Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

  This is not the time for niceties. They must get down to research. So far, no one has carried out an in-depth background analysis of the main suspects, and there is a lack of solid evidence and motives all round, although Manni has been working more or less 24/7 on the case, following up even the most tenuous leads.

  Judith pours herself a cup of coffee – black because the milk’s gone off; certain things don’t change in Division 11, even if the people come and go. She opens the window of her new office; beyond the slip road, behind office blocks, she thinks she can glimpse the Rhine. River and sky are both grey, but there’s still no sign of rain or cooler temperatures. She pushes aside the pile of reports on the Jonny Röbel case, boots up the PC and rolls herself a cigarette. She logs into her email account, finds the promised email from Charlotte’s dentist and forwards the X-rays to Canada. With only a click or a few hours on the plane and you’re in another world – whether you can cope with that is another question. It is said that when the first railways were built, the Native Americans would sit down next to the tracks after getting off the train, to let their souls catch up with them. Cut the ethno-kitsch, Judith. That isn’t going to get you anywhere.

  She gets up and finishes her cigarette at the window. Two time shifts in six days, nights of fitful sleep out in the open, and now no sleep at all for over twenty-four hours. Cologne seems unreal to her. She’s lost ground contact. She isn’t here; she’s somewhere else. She finishes the coffee, which doesn’t wake her up – only quickens her heartbeat and dries out her mouth. She goes to the loo, runs cold water over her wrists, splashes water onto her face, puts her mouth under the tap and drinks.

  Back at the computer, she calls up the Federal Central Criminal Register and then the police information system. Hagen Petermann has no previous convictions, nor does his son Viktor or Jonny’s stepfather. She googles ‘Hagen Petermann’ and finds his construction company in several electronic directories; his contracts include work for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Red Indian club also has its own website, designed with rather more enthusiasm than skill: www.siouxofcologne.de. In the image gallery Judith finds photos of Frank Stadler, of Jonny with feathers in his hair holding the dachshund, and of Hagen Petermann with his son Viktor – evidently an old photo, because Viktor’s hair isn’t blond. She’s getting nowhere.

  Again she goes and stands at the window, breathing in the dusty city air that bites her lungs like cheap cigarettes. She has no strength, but hopes that somewhere inside her she has reserves she can draw on to get her through the day – and the night, and the next day – reserves that will enable her to prove that she is fit again, worthy of being a detective on the Cologne murder squad. There is another piece of research she must carry out, another name she must enter: she needs to look up David Becker and discover what she would rather not know. But she can’t bring herself to do it. She crosses the corridor, back to Manni’s office. His research has also been fruitless so far. Millstätt is leaning against the doorframe, discussing the tourist murderer with the rookie.

  ‘We need reinforcements, Axel,’ says Judith.

  The head of Division 11 shakes his head and disappears into the corridor. The rookie trots out after him.

  ‘The lab rang,’ says Manni. ‘The criminal technicians have found traces of blood on a scrap of carpet they found in Frimmersdorf. The blood is from Jonny’s dachshund. They think the dog was transported in the carpet. Dead.’

  ‘The only question is: who did it?’

  ‘And how did they get there? And where did they come from?’

  ‘What a mess.’

  ‘Yup.’

  Too many possibilities, not enough staff or time and not enough to go by. And on top of this, the nagging feeling that Tim Rinker might have gone missing, like Jonny and Charlotte. Judith tries to push the feeling aside, as if by ignoring it she could avert disaster. As long as no one reports the boy missing, they can’t act, can they? Possibilities. Decisions. The old fear of being too late, because she’s overlooked something. Like in the woods in November. Manni sweeps his file aside as if he can read Judith’s thoughts.

  ‘I’m going to drive round to the Rinkers’ again. And then to Neisser. He lives right next door to the school.’

  Judith goes back to her office and stares at the computer for a while. David Becker. Her fingers rest on the keys, but don’t move. Possibilities. Paradoxes. Things that are not as they appear: a grey sky that brings heat; a turquoise sea that is really a freshwater lake; red-eyed birds that wail and vanish like ghosts; a man who is not what she thought him to be.

