by Helen Grant
“Um,” said Stefan noncommittally. He looked at me; it was time to make our escape.
Up in my room, we regarded each other gloomily.
“I told you,” I snapped.
He shrugged. “It was worth trying.” For a while we just pondered.
“What now?” I said in the end, in a somewhat listless voice.
Stefan looked up. “I’m going on my own, of course.”
“Really?”
“Well, your mother’s never going to change her mind, is she? I can tell you all about it afterward,” said Stefan. And I had to make do with that.
As it happened, the last day of April 1999 was a Friday, which lent an advantage to Stefan’s plan; should his mother choose that day to shift a little within the haze of smoke and alcohol in which she was always enveloped, and inquire into her son’s proposed excursion, at least she couldn’t complain that he had school the next day. I made Stefan promise to come over as early as possible on May morning to tell me what he had seen. The plan finalized, we clattered downstairs.
“Can Stefan come over tomorrow morning?” I asked my mother.
“If he comes at a civilized hour,” she replied.
“Seven o’clock?” I said hopefully.
“Ten o’clock,” said my mother firmly, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Stefan did not come over at ten o’clock that morning, nor did he come at half past ten, eleven o’clock, or noon. I sat by the window in the living room, nursing a comic book and peering out into the damp street, hoping to see him come running up through the rain.
The day wore on, and eventually I was persuaded to go finish my homework; my mother promised to call me the instant Stefan arrived. By the time I had finished the last page and was slipping the folder back into my overstuffed Ranzen, it was half past three, and still no Stefan. I went downstairs and found my mother energetically mopping the kitchen floor; Sebastian was perched out of harm’s way in his high chair, looking a little like a tennis umpire as he watched the mop head whisking back and forth across the tiles.
“Did Stefan come?” I asked in a slightly accusatory tone. Maybe he had turned up and been sent away again because I was doing my homework.
“No,” said my mother, pausing in her metronomic motion. She rubbed the back of her hand across her chin and glanced at me. “Perhaps he can’t come today, Pia.”
“He promised he would,” I said stubbornly.
“You’ll see him on Monday at school. What’s so important about today anyway?”
“Nothing,” I said, biting my lip.
“Well-” She was starting to sound exasperated. “Can’t you call him?”
“Mmmm.” The thought of getting Frau Breuer’s irritable, smoke-roughened voice at the other end of the phone was daunting.
“Out from under my feet, anyway,” said my mother, and the discussion was closed.
I wandered through to the living room and looked at the telephone extension as though it might bite me. It was now three thirty. Time seemed to have slowed down. Monday morning was an eternity away. Where on earth was Stefan? Had he completely disappeared?
As the thought occurred to me, it sent a shiver through me like a tiny electric shock. Perhaps he had disappeared-just like Katharina Linden. No. Don’t be so stupid. But the idea grew on me, the more I tried to convince myself that it was utter rubbish. Supposing he had gone up to the Quecken hill, and whatever it was that had got Katharina had got him, too, while he sat up there in the dark, waiting and watching?
I imagined him sitting there on one of the broken and mossy chunks of masonry, hugging his knees, shivering a little and peering into the dark. Had something crept up on him? Had it taken him with it, carried him off on its endless sweep through the darkened woods? An image of the spectral hunt formed in my mind’s eye, only instead of a knight it was Stefan who clung to the horse’s mane, his face like a pale moon and his eyes pits of darkness.
At last, even I could see that there was nothing for it; I’d have to telephone the Breuers. I hoped that Stefan would answer, so that I could bawl him out for not showing up, and then pump him for information. If not Stefan, then Frau Breuer was the lesser of two evils; she was bad-tempered but at least she was comprehensible: you could tell exactly how rude she was being to you.
Stefan’s father, Jano, on the other hand, had such a strong Slovakian accent that I could hardly understand his German. To converse with him was to pick your way through a thicket of stunted phrases and mangled vowels in the sure knowledge that if you said, “Wie, bitte?” once too often he would lose his temper. So as I dialed Stefan’s number I was praying that it would not be Jano who answered.
