by Gisa Klönne
Now that it’s clear that this particular hot summer’s night isn’t going to come to anything, Miss Cat’s Eyes throws him a glance which is by no means indifferent. Typical. Manni holds her gaze for a moment and then tries to concentrate on the phone call. He takes a sip of shandy and pulls a face. It’s warm and flat, although he’s only been sitting here for ten minutes. He pushes the glass aside and signals to the waitress.
‘How old is the boy?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Maybe he’s with his mates. Swimming. Or at his girlfriend’s.’
‘That doesn’t appear to be the case. Would you drive to the parents and talk to them, please? Try to get an impression of the situation.’
‘Who am I working for?’
‘Me. For the time being, at any rate. And let’s hope, for the sake of the family, that it stays that way.’
And if the boy turns out to be dead, can I go back to Division 11 with this case? The question is on the tip of Manni’s tongue, but he doesn’t ask it. The last six months have taught him caution. When his first investigation with Judith Krieger went pear-shaped – a murder in a forest clearing in the Bergisches Land – Millstätt had informed him that he was transferring him to the Missing Persons Department. Temporarily, he said, to fill a staff shortage. A sanctimonious lie that Manni doesn’t believe. Judith Krieger has taken leave to do some soul-searching and heal her wounded psyche, while he’s stuck doing penance with the manhunters instead of making a career for himself – that’s about the size of it. It’s outrageously unjust; after all, it was bloody Krieger who flouted all the rules. And yet she’ll get to go back to Division 11 when she returns from leave in a week. It looks as if she still has Millstätt eating out of her hand.
‘Any questions?’ Thalbach’s voice brings Manni back to the present. Manni stares at his shandy which doesn’t look as if it ever had a head on it. Why not give them a hard time, if they’re going to mess him around? He doesn’t owe them too much enthusiasm right now and he certainly has no desire to struggle through town to the vehicle fleet at headquarters.
‘I’m in the beer garden. I’ve been drinking alcohol.’
‘A lot?’
‘Not too much. Shandy.’
‘Get yourself an espresso and take a cab.’
Manni catches the waitress’s eye at last and she comes over to his table. He smiles apologetically and wordlessly wrests pad and pen out of her hand to note down the address that Thalbach dictates to him.
*
Downstairs, the front door shuts. Judith can’t take her eyes off Charlotte’s collection of dolls. She is hypnotised by these unblinking imitation children with their brightly coloured clothes; it is like looking at a glassy-eyed time machine. She knows she was in this room once before, decades ago. How old was she? Fourteen or thereabouts. It was a wet, grey day in May, soon after Charlotte’s birthday. She and Charlotte are almost the same age – both born in 1966. ‘Happy birthday,’ she says out loud, to shake off the sense of unease she feels in this room, which is set in the past as if in gelatine.
At the birthday party, Charlotte’s mother had given them rhubarb tart with whipped cream and hot chocolate. There had been candles and flowers – and presents, of course – but somehow the party had never really got going. The other girls had nudged each other under the table and giggled. They were a tight-knit gang who had known each other since the beginning of secondary school; only Charlotte and Judith were newcomers, interlopers, outsiders. The next day, in the school loos, Judith overheard the other girls squeezing into one of the cubicles to have a smoke and bitch about Charlotte. They whispered about her white lace blouse and her dolls. About the lack of ice cream and chocolate bars and Coke and music – and just about everything that was ‘in’. And of course there was worse to come. In the weeks that followed, the other girls stopped talking to Charlotte. They acted as if she didn’t exist. Charlotte asked Judith round to her house, sat next to her in class, told her secrets in the playground at break – all the things that girls do. Judith thought her slightly strange, but by no means stupid or boring. And yet she had stopped meeting up with her. And then she had betrayed her. Hadn’t she?
Judith goes back down to the ground floor, fills a glass with tap water in the kitchen and sits down on the sun-warmed stone steps which lead from the terrace to the garden. The heat makes her feel heavy and sluggish and pulls her far back into the past. She’s still queasy. She tries to push aside the memories of Charlotte and her dolls and think instead of her turquoise lake – an innocuous summer daydream, a dream of now. She fails.
