Boenisch lived in his parents’ house in Spandau, up by the forest. The trees on the property would have been dripping with moisture. It must have smelled of soil, leaves, dust.
But she can’t remember anything.
*
Except for ringing the doorbell on the garden gate in the dark.
It was a long time before Boenisch opened the door. More questions? But he’s already told them everything… Of course, if he could help. He asked her in and apologized awkwardly for not coming to the door more quickly, because he’d been watching television and always had to turn the sound up so loud because of his bad hearing; he only had one eardrum now, the other had burst when he was little and his father beat him with the belt again.
Suddenly he started shaking and Aaron felt sorry for him. His cat weaved around her legs, but didn’t purr. One of its eyes was lined with black, the other with white. Its tail had a kink.
‘Ah, I didn’t even ask you – would you like a drink?’
‘A glass of water would be nice.’
He went into the kitchen. The cat miaowed. Aaron ignored it. She put one hand on the television.
Cold.
She saw too late that Boenisch was standing in the kitchen door.
‘I don’t have any more fizzy water. Is tap water OK?’
His forehead was drenched in sweat.
She said hastily that she had forgotten an important appointment and unfortunately had to go; there was no rush, they could talk another time.
Boenisch looked sad. ‘Pity.’ When she tried to get past him he grabbed her like a mouse. He was incredibly strong. He threw Aaron down on the stone floor, knelt on top of her, took her phone from her, pulled her up, dragged her to the basement door, pushed her down the pitch-dark steps and shut the door.
She has forgotten so much. But not that stench. She threw up immediately. She doesn’t know how much time passed before she was able to breathe again. Her left collarbone stung. She could feel the bone sticking out. Her whole side was numb.
Retching, Aaron felt her way forwards. Found something furry, an animal, a dog, stiff, as if stuffed, hoped for a second that the stench came from there. And a second later touched the first corpse, the skin of the bare legs doughy, repellently soft.
Aaron screamed and screamed until her body was one terrible great pain, and at the same time she could no longer feel it.
She lay there whimpering for a hundred years, she wanted to dream herself out of this hell into her father’s arms and couldn’t do it.
Couldn’t do it.
Every now and again an aeroplane whispered over the house. Somewhere out there was the world. People. The cinema where she had planned to see American Beauty that evening.
Another hundred years passed before the basement door opened. Boenisch came into the darkness. He had a torch and shone it in her face so that she couldn’t see his.
He sobbed: ‘What am I supposed to do with you?’
She wanted to plead for her life and couldn’t get a word out.
He left and locked the door again.
Aaron knew that she would never come out alive from this dungeon if she couldn’t find a way of turning off the centrifuge that was tirelessly slinging her heart against her ribs.
Above her head Boenisch put on a record. Roy Orbison: ‘Pretty Woman’. It crackled and droned.
Dad, what should I do?
Where are you? You have to work with what you’ve got.
Aaron thought: I can’t do it. But her hands were starting to feel their way around.
The second corpse. The gaping hole in the throat, tissue that felt like dry cake.
Keep going. Keep going. And then a feeling of happiness swept through her. A nail. Long and rusty. Aaron gripped it with her fist, crept backwards, took her bearings from the first corpse and the dog, found the steps, took off her shoes, crept up the steps.
At last she knelt by the door.
Dad, I can’t see anything.
Don’t see, know.
The nail is too big, I can’t get the door open.
It isn’t fear that paralyzes you. Fear is good, it keeps you alert. But damn it all, you’ve got to control your breathing! I showed you how!
Trembling, she pulled off her sweater, rested her right hand on her navel, breathed hard against it and as she breathed out concentrated on making sure that her belly arched all the way to her spinal column.
The drum-beat of her heart quietened.
How incredibly glad she was.
Aaron felt her way along the brickwork. She found a crack between two bricks and pushed the nail in. Stamped on it with her bare foot, bent the nail, ignored the pain.
