by Craig Russel
He carefully laid the velvet roll-pouch on the passenger seat. He cast a glance up and down the street before untying the ribbon fastener and unrolling the pouch flat. The blade gleamed bright and hard, sharp and beautiful in the street light. He imagined its keen edge parting flesh. Paring it from the bone. With this instrument he would still their treacherous voices; he would use its blade to shape a shining silence.
There was a movement.
He flipped the dark blue velvet over to conceal the beautiful blade. He placed his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead as the bicycle passed the car. He watched the rider swing one leg over, the bicycle still in motion, before dismounting. The cyclist removed his chain and padlock from the bike’s pannier and wheeled the bike into the passage at the side of the building.
He laughed quietly as he watched the cyclist’s small ritual of security. There’s no need, he thought. Leave it for someone to steal. You won’t need it again in this lifetime.
The cyclist reappeared from the passage, slipped his keys from his pocket and let himself into the apartment.
In the dark of the car, he sheathed his hands in the latex of a pair of surgical gloves. He reached into the back, picked up the toiletry bag from the back seat and placed it next to the velvet roll-pouch.
Convergence.
He felt a great calm descend on him. Zanshin. Now justice would be fulfilled. Now the killing would begin.
3.
The Day After the First Murder: Friday, 19 August 2005.
8.57 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
She stood for a moment and looked up at the sky, screwing up her eyes against the morning sun that shone so optimistically on the Schanzenviertel. It was her first appointment of the day. She checked her watch and allowed herself a small, tight smile of satisfaction. 8.57 a.m. Three minutes early.
Above all else, Kristina Dreyer prided herself on never being late. In fact, as she was about many things in her life, Kristina was obsessive about her punctuality. It was part of her reinvention of herself: of how she defined the person she had become. Kristina Dreyer was someone who had known Chaos: she had known it in a way that most people could never begin to imagine. It had engulfed her. It had stripped her of her dignity, of her youth and, most of all, it had ripped away from her any sense of control over her life.
But now Kristina was back in charge. Where her life had previously been anarchy and tumult beyond her understanding, far less her control, it was now characterised by her absolute regulation of every day. Kristina Dreyer led her life with an uncompromising exactitude. Everything about her life was simple, clean and neat: her clothes, including her working clothes, her small, pristine apartment, her VW Golf, with the lettering Dreyer Cleaning on the door panels; and her life, which, like her apartment, she had chosen to share with no one.
Kristina’s uncompromising exactitude really came into its own in her work. She was supremely good at her job. She had built up a client list across Eimsbuttel that meant her week was full, and each customer trusted her for her thoroughness and honesty. And most of all, they trusted her for her total reliability.
Kristina cleaned well. She cleaned apartments, she cleaned villas. She cleaned homes large and small, for young and old, for German and foreigner. Every home, every task, was approached with the same scrupulously methodical approach. No detail was missed. No corner cut.
Kristina was thirty-six but looked considerably older. She was a short, thinnish woman. At one time in her life, less than a dozen years before but a lifetime away, her features had been fine; delicate. Now it merely seemed as if her skin was pulled too tight over the angular framework of her skull. Her high, sharp cheekbones jutted aggressively from her face and the skin that stretched across them was slightly reddened and rough. Her nose was small, but again, just below the ridge, bone and cartilage seemed to protest against being confined and hinted at an ancient break.
Three minutes early. She let the smile fade. Being too early was almost as bad as being too late. Not that her customer would be any the wiser: Herr Hauser would already be at work. But Kristina’s punctuality meant that the order of her universe was maintained; that no randomness would enter into it and spread, like cancer, to become sanity-and life-threatening Chaos. The way it had been before.
She turned the key and opened the door, pushing against the spring with her back as she swung her vacuum cleaner into the hallway.
The way Kristina thought of it was that she had given birth to herself. She had no children – and no man to father children – but she had created herself anew: given herself a new life and put aside all that had gone before. ‘Don’t let your history define who you are or who you can become,’ someone had once said to her when she had been at her lowest. It had been a turning point. Everything had changed. Everything that had been part of that old life, that dark life, had been abandoned. Dumped. Forgotten.
But now, as Kristina Dreyer stood, halfway across the threshold of the apartment that she was due to clean that bright Friday morning, history reached out from her old life and seized her by the throat in an unyielding grip.
That smell. The rich, nauseous, coppery odour of stale blood hanging in the air. She recognised it instantly and started to shake.
Death was here.
9.00 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
The anxiety was hidden deep. To the casual observer, there was nothing in her composure that hinted at anything other than confidence and absolute self-certainty. But Dr Minks was no casual observer.
His first patient of the day was Maria Klee, an elegant young woman in her thirties. She was very attractive, with blonde hair combed back from the broad, pale brow; her face was a little long and seemed to have stretched the nose a fraction of a centimetre too low and made it slightly too narrow and therefore robbed her of true beauty.
Maria sat opposite Dr Minks, her slender, expensively trousered legs crossed with her manicured fingers resting on her knee. She sat upright: perfectly composed, alert but relaxed. Her grey-blue eyes held the psychologist in a steady, assured, yet not defiant gaze. A look that seemed to say that she was expecting a question to be posed, or a proposition to be expounded, but that she was perfectly content to wait, patiently and politely, for the doctor to speak.
