‘Do you have someone you can talk to?’ Monika asked suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I just said.’
‘Of course I talk to people.’
‘Really? Properly?’
Norah said nothing.
‘We need people,’ Monika said. ‘I know it sounds banal, but it’s true. We can’t live only for ourselves. We have to—’
She broke off and Norah wondered whether this was something she’d learnt during the therapy she underwent after Valerie’s death.
‘We have to learn to open up to others,’ Monika went on. ‘We have to learn to accept help. Do you understand?’
Norah croaked agreement. The turn of conversation was making her feel physically unwell and she seized the first opportunity to end the call without being impolite. Monika was well and Norah wanted things to stay that way. She’d get the information she needed somewhere else.
The call to Valerie’s brother was rather different. Norah hadn’t been in touch with him for years and knew only that he lived in Leipzig and ran his own IT company. But a quick Google search found his office number and, amazingly enough, she was put straight through to him. He sounded awkward when he took the call, but that was hardly surprising; there he was at work, expected to be serious, and suddenly his kid sister’s best friend was at the other end of the line—a girl he used to smoke weed with, a girl who once slapped him round the face when he misread the signs and tried to kiss her.
‘Hi,’ said Sven. ‘Hello. Good afternoon.’
Sven was a nice guy and Norah blushed when she remembered what a dance she and his sister had led him when they were fifteen and he only a year and a half older. She would have liked to have a bit of a natter with him—but her reason for calling was too serious for that. She forced herself to ask him the question she’d failed to ask Monika and soon realised that Sven was by far the better person to talk to.
He thought about his sister a lot, he said, of course he did, especially when the anniversary of her death came round. But Norah must stop reproaching herself. No one was to blame. His little sister had killed herself. They had to live with that.
Afterwards, they talked about this and that. Sven told Norah he was married and had two kids at primary school. They chatted for ten minutes or so and ended the call with warm goodbyes.
Norah put on the kettle and waited for the water to come to the boil. Then she made tea and left it to brew. Then she poured the tea down the sink. She took a tumbler from the cupboard—the wine glasses were still lying dormant in one of the removal boxes—filled it to the brim, and began to drink. Another memory was washed to the surface, a big memory, as spongy and misshapen as a drowned body.
She was at home, a few days after Valerie’s death, at the glass dining table in the living room, under those ghastly Kandinsky prints. Next to her, her mum, with her wacky red hairdo, and opposite them, two police officers, well meaning but plainly bored. They’d heard that she was the deceased’s best friend, they said, and Norah nodded.
Had she noticed anything?
She didn’t answer. Not because she intended any disrespect, but because the question made no sense to her; she was so confused since hearing the news. Someone had given her a sedative, but that had only made things worse—added an extra layer of befuddlement.
Had Valerie seemed depressed?
Norah managed a nod.
Had anything happened? Could she imagine that Valerie was capable of harming herself?
She raised her eyes from the table—dry eyes, cried empty.
‘Yes,’ she said and felt her mother take her hand and squeeze it. ‘I’m afraid I can.’
The police officers nodded as if they were sorry to hear it, but of course it was good news for them, because if it wasn’t suicide, it was something worse and then they really would have their hands full.
‘You’re sure she killed herself? I can’t believe she’d have done a thing like that.’
Norah glared at her mother, noticing with disgust that she was wearing blue mascara. It seemed all wrong to her. Valerie was dead and her mother’s eyelashes were a lurid blue.
The officers nodded again and the older of them added in fatherly tones, ‘Bar the absence of a suicide note, everything points to it.’
‘She didn’t leave a letter?’ Norah’s mother asked.
Nobody said anything.
‘Oh, God, her poor parents.’ Norah’s mother clapped her hand to her mouth, smudging her lipstick—apparently without noticing.
Norah’s heart was pounding so loudly that she thought everyone in the room must be able to hear it. Didn’t it strike them as strange that bookish Valerie, with her dreams of being an author and her constant scribbling, hadn’t left a note? Norah wanted to say something, but her mouth was too dry, her tongue too heavy; it felt as if someone had rammed a cobblestone into her mouth. The younger policeman threw his colleague a glance of annoyance.
‘Even if there was a note,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t make a difference. All the evidence points to Valerie choosing to depart this life.’
Norah wondered how much thought he’d given his choice of words. Had he deliberately avoided saying killing herself, taking her life, putting an end to it all, committing suicide, and decided on choosing to depart this life? Her mind began to freewheel through increasingly absurd expressions for this act she couldn’t get her head round, no matter what anyone called it. Did herself in. Did away with herself. Ended it all. Topped herself. Committed felo de se. And that night, when she lay in bed under the sky of glow-in-the-dark stars that had watched over her sleep all through her childhood, her mind drifted on—there was no stopping it—on and on, into the bleaker territory of fairytale. Norah tossed and turned. Got up, sat down, got up again, paced up and down her room, went into the kitchen, had a drink of water, sat at her desk, got up, went to the window, looked out, turned away, sat on her bed, lay down, closed her eyes, opened them, started over again. It wasn’t the thought of Valerie’s dead body that was so unbearable—though it was. Nor was it the thought of death. What drove her mad was imagining the moments before she did it. The pain, the fear, the loneliness.
