by Helen Grant
‘He paid for it,’ said Hanna. ‘He cried, you know. He got into that stupid car of his late one night and I was already in the back seat, waiting for him with my dad’s Arminius revolver. He thought I was mad at him for what he did to you. He started saying he was sorry and he didn’t mean it and all this other crap. I made him drive up here and back into the garage, and when he put the handbrake on I let him have it in the back of the head.’
‘No,’ I said, but in spite of my horrified incredulity I knew she was telling the truth. I had seen the evidence with my own eyes.
‘He deserved it,’ said Hanna, as though those three words justified everything. ‘All of them did. Frau Kessel and that fat pig Achim Zimmer. You can’t tell me the town isn’t a better place without them.’
‘You can’t just go –’ I began, but she interrupted me.
‘I did what half the people in this town would have done if they had the guts. When Frau Kessel died, how many of those hypocrites sitting in the church afterwards really felt sorry? They were probably glad their secrets were safe at last.’
I remembered Hanna coming down the Orchheimer Strasse towards me the day they found Frau Kessel. I remembered her taking my arm and saying, You’re unbelievable, Steffi. You’ve done it. You’ve actually done it.
‘You made me think I’d done it,’ I said.
‘We did it,’ she said. She looked at me and her eyes were shining, the way they had that time up at the ruined house. I had thought that look was for Max, but it was not. ‘You wished it and I made it real. Nothing happens without someone wanting it to happen.’
The positive thinking of serial killing, I thought, and for a moment a hysterical laugh threatened to burst out of me. I looked around me at the expensive dullness of the Landbergs’ house and the normality of it seemed more surreal than what I had seen in the master bedroom. I could not imagine how life would ever return to its normal flow after this.
‘What did you do to Frau Kessel?’ I said.
‘I got into her house through the yard at the back. She heard me and came down with a candlestick in her skinny claw, like she was going to brain me with it or something. She said, “Hanna Landberg, what do you think you are doing in my house?” So I showed her the gun and she put the candlestick down, but it didn’t shut her up.’ Hanna shook her head. ‘All the way up the stairs she kept on at me – did my father know I had his hunting revolver, what made me think I could get away with it and a lot more like that. I told her to shut up, but she wouldn’t.’
This didn’t surprise me. I doubted Satan himself and all his minions could have got Frau Kessel to shut up.
‘So when we got to the top I told her to jump over the banisters. It’s a long drop down the stairwell in her house – it would have done the job. But she looked at me and said, “Why don’t you shoot me, Hanna Landberg?” I told her, “It’s going to look like an accident.” So she said, “Well, you can shoot me if you like, but I’m not jumping.” So I pushed her. She screamed, but the moment she hit the floor it stopped. I went down to check, but she was dead.’
The matter-of-factness in Hanna’s voice chilled me to the core. Any desire to laugh hysterically passed away as rapidly as if I had had a bucket of icy water thrown over me.
‘Hanna,’ I said. ‘Achim Zimmer – that was you too?’
‘Of course it was.’ She frowned. ‘I can’t believe you ever thought it was that loser Julius Rensinghof. He’s not capable of planning anything like that. He’s too stupid.’ She sounded offended. ‘He wouldn’t have had the guts either. Two nights I had to come to the bakery. The first time was to see how it could be done.’
I recalled the sounds I had heard downstairs that night after Max had run me to the hospital to see my father. The clank, the slapping sound and then silence. I had noticed that the dial on the cold store had been moved when I went down the next morning, but I hadn’t known why. That had been Hanna, laying her plans and having a trial run.
‘How did you get him to come to the bakery?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘How do you think? Men only think about one thing. If they get a sniff of it, they’ll go anywhere, do anything. I just rang Achim up and offered him a private party in the bakery kitchen. He couldn’t wait to get there, couldn’t even wait long enough to park the car off the street.’ Her lip curled. ‘He really was a disgusting pig. And stupid. It wasn’t difficult to get him drunk. Just a shame it took him so long to become incapable.’
