The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  “The Kommissar has been called on an urgent case suddenly. He comes back as soon as possible,” the fresh-faced young assistant said as he ushered them inside. No clue as to why they had been called. And no apology for making them wait.

  “That’s something you’re probably used to here already,” Marthe said. “They never tell you anything unless you ask the right questions. But you can never know what the right questions are.”

  “Oh, and they never say sorry. Especially to a woman,” she added with her index finger raised as if to punctuate this afterthought with an exclamation mark.

  It was plain to Ellen from the sour look the man gave Marthe as he turned to leave that he had understood every word. And to underline their displeasure before he disappeared into the corridor, Ellen gave vent to her own frustration.

  “I thought from the phone call it was urgent. I mean, if it was important enough to drag us out at seven in the morning, then the least you could do is give us a clue what it’s all about.”

  The man smiled uneasily over to Marthe, repeatedly muttering a word that sounded to Ellen like ‘mort’, as if this explained everything. Again and again he repeated it in what Ellen saw as a nervous response. To her, his manner carried the look of a helpless and lost little boy on his first day at school. Suddenly he did not appear to understand a word of English, and she almost began to feel sorry for him. Then Marthe explained:

  “Seven is not really that early here, especially during Fasnacht,” she said. “I told him we would come back later. In the meantime, we can watch the parade. The Kommissar will probably not be back for a couple of hours. He’s been called out on a murder case.”

  It was not until they were out in the chill of the dark early morning, mingling with the crowds and the noise of the carnival, that the significance of Marthe’s last words dawned on Ellen.

  “Did you say murder?” Ellen shouted out over the rat-a-tat of the drums and shrill sounds of the piccolos. The last word fell in the brief fraction of a second between beats and seemed to descend on the whole carnival procession in their vicinity. All heads turned in Ellen’s direction. But they were not distracted for long. Their imagination was caught by the huge painted lanterns that bobbed and floated through the streets above their heads.

  “But the Kommissar is not in the murder squad, is he? Why should he be called out on a murder case?”

  Marthe said nothing in reply.

  “You don’t think it has anything to do with Frank, do you?” Ellen persisted, but Marthe’s attention was elsewhere. Her eyes were alight. She was in another world.

  Ellen had never seen Marthe so disinhibited in public before. And it was clear that these questions had no place here. But she did not ignore Ellen. She was plainly keen to take her along into the celebrations. Yet it was an occasion for which Ellen felt the word ‘celebration’ to be a peculiar description.

  As the huge painted lanterns passed by, with inscriptions that she was unable to decipher, it all seemed strangely serious to Ellen. When Marthe told her it was a carnival, she had imagined something like Rio or Venice. But no one here was letting their hair down. No one was dancing. It appeared more like a ceremony to Ellen. And yet, from the look on their faces, like little wide-eyed children, everyone appeared to be enjoying all the pageantry, the lanterns in the darkness, and the almost military sound of drums and pipes that filled the air. Marthe was no less enraptured than anyone else. Taking Ellen by the hand she started moving, almost dancing, through the jostling crowds.

  “It will start to get light soon,” she shouted to Ellen through all the noise. “We shall go and have a soup then to warm us up before we see the Kommissar.”

  But Ellen found it hard to share Marthe’s enthusiasm. There was something ominously sinister about the military rat-a-tat of the drums in the air – and the lanterns floating huge and ghostly in the darkness with their indecipherable messages – which disturbed her to the core.

  “What do they all mean?” Ellen asked, pointing at the lanterns as they passed.

  “They’re all making political and social statements. Making fun of the politicians. Or the city’s big companies,” Marthe shouted over the noise. “Like that one there,” she added pointing at one that Ellen could at least vaguely understand as a comment about Vitamin C and Hoffmann–La Roche.

  “But that’s the most controversial one this year,” Marthe said with an oddly chilled glee, pointing at the image of a man at the mercy of a woman. And alongside this picture the words Der dressierte Mann.

