with rather more enthusiasm than skill: www.siouxofcologne.de. In the image gallery Judith finds photos of Frank Stadler, of Jonny with feathers in his hair holding the dachshund, and of Hagen Petermann with his son Viktor – evidently an old photo, because Viktor’s hair isn’t blond. She’s getting nowhere.
Again she goes and stands at the window, breathing in the dusty city air that bites her lungs like cheap cigarettes. She has no strength, but hopes that somewhere inside her she has reserves she can draw on to get her through the day – and the night, and the next day – reserves that will enable her to prove that she is fit again, worthy of being a detective on the Cologne murder squad. There is another piece of research she must carry out, another name she must enter: she needs to look up David Becker and discover what she would rather not know. But she can’t bring herself to do it. She crosses the corridor, back to Manni’s office. His research has also been fruitless so far. Millstätt is leaning against the doorframe, discussing the tourist murderer with the rookie.
‘We need reinforcements, Axel,’ says Judith.
The head of Division 11 shakes his head and disappears into the corridor. The rookie trots out after him.
‘The lab rang,’ says Manni. ‘The criminal technicians have found traces of blood on a scrap of carpet they found in Frimmersdorf. The blood is from Jonny’s dachshund. They think the dog was transported in the carpet. Dead.’
‘The only question is: who did it?’
‘And how did they get there? And where did they come from?’
‘What a mess.’
‘Yup.’
Too many possibilities, not enough staff or time and not enough to go by. And on top of this, the nagging feeling that Tim Rinker might have gone missing, like Jonny and Charlotte. Judith tries to push the feeling aside, as if by ignoring it she could avert disaster. As long as no one reports the boy missing, they can’t act, can they? Possibilities. Decisions. The old fear of being too late, because she’s overlooked something. Like in the woods in November. Manni sweeps his file aside as if he can read Judith’s thoughts.
‘I’m going to drive round to the Rinkers’ again. And then to Neisser. He lives right next door to the school.’
Judith goes back to her office and stares at the computer for a while. David Becker. Her fingers rest on the keys, but don’t move. Possibilities. Paradoxes. Things that are not as they appear: a grey sky that brings heat; a turquoise sea that is really a freshwater lake; red-eyed birds that wail and vanish like ghosts; a man who is not what she thought him to be.
‘I don’t think Becker is a murderer,’ Judith had said to Margery.
‘Don’t make a fool of yourself,’ Margery had replied.
‘I just don’t believe it.’
‘Was there something between you?’
But Judith had denied that, to prevent Margery from declaring her biased.
She puts her pistol in its holster. The weight at her belt, too, is at once strange and familiar. She orders a fleet vehicle and goes to the lift. If she sits at her desk any longer, she’ll go mad.
*
A sound. A ringing sound. Or is she mistaken? No. Barabbas sniffs the air and yelps.
‘Quiet, boy.’ Elisabeth gives him a scratch. ‘Nothing can happen to us here.’ The Alsatian sighs and lays his head on her knee. The ringing sound again – longer this time, and yet distant. Barabbas pricks his ears and then settles down again. I don’t want to, Elisabeth thinks. Don’t want to and don’t have to.
The day has advanced. At midday she had gone into the house for a nap. Now she’s back under the cherry tree, watching the blackbirds, looking at the clouds. Elisabeth knows that the peace is deceptive, but she clings to it all the same. She closes her eyes, losing herself in lovely, bright memories. Seconds go by, minutes – she can’t say for sure.
‘Quiet,’ she says again automatically as Barabbas begins to growl again. But this time the dog won’t be hushed. He struggles to his feet and runs off barking.
Fear grips her – and the feeling of being watched. Elisabeth heaves herself up, gropes for the tree trunk and props herself up until the dizziness subsides. Where is Barabbas? There he is. Sitting growling at the fence that divides her garden from the deserted garden next door.
Elisabeth crosses the grass one step at a time. Someone is standing on the other side of the fence, she can see that now. Who knows how long they’ve been standing there watching her. In a panic she looks about her for a weapon, but there is nothing. The police have taken all the garden tools.
‘Frau Vogt?’ The name reaches her as if through cotton wool. ‘Frau Vogt? I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but I did ring . . .’
A woman’s voice. A young woman in strange baggy trousers with pockets sewn on at the knees. It must be some new fashion. Elisabeth’s relief evaporates when the stranger continues to speak.
‘Could you let me in, please, Frau Vogt? My name is Judith Krieger. I’m a detective, I have a few more questions to ask you.’
