by Helen Grant
That cold feeling that had been stealing over me, a churning mixture of fear and guilt and the dread of being found out, began to recede like an ebbing tide.
‘Nobody’s going to find out,’ I said, ‘because there’s nothing to find out. We were just messing about. It was just a game.’
All the same, I thought, it might be worth going back to Gertrud’s house and removing that note from the box.
There was a hard little tapping sound. I turned and saw a wrinkled visage like the face of an old and very ugly tortoise glaring at me through the bakery window over a barrier of silk flowers and ornamental tea-light holders. Even if my mother didn’t come out in a minute or two and scold me for chatting to a friend while customers were waiting, it looked as though the customers themselves would do it.
‘I have to go in,’ I said.
‘Steffi –’
‘We’ll meet up with the others this evening, OK? Look, Izzi, this is mad. We didn’t do anything.’
Izabela looked at me, her blue eyes wide. She didn’t look reassured at all. I thought she was on the verge of panic. She looked the way I thought a person might look if they were sitting at the wheel of their car, afraid to turn around and see what it was that they had run over, the thing that had disappeared under the wheels with a thump that was at once hard and yet horribly yielding.
‘Izzi,’ I hissed. ‘We didn’t do anything. We were just messing around. It’s a coincidence, all right? It’s just not possible that it was anything else.’
‘She died, Steffi,’ said Izabela, and the flat tone she used sent a chill through me all over again. ‘We wished it and she just dropped dead.’
I dared not stay any longer. I put the pad and pen into my apron pocket. ‘Look, I’ll just get you a Coke, OK?’
I hurried back into the bakery. I was itching to get my hands on the newspaper, to read the details of Little Klara’s death from beginning to end. If I could have found a quiet corner for even two minutes I would have liked to call Hanna too, to hear her sensible voice telling me what I had just told Izabela, that it was all a coincidence. Predictably, however, the moment I reappeared inside there was a babble of voices calling for me to bring the bill, to refill a coffee cup, to bring another pastry, a glass of water, a cake fork … They kept me busy for a full twenty minutes, running to and fro, and when I finally carried Izabela’s Coke outside she had gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She just dropped dead. Much later, when the details of Little Klara’s death had seeped out, as they are prone to do, especially in a small town like Bad Münstereifel, I discovered that this was not strictly true.
At first, given the circumstances of Klara’s death, the police didn’t release any information at all. Then Klara’s agent issued a statement saying that Little Klara had died peacefully at home. He was almost as old as Klara had been, white-haired and venerable-looking, but that didn’t stop him from rushing on from announcing Klara’s death to plugging her latest CD, which he described as her ‘memorial’.
The unfortunate truth was that Klara Klein had met her maker face-down in a plateful of cherry streusel.
When Klara was a young woman, she had been marvellously slim, with such famously slender legs and ankles that she had sometimes been known as ‘the doe of the Eifel’. As the years went by, the effects of passing time and a weakness for patisserie had made Little Klara at least twice the woman she used to be. Had she not been considered a national treasure, someone would surely have pointed out by now that if she resembled any traditional woodland creature, it was not so much a doe as the female of the species Sus scrofa, also known as the wild pig.
Little Klara was as fond of cheesecake and Sahnetorte as the next woman, but her especial weakness was for cherry streusel, a confection of sour cherries, flour, eggs, cinnamon and an alarming quantity of butter and sugar. On the evening – or perhaps morning – of her demise (depending on the accuracy of the estimated time of death) she had cut herself a simply enormous slice of cherry streusel from the tray in her refrigerator and carried it through to the living room, where she had seated herself on her well-padded sofa. Pictures of Little Klara in magazines such as Freizeit Revue or Das Goldene Blatt always showed her dressed in a traditional dirndl, even for the housework which it was fancifully suggested that she did herself. However, away from the cameras, Klara swathed her not inconsiderable bulk in a long ruffled nightdress of peach-coloured chiffon and a matching bedjacket.