The phone rang eight times, and then suddenly it was picked up.
“Breuer,” barked a voice in my ear.
“Frau Breuer?” I quavered. “It’s Pia Kolvenbach.”
There was a short pause at the other end, during which I could hear Frau Breuer breathing heavily into the receiver, a sound reminiscent of a Rottweiler panting.
“You can’t speak to Stefan,” she eventually informed me.
“But-” I frantically tried to summon up the right words, afraid that she would hang up on me. “But-is he there?”
She snorted in disgust. “Doch, he’s here. But you can’t speak to him.”
Chapter Sixteen
The following morning dawned gray and uninviting. I looked out at the damp street, the cobblestones gleaming wetly, and my heart sank. Sunday seemed to stretch out before me like some uncrossable wasteland; Monday was a million years away, and I was going to spend every one of them shut indoors with no one but Sebastian to play with.
I looked into the living room, but my father was in there, reading a newspaper. He said nothing, but the slight raising of his eyebrows signaled that I was surplus to requirements, so I shut the door. Then I hung about on the staircase for a while, swinging on the newel post and scuffing my feet on the stairs. My mother, hearing these irritating noises, stuck her head around the kitchen door to remonstrate with me, but before she had time to fire off a remark, there was a loud knock at the front door.
Stefan! was my first thought as I sprang down from the stairs and headed for the door; the second was the surprising realization that I was actually looking forward to seeing him-to seeing StinkStefan.
“Pia, your hair-” began my mother in an irritated voice; she also made for the door, but I was too quick for her. I pulled down the heavy handle and swung it open.
The smile died on my face. It was not Stefan.
“Oh,” was all I could find to say as I stood there in my scruffy jeans with my unbrushed hair hanging around my face in tangled hanks.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kessel,” said my mother, with more presence of mind; she elbowed her way past me, wiping her hands on a tea towel, and held out her hand, which Frau Kessel shook, somewhat gingerly.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kolvenbach,” replied Frau Kessel with aplomb. She was a small woman in her seventies, comfortably compact, with a bosom almost as intimidating as Oma Kristel’s had been. She always dressed very neatly, but in a slightly old-fashioned style; today she was wearing a moss-green wool suit with a large and ugly Edelweiss brooch pinned to the front of it. She had a mass of pure white hair that had become as thin and gauzy as cotton candy; she habitually wore it piled on top of her head. Today it had been back-combed and stacked up so high that she had rather a Marie-Antoinette effect.
Underneath this improbable confection beamed her chubby face, with its twin flash of well-polished spectacles and expensive false teeth. She looked like an adorable old Oma; in fact she was the most vicious gossip in the whole of Bad Münstereifel.
“Won’t you come in, Frau Kessel?” said my mother, not betraying the effort it must have cost her to utter those fateful words. My mother could have cleaned and scrubbed for a week, and presented two charming children with neatly brushed hair and matching outfits (me in a dress, of course), and still Frau Kessel
’s beady old eyes would have found something to complain about to the next person she visited.
“Thank you,” said Frau Kessel, stepping carefully into the house, looking around her with avid-eyed interest.
“Please, do come into the living room,” said my mother in a bright voice, and opened the door. My father got to his feet, folding the newspaper he had been reading, and extended his hand.
“I didn’t see you in church this morning, Wolfgang,” was the first thing Frau Kessel said to him once the greetings were out of the way. She spoke in an arch tone.
“No,” answered my father, refusing to be drawn; Frau Kessel knew perfectly well that my father went to church only when absolutely necessary-for family weddings and funerals, for example-and that my mother being Protestant, evangelisch as it is called in Germany, she was not likely to see the rest of us in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria at all.