Please don’t break! Please don’t break! Please don’t break!
It didn’t.
She guided the nail into the lock. Wiggled it. Registered that it opened.
She pushed the nail back into the wall and bent it straight.
Please don’t break! Please don’t break! Please don’t break!
It didn’t.
A small chink was enough to see Boenisch. He was striding back and forth, every footstep accompanied by a sob, his back turned towards her. The cat sat on the sofa and stared at Aaron.
She had only this one chance. She pushed the door open completely. Tensed her muscles.
At that moment Boenisch turned off the music.
Her pulse raced to over two hundred.
Boenisch picked up the phone.
Too much adrenalin. She was frozen.
When he had dialled four numbers, he was about to turn around with the phone in his hand. The cat jumped past him on to the windowsill and, hissing, swept a flowerpot to the floor. During the second in which he was distracted, Aaron fought down the adrenalin and threw all her strength into five steps across the stone floor. She rammed the nail into the back of Boenisch’s neck and drove it right in almost as far as it would go. He uttered a dull gurgle. His hands flailed in the void. She pulled the nail back out and leaped backwards. Blood sprayed into her face. Boenisch toppled over without a sound. There was a sauce stain on his shirt. His eyes gazed pleadingly. Aaron felt a crazed desire to let him bleed to death like a stuck pig.
She sat down on the sofa and watched Boenisch dying.
The cat paid him no attention. It trotted over to Aaron and jumped into her lap. Purred. Its white eye was shut, and it looked as if it was winking with the black one. Aaron stroked its thin back.
When she turned her head, she saw her father sitting beside her, as he had done on the day she passed her police entrance exam, and they took a rest on a bench after a long walk.
Where? In the forest? In the park? On the Rhine? Was I excited? Did he show me how proud he was of me? And my mother? Did she pretend to be happy for me?
She remembered his words: ‘Before flying to Mogadishu there was something I kept from Wegener, otherwise I wouldn’t have been allowed to go on the mission. Jürgen Schumann, the captain of the Landshut, had been a star fighter pilot and stationed at Büchel military airport; at the same time when I served there in Airborne Brigade 26. A really good guy, ten years older, he took me under his wing and helped me a lot when I had a problem with my superiors. In Mogadishu the first thing I heard after landing was: “The bastards have shot the pilot!” At that point I should have said it; you won’t get anywhere in this job without emotional detachment. I kept my mouth shut. We neutralized three terrorists, Souhaila Andrawes alone survived. She was lying by the toilet at the back, severely wounded, she’d been kicked aside. The others got the hostages out. I could have done it. Bullet between the eyes. The end. I thought about it. Just for one second. When Andrawes was carried out she made the victory sign for the cameras. It was still the right thing to do, though. Never forget that.’
Aaron called for support and an ambulance. While waiting she stroked the cat. They told her she’d been in the basement for eight hours. If they’d said two days or two weeks, she would have believed that too.
*
The siren ends lunch break in Tegel. ‘What do you like most about Mr Brooks?’ she asks Boenisch.
He doesn’t reply.
‘Don’t worry, you can tell me, we can both keep secrets.’
The sound of a plane, right above their heads, beginning to land. The roar of the turbines devours Boenisch’s words.
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘The main character,’ Boenisch says again.
‘Mr Brooks, the respected citizen who goes out night after night, kills people at random and never gets caught?’
‘Mr Brooks isn’t the main character.’
‘What?’
‘You know who the main character is!’
‘Tell me.’
‘Smith!’
‘The man who blackmails Mr Brooks so that he can go with him when he commits his murders? Someone who isn’t capable of killing people himself? What does he have to do with you? Since when have you just wanted to watch?’
‘No, Smith could have done it! Mr Brooks takes him to the cemetery so that Smith will shoot him. Smith pulls the trigger! He pulls the trigger!’
‘Mr Brooks had made the firing pin unusable.’
