Boenisch, on the other hand: ‘I thought for a long time about which one I would take. And that’s exactly when I was given chocolate by Miss Marx for taking her car to the car wash. That’s when I knew: she’s the one! And that Lamprecht one was always so stuck up, come on, jump to it! She really got on my nerves.’
The butcher is incapable of developing feelings for other people, and sees them only as objects. Shifting a chair has the same significance as torturing, killing, dismembering the body and eventually throwing the parts away like rubbish.
Did that apply to Boenisch?
Everyone in the office building said that he never forgot a birthday, kept aspirin and plasters ready in the drawer for emergencies, he visited sick people in hospital. The neighbours said he was always ready to help. At Halloween the children liked to ring on his doorbell because he was so good at pretending to be scared; they got by far the most sweets from him. In hard winters, when he came home at six in the morning after the night shift, he cleared the snow for the whole street and scattered sand on the pavement.
Type two is the ‘planner’, a much rarer species. The nice guy that everyone likes. He has a steady job, a regular life.
Like Boenisch.
The planner carefully chooses the crime scene. Everything has to be perfect; a quiet, safe place.
Like Boenisch’s basement.
He never changes his plan, he needs that for maximum satisfaction. The slightest change would destroy everything.
Both times he had waited for the late end of a working day, anaesthetized the women in the underground car park with chloroform, and only after the days of the fattening phase, in which anticipation feeds the imagination until it’s as fat as foie gras, cut their throats in the basement.
Did not rape, or at least did not penetrate, either of them. He claimed to have done exactly the same thing with the two girls in the forest. Chloroform, basement, waiting, throats, decomposition.
But had Boenisch taken pictures of the corpses? No. Had he kept a souvenir in the house, a piece of jewellery or clothing that he could play with whenever he liked? No. Had he crept around the houses of the families to catch a glimpse of their suffering and get additionally turned on?
‘Ordinarily on the way to work I have to go past Lamprecht’s house, so I took a detour.’
Too many ‘no’s.
Boenisch doubtless had murderous fantasies and necrophiliac obsessions. But Aaron thought he only wanted to murder – and couldn’t. He had carefully sought out the women and locked them in his basement, a highly arousing piece of foreplay. Someone else had killed them, someone with whom he had engaged in a kind of symbiosis, like a blenny and a moray eel. Reinhold Boenisch was allowed to watch and keep the corpses.
The basement was his paradise.
He even took sexual satisfaction from being arrested. He masturbated while giving his confessions, he thought it was wonderful that he was seen as the perpetrator, and that people saw him as the man that he so wished he was. Compassion would have been an extra kick.
He tried everything, but no one gave it to him.
*
Only Aaron, now. ‘I know it’s very hard for you. Was the break long enough, or should we wait a little longer?’
He says hastily: ‘No, that’s fine.’ She hears him energetically rubbing his cuffed wrists. ‘How blind are you? Can’t you see anything?’
‘Why Melanie Breuer?’
‘She reminded me of someone.’
Now you’re hoping I’ll ask: who?
You’d love to tell me, you really would.
‘How did you feel when you went to her?’
Boenisch’s breath scratches disappointedly in his throat. ‘There was always the pressure in my head. She must have noticed. She was an expert.’
‘What happened when she came into your cell?’
‘She looked at my books. But not that one. I put it away.’
‘And then?’
‘We drank tea. Side by side, there’s not much room. She wasn’t wearing perfume, but she smelled good. Exactly as I imagined. She touched my arm. My hands were on fire.’
‘How did she like her tea? With or without sugar?’
Aaron knows that Boenisch doesn’t like sugar. He lacks a protein molecule, an anomaly, one in a hundred thousand, a marginal note in his medical file.
‘Without.’
She tries to irritate him. ‘I’ve asked around. Dr Breuer only ever drank her tea with sugar. Why are you lying?’ He tugs so hard on his handcuffs that she pushes her chair half a metre back.
‘Perhaps the break wasn’t long enough after all.’