Still, she was never one to pass up an opportunity to needle someone; she kept the hundred-candle power smile going for half a minute as the silence stretched out between them, before finally conceding defeat and saying, “I do so miss seeing dear Kristel there every week.”
“Yes,” said my father, and sighed.
“Would you like some coffee, Frau Kessel?” interposed my mother, before the old woman could advance further on the topic of Oma Kristel’s churchgoing habits. “Freshly ground coffee,” she added, seeing Frau Kessel hesitate.
“Thank you, I will,” said Frau Kessel with the gracious air of one granting a favor.
She took the seat my father offered her, and settled herself in it with some care, like an elderly hen preparing to lay.
My mother departed for the kitchen, still smiling tautly-she couldn’t stand Frau Kessel-and my father and I looked at the old lady expectantly. We were under no illusion that this was a purely social visit. Frau Kessel had come over because she had Something to Say.
“Nun, it has been an exciting week for the town, don’t you think, Wolfgang?” was her opening sally. I looked at my father, puzzled. What was so exciting? My father also looked blank. Frau Kessel looked from my father to me, and then back to my father again. Her eyebrows lifted a little, and she cocked her head to one side, as though considering; could it really be that we were the only people in Bad Münstereifel not to have heard?
“An exciting week?” repeated my father eventually. There was something inevitable about conversation with Frau Kessel; she would throw out the bait, and then wait until the victim couldn’t bear not to bite. Now she sat back in her armchair, as though to express astonishment, folding her hands together in her green woolen lap.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s also fire,” she said in a voice loaded with meaning.
“Did something catch fire?” I asked.
“No, Schätzchen,” said Frau Kessel, giving me a soulful oh-you-poor-child look.
“Then why-” I began, but she cut me off.
“I really think you can’t have heard,” she announced in tones of artificially heightened surprise; her eyebrows were now so far up her forehead that they looked as though they might scurry into the towering thicket of white hair. She looked at my father reproachfully. “Of course, if you had been in church this morning, you would have heard Pfarrer Arnold mentioning it.”
She put up a hand and patted her hair. “That is to say,” she went on, “he didn’t mention it directly, but we all knew what he was referring to, and there were those who thought that it was in rather doubtful taste to be launching straight into a sermon of forgiveness.” She sniffed. “I mean, it isn’t as though they’ve found the child, is it?”
Frau Kessel, whose confidences were always labyrinthine, had now lost me completely. I looked at my father again; he appeared mystified too.
“Found the child?” repeated my father ponderously.
“Doch, the little Linden girl.”
My father considered for a moment, then gave in. “Frau Kessel, what are you trying to tell us?”
Frau Kessel looked slightly affronted. “About Herr Düster, natürlich.”
“What about Herr Düster?” asked my father patiently.
“Why, they’ve arrested him,” said Frau Kessel with relish. “Yesterday morning, at eight.”
“They’ve arrested him?”
Frau Kessel made a little moue of impatience; she was clearly tired of my father repeating everything she said, and wanted to get to the meat.
“Yes, they came yesterday morning and took him away in a police car.” Frau Kessel spread out one hand and studied her immaculately manicured fingernails, as cool as the expert witness in a murder trial.
“Did you see it?” I asked with interest.
“Not personally,” said Frau Kessel, in tones that implied this fact was of no consequence; she had her spies everywhere. “Hilde-that is to say, Frau Koch-saw it, with her own eyes. She was watering her flowers at the time.”
Frau Koch was Thilo Koch’s grandmother, and almost as toxic a personality as her grandson. Of course, the flower watering was a pleasantry; Hilde Koch was very likely up at dawn spying on her neighbors, and at the first sign of anything as interesting as a police car she would have been out of doors with all sensors on red alert.
“What happened?” asked my father.
