by Gisa Klönne
*
Cathedral, Rhine and police headquarters glide past the windows of the Inter City Express. She’s made it. Judith thinks of Charlotte and wonders what it was like for her – what she felt and thought as she set off on her first big journey.
Maybe also her last, but in tarot the Death card only seldom means physical death. More often it stands for the universal principle of letting go, which is – according to tarot symbolism – the most important precondition for the birth of new forms. All the same, Judith is vaguely unnerved when she remembers the card. But last night, watching the bats from her roof terrace, she had decided that, no matter what the cards might say, she didn’t feel like cancelling the trip to Canada. In the morning she bought a digital camera and a new tri-band phone, and set up a call diversion from her landline so as to be contactable on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Now she’s on her way to the airport.
The train leaves Cologne behind and accelerates to a speed of 300 kilometres an hour; the landscape begins to fly. Judith puts her iPod plugs in her ears. She needs the right music for the beginning of her journey – not too slow, certainly not too melancholy – something powerful. She tries out a few things and decides on Patti Smith’s Horses.
At Frankfurt Airport she checks in and makes sure that her return flight will get her back to Cologne in time to start work and that she can reschedule it and fly back earlier if need be. In a newsagent’s she buys a paper and a historical novel called The American Woman, which seems appropriate. Her business-class ticket allows her to wait in the lounge. She puts a wafer-thin tuna sandwich and olives on a paper plate and treats herself to a vodka and orange. Just before her flight is announced, she rings Manni. He sounds terse, harassed, as if she’s caught him jogging. He’s probably working up a sweat in the brambles, looking for his missing boy.
‘I’m going to be away until Sunday evening,’ she says. ‘If anything happens at headquarters in the next few days that I ought to know about, will you give me a ring?’
‘You looked pretty tanned to me. I thought you’d just been on holiday.’
‘Roof terrace.’
Manni says nothing.
‘Will you ring me?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Canada.’
‘Your school friend.’
‘Yes. Will you ring me?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
She can’t ask for more. It was probably unnecessary for her to inform Manni anyway. She’ll be back before anyone can miss her.
Her flight is announced and she switches off her phone. She feels young and free as she presents her ticket to the smiling air hostess at the counter.
*
Canada. Manni doesn’t have the time to think about Judith Krieger’s latest escapades; no sooner has he put his phone back in his pocket than it begins to buzz again. He looks at the display: Number withheld. Please, not Mother.
‘We think we may have something,’ says Kurt, who is combing the area around the hut. ‘Nancy’s going crazy again, like the dog in the hut yesterday. And there’s a baseball cap hanging on a nearby bush. Might be the boy’s.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Near the hiking trail to Rath.’
Shit, that means the far side of the Red Indian camp, away from the motorway. Is he going to have to abandon his lay-by theory? It looks very much like it. Even after three hours, they haven’t found any sign of the boy or his dachshund near the lay-by. The operating company employees claim not to have seen anything, and Mr Snack (who really did open his van at ten on the dot) has nothing illuminating to say either. Did he notice anything on Saturday? He sold more drinks than usual – hardly surprising in this crazy heat. Manni glances at his watch. It’s already midday; he needs to go and interview the head of this Red Indian club who is, Petra Bruckner tells him, back from a business trip to Holland. But first it looks as if Manni’s going to have to fit in a little jog through the woods – the very thought of it makes his Nikes smoulder. Nancy’s going crazy like Arco yesterday. What, for Christ’s sake, is going on in this wood? A panic-stricken boy. A mutilated dog. Or is this some fantasy they’ve pieced together? The hot, dry air bites his throat. Too much ozone, Manni thinks; it’s more than a man can bear.
The black baseball cap emblazoned with a leaping big cat is hanging on a bramble a little way off the path. It looks new, just like the one Jonny’s parents said he was wearing. How did it end up in the brambles? Did Jonny roam this way, and if so, why? Did he throw the cap away or lose it? Or did someone else throw it in the brambles? But who?
