by Gisa Klönne
Frank is sitting motionless at the kitchen table, staring at the wooden top which is covered with smears of tomato ketchup and soft cheese. He isn’t listening to her, isn’t answering her, shut off in his own world. Where’s Jonny’s torch? There, on the windowsill. She must take more care of the torch – it’s the least she can do. Martina feels the metal between her fingers; every ridge, every groove, every scratch is so familiar to her that she would find this torch blindfold from among a whole collection of torches. That would be sure to fascinate Jonny – Hey, Tini, you could go on You Bet! That would be cool. It’s almost as if she can hear his voice.
‘Frank, please, I have to know. Where were you on Saturday afternoon? What were you doing?’
Now he looks at her, as if from very far away, his eyes bloodshot.
‘You were there when I answered the inspector’s questions. Isn’t that enough for you?’
‘In the woods, you were in the woods. Alone in the woods. But why?’
He doesn’t bat an eyelid, although this strange voice, which is apparently hers, is screaming at him.
‘Please, Martina, the children are asleep.’ Matter-of-fact. Controlled.
‘The children! What do you care about them? It isn’t as if you looked after Jonny!’
She knows at once that she’s gone too far. She let him provoke her with his calmness; the words came flying out of her mouth before she could stop them and now she wants to take them back, suck them in again, because she can’t bear the look on Frank’s face as he gets up, slowly, dangerously slowly, as if in shock. Martina presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
‘That’s what you think, eh? That it’s my fault?’
She shakes her head – left, right, left, right – like a string puppet gone crazy.
‘Maybe you should ring that inspector and tell him you don’t believe me either – my own wife. Maybe it would be best if you had me arrested straight away.’
‘No, Frank, no.’ Her head’s still moving back and forth; she can’t stop it, and now she’s beginning to tremble too. Her damn words, her damn tongue – faster than her brain, and offensive and wounding. She can’t bear it – not this too, on top of everything else. She’s so cold.
Then Frank takes a step towards her, a lurching movement, and she feels his arms around her, picking her up, staggering back to the bench with her. He lowers himself back down, still clinging tightly to Martina, and she curls up on his lap, huddles up in his warmth, hides in his arms, and he presses his face into her hair – her man, her darling man, who knows what’s going on inside her, who forgives her – and she cries on his shoulder, cries all the tears she has been holding back to spare the children. And for a second, a millisecond, she draws something like courage out of this new-found tenderness and it seems to her impossible that anything could have happened to Jonny, or that Frank, her wonderful, gentle, kind-hearted husband and the father of her children, should be in any way involved. Because she loves him.
*
Judith’s flat still holds the heat of the day. She fills a glass with tap water, rolls herself a cigarette and goes out on the roof terrace. Swifts shoot out from some of Cologne’s oldest buildings into the pale purple sky, strangely in sync with one another, as if at a secret signal. Judith props her elbows on the railing and watches them as she smokes. When she first read Berthold’s text message, she was too taken aback to feel anything. Then she had felt anger at his presumption. And a moment later there had been Manni to think about. She’d been wanting to get in touch with him for ages, but the time had never seemed right. In a way, then, it was serendipitous that they’d bumped into each other. They’d have met at headquarters next week anyway – and who knows what she’ll be dealing with by then. She only hopes it won’t be the missing boy, because that would only exacerbate Manni’s wounded pride.
They had both done their best to act normal in the Greek joint where her ex-colleague is clearly a regular – and that was about as much as you could expect of them for the moment, as long as Manni hadn’t been moved back to Division 11. I’ll do what I can for you, she promises silently. The trouble is I’ve lost my good standing and don’t know if I have a chance of recovering it.
She stubs out her cigarette on the railing, wipes off the ash with her finger and resists the urge to roll herself another fag straight away. The moment before Millstätt threw her medical results into the filing tray – that millisecond of uncertainty – had made her realise something she hadn’t previously confessed to herself. She wants her job back, and although being afraid is a bad idea in the circumstances, she is terrified. She is terrified of failing again. That makes her vulnerable.
