by Gisa Klönne
‘Terence Atkinson has admitted that he got Becker to bring Charlotte Simonis here. It seems she was stalking him. His wife, understandably enough, was frantic. But he swears that he didn’t hear from Charlotte after Becker brought her here.’
‘He once picked her up at the motel.’
‘They went out to eat. Afterwards he took her back to the motel. There are witnesses.’
Margery gets up without taking her eyes off Judith. ‘We have to find David Becker.’
Briefly, Judith feels again the warmth that had surged through her body when David touched her hand, when he gave her that look that was so familiar but already spoke of parting.
‘You have to help us find Becker,’ says Margery Cunningham. ‘Any detail you can remember might be important.’
Warmth, all that warmth. The contours of a stranger’s body against her own – a body that seemed made for her, that kept her grounded, comforted her, promised happiness. The smell of salty skin, the sight of the stars, the feeling of being able to overcome time. The feeling of being able to overcome everything. Don’t forget this.
‘You have to cooperate,’ Margery Cunningham says.
‘I know,’ replies Detective Superintendent Judith Krieger. Two bitter-tasting words.
*
Karl-Heinz Müller wasn’t going to pass up the chance to lead the autopsy; he seems to have got over his disappointment at missing the boules tournament. Forensics have finally released the boy and now he and the two assistant doctors are going about their work with unusual gravity. Manni looks on, fighting back the memory of his father, the pouch of urine hanging at his bedside, the bubbles of whitish saliva in the corners of his chapped mouth, the words that cannot now be taken back.
The external examination is complete: only slight lividity on the right-hand side; no knife or bullet wounds; no strangulation marks – and the x-rays have already shown that there are no freshly broken bones. Naked, pale and faintly yellow, Jonny Röbel lies on the steel table looking almost unscathed, except for the bruises on his arms, legs and chest, that yellowy-brown shiner on his left eye, and the cut lip which looks as if it had begun to heal before Jonny died. Where did he get all those bruises? Had Jonny the scout, Jonny the fighter for justice, got into a punch-up before his death?
Karl-Heinz is busy at the boy’s ribcage.
‘Think of his relatives,’ Manni murmurs, ridiculously, because a post mortem is subject to its own rituals, and peeling off the skin, opening up the body, removing the organs and stripping the corpse of its secrets is the whole purpose of it. Karl-Heinz gives Manni a long, hard stare, and Manni forces himself to grin. It is a small miracle to him that Karl-Heinz manages to stitch the bodies up at the end of every autopsy and leave them looking more or less presentable. He has no choice but to trust once again to the forensic pathologist’s skills and to try to forget Martina Stadler. The air conditioning hums softly and Manni has the feeling he has never left, although it’s more than six months since his last autopsy. The beautiful Darshan was little more than a child too. Like then, Manni feels as if he has lost touch with the real world. Day gives way to night, and summer to winter, but down here in the basement of the Institute of Forensics, there are only steel tables, tiled walls, strip lighting and drains. Down here there is only the whirr of bone saws, the clatter of metal instruments, the Latin jargon spoken into the microphone by the pathologists, the soft squeak of rubber soles on the grey tiled floors.
Karl-Heinz interrupts his muttering and straightens himself. ‘No water in the lungs.’
So he didn’t drown. Manni clears his throat. ‘Any sign of drugs?’
‘We’ll have to wait for the results from Toxicology.’
More waiting – of course. Manni’s mouth is dry. His last Fisherman’s Friend has dissolved and he has forgotten to stock up. He didn’t have lunch or afternoon coffee at his mother’s and he’s not at all sure he’ll make supper – a post mortem takes time and he was stupid enough to promise Martina Stadler she could see Jonny again afterwards. He had rung his mother earlier in the day and mumbled his usual apology into her silence: ‘Work, Mum, you know how it is. It’s really important. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’m sorry.’
Karl-Heinz points at a half-moon-shaped bruise under Jonny’s ribs.
‘That might be a shoe print.’
