by Helen Grant
PENGUIN BOOKS
Helen Grant was born in London. She read Classics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and then worked in marketing for ten years in order to fund her love of travelling. In 2001 she and her family moved to Bad Münstereifel in Germany, and it was exploring the legends of this beautiful town that inspired her to write her first novel. She now lives in Brussels with her husband, her two children and a small German cat.
Praise for The Vanishing of Katharina Linden:
‘A feast of treats and creeps… wonderful’ – Guardian
‘A richly textured, effortlessly written novel’
– Sunday Telegraph
‘For something so chilling, it is terrific entertainment’
– Sunday Times
‘An impressive debut from a writer to watch’
– Daily Mail
‘Gripping stuff… not for the faint-hearted’ – Carousel
‘Remarkable’ – Independent
Books by Helen Grant
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden
The Glass Demon
HELEN GRANT
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
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First published 2010
Text copyright © Helen Grant, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-95820-0
For Iona
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Chapter Sixty-three
Chapter Sixty-four
Chapter Sixty-five
Chapter Sixty-six
Chapter Sixty-seven
Chapter Sixty-eight
Acknowledgements
Meet the Author
CHAPTER ONE
If anyone were to ask me, ‘What is the root of all evil?’ I would say not ‘Money’ but ‘Food’. It was food – specifically the lack of it – that killed my sister, or at least assisted at the death. And the old man that day in the orchard in Niederburgheim was the only person I have ever seen who died of eating an apple.
He was lying in the long grass, and all we could see of him at first was a checked shirt and the worn knee of a pair of blue overalls. We all thought he was asleep.
‘Just nip out of the car and ask that man in the grass,’ said Tuesday.
‘I think he’s asleep,’ I said doubtfully.
‘I’m sure he won’t mind,’ she replied in a severe voice. ‘And shut the door when you get out, will you? It’s windy and I don’t want my hair –’
I slammed the car door, cutting her off in mid-sentence, and waded through the tall grass. It was the end of a long hot summer and the grass was dry and brittle, with a pleasant smell like hay.
‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte?’ I called, peering at the recumbent figure.
There was no reply. I could almost feel Tuesday’s impatient gaze pecking at my back.
‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte?’ I repeated, a little more loudly.
For a moment I thought I saw movement, but it was only the wind ruffling the grass. A fat bumblebee buzzed past close to my face and instinctively I put up a hand to ward it off. I took a step closer to the supine figure in the grass. He was a very sound sleeper, whoever he was; perhaps he had had too much beer with his lunch. I could see part of the lunch lying close to his outstretched hand – a large, rosy-looking apple with a bite mark standing out palely against its reddish skin. I took another step closer.
Behind me, the car door opened. ‘What are you doing?’ called Tuesday irritably.
I didn’t reply. I was standing there with the dry ends of the grass pricking my bare legs and the breeze lifting the ends of my dark hair, my mouth dry and my eyes round with shock. I was looking at the corpse at my feet. At the corpse. Grey-blue eyes iced over with Death’s cataracts, blindly staring at the summer sky. Mouth gaping open, although its owner clearly had nothing to say, ever again. And at the side of the close-cropped head, a dent, an obscene crater in the smooth curve of the skull. Red on the stalks of the yellow grass. Blood. I was nearly standing in it.
There was a clunk as the car door closed again, and I heard Tuesday picking her way towards me, cursing to herself. Vegetation crunched under her feet. As she came up behind me I heard her dr
aw breath to speak and then suddenly hold it. A hand clutched my shoulder; Tuesday was hanging on to me, her other hand clamped over her mouth.
‘Oh, my God,’ she squeaked out eventually. ‘Is he dead?’
My throat seemed to have constricted; I tried to speak but no words came. Instead I just nodded.
‘Should we take his pulse or something?’ said Tuesday in a choked voice.
‘I don’t think there’s much point,’ I managed to say.
I looked again at the red on the grass, and then down at my bare toes in their sandals. I took a step backwards, Tuesday staggering back with me. Her nails were digging into my shoulder.
‘What do we do?’ she croaked.