Comfortably seated on the sofa with the cherry streusel set out invitingly on the coffee table in front of her, Klara had picked up the remote control and switched on the television. When the body was eventually found, the television screen was blank and silent; Klara had been watching a video at the time of her death and the tape had run to the very end and stopped. The videotape was still in the machine, of course. It was a very old recording of Klara’s greatest hits, along with footage of her wandering through forests and alongside rivers, clutching a single red rose to her bodice.
Some time between Klara turning on the video and the tape reaching the end, the years of smoking and eating too many cakes had brought her down, as surely as a pack of dogs taking down a deer. As she leaned over the coffee table with a cake fork in her hand, her abused heart had given out. Klara had fallen forward on to – indeed into – the cherry streusel, the fork with a chunk of streusel on it dropping from her lifeless hand. As her heavy features settled into the crushed streusel with the finality of rubble settling after a building’s demolition, a lone sour cherry hit the floor tiles. After that, there was no movement in the room other than the images of Klara’s younger self on the television screen, and some time later those stopped too.
On Monday morning, around about the time I was climbing on to the bus for Kall, my heart heavy at the prospect of a morning of baking theory, Klara Klein’s cleaning lady had turned up at the Swiss chalet with its bloated edelweiss carvings and had been unable to get in. Klara had not given her a key of her own; she was too suspicious or too private a person to allow anyone free access to her house. So the cleaning woman had stood there on the wooden porch ringing the bell, and then she had knocked, and eventually she had tried to look in at a window. The curtains were closed, which was unusual, but she was able to peer through the narrow slit between them into Klara’s living room. The view of Klara’s chiffon-clad corpse was largely obscured by the bulk of the sofa, but at the side of it one plump hand was just visible, motionless on the floor.
The cleaning lady, panicking, called the local police in Bad Münstereifel, and it was not long before the interested residents of Mahlberg saw a blue-and-silver police car with its blue lights flashing passing through the village. It was shortly followed by an ambulance, but the police were the first to reach Klara’s house.
One of the two policemen on duty that day was Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, the oldest of the small group of policemen stationed in Bad Münstereifel. A decade before, it was Herr Tondorf who had discovered the body of the town’s one and only serial killer. Very little had occurred in the interval, however, and Herr Tondorf was now looking forward to his impending retirement, which he intended to spend trout fishing and listening to his extensive collection of Karneval CDs. When he arrived at Klara Klein’s house and saw how things lay, he gave a heavy sigh; in his opinion he was getting too old to shoulder down doors. He stood back and invited Schumacher, his partner, to do it.
Schumacher had also been present the day Herr Tondorf discovered the killer’s body. He had been younger then; now he was approaching middle age and becoming stout. A decade before, he had been easily dominated by his older partner, and nothing much had changed. Schumacher was never going to rise very much higher in the regional police; he simply lost his head too easily.
Now it was Schumacher who forced his way into the house, with Herr Tondorf close behind him. Barely pausing to take in the opulent but rather sentimental decor or the row of golden discs on the wall, they charged over to the coffee t
able where Klara’s body lay like a fallen colossus, streaks of red cherry juice staining the collar of the peach-coloured chiffon nightdress and the side of Klara’s face where it was visible under the gilded tangle of her hair.
Blood was what it looked like, blood and some indefinable but unmistakably pulpy pale substance – the two cops didn’t even want to think what that might be. Clearly, they thought, violence had been done. Little Klara had been bludgeoned to death in her own living room.
At this point Herr Tondorf may have become aware that his heart seemed to be pounding raggedly, that there was a dull ache in the left side of his body. If Schumacher had been looking at him, he might have noticed a greying pallor to the older man’s face. But Schumacher wasn’t looking at Herr Tondorf’s face. He was staring with horrified fascination at something which lay on the floor tiles, a soft red spherical object, its incarnadine hue matching the stains on the peach-coloured gown.