Norah returned to the present and took a gulp of wine. Whoever was writing her these late-night texts wanted her to remember. And Norah remembered; it all came back to her. Those old-fashioned village policemen and their half-hearted investigations. And her teenage self—the victim’s best friend—blithely confirming their conjecture.
When Norah fell asleep that night, she dreamt she saw a stag beetle creeping over Valerie’s lifeless arm.
38
The next morning Norah woke shivering, worn out by the night, her bare legs cold and aching from desolate dreams. The noise was back. It had changed, from a whispering buzz, a gathering hum, to something deeper, more erratic. To a creaking and groaning, a bursting. It must sound like that in the Arctic, Norah thought, when a crack opened up in the ice.
Loneliness filled the rooms as if there were suddenly an iceberg in her Vienna flat, bluey white and hard as granite. She drank her coffee and left for work without washing up the cup, knowing she’d be annoyed at her own slovenliness when she got back in the evening. On her way past the bistro on the corner, she saw the three old ladies smoking at their usual table, and a small smile stole over her face. Some things, at least, didn’t change. She went in and ordered an espresso and applied herself to the newspaper that someone had left on the table.
‘Have you heard about Marie? About the court case?’ the brunette was asking and Norah, who couldn’t concentrate on the newspaper anyway, pricked up her ears.
The two other women shook their heads.
‘She’s been sentenced.’
‘Go on with you. What for?’ the blonde asked in disbelief.
‘Grievous bodily harm. It was in the papers.’
‘I can’t believe it. Will she have to go to prison?’ the redhead asked, puckering her thickly drawn eyebrows.
‘No, but she’ll have to pay a fine.’
‘What with?’ asked the blonde.
Shrugs and clueless faces.
Norah finished her espresso, put two euros on the table and left. On the train, she looked at her phone. Two new texts, both from Max, worried because Norah wasn’t responding to his calls. Norah suddenly realised that she was no longer angry with him; so much had happened in the last few days that Max’s white lie hardly seemed to matter anymore. She decided to call him as soon as she had a spare moment. She missed him. But she had other things to deal with first; he’d have to wait. Instead of replying to his text, Norah sent a message to the unknown number.
Who are you?
When Norah reached the office, there was still no reply.
Sitting down at her desk, she recalled the conversation she’d overheard in the bistro. She played around with various search terms until she found what she was looking for on the online pages of a local newspaper.
Last summer Marie T. was in a beauty salon in the Fourth District. Shirin W., who testified in favour of her customer at the trial, had just finished giving her a manicure when three men in their early twenties noticed Marie T. and began to knock on the window and make insulting comments about her appearance, especially her weight.
Marie T. stormed out of the beauty salon to confront the young men.
‘I’ve put up with a lot in my life,’ Marie T. told the court, ‘but I’d had enough.’
‘Stupid slag’ and ‘fat bitch’ were among the more harmless insults spoken by the men.
It seems that one thing led to another until eventually Marie T. felt so threatened that she opened her handbag, took out a can of pepper spray which she carried for personal protection, and sprayed it at the young men.
The defence argued that Marie T. had acted in an urgent and stressful situation; she had, after all, been threatened by three men and had only defended herself. But the court rejected this argument, holding that the pepper spray had not been Marie T.’s only option; she could equally have taken refuge in the beauty salon. The court refrained from a prison sentence, but ordered the accused to pay a thousand-euro fine.
Marie burst into tears in the courtroom and had to be comforted by her defence lawyer. The victims of her attack appeared satisfied with the sentence.
Norah clicked the website away with a bitter taste in her mouth. A woman fought back and look where it got her. The old mantra popped into Norah’s head: life is so fucking unfair.
She tried to work—to fit in with the busy rhythm of office life, the relentless ringing of phones, tapping of keyboards, clicking of mice, the constant coming and going. She tried to share in her colleagues’ sense of urgency and enthusiasm, but couldn’t get into her stride—couldn’t concentrate on a job for more than a few seconds at a time. Her thoughts fluttered about like startled chickens.
She wrote Werner an email headed Special Assignment, asking him for his help—again.
And just as she clicked on Send, a text arrived on her phone.
You’re asking the wrong questions.
Norah put down her glass of water.
Who are you? she wrote again.
The reply came immediately.
You’re asking the wrong questions.
Norah groaned, ignoring Aylin’s glance across the desk.
What do you want from me?
Whoever was at the other end answered instantly.
I’m helping you.
Norah sniffed.
What do you know about Arthur Grimm? she asked.
You know all you need to know. You just won’t admit it.
Norah stared at the display. Soon afterwards—perhaps whoever it was had realised that she wasn’t going to reply—another message appeared. Norah opened it.
On the night of February 11. At the big wheel in the Prater. You know all you need to know. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.
Norah gulped. There they were again. Dorotea Lechner’s words. Not exactly the same, but clearly recognisable.