  ‘I don’t think Becker is a murderer,’ Judith had said to Margery.

  ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself,’ Margery had replied.

  ‘I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘Was there something between you?’

  But Judith had denied that, to prevent Margery from declaring her biased.

  She puts her pistol in its holster. The weight at her belt, too, is at once strange and familiar. She orders a fleet vehicle and goes to the lift. If she sits at her desk any longer, she’ll go mad.

  *

  A sound. A ringing sound. Or is she mistaken? No. Barabbas sniffs the air and yelps.

  ‘Quiet, boy.’ Elisabeth gives him a scratch. ‘Nothing can happen to us here.’ The Alsatian sighs and lays his head on her knee. The ringing sound again – longer this time, and yet distant. Barabbas pricks his ears and then settles down again. I don’t want to, Elisabeth thinks. Don’t want to and don’t have to.

  The day has advanced. At midday she had gone into the house for a nap. Now she’s back under the cherry tree, watching the blackbirds, looking at the clouds. Elisabeth knows that the peace is deceptive, but she clings to it all the same. She closes her eyes, losing herself in lovely, bright memories. Seconds go by, minutes – she can’t say for sure.

  ‘Quiet,’ she says again automatically as Barabbas begins to growl again. But this time the dog won’t be hushed. He struggles to his feet and runs off barking.

  Fear grips her – and the feeling of being watched. Elisabeth heaves herself up, gropes for the tree trunk and props herself up until the dizziness subsides. Where is Barabbas? There he is. Sitting growling at the fence that divides her garden from the deserted garden next door.

  Elisabeth crosses the grass one step at a time. Someone is standing on the other side of the fence, she can see that now. Who knows how long they’ve been standing there watching her. In a panic she looks about her for a weapon, but there is nothing. The police have taken all the garden tools.

  ‘Frau Vogt?’ The name reaches her as if through cotton wool. ‘Frau Vogt? I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but I did ring . . .’

  A woman’s voice. A young woman in strange baggy trousers with pockets sewn on at the knees. It must be some new fashion. Elisabeth’s relief evaporates when the stranger continues to speak.

  ‘Could you let me in, please, Frau Vogt? My name is Judith Krieger. I’m a detective, I have a few more questions to ask you.’

  The kitchen is cooler than the garden. The detective sits down on the sofa, just where her younger colleague had sat. Elisabeth gives her a glass of water. ‘You wouldn’t have a cup of coffee for me, would you?’ The detective sounds tired.

  Elisabeth puts water on to boil, fills the electric coffee grinder with beans and pushes a coffee filter into the porcelain filter-holder.

  ‘That’s just the way my grandmother used to make coffee,’ says the detective. ‘A proper ritual.’

  ‘Isn’t she alive any more?’

  ‘Not for a long time.’ Her words are barely audible.

  Elisabeth doesn’t know what to say. She thinks of her grandson, a dog lover, like her. The woman in her kitchen is not at all the way she’d imagined a lady detective. Not nearly as frighteningly purposeful as her young blond colleague – although, of course, she’s wrong there; the woman forced her way in through the garden, after all. Elisabeth brews coffee an
d lays the table.

  ‘Oh, milk.’ The detective smiles and reaches for the jug with almost childlike greed. Her T-shirt is torn. Perhaps she got it caught on something in the garden. Her mane of curls is tied at the nape of her neck with a piece of string. It looks improvised, not like a proper hairstyle.

  ‘Lovely dog you’ve got there.’

  Elisabeth smiles, glad that Barabbas is so clean and spruce. They drink coffee in silence.

  ‘The boy,’ the detective says at length. ‘The boy who owned the wire-haired dachshund. Jonny. He’s dead.’

  Elisabeth’s heart clenches.

  ‘That’s why I’ve come. I was hoping you might have thought of something else that could help us.’

  The buzz of the flies, the glassy eye, the severed ear. The scent of wild camomile and the sky so blue, as if there were no such thing as human cruelty.

