The Glass Demon

by Helen Grant

  ‘From the farm? Which farm?’

  I set the tray with the coffee on it down on the table and then I leaned against the sideboard with my arms folded and listened dispiritedly as they went through the same familiar routine. Tuesday hurled out accusations in all directions and the policeman sifted through them with infinite patience, like a prospector panning for gold in a mountain of silt. I wondered if he would suggest anything more definite than ‘talking’ to Michel Reinartz Senior at the end of it. If not, the whole conversation was pointless.

  Just listening made my head ache. I no longer knew where reality ended and imagination began. I knew what I had seen in the church, the warped and twisted shadow moving behind the coloured glass. In the face of such things the policeman’s questions seemed irrelevant, an attempt to define dreams with mathematical formulae. I had almost switched off completely, staring dully out of the window, when something he did brought me back to myself with the brisk efficiency of a slap in the face.

  ‘Do you recognize this man?’ He was holding a photograph out to her. His expression was neutral, almost bored. I guessed that he did not expect her to recognize whatever he was showing her. ‘His name is Werner Heckmann.’

  It was fortunate for me that both officers were looking at Tuesday, watching her reaction, when he said the name, otherwise they would have seen me start as though someone had stuck a pin into me. The female officer must have seen a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, because she turned her cold blue gaze towards me for a moment. I did my best to look uninterested, jiggling my heel against the sideboard as though desperately bored. The blue gaze moved back to Tuesday, like a searchlight sweeping the room on a restless beat.

  I couldn’t see the photograph from where I stood. Tuesday was holding it with both hands, studying it. She looked at it for a long time. I began to feel the cold prickle of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I thought she recognized him, or perhaps she was unsure. Did she remember where she had seen him? I would never forget any detail of that scene, not in a million years, but then I was not Tuesday. This was a woman who could remember the names of ten different Hermès handbags but forget her own PIN code. Supposing she remembered him, but not where she had seen him and in what circumstances? Would she be so stupid as to admit it?

  Say no, I willed her silently. If she said yes, she would drop all of us in it to a catastrophic extent, but I couldn’t think of anything I could do to prevent it. We could not tell the police that we had seen the dead man without admitting that we had been in the orchard that day, and that even if we had not been responsible for the murder, we had not reported it to anyone.

  ‘I think…’ began Tuesday. She hesitated, and I saw a change pass over her face. ‘No,’ she said finally, putting the photograph down on the table. She sat back and put her hands in her lap. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

  The tall policeman said nothing; he simply nodded.

  ‘Sie weiss etwas, Dieter,’ said the blonde policewoman in a low voice.

  I must have jumped, because the tall policeman glanced at me.

  ‘Sprichst du Deutsch?’ he asked me.

  I nodded. ‘Ein bisschen.’

  My instinct was not to admit that my German was fluent. If the police had any reason to think there was a connection between us and the death of Werner, anything which made it easier for us to become involved in local matters could only make things worse.

  Silence fell.

  ‘What did that man have to do with what happened to my son?’ asked Tuesday.

  I groaned inwardly. To my ears the nonchalance with which she asked the question was obviously fake. Worse, she had asked what he had to do with what happened, and not whether they thought this was the man who had attacked Ru, since she already knew that he was dead. It was easy to infer that she knew it.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t recognize him?’ said the tall policeman, but he didn’t answer her question.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Tuesday with enthusiasm.

  They spent some time after that going through the events of the day Ru was attacked. As far as I could see, they weren’t covering anything new. They asked me where I had been when the attack had taken place; I looked them in the eyes and told them I had gone over to Michel’s. I was prepared to describe some fictitious piece of coursework which he had been helping me with, but they seemed satisfied with the explanation and didn’t ask me any further questions.

  The moment they were out of the house, Tuesday went back to bed. I started to ask her about the photograph, but she put up a hand, like a film star warding off paparazzi, and hurried back up the stairs.