She goes back inside. The painting of Charlotte’s loon is lying on the living room floor, its red eyes staring up at Judith, strangely astute, as if it knows something she has yet to find out. Charlotte hadn’t cancelled or rescheduled her return flight from Canada; she had let it expire. Berthold is right, of course. Considering that Charlotte’s life is ruled by bad luck rather than good, it would seem entirely justified to make an enquiry or two on the other side of the Atlantic. Is anyone missing Charlotte? It looks as if Berthold Pretorius is the only one – a depressing total for almost four decades of life. But what right have I to judge her? Judith thinks. How many weeks would it have been before anyone broke down the door to my flat when I was at my lowest ebb? And why? Because they missed me? Or because the neighbours were bothered by the nasty smell and the overflowing letterbox?
Yes, she had thought of killing herself. That is one truth. But the other side of the same truth is that she didn’t do it. ‘Charlotte thought the world of you,’ Berthold had told her. But Judith hadn’t liked Charlotte. Although she had felt a certain solidarity with her at school, she had rebuffed her attempts to make friends, just as she had later rebuffed so many other attempts to get close to her. She and her brother were constantly uprooted as children, because her father was forever trying his luck in a new town and it had never seemed safe to make friends. Patrick had been an exception; Judith had never kept him at a distance. After his brutal death, though, she had shut herself off from the world again, just as she had done as a teenager. No closeness, no pain – that was her logic. But that is not only arrogant; it is also cowardly.
Maybe it’s time to head off. Maybe she’s already left it too long. She goes to her bureau and leafs through Irene Hummel’s photocopies again. Detail-obsessed academic jargon, so aloofly objective as to be almost brutal. The common loon on the lake near Düren had swallowed a fish hook which had ‘lodged in its upper pharynx’; the line had become entangled around the bird’s foot so that it was unable to catch fish or preen and oil its feathers. Charlotte and the other students could only look on helplessly as it starved to death. A creature of the wilderness, unable to survive the wild, thanks to the carelessness of man. All a bit much, thinks Judith. But it probably came to be the only truth Charlotte knew.
Judith tries to imagine Charlotte in those dank December weeks three and a half years ago, shoulders hunched in a parka, stiff fingers holding binoculars to eyes that were too far apart for her to have been considered a beauty. What did she feel? That, of course, was not recorded; the report only provides a matter-of-fact statement of what she did. When it was clear that the loon was unable to feed itself, Charlotte Simonis tried to rise above the laws of nature and the golden rule that scientists should let nature alone. She called the fire brigade, who attempted to catch the loon with the aid of a speedboat and a net. But in spite of its weakened condition, the bird repeatedly escaped the firemen’s clutches to dive into the bottomless lake. ‘The bird repeatedly dived deep into the lake and swam approx. 80m lengths, surfacing only briefly to breathe,’ the report observes. ‘Its energy reserves were unexpectedly high after at least 5–6 days without food.’ Ten days later, Charlotte found the bird lying dead on the dry shore. ‘The loon apparently made its way onto land to die.’
Judith pushes the report aside and gets up. S
omething propels her up; something about this report is as oppressive as everything in Charlotte’s life. What did she feel when she found the dead bird? Judith goes back out onto the roof terrace and stares up at the sky. She walks over to the bench, but doesn’t sit down. Charlotte had refused to dissect the bird; according to Irene Hummel, she’d been completely hysterical. It had been the end of her career and her own father had laughed at her for it.
Suddenly Judith remembers what it was like at school – all that whispering and laughing. The handful of teenagers who mercilessly decreed what was tolerated and what scorned, bullying anyone who didn’t conform. The look on Charlotte’s face when they laughed at her. The way she withdrew inside herself. How had she managed to endure it? And what had she done when it all got too much for her?
