She had wanted her children to grow up to be strong and self-confident. That had been important to her. And Jonny had been strong; he was no victim. But it had turned out to be his undoing.
Jonny’s death was tragic, the blond inspector had said. A prank that got out of hand because of a lack of responsibility, a lack of compassion, the fear of discovery.
‘A prank?’ Martina had asked, tonelessly.
‘The perpetrators are teenagers,’ the blond inspector had replied. He had kept talking and explaining and patiently answering her questions, although he looked knackered and badly injured.
Martina goes upstairs to the children’s bedrooms. There’s so little you can do, she thinks. She’d tried so hard and in the end it had all been for nothing.
‘Good night, my Tini,’ Leander whispers, putting his arms around Martina’s neck and hugging her tight. And she tolerates it and breathes in his sweet, familiar smell, and thanks to some superhuman power she is eventually able to extricate herself from the embrace of the son who is left to her, to wish him good night in return and slink out of his room. She looks into Marlene’s room, but the little girl is asleep, her toy elephant tight in her arms, her nose buried in the pillow, her hair tousled, the picture of a child’s primal sense of trust. A sense of trust such as surely can never return to this house again. And yet, thinks Martina, here it is, upstairs in these two rooms.
On the chest of drawers in the passage is Marlene’s beloved Leopold the Glow-Worm picture book, and the sight of it tightens the steel clamp around Martina’s heart. Tomorrow afternoon Jonny will be transferred to the undertaker’s. This afternoon they told the little ones that Jonny and Dr D.’s journey wasn’t a normal holiday, but a journey into another world, far away, into heaven, from where they could look down on Marlene and Leander and watch over them.
‘Can Jonny really see me all the time?’ Marlene had asked, when the first shock was over. ‘Even at night when it’s dark?’
‘Yes, even at night,’ Martina had assured her, trying not to think of those awful hours of darkness and fear that Jonny had to go through in the bunker, alone and frantic with grief over the death of Dr D. – without any light. She had, of course, spared the children the burden of that knowledge. ‘Jonny has his torch,’ she had said, and the children seemed to find that reassuring.
They have agreed to look out for Jonny’s light signal on the next clear night. Maybe we should even choose a Jonny star, thinks Martina. A Jonny star, a Dr D. star and a Leopold the Glow-Worm star, because Marlene and Leander are determined to give Jonny the Leopold book on his journey so he doesn’t get bored.
Martina takes the picture book and puts it on the hall table. The torch, the book and Dr D. – those are to be Jonny’s grave gifts. Martina knows the dachshund isn’t allowed to be buried with Jonny, but she’ll find some way. Compared to the other challenges that lie ahead, it will be easy.
Outside, daylight is fading and the air feels silky. It rained last night, but the sun came out in the afternoon. Nature follows its own plan, thinks Martina; it doesn’t care that human hearts break because they have loved and lost and have a funeral to organise.
She crosses the patio and sits down on the steps leading to the garden, feeling restless, adrift, lost. She knows she must cry, if only to stop this steel clamp around her heart from destroying her love of Marlene and Leander. But the knowledge is purely cerebral, removed from her real self. She wonders whether things will ever be any different.
Frank crosses the grass towards her. He must have been at the end of the garden by the swing in the walnut tree that Jonny loved so much. He looks horribly gaunt, and Martina feels a hot surge of shame at having wrongly suspected him.
‘When Jonny didn’t turn up to breakfast at the camp on Sunday morning, I got scared – awfully, irrationally scared,’ he says. ‘But I thought if I said anything I’d only be tempting fate. So I set off to look for him on my own before raising the alert; I knew his routes. That’s why I didn’t ring until so late. I didn’t want it to be true.’
She doesn’t know what to do; she can’t even move. Frank comes closer and kneels down before her.
‘Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.’
Shame, guilt, wasted love. The steel clamp flexes in Martina’s chest – her just punishment for failing to take care of either Jonny or her husband, a husband she can no longer find words for, let alone comfort.
‘Please, Martina, we’re still us,’ whispers Frank. ‘Leander, Marlene, Martina and Frank. A family.’
It hurts, because it’s the truth. The truth she is going to have to live with. Martina feels something wet on her face. She can’t tell if it’s tears.
