by Gisa Klönne
*
‘The person you have called is unavailable right now,’ says an artificial female voice in nasal tones. Manni cuts the connection. Judith clearly has better things to do than take his calls. He considers leaving a message on her landline, but decides against it. If she wants anything, she’ll get in touch; he knows that from experience. And he’ll see her tomorrow anyway.
He arrives in Rath and parks at the entrance to Petermann’s Construction Company. The house at the edge of the property is a swanky monstrosity with an oriel tower; the big chief evidently regards his private property as a kind of showpiece. Drive, front wall, steps, façade and the path that leads around the house to an extensive garden – everything is plastered with all manner of material from the construction company, not necessarily to the advantage of the overall aesthetics of the place.
‘It’s Sunday – I was just about to leave for the camp,’ Hagen Petermann complains, but he ushers Manni in with a patronising gesture. Manni drops onto a black leather sofa while Petermann’s wife puts mineral water on the glass coffee table before retreating to the garden. There, a pale-blue pool is spotlighted by the midday sun, and a fat, maggot-white marble cherub trickles water onto the surface.
‘We’ve found Jonathan Röbel. He’s dead,’ says Manni, pushing aside the thought of Miss Cat’s Eyes, which has gripped him, entirely inappropriately, at the sight of the swimming pool.
‘My God,’ says Petermann. ‘Dead?’
‘He was found by fishermen in a pond, not far from your camp.’
‘Drowned?’
‘We won’t know until the autopsy. Where have you been in the last twenty-four hours, Herr Petermann?’
‘Are you suggesting I did it?’
‘I’m only doing my work, trying to form an impression.’
‘It was our summer party at the camp yesterday evening. I was there with my wife Monika until about one. After that we were here.’
‘And your son?’
‘Viktor too.’
‘The whole time?’
Petermann gets up and looks down at Manni. Manni suppresses the impulse to get up too. Instead, he leans back, trying to look relaxed, although he is anything but. He’s going to have to question all the would-be-Indians again, check alibis, wait for Forensics to comb through another section of land, wait for another hot lead to materialise. And then there’s Jonny’s autopsy. Manni looks Hagen Petermann in the eyes.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that Viktor and Jonny were in the same class?’
‘They weren’t friends. I didn’t think it was important.’
‘I must talk to Viktor.’
For a moment it looks as if Petermann is going to contradict him, but he gives a curt nod and leaves the living room. Manni looks out of the window at the pool where Petermann’s wife is now swimming lanes, her head craned up out of the water, presumably to protect her hair-do and sunglasses. Discreet gold jewellery flashes at her throat, very much in keeping with her overall style; Monika Petermann is a typical representative of that species of women who marry powerful men in order to shine at their sides – tanned, thin as a mountain goat, deeply and drearily perfect.
Petermann returns with his son in tow – an adolescent with the swagger of a reality TV star. He is taller and older than Jonny, his hair streaked with peroxide. Puberty, Manni thinks. How I hated it – the embarrassment, the secrecy, the permanent struggle for recognition. And yet there was no time more exciting.
‘The inspector has some questions for you.’ There is a new sharpness to Hagen Petermann’s voice.
‘I’d like to talk to Viktor on his own.’
‘Let’s sit down.’ Petermann’s tone brooks no contradiction. Hesitantly, Viktor perches on the edge of an armchair, avoiding all eye contact with either Manni or his father.
‘What do you know about Jonny, Viktor?’ asks Manni.
‘Why would I know anything about him?’
‘He was in your class.’
‘So?’
‘Viktor.’ Petermann’s voice is like a knife. A steep line has appeared on his forehead. He doesn’t like his son, thinks Manni. He despises him. Or am I so rattled that I see my own story everywhere?
‘Jonny wasn’t in my gang.’ Viktor is still staring at the floor.
‘Whose gang was he in then?’ Manni leans forwards.
‘No idea.’
‘Tim Rinker.’
Now Viktor looks at Manni for the first time. Unnerved? Taken aback? Angry? Before Manni can decide, Viktor’s eyes are on the carpet again.
