by Gisa Klönne
‘Sorry – the knife – we’re picking mushrooms, Helga and I. It hasn’t been a good mushroom season – too cold – and now it’s too late in the year, but . . .’ He sounds like an idiot. Hastily he stows the knife in the sheath at his belt and smiles.
‘Come on.’ He holds out his hand to her again. ‘Can you get up? You can’t stay kneeling in this puddle. You’ll catch your death.’
Instead of replying, the woman starts to retch again, her face pale and ugly like a contorted mask.
‘My wife’s over there. We’ll help you. I’m a doctor, although recently retired.’
Can she even hear him?
‘Come on,’ he urges her again.
Now the woman stands up. She’s still trembling, but lifts her right arm and points at a raised hide standing in the shade of the trees at the southern edge of the clearing.
‘Th-th-there.’
Egbert Wiehl follows the line indicated by her index finger. Did she fall from the hide? Unlikely, because she was obviously able to walk; her footprints are clearly visible in the wet grass, leading directly from the hide to the place where she is kneeling.
‘Egbert! Is everything all right?’ Helga’s voice sounds very far away. He gestures curtly to her to be quiet and peers across at the raised hide. Crows are fluttering about the wooden lookout at the top of the ladder, jostling each other through the shooting slits at the sides, and yes, it even looks as if they’re diving in at the roof only to be catapulted out again immediately: a reeling, ceaseless up and down. Something isn’t right.
‘Wait here.’ Egbert Wiehl gets up ponderously. He thinks of Hitchcock’s birds, but pushes the images aside and focuses on the hide. Nothing to be afraid of, he tells himself. The woman makes a move as if to walk off. He pats her shoulder. ‘Stay here. I’ll go and have a look.’ No answer; only her gasping breath. He tramps off towards the hide. The sky is pastel blue and cloudless, the sun just high enough to make the treetops in the valley shine red and yellow. Two hours ago Helga had packed coffee, mineral water, sandwiches, apples, a bar of praline chocolate and the picnic rug in the rucksack he is carrying on his back. The weather forecast had promised a glorious Indian summer’s Sunday – the last chance of the year to find a few milk caps and enjoy the view from Bärenberg. Egbert Wiehl arrives at the foot of the ladder and peers up it. The crows have no respect for him whatsoever. There are a lot – must be twenty.
‘Shoo!’ he says. ‘Shoo!’
He puts the rucksack down on the grass and turns around. The two women – Helga and the blond athlete – are standing next to each other now, watching him. It looks as if Helga has a tight hold of the stranger. At this moment, he notices the stench: sweet and rotten. Sick people and dying people sometimes smell bad, but not that bad. Putrefaction, his brain signals. He last smelt it with similar intensity forty years ago when he had to dissect corpses in the basement of the university hospital. There was no air conditioning and you could never be sure what to expect when you lifted the dead out of their formalin baths. Egbert Wiehl peers into the undergrowth, but sees nothing out of the ordinary. He tries to keep his breathing as shallow as possible.
The stench gets worse the higher he climbs. Cawing, the black birds plummet from the sky and reel up again. ‘Shoo!’ he says again, but it’s not until he’s right at the top that they fly away. The blood pounds in his ears. His mouth is dry, his tongue a furry animal. What has been left by the crows is lying on a wooden bench. It stinks to high heaven. It is naked. Picked to pieces. Defenceless. In the roof of the hide, planks are missing. Egbert Wiehl swallows with difficulty. Only the hair of the corpse looks human. It is silky and blond, like that of the sportswoman.
Detective Superintendent Judith Krieger is riding again. She is galloping through a summer’s wood with great leaps that rock her to and fro until she forgets that she and the horse are two separate beings. A grey. It speaks to her in a language that she instinctively understands. A dark voice, deep down inside her, so close that it hurts. Some part of her has known all along that it’s only a dream and registers the sound of the phone, but still she doesn’t stop caressing the horse’s neck. Oh, to sleep for ever! Never to wake up again. Safe – cradled and rocked like a baby. The ringing stops and once more there is only the white back beneath her, a shimmer of happiness. Light falls through the treetops onto the horse, dancing in time with its muscles. Somewhere, deep down in her chest, the pain stirs.