  “Also the most disturbing,” she added. “After everything we won in the referendum last year, this Esther Vilar comes along to undermine us. And the men love it.”

  “Is that The Manipulated Man?” Ellen asked with a hint of recognition in her voice. “I was reading about it recently. It’s caused quite a stir at home as well.”

  Marthe let out a hiss of disdain, which was instantly swallowed up by the piccolos and drums.

  Every group of pipers and drummers, each led by a drum major, were all dressed in a variety of costumes with huge grotesque masks on their heads. Ellen found the bizarre militaristic mood to the parade unnerving. And on the corner where Marthe had positioned herself and Ellen, it was a mood that only added to her sense of vulnerability.

  ‘Or am I just paranoid?’ she asked herself.

  They had been standing on that corner for a good half an hour, when suddenly Ellen became aware of a loud enthusiastic voice of what seemed a particularly artless American behind them. His drawl put her in mind of Bill Plattner – even the way he kept repeating his appreciation with a facile “awesome!” reminded her of the way Frank’s sculptor mate would caress his granite artwork with such wonder – when at that very moment she could have sworn she saw him.

  “Frank’s here!” Ellen shouted, beside herself with disbelief.

  She had never known until then what the expression ‘a sight for sore eyes’ truly meant. The shape of that head, the mop of hair so delightfully, so intimately familiar to Ellen – even in the deceptive light thrown by the lanterns, the street lamps and the slowly dawning sky. She was certain it was him, and she grabbed Marthe’s arm.

  “Where?”

  Marthe craned her neck in all directions, her eyes alight with expectation. She appeared more excited even than Ellen was, as if it was her lost property that had just been found.

  Ellen pointed over to the other side of the street where she had spotted him. But he had already vanished. Then, from behind a crowd that was drowning in a sea of confetti just tossed into the air by a carnival-goer, he reappeared. A little closer now.

  “There!”

  Ellen wanted to tug at Marthe’s arm, but it was not there. She was gone.

  “Marthe!”

  Her companion was nowhere to be found. But by now Frank had seen her. And he was moving in her direction. Yet strangely. He moved in a way that she had never seen in him before. His expression was foreign to her. He wore a hunted look. A crazed desperation widened his eyes.

  He began lunging towards Ellen. Dr Zellweger’s warning words that Frank may be suffering a psychosis flashed into Ellen’s mind. And she panicked. Suddenly she was terrified of her own husband. But this was not her Frank. This was not the man she had married.

  “Marthe!” she cried again. “Marthe! Frank’s here!”

  Frantically, she searched the faces around her. Where was she? And in the corner of Ellen’s eye a glint of metal from Frank’s hand. It was the scream of a woman’s voice beside her that made her spin round…

  … just in time to see him fall. His face stared up at Ellen from where he lay, a trickle of blood from his head mingling with the colours of confetti on the pavement around him. So far away. So distant.

  The scene that took shape around Ellen as her senses slowly returned told her she was back in her own bed in England. But this was only the cruel kind of trick the mind plays halfway to waking. For a moment, which extended far too long for comfort, it w
as a scene that was completely alien to her. A room she did not know. A bed she had never slept in before. Wearing bedclothes that were not hers. And a clean smell of sterility in the air. But Marthe was beside her, holding Ellen’s hand, as if there to lead her back to consciousness.

  “Where am I?” Ellen asked, and she realised as she uttered those words that she was with the only person who had brought her comfort in the last twelve months.

  “You’ve had a terrible shock, Ellen,” Marthe said. “You’re in hospital.”

  “But Frank. What about Frank?”

  “You need to rest, Ellen. I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake,” was all Marthe said in reply, and the softness of the voice instantly lulled Ellen back to sleep.

  How long she slept it was impossible for her to tell. But she suspected it was only a few minutes, because the doctor was just entering the room when she woke again. With his shock of dark brown hair, it could almost have been Frank, and her heart momentarily leapt at the sight. But the white coat quickly brought her down to earth.