*
Manni saves the last report on the Jonny Röbel case and switches off his computer. He needn’t have come to headquarters, not today anyway, but he wanted to wrap things up, and the doctor had given him the all-clear. Only grazes, a torn hamstring and bad bruising on his knee. Slow to heal, annoying and, as Manni well knows, extremely painful – but nothing dramatic. He turned down the offer of crutches. He hobbles along the quiet, deserted corridor. Most of his colleagues are already in the beer garden, on their balconies or sitting in the school-holiday traffic jam heading south. Even Millstätt wasn’t in the office today. An appointment in Düsseldorf, his secretary explained when Manni handed her his request for time off.
Judith is sitting in her cubbyhole smoking, her eyes shut, her bare feet up on the desk. The black nail polish on her toenails has splintered; her curls are tamed by a blue scarf twisted into a headband. She looks vulnerable, young. He wonders who this man with a criminal record is – the one she’s so interested in and was arguing with in English on the phone earlier. She opens her eyes, sensing his presence.
‘Sorry.’ He suddenly feels like a voyeur. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘It’s all right.’ She makes to put her feet on the floor.
‘Stay where you are,’ says Manni, sitting down on the visitors’ chair without bending his right knee – an unsatisfactory manoeuvre he needs to work on.
Judith takes a drag on her cigarette. ‘What’s the truth?’ she asks softly. ‘Did Viktor really know nothing of Tim’s abduction? Is Hagen Petermann innocent?’
The big chief has withdrawn his confession; he had left no fingerprints or DNA inside the bunker and he can’t be prosecuted for something his son did. The various roles played by Tim, Jonny, Viktor and Ralle are less easily established. The truth is, Manni thinks, there are far too many coincidences in this case. It was coincidence that Jonny found out about Petermann’s blackmail, and coincidence that he happened to meet Viktor and Ralle in the woods shortly afterwards. It was coincidence that Tim took refuge in the very place where Ralle Neisser was hiding on Monday morning.
‘I don’t like all these coincidences,’ says Judith, as if Manni had spoken out loud.
‘It’s not just coincidences,’ he says.
‘I know. And the coincidences are only one factor. The truth is what happened next.’
‘And what happened before,’ says Manni, thinking of the expression in Viktor’s eyes when he asked him what his dream was – of the boy’s screams when they had lain on the edge of the roof, and of the hideous seconds when he himself had believed it was all over. Why did Viktor become a murderer and Manni a policeman? Is that coincidence too? There is no satisfactory answer; it’s best not to think about such things.
‘Millstätt has just got back from Düsseldorf and wants a quick word with us,’ says Judith.
Manni heaves himself up and hobbles along next to her. Millstätt and his soft spot for old Krieger – he would ring her rather than him. Nothing’s changed. The truth, he thinks, is also the things that cannot be spoken; all the atrocities in the bunker that you want to explain away, to whitewash – for the boy’s relatives, but also for yourself.
A pedestal fan is swirling warm, stale air around Millstätt’s office. Their boss is leaning by the window and motions to them to take a seat. Towering stacks of files cover his desk. The reports on the Jonny Röbel and Tim Rinker investigations are on top. It’s over, Manni thinks. We’ve come full circle. Millstätt eyes him, taking in the plasters on his hands and chin, his stiff leg stretched out in front of him.
‘You asked for time off,’ he says. ‘You could have taken sick leave.’
Manni shakes his head. ‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ he says. ‘I just need a bit of a break.’
‘I hope it won’t stop you from attending a small celebration on Friday. Your colleagues are clamouring for a hero’s party. And it’s time we had a welcome-back party too. For both of you.’
Back in Division 11. It’s official. And his colleagues want to celebrate with him – it is exactly what Manni has been dreaming of.
‘I can’t make Friday,’ he says.
Millstätt looks at him. Suspicious, surprised, disapproving – Manni can’t say and to his own surprise he doesn’t want to. He worked his balls off and Millstätt kept him guessing. There’s no reason to get overexcited.
‘Well, Detective Chief Inspector Korzilius. Then we’ll have to find another date,’ Millstätt says at length.
