by Gisa Klönne
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 n
otes.
‘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.
‘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?’
