Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

  ‘Not your day today?’ his colleague Petra Bruckner asks, a strapping woman in her mid-forties who passes for a children’s expert and has been sent to conduct interviews in the Jonny Röbel case. Jonny Röbel is still missing, and so the machinery has been set in motion; the police are doing their duty, groping about in the dark again, back in the never-ending battle against time. Abduction seems to have been ruled out. Jonny’s guardians have not been forthcoming. There have been no threatening letters or blackmail calls. Searching Jonny’s room yielded little of any use. The boy likes playing chess, is passionate about Native Americans and loves his dachshund. He has no trouble at school and – if his parents are to be believed – none of his friends knows where he is. Are the parents right? Is it true that the boy hasn’t run away, but is lying injured and helpless somewhere in Königsforst? If so, the dog squad will find him.

  As arranged, Frank Stadler is waiting for them at the entrance to the grounds at the edge of Königsforst which he refers to as a ‘camp’. He has shadows under his eyes and beads of sweat on his forehead, although the temperature here is more or less bearable compared with the heat in town.

  The camp turns out to be a Wild West club. Some clown has written ‘Sioux of Cologne’ on a plank nailed to the entrance gate. Next to the gate is a raised hide with a shooting slit like the lookout in a Wild West fort. Hedges and wooden palisades prevent curious passers-by from peering into the grounds, which are partly planted with trees and bushes. In the middle, three log cabins with overhanging roofs are arranged around a bonfire site. Tree trunks in a circle serve as benches. Manni can think of plenty of ways he’d rather spend his spare time than dressing up as a cowboy or Indian and sitting around on a log, but for anyone into Wild West nostalgia, all this is perfect.

  The sound of a diesel engine announces the arrival of the dog squad. As taciturn as always, the dog handlers let the Belgian shepherds out of the trailers. Stadler’s eyes flit nervously to the panting dogs, tugging at their leads. Their muscles are clearly visible beneath their shining reddish coats, their dark ears are pricked.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be able to find Jonny after all this time?’ Stadler asks.

  ‘You’d be amazed what they can smell,’ Manni replies, wondering whether Stadler is more worried that the dogs will be able to track down his stepson, or that they won’t. Impossible to know; all Manni can read in Stadler’s face with any certainty is that he is tense and has slept badly. If only he’d tell him when he last saw his stepson.

  The first dog handlers head off to the woods. Königsforst is difficult terrain. Dense undergrowth and a lot of brambles make walking hard going, and visibility is bad. They’ve divided the area into grid squares, but even with the dogs it might be days before they find the boy – or are able to say with relative certainty that he isn’t there. Unfortunately the place is also something of a forensic nightmare; day after day, Cologne’s nature freaks descend on Königsforst in their hundreds and thousands, bringing their dogs and bikes and picnic hampers and Nordic walking sticks, not only leaving a vast amount of forensic evidence, but also destroying other people’s in the process. It’s far from idyllic. But Manni doesn’t have time to philosophise about the recreational pursuits of his fellow-citizens. Pointing to the raised hide, he turns to Stadler.

  ‘I suppose one of you sits up there and looks to see who comes and goes when your club meets here at the camp.’

  Stadler nods. ‘During the games.’

  ‘Who was here last weekend?’

  ‘I’m sorry, this is all very stressful.’ Stadler wipes his forehead.

  ‘Can’t you tell me who was here at the weekend apart from you and Jonny?’

  ‘Well, it was very full. There must have been more than thirty of us. It was nice weather and everyone wanted to meet up one last time before the school holidays. Hagen Petermann, our club manager, always keeps a list.’

  ‘I’ll need that list. In fact we’ll need the names and addresses of all the club members.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ One of the dogs barks and Stadler jumps. He’s nervous, thinks Manni. Maybe that doesn’t mean a thing. Maybe it does. Either way, Stadler’s memory lapses are a problem for the investigation. Thirty people to question – probably more. That takes time. And if anything is forgotten or overlooked, then too bad, because most of the witnesses will probably be jetting off to God-knows-where next week when the holidays begin. Meanwhile there might be a boy in danger somewhere – if he isn’t already dead.