The kitchen is cooler than the garden. The detective sits down on the sofa, just where her younger colleague had sat. Elisabeth gives her a glass of water. ‘You wouldn’t have a cup of coffee for me, would you?’ The detective sounds tired.
Elisabeth puts water on to boil, fills the electric coffee grinder with beans and pushes a coffee filter into the porcelain filter-holder.
‘That’s just the way my grandmother used to make coffee,’ says the detective. ‘A proper ritual.’
‘Isn’t she alive any more?’
‘Not for a long time.’ Her words are barely audible.
Elisabeth doesn’t know what to say. She thinks of her grandson, a dog lover, like her. The woman in her kitchen is not at all the way she’d imagined a lady detective. Not nearly as frighteningly purposeful as her young blond colleague – although, of course, she’s wrong there; the woman forced her way in through the garden, after all. Elisabeth brews coffee and lays the table.
‘Oh, milk.’ The detective smiles and reaches for the jug with almost childlike greed. Her T-shirt is torn. Perhaps she got it caught on something in the garden. Her mane of curls is tied at the nape of her neck with a piece of string. It looks improvised, not like a proper hairstyle.
‘Lovely dog you’ve got there.’
Elisabeth smiles, glad that Barabbas is so clean and spruce. They drink coffee in silence.
‘The boy,’ the detective says at length. ‘The boy who owned the wire-haired dachshund. Jonny. He’s dead.’
Elisabeth’s heart clenches.
‘That’s why I’ve come. I was hoping you might have thought of something else that could help us.’
The buzz of the flies, the glassy eye, the severed ear. The scent of wild camomile and the sky so blue, as if there were no such thing as human cruelty.
‘We’ve worked out that somebody must have brought the dachshund to Frimmersdorf in the state you found it in – dead and mutilated,’ says the detective.
A child’s companion, that had been her first thought after she had dragged Barabbas away – and that somebody must hate the child to treat the dog like that. But what did this lady detective just say? The dachshund was brought to Frimmersdorf dead? Elisabeth feels a trickle of sweat running down her back. Then Barabbas can’t have . . . That would mean she had suspected him and beaten him unjustly – and that no one can accuse him of anything. Neither Barabbas nor her.
‘You were in the wood with your dog.’ The detective looks intently at Elisabeth. ‘Maybe you saw or heard something. Or maybe your dog barked. He’s a clever, alert animal. What’s his name, by the way?’
‘Barabbas.’
‘Barabbas found the dachshund, didn’t he? There are bite wounds.’
Elisabeth feels herself beginning to tremble. A trembling that comes from deep down inside her.
‘The dachshund won’t have felt anything.’ The detective’s voice is gentle. ‘Please, Frau Vogt, have another think. Even the smallest detail might be important. We must find the murderer.’
A rattle and a flash of light. Too shadowy, too fast. Later, for a split second by the river, a face she thought she knew. Was it later that day or some other time? If only she could remember.
‘Please, Frau Vogt.’ The detective is leaning over the arm of the sofa to Barabbas, who is letting her stroke his back.
The trembling subsides as suddenly as it began. It is succeeded by a great peace. The lady detective likes her dog. Barabbas is safe; no one wants to take him away from her.
‘A scooter,’ says Elisabeth. ‘I thought it was youths. There was this rattle after we’d found the dachshund. A rattle like a scooter makes. And there was a flash of light from somewhere.’
‘Maybe the reflection of the sun on metal.’ The detective stops stroking Barabbas and sits up straight, leaning her elbows on the table. She looks at Elisabeth as if she wants to drink her words.
‘A scooter,’ she repeats quietly.
‘I’m really not sure, it all went so fast.’ And she was afraid of Barabbas’s growling; that had stopped her from thinking straight. But she needn’t mention that now.
‘It sounded like a scooter,’ says the detective.
‘Do you know what was funny? On my way home I saw someone by the river, only very briefly. It was a young man, and I almost had the impression I knew him. He reminded me of a former colleague of my husband, who used to drive round the village on his scooter and make eyes at the women. But that was a long time ago. Neisser’s old now, and he doesn’t ride a scooter any more.’
‘Neisser?’ The detective opens her eyes very wide. She doesn’t look at all tired any more.