She wasn’t at school with Charlotte and Berthold for long – only two years. Her restless father had landed yet another new job, and they had moved again. Judith doesn’t like to recall those years when she was at the mercy of her parents’ decisions. Her true life, or so it seems to her, didn’t start until she left school. She had moved back to Cologne as soon as she’d sat her school leaving exams, not out of nostalgia, but because she had a place to read law at the university. Even so, right from the start, she was determined to make Cologne her home. She was almost intoxicated by the thought that she never had to move again if she didn’t want to; she could build her own life, her own circle of friends. Meeting up with her old schoolmates was not part of her plan.
Judith rolls herself a cigarette. She knows more or less nothing about Charlotte Simonis, and supposes it would be not only wrong but also presumptuous to imagine that the few experiences they shared as teenagers or the inglorious role she played back then might have had any influence on Charlotte’s life, let alone on her disappearance. But Charlotte is missing, that much is clear. Certainly no one seems to have seen her in the last seven weeks. Judith lights the cigarette and enjoys the familiar tingle of nicotine in her lungs. What has happened to Charlotte? What course has her life taken? Is it possible that she was happy here, in this mausoleum of a house? Is her disappearance the delayed after-effect of a screwed-up life – or did she leave in search of happiness? And what does that mean anyway? Judith takes a drag on her cigarette. We all chase after happiness, surrender to our desires as if to some insatiable god. We refuse to accept that life also has its setbacks – the daily grind, accidents, parents and partners who betray us or leave us. At the end of the day, this desperate pursuit of happiness is pointless; we have to keep on breathing, whether times are good or bad.
Charlotte wanted to be my friend, thinks Judith. I rejected her. That’s all that happened – full stop, end of story. But Judith knows there is more to it than that. Suddenly she is released from her paralysis. She stubs out her cigarette and gets up. If there is any clue in this deserted villa to Charlotte’s whereabouts, she is going to find it.
*
On the other side of town, in the district of Brück, Manni stuffs his taxi receipt into his trouser pocket, pops a Fisherman’s Friend into his mouth and looks about him. The semi-detached houses look the same as everywhere and the front gardens offer the usual range of flowers, benches, miniature trees with grotesquely pollarded branches, and the inevitable plastic paraphernalia of family homes. Manni steps over buckets and spades, a red plastic sit-on car and a deflated football – an ugly mess on the fake cobbles leading to the house. Before he can ring the bell, a man pushes open the front door, barefoot and blond. Two small children cling to his faded jeans, their mouths smeared with chocolate.
‘CID?’ Without looking at Manni’s warrant card, the man grabs the bigger child by the shoulders. ‘Go in the living room with your sister, please. Daddy and Mummy want to speak to this man alone.’
The kids stare up at Manni like stuffed dummies. Their father wriggles his hips to shake them off. ‘Leander, Marlene – you know what we agreed. Go in the living room now or I’ll send you straight to bed and there’ll be no telly for a week.’
The threat seems to have an effect, and the children detach themselves from the man’s legs in slow motion. He gives them a last push in the right direction befor
e turning to Manni.
‘Frank Stadler, come on in.’
Stadler’s wife, Martina, is in the kitchen, sitting on a corner bench behind a roughly hewn wooden table, her legs drawn up to her chest, her eyes vacant. Chestnut hair falls in shimmering waves over her shoulders and she is wearing a light green sundress. If you ignore her swollen eyes, she looks fantastic. Her slim fingers are clutching something as if her life depended on it.
‘You have to find Jonny,’ she says, in lieu of a greeting.
Manni nods and sits down opposite her. Yes, he thinks, sooner or later we’ll find your boy. And maybe you’ll wish we hadn’t. You’ll find yourself longing to return to this uncertainty that now seems so unbearable. Stadler pushes an empty glass over to him and fills it with water from one of those plastic bottles that cheapskates use to make their own fizzy water. It tastes warm and stale. Manni puts the glass down on the table.
‘So you’re missing your eldest son, Jonathan Stadler. He’s fourteen—’
‘Röbel,’ Martina Stadler interrupts him, ‘Jonny’s surname is Röbel.’
‘Röbel.’ Manni lowers his pen. ‘But you’re both called Stadler?’