‘Get Dad,’ I suggested.
I had to resist the temptation to push her off; the nails were hurting. I felt oddly numb looking down at the body. It didn’t seem real, more like some sort of strange tableau, an illustration for an accident-prevention poster. An apple tree with a wooden crate sitting underneath it. A ladder pushed up against the tree trunk. The red apple with the scalloped white bite mark on it. And sprawled in the grass, the body. Already my imagination was making patterns out of the scene. The old man – he looked about seventy to me – had been picking apples. Maybe he’d forgotten that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He’d clambered up the ladder and started work, reaching up among the leafy branches to twist the apples off their twigs. Then he’d seen that red apple – the one now lying on the ground – and hadn’t been able to resist. He’d plucked it, taken one big bite, and then – either because he only had one hand free or because he was savouring the apple too much to look what he was doing – he had overbalanced and fallen off the ladder. Thump. Straight on to the hard earth. One clumsy dive on to a log or a hard stone: lights out. So much for the benefits of healthy eating.
Tuesday let go of my shoulder and staggered back towards the car. My father had opened his own door by now and was shouting something to her. I watched her veer from side to side, as though she had had one too many cocktails. She put up a hand as if trying to ward him off. I hoped she’d have the good sense to tell him to make Polly and Ru stay in the car.
I glanced back at the man lying in the grass. Again that feeling of unreality swept over me. It seemed so incongruous, him lying there stone dead with the apple just a few centimetres from his outstretched hand, as though he might suddenly sit up and take another bite. My gaze slid reluctantly back to that terrible dent in the side of his head. I thought of the force required to crack someone’s skull like that, and for a moment I thought I would throw up my service-station sandwiches. I turned my head away, and as I did so something caught the light and winked brightly at the edge of my vision.
In spite of my rising nausea I couldn’t resist taking another look. At first I saw nothing at all, but then the breeze stirred the lower branches of the apple tree, and with the shifting of shadow and light I saw something flash in the grass. At first I did not understand what I was seeing, but then I realized it was glass – all around the lifeless body of the man, the earth was sparkling with broken glass. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time, and anyway my mind was full with the enormity of seeing a dead person lying there in front of me. It was only later, when I remembered the tale of Bonschariant – the Glass Demon – that I began to wonder.
CHAPTER TWO
I was still standing at the same spot, watching the shards of glass winking in the sunlight, when my father came up beside me.
‘Did you touch anything?’ was the first thing he said.
I shook my head, shuddering at the thought of touching those lifeless hands or, worse, that battered head. You’ve got to be joking.
‘Let’s go, then.’
I gaped at him. ‘What?’
‘Get in the car, Lin.’
He had already turned and was starting to walk away.
I glanced at the figure on the ground once more before half-running after my father. ‘Dad? Are we going to find a police station, then?’
‘No.’
I stopped short. ‘But we have to.’
He paused and shot me an uncompromising look. ‘No, we don’t.’
‘But – there’s a dead body.’
‘I know there’s a dead body.’
‘Don’t we have to report it or something?’
‘Someone has to report it. But it isn’t going to be us.’
‘But, Dad –’
‘Look, Lin,’ said my father grimly, ‘we didn’t kill the old boy, did we? He probably just fell off his ladder, had a heart attack or something. There’s nothing we can do for him, otherwise of course we would go for help. But he’s dead, and if we get involved we’re going to be spending hours, maybe days, in some German police station. So just come and get in the car, will you?’
‘What if it wasn’t an accident?’ I blurted out.
My father stared at me. ‘Of course it was an accident. What else could it be? Someone’s hardly going to come and mug an old man when he’s halfway up a tree picking apples, are they? Now, get in the car.’
As we reached the car he opened the rear door and held it for me. ‘Come on, move. I want to get away from here.’
Reluctantly I climbed in.
‘That was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,’ Tuesday was saying, huddled in the front seat with a tissue clamped to her nose.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to that old man too, I thought as the car pulled away from the roadside with a screech of tyres. I twisted round to look through the back window, trying to catch a glimpse of the figure lying in the grass by the tree, but we were already too far away for me to make out the blue-clad knee or the checked shirt.
