Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

‘Marlene, Leander!’ Her voice sounds sharp. She drags the children back to the cart. The vicar follows her. ‘I thought he’d discussed it with you.’

  Marlene and Leander realise something’s wrong; they climb back into the cart without having to be told. Martina sets off, singing to them to stop them asking questions. She’s amazed that her voice doesn’t break.

  On Friday afternoons there was a drama course she would have liked to attend. But the discussion group did Frank good and they couldn’t always park the children at his parents, so Martina had gone without. The discussion group had made Frank more approachable, more relaxed. He had begun to shout less at the children. He and Martina hadn’t talked much about what went on at the meetings; he was never particularly forthcoming and she had learnt not to pester him with questions. But the men’s group had taken some of the pressure off him, and their marriage had improved. She soon noticed a difference and that was enough for her.

  Are you sure you can trust your husband? Martina keeps singing. The songs pop into her head, one after the other. It must be the shock. Or else her maternal instinct. She doesn’t care which, as long as the kids keep quiet and laugh, and she is spared from having to think.

  *

  Sniffer dogs, criminal technicians, humid heat. The small wood next to Frimmersdorf Power Station is teeming with policemen; the locals throng at the barrier tape. A boy’s corpse next to their power station – that’s enough of a sensation to get them out of their houses. The only problem is that, apart from the dachshund, there is no corpse at present. Manni’s phone buzzes – how many calls is that now?

  ‘You’ll never guess!’ says Karl-Heinz Müller cheerfully.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What the dachshund died of.’

  Too many unanswered questions, too little time – and now guessing games on top of everything else. At least Elisabeth Vogt’s condition seems to have stabilised. Father Lehmann is at her bedside and the doleful-looking Carmen Vogt is due to take over later. It was the best solution; the GP had ordered strict bed rest, but the old lady was determined not to go to hospital. ‘Barabbas, Barabbas,’ she had kept whimpering. It turned out to be the name of her ageing Alsatian. When Manni left, the faithful beast was lying next to her bed, licking her hand, which seemed to soothe her. But he won’t be able to question the old thing until tomorrow morning at the earliest. Manni clears his parched throat. He hasn’t drunk enough water and he’s sweating like a bull in a sauna.

  ‘Tell me what the dog died of, Karl-Heinz. I’m obviously never going to guess.’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue.’ The forensic pathologist puffs cigarette smoke into the receiver, loud enough for Manni to hear. Then he begins to clap – a quick, hectic, nerve-shattering rhythm. ‘Dff – dff – dff – dff,’ he hums in time to the beat. ‘Well?’

  ‘No idea.’ Manni can feel his patience slipping rapidly away.

  ‘Disco.’

  ‘Disco?’

  ‘Techno.’

  ‘Techno? Please, Karl-Heinz, it’s complete mayhem here.’

  ‘The chemo-toxicological analyses show acute MDMA toxicity at the time of death. MDMA 84 ng/ml serum, to be precise. A designer amphetamine which is sold as ecstasy.’

  ‘Jonny’s dachshund was on drugs?’

  ‘No doubt about it. As I said, this is an institute of forensics, not veterinary pathology; we did this analysis out of professional interest and because we’re nice people. All the same, I would venture to draw the following conclusion: the levels of MDMA in the dachshund’s blood would create quite a high, even in a human – maybe also cause circulatory collapse or even complete respiratory arrest.’

  ‘A techno dachshund. Incredible.’

  ‘Yup. By the way, the time of death was probably Saturday or Sunday. Any news on the boy?’

  ‘You can go back to playing boules for the time being, Karl-Heinz.’

  *

  Darkness is falling when Manni parks outside the Stadlers’ house for the second time that day. For once, Martina Stadler doesn’t look as if she’s shivering. Her bare wet feet are shod in rubber mules and her red hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s holding a watering can in her hand. Only her stony expression tells you that her world has been turned upside down.

  ‘I don’t know where Frank is,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t get in touch with you. I’d be glad if the children didn’t find out that you’re here again. They’ve just fallen asleep.’

  ‘We have the results from forensic pathology. Your dog died of an overdose of the party drug ecstasy.’

