Dear Child: The twisty thriller that starts where others end

by Romy Hausmann

  My hip brushes the work surface. Two or three more steps and I’ll be standing right in front of him.

  ‘I want us to be a family too.’

  He narrows his eyes. ‘That’s a really pathetic attempt, Jasmin,’ he says. But he doesn’t try to attack me. Now I know I’m right. It’s love.

  Just one more step.

  And a grab with the hand.

  ‘In hospital they found out that I’m pregnant.’

  Lars Rogner cocks his head. Sizes me up and down. He’s the best journalist in the country; he knows if you’re lying to him. And he can see it. But when he opens his mouth to hurl his verdict at me, all that comes out is a stifled gasp.

  My hip brushes the work surface.

  The knife block is right there.

  And the hope, which is fixing his gaze on mine. Which has made him blind, at that moment or perhaps always.

  His lips get narrower. His pupils flicker. His eyes say he doesn’t believe me. The sharp, burning pain in his stomach. Lars Rogner isn’t divine anymore, he’s no god. Just a human being like the rest of us, with the spark of hope that allows us to be taken in by even the most pathetic attempts.

  Chaos in the background. Kirsten screaming. Matthias Beck yelling.

  We block it out.

  Just him and me and the moment in which I ram the knife into his stomach. It cuts everything, including meat.

  Matthias

  ‘No! Don’t!’

  I crawl over to Rogner, who’s now lying on the floor. He’s still breathing, albeit slowly.

  ‘Tell me where Lena is!’

  I press my hands on the spot where the red stain has seeped through the white material of his shirt and is getting visibly bigger.

  ‘Please!’ I beg.

  There’s a rattling in Rogner’s throat.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ I bellow at Jasmin Grass, who’s standing beside the body, staring at it as if paralysed, the knife still in her hand. ‘I promised her mother I’d bring her home,’ I keep imploring him.

  The hint of a smile darts across Rogner’s face.

  ‘From one father to another. Please!’

  Rogner’s breathing is getting shallower. His eyelids begin to flicker.

  I take my hands away from his stomach.

  Somebody touches my shoulder. Jasmin Grass’s friend.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ I shout.

  ‘The wood,’ Rogner whispers hoarsely. ‘Behind your garden. She loved the garden.’

  ‘Garden? Do you mean the plot of land outside of Germering? Grandma Hannah’s garden, yes?’

  Rogner makes a sluggish movement with his head, which I take to be a nod.

  I nod too, hastily.

  ‘Behind our garden is Germering Forest. There, yes?’

  ‘On the edge of the wood,’ Rogner wheezes in confirmation. ‘So she can always look at the hydrangeas.’

  ‘That’s where you buried them, is it? Will I find Lena and Sara there?’

  ‘She loved the hydrangeas,’ Rogner says, his eyelids twitching.

  For some reason, I mumble, ‘I know.’

  Then the smile darts across Rogner’s face again, quite clearly this time. His head falls to the side, his eyes stare vacantly. I sit beside him, his blood on my hands, his blood on my shirt.

  After 5,013 days.

  Ciao, Paps! See you soon!

  I’m hit by a wave, which surges through my body. I jerk and sob and cry for my child. As if through a veil, I see Hannah, who’s got up from her seat at the kitchen table, and now moves to Rogner’s other side. She stretches out his limp left arm and sits on the floor, his arm around her. Puts her hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder. Whispers, ‘Goodnight, Papa.’ And closes her eyes.

  Gruesome discovery of corpses in Germering

  Germering (MK) – Yesterday afternoon the bodies of three adult women and an infant were recovered from a communal grave in a wooded area near Germering. According to Chief Inspector Gerd Brühling, two of the bodies were those of Lena Beck, the Munich student missing since January 2004, and of her newborn daughter.

  So far nothing is known about the identities of the other two women. According to Brühling, an initial forensic inspection at the site suggests that the two unknown women were bludgeoned to death. The cause of death of Lena Beck and her daughter has not yet been determined. All the bodies were taken yesterday to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Munich, where further examinations are now due to take place.

