The Shadow

by Melanie Raabe

  Norah clicked on the link to the website. Wilkau. Your Engineering Service Provider. Tedium in blue, grey and white. Competent-looking men and women bending over plans, pencils in hand, or smiling inanely into the camera. Dozens of clickable keywords, providing information about the services offered by the company, about completed and ongoing projects. Not knowing where to start, Norah clicked on Contact, leant back in her chair and ran her hand over her face. As she lowered it onto the desk, she felt it tremble.

  Wilkau Engineering. Of course. Angélique Wilkau. Little Angie from their year, who always got travelsick on school trips and was once too slow with the sick bag, earning herself an unflattering nickname and the privilege of being excused from all further outings. Angélique Wilkau who played golf as a child, but later developed into a teenager so rebellious that she would have been kicked out of school if her father’s company hadn’t donated a large sum of money for a new sports hall. (Or so rumour had it.) Angie Wilkau, whose mum had hair like a shampoo model and whose dad sometimes embarrassed her by picking her up from school in a station wagon emblazoned with the company logo.

  Norah opened the file again. She found the page she needed in Grimm’s biography and ran her finger down it until she came to the entry she was looking for.

  Bullseye.

  Arthur Grimm had worked at Wilkau Engineering while he was writing his dissertation. Less than a quarter of an hour from the town where Norah and Angie and Valerie had gone to school.

  It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Grimm had been very close by. For an entire year. Norah squeezed her lips together when she compared the dates. It had been an awful year, perhaps the very worst. It was the year Valerie died. On February 11.

  REVENGE

  I was eleven when I first understood what it means to thirst for revenge, a sensation so physical that it really does resemble thirst. I was a plump child with arms and legs as pale and soft as white blancmange and I was often bullied at school—certainly until the summer I had a growth spurt.

  One day, for reasons I have forgotten, my elder brother flushed my goldfish down the toilet. (It was called Silver after Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which at the time I thought a very clever name for a goldfish.) I was devastated and cried for two days. On the third day, I pilfered the snail poison from the shed and killed my brother’s cat. My parents suspected the neighbours. My brother and I knew better.

  There is, to my mind, only one way of dealing with injustice. If someone pushes you, you push them back twice as hard. That’s something we learn in kindergarten—or not at all.

  I am disappointed, then, that she went to the police. Is it all over before it has even begun? Did I misjudge her?

  People have robbed me, insulted me, spat at me. When I was nineteen, someone broke my nose and two of my ribs. I never went running to the police. Diogenes the Cynic said that the best way of avenging yourself on your enemies is to make yourself better than them. God, how dull. I’d have expected something more thrilling from a man who scandalised the ancient Greek establishment by living on the streets and wanking in public.

  I have always been in favour of revenge. I think it a mistake to demonise something so deeply human. When we avenge ourselves, we cast off the role of passive victim and take action. That feels good, of course. Revenge is a fine and splendid thing; not for nothing is it one of the oldest dramatic motifs. It is universal; we understand it instinctively.

  And yet we rarely give in to it. The Americans are better at that than we are; they took to the streets to celebrate bin Laden’s assassination—and quite right too.

  I refuse to believe she is giving up. I must be patient, I must have trust. I am so tense I haven’t slept for two nights. Don’t disappoint me, I keep thinking. Don’t disappoint me.

  35

  Norah sat at her desk for a long time, trying to put her thoughts in order; she was still sitting there when the sun rose. As soon as it was late enough for her to get hold of someone at the office, she rang her boss and told him she had the flu and thought she’d better work from home, so as not to pass it onto anyone. Then—presumably some form of displacement activity—she really did get on with some work, typing up and going through the previous day’s interview with the local politician. It was only when she stopped for a break that the thought hit her and she saw clearly the shape of the suspicion that had wormed its way under her skin and into her organs.

  A woman, whom Norah now knew to be an actor, had told her that she would kill a man named Arthur Grimm on the anniversary of Valerie’s death. Soon afterwards, that woman had died. And now Norah had discovered a link between herself and Arthur Grimm.

  Valerie.

  Always Valerie.

  Norah shivered and reached automatically for her cigarettes, amazed at how quickly she’d fallen back into old habits since leaving Alex. Even after all those years of not smoking, every bad feeling had her groping for the fags. But the packet was empty.

  She leant back in her chair. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t let your emotions get the better of you. Try to think rationally.

  Was it possible?

  Norah’s hand jerked towards the cigarette packet again, as if it might have miraculously refilled itself in the intervening seconds. As she pulled her hand back, she felt the new knowledge take possession of her like a virus.

  She got up and had a shower. Then she scrubbed the bitter taste from her teeth, tied up her hair and slipped into jeans and a jumper. That was better. She made the bed and flung open all the windows in the flat, leaving them open until she began to feel the cold. Much better. She sat back down at her desk, found an online delivery service and ordered some Vietnamese food. She smoked too much and ate too little, she knew she did. But she mustn’t let herself go just because Alex and Sandra were no longer there to stop her. She must keep her strength up.