As he watched, Herr Tondorf’s large and highly polished black shoe came down with a horrid finality on the red sphere, crushing it so that dark streaks of fluid shot out on all sides. Herr Tondorf, conscious of moving more slowly than usual, hindered by the strange numbness which seemed to be creeping over him, began to raise his foot to examine the thing he had trodden in.
At that moment Schumacher, in an ecstasy of horror, shrieked out, ‘Her eye! You’ve trodden on her eye!’
When the ambulance crew entered the house a mere ninety seconds later, they found two casualties. For Klara Klein they could do nothing. Herr Tondorf was alive, but only just; he had suffered a massive heart attack and was slumped against the side of the sofa, while Schumacher, green-faced, was trying to loosen his superior’s collar. The paramedics got Herr Tondorf into the ambulance, still alive but glassy-eyed and unresponsive, like some great beached fish, and closed the doors. The sour cherry was still stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
CHAPTER NINE
‘We have to go back there,’ said Max.
‘No,’ said Izabela and I simultaneously.
Hanna said nothing, but I saw her looking at Max as though she were appraising him.
We were sitting on a wooden bench opposite the ice-cream parlour – at least, we three girls were sitting on the bench; Timo and Jochen were sitting on the low stone wall which ran along the side of the River Erft, and Max was on his feet, pacing restlessly up and down as usual. He looked like a general addressing his troops – or, I thought, taking in his tigerish grin, like an evangelist just getting into his stride.
I wondered whether Max had been so sanguine when he first heard the news of Klara Klein’s death. If he had been shocked, he had recovered by now. Looking at the nervous energy he was expending, the way he was almost buzzing with it, I understood something quite clearly: this was the best thing that had happened to Max in ages. He was not going to let it go.
In the warm sunshine of a spring evening, with early tourists wandering past, it was hard to believe that our night-time visit to Rote Gertrud’s house had been anything but a piece of tomfoolery, and yet a tiny sliver of doubt remained in all our minds, a doubt which created a kind of dark excitement in the pit of the stomach. Max was thriving on that excitement, like an engine running on high-octane fuel.
I knew that Max, like me, was never going to get out of Bad Münstereifel. He had an indifferent Hauptschule qualification and a future all mapped out for him in his father’s car dealership on the edge of town. And yet Max had this unquenchable conviction that there must be something more, that there must be excitement and drama and danger, and that he should be in the middle of it, the hero of the story.
Now he had stopped in front of the bench and was hanging over us like a vulture on a branch. ‘Look,’ he was saying, ‘it’s a coincidence, right? It’s probably a coincidence. So no harm done. Little Klara was probably going to bite the dust anyway. But –’ his eyes widened and he spread his hands out, encompassing us all – ‘suppose it wasn’t a coincidence?’
‘Max –’ began Izabela, but there was no stopping him.
‘Suppose Rote Gertrud did have something to do with it? We’d be mad not to try it again.’
‘We’d be mad to mess with it,’ grumbled Timo at my right shoulder.
‘Scared?’ said Max in a mocking voice, looking at Timo with raised eyebrows.
‘Of course not.’ Now Timo sounded nettled. ‘It’s just a rubbish idea.’
‘You are scared,’ said Max, and his grin widened.
I listened to the pair of them arguing with each other, but my mind was elsewhere, back in that evening when I had trudged down from Gertrud’s house in the dark, slightly drunk and sick to the stomach, promising myself that I would never go up there again. I was thinking about the box we had left lying in full view on the decrepit floor of the house – the box with a note in it, a note in my handwriting. Again, common sense told me that nobody could trace the note back to me, but then I began to imagine ways in which they might be able to. Suppose someone had seen Max’s car in the Eschweiler Tal? Suppose that same person was one of the other visitors who had undoubtedly been inside Gertrud’s house, leaving a trail of beer cans and food wrappers behind them? I was still not sure whether I could get into trouble of any sort, even if someone positively identified my handwriting. I imagined that the note could be seen as some kind of death threat, not that we had posted it in Klara Klein’s letter box or anything. All the same, I thought I would feel a little happier if I could retrieve the note and tear it into little pieces. Maybe burn it, to be sure.