  ‘Our intention is to identify the two unknown women as quickly as possible,’ Brühling said. ‘We have to assume that they were reported missing by their families, who now deserve clarity.’

  Jasmin

  ‘Really quite dry, isn’t it?’

  Kirsten puts down today’s edition of Bayerisches Tagblatt and reaches for the bread basket. The swelling on the left-hand side of her face has gone down, leaving just a bruise that sometimes shimmers through the skin. The cut she sustained from Rogner is healing well. Ignaz strokes my legs, purring loudly as if he’s being powered by a small motor. My apartment, the ‘crime scene’, is still sealed off. I’m living with Kirsten at the moment – ‘for the time being’, as we’re calling it.

  ‘What else do you expect them to write? That their very own star journalist was a murderer?’ The thought that there were two other women sends shivers down my spine. Even though the police are bound to find out their identities soon, the question of why they had to die will perhaps never be solved. Perhaps they put up greater resistance, fought for their lives more doggedly than I did. Showed the angry god such defiance that all he could do was resort to extreme measures to prove his absolute power to himself and his children. Or they had to die because in his eyes their performances as Lena simply weren’t convincing enough. Thinking about it now, I remember my first day in the cabin, when I awoke on the sofa, having blacked out in the storeroom.

  Do you know what it sounds like when you bash someone’s head in, Lena? It’s like dropping a watermelon on to the floor. Bam!

  Those words terrified me and I didn’t think for one second that they were empty threats. I didn’t doubt that he really had heard this horrific sound before. Several times, as it turned out. My thoughts are with the families of the two women, who will have to learn to live with the holes in their lives. And with the fact that they’ll never get to the bottom of it all. I know how difficult, how cruel that is. Unless, of course, Hannah and Jonathan bring themselves to talk about it one day. But first they’d have to be capable of understanding all that happened from a different perspective. Dr Hamstedt thinks there’s a chance. She compares the view the children had of the world in the cabin with a view through a keyhole. The door is open now, just a crack for the moment so as not to overwhelm them. But the more the door is opened over time, the broader their view of things will become. One day, she thinks, they’ll manage to get things in the right perspective, even though that could take a long time and would also mean coming to terms with the fact that their father was a murderer.

  I don’t have to ask myself if he enjoyed what he did. Of course he enjoyed it. He loved playing the great God, with power over life and people. He loved torture. Perhaps he wasn’t always like that. Perhaps the loss of his wife and son devastated him so much it drove him mad. Then all he had was you, Lena, who he loved, but at the same time hated for your part in what had happened. Things got out of hand, isn’t that the phrase? Things got really terribly out of hand.

  ‘Yes,’ Kirsten says, tearing me from my thoughts. ‘Because that’s exactly what happened. Don’t they owe it to their readers to tell the truth? I mean, he was their star journalist, who even filed reports about the case. It’s so perverted. But none of his oh-so-meticulous colleagues ever noticed anything.’

  ‘I don’t imagine writing that would be particularly good
for business.’

  ‘The other newspapers are printing it,’ Kirsten says with a shrug and takes a bite of her croissant.

  She’s right, Lena. The media can’t get enough of our story. And I’m assuming it’s going to continue like this for quite a while. Until the next ‘most spectacular crime of the decade’. You see, that’s what they’re calling it. There are requests for interviews and even a proposal for a TV movie. Our parts would be played by leading actors, and of course we’d be on prime time. Maybe it’s something that they’re leaving your children alone and switching the focus back to you instead. I mean, it can’t hurt you anymore. All apart from the Bayerisches Tagblatt, which is quietly referring to you as a ‘student’ again, the media is depicting you as the notorious lover who was partly responsible for her own fate. It’s about morality, of course. You mustn’t get involved with married men.