When she comes to the edge of the woods she wants to turn back, but the horse no longer obeys her. I don’t want this, thinks the part of her that is awake – don’t want this dream, or at least not this ending – not again. Far off, beyond the fields, a farm lies huddled in the valley. Bales of hay, swathed in plastic, gleam beside it, at odds with the landscape, like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. The pain in Judith’s chest grows stronger, mingled with panic now; her throat is parched. ‘You’re dreaming,’ her common sense tells her. ‘You must keep searching,’ the grey whispers. What for? she wants to ask, but suddenly it’s carrying her forward – it’s always the same – faster and faster still, and there are no reins; only the mane, which she clings to, and the smell of earth and horse, and the wind, which makes her eyes water. Fear. She feels herself falling. Stop, I don’t want to go to that farm, she tries to yell, but the symbiosis of horse and rider is suddenly gone and she cannot find her voice; only frantic longing and an overwhelming sense of loss.
The next moment she is alone, inside the farmhouse. A steep staircase, darkness all around her. The smell of rancid filth. A stained mattress. Grubby wallpaper. Somewhere in here is the victim. Flesh and bones. Hair. And then: no door, no stairs, no escape; only a room with too low a ceiling. Where are her colleagues? A noise outside the house. Galloping hooves. Panic. The horse is going off and leaving her. She is alone. She hasn’t made it. Where, for crying out loud, is the door? ‘Why didn’t you come?’ Patrick’s voice. Why can’t she answer? Why this panic flooding through her body, into every one of her pores? ‘I couldn’t make it.’ A husky whisper. Is that really her voice? Her lips are stiff. She can’t hear Patrick’s reply; only knows he’s here, somewhere in this dark-brown, musty room. The air is growing scarce and she cowers on the floor, sniffing like a wild animal. ‘Patrick?’ she whispers. So much hope in her voice, so much longing. She must fetch help. After an endlessly long time she finds her phone. It’s on a window sill and there’s no meadow outside the window any more, no bales of hay, no horse. She heaves herself up and stumbles over to the phone, but her fingers are stiff and drenched in sweat and no longer obey her. They send her phone catapulting into a black abyss and she knows she has lost.
On the answering machine in the living room the engaged signal is bleeping. The caller has evidently hung up without leaving a message. Judith Krieger lies motionless, trying to get her breathing under control. She doesn’t know what is worse: the moment in the dream when the horse bolts with her and the boundless loneliness in the dark-brown room – or waking up. She doesn’t understand this dream that’s been haunting her for months, doesn’t understand the longing or the intensity. Doesn’t understand what the horse is supposed to mean. Apart from a brief, joyless period in her teenage years, she has never ridden.
She needs coffee and a cigarette. She needs music to dispel her black thoughts of white horses and the silence in her flat that Martin left behind last night. She puts the espresso pot on the stove and goes to the loo. From the hall comes a muffled rendition of the opening chords of Queen’s ‘Spread Your Wings’. She finds her phone in the pocket of her leather coat.
‘Judith Krieger.’
‘I’ve got hold of you. Good.’ Axel Millstätt, her boss.
‘It’s Sunday morning.’
‘You must come to headquarters, straight away.’
Someone told her the other day that cigarette addiction is as strong as heroin addiction. She fishes a cigarette paper and filter out of her tobacco pouch.
‘They’ve fo
und a corpse in the Bergisches Land. Pretty unsavoury story. Identity can’t be established. Wolfgang has angina. The others are working flat out on the Jennifer case. I’d like you to drive to the Bergisches and have a look.’
She lights the cigarette she’s rolled and takes the gurgling espresso off the stove. ‘Does that mean you want me to lead the investigation?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’
Silence.
‘You know yourself that lately . . .’
Judith takes a gulp of espresso and burns her mouth. She pours the rest into a glass and adds cold milk. Don’t talk about it.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘God, Judith, it’s not possible, not with the best will in the world. We all know what you went through. I’m going to be honest with you. You were an excellent investigator; you know I was on your side, right from the start. But then that awful thing happened – no, let me finish – that awful thing with Patrick, and bloody hell, Judith, everyone appreciated that you needed some time . . .’
