The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  It is neither fish nor meat, Hans said, telling her about Hagen. But she didn’t mind what it was, or was not. It looked huge, vast, far bigger than a town of two hundred thousand. It looked like a vast city. A place where she could get lost, and hide, for ever.

  She loved it more every second.

  She noticed a strange, cylindrical building, all glass, lit in blue, above what looked like an old water tower, and she wondered what that was. Hans would tell her. She would explore every inch of this place with him, in between the times they lay in bed, naked, together. If they could spare any time to explore anything other than each other’s bodies, that was!

  She turned away from the view and walked on up the hill, hands dug into the pockets of her black suede jacket, the sleet tickling her face, her scarf tickling her neck, breathing in the scents of the trees and the grass. She followed the road up into a wooded glade, until it became a track, which after a few minutes came out into a knoll of unkempt grass, with a row of trees on the far side, and a rectangular stone monument at the highest point.

  She climbed up to it, and stopped at a partially collapsed metal fence was that screening it off, for some kind of repair work. She knew it was the Bismarck monument, because she recognized it from every website – one of Hagen’s landmarks. She stared at it silently, then took her little digital camera from her bag and photographed it. Her first photograph of Hagen! Then she stood still, licking the sleet off the air, feeling a moment of intense happiness, and freedom.

  I’m here. I made it! I did it!!!!!

  Her heart was burning for Hans, and yet strangely, she still felt in no hurry. She wanted to savour these moments of anticipation. To savour her freedom. To relish not having to hurry home to make Trevor his evening meal (always a variation on meat and potatoes, he would eat nothing else). To be able to stand for as long as she wanted beneath the statue of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a man partly responsible for shaping the country that was about to become her adopted home, for however many days of freedom she had remaining. And she did not know how many those might be.

  Better to live one day as a lion, than one thousand years as a lamb, Trevor was fond of saying, strutting around in his studded leathers and peaked cap.

  Of course, he would not have approved of her being here. And particularly not of her standing like an acolyte worshipping at the statue of Bismarck. Trevor had a thing about Germany. It wasn’t the War, or anything like that. He said the Germans had no humour – well, Hans had proved him wrong!

  He also said the Germans were efficient, as if that was a fault!

  Trevor had a thing about all kinds of stuff. He had a particularly big thing about crematoriums. They gave him the creeps, he said.

  Whereas she found them fascinating.

  Yet another thing on which they disagreed. And she always found his dislike of crematoriums particularly strange, since he worked in the funeral business.

  In fact, thinking back on fifteen years of marriage, what exactly had they agreed on? Rubber underwear? Handcuffs? Masks? Inflicting modest pain on each other? Bringing each other to brutal climaxes that were snatched moments of release, escape from their mutual loathing? Escapes from the realities they did not want to face? Such as the one – fortunately, thank God now (!) – that they could not have children?

  Time was, when she really had been in love with him. Deeply, truly, crazily do-anything-for-him, unconditional love. She had always been attracted by death. By people who worked close to death. Trevor was an embalmer with a firm of funeral directors. He had a framed certificate, which was hung in pride of place in the sitting room, declaring him to be “A Member Of The Independent Association of Embalmers”.

  She used to like his hands to touch her. Hands that had been inserting tubes into a cadaver, to pump out the blood and replace it with pink embalming fluid. Hands that had been applying make-up on a cadaver’s face. Brushing a cadaver’s hair.

  The closer she was to death, the more alive she felt.

  She liked to lie completely naked, and still, and tell Trevor to treat her as if she was a cadaver. She loved to feel his hands on her. Probing her. Slowly bringing her alive.

  The best climax – absolutely the best ever, in her entire life – was one night when they had made love in the embalming room at the funeral director’s. With two naked corpses lying, laid out on trolleys, beside her.

  Then she had truly felt alive! The way she felt now!

  And those same feelings would happen again with Hans, she knew it, she absolutely knew it! She was going to be so happy with Hans.

  Love doesn’t last, Trevor responded one night, when she had told him she was not happy. Happiness is an illusion, he had said. Only an idiot can be happy twenty-four-seven. The wise man seeks to be content not happy. Carpe diem.

  You have to face reality, he had carped on, after she had told him she was leaving him. You can run but you can’t hide.

  She was running now.

  Hit someone over the head with a big stick hard enough and for long enough and one day they will hit you back. Even harder.

  She could not put a time or a date on when it had all started to go south. Not the exact moment. Could not get a fix on it the way you can pinpoint your position with a set of navigation co-ordinates. It was more of a gradual erosion.

  But once you had made your decisions, there was no going back. You just had to keep running. As Trevor used to say, It’s not the fall that gets you, it’s the sudden stop.

  And now of course, Hagen was that sudden stop. It scared her almost as much as it thrilled her. In truth, she had learned a lot from him.

  I will never let you go, ever, he said, when she had once suggested that they might be happier apart.

  Then he had punched her in the face so hard for suggesting it, she had not been able to go to work for several days, until the bruises had subsided, and the stitches had been removed. As usual she covered up for him, with a lame excuse about being knocked off her bicycle.

