Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

  The darkness returns. Somewhere a husky voice says, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s not possible.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. As far as we can tell, the dog licence number tallies with the tattoo in the ear. We’ll know for certain when we’ve done a few tests.’

  Such darkness. She can’t bear it. She jumps to her feet, sways, staggers to the sink and vomits orange juice and bile over the dirty pans.

  The inspector is behind her immediately, holding her steady until the retching stops. She wipes her mouth with kitchen paper – she must get out of here. Her body is set in motion again. She totters into the hall, through the living room, and onto the patio where the heat hangs heavy under the awning. The inspector follows close behind.

  ‘Please, Frau Stadler, I know this is hard for you, but we need you to help us. Who might have done such a thing – cut off Dr D.’s ear?’

  Martina shakes her head dully. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Oh God, the poor dog. And Jonny! Oh my God, Dr D. mutilated – I can’t bear it.’

  The inspector waits until her desperation has subsided, then he starts on the nasty questions again. About Jonny’s friends. About potential enemies. About Frank and Jonny. About Frank and Dr D.

  ‘Find him, rescue him!’ she yells in the end. ‘But stop torturing us. We’re Jonny’s family, for God’s sake, his family. That means sticking together, even when things don’t go the way you want, taking the rough with the smooth. We haven’t hurt Jonny!’

  The inspector looks at her – searchingly, as if he were weighing things up.

  ‘Has your husband told you where he was on Saturday afternoon?’

  Martina stares at him, unable to reply.

  ‘I can see that you love Jonny,’ the inspector says after a while. ‘But are you sure your husband feels the same way about your nephew?’

  ‘Get out of here, clear off,’ the strange, husky voice whispers. Martina waits for it to say more: I’m quite sure Frank loves Jonny as much as I do. Or just: Of course he does. But however hard she tries, she can’t force herself to say the words.

  *

  A free afternoon. It’s so hot that chess club has been cancelled. Tim’s mother is frying in the sun in a deckchair, her white straw hat with the tissue-paper flowers covering her face.

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Have fun, Timmy,’ the hat replies in a flat, vacant voice. No ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When are you coming back? ‘How are you?’ His mother doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s the way she is when she has her moods. Tim pushes his bike out of the shed. Sometimes he hates it when his mother retreats into a world of her own, but at least it’s better than when she follows him around, being neurotic.

  He rides to the quarry pond, chains his mountain bike to a birch and tiptoes along the path to the lookout point. Across the way is the steep sandy path you have to slide down if you want to get to the beach. Down below it’s packed. Lilos, towels, cool boxes, and hordes of tanned people. Squeals of excitement and snatches of music drift up to him from the turquoise water – that, and a whiff of sun cream. Tim kneels down behind a bush and raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes. A scout has to be invisible, Jonny told him. A scout is someone who is there and yet not there. He finds out all he needs to know about his enemies – often more than they know themselves. Then he’s ready to act.

  Slowly and intently, Tim observes faces and bodies. A few girls from his class in Day-Glo bikinis. His cousin Ivonne, lighting up a cigarette – if her mother knew. And there in the water, a short distance away from the others, are Viktor and Ralle, toting cans of beer, debating something. Or are they arguing? Tim watches them for a while – a shame he can’t lip-read. He lowers the binoculars. What are they doing here? They’re usually at the swimming pool. He hadn’t really felt like swimming anyway, without Jonny, but now sliding down the sandy slope is out of the question. And Lukas and his posse are bound to be at the pool.

  Tim unlocks his bike and cycles around aimlessly for a bit. He’s on his own again. They’ll soon leave you alone, Jonny promised him last Friday. What had he meant? He hadn’t wanted to let on and now Tim might never find out. Tears shoot into his eyes and he blinks them away. Jonny and his secrets – other people’s secrets, his own secrets. Jonny the scout.