Don’t talk about it.
‘But now two years have passed and you’re still lacking the necessary grit. This affair in the Bergisches is a chance for you.’
A hot surge of nicotine and caffeine throbs in her head. Judith takes a deep breath, not sure whether she wants a chance – whether she feels up to it.
‘Manni. You and Manni, you’ll manage. You report to me.’
‘Manni?’
‘Manni.’
She also hears what he doesn’t say – doesn’t have to say: Do or die; this is your chance – your last chance. She can’t even blame him.
‘My office in half an hour?’
Judith blows smoke towards the ceiling.
‘Okay.’
Axel Millstätt has spaniel’s eyes – seemingly unblinking spaniel’s eyes the colour of plain chocolate, which stare at you until you begin to feel like a butterfly with an entomologist’s pin bearing down on you. Detective Superintendent Judith Krieger once entertained ambitions of resisting that chocolaty gaze. Like Icarus, she spread her wings and tried to fly to the sun, and Millstätt was nothing if not appreciative. Now she bows her head and doesn’t know where to look. Manni bursts into the office, eager as an oversized foal. His bony legs are clad in trendy cargo jeans, his blond hair is gelled into little spikes. He slides to and fro on his chair in keen anticipation, munching peppermints while Millstätt reels off what few facts he has. Judith doesn’t know Manni well; she glances furtively at his profile. How, she wonders, has she ended up being put on an equal footing with such a young whippersnapper? Manni’s only been on Division 11 for a year and normally works on another team. She knows he spends his weekends in Rheindorf, the dump where he grew up, and that he has countless mates there because of his active involvement in sundry local clubs: the shooting club, the football club, the young men’s club. His cheeks flush red when he talks about it. He probably still takes his laundry home to his mother and lets her feed him. Judith is glad that Manni feels the need to start by checking the missing persons’ reports at headquarters and informing Forensics.
‘Feel free to go on ahead,’ he says to Judith. He makes it sound as if he’s her boss and she’s an intern he’s keen to get out of the way. Judith forces herself to stay calm. The prospect of being the first to inspect the crime scene is far too appealing.
A little later she’s driving a brand-new Ford Focus onto the motorway – the crème de la crème of the murder squad transport fleet, which she’s only landed because it’s a Sunday. The polystyrene cup of coffee wedged between her legs is a further boost to her mood. Coming up to Lindlar she sees the first half-timbered houses beside the motorway with the green shutters typical of the Bergisches Land. But the rural idyll is no longer; sprawled on the outskirts are the inevitable temples of modern times: warehouses, car showrooms and shopping malls. A few cows graze next to the motorway, presumably deafened over time or sedated by the exhaust fumes. A silo and hay bales swathed in white plastic remind Judith of her dream. She turns on the radio. At Bielstein she leaves the A4 and follows increasingly badly maintained country roads until, after a bendy drive through a lot of yellow woodland, she comes to the village of Unterbach. From here, she’s been told, it’s about three kilometres to the place where the corpse was discovered. She finds the dirt track that branches off to the right a kilometre beyond the village and the wooden sign that a colleague from the region had described to her. ‘Sun Manor’ it reads in ornate writing. ‘TO THE ASHRAM’ someone has sprayed in purple paint on the tree trunk the sign is nailed to.
The dirt track winds its way down to the valley; tall conifers swallow up the light. Judith glances at the display on her phone: no network. The valley has an unreal air, like a child’s farm set. There are sheep pens, an old orchard, two shaggy donkeys and a stream. Farmhouse, barn and outbuildings stand higgledypiggledy, as if a child has scattered his last building blocks any old how in the middle of the field. It is not the landscape of her dream; there is no white horse. But it suddenly seems like a bad omen that she should be reminded of it. ‘Sun Manor – Welcome’ reads a sign nailed to a post beside a muddy car park. A man is leaning against a fence looking at her. He’s dressed in white cotton trousers and an orange T-shirt that clashes with his red ponytail. His bare feet are shod in plastic sandals. Judith lowers the window.
‘Hello, I’m looking for Erlengrund. There’s a turning somewhere here. Can you tell me where?’
