by Gisa Klönne
‘Sorry about the tournament,’ says Judith.
‘Did you have a good time in Canada?’
‘Long story. What should we do with the Stadlers? They’re downstairs in the mourning room and refuse to leave.’
‘Some people need longer than others. Some keep coming back. We’ve seen everything. Leave them. They’re not in anybody’s way.’
Manni lays the torch on the desk. ‘Give this to the boy. It’s against regulations, I know, but do it anyway and don’t ask any questions, OK?’
Karl-Heinz stops typing. He looks as if he’s going to refuse, but then he nods.
‘Do you have the lab results?’ Manni asks.
‘No drugs, no poison.’
‘Sure?’
Karl-Heinz folds his arms in front of his chest and eyes Manni with the expression of a hungry hawk.
‘We can rule out the possibility that master and dog went tripping together.’
‘Maybe not the youth scene after all,’ says Judith.
‘Shit.’ Manni pops a Fisherman’s Friend in his mouth. ‘I’m beginning to get sick of all this.’
*
It isn’t over. They’ll be back with their questions. Elisabeth walks slowly around a house that seems changed, alien. Carmen was hard at work all weekend, tidying, cleaning and washing – even tackling Barabbas, who now smells of camomile shampoo, his coat glossier and silkier than it’s been for a long time. She picked the cherries too, and the beans and strawberries, and she and Elisabeth pickled gherkins together and drank ‘cold duck’ on the terrace in the evening – white wine with sparkling wine and lemon, like when Heinrich was alive. Sometimes it’s nice to have company, Elisabeth thought. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to think about moving, Mother?’ Carmen had asked. ‘Frimmersdorf is so far away and there’s a nice old people’s home in Cologne.’ Elisabeth hadn’t been able to reply; she had started to shake. ‘It’s all right, Mother, it’s all right. You must get better first.’ The concern in Carmen’s voice had hurt Elisabeth – far more than her daughter’s constant impatience, far more than the scrutinising looks she gives her as soon as she thinks she isn’t looking. She kept asking her mother how she could think of staging this grotesque Gothic drama with a dead dachshund. ‘Why, Mother?’ It would all come out in the end, that much was clear.
Now Carmen is back in Cologne. Soon she’ll be opening up the travel agent’s where she makes customers’ dreams come true, taking a break every so often to peer at herself in the tiny mirror above the basin and dab at the worry lines on her forehead with a powder puff. I robbed her of her weekend off, Elisabeth thinks, with a pang of guilt. I shouldn’t have made such demands on her.
She fills a glass with tap water. Drink, Mother – it’s no wonder you keel over if you don’t drink in this crazy heat. A lot of old people die of dehydration, so please drink; I don’t want to lose you. Almost a declaration of love – unusual for Carmen. Elisabeth forces herself to finish the glass. Why does she feel no thirst when her body needs liquid? Why can’t she rely on it any more?
She didn’t tell Carmen what Barabbas had done. She didn’t tell the young blond inspector either. The Alsatian looks at her, raring to go, like the morning they found the dachshund in the wood. She tries to remember – the power station, the wood, the hope she had felt, because the day had seemed so young and innocent, so full of possibility. Then Barabbas had run off and she had heard that awful growling. Why hadn’t the dachshund barked – or at least whined? Would two dogs meet without making a noise? Or had she simply failed to hear it?
Elisabeth remembers the man – a figure she saw and yet didn’t see; someone she thinks she knows, but can’t identify. She wishes she were young again, brave enough to take risks with no fear of the consequences, but she’s a deaf old woman with memory lapses, who buries dead dogs in suitcases and has started seeing ghosts – it won’t be long before someone declares her of unsound mind.
Elisabeth goes out into the garden. She slips off her Birkenstocks and feels the tickle of bristly summer grass beneath her feet; for a split second, she is a young girl again, leaping barefoot over the dew-soaked meadows to the henhouse to feed the chickens. Barabbas nuzzles up alongside her and they walk together to Elisabeth’s favourite spot under the cherry tree. Slowly. One step at a time.
They’ll be back. She knows they will. What she doesn’t know is what she’s going to tell them.