*
Tim Rinker’s parents’ house is still shut up and deserted. Manni looks up the road – not a soul in sight; it’s as if the neighbourhood were in a coma. He walks resolutely past the front entrance to the six-foot iron gate that leads into the back garden and tries the handle; it’s locked. After a quick glance over his shoulder, he puts his foot on the handle and swings himself over onto the other side. The garden looks drearily trim and well kept. Tall shrubs screen it from the neighbouring gardens, for which Manni is grateful. The sun lounger next to the fountain is empty; everything looks empty. Manni goes onto the terrace and peers through the windows. Inside, too, everything looks tidy and deserted. Herr Rinker is in the operating theatre, but where is Frau Rinker? And, more important, where is their son?
It’s only a five-minute drive from Brück to Ostheim, but the contrast between Tim’s street and Ralf Neisser’s could hardly be more extreme. The din of traffic from Frankfurter Strasse mingles with snatches of TV and music to form a wild jumble of sounds. The narrow road peters out into a kind of bumpy footpath flanked by tiny, closely built houses. Ralf Neisser’s parents live at number 73. The house looks neglected. Builder’s rubble and paint buckets are piled up outside. A freestanding Chinese pagoda roof with red-lacquered dragons serves as a garden gate, an absurd piece of outsized kitsch, supremely out of place. In the absence of a doorbell, Manni tugs at the Chinese bell rope.
‘Garden!’ a man yells.
Manni takes this as an invitation and leaves the dragons behind him, squeezing past a dented Opel Manta. The back garden is tiny like the house; weathered wooden fencing bounds it on either side, intensifying the sense of confinement. Empty crates of beer, more builder’s rubble and a few plastic chairs are strewn about. The speaker reveals himself as a red-faced man, sitting in state in an inflatable paddling pool, drinking beer. He looks at Manni in astonishment. From a portable television set come the silly nasal voices of people on some tell-all talk show.
‘Hello, I’m looking for Ralf Neisser.’
‘The cops,’ says the man in the paddling pool. A gold chain flashes on his fat hairy chest. His belly hangs over knee-length Bermuda shorts patterned with palm trees.
Manni waves his warrant card. The man takes a long slug of beer from his bottle, swallows, fishes about for a packet of Marlboros and spits into the dry weeds, a hair’s breadth from the edge of the pool.
‘Ralf isn’t here. What do you want him for?’
‘I’m investigating a murder. I’d like to ask him a few questions.’
‘My boy isn’t mixed up in any murder.’ Neisser senior slides out of his semi-supine position to a sitting position, making his biceps swell.
‘I see him as a witness,’ says Manni, suddenly thinking of his own father, who had never defended him to anyone. If there were complaints about Manni, Günter Korzilius apologised for his son, and then gave him a thrashing when he got home, never stopping to wonder whether it mightn’t be unjust – never asking Manni for his version of the facts. Manni’s phone begins to jingle, sparing him from any more pointless reflections. It’s Judith, her voice high and edgy.
‘Ralf Neisser,’ she says. ‘He has a grandfather in Frimmersdorf he sometimes visits – I’ve just checked. And it sounds as if Elisabeth Vogt saw Ralle the day she found the dead dachshund. She thinks she heard a scooter too.’
‘I’ll look into it,’ Manni forces himself to sound calm, not to lay himself open to attack from Ralf’s father.
‘Can’t you talk?’ asks Krieger.
‘That’s right.’
‘What about Tim?’
‘Nada. Still not got hold of anyone.’
‘Shit.’
Manni puts the phone back in his pocket. The man in the paddling pool seems to have cottoned on to the fact that something has changed, and not necessarily to his son’s advantage. He looks like a sullen toddler, considering Manni suspiciously with his bloodshot drinker’s eyes.
‘Ralf ain’t done nothing.’
The beatings hadn’t been so bad. The worst was the injustice – that and the lack of interest. Fathers and sons – why is it so bloody hard, and why has Ralf Neisser of all people struck lucky in the lottery of paternal love? Not, of course, that there’s any guarantee that Neisser senior’s solidarity with his son will extend beyond Manni’s departure. Manni bends down to pick up a garden chair, sets it the right way up, checks it for stability and sits down – a power game for which he has neither the time nor the nerves.
‘Your father lives in Frimmersdorf?’
The man in the paddling pool nods, takes another gulp from the bottle and then tosses it behind him.
‘Does Ralf have a scooter?’
‘Isn’t a crime.’
‘I need the registration number.’
‘No idea. Ask Ralf.’
Manni stretches out his legs like someone who has every intention of staying put for a while. He eyes the back of the house, the paddling pool and the pile of rubble where there is also a scrap of carpet.
‘Drugs,’ he says thoughtfully, as if he were talking to himself. ‘A few kids from the grammar school are into them. Someone must supply them. Pretty handy, living so near a school.’