‘Tim Rinker was friends with Jonny,’ Manni repeats. ‘Who else, Viktor?’
He shrugs.
‘Why wasn’t he friends with anyone in your class? Why wasn’t he friends with you?’
Viktor shrugs again, and Manni isn’t able to get much more out of him, in spite of – or more likely, because of – his father’s increasingly irritable admonishments. Did Jonny have a girlfriend? Was he popular? Unpopular? More shrugging – no, dunno. Did Jonny take drugs? Does anyone at Bertolt Brecht Grammar take drugs? Of course they do, Manni thinks, but how is Viktor to admit it with his father sitting next to him? Again Manni recalls his own adolescence, how he had lied to his parents, never telling them what he felt or did – and how, in an astonishingly short space of time, that had come to feel perfectly natural.
Not long after his fourteenth birthday, his world and his parents’ world had drifted apart; they became the inhabitants of two separate planets, side by side and yet alien to one another. Now part of one of those planets has burnt out, before Manni could visit it – before he could even make up his mind whether or not he wanted to visit it. He suddenly finds himself in a world where decisions have consequences and ‘too late’ really means too late. He’s known that for a long time, of course, but it has suddenly become real.
Who was Jonny really? Manni still can’t find a full answer to this question. But he has to, urgently, if he is to catch Jonny’s murderer.
‘Frank Stadler met a friend last Saturday,’ he says to Hagen Petermann. ‘Volker Braun. Do you know him?’
‘Vaguely. He was in the club until a year ago.’
‘Why did he leave?’
Now Petermann senior shrugs his shoulders in an unintentional parody of his son, whose own recalcitrance had caused him such intense annoyance only a moment before.
‘Volker had bought a house, I think,’ he says at length. ‘He did all the renovation work himself – he didn’t have time any more.’
‘So you don’t know anything else about Volker Braun, although he was in your club? How long was he a member, by the way?’
‘Four years. But we have more than fifty active members; I can’t be good friends with them all.’
‘Did you see Volker Braun last Saturday when you went for a walk in the woods?’
‘I’ve already told you I didn’t see anyone I knew.’
Viktor raises his head again and for a moment father and son look each other in the eyes. But if this silent exchange of glances conveys a message, Manni can’t decode it.
‘Where were you last Saturday, Viktor?’ he asks.
‘At a mate’s.’
‘Not at the camp?’
‘No.’
‘Or in Königsforst?’
A quick glance at his father. ‘No!’
‘Tell me what you did, you and your mate.’
‘Nothing. Just hung out.’
‘Where? What’s your friend’s name?’
‘Tell the inspector, Viktor,’ Petermann senior says. ‘And answer in complete sentences, please.’
‘We went to Ralle’s.’ Another sidelong glance at his father, who is pressing his lips together as if to stop himself from saying anything.
‘I need his full name,’ says Manni.
‘Ralf Neisser.’
‘A boy from your school?’
‘He lives nearby.’
‘Does that mean yes or no?’
‘Ralle’
s not at Brecht.’
‘Viktor has friends at the grammar school too, of course,’ Hagen Petermann puts in. ‘He has a very nice girlfriend for instance, Ivonne Rinker, who’s in his class. You saw her on Saturday evening, didn’t you, Viktor?’
For the first time, Manni has no trouble interpreting the glance Viktor gives his father – he looks as if he’d like to gag him. ‘Yeah,’ he mumbles after a while.
‘Ivonne is Jonny’s best friend’s cousin, is that right?’ Manni asks.
For a moment Viktor looks Manni in the eyes again, cold and wary. Then he stares at the glass coffee table and shrugs again.
‘Yes. So?’
He’ll have to find another way of tackling Viktor, without his parents or teachers. He must find some way into the world of the schoolchildren if he wants to find out anything about Jonny and solve this case. If he fails, there will be a disaster, another disaster. Manni doesn’t know why he is suddenly so sure of this; he only knows he isn’t wrong.