He pleads. ‘No, please! I’m sorry!’
*
In her fourth week off work, Aaron’s collarbone had recovered sufficiently that she was able to drive all the way to Kassel. The two murders were fresh, Helmut Runge must still have been in the cooling-off phase. Over the next little while a new victim was unlikely, but perhaps he would make a mistake, take Aaron to the hiding place where he kept his souvenirs.
She prepared to follow him on a sales tour in her rattly Beetle. No need. Runge was on holiday, and spent it with his family on the allotment. Aaron took a room in the bed and breakfast with the fat landlady who always watched her curiously when she went out of the house with her camera. There are no tourists in Kassel.
Once Aaron stared provocatively back, and the woman murmured: ‘A cat can look at a queen.’
Runge made a bird house, grilled pork chops with other allotment-keepers, went canoeing with his son, went on an excursion with his wife and children to Heide Park near Soltau, lay in his hammock, solved crosswords, read war stories.
What did the bird house look like? He painted it. In what colour? Was it a canoe, or was it a dinghy? What was going on in my mind when I lay at last in the forest glade and watched Runge through the telephoto lens? Was I furious because he was behaving so normally? Did I hope I was wrong?
Her mother called. Her voice was filled with concern. And she knew nothing about Boenisch and his cellar. Her father said it was better that way. Aaron had invented a sporting accident, stupid, but quickly healed.
Her mother asked: ‘Won’t you come to ours? You have friends here, they’ll be delighted.’
‘Oh, Mum, I have to swot so much for college. And in two weeks I’ve got to carry on with my probation period.’
Meanwhile she didn’t take her eyes off Runge for a second.
‘Take care, sweetie,’ her mother said sadly.
‘Sure.’ She focused the viewfinder. Runge was having his wife rub his back with sun cream. She put on a little too much and recoiled when he suddenly lashed out at her.
*
One morning the fat bed-and-breakfast landlady was sitting behind her table crying. At first Aaron tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed, thinking the woman wouldn’t want a complete stranger poking her nose into her life, but when she was standing in the doorway she heard another sob and asked: ‘What’s wrong?’
They had a coffee together. The woman was glad to have someone to talk to. Her daughter had abandoned her studies, Geography and Physics, at a time when they were taking on teachers. It was her ex-husband’s fault. He owned a bar in Hanover, and had persuaded his daughter to start with him as a business manager, telling her she would be able to earn a lot more money. She had always been Daddy’s girl, and if he had had an ice-cream stall in Greenland she would probably have gone there too.
Aaron realized how good it felt to listen to someone. That was one of the reasons why she had wanted to become a police officer: listening, with a view to understanding someone’s fate, because it’s only then that you can act in a just way. She wasn’t yet aware that she would become a quite different type of police officer, and follow her father on to the thin ice, beneath which you could see the faces of the dead with every step you took.
Now she was involving herself in the concerns of the woman who no longer knew what to do; she saw her child
rushing headlong into disaster, just as she herself had done when she had married that man. She couldn’t remember what she had once seen in him. She shook her head and sighed: ‘It never rains but it pours.’
While Aaron struggled to find the right words and recommended that the three of them sit down and discuss the matter, she couldn’t help thinking of her own mother. She would talk to her friends in a very similar way, telling them how despondent she was that Aaron wanted to become a police officer because of her father, too young to understand what sort of life it would be and what it meant for her mother. She only had Aaron and her husband. Now she would have to worry about both of them.
The fat landlady gratefully shook her hand. ‘That was a huge help.’ When Aaron left, the woman’s heart was a little lighter and her own a little heavier.
As if it was yesterday. I even remember that the stocking on her right leg was laddered.
*
A day earlier than Aaron’s planned return to Berlin, Runge’s daughter fell off her bicycle on to a stony path. She hobbled tearfully to the allotment, her knee covered with blood. Her mother threw her hands over her head and treated the wounds inside the house. Runge didn’t budge from his hammock. He set his book down and dozed.
