by Helen Grant
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Two days later Michel failed to turn up in the morning. I stood outside the green gate with my bag, shivering a little in the fresh autumn air, and watching pale tendrils of mist seeping through the trees. Normally Michel was punctual; sometimes he was even waiting for me. Today there was no sign of him when I came out of the house, and after I had been waiting for a few minutes I realized that he was actually late. I looked at my watch; it was twenty-five to eight. If he did not turn up soon we would both miss the start of school. I listened, but there was no sound of an approaching car. All I could hear was birdsong and once, briefly, a harsh cry which might have been the bark of a fox.
At twenty to eight I went back into the house and with some trepidation roused my father. Neither he nor Tuesday was an early riser and it was difficult to make him understand that we needed to leave now, urgently. He seemed to take an age to get dressed and when he came downstairs he was muttering about coffee.
‘Dad, we have to go.’
I watched him stumbling about like a sleepwalker. Clearly I was going to be very late. For a brief moment I considered writing a note to the school excusing myself for the day and signing it in Tuesday’s hand, but then I realized there was no one to take it to school for me. The prospect of making myself conspicuous in the classroom again made me frantic. I cursed Michel inwardly. What was he playing at?
In the event I reached the school half an hour late and had to endure Frau Schäfer’s grim reminders that lessons began at eight sharp. It was not until I was finally sitting in my seat next to Johanna, who was pointedly engrossed in her work, that I realized I had not made any arrangement for my father to pick me up after school.
During the morning break I scoured the foyer and the crowd around the vending machine for Michel but could not spot him anywhere. Eventually a familiar corpulent figure broke away from the others and lumbered over to me; it was Hendrich. I didn’t need to smell that caries-laden breath to know that he had been gorging himself on something with chocolate in it; it was smeared on the sleeve of his grubby sweatshirt.
‘You looking for Michel Reinartz?’
I looked at him silently. Naturally he took this to mean that I could not understand what he was saying. He repeated the question, this time more loudly.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ I said, trying to sound as non-committal as possible. The prospect that Hendrich might think I was missing Michel, or, worse, that he would drop this surmise into the current of gossip which ran through the school, like a hippo releasing a turd into a fast-flowing river, was too grisly to contemplate. I did my best to look as though I was completely indifferent to Michel’s whereabouts.
‘He didn’t come to school today,’ Hendrich informed me, observing me slyly for signs of disappointment.
‘Really?’ I said, and turned my back on him.
Michel still could’ve called me, I thought irritably, and then realized that he couldn’t; there was no signal in the forest. I supposed he was sick. At any rate, it seemed he wasn’t deliberately avoiding me.
I asked around before lessons restarted. Nobody was prepared to take me right back to the castle, but I found someone who was willing to drop me off at the village of Traubenheim, which lay on the other side of the woods. From there I would have to walk.
It was cool that morning, but later when my lift dropped me off at Traubenheim it was quite warm. After I had been walking for ten minutes I had to take my jacket off and carry it over my arm. The leaves of the beech trees which intermingled with the pines had not yet turned golden and the sunlight glowed green through them. My geography of the forest was still imperfect but I knew that the track from Traubenheim ran nowhere near the Reinartzes’ land, where that monstrous dog roamed like a Minotaur lurking in a maze. This part of the forest seemed unthreatening.
My spirits lifted. I kicked up dust with the toes of my boots and felt the breeze lifting the ends of my hair, and smiled in spite of myself, enjoying a moment of absurd happiness. Annoyance and anxiety melted away; it was impossible not to feel good, any more than a plant can help itself growing towards the light. When I finally came out from the forest and strolled towards the castle gate, I was actually singing under my breath.
I was just stepping into the courtyard when I heard it: far off in the woods, a long drawn-out howl. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought it was a wolf. But there were no more wolves in Germany – were there? I listened but the sound had died away, replaced with a silence that was somehow ominous.
The next moment the sound from the woods was forgotten. Polly was standing outside the house, close to the open front door, with her back to the wall. Her knees were sagging under her as though she would have collapsed without its support. Her face was ashen.
‘Polly?’
She looked at me but said nothing.
‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’
‘Did you see him?’ she said in a choked voice. She was trembling.
‘Who?’
She just shook her head helplessly. Her hands moved to her stomach; I guessed she was feeling sick.
‘Where’s Dad?’
Polly didn’t even try to answer this time; she just pointed at the door. I swung my bag off my shoulder and hurried inside.
The scene which met my eyes was like some horrible parody: Dutch Interior with Sacrifice. The table had clearly been laid for lunch. There were three plates still on it, with the remains of food on them, and a fourth on the floor in pieces. A large piece of ham had been set out on a blue-and-white platter beside my father’s place; there was a carving knife next to it on the table, but the fork still stuck out of the ham’s back, as though it were a bull lanced by a picador. Next to the ham was a plastic tub of salad. There was a half-full bottle of Dornfelder and two wine glasses, one of them smeared with lipstick. I saw all these things but did not really notice them. I was looking at the thing in the centre of the table, the thing which had clearly landed there with some force, because one of the wine glasses was on its side, the dregs of the red wine forming a dark pool on the table and mixing with some other, more sinister-looking stains.