  The disbelief in her eyes seems genuine.

  ‘Is it possible that Jonny takes drugs?’

  ‘No. No way.’

  Martina Stadler takes two bottles of beer from the fridge.

  ‘Alcohol-free,’ she says. ‘Let’s go in the garden. I have to finish watering the flowers.’

  Manni sits down on the stone steps leading into the garden from the patio. For the first time today he thinks of Miss Cat’s Eyes. He’d like to watch her watering plants – even if he had always sworn up until now that all that mundane stuff in a relationship is a sure-fire way of dealing a death blow to eroticism. Maybe it wouldn’t have to be a shared garden to begin with, he thinks. Maybe she already has a garden. He drinks his beer and watches Martina Stadler wiping the froth off her lips, putting the bottle down on a stone, dead-heading wilted flowers, watering, pulling weeds and finally rolling up the garden hose.

  ‘I’m going to have to put your husband on the Wanted List, Frau Stadler. I need a photo of him.’

  She nods absently, but when she begins to speak, her voice is dispassionate. ‘Can you wait till tomorrow? For the children’s sake? It will be a disaster for them when that gets about – another disaster.’

  One night isn’t going to make a difference now. The ecstasy lead points more to the youth scene in any case. But who knows, perhaps Jonny turned to drugs because his stepfather was abusing him. Or perhaps the stepfather’s a dealer. Or Petermann – there’s that whole Holland business, which appears in a new light now they know that drugs are involved. Manni gets up. ‘All right, then, but can I ask you to give me the photo now?’

  He waits in the kitchen while Martina Stadler searches for a suitable picture. He puts the beer bottles next to each other by the sink and thinks of Miss Cat’s Eyes, of another day without karate practice, of his parents. He remembers how angry his father used to get when he mowed the lawn, in the days when he was mobile. He would curse and ram the lawnmower into the edges of the flowerbeds, until Manni’s mother begged him through her tears to leave the gardening to her in future. Manni feels more tired than he’s ever felt before.

  Martina Stadler is gone a long time. When she comes back, she gives him the photo and a sheet of paper folded into a stiff square.

  ‘The day before Jonny went missing, Frank withdrew twenty thousand euros from our account. I don’t know why.’

  *

  The sun has passed its zenith. The cloud of insects has taken over Charlotte’s bag of provisions. Judith leaves them to it. Day and night, sun and rain, life and death – in our everyday lives we can forget that we are, in spite of all our technological advances, at the mercy of all that. We curse the urban Moloch, glorify nature, and deny our own helplessness. It isn’t the big animals who have the real power in the wilderness, David had said. In May and June when the mosquitoes hatch it’s almost unbearable here; they eat you up. And sometimes in September there are gnats the size of a pinhead; you can’t see them, but you can feel them – and there’s nothing you can do about them.

  Judith takes the binoculars and scans the island. Something in its still sublimity attracts her, and the longer she sits here in the camp, the more she feels drawn to it. Perhaps Charlotte felt the same; she’s sure to have made a trip to the island. Maybe Judith will find some trace of her there, maybe even an explanation for her disappearance. She pushes the canoe into the lake and only takes a few minutes to re
ach the island, with its hardy trees and its bone-white rocks, stained red where the water laps at them. Branches stick out of the water, stripped of their bark by the wind and the weather, bleached and intertwined. They look like a mythical Chinese dragon guarding the island. Judith ties up the canoe and is suddenly certain that this is Charlotte’s island; her presence is almost palpable. I can feel it, thinks Judith. I can feel that Charlotte was here. But the next moment she thinks of David and where her feelings led her with him – straight to disaster. It’s a good thing Manni isn’t here, she thinks. He’d laugh himself silly. She hangs the shotgun over her shoulder, gets out of the canoe and clambers up the rocky bank. The island isn’t very large – perhaps two hundred metres by three hundred – but Judith makes slow progress. As soon as she moves away from the shore, the trees stand shoulder to shoulder. Their knotty roots claw the ground, a mute struggle between plant and rock, a struggle for existence.