Manni stares at him. Detective Chief Inspector. Is this it, at last – his long-awaited promotion? I must have misheard, he thinks, but Judith jumps up and hugs him and Millstätt smiles and shakes his hand and Manni hears himself say ‘Thank you’, so it seems he must have heard right after all.
Outside, the city is quivering in anticipation of another warm summer’s night and Judith folds back the roof of her 2CV with childish delight. Jazz songs accompany them on the drive to Manni’s flat, flowing sequences of notes, full of promise and regret. Detective Chief Inspector Manfred Korzilius. That too is a truth, thinks Manni. A wish comes true, and however pleased you know you are, all you can manage is a tired grin.
A woman standing at a set of traffic lights reminds him of Miss Cat’s Eyes. I’ll go to the beer garden and she’ll be there, he thinks. We’ll drink a beer or two and talk about life. We’ll go to the dykes, moor somewhere, look at the cows and fuck. Later, when I’ve buried my father.
*
Judith parks her car outside Melaten Cemetery, walks the familiar route to Patrick’s grave and sits down on the stone bench. Her body is heavy, and her tiredness hits her again with full force. She longs to be able to sleep again, to have at least one night without thinking about the dead, about the atrocities of children who haven’t learnt to love themselves or others, about responsibility and things left undone and guilt and how it’s all connected. She had been so obsessed with saving the boy Tim – with getting there on time for once. She had thought things would be better afterwards.
But what she found in the bunker was a tensed-up, maltreated body, coldness and darkness, stench and horror. It was a while before Judith realised that the horror was her own – that the boy on the mattress was past feeling horror.
‘Tim is strong, we mustn’t give up hope,’ his psychologist Joachim Wallert had said. ‘But of course he has a heavy burden to carry.’ The burden of memory, Judith thinks. We can’t eradicate what has happened, even if we learn to live with it and look ahead. We can go on living, but the scars remain. Perhaps that is what killed Charlotte – an excess of old wounds. The insidious loss of vitality. Not the man who made her empty promises and then wanted to get rid of her. Not David.
Karl-Heinz Müller is standing outside the Institute of Forensics, throwing boules in the gravel bed. Judith sits down on the concrete ledge and pours herself a drop of his red wine.
Karl-Heinz polishes a boule and bends his knees. With a satisfying metallic clack, the boule knocks a competitor away from the jack. Karl-Heinz straightens himself. ‘How about that?’
‘I’m impressed.’
He sits down next to Judith and lights himself a Davidoff. ‘You know I can’t tell you much about your photos.’
‘It’s all I have. The Canadians won’t let us have the bones.’
‘They’ll know what they’re doing.’
‘They say they can’t determine the cause of death.’
‘Do they have any tissue residue, fractures, bullet holes?’
Judith shakes her head. ‘Charlotte must have been lying dead on that island for weeks.’
‘Cause of death not ascertainable.’ Karl-Heinz helps himself to more red wine. ‘Sometimes cases like that keep me awake at night. When that happens, I drive to the institute and rummage through my personal archive of unsolved deaths.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘When morning comes, I’m none the wiser.’
‘Perhaps Charlotte killed herself. I sometimes have such strange dreams. But she was lying on the island, her canoe was on the opposite shore and she couldn’t swim. So someone must have taken her to the island.’
‘It might have been an accident. The canoe might have drifted to land and been tied up by someone. She might have starved to death on the island.’
‘But why wasn’t she wearing any clothes? And why didn’t the person who pulled her canoe ashore look for her?’ Judith’s voice sounds husky. She tries to push aside the images of the island. Starving to death without rescue – what a horrific way to die.
Karl-Heinz looks at her. ‘This isn’t just about your school friend, is it?’
It’s about the fact that my bloody body is still longing for the man who probably killed Charlotte, thinks Judith. It’s about the fact that something in me refuses to believe that a man I once loved is capable of leaving a woman to starve to death in the wilderness. I really ought to know better; that’s my job, after all.
She puts her wine glass down on the concrete ledge, rather too forcefully. I’m making a fool of myself, she thinks. I’m mixing up the cases. Tim, Charlotte, Ivonne, myself – past and present. I’m going mad, like that night on the island, alone with Charlotte’s bones. I’m seeing ghosts. Black-and-white ghosts with glinting eyes – ghosts that cry like lost souls and try to lure me to the bottom of a lake. Me or Charlotte, I don’t even know whose dreams they are. She feels the pathologist’s eyes on her back as she walks back to her 2CV. Without looking round, she raises her hand and waves.