*
The detached house where Tim Rinker lives with his parents has a deserted air to it, and even after several rings at the bell, no one comes to the door.
‘Coffee,’ says Judith when they’re back in the car. ‘Coffee, a roll and tobacco. Please, Manni.’
Pale rings have formed under her eyes, as if the colour were gradually being drained out of her face. The intense smell of wood smoke she gives off is mingled with sweat.
‘Haven’t slept for a long time,’ she mumbles. ‘Came straight to headquarters from the airport.’
Manni spots a kiosk that promises to fulfil all his colleague’s desires. He stops the car. He’d like to go to sleep and forget everything; watch Miss Cat’s Eyes in a garden; glide past green dykes in a houseboat; escape to a peaceful foreign country, where there are no crying mothers, no dead fathers, no children being beaten to death. Judith returns with her mouth full. She drops onto the passenger seat and drinks her coffee with closed eyes.
‘If our perpetrator is a schoolkid of Jonny’s age, how did he get the dachshund to Frimmersdorf without a car?’ asks Manni.
‘Good question.’
A young perpetrator or an adult? They toss ideas back and forth, but arrive at Bertolt Brecht Grammar no further on than before. Still, at least Judith opens her eyes at last. She pulls a face when she sees the grimy, several-storeyed seventies monstrosity and the steel railings.
‘Imagine having to go in there every morning.’
‘What’s so bad about it? It’s only a fence.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, doubtfully.
The staffroom is on the first floor, overlooking the playground. Filing cabinets line the walls; a jumble of thermos flasks, mugs, lunchboxes, apples and piles of marking litter the scuffed tables, and a vast pin board is plastered with timetables, break-duty rosters and notices about trade union agitation. News of the schoolboy’s death has already got around; the handful of teachers sitting out free lessons are talking in hushed tones.
‘Tim Rinker,’ says Manni. ‘Where can we find him?’
One of the teachers gets up and disappears into the corridor. After a while she returns with the headmaster, a man of about sixty whose round face is scored with worry lines.
‘Tim Rinker didn’t come to school today. Absent without an excuse, apparently. I can’t get hold of his parents, but I’m sure they’ll be in touch – the Rinkers are an exemplary family.’
Exemplary, whatever that means. Manni wonders how to proceed. Judith goes over to the window. The sill is dotted with pot plants in various stages of decay, but Judith seems not to notice them; she is peering out at the playground through the murky glass.
‘No money,’ says the headmaster, running a nervous hand over his hairless scalp. ‘The windows are filthy, I know. But our cleaning budget is utterly inadequate. We can’t even afford to have the classroom floors swept once a day.’
Judith doesn’t move.
The headmaster sighs, a well-rehearsed sigh that must come in useful in meetings when decision-making is dragging out. ‘We’re short of money all round. Why do you think Germany always comes out at the bottom of all the league tables? Not enough teachers, not enough books – certainly not enough computers. This grammar school was supposed to embody the social democratic hope of universal education, but the reality . . .’
‘The reality . . .?’ asks Manni.
‘Most of the kids here come from Brück or Rath or Königsforst, not from Ostheim or Merheim.’
‘You mean they’re from wealthy homes.’
&nbs
p; ‘Well-off at least, yes. But don’t go thinking that means the parents are prepared to cough up. The way they see it, it’s up to the state to sort out education, and if anything goes wrong, the school’s to blame – or politics.’
‘Bullying,’ says Judith, out of the window.
The headmaster shakes his head. ‘It’s never easy when people have to get along with one another. But bullying? No. We’ve developed a code of honour at our school – worked on it together, students and staff. Respect is our guiding principle. We have mediators, project teams, campaign days . . . We were even awarded a prize for our initiative. I regard it as absolutely out of the question that Jonathan Röbel . . . that the perpetrator is from this school.’
‘I thought you had no money and were desperately understaffed?’ says Judith from the window.
The head blushes. ‘You have to set priorities.’
‘What’s the drugs situation?’ Manni asks.
Another practised sigh. ‘Teenagers experiment with everything; things were no different in our day. But we certainly don’t have a drugs problem at this school.’