  I went and stood in the courtyard, looking through the gateway, and watched as the police got into their car. When they drove away, I went back into the house. I was glad Tuesday had gone upstairs; I needed time to think. I had understood what the blonde policewoman had said: She knows something, Dieter. But she was wrong; it was not Tuesday who knew something, it was me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  We had one other visitor that day. Late in the afternoon Polly opened the door to Frau Pütz, a diminutive woman from the Jugendamt in Nordkirchen, whose forbidding face softened into a pleasant smile when she saw Ru. To the relief of all of us, she was clearly more concerned with the effects of shock on the family than anything else. All the same, this struck me as a little odd. Herr Esch had made a visit from the Jugendamt sound like a threat, as though my father and Tuesday were one step away from being prosecuted for child abuse. Watching Frau Pütz speaking to Ru in a crooning voice and patting Tuesday’s hand reassuringly, I could only conclude that this had been bluster on Herr Esch’s part. Frau Pütz was from Nordkirchen and she was here to do her job; Herr Esch was from Baumgarten and he wanted us gone.

  On Saturday morning Uncle Karl went back to Koblenz. My father and Tuesday took Ru and went into Baumgarten to investigate the possibility of a hotel or apartment. Uncle Karl had had no success with the agent who had rented us the castle; we could disentangle ourselves if we wished, but only at a punitive cost.

  Tuesday had had some difficulty in accepting this. She had not quite come out and said that she would scream and scream until someone found her somewhere else to live, but she might just as well have done. She plagued my father until he agreed to go and see if there was anything cheap enough that we could rent it even without getting rid of the castle.

  Polly went out too, dressed in her running gear: she said she would run in the park in Baumgarten. I had looked at her uneasily, wondering whether she had been telling me the truth when she claimed she was OK now. At any rate I was glad she was avoiding the forest. I shuddered at the thought of my sister jogging along those lonely tracks, where anyone or anything might be lurking among the mist-veiled trees and where danger once seen would be impossible to outrun. The tangled undergrowth would trip you at every other step and the ground was treacherously slippery with mud.

  I watched the others drive off with a feeling of oppressive sadness. I had sat at the scrubbed pine table at breakfast-time and watched Polly feeding Ru, while her own breakfast sat neglected in front of her. Ru was being difficult, refusing the spoon and kicking his little legs, but all the same I wondered if Polly’s dedication to the task was a tactic to avoid eating. Tuesday was sipping black coffee with a don’t-speak-to-me look on her face and my father was engrossed in a book about sixteenth-century methods of creating stained glass. I felt a stab of anger looking at him studying the densely printed pages. He was the one who had dragged us to this remote part of Germany, chasing another of his wild plans for instant fame and fortune, and it was still so important to him that he couldn’t see what was happening right in front of him. I felt like snatching the book and throwing it on to the floor. Instead I sat and sipped my orange juice and wondered what on earth I was going to do.

  After they had gone I started to go through some of the books scattered around the living room. I had no better idea of where to start looking for inf
ormation about exorcizing demons. I opened a heavy book with the title ‘Witch Trials in the Eifel’ written in German on its shiny cover and had just found the word Exorzismus in the index at the back when there was a knock at the door.

  Michel, I thought. Well, he could start looking through this book for me; he would be able to skim-read it far faster than I ever could. I went to the door.

  To my surprise I found Herr Krause standing on the doorstep. He was dressed all in black and I remembered that the locals called him Father Krause. I couldn’t resist looking down to see whether he was wearing those shoes again. He wasn’t, but the ones he had on were just as bad. I looked up and found his blue eyes staring intently into mine.

  ‘Guten Morgen –’ I said, and stopped short; I had been about to call him Pfarrer Krause.

  ‘Good morning,’ he returned in English. ‘Is your father at home?’

  ‘He’s gone to Baumgarten,’ I said. I hesitated, unsure whether to invite him in.