  Out on the water, a loon seems to be keeping an eye on Judith’s exploratory efforts. At the western tip of the island, she understands why: a second loon is sitting on a nest. It opens its beak in a mute cry, fixing Judith with its cold red eyes. She draws back, certain now that Charlotte must have been here. A little later she finds a shelter, just big enough for one person to sit in. Dry fir twigs provide a screen, a dark-green tarpaulin serves as a roof. She crawls inside and peers out at the nest where the other loon is beginning to calm down. She tries to imagine what it must have been like in July, in the rain, at the mercy of the blood-crazed mosquitoes.

  Time passes. The loon seems to have forgotten Judith; its mate comes on land and totters to the nest. At such close quarters, she can see how large the loons really are. According to one of Charlotte’s books, their wingspan can reach as much as a metre.

  What was Charlotte looking for here in the wilderness? Did she really want to gather material for her Ph.D. and, if so, where are her notes? Judith crawls out of the shelter. She tries to move away without making a noise, but it’s impossible. The red eyes follow her, boring holes in her back. She straightens herself and quickens her pace, gripped all at once by a primal fear.

  Branches lie strewn on the ground – dead, dried branches, faded to the pale brown of bones. Judith stops and looks more closely. Her breath is racing as, with the trained eye of a criminologist, she identifies fibulae, pelvis, ribcage and skull. In front of her is a person, or what was once a person; what has been left by the insects and the birds and God only knows what other animals.

  Judith kneels on the ground. Tears stream noiselessly down her face. She doesn’t know why. She has found Charlotte’s camp. She has found Charlotte – or what is left of her. She has documented all her findings with photographs. Very cautiously, Judith extends a hand to stroke Charlotte’s skull.

  She knows now that David is not going to come back. He’s on the run.

  *

  Before driving to the hospital, Manni makes another detour to Königsforst lay-by. The car park is in some way connected to Jonny Röbel’s disappearance and he isn’t going to give up until he’s worked out how. Reality is a construct made up of the sum of the various ways of looking at it. The same marriage can be one person’s happiness and another’s prison. A lay-by can be a lay-by or a drug-trafficking spot. And what Manni’s mother calls his ‘last chance’ usually turns out to be rather less final than she insists.

  A delivery van is parked next to Mr Snack’s. Two men are unloading boxes. Manni goes over to them, waving his warrant card.

  ‘We’ve got papers – all in order, all clean,’ says Mr Snack.

  The first time Manni questioned Mr Snack he had forgotten to ask whether he had employees. A beginner’s mistake – unforgivable. Manni pushes his warrant card back in his pocket. Both men have assumed a silly, butter-wouldn’t-melt expression: ain’t done nothing, don’t know nothing, only playing – an old trick.

  ‘Can I have a Coke, please?’ Manni asks. ‘A cold one.’

  Taking his time, Mr Snack climbs into his van and produces a bottle.

  ‘On the house.’

  Manni looks at Mr Snack’s partner. ‘Saturday afternoon,’ he says. ‘Were you here?’

  The man squints questioningly at Mr Snack.

  ‘Everything’s in order here,’ he asserts.

  Manni drinks a gulp of Coke. ‘I can happily check up on that; I have a good friend on the environmental health board. But some simple information would do me.’

  He lays photographs of Jonny and Frank Stadler on one of the high tables. ‘Was either of these people here on Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘The boy was here, with a dog,’ Mr Snack’s partner says. ‘He went to the toilet.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Dunno. Didn’t notice.’

  ‘Was the boy alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  Mr Snack taps Frank Stadler’s picture. ‘This one here bought a bottle of water off of me, but I didn’t see the boy. Most people who come here stand at the tables, but this one here’ – he gives Stadler’s photograph another tap – ‘must have wanted a bit of peace and quiet. He went and sat over there by the edge of the woods and talked to some other bloke. Hardly ever see anyone sitting there.’

  ‘Talked. Just talked? Or did anything change hands?’

  ‘If it did, I didn’t notice.’

  ‘And the boy wasn’t with them?’

  ‘I didn’t see him.’

  ‘How did the two men arrive at the lay-by?’

  ‘Dunno. In a car?’

  ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  They stare at him, clueless.