‘This is where Nancy went wild.’ Kurt gestures to a spot just beneath the cap, where investigative technician Karin is hard at work. She puts a piece of bark into a plastic bag and looks at Manni without removing her mouth protection. ‘Could be blood here on the bark.’
Has the perpetrator marked the crime scene with Jonny’s cap in a rather macabre manner? Manni swallows. And whose blood is it? The boy’s or the dog’s?
‘I’ll get it to the lab as soon as I can,’ says Karin, as if she can read his mind.
‘Nancy’s pulling that way,’ says Kurt. ‘So presumably the scared person, whoever he was, went that way too.’
Away from the motorway, then. Rather than narrowing down the search radius, they’re going to have to extend it. What happened in this bloody wood? A murder, Manni thinks. The boy was murdered. He doesn’t know why he is suddenly so sure, but once the thought is there, he can’t shake it.
Forty minutes later he’s parking his Vectra in the yard of Petermann Construction Company on the outskirts of Rath. Sand, gravel and a variety of cobbles are piled up in heaps at the end of the access road. An adolescent boy with bleached hair vanishes between bulldozers and forklift trucks that are sitting abandoned in the midday sun; no one else is around. Hagen Petermann has an office on the ground floor, which looks as if it’s been expensively fitted out, if not exactly tastefully. Pale blinds keep out the view of building material in the yard; a carved totem pole leans against the wall behind an enormous and immaculately tidy desk. Petermann is a well-toned man of about fifty, fairly tall, like Manni. For a moment he looks Manni straight in the eyes – the scornful gaze of a boxer confident of winning. Then he lowers his eyes to take in Manni’s jeans, sweaty T-shirt and dusty Nikes.
‘You don’t mind if I make myself a little more comfortable?’ Without waiting for Manni to reply, the big chief takes off his mocha-coloured jacket, loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his short-sleeved silk shirt.
Arsehole, thinks Manni, but only gives a slight nod and lets Petermann direct him to a table where an efficient secretary has set out coffee, mineral water and biscuits.
‘Awful story. I hope you find Jonny soon.’ Petermann’s voice no longer sounds quite as arrogant. ‘Great boy.’ Manni pulls his notepad out of his trouser pocket and unfolds the membership list of the Sioux of Cologne. At some point on Saturday afternoon, probably at about 4 p.m., Jonny went into the woods – several of the would-be Indians have made statements to that effect. Jonny’s stepfather left the camp at around the same time. But unlike Jonny, he returned in the early evening. It’s time somebody came clean at last.
‘Herr Petermann, when and where did you last see Jonny Röbel on Saturday?’
‘You don’t beat about the bush.’ Criticism? Respect? Manni can’t make up his mind. Petermann’s voice is toneless. He pours out coffee and water and pushes a tray holding a milk jug and sugar shaker in Manni’s direction.
‘The boy’s missing. I don’t have much time.’ The boy’s dead, Manni thinks. But so far that’s only a hunch.
‘Let me think.’ Petermann reaches for the milk jug. A plump gold signet ring adorns his left ring finger. Out in the yard the bulldozers are waking from their afternoon nap with a low rumble.
‘In the morning I played golf. I got to the camp at about 1 p.m. Frank and Jonny were already there,’ says Petermann.
‘An
d the dog?’
Surprised, Petermann looks up from his coffee cup. ‘The dog too, of course.’
What comes next Manni already knows off by heart, because the witness statements are all the same. The club members made themselves at home at the camp, gathered wood for the bonfire, chatted, hung out, played fistball, got the tents ready for the night. One group left to go swimming and returned at about six. No one really took any notice of what Jonny was up to. Blah, blah, blah.
‘How did you spend the afternoon?’
‘I was at the camp, apart from a short walk at about five.’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
Petermann hesitates. ‘Walkers, joggers.’
‘Strangers, then?’
Again the almost imperceptible hesitation. ‘Yes, strangers.’
‘Did you talk to anyone?’
‘No, nobody.’
‘See or hear anything out of the ordinary?’
‘There was a dog that barked for quite a long time, almost hysterically. It was rather unnerving. Some dog owners have no control over their pets, I’m afraid.’