The man in the paddling pool reaches out behind him for another beer which he proceeds to open with a plastic lighter. He stares at the television, at Manni, at the bottle and then back at the television. He’s nervous. Manni suppresses a grin and turns his attention back to the rubble. Maybe Ralf really is the source of the ecstasy. That scrap of carpet certainly looks bloody like the carpet that was used to transport Jonny’s dachshund. This fact, along with the Neissers’ connection to Frimmersdorf – an easy scooter ride away from Cologne – ought to be enough for a search warrant.
His phone begins to buzz. The display shows the number of Division 66.
‘Tim Rinker’s parents have just reported him missing,’ says Petra Bruckner. ‘They’re desperately worried. Thought I’d let you know straight away.’
*
Berthold Pretorius is already there. The front door to Charlotte’s villa stands ajar; the blinds have been raised. Inside, it still smells of disinfectant, mothballs and abandonment. The walls seem to loom in on Judith; she feels as if she can’t breathe, as if her sense of time is slipping away. Did she really find Charlotte in Canada? For a moment it seems as unreal to her as a delirious dream. Berthold comes out of the living room to meet her, hesitantly, as if he isn’t sure he wants to talk to Judith. They shake hands and look at each other, but neither speaks. His hand is warm and damp, and locks onto Judith’s. She counts to twenty in her head, and then pulls her hand away.
‘Charlotte is dead,’ she says, and Berthold starts, although he must have known what was coming. ‘There is no doubt,’ she adds. ‘You were right to be worried. I’m sorry.’
The walls seem to inch even closer. With a heavy tread, Berthold goes to the drinks cabinet and pours himself a cognac. He refills his glass, closes the cabinet again and sits down in an armchair, gripping the balloon of cognac in his right hand. What will he do when this conversation is over? Drive back to his computers which, unlike living beings, can generally be brought back to life with a little patience and know-how? Sit alone in his flat, staring at the walls, trying to get his head round the loss of his only friend? Judith knows nothing about Berthold and doesn’t want to know anything; she doesn’t want to recall the boy with the inky, bitten fingernails and the flickering gaze – doesn’t want him back in her life. And yet they are connected.
She suppresses the impulse to roll a cigarette; for some reason it seems disrespectful. Instead she sits down on the sofa beneath the oil painting of the bloody-mouthed hunting hounds and begins to tell Berthold what she knows. She relates everything matter-of-factly, in the tone of a trained detective who has learnt to keep disaster at bay. She tells him of visiting Atkinson’s university office and his white house, of Charlotte’s decision to watch loons, of German-born guide David Becker, who flew Charlotte into the wilderness, of Charlotte’s camp, the rotten food and the bones on the island which, with the help of dental data, the Canadian police have since identified beyond doubt as Charlotte’s mortal remains. She tells him that the guide, who may or may not have been involved in Charlotte’s death, has disappeared without trace.
‘Since there is no bullet or knife wound on the bones, it’s more or less impossible to establish the cause of death,’ Judith ends. ‘It might have been a tragic accident.’
‘How did she get to the island if her canoe was on the other shore?’ Berthold swills the cognac around in the big-bellied glass, steadily, mechanically.
‘I presume she swam.’
Berthold put the glass down on the table. ‘She couldn’t swim.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘She almost drowned as a girl. She was scared of water. And I think it highly unlikely that she dared cross the water in a rickety canoe.’
The life jacket in the tent. The shelter on the island. Charlotte did dare, Judith thinks. And perhaps her fear of water explains her fascination for loons, for birds which can swim better than they can fly – which have a second secret life under the surface of the water. But Berthold is right, it’s an important question: how did Charlotte get to the island without the canoe and without the life jacket? There is only one possibility – somebody took her there, dead or alive. That would also explain why there was nothing else on the island – no clothes, no binoculars, none of a birdwatcher’s usual paraphernalia.
‘Charlotte couldn’t swim,’ Berthold repeats. ‘That guide must have killed her – he must have done.’
‘Investigations have only just begun.’ Judith has to get out of here. She wants to shower and change and eat. Most important, she must sleep – sleep and forget, if only for a few merciful hours.
Berthold Pretorius closes his broad fleshy fingers around the cognac glass and raises it to his mouth, which looks raw, like a crustacean that has had its shell ripped off.
‘I don’t know what to do next,’ he says. ‘I have to find that bastard. I have to do something.’