‘Jonny is actually Martina’s sister’s son,’ says Frank Stadler. ‘We took him in because his parents were killed in an accident.’
‘Don’t bring up the past.’ Martina Stadler’s voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘All that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that you find Jonny.’
‘Jonathan Röbel, known as Jonny,’ says Manni. Martina is the boy’s flesh-and-blood aunt, then, and her suffering seems genuine. But what about her husband? Are stepfathers potential offenders? Is that why his boss is considering the possibility of a violent crime within the family? Manni scrutinises Stadler, who runs his right hand over his forehead and buzz cut. New beads of sweat immediately form on his hairline. He is thirty-odd, about Manni’s age, and the kids clearly have no respect for him. But what does that mean? Maybe Stadler was jealous of his adolescent stepson, and saw him as a rival who had to be eliminated. For a moment, Manni thinks of his own father. Was he ever young and cheerful? Was he ever interested in his son? Manni can’t remember that he was. But it’s too hot and stuffy to concentrate on more than one thing at a time.
‘How long has Jonny been living with you?’
‘Three years.’ Frank Stadler clears his throat. ‘I know what you’re going to ask next. Yes, it was difficult – of course it was – what do you think? The boy was grieving; the two of us were in shock – my wife and her sister were very close – and little Marlene was only a few months old.’ Again he wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘So it was difficult and Jonny ran away twice in the first year, wanting to see his old home again. But that’s over now, believe me. We all pulled together and we coped. My wife’s right: Jonny’s disappearance has nothing to do with what happened back then.’
‘Where is his old home?’ Manni asked. No matter what Stadler says, the boy’s former home will have to be checked out. At the Cologne headquarters, Criminal Investigation Division 66 files 2,400 missing persons reports every year. But most of the missing persons haven’t really disappeared. Teenagers come and go, especially if they’re from dysfunctional homes. Their parents always swear that all’s well, of course, but what do they know about their children?
‘Jonny used to live in the Eifel,’ says Stadler, his lips narrowed. ‘In Daun, to be exact.’
‘I’ll need the address. And if possible the addresses of Jonny’s old friends there.’
‘Jonny’s not in the Eifel. He wouldn’t have gone there without letting us know,’ says Stadler, struggling to contain himself. ‘We rang acquaintances in Daun just to make sure, and no one had seen him.’
‘Did you have any kind of argument before he left? Was anything troubling the boy?’
‘No, nothing.’ Both the Stadlers shake their heads.
‘Is he healthy? Intelligent?’
‘Why do you ask? Yes.’
‘Sporty?’
They nod.
‘Reliable?’
‘Completely.’
‘But there have been times in the past when he ran away – you said so yourself.’
‘Jesus, yes, because it’s the truth. But that was in the past, you know – three years ago, before he’d settled in here. If I’d known you were going to use our honesty as an excuse not to look for the boy, I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you.’
Going by what Manni has learnt about missing teenagers over the course of the last months, it is by no means unlikely that Jonny has run away again. But perhaps he hasn’t. Manni feels cold sweat on his neck. What if he is underestimating the danger? What if the boy has been abducted and is being held underground somewhere, injured and desperate with fear?
‘His torch.’ Martina Stadler gives a sob. ‘Jonny’s torch was still in his bed. But it doesn’t make sense – he never forgets his torch, he can’t get to sleep without it.’
Keep calm, man, keep calm. Manni takes a deep breath. ‘Can I see this torch?’
Sobs.
‘Please, Martina, show the inspector.’ Cautiously, as if afraid to injure her, Frank Stadler reaches across the table and begins to wrest the object from the woman’s fingers.
‘I shook up Jonny’s duvet and it fell out.’ Martina is trembling all over; it is almost impossible to understand her. ‘I picked it up straight away and it’s still working, but the glass is broken.’
‘It’s only a crack. I’m sure Jonny won’t notice.’ Frank has managed to get hold of the torch. He looks at it before putting it down on the table in front of Manni.
‘It’s broken,’ Martina whispers, ‘broken. He’s scared without his torch. Why didn’t you remind him to take it?’
‘God, Tina, you know what it’s like. The little ones were whining, we were late and Jonny said he had everything.’