It’s nearly dark when she parks outside her flat. She buys bread, cheese, milk and a few bottles of beer at the kiosk, and walks up the stairs without turning the light on. I must ring Berthold, she thinks. Find out how he’s getting on. Tell him that I’m not going to get anywhere, that he’ll have to live with that. But he’ll want to meet me and I can’t face that just now. I’m not a replacement for his dead friend. I can’t help that. There is no justice, that’s all there is to it. I must get some sleep.
At first she only senses a presence, like a premonition. She stops abruptly and spots a shadow a few steps above the door to her flat, not far from the access to the roof at the top of the stairs.
‘Judith?’
David’s voice. Judith’s shopping bag drops to the floor with a clatter. She tears her pistol from the holster, switches the light on and stares at him. He looks absurdly out of place here on her stairs. There is a rucksack leaning against the wall beside him.
He abused her trust. He abandoned her in the wilderness. He’s been keeping the police in suspense for days, and now here he is, sitting outside her door, smiling. She takes the last steps to the door of her flat, still pointing the pistol at him. She’ll arrest him. He’s trapped here; the hatch to the roof is locked. Judith leans against the wall, keeping her hip on the timer switch to stop the light from going out.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I wanted to give you this.’ He holds out a thick envelope to her.
‘What is it?’
‘The explanation you’re looking for.’
Judith had tried to explain to Margery that an anti-nuclear power activist isn’t necessarily to be equated with a violent criminal. The Canadian woman had given a dry laugh. Don’t kid yourself.
Judith grips the pistol tighter. ‘Come on, against the wall.’
He looks about him, gauging the distance between them.
‘Forget it. Top floor. End of the line!’ She’s shouting.
He looks at her. ‘You’ll ruin everything.’
‘I’ll ruin everything? Spare me the romantic crap.’
‘OK, you’re right. I ruined everything.’
‘You just buggered off.’
‘When you said you were a detective, I suddenly panicked. I felt betrayed. Why didn’t you tell me right off?’
‘I didn’t think it would make any difference to you. I didn’t know you’d killed Charlotte.’ The pistol lies heavy in Judith’s hand. She grips it more firmly, her hip still on the light switch.
‘I didn’t kill Charlotte.’
‘Didn’t you? Then why did you do a runner?’ Judith is so tired. She searches David’s eyes, fixing him, like in an interrogation.
‘It was a reflex, a panic reaction. An idiotic mistake, I know. I wanted to win time. I didn’t want everything to start all over again, like all those years ago in Germany.’
‘You could have come back.’
‘I was never very good at facing up to conflicts.’
‘You could have trusted me.’
He stares at Judith’s pistol. ‘That’s a bit rich, coming from you.’
He mustn’t whisper, he mustn’t look sad, because it reminds her of lying in his arms. The light goes off; frantically Judith presses the timer switch again. She mustn’t make a mistake, not now, not again.
‘You abandoned me in the wilderness.’
‘You had the hut, you had supplies. I wouldn’t have let you starve. I’d have made sure the police found you.’
‘Yeah, right. Like you did with Charlotte.’
‘I didn’t do anything to her. I don’t know where she is. Please, you have to believe me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. How stupid do you think I am?’
Again, he holds out the envelope to her. ‘Please, take this. It’s Charlotte’s notes.’
‘Censored, I assume. Where did you get them?’
‘I went to fetch Charlotte so she could catch her flight back. Her canoe was drifting on the lake, and her clothes were inside it. That seemed strange to me. I pulled the canoe ashore. I looked for her but couldn’t find her. The camp was tidy. The notebooks were in the tent. I read them and came to the conclusion that she had killed herself. That she had gone into the water.’
‘She couldn’t swim.’
‘I know,’ David says softly. ‘She always wore the life jacket in the canoe.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘June the tenth. Two weeks before her flight back.’
How long does it take to starve to death? Days? Weeks? Is that what Charlotte wanted? To lose strength by the hour – torturously, slowly, alone on the island? Or is Karl-Heinz right? Was it an accident? Did she want to go into the water, and then find that she didn’t have the courage? It’s a brutal thought. Judith closes her eyes and then starts, because the stairs creak. David is coming towards her.