  Suddenly Manni’s enthusiasm is back – his iron determination not to give up until he’s got what he wants. He’s going to solve this case. He’s going to restore his reputation. He’s going to save this boy – if it isn’t too late. Manni looks Stadler in the eyes. You’re lying, he thinks. Or at least you know something you don’t want to tell me. You might even be a murderer. Whichever it is, I’ll get you in the end.

  ‘The dogs . . .’ says Stadler, staring towards the woods. ‘That barking. Have your colleagues found something?’

  ‘We’ll soon find out if it’s anything important,’ says Manni. ‘Show me where Jonny was the last time you saw him.’

  Frank Stadler points to the conical teepees, so realistic you wouldn’t be surprised to see real live Indians poking their noses out from between the flaps.

  ‘Jonny was supposed to sleep in the middle tent,’ says Stadler. ‘His rucksack was still there on Sunday morning.’

  ‘And that’s the last place you saw him? Can you tell me when exactly, and what your stepson was doing?’

  Stadler seems to reflect. When he finally answers his voice is hoarse and he doesn’t look at Manni.

  ‘We always split up into cowboys and Indians. Jonny’s an Indian and they had their secret meeting here by the lake on Saturday night. Believe me, I feel guilty about this, but I can’t say for sure whether Jonny was there. I think I saw him here in the afternoon but I couldn’t swear to it.’

  ‘But somebody must have noticed whether or not Jonny slept in his tent on Saturday night.’

  ‘That’s just the question I asked the other children in his tent. They said they didn’t think he was there when they went to bed, and he definitely wasn’t there when they woke up. But he could have crept into his sleeping bag after they’d gone to sleep and got up before them, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Had his sleeping bag been slept in?’

  Stadler shakes his head mutely.

  *

  It is too early for visitors; she hasn’t even had a shower. But Berthold Pretorius seems oblivious to this. He looks more than ever like a crustacean in disguise, his lobster eyes darting restlessly about Judith’s kitchen before attaching themselves to her face.

  ‘I’ve dealt with the computer.’

  ‘Already? Yesterday evening I couldn’t even boot it up.’

  ‘It wasn’t hard to find the problem.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No-brainer. Someone had removed the hard disk.’

  ‘Maybe the hard disk was faulty.’ She wants a shower and breakfast before she plunges back into the past – into a stranger’s life. She’s not in the mood for talking to Berthold.

  But he’s persistent. ‘If there’d been anything wrong with Charlotte’s computer, she’d have rung me. OK, I was away for two weeks in May and there was a lot going on at the company at that time. But she’d have rung me all the same. It’s not like her. It doesn’t add up.’

  That night, Judith had dreamt of the strange black-and-white water bird. It was swimming on a lake, looking at her with its fiery eyes, as if it had a message for her. Judith had wondered what it was trying to tell her, but had found no answer. In the end she had accepted that she didn’t know, the way you do in dreams, and simply continued to look at the bird.

  ‘Charlotte’s in trouble,’ says Berthold. ‘You have to help her.’

  Why is Berthold so bloody worried? Is it really only because
she’s his friend? Judith looks into his watery blue eyes.

  ‘Who else was Charlotte friends with apart from you?’

  ‘She’s always thought the world of you, Judith.’

  ‘Very funny. It’s twenty years since we last saw each other.’

  ‘No, really, she’s often talked about you. She likes you.’

  ‘She has no reason to.’ Again Judith has the sense of muffled unreality she felt in Charlotte’s villa. It’s as if she’s stuck in something she can’t understand – as if she’s been conducting a complicated cross-examination and spent hours battling with words which ought to tell you whether someone is guilty or innocent, but hardly ever do.