*
Strawberry cake with whipped cream. Chocolate gateau. The smell of coffee. The clatter of crockery. But the familiar voices of the adults are less cheerful than at the usual Rinker get-together – more subdued. It’s because of his friend Jonny – Jonny whom he trusted and believed in; Jonny who abandoned him and is now dead. Tim stares at the slice of strawberry cake on his plate; it looks as if it’s growing larger by the minute, swelling like a blowfish that’s trying to intimidate its attacker. Only that Tim doesn’t feel like an attacker; he feels empty, as if he, too, were dead. But Jonny’s knife, like a last goodbye, is still in with the sea urchins in the box under Tim’s bed, because he’s too cowardly to use it.
‘You aren’t eating anything, Timmy.’ His aunt strokes his head and slaps a dollop of whipped cream onto his plate next to the cake. ‘There, that’ll help it slip down nicely.’
Obligingly, Tim pokes his fork into the cake and pushes a piece into his mouth. All at once it seems to swell to a sweet, choking mass, and Tim wishes he had Dr D. there – Dr D. who used to love licking up cream and ice cream with his wet, rough tongue. He feels his Cousin Ivonne looking at him. Since Tim and his parents got here, she hasn’t let him out of her sight, staring at him whenever she thinks nobody’s looking. Snake, Tim thinks. Snake in the grass. You play the perfect daughter, serenade your dad on the piano and act all nice, but you can’t fool me; I know what you’re really like.
At last coffee is over. Ivonne says goodbye, all sweetness and smiles, and leaves to help a friend with her homework. She throws Tim a warning glance, as if he were thinking of grassing on her. As if that would get him anywhere. If there were any doubt at all, they’d believe Ivonne rather than him every time.
The grown-ups are now opening a bottle of sparkling wine and clinking glasses. Tim can sense that they’re dying to talk about Jonny – about Jonny and Ivonne and Tim. Adult talk.
‘Why don’t you go up to Ivonne’s room and listen to a CD if you’re bored, Timmy?’ his aunt suggests. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’
The others nod and smile. Tim knows how desperate they are to get rid of him.
He gets up and goes to the loo, where he sits on the toilet lid and listens through the tilted window to the chinking glasses and increasingly animated conversation. At last they begin to talk about their worries, in those strained voices that say: life is hard, but we’ve got the measure of it.
‘. . . Tim’s so sensitive, takes everything to heart . . . and now Jonny’s death on top of everything . . .’
‘Awful, simply awful.’
‘. . . hope his troubles at school don’t start up again . . .’
‘Ivonne’s been all right since she started at the new school, thank goodness . . . but it was so stressful before – always crying because she thought the other children didn’t like her.’
‘. . . ah well, it did get out of hand in the end.’
‘. . . good thing it’s over.’
‘Tim’s OK now too. Practically went down on his knees to us, begging us not to tell the police about it – says they don’t bully him any more.’
Ivonne’s room is enormous, much bigger than Tim’s. She has a four-poster bed, a white lacquered dressing table with a three-way mirror, an expensive stereo – even her own television and DVD player. Tim examines the CDs: Silbermond, Robbie Williams, Pink – girls’ stuff. A magnet board above the desk is hung with photos: Ivonne, Viktor and Ralle, arm in arm; school journey snapshots of the whole class, with Jonny looking pensive at the back; Ivonne in the middle of a gaggle of girls, laughing loudly, the most beautiful girl in the school.
It used to be different. She and Tim were always in and out of each other’s houses and told each other everything. They’d been close, and Tim had been delighted that Ivonne was moving to his school. But the girl who walked onto the school playground after the summer holidays was not the cousin he knew; she was a cool, feisty girl in trendy clothes who treated him as if he didn’t exist, as if the hours of shared confidences had never happened. Tim spots another photo from the same school journey, half hidden behind a postcard of a horse – Ivonne and Jonny. Ivonne is in profile and Jonny is looking at her as if she were a very special, very precious thing – as if he were her boyfriend. Jonny, you traitor.