  Everybody is saying that Lena Beck wasn’t the woman people thought she was, and most say it with raised eyebrows. But they’ve no idea, Lena. You were a mother who did everything for her children. Strong, that’s what you were. Strong and brave out of love for your children, right up until your death. And I admire you for that. I promise to keep an eye on your children. Not yet, though; we all need a little more time. But I know they’ll be fine. They’ve got the best therapists. Your parents are there. And I’ll be there soon too.

  ‘Jassy? Are you crying?’

  Kirsten puts the croissant down on her plate.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, sniffling.

  ‘It’s over,’ Kirsten says, smiling. ‘For good this time.’ She takes my hand; we interlink fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, smiling back. ‘It’s over.’

  Lars Rogner is dead.

  Less than two minutes after I’d rammed the knife into his stomach the police stormed my apartment. Frau Bar-Lev had called them. Because of the creepy, strange man she’d bumped into when she came back home from her trip that evening.

  Your father, Lena.

  Whatever one says or writes about Lars Rogner, at least he had the decency to tell him your story, rather than take it to the grave with him and let your father go on suffering.

  He did, however, take a second story to the grave. As strange as it might sound, this was decent of him too.

  It’s the story of another fickle young woman. She’d had a bust-up with her best friend and was now planning her dramatic disappearance. She was going to go to the station and take the next train, no matter where it was heading, in the middle of the night without telling a soul. She just wanted to get away, switch off her mobile, give her friend a fright, put one over on her. That was her plan when, one late evening in May, she ended up in a bar on the way to the station, to give herself the last bit of Dutch courage. And he happened to be in this bar too. And it was she who offered to buy him a drink. And it was she who not only had a drink with him, but sat on his lap too. And it was she who whispered in his ear, ‘Shall we go back to your place?’

  ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ Kirsten asks, narrowing her eyes searchingly.

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘Nothing else.’

  Nothing that matters anymore.

  Lars Rogner is dead and I’m having breakfast with the woman I love.

  ‘Do you think we could go past the shops later?’

  ‘Sure,’ Kirsten says. ‘What do you need?’

  I smile.

  ‘Hair dye. It’s time to get rid of the blonde.’

  There’s one thing all the papers agree on, Lena: Jasmin G survived. And I’m slowly beginning to believe that this is the truth. A good truth.

  Matthias

  It’s a late October day straight out of a picture book. The air is balmy. The trees are making a final show of their potency before winter, putting on their loveliest display of colour. The light has a golden quality. Says Karin. The perfect afternoon for a walk, she adds, reluctant to give up.

  And yet both of us know that once again I won’t be leaving the house today. I’m sitting opposite her at the dining table, on my plate a piece of cake I don’t want. I’m in my pyjamas, my thick, brown towelling dressing gown and my slippers. I’m unshaven and my hair hasn’t been combed. Like yesterday. Like the day before yesterday. Like all the days over the past week when I’ve done nothing but shuffle around the house. Having the odd rest, a few insipid mouthfuls at the dining table. A doze on the sofa. Or brooding in Lena’s old room, which is now empty again. Just like me. Hannah’s gone. Back to the trauma centre. Dr Hamstedt says her therapy is going better now that the story has come out; they can make a proper start now. Jonathan’s making progress too. Karin said that on her last visit he was in high spirits. He’s already calling her ‘Grandma’.

  ‘More tea?’ Karin says, giving me a smile of encouragement across the table. I shake my head. Push the plate away. Leave the table, say I’m going upstairs, to Lena’s room. Karin lets me go without passing further comment.

  Gerd called yesterday. They’ve analysed the fingerprints from the two letters that Jasmin Grass handed over to the police. Of course they’re mine. Gerd says he’ll see what he can do. This is, after all, the second accusation against me. Even if Jasmin Grass were to refrain from pressing charges – and she will – the fact remains that I hindered the investigation, Gerd tells me. Anything beyond a fine of ninety days’ wages and you’re considered to have a criminal record, Gerd adds with a sigh. ‘Why on earth did you do it, Matthias?’

