The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2)

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  While he was listening to Bitterle, Kovacs caught himself contemplating the two techniques of eating hazelnut pastries. He and Sabine Wieck worked along the spiral, eating the pastry from its end to the middle. The others just took bites out of it, Mauritz only a few. Wieck poked him in the ribs: “Excuse me, boss, do tell us where your thoughts are wandering.” Kovacs looked around the room. From the edge to the middle, that is what he had just been thinking, he said. “Great image,” Mauritz said.

  Wieck and Bitterle were talking about the results of their meetings with the social workers from the child welfare office, the surprisingly high proportion of overlapping data, the differences between impulsive fathers and overworked mothers, the reasons why some violence against children was deliberately not reported, and the fact that the easiest way to recognise a true psychopath was that after meeting him you felt the urge to wash your hands. At that moment Christine Strobl came into the room with a telephone message. “First: George rang. He’s completely off his rocker, blabbering on about something huge and saying we should sit tight if at all possible. He’ll tell us what to do and when. Second: A father from Sankt Christoph, Peter Ludwig, rang to say eight-year-old daughter, Julia, was attacked yesterday, can’t go to school today, says it was the black owl.” Mauritz had a coughing fit. Lipp slapped him between the shoulderblades. “Yes, it’s still going on,” he said. But that wasn’t why he was choking.

  “Why then?”

  Demski was seriously getting on his nerves, Mauritz said, first of all it was his fault that he had almost had to scale scaffolding, and now he was issuing orders from Berlin, instructing them to sit tight. He reached for a second pastry. Three bites, Kovacs thought, four at most. “I’ll call him,” he said, “and you can shut up about the scaffolding.” Kovacs got up. “What are you doing?” Wieck said. “I’m going to Sankt Christoph,” Kovacs said.

  “On your own?”

  “No, with you.”

  Florian Lipp raised an arm in protest. Wait, there was something about a fish, he said. “A Siamese catfish,” Mauritz said, wiping the corner of his mouth.

  “And?”

  The biggest threat to Siamese catfish is being flushed down the loo, Sen Wu had said.

  *

  He needed to talk to Eyltz about getting a new work car, Kovacs said as they drove south along Grazer Straße, the Vectra was not at all suitable, and meanwhile Eyltz was hogging the Puch G all to himself. Wieck shrugged. “The main thing is it goes,” she said. There was a queue of cars tailing back from the entrance to the Kammwand tunnel. Cleaning work, twenty minutes’ wait. Kovacs switched on the blue light and Wieck held out her I.D. to the man holding a sign where the lane was closed off. “Everything’s urgent,” Kovacs said when she gave him a rather odd look.

  The hairpin bends that wound down to Sankt Christoph were bathed in sunlight. Kovacs liked this stretch of the journey, the cliffs beside the road, the view of the roofs and the lake, and the screeching of his tyres as he accelerated out of the final bend. The car park at the entrance to the village was half full. The tourists came at Easter. He asked Wieck whether she had ever been part of a gang when she was sixteen, hooligans or anything like that. She laughed. She had been a girl guide for a while, she said, but had soon found it a bit too stuffy. “What did you want most of all when you were sixteen?” he asked. “A prince and a horse,” she said. No, he meant for Christmas or her birthday. “Money,” she said, “as much money as possible.”

  “For what?”

  “A horse.”

  “And what would you give to a girl punk?”

  “Money,” she said. Also for a horse? he asked, and she said, no, just like that, money was always good.

  The drive through the village was pretty clear, they only had to overtake the Pony Express which started operating in Holy Week. There was an elderly couple sitting in the last of the three carriages, but otherwise it was empty. They drove along the embankment towards Mooshim until they reached a copse of willows. Beyond it a narrow cul-de-sac led up a hill to a small plateau. “Lovely view,” Wieck said as they got out of the car.

  The house, one of those woodcutter’s cottages typical of the area, had evidently just been renovated. The stone walls had been completely taken down, they had re-plastered around the windows, and a generously sized conservatory had been added to the narrow side of the house. Someone who likes having no neighbours, Kovacs thought, and someone who likes being at home. “Nice front garden,” Kovacs said.