Judith goes back to the living room and turns on her laptop. It doesn’t take her long to find the biology department of the University of Toronto and a telephone number for the Criminal Investigations Branch of Ontario. It’s midday in Toronto, a good time to make a phone call. But it’s university vacation and Professor Terence Atkinson is on holiday with his family in their cottage in the Northern Lakes; that’s as much as his secretary is prepared to reveal. And the police ask Judith for a rather more specific query, ideally in the form of an email and even more ideally in the form of an official letter. Judith clicks her way around the world of her Canadian colleagues for a while longer. Laughing young people of all ethnicities advertise work in the police force. One of the sites looks as if it’s been programmed by amateurs; the white Canadian flag with its red maple leaf flashes in welcome beside the slogan ‘Ontario – Yours to Discover’, and below, the insignia of the local police authorities are set out as if in a children’s sticker album. You’d think there was no crime in Ontario.
Judith turns the computer off; she’s getting nowhere. All of a sudden she feels restless, inert, trapped. A wave of anger surges through her, and the thought of flying to Canada and getting out of her stiflingly hot flat is appealing – leaving behind her memories of the past and her fears for the future, falling out of time, dancing out of step, if only for a few days. Why not?
She switches on her phone. Eight calls from Berthold Pretorius – entreaties, flattery, promises, concern. But all that is beside the point; she owes Berthold nothing. It’s Charlotte she owes – and maybe also herself. The loon is still looking at Judith. She stares back and rolls herself a cigarette before ringing Berthold. If he books her a return flight that gets her back to Cologne in time to start work next week, she’s going to be jet-lagged on her first day back at Division 11.
*
The Königsforst lay-by is like all motorway lay-bys – ugly, dusty and loud. Grotty picnic benches, litter bins, a honeycomb brickwork toilet building and a snack van, shut up for the night, with a few high tables – that’s all there is. Two dozy lorry drivers are sitting on fold-out stools next to a truck with Russian registration plates, eating bread and butter and tinned sardines and drinking tea. A businessman in a smart suit swings himself out of a black BMW Z4 and bounces energetically over the heated asphalt to the loo. Not a bad idea – Manni follows him. Inside, the stench of piss assails his nostrils, although for a public toilet without an attendant it looks really quite decent. Dim strip lighting, and everything done in stainless steel – toilets, urinals, basins, soap and towel dispensers; even the mirror, which reflects Manni’s face as a wan blur. Nothing doing here. Anyone frustrated by traffic or life would have to work it off elsewhere.
Manni scoops cold water onto his face and pulls a paper towel out of the dispenser. There must be someone who fills up the towels and cleans the loos. Behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas rawlplugged to the wall, a sign gives the name and phone number of the operating company. Manni makes a note of both on his pad. Bit of a long shot, but you never know – maybe a cleaner saw the boy or his dog. But the snack van is probably the better bet for potential witnesses. Manni leaves the toilets and walks over to it. Mr Snack – Open daily from 10 till 6, it says on the closed hatch. Manni props his elbows on one of the high tables and looks about him. Yup, you get a pretty good view from here – with any luck Mr Snack will be able to confirm that for him at ten tomorrow. And now?
His jingling phone saves him from having to decide. It’s Karl-Heinz Müller – at last.
‘The forensics team have left a rotting hairy thing on my table and told me you’ll get in touch, but I’m still waiting.’
‘I tried to ring you. But first it was permanently engaged and then no one answered and your mobile was off.’
‘I guess you’re right. New boss, new rules. No mobiles at the post mortem, no cigarettes – he’ll probably ban breathing next.’ Karl-Heinz snorts with such fervour that Manni thinks he can smell the smoke from his inevitable Davidoff down the phone. ‘So tell me why you want me to branch out into zoology?’
‘The dog squad should have left a comparative sample with you – dog hair. And a dog licence.’
‘Yes, they have.’
Karl-Heinz is a great bloke and extremely kind, Judith had once said. You just have to know how to handle him – and that means making him feel that you’re completely fucked without him. Time for a bit of humility, then, Manni thinks.
‘Listen, Karl-Heinz, I know I should have told you in person, and I can imagine you’ve got a lot on at the moment . . .’ Manni swallows. A lot on – like investigating the tourist murders which are keeping Division 11 busy and panicking the municipal powers-that-be, for whom murdered tourists are nothing short of a PR disaster. Manni, meanwhile, is worried about missing dachshunds. ‘. . . But I need your help all the same, and I need it as quickly as possible. You might be able to help me save a boy’s life.’