  ‘We’ve worked out that somebody must have brought the dachshund to Frimmersdorf in the state you found it in – dead and mutilated,’ says the detective.

  A child’s companion, that had been her first thought after she had dragged Barabbas away – and that somebody must hate the child to treat the dog like that. But what did this lady detective just say? The dachshund was brought to Frimmersdorf dead? Elisabeth feels a trickle of sweat running down her back. Then Barabbas can’t have . . . That would mean she had suspected him and beaten him unjustly – and that no one can accuse him of anything. Neither Barabbas nor her.

  ‘You were in the wood with your dog.’ The detective looks intently at Elisabeth. ‘Maybe you saw or heard something. Or maybe your dog barked. He’s a clever, alert animal. What’s his name, by the way?’

  ‘Barabbas.’

  ‘Barabbas found the dachshund, didn’t he? There are bite wounds.’

  Elisabeth feels herself beginning to tremble. A trembling that comes from deep down inside her.

  ‘The dachshund won’t have felt anything.’ The detective’s voice is gentle. ‘Please, Frau Vogt, have another think. Even the smallest detail might be important. We must find the murderer.’

  A rattle and a flash of light. Too shadowy, too fast. Later, for a split second by the river, a face she thought she knew. Was it later that day or some other time? If only she could remember.

  ‘Please, Frau Vogt.’ The detective is leaning over the arm of the sofa to Barabbas, who is letting her stroke his back.

  The trembling subsides as suddenly as it began. It is succeeded by a great peace. The lady detective likes her dog. Barabbas is safe; no one wants to take him away from her.

  ‘A scooter,’ says Elisabeth. ‘I thought it was youths. There was this rattle after we’d found the dachshund. A rattle like a scooter makes. And there was a flash of light from somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe the reflection of the sun on metal.’ The detective stops stroking Barabbas and sits up straight, leaning her elbows on the table. She looks at Elisabeth as if she wants to drink her words.

  ‘A scooter,’ she repeats quietly.

  ‘I’m really not sure, it all went so fast.’ And she was afraid of Barabbas’s growling; that had stopped her from thinking straight. But she needn’t mention that now.

  ‘It sounded like a scooter,’ says the detective.

  ‘Do you know what was funny? On my way home I saw someone by the river, only very briefly. It was a young man, and I almost had the impression I knew him. He reminded me of a former colleague of my husband, who used to drive round the village on his scooter and make eyes at the women. But that was a long time ago. Neisser’s old now, and he doesn’t ride a scooter any more.’

  ‘Neisser?’ The detective opens her eyes very wide. She doesn’t look at all tired any more.

  *

  Tim Rinker’s parents’ house is still shut up and deserted. Manni looks up the road – not a soul in sight; it’s as if the neighbourhood were in a coma. He walks resolutely past the front entrance to the six-foot iron gate that leads into the back garden and tries the handle; it’s locked. After a quick glance over his shoulder, he puts his foot on the handle and swings himself over onto the other side. The garden looks drearily trim and well kept. Tall shrubs screen it from the neighbouring gardens, for which Manni is grateful. The sun lounger next to the fountain is empty; everything looks empty. Manni goes onto the terrace and peers through the windows. Inside, too, everything looks tidy and deserted. Herr Rinker is in the operating theatre, but where is Frau Rinker? And, more important, where is their son?

  It’s only a five-minute drive from Brück to Ostheim, but the contrast between Tim’s street and Ralf Neisser’s could hardly be more extreme. The din of traffic from Frankfurter Strasse mingles with snatches of TV and music to form a wild jumble of sounds. The narrow road peters out into a kind of bumpy footpath flanked by tiny, closely built houses. Ralf Neisser’s parents live at number 73. The house looks neglected. Builder’s rubble and paint buckets are piled up outside. A freestanding Chinese pagoda roof with red-lacquered dragons serves as a garden gate, an absurd piece of outsized kitsch, supremely out of place. In the absence of a doorbell, Manni tugs at the Chinese bell rope.

