About the Book
‘On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm. Of your own free will. And for a good reason.’
Norah has just moved from Berlin to Vienna in order to leave her old life behind her for good when a homeless woman spits these words at her. Norah is unnerved: many years earlier, something terrible happened to her on February 11. She shrugs this off as a mere coincidence, however, until shortly afterwards she meets a man called Arthur Grimm.
Soon Norah begins to have a dreadful suspicion: does she have a good reason to take revenge on Grimm? What really happened in the worst night of her life all those years ago? And can Norah make sure that justice is done without herself committing murder?
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’
‘It is bitter—bitter,’ he answered;
‘But I like it
‘Because it is bitter,
‘And because it is my heart.’
‘IN THE DESERT’, STEPHEN CRANE
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright page
Prologue
She would simply disappear. The ice would crack and give way beneath her feet and she’d be pulled swiftly under—no flailing and thrashing to stay above water, no struggle, just down, down, down into the darkness and silence.
When she was little, she had often walked on the frozen pond that lay between the edge of town and the fields. It didn’t occur to her back then that it was possible to fall through.
To think that such a place existed—a small lake in the middle of the wood, overhung by trees, their branches weighed down by snow as if they were mourning. The tips of her fingers were numb, her toes so cold that they hurt. She swung the torch to and fro. There was nobody here but her. They hadn’t come. And yet there were tracks. Had she missed them? Was she late? She glanced at her watch. No, she wasn’t.
She switched off the torch. Inching her way along the forest path, she had needed the grainy beam of light, but now that she’d stepped out from the shadowy trees, she could do without it.
•
The stars were bright out here, far from the city. Frosty leaves crunched underfoot. The night glistened. For a moment she forgot what she was doing here in the middle of the night—forgot about the betrayal and the anger and the pain.
She stepped out onto the frozen surface, stopped, listened. The ice creaked, a living being, stirring in a dream.
She listened more closely, looked up at the sky, closed her eyes. The silence sang in her ears.
Strange, she thought.
A wind got up, sharp as a knife and smelling of fresh snow. She hunched her shoulders.
The stars gleamed milkily. She had the feeling she shouldn’t be here.
Then she saw something on the ice. She hesitated. Stooping to get a better look at whatever it was, she reached out a hand to it. When she realised what she was looking at, she recoiled. A dead bird, dark against the white snow, not yet frozen.
She stiffened and turned away abruptly, breathing fast. She believed in signs.
There was nobody there.
She wheeled round—nothing, nobody, just her and the night. She looked up at the stars again. Then she made up her mind.
She would do it. She would destroy them, all of them. But the one she really wanted to destroy was Norah.
1
Norah loved goodbyes. She loved moments of transition: the minutes between night and day, winter and spring, one year and the next. She loved new babies and weddings. Another life, a second chance, rebirth. A clean slate and a new pencil.
Then why are you crying?
The road stretched endlessly before her. The woods were black and impenetrable, the sky bruised by the night. Norah stared into the darkness, and in the rear-view mirror her old life receded, growing smaller and smaller, almost unreal—her job, her boyfriend, her home, the dog.
The disaster.
Norah wiped away her tears. One day she’d get over what had happened in Berlin. Life wasn’t fair, she knew that; she’d survive. The anger and bitterness would never entirely disappear, but they would fade like an old tattoo. The heaviness of the last weeks and months was beginning to lift even now, with every mile she put between herself and Berlin. She’d been right to leave.
•
Norah had a good six hours’ drive ahead of her. She slowed the car and rounded a bend, taking care not to cut the corner. She switched on the radio and electronic music poured out of the speakers. It was some time since she’d passed a car going the other direction and she liked it that way—liked the sound of the asphalt under the tyres, the soft music, the woods, the peace, the feeling of starting over. The last light faded. The pine forests on either side of the winding road seemed to grow denser. She steered the car around another long drawn-out bend and stepped on the accelerator. When she looked up, the sky was suddenly full of stars—a handful at first, then dozens, thousands, myriads.
A glance at the sat nav told her she had almost five hundred kilometres to go. So what? She wasn’t in a hurry. She slowed and pulled over, switched off the radio, engine and headlights, and sat and stared at the sky.
Then she got out of the car, walked to the middle of the road and threw back her head. The stars were painted with the finest of brushes. She smiled and for a moment she just stood there, looking up. She felt the cold on her cheeks first, then in her fingertips, through the thin leather of her gloves, then in her toes. She tried to remember why stars twinkled, but she’d forgotten. What was that? A cracking noise. She turned and stared into the darkness. Forest sounds. Norah laughed at the sudden thumping of her heart.