  Manni takes down their details. ‘You’ll have to come to headquarters tomorrow – we need to record your statements.’ He gives the men his business card. ‘Give me a ring if anything occurs to you in the meantime.’

  The picnic bench where Stadler and Mr X allegedly sat is indeed isolated; all the other tables are near the parking bays. The forensics team might even find fingerprints here, but it’s unlikely. This case is getting Manni down; even the smallest success brings new questions with it, makes more work. Who did Frank Stadler meet here and why? It can’t be coincidence that Jonny was at the lay-by at the same time. Jonny the scout. Jonny the Brave, the fighter for justice. Perhaps he was watching his stepfather. Perhaps he discovered something he shouldn’t have done and had to die. If, that is, he did die. Dead or alive, Manni has to find the boy, for Christ’s sake. And he has to confront Frank Stadler. But of course he can’t do that until he’s found him. Why does he have to do all this on his own? Why is there no one in Division 66 – apart from that lame arse Bruckner – to help him?

  Manni’s phone begins to buzz – a Bonn number that seems vaguely familiar.

  ‘Herr Korzilius? Manfred Korzilius?’

  The undertone in the stranger’s voice is like a punch in the stomach. Manni knows what’s coming; he would like to be mistaken, but he knows that tone.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Herr Korzilius. Your father passed away half an hour ago . . .’

  . . . without suffering . . . a second stroke, last night . . . didn’t recover consciousness . . .’

  Shit.

  ‘. . . your mother, Herr Korzilius, she’s not in a good way. We’ve given her a tranquilliser. Can you come as soon as possible?’

  Once Manni’s father had brought him a whole bag of yellow gummy bears from one of his trips. Manni hid in his bedroom and ate them all in one go. Afterwards he felt sick and couldn’t eat any supper. His father had belted him one. When Manni got a place at the grammar school, his father thought he was wasting his time. At the school leavers’ celebrations, Manni had persuaded himself that his father was proud of him, but the old man didn’t say a word; he only put away too much beer and schnapps. It was the same a few years later when Manni joined the force.

  Policeman. Throwing your life away. Manni lurches across
the grass to the Tarmac and into the toilets. He staggers into one of the stalls and pukes a sticky spume of Coke and kebab into the steel toilet bowl. He pukes until there’s nothing left inside him and he tastes bile; he beats his fists against the wall until his knuckles bleed. His mother was right – he’s too late.

  A considerable time later, he washes his hands and face, straightens himself and stares into the stainless-steel mirror that throws back a pale, distorted version of his face. Blood drips into the basin and runs between dirty streaks to the plughole. There goes your life, he thinks. He can’t cry.

  *

  Darkness comes, bringing with it the sounds of night. The wind has dropped again. The lake reflects the last light of evening, then the first stars and the fire that Judith has lit on the island shore. There are no signs of a violent crime on the island. There are no traces of violence on the bones. But how can she determine the cause of death with any certainty, when any number of injuries and clues could have disappeared with the flesh and the tissue?

  A woman alone in the wilderness. Hour after hour. Day after day. Perhaps she exchanges the odd word with the pilot who brings her food. If she’s in the mood, she paddles over to his log cabin when she hears his plane, but if she isn’t quick, he’s gone before she’s got there. What did she do when she found herself longing for words, for physical contact – perhaps only for the sound of her own voice in a conversation?

  A woman sitting by the fire, talking to herself. A woman alone in the wilderness. A woman and a man in the wilderness. He’s the only person who knows where she is, and she pays him to keep quiet and to bring him food. Perhaps one day she asks for something he doesn’t want to give her, so he kills her. Perhaps that’s what happened. Perhaps Charlotte’s story with David began in exactly the same way as Judith’s.

  Judith drinks a gulp of whisky, listening to ‘Messin’’ by Manfred Mann. People mess up their lives – their relationships, their careers. Judith turns up the volume on her iPod and sings along – the same song, over and over. It helps her forget her loneliness. It’s a song she has always listened to, all her life, ever since she first heard it on the record player she had saved up for. Back in the days when she and Charlotte were in the same class, when Judith would escape from the tyranny of her classmates to the safety of her room after school – to her music and her dreams.