  “Sort of,” Wieck said.

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

  Too neat, she said, the edged lawn, the layout of the roses, the paved path to the biotope – more maths than nature. He didn’t understand a thing about gardening, Kovacs said, on the flat roof above where he lived there was an olive tree growing in a wooden tub, and that was it. A friend had given it to him when he got divorced – so that he would still have something to look after. “Olive trees are sensitive to frost,” she said, pressing the doorbell. She knows what she’s talking about and she thinks I would let let it freeze, Kovacs thought.

  The man was wearing a freshly ironed shirt. He was short and thin, mid-thirties, with a scratch above his left eyebrow which had only just formed a scab. “Pruning fruit trees,” he said, noticing Kovacs’ stare. He led them into the conservatory. They sat down in brand-new armchairs. “It’s good you’re here,” the man said. “Where’s your daughter?” Wieck asked. Julia was in her bedroom with his wife. When she heard about the police investigation, she was immediately in bits again. What did he mean by “in bits”? Wieck asked. The man gave her a hard stare. Howling, screaming, panic, he said, they had to remember that she’d just been given a severe beating.

  The day before, Julia had visited a school friend who lived in the village, he said, he’d brought her there himself shortly after two o’clock. To begin with they had painted Easter eggs with her friend’s mother, then played Pokémon on the PlayStation for an hour. At half past four Julia had said she wanted to go home, and as she was absolutely sure of the way along the upper lakeside path, which took ten minutes at most, they let her go. Then she’d turned up at home at half past five in a desperate state, filthy, clothes torn, swollen face. He thought he’d go berserk, he kept on asking her: Who was it? Of course he’d harried her, it seemed the natural thing to do; he’d grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her, but what father wouldn’t in such a situation? Eventually he got it out of her: “the black owl”. And she’d repeated it when his wife asked her the same question. He’d driven her to the family doctor in the village right away. The doctor hadn’t found any serious physical injuries, just a haematoma on the left cheek and one on the chest. Mentally, on the other hand, she was all over the place. “Would you go and get her, please?” Wieck said. He would try, the man said, and stood up uncertainly.

  “With some people you want to wash your hands before they open their mouths,” Wieck said with a shudder. Her vehemence astounded Kovacs, and then it struck him that the man had left him cold, too. I’m not even moved when I hear him telling the story about his daughter, he thought. “Do you know what’s odd?” he said, unexpectedly. “I don’t think I’ve ever painted an Easter egg in my life.”

  The girl being pushed into the room by her mother had her hands over her face. The father came in ahead of them and sat back down in his chair. “This is Julia,” the mother said. She was at most a head taller than her daughter, dark blonde, round face and wearing denim dungarees. “We’ve still got the storage room to paint,” she said apologetically. “I’ve been filling cracks.”

  “Were you helping your mother?” Wieck asked. The girl shook her head.

  “What then?”

  “She was playing with her Pokémon cards,” the woman said. Wieck said she knew nothing about Pokémon. “But I do,” Kovacs said. The others looked surprised. To be more precise he knew about one single Pokémon, did she want to know which one? Julia nodded. Snorlax, Kovacs said, a school class
he had chatted to about police work had given him a toy Snorlax as a present. From what he could make out, Snorlax did nothing but sleep.

  “Not true.” For a second, the girl put her hands on her hips. The left side of her face was aubergine coloured, the finger marks were visible even a few metres away. “Not true, he’s got lots of psycho attacks.” “Does it hurt?” Kovacs asked, pointing to the haematoma. The girl tried to put her hands up again. Her mother stopped her. Her father had said that she’d been mistreated, Kovacs said, was that right? The girl stood absolutely still. “Tell him,” the man said. The woman looked at him and then outside at the garden. There were some people who took pleasure in hitting children and frightening them, Kovacs said, it was the police’s job to stop this happening. “Do you understand?” The girl nodded. “What did the black owl look like?” Wieck asked. The man got up, took a piece of paper from the shelf and passed it to the two of them. A single dark wave with a round head on top. “Was it big?” Wieck asked. The girl nodded.