Forest sounds, her own breath. A dead straight road ahead, and above her the sky. Nothing to be afraid of. She got back in the car without hurrying, switched on the headlights, started the engine. Her handbag lay beside her on the passenger seat; a few belongings were piled in the back. That was all. The hastily packed removal boxes were waiting for her in Vienna. She was starting over; she was free. Norah turned the radio on again and changed stations. Then it was just her and the road and the music.
2
When Norah woke up in her new flat in Vienna the next morning and walked barefoot to the window, the grand facades of the houses opposite were already bathed in the milky light of the winter sun. She opened the window and stood there, enjoying the crisp chill on her face as the city stirred to life below. A group of children was crossing the road, their shouts almost drowned by the noise of the traffic. Norah took a deep breath, then closed the window and looked about her.
How little there was to her life. Her bed was only a roll of slats and a few pieces of wood, strewn over the parquet of her bedroom like a disjointed skeleton—she’d spent the night on a camping mat, feeling the hard floor beneath her whenever she’d moved. Then there were the removal boxes, forty-eight of them. That was as much of her old life as she’d brought with her into the new.
She opened one of the boxes at random. It was labelled Clothes and contained summer things—flip-flops and the white bikini she’d bought for the previous year’s holiday in Sardinia, where they’d celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday.
She’d packed too hastily, desperate to leave the flat in Berlin. Alex had looked on in bewilderment, knocked sideways by what was happening. He didn’t know what to say and she wouldn’t have listened if he had.
Norah shut the box again, then opened another and another and another: bedclothes, diving gear, blankets, shirts, T-shirts—but no warm jumper anywhere. She shivered. It was cold in the flat; the radiators barely gave off any heat. Sighing, she threw down a black blouse, then stretched and looked about her again. The removal men had stacked the boxes at random all over the flat. Piled up against the backdrop of bare white walls and high ceilings, they looked like installations in a museum of modern art.
Only a few things were already in place: her desk in the study, her sofa in front of the TV in a corner of the living room—she could leave the TV on, if the silence got too loud for her—and the coffee machine in the kitchen. The rest was a desert. No, she thought, not a desert—a blank sheet of paper, waiting for the first brushstroke.
Norah found herself smiling.
When she went out a little later, locking the door behind her, the communal stairs smelt of damp carpet and filter coffee. She was about to head down when she heard a low noise and, glancing up, she saw a small black cat eyeing her shyly from the stairs above.
‘Hello,’ said Norah. ‘Where have you come from?’
She crouched down and reached out a hand. The kitten stared. Then, timid at first, but gradually bolder, it started towards her. Norah stroked the little head gently. She’d always wanted a cat as a child, but her mother hadn’t wanted a pet in the flat, and by the time Norah was old enough to make her own decisions she was working twelve hours a day in an office and didn’t have the time.
The cat, forgetting its initial caution, pushed its head against the back of Norah’s hand, arched its back and began to purr.
‘Katinka?’ said a voice from the next floor up. The cat raised its head, clearly uncertain whether to respond to the call, or stay and be stroked a little longer by its new friend. It didn’t hesitate for long; when Norah stood up, it began to rub itself coquettishly against her legs.
‘Hello,’ Norah called up the stairs. ‘If you’re looking for your cat, it’s here.’
There was a laugh, then footsteps. The voice said, ‘Well, Katinka? Pestering the neighbours again?’ And then to Norah, ‘Sorry, she must have given me the slip. I’m Theresa, by the way. From the third floor.’
Norah froze for a moment, staring at the almost almond-shaped eyes, the blonde lashes, the small curved mouth that looked as if it had been painted with a single flourish, the freckles…
‘Are you okay?’ asked the young woman, but Norah barely heard her.
So similar…
‘Don’t you feel well?’ the woman said.
At last Norah managed a smile.
‘I must have been dreaming,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
She took the hand that was held out to her.
‘Norah,’ she added, ‘from the second floor.’
‘Cool,’ said the woman. ‘Nice to meet you.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘I’d better try and catch the little devil.’
Norah stepped slowly down the stairs to the ground floor.
Don’t you feel well? the woman had asked. Well? How were you supposed to feel well, when you’d seen a ghost?
3
Vienna was giving Norah the cold shoulder. When she’d visited with Alex in the summer, she’d been enchanted; it had seemed to her a city with a mind of its own, unlike anywhere she’d been before. That felt like light years ago.
Everything seemed so bleak—a Munchian vision of a city; a dark, urban forest, warped and menacing. The gloom pervaded Norah’s empty flat and the dingy streets. Passers-by stared grimly at their phones; melancholy coated everything like a film of grease. And it was fucking freezing.