  At a kiosk, Tim buys an ice cream. He sits down on a bench and peels off the wrapping. The ice is stickily sweet and cold on his teeth. It tastes horrible, and he shouldn’t really be snacking between meals because it makes you fat. But he finishes it anyway. No Dr D. to help him any more. Who are the enemies Jonny was watching? He never told Tim, and Tim always assumed that all his talk of friend and foe was something to do with the Red Indian camp. But what if it wasn’t? Lukas and the others are right, he thinks: I’m useless, I’m a failure. I don’t even know who my best friend’s enemies were. They’ll soon leave you alone. Jonny wasn’t as blockheaded as Tim; he was genuinely interested in Tim. What happened last weekend at the Red Indian club? Did Jonny do something stupid? Did he get too close to one of his enemies? But who is this enemy? And what has he done to Jonny?

  All at once, Tim knows what he has to do. He swings himself onto his bike and pedals fast and furiously so that he can’t change his mind. He doesn’t stop until he reaches an empty factory building. He knows Jonny sometimes sneaked off here, because he watched him. He watched him secretly – secretly and guiltily, because he should have trusted his best friend, and instead he was always making sure he wasn’t going behind his back. But Tim never followed Jonny into the building; he was too scared to do that. Scared of the dark factory hall, but more than anything, scared Jonny might see him. Mummy’s boy, arse-licker, Rinker Stinker, Lukas jeers in his head. Chicken. Going to pee his pants.

  Tim hides his bike in a clump of bushes and skirts the side of the building the way Jonny always did. There are graffiti and tags sprayed on the brick walls and jagged window panes glint in the sun, sharp as sharks’ teeth. A rusty iron door stands ajar; Tim squeezes through into the factory hall. It’s gloomy inside – filthy. Enormous cable drums are scattered about the floor, pieces of railway track, indefinable machine parts, rubbish. What did Jonny do here? Why did he come and hang out here? Tim crosses the hall. In the far corner, someone has made a kind of snug: three old sofas, a crate serving as a table, more graffiti on the wall. A full ashtray, half-burnt cemetery candles in red plastic holders and empty bottles suggest that people meet here. There’s even a ghetto blaster, a bong, and a rusty iron stove.

  Tim’s heart is pounding. Is it possible he got Jonny so wrong? Did Jonny come here to meet some gang Tim knew nothing about? What did you think, Rinker Stinker? That Jonny likes you and takes you everywhere like his dog? Tears prick Tim’s eyes. He kicks the stove in frustration and then gives a yell of pain; he’d forgotten he was wearing sandals. He drops onto one of the sagging sofas to nurse his toe. Crybaby, Mummy’s boy. Serves you right.

  In the factory hall it’s cooler than outside – cool and quiet. The pain gradually subsides and Tim can think straight again. What did Jonny do here? He surely didn’t come here to sit on the sofa and smoke the bong. Or did he? Tim scans the hall again, trying to take in every detail, like a true scout. The stove door is open; that’s the only thing that’s changed. He kneels down to close it, because a good scout leaves no trace of his presence, and he sees something inside – something that doesn’t belong there, something familiar. Tim reaches in and pulls it out – Jonny’s knife, his sheath knife with the red leather strap studded with glass beads. Only on Friday they had used it to cut Tim’s liver sausage sandwiches. Why did Jonny put his knife in the stove? Where’s the leather sheath Jonny wore on his belt? And, most important of all, when did he bring the knife here if he was in the Red Indian camp? None of it makes any sense. Tim goes over to one of the murky windows and holds the knife to the light. The blade is stained with something reddish brown. It looks like blood.

  *

  ‘Some of the blood in the bush where the
baseball cap was hanging was from a dog, some was human,’ reports criminal technician Karin Munzinger, whose surname, these days, is the same as that of her colleague Klaus.

  ‘Was there much blood?’ Manni looks up from his notepad.

  ‘Not a lot. And all in all we found more animal blood than human blood.’

  So perhaps it isn’t the crime scene after all, Manni thinks – just another mystery. But who can say, as long as they don’t have a clearer set of clues. Strangulation, suffocation, poison – there are plenty of ways of killing a person without shedding blood. The question is, whose is the human blood?

  ‘How long . . .?’

  ‘By tomorrow afternoon – the day after tomorrow at the latest – we’ll know whether or not the blood is Jonny’s – and his dog’s.’