  ‘To Baumgarten?’

  I thought his voice was just a little too innocent-sounding. Of course; everyone in Baumgarten knew what had been going on here. I imagined them all working away in their sitting rooms and front gardens and allotments, straightening up to watch the blue lights shooting past on their way to the castle. From my conversation with Frau Kessel it was quite clear that nothing could be concealed from anyone for very long.

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ I said non-committally, determined to give away as little as possible.

  ‘I hope that everything is in order?’ said Herr Krause primly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s… lots of order.’

  ‘So,’ said Herr Krause after a long pause, ‘your father is not at home?’

  I shook my head. ‘He won’t be back until this afternoon.’

  ‘And Frau Fox?’

  ‘In Baumgarten too.’

  I wondered whether he would ask me about Polly next, but he didn’t.

  ‘That is a shame,’ he said. ‘I had something I wished to discuss with your father. About the Allerheiligen glass.’ He reached into a pocket and drew out a little leather-bound notebook. He looked at me. ‘May I come inside for a moment, Fräulein?’

  I stood back to let him in.

  ‘I shall write him a note,’ he said, tearing a page from the notebook.

  I watched him slip a pen out of the inside pocket of his unfashionable jacket and begin to write. I could not read what he had written; it was upside down. But I could tell that his handwriting was almost unnaturally neat and slightly old-fashioned. A priest’s hand, I thought. My heart began to pound. If it had only been Father Engels standing there, so close that I could have reached out and touched his sleeve… And then I thought, Why not ask Father Krause?

  I had no intention of telling him the whole story. I knew Michel would be furious if I told anyone I had seen the Allerheiligen glass. Even if I tried to make Father Krause promise not to tell anyone, I did not think the promise would be worth anything. Gossip was the throbbing lifeblood of small towns, and anyway, this was too big a story to be suppressed: nearly a million pounds’ worth of medieval art stashed away in the middle of a forest. Once the information got out, Michel would never speak to me again, and who knew what Michel Reinartz Senior would do? I thought of him striding along the forest track with that great slavering monster of a dog at his heels. He might blame Michel, and I didn’t think he would be content with delivering a ticking-off.

  I was not ready to risk any of that. Besides, I would never have chosen to confide in Father Krause, not when faced with the far more appealing alternative of pouring out my story to Father Engels and feeling the gaze of those beautiful dark eyes riveted upon me. But I could ask Father Krause for advice. He was an expert on the glass in his own way – fussy, obsessive and geeky perhaps, but still an expert. And he had been a priest.

  ‘Herr Krause?’ The words had left my lips before I even realized I had made my decision.

  Herr Krause stopped writing and looked at me, his pudgy face solemn.

  ‘The Allerheiligen glass… how can you be sure it was destroyed?’

  ‘There was a letter from the last abbot, in the archive at Trier,’ he said.

  ‘But…’ I hesitated. ‘The letter doesn’t exist any more.’ I could feel my face growing warm and guessed that I was blushing. It sounded as though I were calling him a liar.

  Herr Krause did not seem to notice. ‘My uncle saw it, before the archive was damaged,’ he said.

  ‘Could –’

  I stopped short. I had been going to ask whether his uncle could have been mistaken, but I decided this was actually rude. I thought for a moment and then tried another tack.

  ‘People keep telling us my father shouldn’t be looking for the glass anyway. They say it’s unlucky and that nobody would tell us where it was, even if they knew.’

  At this, a faint and rather grim smile lifted the corners of Herr Krause’s mouth. ‘That is unnecessary,’ he said, ‘since the glass no longer exists.’

  ‘But if it did,’ I persisted, ‘I don’t see why it would have to stay hidden. It ought to be in a museum or something.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Herr Krause. ‘But you have to understand how people feel about it here. If your father were to discover it, do you think it would stay here, in the Eifel? No.’ He shook his head. ‘It would end up in a museum, maybe in Bonn, maybe in London like the windows from Steinfeld Abbey, or even in New York.’