Of course not, thinks Manni. This is the island of the blessed – not an urban grammar school built by some crazy social engineer a few decades back in the no man’s land between wealthy neighbourhoods and working-class districts that ought to be called Doleville.
The school bell rings for break. Teachers pour into the staffroom, noise floats up from the playground. Judith still hasn’t moved.
‘The big ones bully the little ones; the sporty ones bully the unsporty ones; the kids with bad marks bully the kids with good marks, or vice versa,’ she says to the window. ‘They always find some reason. There’s always someone bullying someone else. Nothing’s changed.’
Manni joins her. He sees clusters of older schoolchildren in a huddle, clusters of younger children playing tag. A teeming, screaming, jostling, cavorting mass – a school playground like any other.
‘Were you popular at school?’ asks Judith.
What a stupid question. ‘Dunno. Just normal.’
‘Maybe you can’t see it,’ she says softly.
‘Can’t see what?’
‘The hierarchy.’
‘Hierarchy?’
‘There are the kids in the centre, who are like magnets. Then there are the ones who worship them, who are in their sphere of influence. Below them you have the kids who defer to the rules at a safe distance and get left in peace. And, last of all, you have the misfits who are all alone, cowering with their backs to the wall.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the head intervenes. ‘All that’s perfectly normal. Let’s go to my office.’
‘Just a moment,’ says Manni, because he is suddenly interested in the children’s patterns of movement. Where would Jonny the scout have stood, Jonny the loner, who perhaps saw something he shouldn’t have seen, who put up a fight and lost? And what about his friend Tim, who always looks as if he’s about to burst into tears? At the edge, Manni thinks; Judith is right. Tim is the kind who stands at the edge. Jonny might have been one of the inconspicuous ones. Or at the edge like Tim, but hidden from view – whatever that might mean for the investigation.
Manni spots blond-haired Viktor, and has to concede again that Judith’s theory works. Viktor is clearly a magnet. He is sitting on the uppermost step of the atrium, in full view of everyone, a blonde girl in his arms – presumably Tim’s cousin Ivonne. A few boys are fidgeting on the steps beneath them, lapping up Viktor’s words like hungry puppy dogs. And now another peroxided adolescent is walking towards the group, stronger-looking than the other kids, self-confident in a different way. Viktor abandons the girl as soon as he spots him and the two boys climb the escarpment above the atrium together. The newcomer seems agitated about something and is talking insistently to Viktor.
Manni turns to the headmaster. ‘Who’s the blond boy over there above the atrium with Viktor Petermann?’
The headmaster shakes his head. ‘A mate of Viktor’s, as far as I know. He isn’t one of ours.’
‘Ralf Neisser?’ Manni asks. ‘Known as Ralle?’
The head looks at him in surprise. ‘Yes, I think so.’
Manni runs off on an impulse. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps it’s nonsense, perhaps Judith’s theories have messed with his mind, but he has the feeling that he needs to confront Ralle right this minute, that Ralle is the key – an important witness in the Jonny Röbel case, and maybe even more. Maybe a perpetrator. The boy Viktor was with when Jonny went missing. The boy Viktor’s father doesn’t like.
He reaches the playground just as the bell is announcing the end of break. Hordes of children surge towards him; by the time he has fought his way through to the atrium, Viktor and Ralle are gone. There is only a fat pigeon, attacking the remains of somebody’s sandwich.
‘Maybe we’re wrong and Jonny didn’t see anything in the woods; maybe he saw something here at school,’ says Judith, who has followed Manni unnoticed. ‘There are paths all over the place in these bushes. Heaven for a boy who likes playing Red Indians.’
Until the enemy appears, thinks Manni – whoever the enemy might be. But what about the motorway lay-by and Frank Stadler’s secret meeting? What happened in the shelter? And how does Viktor’s father fit in? He was in the woods too the afternoon Jonny went missing. Once again, the myriad facts only raise new questions. Manni’s headache is back, throbbing at his temples.
‘We must talk to Tim Rinker,’ he says. ‘He knows something. He must know something.’
He leaves another message on the Rinkers’ answering machine, asking them to call him, urgently. He rings the hospital again, where a harassed nurse assures him that Tim’s father is still operating. Open-heart surgery – it could take hours. The patrol car outside Forensics has no news either; neither of the Stadlers has left the building so far.