‘When was that?’ Manni asks.
‘What do you mean?’ Stadler looks at Manni as if he had forgotten his presence.
‘When you left with Jonny. When was that?’
‘Saturday morning, at about eleven. We dropped the little ones at my mum’s in Bensberg and then went straight on to the campsite.’
Manni leafs through the pad he wangled out of the waitress in the beer garden. ‘And the camp was at the edge of Königsforst, in the grounds of a club called the “Sioux of Cologne”. ’
Stadler nods. ‘Yes, damn it. Why the hell aren’t there search parties out there?’
‘We have to assess the situation first. When did you last see Jonny?’
Martina Stadler begins to cry harder.
‘Listen . . .’ Manni tries to get Frank Stadler’s attention. ‘Please answer my questions. And perhaps it would be a good idea if your GP—’
‘Jonny’s torch is broken. I broke it! Oh my God, I can’t bear it!’ Martina’s voice cracks.
‘Don’t say that.’ Frank Stadler strokes the slim fingers that are lying limp and useless on the table, like a puppet without strings. ‘Please, Martina, nothing’s broken. And Jonny still has Dr D.’
‘Who’s—?’ But Manni gets no further because, as if the name were a call to arms, the children burst into the kitchen with deafening yells. ‘Dee-Dee! Jonny! Dee-Dee! Jonny! Where’s Dee-Dee?’
Before either parent can react, they are clambering onto the corner bench and plunging their smeary faces into their mother’s chest and belly. She begins mechanically to stroke their tousled heads and murmur soothing nonsense.
Frank Stadler gets up, signalling to Manni with a jerk of his head that he’s to follow. He seems to have given up wiping the sweat from his forehead; a fine trickle is creeping past his ear towards his chin. From the living room a piercing child’s voice trills a little song about a crocodile called Snappy. Manni feels as if he’s being slowly smothered in this house.
‘I don’t know when Jonny disappeared,’ Stadler says softly. ‘The kids live according to their own rules at the
camp.’
He turns round abruptly. ‘Come on, I’ll show you Jonny’s room.’
It almost looks as if Stadler is running away from him. Manni ignores his need for oxygen and follows on his heels.
‘Who’s Dr D.?’ he repeats, when they reach the bottom of the stairs.
Frank Stadler opens the door to a basement room. There is a bed, neatly made up with dark blue bedclothes and, on the floor beside it, a dog basket.
‘Dee-Dee, Dr D., is Jonny’s dog, a wire-haired dachshund. The pair of them are inseparable.’
*
The muffled silence of Charlotte’s villa seems to swallow Judith’s anger. The heat creeping in at the open windows, the furniture, frozen in another era, her own memories of Charlotte – everything gives Judith a feeling of unreality. She doesn’t touch or move anything yet, but all her senses are on the alert. Searching a house is like gradually decoding an unknown microcosm. Every home guards secrets, even if its occupants have done their best to eliminate any evidence. Has Charlotte Simonis burnt love letters and bank statements? Has she destroyed photo albums, or perhaps her father’s life insurance policy, which might have raised questions about the cause of his death? Has she tidied up where once chaos reigned? I don’t know, Judith thinks, walking from room to room. This first silent tour of a house is her ritual prelude to a search. She doesn’t proceed systematically like her colleagues on the forensics team. Instead she surrenders her senses to the house, letting it guide her, attentive to its smells and sounds, but most of all to anything that seems to be missing or out of place.
The ground floor consists of kitchen, utility room, toilet, dining room, living room, hall and Charlotte’s father’s study. This last is without a doubt the most congenial room in the house, in spite of the dark shelves of academic tomes lining two of the walls. In front of the bookcases, two dark green leather armchairs and a polished mahogany side table create the perfect atmosphere for talking shop or playing chess. The third wall is hung with photographs, paintings and prints of animals, plants and landscapes. The quality of the pictures varies considerably; some of the photos are very faded. They show men in knee breeches with rucksacks on their backs, staring into the camera like conquerors. There is something disconcerting about the wall of pictures. Judith stops and studies them with an analytical eye, focusing on each in turn. Something is wrong, but she can’t put her finger on it.