Carefully he measures the bruise, then peels off the skin, layer by layer, handing it to his assistant to preserve. ‘Haematoma, internal bleeding,’ Manni hears; the rest is medical jargon. The scalpel opens the abdominal cavity; Manni sees only stinking, black-red blood, but Karl-Heinz whistles a few bars of Queen as if he’s just won the lottery.
‘Massive internal bleeding,’ he says eventually. ‘That would explain the underdeveloped lividity.’
Internal bleeding. Manni leans on an autopsy table that is not in use, while Karl-Heinz and his assistants poke about in Jonny’s body, cutting and lifting out organs to be weighed and measured. Internal bleeding – what does that mean? Is it possible that Jonny Röbel wasn’t actually murdered – that he died of some illness? But then who threw him in the pond? Where was he before he died? It seems clear that he hasn’t been dead for much longer than forty-eight hours.
‘There’s half-digested food in his stomach – possibly mincemeat and tomato sauce,’ says Karl-Heinz. ‘Spaghetti Bolognese, or perhaps a hamburger. I’ll send a sample to the lab.’
Poison? Drugs? Wait and see is the order of the day. Manni goes and stares into the bloody abdominal cavity. He feels his own stomach turn over.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he says. The three men in green overalls are so engrossed in their work that they don’t even notice him; they set the saw to Jonny’s skull. In the toilets on the first floor, Manni splashes cold water onto his face, soaking the plasters on his hands and making his knuckles throb. His face looks green under the strip lighting. He goes outside and stares at the gravel bed planted with bamboo – the Japanese garden that Karl-Heinz has repurposed as a boules court. Such a lot to do – he must write reports; he must put Martina Stadler off until tomorrow; he must evaluate the information he has to date, draw up a list of priorities, and get a foothold in the investigation so that Millstätt and Judith don’t push him to the wall tomorrow. He suddenly remembers the old lady who found Jonny’s dachshund – he should have questioned her ages ago. Then there’s his mother to attend to, the funeral to be organised. It’s all too much.
‘Two-stage splenic rupture!’ Manni hadn’t noticed Karl-Heinz coming to stand next to him.
‘Two-page splenic what?’
‘Two-stage, if it’s all the same to you. Splenic rupture, which is to say a torn spleen. And two-stage means that the first injury happened considerably earlier than the massive bleeding we found in the abdominal cavity.’
‘A torn spleen – how do you get one of those?’
‘Pretty easily – by being hit or kicked. Doesn’t even have to be particularly violent. A splenic rupture is a typical fighting injury.’
‘And it’s fatal?’
‘It’s the two-stage aspect that’s the problem. The spleen tears, but the bleeding remains inside the organ to begin with. The injured person may not even notice anything, and the injured spleen becomes a kind of time bomb. Eventually it tears again, blood flows into the abdominal cavity – a lot of blood – and by then it’s usually too late.’
‘So the day of the injury needn’t be the same as the time of death,’ Manni concludes, looking thoughtful.
Karl-Heinz nods. ‘Injury and exitus can be several hours or even several days apart.’
‘So Jonny could have been hit in the woods on Saturday but not died until Thursday or Friday?’
‘Indeed!’
‘Where was he all that time? What was he doing? Why didn’t he ask anyone for help?’
‘He certainly ate something, about eight hours before he died. And some of the bruises look as if they weren’t inflicted until later.’
‘He
was hit several times?’
The forensic pathologist lights another Davidoff from the glowing butt of his last. ‘Yes. And somebody kept his corpse cool before throwing it in the fishing pond.’
‘Somebody kept Jonny Röbel captive and abused him,’ says Manni. ‘Somebody with access to a cold store.’
‘Needn’t have been a proper cold store. Only somewhere cooler than outside.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’ll put pressure on the lab – maybe they’ll find something else.’ Müller stubs out his cigarette and disappears back into his inner sanctum. Jonny Röbel’s dog was killed with drugs. Jonny was kept captive and tortured. Where? And, more importantly, who did it? Manni doesn’t have a fucking clue.