Norah bought an Austrian paper, a German paper and a packet of cigarettes in the newsagent’s across the road, and sat down with them in the corner bistro. By the time she took her first sip of coffee, the shock of memory aroused in her by Theresa had subsided a little, and she could turn her mind to the day ahead.
Although Norah’s job wouldn’t officially begin for two weeks, her new boss had asked her to go and meet him that morning. They’d talked at length on the phone, but this would be their first real meeting, and Norah was looking forward to it; she couldn’t wait to get back to work, even if she was a little nervous. She knew she was a good journalist; she’d won prizes for some of her features, and there had even been attempts to headhunt her. But all that had been before what she secretly thought of as the disaster. Coming after that, the job offer from Vienna had seemed too good to be true; she was almost afraid it would turn out to be a cruel joke.
Mira Singh, the publisher, had rung her in person. Norah’s feature on women soldiers in Afghanistan had caught her interest; she’d gone on to read all Norah’s latest work and been impressed by her keen eye and her choice of topics. Mira was involved in setting up a new weekly magazine in Vienna and wanted Norah on board. The idea, she explained, was to forget about trying to keep up with the internet and publish an old-school high-quality magazine headed by an outstanding team of editors and filled with well-researched articles by prestigious writers.
It sounded perfect to Norah. Where was the catch? Did Mira realise Norah was lumbered with a lawsuit? Mira only said that she’d read the article in question. She was looking for a woman with attitude and thought she’d found one in Norah. Not wanting to sound overeager, Norah had asked for a day to think it over. Then she’d accepted. What else could she have done?
And here she was.
The magazine offices were in the touristy part of town, not far from St Stephen’s Cathedral, on one of those big shopping streets lined with fast-food outlets and clothing chains that sell more or less the same things the world over. Norah knew the area from one of her previous visits to Vienna; it was packed from early till late with tourists and those who lived off them. There were tour groups on their way to the cathedral, con artists, buskers, teenagers taking selfies on their phones, and here and there an exasperated local who actually wanted to get somewhere. And there were beggars and homeless people, their calls echoing through the streets like the cries of ghosts. The living shuddered at their voices, but pretended not to hear them.
Some years ago, Norah had wanted to write a feature on homeless minors, but hadn’t been able to persuade her boss. Maybe it was time to give it another go. She lit a cigarette and walked down the street, thinking hard. Her tongue probed a molar that was throbbing dully, as if the tooth couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to ache properly. That was the last thing she needed. She wanted to go to the shops that evening, not the dentist.
Outside H&M, a nondescript girl was sitting cuddled up to an Alsatian with a sign in front of her. I’m hungry. Early twenties at most, reddish-brown hair under a bla
ck beanie, military parka, chewed fingernails. Next came a man of sixty-odd with finely drawn features behind a pair of glasses, and then a guy with blond dreads—presumably the local psycho—who sat there, mumbling away to himself and scrounging off the passers-by, occasionally turning on a passing woman and hurling obscene abuse at her with astonishing inventiveness and persistence.
Then Norah saw the woman—an elderly woman, with striking wrinkles and clear, bright blue eyes. The kind of face that won photographers prizes, if they were lucky enough to spot it in a remote mountain village.
She wasn’t sitting or kneeling on the ground like the other beggars, nor was she at the edge of the street. She was standing right in the middle of the pedestrian precinct with a small brass dish in her hand, apparently unfazed by the milling crowd. It was incredible. This woman—a good six foot, Norah guessed—stood in everybody’s way, and yet nobody bumped into her; the bustle of the city washed over her like water lapping a river island. Now and then a couple of coins chinked in the dish, but she didn’t say thank you, she just stood there motionless—upright and forbidding in the steady flow of people. A rock, a black tower. Only her eyes moved. Norah wondered what story she had to tell.
•
Sebastian Berger, Norah’s new boss, was a tall, strongly built man in his fifties, with still-dark hair combed back off his face. He was wearing jeans and a tweed jacket that made him look rather donnish. What really struck Norah, though, was his expression. It said, You are not the way I imagined you. But she was used to that. With her fine-featured face and petite figure, she was regularly mistaken for the rookie, even now, in her mid-thirties. When she’d had photos taken for the various web portals where her writer’s profile was posted—photos that Sebastian Berger had presumably seen—she’d deliberately worn dark clothes and a serious expression, and then chosen the pictures that made her look the most grown-up. In real life, of course, such tricks were no use to her, and she’d realised early in her career that if she wanted to be respected, she had to be tougher than most, and work harder. Berger, to his credit, soon regained his stride. He offered Norah coffee and they resumed the conversation they’d begun on the phone about potential topics for articles. When Norah took the lift down two hours later, her mind was whirling with ideas. It felt good to be going back to work.
The Shadow Page 1