He smiles, transforming his face into a cross between Boris Becker and Kermit the Frog.
‘Journalist?’
‘Do you know the way?’
‘Sure.’ He bends down to her. ‘But it’s all cordoned off. The cops won’t let you in – no matter how nicely you smile at them.’
She stares at his light-blue eyes and waits. He gives in.
‘Along the track, over the bridge and right at the ponds. Pretty muddy down there. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Thanks. Do you know what’s happened?’
He scrutinises her. ‘Somebody’s dead. No one from Sun Manor.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s nobody missing here.’ He doesn’t look remotely friendly now. Folding his arms across his chest, he takes a step back.
‘Why aren’t you wearing socks? Your feet have turned blue.’
To her surprise, the question seems to amuse him. He winks at her.
‘Bye, journalista. Drop in for a yoga class if you have any more questions.’
‘Bye-bye.’ Judith puts her foot on the accelerator. Perhaps she’ll take Kermit up on his offer. Something tells her he’d be none too pleased.
At the end of the valley she comes to the wooden bridge and drives the Ford over it at a crawl. On the other side are the ponds, immobile and glittering, like bottle-green glass. To the right a track leads into the woods; it is indeed extremely muddy. Judith stays in the ruts made by previous cars. The cordoned-off area which she reaches after about five minutes is guarded by two young police constables. Shifting their weight from one leg to the other, they painstakingly examine Judith’s warrant card. Erlengrund is a marshy clearing, about a hundred metres across. Several police cars and a green-and-white minibus are parked at the edge on the forest track. Judith parks behind an estate and gets out.
Although the sun is directly above the clearing, it is cold. There is a smell of fungi and leaf mould. From the police cars come the muffled whistles and bleeps of a radio transceiver. A grey-haired man approaches her.
‘Hans Edling. You’re from Criminal Investigation Division 11?’
‘Yes, I’m Detective Chief Superintendent Judith Krieger.’
They shake hands.
‘You’d better have a look yourself first. Lad’s not a pretty sight. I rang Cologne immediately.’
He turns away again abruptly and jumps over a ditch onto the clearing.
‘See the raised hide over there? That’s where he is. Found by mushroom pickers. T
hey’re here in the van. A colleague’s up in the hide keeping an eye. Shall I come with you?’
‘Thanks, there’s no need. The fewer traces we leave—’
‘Yes.’ He jumps back onto the track. ‘See you in a minute.’
Erlengrund, Judith thinks as she walks across the wet grass: Alder Dell. Presumably there were alders here – but what does an alder look like? She thinks of the poem about the Erlkönig and about her German teacher whose nervous dormouse eyes darted to and fro behind tortoiseshell specs. She had a beautiful voice, fluid and melodic, but no one in Year Nine wanted to listen and Judith didn’t dare challenge her classmates. Who’s riding so late through night and wind? Fräulein Meinert recites in Judith’s head. Bloody hell, not riding again. A child is afraid and dies – that’s what the poem is about. The Erlkönig brings death. Erlkönig. Erlengrund. Get a grip on yourself, Judith.
She looks about her, newly attentive. Footprints lead to the raised hide from various directions; there is no proper path across the clearing. They will have to work out which prints are whose. The sun is high in the sky. With its brightly coloured autumn trees and glittering puddles, the clearing would make a rewarding subject for a landscape photographer. There is nothing to show that a crime of violence has been committed. The world is beautiful and human beings do all they can to make each other’s lives hell, Judith thinks. The raised hide is half concealed among sparsely growing trees. When she gets there, a policeman is climbing down the ladder. His mouth and nose are swathed in a scarf which he slips off with a flick of his wrist.
‘Hello. There’s no getting used to that smell.’
‘Why don’t you wait down here?’
He jerks a thumb at a tree whose bare branches are filled with big black birds.
‘Afraid I can’t – because of the vultures.’
He pops a Marlboro in his mouth and inhales greedily. Judith looks up at the hide. Her feet are wet. It smells of death. The only sound is the husky cry of the crows. She pulls on latex gloves and shoe covers. You always imagine it’s going to be awful, she thinks when she reaches the top, but it is always different again from what you expect. She forces herself to have a very close look.