Judith’s phone plays Queen’s ‘Spread Your Wings’. She takes the call and hastily, guiltily, finds a pad on the telephone table in the hall and notes down the address that Manni raps out at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says to Berthold Pretorius, who is sitting motionless in Charlotte’s father’s armchair. ‘I can’t stay any longer – I have to get back to work. I’ll find out about Charlotte. I’ll call you.’
Berthold opens his mouth to protest, but she runs out of the house as if the hunting hounds have jumped out of the oil painting and given chase.
In the car her hands begin to tremble, her vision is blurred, her body tries to take by force what she is refusing it and pulls her down towards the floor. She stops at a kiosk and buys a bar of chocolate, a packet of Benson & Hedges and a bottle of water. She wolfs the chocolate, rolls the windows right down, lights a cigarette and goes on her way, desperately trying to keep her eyes open. Now for some very loud Manfred Mann, or Patti Smith or Gianna Nannini, she thinks – but the only radio stations she can get are playing muzak. Judith takes a drag on her cigarette. She must stop smoking – soon, very soon, but not today, not now.
She parks outside Tim Rinker’s parents’ house and wipes the remains of the chocolate from the corners of her mouth. The house looks smart, but today horror has broken in on its inhabitants and she is part of that horror. Manni is sitting in the living room with Tim’s parents – a tight-lipped heart surgeon and a sobbing woman on white upholstery. White, for heaven’s sake, Judith thinks. They have a fourteen-year-old son. How is he to feel at ease in here?
Brief questions, hopeless answers. In the morning, Tim left for school on his bike at the usual time. Tim’s father was operating; Tim’s mother spent the day on a beauty farm in the Bergisches Land so she had her phone switched off. She had presumed the boy was safe at school. At lunchtime he was to warm up pasta in the microwave, just like every Monday; in the afternoon he had chess club. But instead, something happened that only a few hours ago was beyond imagining. Their only son disappeared, leaving as little trace as his best friend, who was – the awful facts are now common knowledge – abused and murdered in some as yet unknown place.
They go upstairs to Tim’s room, a neat, pleasant room with pale-blue walls covered in posters of marine animals and fish, and curtains with a deep-sea pattern on the high windows. Shells, starfish, sea urchin shells and stuffed fish are set out on the shelves and windowsills. Two houseplants with fleshy green shoots are reminiscent of seaweed. Tim has a lot of books and a computer of his own. In one corner are two comfy armchairs at a chess table with chessmen made of semi-precious stone. The room lacks nothing – except a happy child.
‘He’d have liked an aquarium . . .’ Tim’s mother sobs quietly.
But living fish would have meant dirt and work, thinks Judith. So you preferred to buy him a poster.
Manni asks the Rinkers to wait for them downstairs. The plasters on his hands are damp and grimy; his eyes look as tired as Judith feels. They pull on latex gloves in silence and begin their search for the profile of another boy.
‘He was scared of something.’ Manni is examining carefully labelled boxes of shells under Tim’s bed. ‘He wouldn’t tell me what. I shouldn’t have fucking given up.’
‘You did what you could; it was just too much,’ says Judith.
Manni nods and continues to rummage through the shells. Something has changed between them. The distance has evaporated; perhaps they are simply too exhausted to care about it. Too exhausted, too worried. Judith starts on the second desk drawer. Girls keep diaries, but it’s rare for boys to; Tim has left no personal notes.
‘Judith?’ Manni holds up a sheath knife, its red leather strap studded with glass beads. He holds the knife under the desk lamp.
‘A Red Indian knife,’ he says.
‘Jonny’s?’
‘We’ll have to ask the parents.’
‘What’s that on the blade?’
Manni pushes the knife into a plastic bag. ‘Maybe blood.’
‘Could Timmy have mutilated Jonny’s dog?’
‘I don’t think so.’
In the bottom drawer of the desk is a sketch pad. Tim is good at drawing. Judith leafs through various colourful and imaginative pictures. But there is something else wedged right at the back of the drawer, a picture that makes the seemingly wholesome, happy room appear in a different light – a solid black surface. ‘DEEP SEA’, Tim has written on the back, along with a date. Last Friday’s.
Red circles dance before Judith’s eyes; again she feels as if she’s about to keel over. We need reinforcements, she thinks. We must question parents, teachers and schoolmates. Someone must search Tim’s computer; someone must organise a search for Ralf Neisser and find out whether Forensics have discovered anything in his father’s house. She picks up the picture, forcing herself to concentrate. If she doesn’t keep moving, she’ll collapse.