  Charlotte is elusive, thinks Judith. That’s what’s so disconcerting. She has vanished so completely without trace that you’d think she’d never really been alive. Her house with its smell of disinfectant and desolation is like a cocoon abandoned by an insect, or like the sloughed-off skin of a snake. You hold the remains in your hand – maybe even put them under a microscope – but they are mere empty shells, and whichever way you turn them, they reveal nothing about the life which once inhabited them.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower now and some breakfast, Berthold. Then I’ll see what I can find out about the picture of the loon. Maybe that will get us somewhere.’

  He nods hesitantly and holds out his hand. She grips it briefly and sees him to the door.

  ‘Please, Judith,’ he says. ‘Charlotte is in danger.’

  *

  When the school bell rings for break at last, Tim stuffs his wallet into his trouser pocket and runs out of the classroom before Frau Dolling or any of the children can stop him. He knows where he can meet Jonny because he’s learnt Jonny’s timetable off by heart – although he’d never admit this to anyone, not even to Jonny. The thought that his friend might feel stalked if he realised how much Tim knows about him is not a pleasant one and he quickly pushes it aside. The important thing is to find him. Tim jumps down the stairs and dashes across the playground to the laboratories. On Monday morning Jonny has chemistry. The first children from his class are already shuffling out, blinking lazily into the sun. Tim presses himself up against the shady wall opposite the science block and keeps his eyes fixed on the door. He knows it’s the only one and that Jonny’s class 9D have German next. Jonny has to come out of that door.

  It’s hot, a perfect midsummer’s day. If it gets hot enough, they might be let home early; then they can cycle to the quarry pond with Dr D. straight after lunch. The dachshund looks so funny paddling around with his paws bent, yelping with excitement – like a beady-eyed muskrat. Before Tim was friends with Jonny, he didn’t like going swimming, although he loves water. He didn’t want to go to the swimming pool because of the other children, and he was too scared to brave the quarry pond on his own. But with Jonny it’s different. Last Friday they had used a Lilo as a diving board. Dr D. was the captain and they had taken it in turns to dive as deep as they could and stay under water for as long as possible. It had been exciting, even if they could hardly see a thing through their goggles in the green, weedy water.

  For as long as he can remember, Tim has been fascinated by deep-sea life. He collects shells which he catalogues in little boxes in the drawer under his bed. He saves every cent he can spare so that he can go on a diving course when he’s sixteen. He devours every book about the sea he can lay his hands on and is familiar with all the interesting websites on scuba diving and marine life. He has a season ticket to the aquarium. And he likes to imagine he’s a fish. A burrfish, for example – cyclichthys antennatus – which lives in the ocean off the Antilles. The burrfish is unspectacular – small and brown, flecked with black. But when it has to defend itself, it swallows so much water that it looks like a puffy pin cushion covered in spiny prickles. No easy prey.

  His cousin Ivonne appears in the door to the science block with her boyfriend Viktor, her blond hair gleaming in the sun, her skimpy top revealing more than it covers, the earplugs of her MP3 player dangling at her breasts. She takes in the playground at a glance, managing, as usual, to look straight through Tim.

  ‘Come on, you two, get a move on – I want to lock up.’ Herr Mohr, the chemistry teacher, emerges behind Ivonne and Viktor and they set off provocatively slowly, locked together and bursting with self-importance – the coolest couple at Bertolt Brecht Grammar School.

  Last year when Tim and Jonny became friends, Tim had worried that Jonny might fall in love with Ivonne, like all the other boys in year nine, and that his cousin would bad-mouth him to Jonny. Tim had of course kept his concern to himself, but when Ivonne started going out with Viktor and Jonny said he didn’t care, he had been very relieved. He still doesn’t understand how Ivonne can worship that idiot Viktor. But that’s her problem, not his.

  Herr Mohr is locking the door to the science block. He rattles the handle to make sure it really is shut and sets off towards the main building. And Jonny? Tim’s worry tears him out of his stupor. He rushes up to Herr Mohr, disregarding the other children’s scornful glances.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jonny, Jonathan Röbel. Wasn’t he in your class today?’

  Mohr gives him a long hard stare. ‘No.’

  ‘But . . .’

  The X-ray eyes continue to pierce him. ‘But what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Really? You don’t look as if it were nothing. Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Do you know where Jonathan is?’