A dog that was having its ear cut off. Manni whips out his pen.
‘When was that precisely?’
‘I didn’t look at the time, but I was on my way back. So before 5.30.’
Half an hour’s walk – not enough time to kill a boy and his dog and get rid of them.
‘What do you mean by “hysterically”?’
Petermann raises his eyebrows questioningly.
‘Did the barking sound aggressive? Is it possible that the dog had injured itself?’
‘I don’t know. It was yapping. Pretty nerve-shattering, and it went on for a long time.’
‘A big dog or a little one?’
‘I’m hardly an expert, but I’d say it was on the small side.’
Dr D. Suddenly Petermann seems to realise what Manni’s driving at and, for the first time, something like genuine feeling flashes out from behind the slick façade.
‘You think it might have been . . . But why would it have barked so loudly?’
‘There are indications that Jonny’s dog was injured.’
‘Injured?’ asks Petermann.
‘Is there anyone at the camp who doesn’t like the dog?’
Petermann spreads his arms, revealing impressive biceps. ‘I’m well known for my dislike of dogs.’
‘Did you hurt Jonny’s dachshund?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Who else could it have been?’
‘How am I to know? I’m sure it wasn’t anyone from the club.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I know the members. We’ve been meeting up for years, we—’
‘Could Jonny have injured his own dachshund?’
‘On purpose? Jonny? No way, no, definitely not.’
‘Who’s he friends with at the club?’
‘The teenagers often do their own thing; you’re best asking them. But I’d say Jonny’s more of a loner. He likes to play the scout in our games. Spends hours roaming around the woods. He’s happiest doing that.’
‘Loners often have enemies.’
‘Not Jonny, no.’
‘What’s his relationship with his stepfather like?’
‘Good. Of course they sometimes have their differences. It’s natural at that age. You know what adolescents are like.’ Petermann looks at Manni as if trying to work out whether Manni might not still be one of those hormone-troubled creatures himself.
‘So Jonny and his stepfather had rows. What about?’
‘What about? The usual – bedtime, washing hands, cleaning teeth. Whether the dachshund’s allowed to beg at meals.’
‘And is it?’
‘Frank thinks it shouldn’t. Sensible, if you ask me. Dogs are unhygienic and have no business at table.’
Interesting, thinks Manni, very interesting. He must find out where else Frank Stadler believes dogs have no business to be – and what Jonny thought of it. Thinks, he corrects himself – present tense. It’s still quite possible that the boy is alive. His phone begins to buzz. K-H Müller, the display tells him. Manni makes an apologetic gesture to Petermann and takes the call.
‘Karl-Heinz. Hello.’
The forensic pathologist comes straight to the point: ‘One of the numbers has been eaten away; one could be a five or a six, I’m not sure, and another looks like a one, but might also be a seven. I’ve arranged for a DNA test, but if you ask me, the likelihood of a match is very high. It’s the right breed too, so I think you can reasonably assume that the ear is from Jonny Röbel’s dachshund.’
‘Thanks, Karl-Heinz, that’s great. I’ll look in on you later.’
Petermann has been watching Manni with his scornful boxer’s eyes. Manni returns his stare for a moment before resuming his questioning.
‘You were saying Frank Stadler was sometimes annoyed by his stepson’s dog?’
‘Oh no, that’s not what I meant to say. You misunderstood me.’
‘Really?’
‘Listen, Frank didn’t hurt Jonny’s dog. I’d be willing to swear to that.’
*
It is Tuesday. Usually, Jonny would be coming back from school at about this time. He has double PE last thing Tuesday, so he’s always especially hungry when he gets home and Martina always makes pasta. Marlene and Leander have already eaten, two brave little soldiers, doing their best to believe Martina and Frank when they tell them that all’s well. Frank’s left to take them to his parents. Martina feels bad because it’s such a relief to have them out of the house. Shouldn’t she be watching over her two remaining children like a broody hen? But she doesn’t have the energy. She can’t face calling her own parents either – keeps putting it off. Her dead sister’s son – how can she possibly tell her parents she didn’t take care of him? What a battle she fought, back then, to get guardianship of Jonny. She really must ring her parents. Jonny’s picture is all over the papers. The local television station is going to broadcast an appeal from her on the evening news. Jonny, come back, we love you. How hopeless it all is.