“Well,” said Frau Kessel, “Hilde said that they came at eight o’clock, two of them, in a police car. She thinks they came early in order not to be seen. Of course,” she continued conspiratorially, “not everyone would feel happy about living next door to someone who… well, you know. So perhaps it was as well. She said she knew Herr Düster was at home; he’d already been out once, to take the paper in or something. When they knocked, he opened up straightaway, and they all went inside. They were in there for quite a time; Hilde said she had watered all the flowers twice before they came out again, but she couldn’t go inside; she said she was transfixed.
“Anyway, eventually they came out and Herr Düster got into the back of the police car and off they drove; Hilde said he was sitting there as rigid as a figure on a meerschaum pipe, didn’t show any sign of emotion at all. She said it made her feel quite ill.”
“Well,” said my father, at a loss for any other remark. Then he looked up thankfully; my mother was in the doorway, carrying a tray laden with coffee cups, a pot of coffee, and a stack of cookies, the standard offering to placate visiting demons. He rose to help her.
“It’s all right, I can manage,” she began when Frau Kessel’s voice rose above hers.
“I was just telling Wolfgang-Herr Düster has been arrested.”
“Really? What for?”
Frau Kessel flashed her glittering false teeth. “The little Linden girl-what else?”
My mother set down the tray on the coffee table, her face serious. “That’s terrible. Are you sure?”
Frau Kessel gave her a look that should by rights have curdled the cream in the milk jug. She hated her nuggets of gossip to be questioned. “Hilde Koch saw him being driven away by the police.” She accepted a cup of coffee with a large quantity of cream and spiked with two lumps of sugar. “Of course,” she added, after taking a cautious sip, “it did not come as a surprise to those of us who have lived in the town as long as I have.”
A wrinkled hand embossed all over with rings hovered for a moment over the cookies, and then retreated without selecting one.
“Once you have seen Evil in Action, you never forget it.” You could hear the capital letters in that portentous voice; Frau Kessel’s delivery was nothing if not dramatic.
I reflected that if she wanted to see Evil in Action she had only to look in the mirror every morning, but wisely I kept this to myself.
“Well, he is a little-er-unfriendly,” suggested my mother cautiously.
“Unfriendly!” Frau Kessel was outraged at this understatement. Then she collected herself, leaned forward, and patted my mother on the knee.
“Of course, you could not be expected to know.”
She manage
d to make the remark sound insulting; my mother could not be expected to know anything because she was a foreigner, probably with a comically poor grasp of German. Seeing my mother heating up for a tart retort, my father stepped in and rescued her.
“I don’t know either, Frau Kessel.”
“Ach, Wolfgang!” Frau Kessel shook her head. “And when Kristel was so close to poor Heinrich-Heinrich Schiller, I mean. We always thought it was so charming that she took Pia to visit him-since he lost his own daughter, of course.” She heaved a theatrical sigh, and then, perhaps noticing that her whole audience was still looking unsatisfactorily bewildered, she decided to put her cards on the table. “We all knew Herr Düster was responsible.”
“You mean for…?” began my father, his brows furrowed.
“For taking Gertrud,” finished Frau Kessel. She shook her head. “I don’t know why he wasn’t put away then. That poor little thing-no older than Pia, and such a beautiful child. Poor Heinrich was never the same afterward-and how should he be? With Herr Düster living a few meters away, and nobody doing anything about it.”
“That’s a terrible accusation.” My mother sounded shocked.
Frau Kessel shot her a narrow glance; had she overreached?
“I’m not making an accusation,” she retorted, tossing her head. “I’m repeating what is common knowledge in the town. Ask anyone.”
“How did they know it was him?” I asked.
Frau Kessel looked suddenly uncomfortable, as though she had only just remembered that I was there. She reached out one of her jewelencrusted claws and would have patted me on the head like a small dog if I had not ducked out of her way.
“Never mind, Schätzchen,” she told me. “Just remember that you should never, ever go anywhere with a stranger.”
I remembered something. “But isn’t Herr Düster Herr Schiller’s brother? Then he wasn’t a stranger, was he? He was her uncle. It’s OK to go with someone if they’re your family.”