I slumped back in my seat. I tried to work out how I felt about what we had just seen and done. I had just seen a dead person – a corpse. I had been close enough that I could have touched it. Him, I reminded myself. Him, not it. I felt strangely detached. Perhaps a reaction would come later. Or perhaps, I thought, listening to the sobs from the front seat, Tuesday was having the hysterics for both of us.
Neither she nor my father had noticed the glass lying glittering around the old man’s body like some unearthly and unseasonal frost. After a while I put it from my mind too, believing – wrongly, as it turned out – that it had nothing to do with us at all.
CHAPTER THREE
We should not even have been in Germany that afternoon – not if things had gone the way my father had intended them to. Instead of standing there in the orchard at Niederburgheim, gazing queasily down at the corpse of an elderly German farmer, I should have been back in England, enjoying one of the hottest summers on record. I might have been with my friends, lying on the grass in the big park near our house, swigging iced tea from plastic bottles and soaking up the sunshine. We might have nagged someone who already had their licence to drive us somewhere – the coast, maybe. Seventeen was not too old to think that summer wasn’t summer without the wheeling and screeching of seagulls and the whisper of the surf.
Instead, we were facing almost an entire year of being stuck in an obscure part of Germany neither I nor my friends had even heard of, near a town with a name most of them couldn’t pronounce. And all because someone else was being made Professor of Medieval Studies instead of my father.
It was not enough for him that he was employed by one of the most famous and most ancient universities in the world. I doubt that even if he had been made professor it would have been enough for him. His ambition was a monstrous thing, a rampaging bull elephant upon which he rode like an ineffectual mahout, while the rest of us ran alongside like street children, trying to keep up yet afraid of being trampled.
What he really wanted was to be not only the Professor of Medieval Studies but a media star. My father had the good looks of a Hollywood actor – straight nose, square jaw, a thick head of dark hair. When he smiled he went from being good-looking to being swooningly handsome. In his imagination he saw his good looks displa
yed to advantage on the screen; he saw himself dressed in tight jeans and an open-necked shirt, standing in front of a crusader castle or a medieval palace, dispensing soundbites about fourteenth-century history and the culture of the Middle Ages. He liked to tell Tuesday that he wanted to make medieval politics sexy, but actually what he wanted was to be Heinrich Schliemann or Allan Quatermain or Indiana Jones.
His more sober-minded colleagues watched his progress rather as crows perched on a gable might regard the strutting of a peacock on the lawns below. Still, he was the obvious candidate for the professorship, and he probably would have got it, had it not been for the matter of the dean’s brother’s book. The book was an earnest and densely written volume about eroticism in medieval literature, with a plain cover and printed in an eye-wateringly small type. It was published simultaneously with my father’s own book on the same topic, which had a painting of Lancelot and Guinevere kissing on the cover and the word sex in the title. My father’s book outsold the dean’s brother’s by thousands to one. The affront was still in the mind of the dean and his peers on the selection committee when my father’s name came before them.
The moment my father realized that events were going against him was towards the end of a Friday afternoon, late in the summer term. Closeted in my room, the first I knew of his arrival home was the cataclysmic slam of the front door, which made every window in the house rattle. His progress down the hall was tempestuous; it sounded as though a wild animal had got into the house and was wrecking everything. There was a tremendous thump as the leather case he carried his papers in was flung into a corner of the hall, followed by a crash that was my father kicking the door. A series of four-letter words, the ones which Tuesday was always primly telling us not to use, came pouring out, mercifully muffled by the closed door between us. Then I heard the distinctive sound of breaking glass. I guessed that the statue which normally stood on the hallstand, a rearing horse with a silvery glaze, had met its end on the tiled floor.
A door opened downstairs and I could hear Tuesday’s voice floating up. I could not hear what she was saying but it was evidently something soothing. To no avail; my father crashed up the stairs with a mighty stamping tread which shook the floor, and then, like an echo of the thunderous slam of the front door, I heard his study door shut with a bang which reverberated through the entire house.