  “Very big?” The girl nodded again.

  “Bigger than Snorlax?” Kovacs asked. Julia looked at her mother for help. The woman shrugged.

  Kovacs stood up abruptly. “Would you please tell your daughter again what the police are there for?” he said to the woman.

  “For our protection,” she said.

  “Should you be frightened of the police?”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  Kovacs walked over to Julia. Now he was going to say something in her ear which was for nobody else to hear, he said, and he wanted her to listen. The mother gave the child a nudge. Kovacs took her hand and went with her to the corner of the room. “What are you doing?” the man asked. Wieck waved her hand at him to be quiet. Kovacs squatted down and whispered something in the girl’s ear. The girl whispered back. “We’re just going to pop to the car,” he said. “We’ve got to fetch something.” The girl looked expectant as the two of them left the room. The woman stayed where she was, motionless. The man sat in his rattan chair, tapping his toes. “I hope she can cope with this,” he said. “Children can cope with quite a lot,” Wieck said.

  “Were you beaten as a child?” Kovacs asked when the two of them returned. The man slowly got out of his chair. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “We know the story,” Kovacs said. “People get beaten repeatedly throughout their childhood, they swear they won’t do it to their own children, but it happens nonetheless.” “What are you talking about?” the man said again. His face had turned ashen. His wife took tiny steps backwards; they were barely noticeable. Frau Weinfurter from the child welfare office was already on her way, Kovacs said. She would organise the counselling the family needed. He would file a report on their visit under the heading “Interrogation following self-denunciation”, to ensure that the matter was settled out of court and that the man wouldn’t receive a sentence. Did that seem fair to him? The man said nothing. To begin with the girl just stood there for a few moments, uncertain what to do, then she went over to her mother and said softly, “I’m going upstairs now.” The woman nodded.

  *

  Just after the child welfare lady had arrived she’d needed to wash her hands, Wieck said on the drive back, even though the loo in that house somehow seemed contaminated, too. Nothing could change how she felt, neither the man’s compliance, nor her sympathy with the mother and daughter, nor the fact that the social worker appeared to be an extremely sensible woman. And anyway, he had been wearing a crappy shirt. But it was ironed, Kovacs said. In his view the man was one of those neurotics whose actions were principally though unconsciously aimed at self-punishment. Wieck looked at him in astonishment. He’d been doing his psycho lessons over the years, too, he said.

  “By the way,” she said, “how big is this Snorlax?” In the booklet that came with the cuddly toy it says two metres tall and almost five hundred kilos, Kovacs said. He’d been fascinated by that, more than by the descriptions of the attacks he could perform: Headbutt, Body Slam and Amnesia.

  “And that’s how you got the little girl to talk?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Body Slam and Amnesia.”

  “Not directly.” It had been far simpler.

  “What then?”

  “Money.”

  She spun around. “You’re not serious?!”

  “Yes, I am.” Kovacs said, “Five euros for Pokémon cards and she couldn’t stop talking.” After all it was Sabine who’d told him that money always worked. She shook her head and turned away. “You can be terrible sometimes,” she said.

  This time there was no hold-up at the Kammwand tunnel. Two point two kilometres into the tunnel, the overhead lighting flickered for fifty metres or so. The cleaning vehicles had vanished. “It’s just as filthy as it was before,” Kovacs said.

  At first the girl had seemed terrified, her eyes darting all over the place. When he explained about the digital camera and dictaphone, she calmed down a little, and as soon as he started talking about his own daughter she relaxed. He had told her about what Charlotte used to like playing with, about her dolls’ houses, Lego and her mother’s old dresses which she would wear for days on end. Julia had listened, picking at her thumbnail. She had been especially interested in the thing about the old dresses, and had wanted to know whether one of them had been light blue with white stripes. He could not remember. At one point he asked her whether there were blue marks anywhere else on her body similar to the ones on her face, and what he had hit her with. She pulled up her sweater and vest and said, “Only with his hand.” Then he asked her straight out whether her father often got like that, and she said, “No, never.” He had tried to draw a Relaxo in his notebook – a pretty poor effort – and then he had given her the five euros. When he asked her why her father had beaten her, she said, “Because I was cheeky.” “What did you say?” he asked her, and she said, “You can’t even earn money.”