  ‘No, no.’ I must get out of here, Tim thinks. Out – and he begins to run. It’s nobody’s business; he doesn’t want anyone to see the tears that are shooting into his eyes. He runs past the science block, over the field to the hill where he squats behind a bush and looks down on the playground. His mouth is dry and his heart is hammering almost as hard as this morning, when he had pedalled so fast. Where is Jonny? Can he have gone to Radebeul by himself, to visit Karl May, Villa Bear Fat and Winnetou’s Silver Gun? No, he can’t have done; they had planned to go together. Tim had even decided to give up part of his savings for the adventure with his friend. Jonny had held out his hand when he heard that and said, ‘It’s a deal, my brother,’ in that strange, solemn way he’d learnt at his Red Indian club.

  Jonny is reliable. Jonny doesn’t let you down; he isn’t like that. So he can’t be in Radebeul. But where else could he be? Suddenly, with a painful, stabbing certainty, Tim knows that Jonny is in serious trouble. In the same instant, a police car turns into the school drive and the school bell announces the end of break. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jonny, nothing at all,’ Tim whispers. But his heart doesn’t stop hammering – boom, boom, boom – and all at once Tim knows why: he is scared, with an awful foreboding fear he has never known before.

  *

  The thwack of the rotor blades comes nearer until it is unbearably loud. The police helicopter emerges above the treetops and circles the Red Indian camp; the pilot gives a wave and veers off towards Wahn Heath. That’s one way of saying goodbye, thinks Manni. His colleagues spent an hour and a half scouring the terrain from the air, but found neither a fourteen-year-old boy nor a dachshund. Not that that means anything; only very few clearings and paths are visible from the sky. Manni kicks the tyre of the official heap-of-junk Focus. That leaves the dog squad, then, but the sniffer dogs are making slow progress – too slow, when you think that Königsforst is a good twenty-five square kilometres and that a helpless boy might have been lying somewhere in the undergrowth for forty-eight hours.

  ‘Come on, Nancy, time for a break.’ Kurt, the oldest dog handler, pours water into a bowl and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Bloody brambles. Feels like a jungle camp. All that’s missing is the camera team.’

  ‘Spare us.’ Manni stares at the map that he has spread out on the bonnet of his car – his temporary control centre. A sniffer dog works for twenty or twenty-five minutes at a time, the dog handlers explained to him. After that it’s relieved of its duties
and allowed to recover from the thousands of smells it’s been bombarded with. The problem is that dogs may be bloody good at picking up scents, but they devote as much attention to a jogger or a decaying squirrel as an injured boy. Once they’re done, though, you can be pretty sure that the terrain they’ve covered is clean. And they certainly work more quickly than a human search party.

  ‘At the narrowest point it’s about two kilometres from here to the A4.’ Manni’s index finger taps a motorway lay-by. They have agreed to begin by searching the area between the camp and the motorway. Perhaps the boy walked to a car park and hitchhiked. Or maybe he’d arranged to meet somebody. If either of these scenarios is correct, and Jonny is lucky, he’ll be right as rain, sitting in a field somewhere with his dog, laughing up his sleeve. But for some reason, Manni is sceptical. This might have something to do with the sense of feverish agitation aroused in him by ten Belgian shepherds and their handlers. Or it might have to do with Frank Stadler’s shiftiness. Two colleagues from patrol drove Stadler home earlier on, because he was only getting in the way. Petra Bruckner accompanied him. She’ll have got hold of a list of Jonny’s friends and the membership list of the Sioux of Cologne Red Indian Club, and by now she’ll be at Jonny’s school. Manni ought to be there too; perhaps one of the children has some information for them. Better not to leave Bruckner to decide what’s of use to them and what isn’t.

  Manni folds up his map; the dog squad have their own. ‘How long will it take you to get to the motorway, Kurt?’

  ‘Hard to say – could take until tomorrow – longer if we cover the entire breadth. Unless the undergrowth thins.’

  ‘I’m going to drive to the boy’s school now. Call me if you find anything.’