For the moment, he didn’t. Dr Friedrich Minks took his time as he examined the patient’s notes. Minks was of indeterminate middle age: a short, dumpy man with dull skin and thinning black hair; his eyes were dark and soft behind the panes of his spectacles. In contrast to his poised patient, Minks looked as if he had been dropped into his chair and that the impact had crumpled him further into his already crumpled suit. He looked up from his notes and took in the carefully constructed edifice of confidence that Maria Klee presented with her body language. Nearly thirty years of experience as a psychologist allowed him to see through the sham instantly.
‘You are very hard on yourself.’ Minks’s long-gone Swabian childhood still tugged on his vowels as he spoke. ‘And I have to say that is part of your problem. You know that, don’t you?’
Maria Klee’s cool grey eyes didn’t flicker, but she gave a small shrug. ‘What do you mean, Herr Doktor?’
‘You know exactly what I mean. You refuse to allow yourself to be afraid. It’s all part of these defences you’ve built around yourself.’ He leaned forward. ‘Fear is natural. After what happened to you, to feel fear is more than natural… it’s an essential part of the healing process. Just as you felt pain as your body healed, you have to feel fear to allow your mind to heal.’
‘I just want to get on with my life, Dr Minks. Without all this nonsense getting in the way.’
‘It’s not nonsense. It’s a stage of post-trauma recovery that you have to go through. But because you see fear as a failure and you fight against your natural reactions, you are stretching out this stage of recovery… and I’m worried it’s going to be stretched out indefinitely. And that is exactly why you are having these panic attacks. You have
sublimated and repressed your natural fear and horror at what happened to you until it has burst through the surface in this distorted form.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Maria said. ‘I have never tried to deny what happened to me. What he… what he did to me.’
‘That’s not what I said. It’s not the event that you’re denying. You’re denying your right to experience fear, horror, or even outrage at what this man did to you. Or that he has yet to be held to account for his actions.’
‘I don’t have time for self-pity.’
Minks shook his head. ‘This has nothing to do with self-pity. This has everything to do with post-trauma stress and with the natural process of healing. Of resolution. Until you resolve this conflict within, you will never be able to connect properly with the world around you. With people.’
‘I deal with people every day.’ The patient’s grey-blue eyes now glinted with defiance. ‘Are you saying I’m compromising my effectiveness?’
‘Perhaps not now… but if we do not start laying ghosts to rest, it will, ultimately, manifest itself in how you conduct yourself professionally.’ Minks paused. ‘From what you’ve told me, you are increasingly showing signs of aphenphosmphobia. Considering the type of work you’re involved with, I would have thought it would present significant difficulties. Have you discussed this with your superiors?’
‘As you know, they arranged physical and psychological therapy.’ Maria angled her head back slightly and there was a defensive edge to her voice. ‘But no. I haven’t discussed these current… problems with them.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Minks, ‘you know my feelings on this matter. I feel that your employers should be aware of the difficulties you’re having.’ He paused. ‘You mentioned this man with whom you began a relationship. How is that going?’
‘Okay…’ There was no longer a defiant tone in Maria’s voice and some of the tense energy seemed to have seeped from her shoulders. ‘I am very fond of him. And he of me. But we haven’t… we haven’t been able to be intimate yet.’
‘Do you mean you have no physical contact… no embracing or kissing? Or do you mean sex?’
‘I mean sex. Or anything approaching it. We do touch. We do kiss… but then I start to feel…’ She drew her shoulders up, as if her body were being squeezed into a small space. ‘Then I get the panic attacks.’
‘Does he understand why you withdraw from him?’
‘A little. It’s not easy for a man – for anyone – to feel that their touch, their close proximity, is repellent. I’ve explained some of it to him and he’s promised to keep it to himself. I knew he would anyway. But he understands. He knows I’m seeing you… well, not you specifically… He knows I’m seeing someone about my problem.’
‘Good…’ Minks smiled again. ‘What about the dreams? Have you had any more?’
Maria nodded. Her defences were beginning to crumble and her posture sagged a little more. Her hands still rested on her knee but the manicured fingernails now gathered up a small clutch of expensive tailoring.
‘The same thing?’ asked Minks.
‘Yes.’
Dr Minks leaned forward in his chair. ‘We need to go back there. I need to visit your dream with you. You understand that, don’t you?’
‘Again?’
‘Yes,’ said Minks. ‘Again.’ He gestured for her to relax into her seat.
‘We’re going back to your dream. Back to where you see your attacker again. I’m going to start counting, now. We’re going back, Maria… one… two… three…’
9.00 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina left the door open, leaning the vacuum cleaner and her cleaning tray as checks against the door spring; leaving her escape route clear. Old instincts started to rouse themselves from somewhere deep within her, awoken by the scent of fresh death in the air. She became aware of a rhythmic rushing noise and realised that it was the sound of her pulse in her ears. She reached down and picked up a spray bottle of cleaning fluid from her tray, gripping it tight in her trembling hand, like a gun.