Aaron called the Homicide Unit and asked if she could stay away for another week. Of course. Take as long as you like.
Nothing for the next two days. But in the two after that Runge did something strange. He drove alone to the station in Kassel. There he sat for hours in the station hall. No paper, no book, no one to pick up. He was absorbed in himself and didn’t move. Like a salamander on a cold stone.
On the second day Aaron waited until he left the station and then stumbled into him carrying a city map. ‘I’m sorry, can you help me? I’m looking for the Brothers Grimm Museum.’
Runge didn’t know her, he had never seen her before. His eyes were tar-stained pebbles, his voice thin and inexpressive. His horny yellow claw ran over the map. ‘It’s not far at all. Straight on, right at the crossroads, second left, then you’re walking straight towards it.’
‘Very kind, thank you. I got lost. That’s what it’s like when you don’t have anyone to walk with you.’
You’re the big bad wolf.
But believe me, I’m not Little Red Riding Hood.
If Runge had offered to show her around a bit, perhaps with an outing to Wilhelmshöhe, a little trip that was worth it because you had a wonderful view, she would have got into his car, and once he revealed what he was, shot him without hesitation with the Starfire in her handbag. But he wished her a good day with his salesman’s smile.
Aaron went back to the Homicide Unit. The fact that she, a twenty-year-old agent on probation, was the only one to have spotted the contradictions in Boenisch’s statements, won her considerable respect. However, there was also much shaking of heads that she could be so reckless as to drive to Spandau on her own. An experienced colleague saw how distracted she was, and was concerned about her. Aaron was on the point of confessing to her.
But she didn’t.
Before Christmas she had a week’s holiday. She hired a car and followed Runge through the Bremen area. He did his rounds, joked with the customers, watched television in the evening in his cheap hotel, turned the light out early, had a fish sandwich at lunchtime, always taking out the onions, bought Christmas presents for his family. A pearl necklace, nine hundred and eighty marks; Backstreet Boys concert ticket for his daughter, Stadthalle Kassel, forty-three marks; briefcase for his son, who was starting to train as a banker, one hundred and nineteen marks.
On the third evening he drove to a little restaurant in Delmenhorst. But he didn’t get out. He sat in the car and looked through the brightly lit window with the sticker saying ‘Zum krummen Eck’, in honour of a nearby mountain resort. Aaron parked on the other side of the road and saw the waitress joking with the customers.
She checked the magazine of the Starfire.
Runge waited until the restaurant closed. The waitress stepped out on to the pavement. She was one of those women whose dreams of a life that they have never lived lie pasted on their faces like a thick layer of make-up. She got into Runge’s car. They kissed, and looked as if they knew each other. He gave her a prettily wrapped box. She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the lips. He put the pearl necklace around her neck.
Aaron couldn’t move. She followed Runge and the woman to a block of flats in a run-down part of town. When the curtains were drawn on the first floor and the light went out, her heart was beating as hard as it had in Boenisch’s basement. What was she supposed to do? Warn the woman? And then? She would hardly believe her, and she would tell Runge everything. She certainly wasn’t in immediate danger, or else he wouldn’t have bought her the pearl necklace. Would he give a gift like that to a victim? Probably not. He must have known the woman for a long time, and killing her wouldn’t have fitted in with his scheme. Those thoughts, which collided like the balls on a Newton’s cradle, haunted Aaron’s night.
She started from her sleep in the first dirty light of morning.
Aaron hadn’t noticed that she had parked in a disabled space. Two bored policemen had stopped their patrol car and knocked on the window. They asked to see her disabled permit. Aaron asked woozily if they didn’t have anything better to do. And then she had to get out for a telling off.
The door of the building opposite opened. The waitress, wearing her dressing gown, said goodbye to Runge. She was still wearing the necklace. When he walked to his car, he saw Aaron with the two policemen. He stopped and recognized her.
Runge showed no reaction.
As he got into the car he dropped his key.