‘Stay where you are! Don’t move!’ Judith’s shouts ring out through the stairwell; she points the pistol straight at his chest. She must arrest him, fetch reinforcements. She mustn’t let him quell her suspicions again.
‘Please, Judith, read the notebooks.’
She leans against the wall. Her arm, holding the pistol, aches; she feels dizzy, as if oxygen levels in the building are falling by the minute. ‘Why didn’t you give me the notebooks in Canada?’
He shrugs. He suddenly looks helpless.
‘Why did you take me to Charlotte’s camp if you knew she was dead?’
‘All I knew was that she had planned to kill herself and then disappeared.’
She stares at him, trying to plumb his thoughts.
‘OK, then, I’ve got myself up shit creek. Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’
‘What do you want from me, David? Why are you here?’
‘Please, read Charlotte’s notebooks.’
She doesn’t take her eyes off him, keeps the pistol pointed at him. ‘All right, then. Throw the envelope on the floor, nice and low, very slowly, and stay where you are.’
He does as she tells him and, quick as lightning, she kicks the envelope down the stairs.
‘A deal.’ She points to the door to her flat with her free hand. ‘You wait in there while I read. If you’re innocent, you can go.’
David shakes his head. ‘This is a trap.’
‘It’s your choice. Either I get to make the rules, or I call my colleagues immediately.’
He is about to say something, but realises that it’s pointless and reluctantly acquiesces.
Again she presses the light switch. Then, without taking her eyes off David, she opens the door to her flat with her left hand, switches on the light inside and motions David down with a brisk wave of the pistol. ‘Nice and slowly now, no tricks, hands behind your head.’
She directs him down the hall, through the living room and out onto the roof terrace. He gives a shout of anger when she shuts and bolts the terrace door. She runs back to the stairs, locking the front door behind her, then fetches the envelope and drops down onto the stairs.
The notebooks are simple lined exercise books. Joined-up handwriting fills the pages, angular and vaguely familiar. Letters combine to make words and sentences that tell with scholarly sobriety of disappointments and hopes, of Charlotte’s blind desire for a man who didn’t love her even when she travelled to Canada for him. With scrupulous accuracy she records every attempt to get close to him, and all his rebuffs. Again and again she tried, until eventually Terence Atkinson asked David Becker to fly Charlotte into the wilderness where her second dream, at least, could come true.
There follow descriptions of birds, reports on the lives of loons, sketches of the lake, the island, the conifers. The last page is a letter of farewell. Fond regards to Berthold, who is to inherit Charlotte’s house. The request that the rest of her assets go towards research into loons. I have arrived, she concludes. I am going to stay here. I am going to the loons. I am no longer afraid of the water.
Judith closes the last notebook. Nothing in them seems fake. There don’t seem to be any missing pages. Tomorrow she will have the most important passages translated and fax them to Canada – a case for the files. Not a murder, not a crime – not a punishable one, anyway. Her instinct was right; her body didn’t betray her. David is not a murderer.
Not a sound comes from Judith’s flat. She takes her bag of shopping and unlocks the door. David hasn’t broken down the terrace door. He is leaning at the railings with his back to Judith, looking at the sky that never grows properly dark here in Cologne, where you never see more than a hint of the stars.
Charlotte was wrong, thinks Judith. She was more scared of the water than she thought. Perhaps she even wanted to live in the end, but it was too late. Judith opens the door to the terrace.
‘Charlotte was on the island,’ she says to David’s silhouette. ‘She starved to death there. Now go.’
He gives a start and comes towards her and, for a moment, her longing flares up again; she feels his warmth when they shake hands. Then he is gone and, although it hurts, Judith knows it is the only way.
She gets a bottle of beer out of the fridge and takes it out onto the roof terrace, past the painting of Charlotte’s loon, which still looks as if it has a question. She’ll find a place on the wall for it, later, when she’s had a proper sleep at last.
The city is throbbing below her, alive. Her tiredness returns and with it her memories of floating stars and happiness. The darkness is soft and warm, almost physical. For the moment, it is enough.