I did my best not to think about it, about how Hanna had persuaded Achim to take his clothes off, had kept on pouring out the vodka until he could no longer put his ugly desires into practice, couldn’t ward off drowsiness, couldn’t find the cold store’s emergency door release. Had it been sufficient for Hanna to leave the cold store and close the door with Achim inside, then turn the dial to its lowest setting, or had she had to lean on the door, listening to his feeble thumps, his muffled calls for help growing fainter and fainter?
‘Oh, God,’ I said.
I was sick with horror, but Hanna looked at me and saw squeamishness.
‘He got what he deserved, Steffi,’ she said, and there was a gentleness to her tone that was worse than the venom I had heard in it before. It was the blandness of milk laced with a tasteless poison. She moved closer to me and her hand was on my shoulder again, as though she wanted to reassure me. ‘Why do you feel bad about it? He deserved it.’ Her hand moved to my hair, stroked it. ‘You’re so …’ She stopped, and I thought that she had been going to say weak but decided that it was too harsh a word.
She said nothing more, but she put her arm around me. For a moment I thought confusedly that she was trying to comfort me, or seek comfort herself. Then I felt her face against mine and realized that she was not trying to comfort me, that this was not the reassuring embrace of a friend with a friend.
I was not so green as to die of shock at the idea of being kissed by another girl, but I knew now what Hanna had done and I would as soon have let myself be sucked dry by leeches. The hands which were clasping me had pushed Frau Kessel to her death; the lips which were seeking mine had lured Achim to his end. She’s the witch, I thought, and I put up my hands and pushed her away.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
‘We belong together, Steffi,’ said Hanna. Her eyes were gleaming.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ Hanna’s face contorted into a scowl. ‘Julius Rensinghof? Is that why?’ She reached for me again, trying to grasp my shoulders as though she wanted to shake some sense into me. ‘I told you, he’s a loser. Why do you still think you need him?’
I looked at Hanna, at the ugly expression on her face, and at last I understood. Jealousy. What she felt about Julius had nothing to do with him being a loser and everything to do with him being a rival.
‘I know better than you do what you need, Steffi,’ said Hanna. ‘You don’t need him.’
‘You can’t make me wish him dead by putting a piece of paper in a box in Gertrud’s house,’ I told her.
‘You wrote it,’ she said.
‘I wished for him to leave.’
‘You wished him dead first.’
‘I thought he was the one doing everything. I just wanted him to stop.’
‘He wouldn’t do all the things I did for you, Steffi,’ said Hanna. She was trembling. ‘I did everything you asked. Everything.’
‘I didn’t want this!’ I shouted. ‘What about your parents, back there?’ I pointed wildly at the bedroom door. ‘I didn’t wish them dead. I didn’t even know them, Hanna!’
‘They were in the way. They’ve always been in the way. I couldn’t do anything, living here in one crappy room and doing a crappy job. They had money and the big house and the car and they never did anything with it. My dad just paraded around in his stupid hunting gear and my mother, God, she spent all her time cleaning the house. She did the inside of the shutters with a toothbrush, can you believe that? I was such a disappointment to them. Nothing bette
r than a Hauptschule qualification, nothing to boast about with their friends from the shooting club. They never gave me anything. It was like starving, spending my whole life like that. And then that night we all went up to Rote Gertrud’s house for the first time … You wished for something and it came true, and I saw the power that you had, the way it changed how we all looked at you. We’re two halves of one whole, Steffi, two sides of one coin. That’s the magic, not some rubbish in a ruined house in the woods full of beer cans and piss.’