  A ring at the door made her jump. She looked through the spyhole, almost expecting to see Theresa, but there was nobody there. She picked up the intercom receiver and pressed it to her ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Delivery for Norah Richter,’ said a young male voice.

  It couldn’t be the food; they weren’t that fast. More furniture? But that wasn’t supposed to come until next week.

  ‘Hello?’ the voice said again, sounding impatient.

  ‘Hang on, please.’

  Norah ran to the window and looked down onto the street. A UPS van was parked outside the building. Back in the hall, she buzzed open the door. Footsteps clattered up the stairs and a shock of reddish-brown hair appeared behind a huge gift basket wrapped in rustling cellophane.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Morning,’ said Norah, watching the postman set the basket at her feet.

  ‘If you’d sign here, please,’ he said, thrusting a small digital gadget at her. He looked so young that Norah felt like asking whether he shouldn’t be at school, but she bit back the question and signed. She always felt sorry for the parcel postmen she saw scooting around all over the place—paid a pittance and forever in a rush.

  ‘Bit like you,’ Sandra had once said, when Norah mentioned this to her, and Norah had laughed.

  The man had already dashed off to his next job. Norah heard the downstairs door close behind him and eyed the delivery with suspicion. She couldn’t see a card anywhere—perhaps it had slipped into the cellophane under the basket. Cautiously, she began to take off the rustling wrappings. What an eco-sin, Alex would have said—he was stricter about such things than she was. She looked more closely. It was a huge basket of fruit. Apples, pears, green and red grapes… Had Tanja sent it to apologise for her behaviour the other day? There didn’t seem to be anything weird or dangerous about it, so Norah picked it up, carried it into the flat and put it on the living-room table. Then she stuffed the cellophane into a bin liner in the kitchen and was on her way back to the living room when the doorbell shrilled again.

  This time it was the food, and as Norah unpacke
d it, she suddenly realised how hungry she was. She ate the two summer rolls straight out of the polystyrene box without even sitting down. Then she tipped the noodles into a dish and got out a fork. Today she would eat at the dining table like a civilised person, not at her laptop again—she’d got into bad habits these last weeks.

  In the doorway she stopped.

  The sun shining in at the window threw a broad strip of light across the living room onto the table, making the basket of fruit look like a Dutch still life. But it wasn’t the painterly beauty that captured Norah’s attention; something had been hiding in among the apples and pears and grapes. Scuttling across the table, heavily antlered, their black bodies almost surreally large, were three stag beetles.

  36

  I’m on the moon. That was her first thought when she opened her eyes and blinked in the sunlight.

  Or Mars.

  She couldn’t speak, could only stare as she took first tentative steps on the slippery ground, conscious that there was usually nothing here but water. Gallons and gallons of water.

  ‘I know,’ said Valerie, as if Norah had said something, or as if she’d read her thoughts. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’

  Norah nodded.

  All her life, the reservoir had been a vast lake. She had picnicked on its shores as a child, camped by it with her friends when she was old enough, swum in its clear waters more often than she could remember. Now, since being drained for repair works a few weeks before, it was transformed. The reservoir bed was dry—an apparently endless waste of pebbles and mud in every shade of brown and grey. Norah turned and looked up at the dam, dizzy at the sheer height of the wall and the thought of the unimaginable quantities of water that usually filled the lake.

  They walked along the lakebed, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  ‘I kind of imagined it cooler than this,’ said Bastian, and Norah didn’t have to look at Valerie to know that she was glaring at him with a mixture of scorn and pity. Everyone knew that Valerie only put up with Bastian because he was three years older than her and willing to ferry her around in his old VW Polo. He wasn’t her boyfriend; he was her chauffeur. Today, as usual, he’d done her bidding, falling in with her idea of blindfolding Norah and driving her to a place that she would—I swear to you, Norah—absolutely love.

  They wandered around the drained reservoir for most of that hot spring afternoon, completely undisturbed after abandoning Bastian at the dam with his cigarettes and his stupid remarks. They ran off in different directions, then came together again, screeching and giggling; they spun wildly round and round and collapsed on the dry mud. They told each other they were on the bottom of a vast lake beneath a huge mass of water, but could still breathe and talk because they were mermaids—though not the kind who sacrificed their tails just because they’d seen a young man they liked the look of. No way.

  ‘No way,’ said Norah. ‘Not that kind.’

  Later that day, they lay in Valerie’s back garden on the bumble bees’ approach path, surrounded by buttercups and daisies, and Norah watched a ladybird crawl over her fingers as if over hilly countryside.

  Suddenly Valerie said, ‘I think I’m in love with Milo.’

  Norah peered at the ladybird—the shiny red shell, the neat black dots that looked as if they’d been painted with a tiny brush.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ she said.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Valerie asked. She stretched out her hand and the ladybird climbed onto it.

  ‘Of course,’ Norah replied. ‘You fancy Milo. Who doesn’t?’

  The ladybird crossed the back of Valerie’s hand with astonishing speed. She turned her hand and let it move over her palm, back and forth over her lifeline.

  ‘I didn’t say I fancy him; I said I’m in love with him.’