  The doctor shook Ellen’s hand as she sat up and introduced himself with a name she was unable to understand. But he spoke impeccable English.

  “You have suffered a shock, Mrs Goss,” he explained (as if she needed to be told), “but all the vital parameters seem to be in order, so I think we can discharge you into the safe hands of Dr Zellweger’s wife.”

  Marthe’s reassuring hand rested on Ellen’s arm.

  “Come on, let’s get you home,” she said. But Ellen was far from reassured by either Marthe’s hand or the doctor’s words.

  “What about the police?” she asked. “We were supposed to see the Kommissar.”

  “The Kommissar will want to speak with you, of course. He will come to the house once we’ve got you home.”

  The anxiety that had permeated Ellen’s every thought since she received Marthe’s call was shot through now with a wholesale fear made inconsolably real by her memory of Frank lying at her feet on the pavement. Or had she just dreamt it in the melee of grotesque masks and incessant drums?

  She knew the answer, of course, without having to ask. And the knowledge cowed her into a timid silence on the drive back to the Zellwegers’ home.

  “Now, you relax in the lounge, while I make you some tea. And I will be with you in a moment,” Marthe said as she disappeared into the kitchen. Ellen retreated to the sofa in the lounge and listened to the boiling of the kettle.

  Sitting on the sofa that had been so familiar to her the best part of twelve months ago, she was struck by how little had changed in the intervening months. The same newspaper, the National-Zeitung, lay on the table. And the same magazines. Only the headlines and pictures had changed. And the erotic watercolour still hung there on the wall. Tantalising. Ellen smiled at the sensual scene as the thought occurred to her at that moment – knowing Marthe in the way she now did – that perhaps Marthe herself was one of the women in that naked embrace.

  It was a thought that prompted oddly unconnected memories of a day out with some school friends when she was fifteen or sixteen. They were strolling through a narrow, wooded valley carpeted with primroses and bluebells on the southern fringes of Dartmoor one afternoon, when suddenly the idyllic peace was shattered by a thunderous crash. It shook the earth they walked on. They all instantly froze to the spot in trepidation. Ellen had never felt such paralysing fear in her life. When the group finally plucked up the courage to continue on along the valley, they soon came upon a clearing at the foot of a rock that rose above the trees like a monument to the bucolic nature that surrounded them.

  There on the ground lay a man. Quite still. Ellen and her friends stood watching the lifeless body. Was this the cause of the thunderous crash? Had he fallen from the rock? Had he thrown himself off? The girls looked uncertainly at each other, immobilized by their fear.

  “Feel his pulse,” one screamed. “We need to feel his pulse.”

  But nobody moved. Until Ellen stepped up. She gripped the man’s wrist in her hand and felt for the pulse with her thumb. She felt nothing. Not the slightest movement. Not the vaguest hint of life. The man was plainly dead.

  Ellen had never before been confronted with death in any form, let alone in such a stark and direct encounter. What shocked her most was the ordinariness of the scene, the unremarkable picture of the man who now lay before her. A life completely expunged.

  Two of her friends instantly ran to find the nearest village where they could phone for an ambulance. While the rest of the group waited at a safe distance from the corpse, Ellen casually wandered off into the woods and picked bluebells to help her through the long wait, as if the trivial pursuit of woodland flowers would blot out this confrontation with death.

  And today, in the slightly disturbing comfort of the Zellwegers’ lounge, her bluebells were these two naked women in their erotic embrace.

  Ellen did not cry. Did not even gently weep to herself when Marthe sat down beside her, poured the tea and explained what happened when she fainted. Ellen was imbued with an intensely uncomfortable feeling of guilt that she was unable to shed any tears. In her heart, she had long since come to terms with the idea that she would never see Frank again. She had sensed it the moment she decided to return to London. And yet, when she did set eyes on him, face to face, he came to her like a figure in a dream. Lunging in her direction from a crowd of strange faces and masks, before instantly vanishing again. It was hard for her even to comprehend the idea that this could actually have been Frank. After all these months.