‘Let’s drive to headquarters,’ Judith suggests. ‘Or do you think Tim’s—’
‘No.’ Manni knows, even as he says it, that it sounds too abrupt, too loud.
Hope. It’s a foreign word to him.
*
Martina hadn’t thought Jonny would look so peaceful – almost happy, as if he were asleep in bed, watched over by Leopold the glow-worm, Dr D. snoring at his side. He has her brother-in-law’s face, and something of her sister’s too – even a touch of her own. He lies there beneath glass, pale, his eyes closed. Jonny died – no, Jonny was beaten to death like a mangy dog. Jonny is dead, for ever.
She ought to cry and scream and beat her fists against this horribly sterile glass dome separating her from her stepson – from her godson whom she failed to protect, in spite of her baptismal vows. She ought to cry and scream and flail about – anything to ease the clamp on her chest, if only a little.
But she can’t or won’t, because she knows that what comes afterwards, when the steel clamp has been loosened, is worse still, even harder to bear. It is the steel clamp that enables her to stand in this awful black catacomb and muster strength for the children who are left to her – innocent children. They need her because they have lost their adored big brother, who was always there for them, as far back as they can remember. They need her because they are even less able to make sense of this loss than she is.
She strokes the Plexiglas dome. She can’t stop.
‘Martina,’ says Frank. ‘Please, Tina. Let’s go.’
‘I can’t leave Jonny alone. It’s so dark here. So cold.’
‘He’s safe where he is.’
Safe. Martina turns round and meets her husband’s eyes. She gets a fright; he’s lost weight and his haggard cheeks are dark with stubble. Or is she mistaken? She tries to remember what he used to look like. A man who was strong enough to carry her. The memory seems like an illusion.
‘I went to the parish hall on Friday afternoon,’ says Martina. At last she speaks the words that have been threatening to choke her for days.
Frank doubles up, burying hi
s face in hands she once never wanted to let go of and now can’t bring herself to touch.
‘The discussion group was good. But after a while I’d had enough,’ he whispers into his hands. ‘I didn’t want to talk any more. I just wanted a few hours to myself every week.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’
A bitter sound escapes Martina – an unsuccessful attempt at a laugh, she realises, as Frank continues to speak.
‘Then Volker came up with the fishing idea – just sitting around waiting. Usually just me, sometimes the two of us. Sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun. No noise, no colleagues, no children, no demands.’
‘Fishing.’
‘I should have told you, of course I should. But I didn’t dare. I thought you’d get me to take the children.’
‘Fishing!’
‘I know it wasn’t fair of me; you need time to yourself too and you’d had to sacrifice your drama course . . .’
‘Where?’ It’s more of a scream than a question, because she knows the answer even before Frank stammers his innocence. She must believe him; it must be some awful, cruel coincidence that they found Jonny there of all places – that they found him in the pond where he goes fishing.
‘A coincidence, or someone trying to frame me. But it wasn’t me, Tina. It wasn’t me.’
She turns back to Jonny, lets Frank keep talking, blocks him out. She thinks of the twenty thousand euros that went missing. She tries to remember their Friday evenings. Frank must have talked to her when he got home. Sometimes, at least, they must have spoken about the group, when the children were in bed, the evenings when they hadn’t put the television on straight away, too exhausted to talk.
‘Please, Tina!’
She hears Frank get up – a faint scrape of metal chair legs on the floor. She turns round, making him freeze mid-movement.
‘You’re lying,’ she says.
*
Judith’s old desk has been given to someone else, and Millstätt sends her to the intern’s room. It’s a dark cubbyhole at the end of the corridor, but at least she doesn’t have to share it with anyone; it’s too small for that. Manni, too, has to decamp temporarily and installs himself at the desk usually occupied by Holger Kühn, who is on holiday. Manni’s old desk, in the same office, has been taken over by Ralf Meuser, the ‘rookie’, who has hung the wall behind him with framed landscape photos of the Scottish highlands. Judith half expects Manni to protest and insist on hanging his trophies and club pennants in their old place, but he simply gives the rookie a nod, drops onto Holger Kühn’s desk chair and switches on the computer.