Monday, 1 August
Monday morning. Tired faces. The sky outside the windows of the Division 11 conference room has turned from blue to grey, but the storm that everyone is longing for still hasn’t come; the air tastes of heat and dust. ‘Our returners, Manni Korzilius and Judith Krieger are going to form the core of the Jonny Röbel murder investigation team,’ Axel Millstätt had announced at the start of the meeting, but so far there is no sign of Manni’s old – and new – team partner. A few colleagues had given Manni a nod or a thumbs-up sign, then talk had turned to the tourist murderer – the current state of the investigation; the necessary reinforcements to Investigation Team Tourist. Manni thinks of his mother and her generously laid breakfast table – as usual, he hadn’t lingered. He hasn’t mentioned his father’s death at headquarters. He can’t risk having his work given to somebody else or, worse still, being let off work altogether – not now that he’s so close to being reinstated in Division 11.
The door opens and Judith enters the room. She comes in soundlessly, almost cautiously, but as soon as her colleagues notice her, there is a small commotion. Judith smiles and makes a dismissive gesture like a pop star trying to calm a frenzied audience, but as at a concert, it is some time before calm returns. Judith looks wild. Yes, Manni thinks, there’s no other way of describing her; she looks wild, as if she’s come straight from a bush safari. Her unruly curls are sticking up all over the place, her face has grown thinner and the skin around her eyes is translucent, in spite of her deep tan. She’s wearing combat trousers which look as if they belong in the washing machine, and a black tank top with a rip at the neckline. An orange hoodie is tied around her hips, a rucksack is hanging over her shoulder, full to bursting.
‘Welcome back, Judith. I’m afraid we have to put off celebrating for the time being.’ Unlike Manni, Millstätt seems unsurprised at both the appearance and the late arrival of his erstwhile favourite. Judith nods, drops her rucksack on the needled felt carpet and leans against the wall. She doesn’t look at all sure that she wants to stay.
Twenty minutes later, however, the three of them are sitting in Millstätt’s office. Judith downs a coffee and pours herself another. Her body exudes the unmistakable smell of wood smoke; her fingernails are filthy. Silvery scales are flaking off her tanned, freckled arms. The last time the three of them met was beside a murderer’s corpse in a dank wood last winter. ‘We’ll talk later,’ the head of Division 11 had said. But then Judith had taken leave and Manni had been transferred, and no one had talked – not to him, at least.
‘We have three suspects, then,’ Millstätt says, when Manni has come to the end of his report. ‘Jonny’s stepfather; the head of the Red Indian club, Hagen Petermann; and – a possibility I personally consider well worth pursuing – a perpetrator from the school community. We know that ecstasy was involved, and it is a drug that’s particularly popular with the young.’
‘When will Karl-Heinz have the lab results?’ Judith asks.
‘He’s going to call me,’ Manni replies.
‘It would be better if you got in touch with him,’ says Millstätt.
An order, not, Thank you, Manni, for your report and all the overtime you put in. Manni throws his pen down on the table. ‘I have to go to Forensics anyway; I’ve arranged to meet the Stadlers there.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Judith gets up. ‘I have to start somewhere.’
Axel Millstätt gives them a nod. ‘I’m hoping for rapid progress.’
*
The traffic is at a standstill on Severin Bridge and the heat in town has thickened to a viscous humidity in Judith’s absence. Typical Cologne. Nothing has changed. Manni sits beside her, focusing grimly on the traffic, every cell in his body signalling: don’t touch. For a moment, Judith longs to be working with Patrick again; it seems to her impossible that they’ll never work together again – that there is nothing left of Patrick but a gravestone. There are plasters on the back of Manni’s hand. We’re a team held together by sticking plaster, thinks Judith. We’ll talk later, Manni – when I have somehow managed to shower and change and have a bite to eat; when I’ve read through the files and informed Berthold of the death of his only friend.