Martina goes to the kitchen window. Although she knows Jonny’s mountain bike is in the garage, she still hopes to see Jonny cycle up to the house, one hand on the handlebars, the other hastily pushing his MP3 player into his trouser pocket so that Martina doesn’t notice he’s ignored her ban and listened to music on his bike. He’d lean his bike in the drive, Dr D. would bark happily (he always dashed to the front door long before Jonny came into sight), Jonny would throw his rucksack down in the hall, stroke Dr D. and say something like, ‘Mm, smells yummy, Tini’– and all would be well.
The pot plants on the windowsill have wilted, the paper chicks the kids made in nursery at Easter – and which Martina isn’t allowed to throw away – are faded and grubby with little finger marks. She takes up Jonny’s torch and switches it on. The beam has grown yellow and she feels a pang in her chest when she sees that. Or is she imagining things? She cups her hand in front of the light. Is it fainter or isn’t it? And what if it is? It has nothing to do with Jonny and whether or not he’s all right. ‘Stop it, it doesn’t mean a thing,’ she says out loud, but she doesn’t believe herself, and hurriedly switches it off again.
A car draws up outside the house and Korzilius, the blond inspector, gets out. Martina’s body is set in motion and she opens the door to him, the pang in her chest sharper. She can see from the way he looks at her that she must stink. She should have done as Frank said and had a shower, put on clean clothes. She draws the woollen scarf tighter about her shoulders and presses her arms to her body. Frank manages to keep functioning – to remain calm and down-to-earth and sensible, and be there for the kids. How does he do it? And how does he manage to comfort her, even when all she does is berate him, like yesterday evening?
‘Can we sit down?’ the inspector asks. ‘Is your husband here?’
His expression – he knows something. She’s afraid of falling
into an abyss, into a black hole. ‘Jonny . . . Has anything . . .? You’ve . . .’
The inspector takes her by the arm. ‘No, we haven’t found your son.’ He propels Martina towards the kitchen.
‘Frank’s taking the kids to his parents’ house.’ Her teeth are chattering now and her knees are jelly again. Unresisting, she lets the inspector direct her to the corner bench. He opens the fridge, takes out a carton of orange juice, finds a glass. ‘Drink this.’
The smell of Martina’s fear fills the room. The inspector sits down opposite her and waits for the trembling to subside.
‘The dachshund – Dr D.,’ he says, ‘Jonny brought it with him when he moved in with you, didn’t he?’
She nods.
‘Your husband, Frau Stadler. One of the witness statements suggests he wasn’t too pleased about the dog coming to live with you. Is that true?’
Frank had hated Dr D. from day one. He couldn’t bear the way the dachshund dug up the flower beds and did his business on the lawn. He had fumed inwardly whenever Jonny brought the dog to the table and petted it on his lap. But he had kept a grip on himself – for her sake and because the boy was so traumatised.
‘We were none of us happy at that time,’ Martina explains with an effort. It had felt like drowning: The pain’s too much to bear. The babies are getting a raw deal. I can’t get through to Jonny – and what passion there was between Frank and me has gone. And then there’s that bloody dog, getting under our feet and looking at us with his big doggy eyes, because he’s gone and shat on Frank’s lawn again – and no end in sight. That’s how it was, but she can’t tell that to this fresh-faced young man. He wouldn’t understand; he doesn’t know what pain is.
‘Of course not,’ says the inspector – as if he has any idea how much unhappiness death can wreak on a family. ‘But your husband doesn’t like dogs, does he?’
‘He got used to Dr D. Why are you asking, anyway?’
‘I’m sorry, Frau Stadler. It looks as if somebody injured Jonny’s dog – mutilated it. We don’t know for sure yet, but we have found an ear in Königsforst which is almost certainly one of your dachshund’s ears.’