  ‘Garden!’ a man yells.

  Manni takes this as an invitation and leaves the dragons behind him, squeezing past a dented Opel Manta. The back garden is tiny like the house; weathered wooden fencing bounds it on either side, intensifying the sense of confinement. Empty crates of beer, more builder’s rubble and a few plastic chairs are strewn about. The speaker reveals himself as a red-faced man, sitting in state in an inflatable paddling pool, drinking beer. He looks at Manni in astonishment. From a portable television set come the silly nasal voices of people on some tell-all talk show.

  ‘Hello, I’m looking for Ralf Neisser.’

  ‘The cops,’ says the man in the paddling pool. A gold chain flashes on his fat hairy chest. His belly hangs over knee-length Bermuda shorts patterned with palm trees.

  Manni waves his warrant card. The man takes a long slug of beer from his bottle, swallows, fishes about for a packet of Marlboros and spits into the dry weeds, a hair’s breadth from the edge of the pool.

  ‘Ralf isn’t here. What do you want him for?’

  ‘I’m investigating a murder. I’d like to ask him a few questions.’

  ‘My boy isn’t mixed up in any murder.’ Neisser senior slides out of his semi-supine position to a sitting position, making his biceps swell.

  ‘I see him as a witness,’ says Manni, suddenly thinking of his own father, who had never defended him to anyone. If there were complaints about Manni, Günter Korzilius apologised for his son, and then gave him a thrashing when he got home, never stopping to wonder whether it mightn’t be unjust – never asking Manni for his version of the facts. Manni’s phone begins to jingle, sparing him from any more pointless reflections. It’s Judith, her voice high and edgy.

  ‘Ralf Neisser,’ she says. ‘He has a grandfather in Frimmersdorf he sometimes visits – I’ve just checked. And it sounds as if Elisabeth Vogt saw Ralle the day she found the dead dachshund. She thinks she heard a scooter too.’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ Manni forces himself to sound calm, not to lay himself open to attack from Ralf’s father.

  ‘Can’t you talk?’ asks Krieger.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about Tim?’

  ‘Nada. Still not got hold of anyone.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Manni puts the phone back in his pocket. The man in the paddling pool seems to have cottoned on to the fact that something has changed, and not necessarily to his son’s advantage. He looks like a sullen toddler, considering Manni suspiciously with his bloodshot drinker’s eyes.

  ‘Ralf ain’t done nothing.’

  The beatings hadn’t been so bad. The worst was the injustice – that and the lack of interest. Fathers and sons – why is it so bloody hard, and why has Ralf Neisser of all people struck lucky in the lottery of paternal love? Not, of course, that there’s any guarantee that Neisser senior’s so
lidarity with his son will extend beyond Manni’s departure. Manni bends down to pick up a garden chair, sets it the right way up, checks it for stability and sits down – a power game for which he has neither the time nor the nerves.

  ‘Your father lives in Frimmersdorf?’

  The man in the paddling pool nods, takes another gulp from the bottle and then tosses it behind him.

  ‘Does Ralf have a scooter?’

  ‘Isn’t a crime.’

  ‘I need the registration number.’

  ‘No idea. Ask Ralf.’

  Manni stretches out his legs like someone who has every intention of staying put for a while. He eyes the back of the house, the paddling pool and the pile of rubble where there is also a scrap of carpet.

  ‘Drugs,’ he says thoughtfully, as if he were talking to himself. ‘A few kids from the grammar school are into them. Someone must supply them. Pretty handy, living so near a school.’

  The man in the paddling pool reaches out behind him for another beer which he proceeds to open with a plastic lighter. He stares at the television, at Manni, at the bottle and then back at the television. He’s nervous. Manni suppresses a grin and turns his attention back to the rubble. Maybe Ralf really is the source of the ecstasy. That scrap of carpet certainly looks bloody like the carpet that was used to transport Jonny’s dachshund. This fact, along with the Neissers’ connection to Frimmersdorf – an easy scooter ride away from Cologne – ought to be enough for a search warrant.