‘Herr Hauser?’ She called into the hall, into the quiet rooms beyond. She strained to hear any sound, any movement. Any sign of something living within the apartment. She gave a jump as a car drove past on the street outside, the thudding bass of raucous American dance music synchronising with the pulsating rush of blood in her ears. The apartment remained silent.
Kristina edged down the hall towards the lounge, the hand with the cleaning-fluid bottle held out hesitantly before her, the other offering uncertain support, tracing its way along the bookshelves that lined the hallway wall. As she did so, Kristina couldn’t help her trembling fingers registering a hint of dust on a shelf needing special attention.
She felt her anxiety ease as she stepped into the bright lounge and found nothing untoward, other than that Herr Hauser had left it particularly untidy: a whisky bottle and half-drained glass sat on the table beside the armchair; some books and magazines lay scattered on the sofa. Kristina had always marvelled that someone who was always so concerned about the environment in general could be so careless of his personal surroundings. Kristina Dreyer, the assiduous cleaner of other people’s homes, swept the room with her gaze, registering and mentally timetabling the work that needed doing. But a former Kristina, a past-tense Kristina, screamed at her from deep within that there was death here: its wraith smell hanging in the stuffy air of the apartment.
She stepped back out into the hall. She stopped in her tracks, as if the energy from even the slightest movement had to be diverted to her hearing. A sound. From the bedroom. Something tapping. Someone tapping. She moved towards the bedroom door. She called out ‘Herr Hauser’ once more and paused. No answer, except the ominous sound from within the bedroom. Her grip tightened on the cleaning-fluid bottle and she threw open the door so hard that it banged against the wall and swung back, slamming shut again in her face. Again she pushed it open, more carefully this time. The bedroom was large and bright, with off-white walls and a polished wooden floor. The window was open slightly and a breeze stirred the vertical blinds, which tapped rhythmically against the window. Kristina let go the breath she did not know she had been holding with a half-laugh, half-sigh of relief. But still the anxiety didn’t fully leave her, and pulled her back out into the hall.
The apartment’s hall was L-shaped. Kristina moved with slightly more confidence now and made her way down to where the hall took a right turn and led to a second bedroom and the bathroom. As she turned the corner, she noticed that the second bedroom’s door was open, casting the bright sunlight from the windows onto the bathroom door, which was closed. Kristina froze.
There was something nailed to the bathroom door. She felt a nauseous surge of terror. It was some kind of animal pelt. A small animal, but Kristina couldn’t guess what kind. The fur was wet and matted and bright red. Unnaturally red. It was as if the pelt had been freshly skinned and blood ran down the white painted surface of the door.
She edged her way towards the door, her breaths coming short and fast, the searchlight of her gaze locked on the oozing rawhide.
She stopped half a metre from the door and stared at the pelt, trying to make sense of it. Her hand reached out, as if to touch it, her fingers stopping just short of the glossy red fur.
It took a time too brief to be measured for her brain to analyse what her eyes were seeing and to make sense of it. The thought was a simple one. A simple statement of fact. But it ripped into Kristina and in that instant shredded her ordered world. She heard an inhuman shriek of terror reverberate along the hall and tumble out through the still-open front door. Somehow, as the fragile fabric of Kristina Dreyer’s world was rent asunder, she realised that the shriek was hers.
So much terror. So many long-forbidden memories flooding back. All from a single realisation.
What she was looking at was not fur.
9.10 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
Maria stood in the heart of the dreamscape field. As it
always was in her dream, reality was exaggerated. The moon that hung in the sky was over-large and over-bright, like a stage light. The grasses caressing her naked legs and swirling silently to the command of an unheard breeze moved too sinuously. There was no sound. There were no odours. For the moment, Maria’s world was stripped down to two senses: sight and sensation. She looked out across the field. The silence was broken by a soft voice with a hint of a Swabian accent. A voice that belonged somewhere other than the world she now stood in.
‘Where are you now, Maria?’
‘I’m there. I’m in the field.’
‘Is it the same field and the same night?’ the spirit voice of the psychologist asked.
‘No… no, it’s not. I mean it is… but everything is different. It’s larger. Wider. It’s like the same place but a different universe. A different time.’ Far in the distance she could see a galleon – its great white sails rippled insubstantially in a weak wind as it sailed towards Hamburg. It seemed to drift through the swirling grass instead of the water. ‘I see a ship. An old-fashioned sailing ship. It’s going away from me.’
‘What else?’
She turned and looked in another direction. A broken building, like a ruined castle, sat small and dark at the edge of the field, as if at the edge of the world. A cold, harsh light seemed to shine from one of the windows.
‘I see a castle, where the disused barn should be. But I am so far away from it. Too far away from it.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘No. No, I am not afraid.’
‘What else do you see?’
Maria turned around and gave a small jump. He had been there, behind her, all the time. And because she had dreamed the same dream so many times before she had known he was going to be there, yet she had still given a start when she found herself face to face with him again. But, as in all her dreams before, she felt none of the raw, stark fear that his face stimulated in her waking hours: whenever she saw it in a photograph, or whenever it appeared suddenly and unbidden from within the dark hall of memory where she tried to keep it locked up.