*
She spent Christmas Eve with her parents. The presents had been unwrapped; her mother was making dinner on her own, just because Aaron is absolutely hopeless at cooking.
Her father murmured: ‘Right, let’s take a walk around the block.’
A deserted street, New Year’s Eve fireworks already going off. Silent, cold, restless night. Aaron knew her father had seen through her, and got everything off her chest. The perpetrator’s profile, her ‘time off from her probation period’, the moment when Runge lay peacefully in his hammock. His lover in Delmenhorst. The only things she left out were the Brothers Grimm Museum and the loaded Starfire in her handbag.
‘So he’s having it off with the waitress. It happens.’
‘And his reaction to his daughter’s injury?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t his day.’
‘He was totally relaxed. And the girl was bleeding really badly.’
‘Maybe his old woman was getting on his nerves.’
‘Nothing gets on his nerves. He can’t even bear the sight of his wife.’
‘I know a few guys at Sixth Homicide. Good people.’
She stopped furiously. ‘Have you even been listening to me?’
He put a reassuring arm around her and they walked on. ‘When you were little, a couple lived in that house over there, he was a master electrician, I’m sure you won’t remember them. They came to dinner once. There was bad blood between them and I had to keep topping up his schnapps glass. Eventually the women went and chatted in the garden, probably about clothes, and he vented his spleen. They had a poodle.’
What was he talking about?
‘He snapped: “Bloody awful mutt. Every morning there was a yellow stain on the carpet in my study. My wife was away at a spa for two weeks, and I dumped the brute in the forest. On Friday she came back, I told her the dog had run away. She went nuts and put up signs all over the place. Yesterday the damned thing found its way back, but only just. Since then my wife hasn’t said a word to me. This morning it turned out that the stain in my study was from a broken heating pipe. I’m a dead walking.”’
Again they stopped.
‘The obvious thought is sometimes the right one. But sometimes you just can’t accept it. You need to lock up Boenisch and Runge for ever. If you
don’t do that, you’ll go round the bend.’
She knew her father was right.
Boenisch stood trial in February. The unusual gravity of the crime was established. Boenisch was given life followed by preventive detention. When he was sentenced he burst into convulsive tears.
*
Sixteen years later he’s crying again. Aaron hears him forcing out the same thick, eager tears as before.
‘Why did you suffocate Dr Breuer with the plastic bag? You could have throttled her, wouldn’t that have been more arousing?’
‘She asked if I wanted to change my job,’ he sniffs in something half-way between a sob and a hiccup. ‘She talked and talked. I silenced her. It’s so lovely when they’re quiet. Like in a glider, when you can only hear the wind.’
‘The plastic bag was opaque. But you love seeing fear in women’s faces. What do you get from a fight to the death that you can’t even see properly?’
He thinks. Hates the question. Chokes on his tears as if they were an unusually big piece of meat. ‘The bag was all I had.’
‘There are plenty of transparent ones in the laundry.’
He tries to sound even more afflicted; perhaps then she would change the subject from that bloody bag. ‘I was so disgusted with myself.’
When she came in in the morning the wallpaper seemed to brighten.
Aaron puts her phone away and gets to her feet. ‘No, you weren’t. You’re a coward who lets someone like Bukowski beat him up so that he can complain, someone who gets an erection when people think he’s a murderer. You’re not Mr Brooks. You’re Smith. A bedwetter. And you and I are finished now.’
Boenisch roars like an animal. ‘I’ll kill you, you whore! I’ll finish you off! I’ll pull your blind eyes out! Cunt!’
Aaron is scared that the radiator will come away from the wall. The door flies open. Niko. He leads Aaron out of the room.
‘I should have stabbed you back then! Drunk your blood!’
Last of all she hears the prison officer: ‘Shut it, or I’ll slap you one.’
She can hardly wait to wash her hands.
*
Snow creaks under his shoes like peanut brittle. Niko asks no questions. He’s good at that. Aaron used to be good at that too.
In the Dark Page 6