For a moment I could not work out what it was, the wedge-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the table, its surface marbled black and red, a single fly buzzing about it. I could see a horn, curling in a ridged spiral like an ammonite. There was a protuberance with a dull sheen to it which I queasily recognized as an eye.
It was the head of a ram. As I gazed at it, a second fly droned in through the open doorway and landed on the animal’s nose. I saw it crawl into the nostril and disappear.
There was a smothered exclamation from the corner of the room. I jumped; I had thought I was alone. Now I saw that my father was standing there, with his back to the wall. He had one arm across his body, as though defending himself, and his other hand to his face. He looked as sick as Polly had. I scanned the room and realized that Tuesday was there too. She was curled into one of the battered armchairs, her feet tucked under her as if she were a little child. Ru was in her arms; she was holding him tightly to her, his little face buried in her neck.
It was some time before I could get enough sense out of any of them to understand what had happened. A scruffily dressed man – ‘a lunatic,’ said my father – had stormed into the house, and flung the ram’s head, mangled and bloody, on to the dinner table. And then he had told my father and Tuesday that he would kill us all if we didn’t get out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘He really said he’d kill us?’ I asked Tuesday for the fifth time.
It was half an hour since I had arrived home, but I was still having difficulty taking it all in. I was numb with shock. This was something different from mysterious fires which might or might not have been started deliberately, or unknown Germans whose deaths – though tragic – might have been accidental. Those things bore as much resemblance to what had just happened as a horror film does to newsreel footage of a disaster. This wa
s real.
My father had finally roused himself from his shocked inertia and driven into Baumgarten to summon the police. The rest of us were huddled in the kitchen. Even if we could have borne to touch the bloodied head of the ram, we suspected it ought to stay where it was until the police came. All the same, none of us wanted to stay in the living room, where the blank gaze of those filmy eyes seemed to follow you around and the air was thick with the buzzing of flies.
‘Well, it’s obvious that was what he was saying,’ said Tuesday. She had given Ru up to Polly and was clutching a mug of hot sweet tea as though it were some life-preserving elixir. ‘He was yelling the place down. He sounded absolutely insane.’
‘Are you sure?’ It was almost too much for me to take in.
‘Of course I’m sure.’ Tuesday glared at me, her feelings finding vent in the familiar groove of irritation at my behaviour. She made a sweeping gesture which caused the bracelets on her skinny arm to clank together. ‘He was rabid. Ask Polly.’
I glanced at Polly, but her face was turned away from me. She was hugging Ru as though both their lives depended on it, her face pressed close to his neck. She seemed to be murmuring something to him in a low voice, over and over again, comforting him. Somehow this made me uncomfortable. She must have been just as shocked as Tuesday, but she was not talking; she had retreated to a place within herself. As soon as I could get her away from Tuesday I would have to try to speak to her. For now, I needed to get to the bottom of what had happened.
‘What exactly did he say?’ I persisted. ‘Did he –’
‘I don’t know,’ snapped Tuesday irritably, cutting me off. ‘He was shouting in German, of course. But it was obvious what he meant. He was completely mad.’
‘But –’
‘And don’t tell me he wasn’t,’ continued Tuesday. ‘He threw an animal’s head on the table, for God’s sake.’ Her hands were shaking; tea slopped unnoticed on to the floor.
I sighed. It was difficult enough to get any useful information out of Tuesday at the best of times, and I could see that very soon she would have worked herself up into such a state of indignation that it would be impossible. I tried again.
‘It must have been horrible for you,’ I said sympathetically.
This tack generally worked well on Tuesday, who loved to talk about her feelings, and this occasion was no exception. It took another half-hour and several more cups of heavily sweetened tea before I had the whole story, but eventually I had pieced it all together.
The family were having a late lunch when it happened. My father was carving himself a slice of ham; Tuesday was sipping the Dornfelder; Polly as usual was supervising Ru. They were discussing a plan of my father’s, to visit the offices of the archdiocese in Köln, which Tuesday thought she might combine with a shopping trip. They had been surprised to hear the courtyard gate bang and the next moment they had all heard someone crossing the courtyard with a quick, angry tread.
My father had put down the carving knife and turned to Tuesday to say something when the front door was flung open and a man had barged into the room, wild-eyed and red-faced, shouting something in furious German. He was followed by a younger man – Tuesday said he was about twenty, and ‘he looked just as mad as the other one, only he wasn’t shouting’ – and an animal which Tuesday described as ‘a wolf’.
Michel Reinartz Senior, I thought. It had to be him. The younger man might have been Michel’s older brother.