‘But Smith doesn’t know that! He pulled the trigger!’
‘So? He’d known for ages that Mr Brooks wouldn’t let himself be shot just like that. For Mr Brooks it was a game. Smith is a pitiful coward.’
Boenisch wails. Aaron calls: ‘Niko?’ He comes in. ‘Mr Boenisch and I are going to take a little break.’
‘No! I don’t need a break!’
You do, she thinks as she and Niko leave the room. She wants Boenisch to get wound up again.
To become as greedy for her as he was at the start.
*
Outside Block Six Aaron takes a deep breath. She wishes she hadn’t given Bukowski her last cigarette. ‘Will you get Dr Breuer’s notes from the Psychology Service? I’ll wait here.’
She feels Niko moving away. She can’t hear his footsteps, even though they must be crunching on the snow.
*
Ten things that Aaron likes to hear:
Janis Joplin
children’s laughter
the sea at turning ebb tide
a pencil on paper
rain on a corrugated iron roof
Harley-Davidsons
sparrows in the spring
the click of her Dupont lighter
the page of a book being turned
purring
*
Unconsciously she turns her face towards Jungfernheide, the nearby forest. She’s a long way from a road, she feels springy moss under her shoes, twigs brushing the back of her neck, she hears the rustle of little birds and wonders when she was there last.
When she was carried out of Boenisch’s house she asked after his cat. No one had seen it. After she was allowed to leave hospital, Aaron went immediately to Spandau and talked to Boenisch’s neighbours, but they didn’t know where the cat had ended up either. She stuck pieces of paper with her phone number on lamp posts and trees in the area. No one had seen the cat. No one ever called.
But then, months later, she woke up in her flat, and something was nipping at her big toe.
Marlowe.
Her black, smug, fat cat, who had come dancing into her life overnight, as if he had known he had to step in for someone else.
Aaron can’t remember where he suddenly arrived from. Her favourite idea is that he travelled on the roof of the car when she came out of a chocolate shop where she had been buying some langues de chat.
She doesn’t know how old he was when he arrived, but she does know that they immediately belonged together. He made it quite clear that he had sought her out. When she went to bed he lay in the crook of her arm and purred her to sleep because he knew she was afraid of her dreams. Every morning he nibbled at her big toe at exactly waking-up time, and didn’t go to his food bowl until she was having breakfast too. He snuggled with her when she needed him to and left her in peace when she had to concentrate on a thought. He was busy with cat matters and very serious and her best friend.
Thank you for allowing me that opportunity.
She never discovered how Marlowe spent his days. But when she got out of her car he was always sitting fat and round on the windowsill waiting for her, although she never had a sense that he had been lonely. Aaron sat down on the sofa, the cat hunkered on the table, and they played that game that you play with your eyes, where you have to shut your eyes and try and guess who’s going to look again first.
Later, when she was with the Department, she spent a lot of evenings at Sandra and Pavlik’s, and every time Marlowe knew in advance. He liked them, and their children. He sat expectantly by the door, of course he came too, or happily on the windowseat, and when he was with the twins he would even pretend for their benefit that he was interested in a ball or a toy car because he knew they liked it.
But he didn’t like Niko. Was he jealous?
She often had to leave him on his own, sometimes for weeks at a time, and when she did so she gave him to an old lady in the building who was alone and enjoyed Marlowe’s company. When Aaron came back, he jumped into her arms, bumped her with his head for a moment to say hello, and wasn’t hurt because he knew she must have had good reasons for being away.
One morning she slept in because Marlowe hadn’t woken her. He was very weak and breathing quietly. Terrified, she drove him to the vet. It was a tumour. He wouldn’t live long, but he wasn’t in pain, they told her.