  I sighed too, just sighed, nothing else. Words fail me. I thought Jasmin Grass had something to hide. I thought the letters might help make her talk. Give her a bit of a fright. Remind her of Lena, who deserved the truth. But perhaps I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just in another of my blind rages, being the useless, silly ass I’d always been. I put the letters in Frau Grass’s mailbox on my way to the trauma centre. Gerd asked where I got her address. I sniggered down the phone. Oh, Gerd, good old naïve Gerd. Anyone can find an address with a few clicks on the internet.

  ‘You didn’t make it particularly easy for anyone, Matthias.’

  No, I’m a hopeless case, I know that myself.

  ‘Ah well, it’s all over now,’ Gerd said at the end of our conversation. ‘Maybe we should go fishing again sometime. Remember? Like in the old days?’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ I said, and, ‘Bye, Gerd.’

  All over.

  I go into Lena’s old room. The bed is made, the swivel chair is pushed neatly up against the desk. The two orchids that Karin lovingly nurtures rise up from the windowsill.

  All over and now I should be at peace.

  I sit on Lena’s bed, the stars above me.

  Five thousand and thirteen days.

  That’s how long I spent looking for my daughter, looking for answers, certain that I would find peace if I got any.

  Five thousand and thirteen days, which in the end fitted into a story lasting ten minutes. Rogner didn’t take any longer than that.

  Was that supposed to be it?

  Yes, that was it, and it feels wrong. Unsatisfying. Who am I now? What remains of me? What remains when Lena’s dead and Hannah’s gone?

  Dr Hamstedt has said we’re very welcome to visit the children, twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, between three and four in the afternoon. Gradually, of course, the visiting hours can be extended, but right now, and especially in view of recent events, the children should focus on their therapy. Karin says that’s ‘sensible’.

  I’m lying beneath a starry sky.

  Thinking of Hannah.

  My little Hannah . . .

  I imagine how it would be if I were suddenly filled with life again. If there were hope, prospects. I would get up, because at once I would know what I had to do. It would feel like an epiphany. I’d go into the bedroom, take some clean clothes from the wardrobe. Then into the bathroom for my first shower in days. A sha
ve. Comb my hair into a neat parting. Go downstairs where Karin’s washing up and she looks pleased to see me, dressed and groomed like a normal human being. The sight of me gives her hope. Hope for a walk in the glowing autumn afternoon. I’d kiss her on the cheek and say, ‘I’m just popping into the office to pick up the messages,’ and Karin feels even more hope. We will cope. A few more good years together. It will be different, that’s for sure. But we’ve still got each other and finally we’ve got closure. I’d smile at her again before I leave the kitchen, cross the hallway to the garage and get into my car. The garage door opens, I reverse. Drive off. Not to the office.

  To Regensburg, to the trauma centre. To Hannah.

  I imagine myself holding her hand and taking her out of the building to the car park. Putting on her seat belt in the back. Me sitting in the driver’s seat. Starting the car.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere really far away, Grandad,’ a squeak comes from the back seat.

  I smile into the rear-view mirror and say, ‘Yes, my darling, let’s do that.’

  I’m lying beneath a starry sky.

  I could . . .

  We’re not that dissimilar, Herr Beck.

  Epilogue

  Lena, September 2013

  Our world has solid walls. No windows, no doors. Our world is small. If you measure by putting your heel to your toes, it’s twenty-four paces from the bookshelves to the galley kitchen. Our world has its rules and punishments and its own time.

  It’s about power.

  You think you’ve locked us in. We are your prisoners. Isolated from everything, from outside, from people. We belong to you alone.

  Yes, it’s about power.

  Your power consists of four solid walls and twenty-four paces.

  I know you’d love me to say your name. You practically beg me to say it, like in the past when it would fall lovingly, excitedly, admiringly or at least politely from my lips. But I don’t do you this favour, no matter how often you try to remind me of the lovely times we had. No matter whether you beat me or kick me, insult me or hurt me in every conceivable way. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve become a stranger, and I’m going to make you feel this until the end. That’s power. My power and it’s inexhaustible.