  Wieck sat beside him saying nothing, her face still turned towards the window. He briefly felt the urge to reach across and touch her, but resisted. “Should I be feeling bad?” he asked when they turned into Seestraße after the Abbey. “You’ve never asked me anything like that before,” she said.

  Kovacs noticed the squat woman with short hair before he got out of the car. She was leaning against the wall by the entrance to the police station, holding up her face to the sun, and she looked familiar. Images of flowers came into his mind, a strange fountain, a shoehorn. Then he remembered: a nut-brown piano, with a photograph of Thelonious Monk on it. He approached her. “Did you want to see me, Frau Weghaupt?” She nodded, and started rummaging through her handbag.

  Wieck said goodbye and went inside. She had said something to him as she walked past. It hung on the very edge of his consciousness.

  Gerlinde Weghaupt pulled out a piece of paper, unfolded it and gave it to him. “I printed it out,” she said. “Song lyrics?” he asked. She shook her head. He mustn’t think badly of her, she said, but when your child dies you do strange things: you lie on his bed, you smell his clothes, and you keep the contact lenses that used to float in his eyes every day. So she had gone through the list of calls on his mobile as well as stuff on his computer, particularly his e-mails. She had decided either to keep them to herself or delete them. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t show them to anyone else, it was just this one she couldn’t keep secret. Kovacs glanced at it. What did she mean she couldn’t? “I think it’s a sort of farewell letter,” she said.

  “From your son?”

  “No, to him,” she said. Then she started crying.

  Kovacs read the letter twice. “I understand it all apart from the sender’s address,” he said when Gerlinde Weghaupt had calmed down a bit. “Dark Fire,” she said. “That’s the name of his guitar. It’s all he’s got.”

  They talked about the other members of her son’s band, their expectations, their vulnerabilities and their families, and finally about how shy the five had been whenever you
said you wanted to listen to one of their rehearsals. It’s strange, Kovacs thought, one wants to die and he doesn’t manage it; the other plummets to his death, even though he doesn’t want to die, and the farewell letter that the first one writes doesn’t fulfil its promise, nor does it arrive in time.

  “He’s in hospital,” Gerlinde Weghaupt said. Sometimes he had behaved so weirdly, as if he wanted to have nothing to do with anyone else. She did think, however, that Florian had been his best friend.

  He watched the woman leave. She walked slowly, her knees rubbing together. He remembered how she had leaned against the wall, her face to the sun. When she had gone, it came to him what Wieck had said as she passed him: “The answer’s ‘yes’.”

  SIXTEEN

  Switi’s gone. I’m back from this rubbishy language trip, I go into the sitting room and say, “Switi’s gone.” The mad woman looks at me and asks, “What do you call her?” I say, “Switi,” and she says, “But that’s not her name.” I say she’s my sister and I’ll call her what I like. She says, “She’s not your sister,” and I say of course she’s my sister. She leaps up to pounce on me, but I’m quicker than she is.

  Everything has gone from her room: the doll’s house, the big and little unicorns, Betty, the stuffed chicken, the elephant that has to be within reaching distance of her bed, the box with the Playmobil figures, the pinboard with drawings. The bed has been stripped. I can see hundreds of spit stains all over the pillow. The mattress is made out of foam, with white and brown diagonal stripes. I can’t see anything on that. There was always a rubber cover over it. I open the cupboard. It’s empty. The clothes have gone, the blue sweater with silver stitching, the checked trousers that look like they belong to a clown, the green raincoat, the quilted jacket with polar bears. Even her swimming things are gone, and her knickers. I reach my arm into the shelf where she sometimes lies curled up. Nothing.