The noise of a phone jolts Tim back to the present. Ivonne has forgotten to take her mobile with her; Tim finds it in the pocket of a pair of jeans lying on the floor next to the four-poster bed. Cautiously, he picks it up. It’s stopped ringing, and the display tells him that the call was from Ivonne’s voicemail – a new message. Tim goes to the window – the adults are on their second bottle of sparkling wine. He creeps to the door of the bedroom, opens it and listens out. All is quiet – no sign of Ivonne coming back early to collect her forgotten phone. Should he or shouldn’t he? Tim’s fingers have begun to press the keys even before he’s made up his mind. He clamps the phone to his ear, his heart pounding.
‘Hey, babe, where are you?’ It’s Viktor’s voice. ‘I’m waiting for you. And listen, if anyone asks, I was with you last Saturday night, OK? My old man will freak out otherwise. You know how much he hates Ralle.’
Vik – big, cool Vik – is scared of his dad. The discovery is so overwhelming that Tim has to sit down. Voicemail messages, received texts, sent texts – he clicks his way deeper and deeper into the world of his cousin, until he no longer feels quite so powerless. They’ll soon leave you alone. Perhaps Jonny is right in spite of everything; perhaps there is a way. But then Tim finds the pictures. Confronted with his shame, he hears their voices again, imagines Ivonne looking at the pictures, commenting on them, laughing at them – laughing at Tim’s humiliation. He recalls the way she had looked at him earlier. How can he ever look her in the eyes again? He clicks on ‘Delete’, a laughable attempt to undo the shame. Crybaby. Arse-licker. Rinker Stinker. What a small dick.
Tim pushes the phone back into Ivonne’s jeans pocket. How many phones are there at school? How many of his schoolmates have already seen those pictures? How many are yet to see them? Nothing is ever going to change for him. Jonny lied; he had no power. But now that Tim realises it at last, it’s too late.
*
Fortune is followed by misfortune, life by death – and then everything begins all over again, only different, maybe even better, at least for those who can believe in it. But belief plays no part in the life of a detective superintendent whose day-to-day work is called ‘corpse processing’. Judith lights a cigarette. Another five cigarettes and then her tobacco supplies are exhausted. They lie in front of her, ready rolled. Five cigarettes. Five small eternities of idle waiting. On the Death tarot card the black skeleton is cutting through puppet strings with its scythe – strings tying it to something that is obsolete and must be left behind. Is Charlotte’s death a beginning? And if so, the beginning of what?
A droning noise, deep and unnatural. An aeroplane. It comes as such a surprise that Judith doesn’t imme
diately react. Then she leaps up, puts wood on the fire and runs onto the jetty. She looks up at the sky and sees the silvery belly of the plane low over the lake; she waves and yells. Two men are sitting in the cockpit. Not David; strangers. The aeroplane heaves to, the engine falls quiet, the door swings open. One of the men jumps onto the jetty and ties up the plane. Another figure comes into view in the cockpit, a small figure with blond curls, who jumps onto the jetty in one easy bound.
‘Are you OK?’ asks Superintendent Margery Cunningham in her nightclub singer’s voice, the steep line between her eyebrows the only indication that her trip into the wilderness is no Sunday outing, and that she is not amused by Judith’s attempt to go it alone. She tells Judith she had begun to worry even before her cry for help. Judith’s hire car had been outside David Becker’s house for days and there was no trace of Becker himself.
‘He brought me here and then disappeared,’ says Judith. She feels pain as well as anger, saying it out loud for the first time, but all that will have to wait. As soon as she reaches the end of her account, Margery Cunningham radios for reinforcements and makes clear that she regards Judith as the chief witness in her investigation into the unsolved death.
‘I know I ought to stay, but I have to fly back to Germany this evening. I’ll help with the investigation from there as best I can,’ says Judith, when they reach Charlotte’s island. ‘Please, Margery.’
For a long time it looks as if her Canadian colleague isn’t going to reply. Without a word, she follows Judith to the place where Charlotte’s mortal remains are lying. Without a word, she crouches down. It’s only after carefully examining everything that she looks up at Judith, as if weighing the matter – a cherub in a checked shirt.