  It was his diabetes that caused his mood swings, she had come to learn over many years. Too little sugar and he became edgy and aggressive. Too much and he became sleepy and docile as a lamb.

  She retraced her steps from the Bismarck monument to her car, then threaded her way back down the network of roads, noting the pleasant houses, wondering what kind of house Hans had lived in until his marriage break-up. After a few minutes she found herself back on the Bergischer Ring, where she turned right. She drove along, past a market square where the Ferris wheel had been erected on the edge of a small fairground. She saw a row of kerbside Christmassy tableaux, one after the other, with puppets acting out fairytale scenes. One was full of busy bearded goblins with hammers. Two small girls, clutching their mother’s hands, stared at them in wonder.

  Janet stared at the girls as she waited at a traffic light, and then, wistfully, at the mother. Forty was not too old. Maybe she and Hans could have children. Two little girls? And one day, she would stand here, holding their hands, a contented hausfrau of Hagen, while they looked at the hammering goblins.

  Just three weeks to Christmas! She would wake up on Christmas morning, in her new country, in the arms of her new man.

  As she drove on she saw, on her left, a brightly lit shop, the windows full of sausages hanging in clumps, like fruit, the name Wursthaus Konig above the door. She stopped for a moment, and checked her map. Then after a short distance she turned left into a side street, past a restaurant, then pulled over outside the front entrance of the hotel she had found on the internet.

  Hans had invited her to stay with him. But after only one date – even if it had finished – or rather climaxed – with the bonk at the end of the universe!!!! – she wanted to keep her options open. And her independence. Just in case.

  She tugged one bag off the rear seat of the car, and wheeled it in through the front door of the hotel. Inside was dark and gloomy, with a small reception desk to her right and a staircase in front of her. A living
cadaver of a man stood behind the desk and she gave him her name. The place smelled old and worn. The kind of place travelling salespeople would stay in. The kind of dump she occasionally had found herself in during her early years on the road.

  He passed her a form to fill in, and asked if she would like help with her luggage. No, she told him, emphatically. She filled in the form and handed him her passport.

  And he handed her an envelope. “A message for you,” he said.

  Using the one word of German that she knew, she said, “Danke.”

  Then as she went back outside to get her second suitcase, she tore it open, with eager fingers, and nails she had varnished to perfection for him. For Hans.

  The note read: Meet me at the crematorium. xx

  She smiled. You wicked, wicked, man!

  The cadaver helped her up two flights of stairs to a room that was as tired and drab as the rest of the place. But at least she could see down into the street, and keep an eye on her car, and she was pleased about that. She popped open the lid of one case, changed her clothes, and freshened herself up, spraying perfume in all the places – except the one that she remembered Hans had liked to press his face into most of all, last time.

  Twenty minutes later, in the falling dark, after getting lost twice, she finally pulled into the almost deserted crematorium car park. There was just one other car there, an elderly brown Mercedes that tilted to one side, as if it had a broken suspension.

  As she climbed out, carefully locking the car, she looked around. It was one of the most beautiful car parks she had seen in her life, surrounded by all kinds of carefully tended trees, shrubs, flowers, as if she were in botanical gardens. It barely felt like December here, it felt more like spring. No doubt the intention – a perpetual spring, for mourners.

  She walked up a tarmac footpath that was wide enough for a vehicle, and lined with manicured trees and tall black streetlamps. Anticipation drove her forwards, her pace quickening with every step, breathing deeper and faster. God, her nerves were jangling now! A million butterflies were going berserk in her stomach! Her boots crunched on grit; her teeth crunched, grinding from the cold, but more from nerves.

  She walked through open wrought-iron gates, and continued along, passing a cloistered single-storey building, clad in ivy, its walls covered in memorial plaques.

  And then, ahead of her, she saw the building.

  And she stopped in her tracks.

  And her heart skipped a beat.

  Oh, fuck! Oh wow!

  This was a crematorium?

  It was one of the most beautiful buildings she had ever seen in her life. Rectangular, Art Deco in style, in stark white, with a portico of square black marble columns, with windows, high up, like portholes on a ship, inset with black rectangles. It was topped by an elegant red-tiled pitched roof.

  Wow! Again.

  There were steps leading up to the portico, with stone balustrading to the right, giving a view down across terraces of elegant tombstones set in what looked like glades in a forest. When I die, this is where I would like to lie. Please God. Please, Hans.

  Please!

  She climbed the steps and pushed the door, which was unlocked and opened almost silently. She stepped inside and simply stopped in her tracks. And now she could understand why the crematorium featured so prominently as one of Hagen’s major attractions.

  It was like stepping inside a Mondrian painting. Vertical stripes of black and white, with geometrical squares in the centre, varying in depth, width and height, at one end. At the other end was a semi-domed ceiling, with quasi-religious figures painted on a gold backdrop, above more black and white geometrics.

  Beneath was a curious-looking altar, a white cross rising above what looked like a white, two-metre-long beer barrel.