  Tomorrow or the day after – of course – nothing in this case is fast-moving. Manni pushes a few strands of damp hair behind his ear. Karin sits down and stretches out her legs. The electric desk fan at the head of the conference room puffs stale warm air into their faces with a low hum. Manni plunges a hand into the bag of gummy bears contributed by Bruckner. The yellow ones are his favourites – always were. When he was at nursery, his mother had baked him a chocolate birthday cake decorated with gummy bears. Someone else had got the slice with the yellow bear and Manni had cried. His father had clouted him one. He called it ‘toughening the lad up’.

  Petra Bruckner studies the map of Königsforst they have hung on the wall. The Red Indian camp, the lay-by, the shelter and the place where Jonny’s cap was found are marked in yellow highlighter. Bruckner stabs three red and four blue flags into the adjoining areas.

  ‘So far no one has reported seeing Jonny accompanied by anybody. The red flags mark the spots where witnesses claim to have seen Jonny and his dog. Blue is witnesses like Hagen Petermann who heard barking at around 5 p.m.’

  ‘No one saw the boy just outside the hut?’

  ‘Not so far. But it’s striking that the witnesses who say they heard the barking were all relatively close to the hut.’

  Manni joins Bruckner at the map. ‘This red flag here isn’t far from the lay-by, which would put it outside Jonny’s area of movement.’

  Petra Bruckner nods. ‘That’s a borderline case – an elderly gentleman who saw a boy, but couldn’t say for sure whether his T-shirt was red.’

  ‘Maybe he’s colour blind.’

  Bruckner nods thoughtfully. ‘That’s one possibility. I’ll ask him. Timewise it would more or less fit. All the other witnesses say it was after 5 p.m. when they saw Jonny or heard the dog. But this one here’ – she taps the red flag – ‘claims he saw the boy at around 4 p.m.’

  ‘In which case, after leaving the camp, Jonny would have gone first to the lay-by and then to the hikers’ shelter.’

  ‘The only question is why? And what happened next?’

  ‘Someone cut off the dog’s ear. With a weapon we haven’t yet found. Then the pair of them melted into thin air.’

  They exchange weary glances. Manni swipes the last of the yellow bears from the bag as they work out how to proceed. Frank Stadler must be more closely monitored. The neighbours need questioning. The Sioux of Cologne need to be tackled again, especially the teenagers. Big Chief Petermann is presumably not the only one to have noticed that Stadler couldn’t stand his stepson’s dog. The danger is that Stadler turns out to be innocent and they end up plunging the family even deeper into disaster. But what alternative do they have? A solitary walk in the woods isn’t exactly a solid alibi. Maybe they need to be tougher with Stadler – summon him to headquarters, hold him on remand. But on what grounds? They can’t even say with any certainty that Jonny is dead. Hang on in there, Manni thinks. That’s all we can do. If Stadler has a skeleton in his closet, he’s bound to make a mistake sooner or later.

  It is also to be hoped, of course, that more witnesses will come forward – that the boy has been seen with another person. So far, the interviews Bruckner has carried out at the boy’s school have been as fruitless as all the other lines of enquiry. The statements from Bertolt Brecht Grammar read as if Jonny had spent his school hours in a separate orbit from his classmates. The boy was universally respected, but solitary. He was highly intelligent, and had even skipped a grade. That boy from the chess club, Manni thinks – Tim or Tom – several teachers and witnesses had described him as Jonny’s best friend, and it’s true, he was clearly shaken by Jonny’s disappearance. But then why didn’t he make a more helpful statement? I must talk to the boy again tomorrow, Manni thinks. Tomorrow. Today I must look in at the Institute of Forensics and at the hospital.

  The dregs of oxygen being swirled around the room by the fan are now so thin that eyes are beginning to droop. Last night was too short, Manni thinks. The day’s passed too quickly and we haven’t got anywhere. I can forget about going back to Division 11. He reaches for the remote control and turns on the local news. After seven and a half minutes, the anchorwoman switches off her smile and asks her viewers in serious tones to pay particular attention to the search for a missing boy. Martina Stadler appears on the screen. She must have showered after Manni left. Her reddish-brown hair is tied back in a glossy but maternal pony tail, and she has at last changed out of that sweaty green sundress and put on an ironed white blouse. She’s beautifully made up too, apart from her tear-stained eyes, but they give the appeal precisely the dramatic authenticity it requires to grab the attention of viewers jaded by too many bad crime series.