Who are you? Norah asked yet again.
No answer.
Feeling numb, Norah read the texts over and over. Her hunch had been right. It wasn’t a joke; it was serious. Someone was expecting her to kill Arthur Grimm. On the very date and in the very place announced to her weeks ago by a woman who was now dead.
But this was crazy!
Norah sank back in her chair.
She remembered Valerie’s funeral—the coffin, Valerie’s parents (still together at that point), her brother Sven. Poor Sven had attracted horrified stares by bursting into laughter in the middle of the service, and Norah, who had always been terrified of laughing at a funeral, but had, until then, somehow managed to persuade herself that it couldn’t actually happen, was gripped by panic.
She remembered the girls at school who had surprised her with their sudden kindness. They wanted her to hang out with them all the time, kept asking her round to their houses, seemed to have developed a new, keen interest in her. At the time, Norah had wondered whether it wasn’t her close friendship with a dead girl that made her, in some macabre way, more interesting to them. Only years later did it occur to her that it was possible they had been nice to her all along; she just hadn’t noticed. As long as Valerie was alive she hadn’t needed them—hadn’t wanted to spend time with anyone except her best friend.
She remembered the policemen. She remembered hearing her mother’s whispered phone calls to her friends and knowing that she was talking about her. And she remembered the moment when she found out how Valerie had done it.
Norah returned to the present. Opposite her, Aylin was on the phone, talking about her latest meditation retreat. When Norah got up and crossed the corridor to go to the toilet, she felt like a sailor staggering across a pitching deck wet with spray.
39
That evening she waited a long time for him, hidden in the shadows across the road from his flat. She had taken up her lookout post early so as not to miss him when he came home from work. Charges or no charges, she had to see him again; it was as if some inner compulsion were driving her. She recognised him from a long way off and everything about him aroused her disgust: his precise, measured, almost soldierly movements; his cold, pale eyes; his square chin; his fake, narrow-lipped smile. He greeted an old woman, perhaps a neighbour, and the smile flickered across his face only to drain away like water into sand as soon as she had passed. When another woman passed him a few metres further on—this one taller and younger with a blonde ponytail and an aloof expression—he strode on without so much as a glance at her.
Norah saw him vanish into the building and soon afterwards a light went on at a first-floor window. So that was where Arthur Grimm lived. Norah stared up at his flat, but he didn’t appear at the window. Then, just as she was turning to leave, the light went out and a moment later Grimm reappeared at the door, a black sports bag over his shoulder. She watched him walk down the street, get into his car and drive away. There had been some mention of sport in Werner’s dossier. Norah racked her brain. Did he play football? Work out? Then she remembered: he went boxing. That figured.
This time she had been more careful not to get too close, and from a distance she was so inconspicuous—jeans, a khaki parka, her hair hidden under a black beanie—that Grimm probably wouldn’t have noticed her even if he had happened to see her.
Norah stood on the cold, dark street, trying to work out what her intuition was telling her. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it carefully out of her bag. The unknown number.
Get away from there!
Norah stared at the message. Then she raised her eyes and looked about her. A street on a winter’s evening in a well-off residential area, light at most of the windows. A couple passed on the other side of the road; an underground train jingled in the distance. ‘Where are you?’ Norah whispered. A second text arrived.
He’s dangerous!
Norah looked about her again, but coul
dn’t see anyone watching her. Had she been followed? A moment later she wrote:
Why should I believe you?
As so often, there was no immediate answer. Norah set off towards the underground, her gloved hands over her cold, aching ears. She tried to put her thoughts in order. Then, at last, the answer came.
I’ll prove it to you.
40
All next day, she only pretended to work. She was stuck in a cul-de-sac. Valerie’s relatives were sure she had taken her life, and though Norah might have her doubts about that—and her suspicions about Grimm—she had no idea where to look for proof. It was all so long ago. Her only hope was the latest message from the anonymous texter, but he—or she—hadn’t been in touch since.
Norah tried to distract herself. All morning she had typed and cut, taken calls and talked to people, made notes and read—but all she had really been doing was waiting for another text message. It wasn’t that she was short of work; she had an interview with a famous conductor in Salzburg in a few days and hadn’t even begun to prepare. She opened her browser and found trains that would allow her to spend all afternoon and evening in Salzburg and still be back in Vienna by midnight. When she’d bought the tickets, Norah leant back in her chair to think about the interview. But however hard she tried, she couldn’t concentrate.
•
As she neared her flat that evening, she was exhausted from the relentless tension. She did a quick supermarket shop, got herself home, manoeuvred herself and the bags through the door, mechanically opened her letterbox—and found a letter that she stuffed into one of the shopping bags.
After putting the food away in the fridge, she had a closer look at the letter. There was no return address, no postmark. Carefully Norah opened the envelope. Inside was a single printed sheet. Nervously she unfolded it and read it through, then dropped onto a chair with a relieved sigh. The letter, addressed to all tenants, informed them that the drains would be cleaned between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on 14 March and asked them to leave a key with a neighbour if they weren’t going to be in. God, she really was getting paranoid.
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