That’s laying it on a bit thick, but it seems to do the job. Karl-Heinz sighs. ‘No corpse – just this furry thing, which definitely doesn’t belong to a boy.’
‘I think it’s a dachshund’s ear. There’s something blue on one side, which might be a tattoo; perhaps you can find out whether it’s the same number as on the dog licence. The comparative sample is from the basket of the dachshund we might be dealing with.’
‘I can’t manage that today. As I said, your offering isn’t exactly fresh. And a DNA test takes time.’
A man in silly novelty boxer shorts heaves himself out of a Golf, bestows a withering look on the toilet building and trudges over the unkempt grass past the picnic benches. At the edge of the wood he stops and pees into a bush.
‘A peeping Tom!’ says Manni.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean you; I was just thinking out loud.’ Where there’s something to peep at, there are peeping Toms – that’s a rule Manni learnt at the vice squad. Had the boy been a peeping Tom? Hardly. But maybe he’d crossed paths with one. The open-air pisser gives his pride and joy a shake, packs it away in his boxer shorts, wipes his hands on his ample backside and trudges back to his car. The dog squad must search all this first thing tomorrow. Right now there’s just enough light in the sky for Manni to see how long it takes to get from here to the shelter.
‘It would be great if you could find the time to squeeze in this ear or whatever it is. If you managed to decipher the tattoo, we wouldn’t need a DNA test,’ he says into the phone.
‘That’s for me to decide.’
‘Of course, I only meant—’
‘I’ll get back to you.’ With a grunt that could, with a bit of goodwill, be interpreted as a ‘Bye’, Karl-Heinz ends the call.
The scrub where the driver of the Golf had relieved himself is stunted and withered. Behind it, well camouflaged by further bushes, a path leads once around the lay-by, between the edge of the wood and the grass – a peeping Tom’s paradise. There’s no one around, although heaps of dried shit, tissues and a shrivelled condom suggest that the driver of the Golf is not the only one to spurn the public toilets. What’s so great about doing your business in the woods? And who would want to fuck
next to a heap of shit? Treading carefully, Manni walks once around the car park. No sign of Jonny or his dachshund.
In the woods it is getting dark. Manni finds a path leading roughly in the direction of the shelter, looks at his watch and trots off. Something pricks his forehead, then his arm. Bloody mosquitoes, he thinks. Sweat trickles through his hair and down his neck, making his skin itch. In the last six months he’s grown his hair collar-length, because the women like it. But perhaps this concession to fashion wasn’t such a good idea – not in summer anyway. And it was probably a stupid mistake to come here. He’s sacrificed his evening just because of some vague hunch. He could have showered and got changed; he could be sitting in the beer garden with a wheat beer. He might even have seen Miss Cat’s Eyes again, and who knows, maybe she likes his haircut. When did he last have sex? A long time ago. Too long. Somehow the opportunity hasn’t arisen. Things haven’t gone well lately.
He comes to a hiking trail, checks his map and takes a right. Not far to go now. About twenty minutes all told from the car park to the shelter. His phone begins to jingle again, cutting through the silence.
‘Your father!’ his mother’s voice shrills. ‘He’s in hospital. You must come straight away, Manfred. He’s dying!’
*
Her father’s face smiles at her. Her real father, not the man she calls Father, not the man whose name she shares, the man who married her mother when she was four and whose meteoric banking career, Judith feels, looking back, made her childhood seem like one perpetual move. Settling in, saying goodbye, starting over. The man in the simply framed black-and-white photo which she hung over her kitchen table a few months ago knows nothing of all that moving house. He died in 1969 – froze to death in the mountains of Kathmandu where he had gone with two friends, former law students, like him, in search of enlightenment. Judith stares at this man of whom she has no memory – Hans Engel. She knows from other photos that she has his eyes – grey irises edged with turquoise; her curls and freckles are her mother’s. What kind of life would she have led as Judith Engel? A mellower one? A more pleasant one?