  “Can I see him?” Ellen asked.

  “You will have to identify the body,” Marthe said. She placed a comforting hand on Ellen’s arm. “And they may want to perform an autopsy.”

  “An autopsy?”

  “Kommissar Staehelin will send someone to pick you up tomorrow morning,” Marthe explained.

  “I still don’t understand,” Ellen said.

  “Do you remember just before you returned home last year that a man was attacked on a shooting range and his gun was stolen? And the police suspected it might have been Frank?”

  Ellen gave Marthe a look both incredulous and disapproving.

  “Apparently a gun like that was used in the killing of a gangster around the time you returned to London,” Marthe continued. “Last night, a man was shot in the same house. That is the murder case which was occupying our Kommissar yesterday, because they think that Frank may have had something to do with it.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” cried Ellen. “My Frank a killer?”

  As she spoke these words, her memory of that fleeting sight of Frank resurfaced, the glint of metal in his hand.

  “The Kommissar will speak with you later. You know, the police are watching the house where the dead man lived since many months already. He was in a drugs gang, and now they are thinking that Frank has had something to do with it.”

  “No, it’s ludicrous,” Ellen insisted. Then asked: “What happened exactly? After I passed out?”

  “Ellen, my love.” Ellen had never seen such tenderness in Marthe’s expression before. Even when they lay in each other’s arms, it was usually lined with a certain severity – hardened maybe by years of disappointment.

  “You can tell me, Marthe. I saw him fall. I remember his face staring up at me, deathly white and empty.”

  Marthe placed a hand on Ellen’s arm.

  “They are not sure until they have made an autopsy, but it was probably a heart attack.”

  Just like his mother, Ellen thought. Or was it? There were still so many unanswered questions. Yet all of a sudden none of them interested her any longer. She had spent so long searching and waiting for Frank, only to discover a huge unexplained hole. And she had no wish to spend any more time filling this hole with pointless questions and answers. She was too tired for that. Frank was gone. He was dead. That was all she needed to know.

  “It’s all over, then.”

  Marthe nodded.

  Chapter
27

  The next morning, when Ellen was called to identify Frank’s body, she was on edge. Her nerves frayed. She was wondering after all whether she could cope with seeing his lifeless corpse. What bluebells could there possibly be to help her through this ritual?

  Marthe suggested they go and have a drink at a café in the market square beforehand to calm her nerves. They found a table on the first floor next to a window overlooking the market square.

  “I have been thinking a lot in the months while you were away, Ellen,” said Marthe as she sipped on their coffee. Ellen was lost in her thoughts, gazing out over the stalls in the market. The winter vegetables. Cheeses. And cut flowers to add a splash of colour.

  “What you said about Frank and how difficult his mother found him when he was a child,” Marthe continued. Ellen turned her gaze back at Marthe, who could not escape a hint of curiosity in her eyes. But there was also a resignation, a flatness to Ellen’s expression.

  “What of it?” she asked.

  “When I was in America with Urs, I was reading some fascinating articles by a psychiatrist there about the survival of human personality after death. I think his name was Stevens. Or maybe Stevenson. It was really thought-provoking. Of course, Urs found it complete nonsense. Like most of his colleagues. He just laughed at the whole idea, which really shocked me at the time, because I knew how much he admired C.G. Jung’s work. But ‘it was Jung’s contribution to psychotherapy that was so important,’ Urs said. ‘Not all that visionary, occultist nonsense.’”

  “What does all this have to do with Frank?” Ellen asked.

  “This Stevens man wrote about children with memories of a former life. They recalled places, people and also past events, things that happened long before they were even born and which they could not possibly have known. And when he checked their stories, he found those people and places had really existed. The events had really happened. They corresponded exactly with the memory of the child – although the child could not possibly have had knowledge of those places and events. It’s even been suggested that injuries in a past life can show up as deformities in the next life.”