  ‘But wouldn’t that be a good thing?’ I asked. ‘Then thousands of people would see it, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘But the glass would not be where it belongs, which is here,’ he said. He glanced down at the note he had been writing. ‘All this is theoretical,’ he added sternly. He pronounced it teoretical. ‘There is no Allerheiligen glass; there has been none for two hundred years.’

  ‘I know,’ I said mendaciously. ‘But if there were, I still don’t see why people would be so against it being found.’

  ‘People here are superstitious,’ said Herr Krause. He signed the note carefully. ‘You have heard the story of Bonschariant?’

  Now we were getting to the meat of it. I nodded enthusiastically. ‘My father told me. He said the glass is cursed. That the abbot who had it made saw Bonschariant looking at him from the other side of the window and he had a heart attack.’

  ‘You know he was not the only one?’ asked Herr Krause. ‘There were other deaths. The glass had an evil name. People are still a little afraid of it now, you know. You can imagine the stories which were told about it hundreds of years ago, when people lived in fear of the Evil One.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘If the French soldiers had not smashed every one of the windows, I think the local people would have done it themselves when the abbey closed down.’

  Maybe that’s why they were taken down and hidden, I thought.

  ‘But…’ I said slowly, ‘couldn’t the abbot have done something? Couldn’t he have blessed the windows or – or –’

  ‘Or exorcized them?’ supplied Herr Krause.

  His blue eyes had such an ironic look in them that I began to feel foolish for even raising the topic. I could not imagine asking him how one might go about such a thing. Miraculously, I didn’t need to; the local historian inside of him got the upper hand and he brought up the subject himself.

  ‘Don’t forget, the last time there was an abbot of Allerheiligen was two centuries ago. The abbot would have been more educated than the local people, but he still would have shared many of their superstitions. The thing which walked behind the glass was not a harmless little ghost, a nun who died of a broken heart. It was a demon, a monster from hell. If he stood in front of it with a Bible and a flask of holy water, and read the rite of exorcism, he would have taken his life in his hands. Or so he would have believed.’ He shook his head. ‘Far easier to smash the glass instead.’

  ‘Father Krause?’ The name was out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying, but he didn’t react; I suppose
he must have heard it a hundred times before. ‘Can anyone do an exorcism?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He sounded indignant at the question. ‘It must be a priest.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You would not ask someone to do brain surgery unless they were a qualified surgeon.’

  ‘But that’s different,’ I said. ‘If I tried to do brain surgery, someone might die.’

  ‘It’s not different at all,’ said Herr Krause. ‘If you tried to exorcize a demon, you might die too.’

  I studied his face to see if he was teasing me, but his expression was perfectly serious. A cold stab of fear ran through me like an electric shock darting through my body. He meant what he was saying. Ever since that moment in the church when I had seen the dark shape moving behind the glass, a war had been going on inside my head, a war between my rational side and the evidence of my own eyes. For two days my own belief had been veering towards the fantastic, the acceptance of something which existed outside the material world, crazy though it sounded. Now I realized that I had been hoping that something would happen to pull me back from the brink of what was surely madness. Instead here was an adult – a geeky one, admittedly, but still an adult – talking about exorcism and demons as though they were real.

  Herr Krause was looking at me too; we were staring at each other like a pair of owls. I could see something dawning in his face, an unpleasant realization which spread across his mild features like a scum forming on soured milk. I quailed. I was not afraid of Herr Krause’s displeasure; he seemed like the fussiest, most repressed person on the planet, and I suspected that his anger would back up on him like sewage in a blocked pipe, until he was just about fit to rupture himself. What worried me was the sure knowledge that the longest, most pedantic and tedious lecture of my life was about to be delivered, with the topic being the foolishness of young people meddling with things they did not understand.

  He took a step towards me and I mentally braced myself. For a moment he said nothing.