Hanna turned her eyes towards me and they were full of savage brightness. I was terribly afraid that she would try to kiss me again. The stink of death hung over her. I would as soon have pressed my face to the bloody remnants on a butcher’s block. I began to think too that perhaps my situation here was precarious. Someone who could talk so calmly of killing people she had known for most of her life was not the sort of person you wanted to be shut up in a lonely house with, whether they said they had done it all for you or not. I was well and truly in the labyrinth now, and the question was whether the monster at the centre would let me leave.
We did it, Hanna had said, with her eyes shining, and that, I thought with a sick feeling, was the crux of it. Hanna saw us as we, not as two separate people, she and I. If I broke away, told her I didn’t want any part of the offerings she had brought me with bloody hands, it would be as bad as a hare breaking cover and darting in front of a greyhound. Still, it was not possible to turn to her and say, It was a good thing that you did, even as a lie. All my life I had been shy. People had talked for me and at me. They had made assumptions about what I wanted, even from my own life. I was sick of it, sick of being a blank screen on to which other people projected their thoughts, their dreams, their own capering demons. I shook off Hanna’s clutching hands.
‘No,’ I said.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
I saw the emotions struggling for dominance in Hanna’s face, denial and anger, like oil and vinegar swirling in a bottle.
‘No, no,’ I said, and already I was on my feet, ready to shove her away if she tried to get near me again. I retreated down a couple of stairs, clinging to the banister. I dared not turn my back on her.
‘Don’t say no, Steffi,’ said Hanna.
She was on her feet too now. I saw her expression and backed down another step.
‘It was wrong,’ I told her. ‘All of it. I was wrong to wish those things. It was just a stupid game at the start and it shouldn’t have gone any further. It was wrong, Hanna. Wrong.’
‘What’s the use of saying that?’ she said angrily. ‘You can’t take it back, Steffi.’
‘I would if I could.’
‘Why? Because it’s wrong?’ sneered Hanna. ‘Then tell me what’s right with a life where people who are half dead already tell you what to do, where it’s all mapped out like a prison sentence, unending nothingness. What, are you going to go back and spend fifty years making Florentiners to your dad’s secret recipe?’ She was shouting now. ‘What’s – the – fucking – point?’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do!’ I shouted back. ‘But I’m making up my own mind. Maybe I will make bloody Florentiners forever, I don’t know. But I’m deciding. Not my parents. Not you. I am.’
‘You can’t leave,’ said Hanna, and her voice was suddenly cold.
‘Yes, I can,’ I said, and I withdrew another step, watching her all the time in case she made a move towards me.
‘You can’t tell anyone. You’re in this just as much as I am.’
‘I didn’t shoot anyone in their bed or push anyone downstairs, Hanna.’
‘You told me to,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve got every single one of your notes proving it. You’re in it up to the neck.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘Then you’re stupid. Just as stupid as the rest of them.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, and went down another step.
‘Look, it doesn’t have to be like this. Forget Julius Rensinghof. It can end here.’
‘How can it end?’ I asked her incredulously. ‘There’s a corpse in the garage and two bodies upstairs in bed. You think that’s all just going to go away?’
‘I have money,’ said Hanna. ‘Thousands of euros in my dad’s safe. There’s the Mercedes. We can go anywhere we want, do anything we want.’ She gazed down at me and her dark eyes were as cold and hard as chips of haematite. ‘It’s your last chance. Stay with me.’
‘No.’
I expected her to lunge at me, maybe try to get her hands around my throat, or shove me down the stairs. I was waiting for that, holding on to the banister, ready for the assault that never came.
Instead Hanna turned on her heel and marched away up the landing.
Where’s she going? I thought to myself, and then suddenly I knew. It came into my head as clear as day: Herr Landberg’s study, with the shooting-club photos and the dead animals’ heads on the walls and the open gun locker. Hanna was not going to let me leave. She wasn’t going to bother with anything as unreliable as a shove from the middle of the staircase. She was going to her father’s study to fetch something that would send a message screaming down the hallway after me, a deadly message that could travel faster than I could run, the kind marked no response required.