‘I’ll go and see if Tim’s parents have anything to say to this.’
‘I’ll join you in a second.’ Manni is finished under the bed and turns to Tim’s wardrobe.
Downstairs, in amidst the spotlessly white upholstery, the black picture seems almost obscene. The Rinkers stare at it in disbelief. They look defensive.
‘That’s not a picture drawn by a happy child,’ says Judith.
But Tim’s parents refuse to accept that. The picture’s a joke, they say, or an attempt to represent the darkness of the ocean depths. Their son has an enquiring mind; he’s a happy boy, he wants for nothing. We love him.
‘Where do you think your son is? Why did he disappear without leaving a note?’
Now Tim’s father looks as if he were about to cry.
‘Would you come up, please?’ Manni calls from the bedroom before the Rinkers are able to answer Judith’s question.
Again they climb the stairs – a kind of dragging goose-step, like a procession of shy children.
Manni is standing in front of the open wardrobe holding a sports bag.
‘Tim’s tennis bag – he doesn’t play any more. What about it?’ asks the heart surgeon.
Manni lifts the bag onto Tim’s desk. Inside is a picture book – or rather the remains of one. The binding has been brutally destroyed. Colour photographs have been shredded and slashed and screwed into balls. Carefully, Manni reaches into the bag and pulls out a scrap of dust cover: Splendours of the Seas.
‘My God, Tim’s favourite book!’ Tim’s mother stretches out her hand as if she wanted to undo the work of destruction.
‘Don’t touch, please,’ Manni says sharply.
Again the woman begins to sob uncontrollably.
‘But it was all over,’ Tim’s father says tonelessly. ‘Tim swore it was over.’
‘Over?’ Manni’s voice is insistent, almost cajoling. ‘What was over, Herr Rinker?’
‘The bullying at school, Tim’s despondency, the hours spent hiding in his room, crying . . . His fits of blind, destructive rage, the talks with the teachers and the other children’s parents . . . Then, eventually, when nothing was any use, the sessions with a child psychologist – until Tim wrongly accused another boy of stealing and had to apologise.’
‘Stealing?’ asks Manni sharply.
‘Tim’s iPod. He claimed a schoolmate had stolen it, but it turned up in his own schoolbag,’ says the doctor, who possibly knows more about strangers’ hearts than about his own son.
‘What’s the name of the boy he accused?’
‘Lukas Krone.’
‘Lukas, not Viktor?’
‘Lukas.’
‘So Tim apologised to Lukas – and then?’
‘After that, things improved. Tim got to know Jonny; the crying stopped. He didn’t want to carry on seeing the psychologist. He swore it wasn’t necessary – that everything was all right.’
‘And you believed him.’
‘Yes.’ Tim’s father’s eyes wander to the destroyed picture book, over the walls and out of the window.
‘I’d like to talk to this psychologist. You must give us the address,’ says Judith.
Manni lays the knife next to the sports bag. ‘Does this belong to Tim?’
‘No, Tim doesn’t have a knife. Where did you find it?’ Tim’s mother whispers.
Manni’s phone begins to jingle; he takes the call.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Keep going.’ He looks at Judith. ‘They’ve found ecstasy at Neisser’s place.’
‘A lot?’
‘They aren’t finished yet. Ralle hasn’t reappeared either.’
Another missing boy. A boy who might be a murderer – mightn’t he?
Splendours of the Seas, Judith thinks – blackness, fish that can’t be seen. Birds that dive into the depths of an icy lake and vanish. An unhappy boy, an unhappy girl. Unhappy, misunderstood, ‘counted out’, like in a playground rhyme – but by whom?
‘Judith?’ Manni’s voice seems to come from very far away. She opens her eyes, confused. Did she fall asleep standing up?
‘The psychologist’s address,’ she repeats ponderously.
Tim’s father nods. ‘I’ll fetch it.’
Manni reaches for his phone and rings Forensics, giving the Rinkers’ address and asking for a computer specialist.
She needs to sleep – to forget – but it’s impossible; there’s too much to be done.
The feeling of falling grows stronger. She is falling, losing ground contact; her sense of time is slipping away.
*
By the time they leave the Rinkers’ it is getting dark. One behind the other, they drive back into the other world beyond the school, a world where there is no well-ordered wealth – certainly none in evidence. Neisser senior is sitting red-faced and sullen in his filthy miniature kitchen. No, he doesn’t know where Ralf is. No, the boy isn’t a dealer; the ecstasy pills in his room must be some mistake, or even an insinuation on the part of the police – his boy is clean. They confiscate the carpet from the pile of rubble, and the criminal technicians take it off to the lab along with the techno pills. Then, as the paddling pool king registers with a malicious grin, they have to admit defeat for the time being.