‘I think we should go,’ I said suddenly, and they all turned to stare at me.
‘You see?’ said Max triumphantly. ‘Even Steffi’s got more guts than you have.’
Jochen slid off the wall. ‘OK, let’s go.’
‘Now?’ asked Hanna.
‘Why not now?’ said Max. ‘Or do you want to wait until it gets dark?’
Nobody answered that. Max pulled the car keys out of his jeans pocket and hefted them in his hand so that they jingled together. ‘Come on, then.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘This is a totally stupid idea,’ grumbled Timo as we struggled our way uphill through the clinging undergrowth. ‘I don’t know why we’re even doing this.’
He had not stopped complaining since we set out, all six of us crammed into Max’s car as usual. All the same, he had not missed an opportunity to be all over Izabela, I noticed. With four of us in the back of the car there was barely room to breathe, but I didn’t think that was the only reason Timo had his arm along the back of the seat behind her, his hand dangling casually above her left breast. I didn’t bother to challenge him about it. Two strands of emotion twisted around each other inside me like snakes. One was indignation; the other was relief.
Now, as I picked my way between brambles and tree stumps, I found myself wondering why I didn’t just tell Timo it was over between us. Was I condemned to spend my entire life in stasis, like an insect in amber, existing but never going anywhere? I wanted more than a safe job in the family bakery and a relationship that had become little more than a habit. I wanted to get out of Bad Münstereifel. To escape.
I was so absorbed in these gloomy thoughts that I barely noticed that we were approaching the ruined house until I was almost close enough to touch the grey and lichenous wall. It looked little better than it had at night-time. There was a dank, desolate air about it, the dark growths on the stonework as ominous as grave mould on dead skin. We made our way along the side of the house, as we had that first night, and it was not until we turned the corner and came to the gaping hole in the front wall that we had a clear view of the interior.
‘Ach, du Scheisse,’ said Max.
Beside me I heard Izabela inhale sharply. She stopped dead in her tracks and would not have gone into the house at all if Jochen hadn’t pushed her forward, jostling her in his attempt to see what Max was looking at. Then I heard him swear too under his breath.
The six of us stood there, arms
hanging limply by our sides, mouths open, eyes round, staring at the walls. The first time we had come to the house, it had been dark, even the moon shrouded in clouds. Now, with nearly two hours until sunset and the spring sunshine still bright, we could see what had been invisible the first time.
The walls were covered with writing. Not graffiti, at least not in the normal sense of the word; no enormous spray-painted names in wild colours or crude cartoons. Writing, in dozens, maybe hundreds of different hands, some of it large and straggling, some of it small and cramped, scratched or painted on to the rough stone walls.
Even before I stepped up to the wall to read some of the legends scratched there, I knew what I would find. J. Fuchs, die by 05.06. Peter S., die by 12.98. A.H., die by 07.87. Some of the inscriptions were very faint, almost obscured by weathering and lichen. I leaned close to the stonework, screwing up my eyes to try to make out what was written there, and with a sense of shock I read H.D., die by 10.43.
Did it really mean 1943? I ran my finger over the worn and pitted stone, searching for the faintest and oldest inscriptions. Someone had written 1941 in black paint, although the rest of the message, if there had been one, was long since gone. And here, low down on the wall, as though the writer had tried to hide them, were three numerals: 917. If they were really the remains of 1917, then they had been there for almost a century.
They weren’t all curses. There were messages pleading for love, messages asking for good health. Some of the older inscriptions simply said ‘return’; I thought perhaps they were from the war years, written by mothers and wives and sweethearts, desperate for loved ones to come home safely.
There weren’t just scratched messages either. In half a dozen places I found scraps of paper, folded into tiny squares and thrust into cracks in the walls. I pulled one of them out, feeling slightly squeamish, as though I were touching something best left undisturbed, but there was nothing to read. I could see a bluish blur where letters had been, but moisture had seeped into the paper and the ink had run.