The following day Aaron was supposed to go on a mission that would last a long time. She wanted to take her annual leave. Her boss was sick, and his deputy said it was impossible. Aaron announced that she would quit the service. She got the leave. For many hours she rocked Marlowe in her arms and told him what he meant to her. She knew he understood and felt exactly the same. When she woke up the next morning, he had fallen peacefully asleep in the crook of her arm while watching over her dreams as always. She buried him under a birch tree in the Jungfernheide and went often to his grave and talked to him until she flew to Barcelona.
Could she ask Niko to drive her there afterwards? No, Niko wouldn’t understand.
He comes as silently as he had disappeared. She gives a start when he says: ‘I’ve got the medical notes.’
Two minutes later she is sitting opposite Boenisch again. Aaron senses his impatience. But first she has to go back to the night when she saved his life and his house was swarming with police officers.
4
Why would someone like Boenisch, who had two blood-drained women’s corpses in the basement and a third victim, injured, defenceless, still to look forward to, make a phone call?
And who to?
The four numbers on Boenisch’s phone had the area code for Kassel. One was a number he had called a few times. It belonged to a man called Helmut Runge. The police dragged him out of bed at dawn. A travelling salesman in bathroom tiles, fifty-two, married, thirteen-year-old daughter, a son about to leave school. A life as interesting as dust on a sideboard. Runge said he had met Boenisch a few years before in a pub in Spandau, when he was in Berlin on a sales trip. They had met now and again, darts, cinema, sometimes for a drink. Boenisch was a poor bastard, he said, he had no one to talk to, he sometimes called up and droned on. But two dead women… Runge drank down a glass of schnapps at six in the morning.
The most remarkable thing that the search of his house brought to light was the collection of Kinder eggs in his den. Runge had alibis for the days when the women had disappeared: on the first he was at a sales reps’ seminar in Minden, on the second at a birthday party in Peine where he had stayed until midnight. Thirty witnesses, including his wife.
At that point it was quite clear to the investigators: Boenisch had acted on his own.
Hour after hour Aaron stood behind the two-way mirror and watched the interrogation. Boenisch’s eyes were one big waterfall. Again and again he cracked his
head against the tabletop. ‘I did it! I did it! I did it!’
They showed him photographs of some missing women, unsolved cases from the past few years. Boenisch admitted to murdering two joggers and took the police to the place in Spandau Forest where he had buried the body parts. There was no doubt that he was the perpetrator.
But Aaron couldn’t forget the bowl of mouldy leftover food in Boenisch’s basement. The women hadn’t been killed immediately after their abduction, and in the days that followed Helmut Runge could easily have been in Berlin. He was on a sales tour of Sachsen-Anhalt – ‘they order tiles like lunatics’. That was only a hundred and twenty kilometres away.
No one would listen to her. She was injured, traumatized, they said, she needed to recover and forget. She had to wear a cast for six weeks, during which time she was exempted from her probation period.
Her father came to Berlin. He asked the right questions: was the record scratched? How many steps were there? What sort of nail was it?
With him she could cry at last.
Is that all I want?
Did I ever cry before I woke up in Berlin?
But he too said: You’ve got to forget it.
Never.
On the website of Runge’s employer Aaron found a report on a sales reps’ seminar. Runge had the second-highest sales figures in the northern area. He held a trophy aloft. She enlarged the photograph. His fingernails were yellow, untended, almost like claws. Why could no one else see that? Aaron immediately thought about Boenisch shining the torch at her and sobbing: ‘What am I supposed to do with them?’
Why did he want to call Runge, of all people?
‘I needed to talk to someone about something, distract myself so that I didn’t kill the one in the basement too quickly.’
Aaron bought half a bookshelf of specialist literature. The first sentences came from Charles Manson: ‘If ever a devil existed on earth, it’s me. He took over my head whenever he wanted.’
Evil is a moral parameter, not an algorithm. And yet among all serial killers, with the exception of snipers, there are constants as valid as mathematical axioms.
The ‘butcher’ adapts the murders to the situation, improvises, and acts randomly and spontaneously.
In the Dark Page 5