Outside, they are assailed by air that is damp and heavy, statically charged like the harbinger of a subtropical storm.
‘What next?’ asks Krieger, leaning against her service vehicle and lighting a cigarette. ‘We can’t knock off now.’
‘I’m going to drive back to the Petermanns’; I want to catch Viktor. He’s Ralf’s friend – maybe he knows where Ralf is.’
To Manni’s surprise, his colleague doesn’t protest – nor does she want to go with him.
‘Give me a ring if you get anywhere,’ is all she says. ‘I’ll drive to headquarters and see if I can dig up anything on the Neissers or the Rinkers.’ Her face looks ghostly in the twilight, at once shadowy and translucent.
In the car, Manni suddenly realises how hungry he is, and stops at a kiosk to order currywurst and chips. While he’s eating, he rings his mother, who listens to yet another apology in silence. It strikes him that she hasn’t once rung him since his father died, as if, now that her worst nightmare has become real, she no longer needs him. Or is her silence her typical female way of showing that she disapproves of her son’s obsession with his career? He isn’t in the mood to think about it, nor does he have the time – or the nerves, or the aptitude.
‘The funeral will be on Friday,’ his mother says quietly.
‘I’ll take the day off,’ he promises her, spearing the last piece of sausage with his plastic fork and hoping fervently that the case will be closed by then.
It doesn’t look much like it at the moment. Petermann’s offices and house are plunged in darkness, and stay that way even when Manni rings the bell. Anger drives him back to his car and sweeps him off to the Stadlers’ terraced house. Here, too, the windows are unlit. Manni presses the doorbell and hears the familiar three-tone chime inside. He starts when Martina Stadler opens the door only seconds later.
‘What on earth . . .?’ She pulls her woollen shawl tighter about her shoulders.
‘I must speak to your husband. Right now.’
‘Frank’s in the garden. You know the way.’ She turns on her heel and disappears. Manni closes the front door behind him. On his way through the house he sees Martina Stadler in the kitchen. She looks as if she’s already forgotten that he’s there, huddled in her usual place on the corner bench, staring into the darkness, her legs drawn up to her chest.
Frank Stadler is sitting on the steps leading down from the patio, where Manni had sat daydreaming of Miss Cat’s Eyes while Martina Stadler watered the flowers. Looking back, those days seem almost happy. There was still hope then. Hope that a missing boy might turn up alive. Hope that Manni might see Miss Cat’s Eyes again, and maybe even his father.
Stadler is drinking wine from a bottle. When Manni says his name, he jumps to his feet and, for a moment, he seems confused. Then he motions to the garden table and lights a lantern.
‘Tim Rinker is missing – Jonny’s best friend. Things aren’t looking good.’ Manni isn’t in the mood for pleasantries. Stadler is still hiding something. Now his time’s up.
‘Tim? My God!’ Stadler slumps onto a wooden chair, burying his face in his hands.
‘On Saturday afternoon,’ Manni says, ‘when Jonny went missing, he – Jonny – was in the lay-by. You were there too with your friend Volker Braun.’
‘We’ve already discussed this. I didn’t see Jonny.’
‘He was there.’
‘I can’t imagine—’
‘Your stepson is dead, his best friend is probably in mortal danger. What is it that’s so important you can’t say it? Out with it, man. Or do you want another boy to die?’
The light from the lantern flickers in Stadler’s face, deepening lines that hadn’t even existed a week ago.
‘Will you treat it in confidence?’
‘As far as I can.’
‘I told you, didn’t I, that Volker’s in financial trouble? Two years ago he bought a house with a big garden, for the children – an old house that needed work doing on it. A lot of work, a lot of money, but he’d done his sums. Then, a year after they’d moved in they had the first lot of water damage. I’ll spare you the details, but one thing led to another, the bills went through the roof and they reached their credit limit. Then Hagen Petermann gave Volker an interest-free loan – twenty thousand euros.’
‘Hagen Petermann?’
Stadler nods. ‘That saved Volker’s bacon. To thank him, he put in a good word for Petermann’s company in a call for bids – Volker is a consultant for the ministry of construction in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia. Let’s just say, he made sure Petermann got the job.’
‘Bribery. And he couldn’t have that getting out in the ministry.’