  As she stared at it, a noise made her jump. A sudden, terrifying sound. A mechanical grinding, roaring, vibrating bellow of heavy machinery. The barrel began to rise, the white cross with it, the floor trembling beneath her. As it rose higher, at the back, a bolt of grey silk slowly unfurled. Then a coffin rose into view. Janet stood, mesmerized. The grinding, roaring sound filled the galleried room.

  Then the sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  There was a moment of total silence.

  The coffin lid began to rise.

  Janet screamed.

  Then she saw Hans’s smiling face.

  He pushed the lid aside and it fell to the floor with an echoing bang, and he began to haul himself out, grinning from ear to ear, hot and sweaty, wearing nothing but a boiler suit over his naked skin, and black work boots.

  She stood and stared at him for a moment, in total wonder and joy. He looked even more amazing than she remembered. More handsome, more masculine, more raw.

  He stood up, and he was taller than she remembered, too.

  “My most beautiful angel in all the world!” he said. “You are here! You came! You really came!”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “My brave angel,” he said. “My brave English angel.” Then he scooped her in his strong arms, pulled her tightly to him, so tightly she could feel the contour of his body beneath the thin blue cotton, and kissed her. His breath smelled sweet, and was tinged sweetly with cigarette smoke, garlic and beer, the manly smells and taste she remembered. She kissed him back, wildly, deeply, feeling his tongue, holding it for a second, losing it, then finding it again.

  Finally, breathless with excitement, their lips separated. They stood still, staring at each other, his eyes so close to hers they were just a warm blur.

  “So,” he said. “We have work to do, yah?”

  She pushed her hands down inside the front of his trousers, and gripped him gently. “We do,” she said with a smile.

  He drew breath sharply and exhaled, grinning. “First we must work.”

  “First we make love,” she replied.

  “You are a very naughty little girl,” he teased.

  “Are you going to punish me?”

  “That will depend, yes? On how naughty you have been. Have you been very naughty?”

  She nodded solemnly, stood back a pace, and put her finger in her mouth like a little child. “Very,” she said.

  “Tell me?”

  “I can show you.”

  He smiled. “Go and fetch the car, I will be prepared.”

  Five minutes later, Janet reversed the Passat up to the side entrance to the crematorium, where there was a green elevator door. As she halted the car, and climbed out, the green metal door slid open, and Hans stood there, with a coffin on a trolley. There was a strange expression on his face and he was looking at her in a way that made her, suddenly, deeply uncomfortable.

  Her eyes shot to the coffin, then back to his face.

  Then to the coffin.

  Had she made a terrible mistake? To be alone, here, with all her bridges burned, her trail carefully covered. Had she walked into a trap?

  No one at home in Eastbourne knew where she was. No one knew where she was. Only Hans. And she was alone with him at the crematorium, in the falling darkness, and he was standing, looking at her, beside an open coffin.

  She felt suddenly as if her insides had turned to ice. She wanted to be home, back home, where it was safe. Dull but safe. With Trevor.

  But none of that was an option any longer.

  Then he smiled. His normal, big, warm Hans smile. And the ice inside her melted in an instant, as if it had flash-thawed. “In the trunk?” he questioned.

  Nodding, she popped open the boot of the car, and then they both stood and stared for some moments at the black plastic sheeting, and the curved shape inside it.

  “No problem?” he asked her, putting his arm around her, and nibbling her ear, so tenderly.

  “He was good as gold,” she said, wriggling with the excitement of his touch. “Went out like a lamb, after I swapped his insulin for sugared water. But he was heavy. I nearly didn’t have the strength to get him into the b
oot.”

  Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Trevor was fond of saying. And of course what was particularly sweet was that Trevor had written a will, leaving everything to her, naturally, a long time ago.

  “It is good he is so thin,” Hans said, unwrapping him. “I have two cadavers waiting for the burners and one is very thin. I have the two certificates each from the doctors; we are all set. He will fit nicely into the coffin with him. No one will know a thing!”

  Down in the basement, as they wheeled the coffin out of the elevator, Janet recognized the beige metal casings, the instruments, the dials. The word Ruppman was printed above them, and on other machines in the room, and on top of wiring diagrams. Opposite them, two coffins sat in front of two huge open furnaces, with gas flames licking along their lengths.

  Hans smiled. A totally wicked smile.

  A few minutes later, after he had pressed a number of buttons, and the mechanical doors had closed, and the roar of the burners rose to a crescendo, she felt Hans’s arms around her waist. Slowly, shedding their clothes, they sank to the floor.

  Smoke rose from the chimney into the night sky. They made love while the burners rose in temperature to their optimum heat, and their own body heat rose with it.

  In the morning, Hans raked the remaining pieces of bone into the cremellator, then ground them to a powder that mingled with the ashes. Then they stepped through the crematorium doors, arm in arm. Outside, in the early, pre-dawn light, the world seemed an altogether brighter place. Birds were starting to sing.

  Hans slipped an arm around her, then whispered into her ear, “You know, my English angel, I will never let you go.”

  And for an instant he sounded just like Trevor. She kissed him, then whispered back into his ear, “Don’t push your luck.”