Michel’s father – if it was him – had strode right up to the table, until he was almost nose to nose with my father, and within a metre of Tuesday, who had recoiled from his unkempt appearance and the rank smell of body odour which roiled off him. A torrent of heavily accented German crashed over both of them with the battering force of a hurricane. My father, too stunned to know how to react, had put up a hand, as though trying to calm the man down, and the man had raised his own fist, aggressively, and they had seen for the first time what he was grasping in it: the severed head of the ram. He was holding it by one of the horns and flourishing it as though he meant to strike my father with it. Then suddenly he had hurled it down with all his force on to the centre of the table, where it had landed with a meaty thump, spilling wine and splashing unspeakable fluids on to the wooden surface.
By this time Ru had been screaming with fright, Polly was backed up against the sideboard, and the dog was snarling and rearing up, the whites of its eyes showing. Tuesday had uttered one short shriek when the man wheeled around and fixed her with a glare which silenced her in an instant.
‘It was as though he was angry with me,’ she said. ‘So angry that he could have killed me.’ Her voice shook.
He had raised his right hand and Tuesday clearly saw that the fingers were stained with congealed blood. He pointed at her, his filthy forefinger a few centimetres from her nose, and then he turned back to my father and thrust the finger towards him, stabbing the air as though he wanted to run my father through. His chest was heaving with exertion. He had paused for an instant, fixing the pair of them like a hellfire preacher with two sinners in his sights, and then he had spat out one sentence which was unmistakably a threat.
The next minute he was striding back out the way he had come, the dog at his heels. The younger man had lingered long enough to spit on the floor, then he had lumbered after them. During the entire time he had been in the house he had not uttered a word.
For a moment there had been a stunned silence. Then Tuesday had flung herself at Ru and gathered him into her arms while bursting into a fit of hysterics which had probably frightened him as much as the violent intrusion. My father had sagged against the wall. Neither of them had thought to reassure Polly, who had stumbled out of the house as though the atmosphere inside was full of poison gas.
Tuesday could not repeat to me any of the German words used, nor could she say how long it had been between the men leaving and my arriving home. I judged it could not have been long, since no one had had time to gather their wits and go for help until after I got home, nor had I seen any sign of the men when I arrived. All the same, I remembered the distant howl in the forest and could not help shivering. If I had been a few minutes earlier, if someone had given me a lift back to the castle instead of letting me walk from Traubenheim, I might have run straight into them, all on my own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
My father returned from Baumgarten with a green-and-white police car in tow. The two cops inside looked bored and sceptical. One of them was the skinny one with the moustache whom I had seen at the cemetery; I thought his name was Esch. The other was a woman I had never seen before, whom he introduced as Polizeikommissarin Axer. She was taller than the officer with the moustache and perhaps ten kilograms heavier than he was; her uniform strained at the seams. She had bleached blonde hair which was too short for her heavy features and her face was bare of make-up. I could see her and Tuesday eyeing each other like members of inimical species.
When she saw the ram’s head lying upside down on the dinner table, with a bloody stub of bone pointing at the ceiling, she gave a short grunt which might have been amusement or even approval. Herr Esch just looked at it as though it were nothing unusual at all, as though here in the Eifel it was perfectly normal for neighbours to drop in on each other at mealtimes and fling offal on to the table.
‘Schwarzköpfiges Fleischschaf,’ he said.
‘What did he say? Does he know who it was?’ whispered Tuesday to me.
‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘He says it’s a black-headed sheep.’
Herr Esch cleared his throat. ‘May we sit down?’ he asked in English.
‘Do,’ said Tuesday in a faint voice. She edged away from the dinner table; clearly she had no intention of sitting there herself.
Frau Axer was already opening a laptop on the corner furthest from the ram’s head. Herr Esch pulled out a dining chair and settled himself on it. The head was within an arm’s reach of him but he seemed unbothered.
H
e glanced around at us. ‘Sit, please.’
I think we all had high hopes of that interview. All of us thought that it would lead to instant action, that the two men who had stormed into the house would be found and arrested for trespassing. My father, who had recovered his spirits slightly, was inclined to stand on his dignity as an academic. When Herr Esch called him Herr Professor he didn’t correct him. He forthrightly expressed his opinion that the intrusion was an attempt to frighten him off his search for the Allerheiligen glass. Listening to him talking about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, I felt rather disgusted; it sounded as though he were quoting from the book as yet unwritten. I could imagine him working the story up into a dramatic confrontation between himself and pitchfork-bearing peasants in bloodstained lederhosen, a Gordon of Khartoum moment translated to the Eifel.
Tuesday, on the other hand, clung to the view that the two men were ‘mad’ and that they should be hauled away to a secure institution without further delay. She kept coming back to this viewpoint with the wearying regularity of a beast of burden which no longer knows how to plod anywhere except around the old familiar track.
Polly said very little, merely adding a quiet ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when asked to confirm something Tuesday or our father had said. I sat by her, holding her hand, which was as cold as marble. I had tried to put an arm round her, but she had instantly stiffened. I felt that she would have liked to disappear into the woolly jumper she was swaddled in.