‘It would have cost him his job, and then he really would have been done for. Just once, Volker thought. Just the once. But Petermann wanted more.’
‘So your friend asked you to help him out.’
‘I didn’t tell you – because I wanted to protect Volker.’
Rather than your stepson, Manni thinks. Explain that to your wife. Explain that to your dead stepson. Explain that to yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning.
‘Did you talk about Petermann’s attempts at blackmail at the lay-by?’ he asks.
Stadler nods, his face buried in his hands again. ‘I didn’t think . . . I wasn’t to know . . .’
Petermann, then. Manni gets up. He must talk to this Volker Braun. And he needs a search warrant for Petermann’s company.
‘Another thing,’ says Stadler huskily. ‘The pond they found Jonny in. I go fishing there, every Friday afternoon. That can’t be a coincidence; somebody’s trying to pin something on me, but I don’t know who. Apart from Volker and now Martina, nobody knows about it. Please believe me, I didn’t do anything to Jonny.’
Manni shows Frank Stadler the knife from Tim’s room.
‘Was this Jonny’s?’
‘Yes, where did you find it?’
‘I’ll see myself out.’ Manni gropes his way across the dark, deathly silent living room towards the front door. From the patio he hears the dry, unpractised sob of a man unaccustomed to giving vent to his feelings. Instinctively Manni quickens his pace and clenches his fists; his battered knuckles respond with a stabbing pain. Petermann, he thinks again. But what about Ralf Neisser? What about Petermann’s son? And most important: what’s happened to Tim?
Volker Braun lives in Immekeppel in the Bergisches Land, only a quarter of an hour on the motorway.
‘No, no, no,’ he whispers, when Manni confronts him with Frank Stadler’s statement. ‘Frank misunderstood. I’m not open to bribery – I didn’t favour Petermann. He didn’t blackmail me, I work by the book. Please, you have to believe me – I have children.’
And he sticks to that, try as Manni might. A man who is fighting for survival – not a reliable witness. Frustrated, Manni drives back to Cologne. He tries at the Petermanns’ again, but their house is still in darkness and no one lets him in.
Division 11, on the other hand, in spite of the late hour, is in uproar. Investigation Team Tourist have caught their murderer, and are making a great deal of noise in the conference room – preparing for hearings and press conferences, congratulating themselves and all talking at once. Judith Krieger’s cubbyhole is empty, but her computer is on, the printer is spewing paper and there is a lukewarm cup of coffee next to the full ashtray. Manni slumps onto the office chair and stares at the screen. David Becker, born in Hanover on 11 October 1959, biologist. Civil disorder, violation of the ban on public assembly, grievous bodily harm, tax evasion – the man’s criminal record is impressive. In 1995 Becker married a Canadian and moved to Toronto with her. They were divorced three years later; it sounds suspiciously like a marriage of convenience.
Krieger suddenly pops up at Manni’s side. She blushes all over when she sees what he’s reading.
‘That’s private.’ She reaches for the mouse, clicks the website away and almost staggers to the chair opposite Manni. ‘Well?’
As Manni sums up his latest findings, it seems to him that Stadler was telling the truth, and that Volker Braun was lying. ‘Jonny eavesdropped on his stepfather at the lay-by and found out that Hagen Petermann was blackmailing Stadler’s friend. Then he met Petermann in the woods – probably by chance – and confronted him.’
‘And Petermann attacked him? And mutilated and killed the dachshund? And why is Tim missing now?’ Krieger looks suspicious.
‘Because Jonny confided in him.’
‘But then Tim would have had to be in the woods. And anyway – why didn’t Tim tell anyone?’
Millstätt and the public prosecutor ask exactly the same questions, and because Manni has no answers and nothing to go on except Stadler’s statement, they refuse to provide a search warrant for Petermann’s house.
‘Go home – that’s enough for today,’ says Millstätt. ‘No arguing. See you tomorrow.’
On the car radio, Herbert Grönemeyer is yelling about life and humanity. Judith’s wood-smoky smell has grown fainter, overridden by sweat and stress and nicotine. She sits beside Manni with closed eyes, a bluely shimmering silhouette in the light of the dashboard. Manni thinks of his father and of Frank Stadler’s sobs. He thinks that Grönemeyer was wrong to be so optimistic – that things get left undone, wrong decisions are made, and then lives are destroyed. He thinks of Tim, who was too frightened for a boy of his age. He turns the car onto Severin Bridge. The city lies before him as if it were waiting for something. Perhaps the rain – release that doesn’t come.