The mourning room in the Institute of Forensics is in the basement. Back in the seventies, it must have complied with somebody in government’s idea of interior design and reverence for the dead: black walls that swallow the dim artificial light of the porthole lamps and a faux-religious stained-glass window. There was presumably once a cross on the wall, but it has been removed in a fit of multicultural political correctness to avoid offending non-Christian members of society. Today there is no symbol of hope for any religious community – nothing to distract from the long Plexiglas hood that covers the mortal remains of fourteen-year-old Jonny Röbel, and allows his step-parents to say goodbye to him, grateful that Karl-Heinz and his assistants didn’t take the boy’s face away, along with everything else. In the anteroom, a stretcher is leaning against the wall – ready to be put to use should either of the mourners collapse.
Judith looks at Jonny’s relatives – the thin, stony-looking red-haired woman, who keeps running her hand over the Plexiglas, as if she were stroking Jonny’s face, and the handsome man slumped in one of the black upholstered chairs with the metal legs, who looks as if he might need the stretcher at any moment. Between the two of them is an invisible but highly efficient dividing wall. Mined area, thinks Judith, like there used to be between East and West Germany. Frank Stadler is holding back information – maybe he’s the perpetrator, or trying to cover up for the perpetrator. His wife, I would say, is innocent, but there’s something dodgy about her too. We must step up the pressure, Manni had said. Once, Judith would have agreed. Now, more than anything else, she feels tired, and her tired mind is filling with memories – memories of Patrick, the friend and colleague she lost for ever, memories of David, of Margery Cunningham. All of a sudden, Judith isn’t sure it’s right to expect a victim’s relatives to betray one another. And yet it is unavoidable – the dark side of any investigation. If you want to achieve a breakthrough in the name of justice, you have to sow seeds of doubt to make people break their silence.
Margery Cunningham is going to send the German Criminal Investigation Department an official request for administrative assistance, mentioning Judith who has promised to assist in the investigation from Germany. She has promised to investigate David’s past and to search for him; she thinks it unlikely he is in Germany, but Margery Cunningham isn’t interested in what Judith thinks. Unconditional cooperation was the price she had to pay to be flown to Toronto in a small plane, and she had, of course, agreed. But perhaps the price was too high – perhaps she is going to end up paying more than she bargained for.
‘We have some more questions to ask you,’ Manni says in the direction of the snow-white sarcophagus.
The red-haired woman lifts her head in slow motion. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’
Manni shakes his head.
‘And you, Frau Krieger?’
‘No.’
Martina Stadler nods. ‘Of course you don’t. You wouldn’t be here if you did.’
‘We—’
‘You can’t understand what it is to love a child –
what it is to lose a child.’
The man on the chair looks like a watchful animal.
‘Having children is an expression of hope,’ whispers Martina Stadler, ‘and a life-long lesson in letting go. That’s what my sister said at Jonny’s christening, when I was made his godmother. And she was right. When I had children of my own, I understood. The first smile, the first tooth, the first step, the first word, nursery, school, sports club, friends. You do what you can. You have your hopes and your fears. And you trust that everything will turn out all right, because there are no guarantees. You want a healthy child and find yourself with a sick one. You want a footballer and end up with a violinist. You learn to accept it, or even come to like it. As long as the children are happy, you tell yourself. You learn to draw your own happiness from their happiness, and it’s as much as you’re going to get back – you certainly won’t get anything you can build on. It’s nonsense to talk of having children.’
Again, Martina Stadler strokes the Plexiglas, leaning over it, looking at Jonny’s face.
‘Letting go. But this isn’t what Susanne meant; she’d never have accepted this, she can’t have meant this. You can’t ask this of parents.’
Abruptly she moves away from the bier.
‘Please go now and leave us alone with Jonny. Maybe we can answer your questions afterwards, when we’re finished.’ She reaches into her handbag. ‘Here, make sure Jonny has his torch with him.’
‘I can’t,’ Judith is about to say, but Manni holds out his hand and gives Martina Stadler an almost conspiratorial nod.
The staccato clatter of a computer keyboard is coming from Karl-Heinz’s office. He waves them in and immediately returns to hacking away at the keys using some ingenious four-finger system. Beside him, a fag is burning down in an overflowing ashtray. Folders, medical reference books and CDs are piled up around his desk. On a shelf, a half-eaten chocolate rabbit and a human skull grin at each other beside Karl-Heinz’s boules.