I thundered down the rest of the stairs as fast as I could, paused for a dangerous second at the bottom, looking wildly for a way out, and then I was running across the parquet floor, making for the front door. I thought I could hear movement on the upstairs landing as I reached the door and grabbed the handle.
Open, open, I thought as I wrenched uselessly at it. I looked for a key, but there wasn’t one in the inside lock. I glanced up and down; there were no bolts either. Hanna must have locked it and taken the key away altogether.
I heard the top stair creak as Hanna put her weight on it. She wasn’t bothering to run now; she knew she had the means to drop me even if I had a good head start on her. She had probably heard me rattling the front door too, so she knew exactly where I was. Sick and light-headed with fear, I ran towards the nearest open door. I glanced in and saw that it was the kitchen, with its subsiding landscape of used cartons and jars spread over every surface like the remains of a bombed city. There was no second door out of the kitchen, I saw. If I hid in here and Hanna found me, I would be trapped.
Sick fear had laid its hand heavily on me and for a moment I almost ran back the way I had come, blind and unreasoning in panic. Then I saw the telephone table with its stack of unopened letters and I remembered that I had come into the house this way. I was within a few footsteps of the door leading to the garage. My heart thumping wildly, I opened the door. It occurred to me that it would have been a good idea to open another door in the hallway, to confuse the trail, but there was no time for that now. I could hear the rapid thuds of Hanna’s feet on the stairs. She had decided to dispense with the sporting head start. I slipped through the door and closed it behind me as quietly as I could.
I looked out through the open garage door and for a moment I considered hiding inside. The distance to the gate or the shrubs bordering the garden seemed immense. I was not confident of crossing it before Hanna burst out through the door behind me and took aim. I glanced at the concrete floor, calculating whether there would be sufficient clearance for me to wriggle underneath Herr Landberg’s Mercedes. Some deeply ingrained animal instinct warned me against the idea. Hanna might not think to look there, but if she did I was all out of options. If the Mercedes ever went in for another service the mechanic would be cleaning my brains from the pipework underneath. I went for the open door.
Now I was on the gravel drive and the gate was a million kilometres away. I took a split-second decision and, instead of running towards it, I ran in the other direction, towards the corner of the house. I heard the front door slam as Hanna came racing out with such force that it swung shut behind her. She had foreseen that I would go for the gate and was determined to head me off.
I glanced back and saw her standing there on the gravel, chest heaving, eyes scanning the drive for signs of me. At the very instant that I reached the corner, her head turned and our eyes met. I saw the revolver in her hand and my heart seemed to give a mighty kick inside my chest, like a bucking horse. Galvanized by terror, I flung myself around the corner, my feet skidding on the gravel, desperate to put the solidity of a stone wall between myself and the gun. A split second later I heard a single harsh report which echoed off the hillside so that for a moment it seemed that the air was full of the sound, like deadly rain.
Then I was pelting the length of the wall, passing the neatly stacked log pile that Herr Landberg would not be needing next winter. The crunching of gravel under my feet and my own ragged breathing were loud in my ears, but still I was listening with fearful intensity for Hanna’s footsteps and for the second report, the one that would bring death speeding towards me. I thought I could hear the sound of her approach already on the gravel as I turned the far corner, my lungs burning and my heart thumping.
At the rear of the house was a large conservatory, utterly useless to hide behind, and around it an expanse of lawn edged with shrubs and trees. I was running out of options. I circled the conservatory, hoping that it might provide a little cover for my flight, even for an instant, then made for the shelter of the trees. As I ran I sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the long dry summer. Since Herr Landberg had clearly not been in a position to mow the lawn for some weeks, only the searing heat had kept the grass short and dry. If it had been wet my footprints would have shown up as clearly as a neon sign saying She went this way. I dived between two large overhanging shrubs, jarring my knees and elbows painfully on the hard earth. Then I lay there in the shadows, trying desperately to stifle my own gasps of exertion and terror.