  The ladybird had reached the tip of Valerie’s index finger and took off, maybe to find more girls lying on the grass, drinking warm iced tea and talking about boys, despite their vows to stay mermaids forever. They watched it go. It looked as if it were wearing a red cape, slit in the middle.

  ‘No,’ said Norah, ‘that’s not what you said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said: “I think I’m in love with Milo.”’

  Valerie rolled her eyes.

  ‘I am in love with him.’

  Norah laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I was just thinking of Bastian,’ she said. ‘He’ll be devastated.’

  And now Valerie laughed too and the warm spring day was so light and carefree, so beautifully insubstantial that Norah couldn’t later remember how it ended. Had Valerie’s dad got the barbecue going? Had they gone back to Norah’s and watched TV with her mum while Valerie painted Norah’s nails? Had they gone out on their bikes?

  Norah hadn’t thought of that afternoon for ages; she and Valerie had shared so many happy moments. If some people attracted good luck and others bad, some strange situations and others cats and weirdos, Valerie—so it had seemed to Norah—attracted these almost magical moments.

  Now, though, it came back to her as she hovered by the phone, trying to muster the courage to ring Valerie’s mother Monika. She had always liked Monika, often finding her easier to get on with than her own mother. She was a real mumsy type who cooked and baked and loved and scolded, always worrying when Valerie didn’t get home on time, while Norah’s young mum, with her wacky hairdo and laid-back nature, was more like a big sister—something that Norah didn’t find nearly as cool as she pretended to her admiring friends. Now her mum had been dead for years and she hadn’t seen Monika for half an eternity. Monika. It was at Valerie’s funeral that she’d told Norah to call her that. Norah had suddenly felt very grown up—and immediately realised that it wasn’t a good feeling.

  Her gaze fell on the dining table and she couldn’t keep from shuddering at the thought of those big brown-black beetles scuttling over the wood on their sturdy legs. No mere insects, those beetles; they’d been living warnings. Norah thought of Baroque vanitas, still lifes where the fine things of life—fruit and bread, wealth and pomp—are displayed in all their glory, but invariably subverted by symbols of death, decay and transience: moths, rats, snails, hourglasses, skulls. And—a particularly popular motif—stag beetles.

  She had caught the beetles and set them free on a patch of grass outside the house. Then she’d thrown away the fruit. But the feeling of menace had remained.

  Norah took a deep breath and reached for the phone. She had to know. Had to hear it from someone who was around at the time. Was it absolutely certain that Valerie had taken her life? Absolutely, indisputably, definitively certain? Because if not, she thought, maybe I know what’s going on here. Maybe someone’s trying to tell me something. Trying to tell me that Valerie didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered. Maybe someone out there knows the murderer and is trying to put me on his trail, hoping I’ll find him and punish him. Maybe they don’t have the courage to do it themselves. Maybe they know that I’m one of the people who loved Valerie the most.

  Maybe they know that I’m the only person who loved Valerie who is capable of killing her murderer.

  37

  Norah couldn’t have said how she’d expected Monika to react, but she hadn’t reckoned with such a frenzy of joy.

  ‘How are you?’ Monika asked, when she’d calmed down a little.

  Norah smiled. Her mother had always annoyed her by speaking rather contemptuously of Monika as the hen, but now, listening to Monika’s clucking laughter, it struck Norah that there really was something henlike about her.

  ‘Tell me what you’re up to.’

  ‘I’m doing all right,’ Norah said, because she had to say something.

  ‘Where are you living? Still in Berlin?’

  ‘Vienna.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a great city.’

  ‘And?’ Monika asked.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Seeing anyone?�
�

  Norah hesitated. She was the one who’d left Alex, not the other way round. So why was it still so painful?

  ‘Not right now,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing to say you have to. It’ll happen when it’s meant to.’

  Norah usually rolled her eyes when someone felt obliged to offer her comfort like this, as if singledom were a terminal illness. But she couldn’t bring herself to be angry with Monika.

  ‘Any other news?’ Monika asked.

  Norah searched frantically for a satisfactory answer, but she was too slow and Monika sighed.

  ‘You girls,’ she said. ‘You always were closed books, the pair of you.’ Norah suddenly felt cold, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Guilt rose in her gorge like heartburn. Even if she’d tried, she wouldn’t have been able to get a word out. She hadn’t expected Monika to mention her daughter unprompted. Not now—not today, after years of talking to Norah on the phone without a word about Valerie.

  ‘Do you know what Valerie’s dad used to call her?’

  Norah shook her head. She tried to make a negative noise in her throat, but it came out as a croak.

  ‘The black box,’ Monika said.

  Norah said nothing.

  ‘Do you get it? A black box. All kinds of stuff goes into it. You know there’s an awful lot in there—probably more than you can imagine. But nothing ever comes out.’

  Norah didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You were both like that,’ Monika went on. ‘Maybe it’s normal, maybe all teenagers are like that and I’ve just forgotten that I was the same.’

  She was silent, then gave a short laugh, as if to take some of the gravity from her words.

  ‘Not with each other,’ Norah said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We weren’t like that with each other.’

  ‘I know,’ Monika said. ‘I know.’

  Norah heard the static in the line as the silence spread.