  Martina Stadler clasps her hands together as she speaks, and her voice is soft and trembling. ‘Help us!’ she ends, ‘Jonny, if you hear this, please get in touch. Come back to us – we love you.’ She tries to say something else but she’s choked by tears, and a hard cut takes viewers back to the news studio and the still-serious anchorwoman, who is standing in front of a photo of Jonny and Dr D. She reads out the official missing persons report and the dog licence number appears in an insert. ‘It looks as if somebody cut off the wire-haired dachshund’s ear, perhaps to prevent Jonny’s dog from being identified,’ the anchorwoman explains. Wow, Manni thinks, our press department did a good job; that was actually coherent for once. If this yields some usable evidence, we might make some progress at last.

  *

  ‘You were good.’ Frank steers the car along the Rhine embankment to the Zoo Bridge. ‘I’m sure someone who saw Jonny and Dr D. will come forward now, and it’ll all turn out all right.’ He reaches for Martina’s hand.

  ‘No, it’s too hot.’ Martina pulls her hand away. Nothing will turn out right; she feels it with every cell in her body. Even her TV appeal can’t change that. She turns her head and looks out of the window. Lightly clad people are strolling under the plane trees by the river and she hates them for their cheerfulness. Then it occurs to her how easily the so-called ‘tourist murderer’ could strike again, and however vile the thought is, it consoles her more than Frank’s words can. You were good. As if she’d auditioned for a part in the theatre. As if she were being assessed. How revoltingly tasteless.

  Are you sure your husband loves Jonny as much as you do? Korzilius’s question is still reverberating in her head. All day long she has tried to ignore the echo. When Korzilius left, she washed up the vomit-filled pans, had a shower and finally got round to ringing her parents, dropping hollow, meaningless phrases down the line into the dumb horror at the other end. Then Frank came home and they ate side by side in silence, waiting until it was time for him to drive her to the television studio. And all the time she tried not to hear the terrible question in her head.

  But now that Frank has dropped her outside the house and gone on to pick up Marlene and Leander, the question is so loud she can no longer ignore it. Martina crosses the lawn to the far end of the garden and straddles the swing in the old walnut tree, as innocent as a little girl in an Astrid Lindgren book. She clutches the rope and swings gently.

  Are you sure your husband loves Jonny as much as you do? And if he doesn’t? Now,
at last, she allows this second question to take shape. How often has she discussed such scenarios with her colleagues at the after-school care centre? How often have they suspected a father or stepfather of abusing his child while the child’s mother shut her eyes to what was going on? Up to a point, of course, it was understandable that the mother turned a blind eye to the facts, on the principle of ‘what shouldn’t happen, can’t happen’. Because if the suspicion should prove justified, it leads into a hole that is deeper and blacker than can be endured by anyone who loves that person. But you have to protect your children, Martina always said. Maternal love should be stronger than a woman’s love for a man, stronger than her desire, more important than her own satisfaction. Time and again she had ended the discussions in these terms, not noticing how self-righteous and arrogant and blind she was. Of course, as soon as it’s your own life that’s at issue, nothing is that straightforward or clear cut.

  Martina doesn’t have to get out her records or the many leaflets from the youth welfare office and the Child Welfare Association to recognise the truth. She knows it’s often outsiders who are the first to see the signs, and that their suspicion is almost always confirmed. She knows that male relatives and family friends constitute a not insignificant threat to the children in their care. Her mouth is dry; she feels cold again. In the days – or was it weeks? – before Jonny went missing, he had seemed depressed, more reserved than usual. Why hadn’t she got him to confide in her? He’ll come to me when he’s ready, she had told herself – he always does. She notices that she’s beginning to tremble. Would I have acted the same way if Jonny had been my own child? What am I shutting my eyes to? And who is Frank, the man I think I’ve loved for eleven years? Had he also been acting differently in the weeks before Jonny disappeared? Why can’t he tell me where he was when Jonny went missing? And why didn’t he ring me up, at least, when he first began to suspect something? He said he didn’t want to interrupt the drama workshop I’d been looking forward to for so long. Ridiculous.