by Helen Grant
I thought about Klara Klein, lying dead in her locked house. Heart attack, everyone said. There was no sign of anyone breaking and entering, at least not until Herr Wachtmeister Schumacher broke down the door.
Maybe someone scared her to death. She was old, she was titanically fat, she was all alone in the house. What would it take? A few raps on the window – a threatening phone call?
Stop it, I told myself. This is ridiculous.
Julius’s face came into my mind, the sharp cheekbones, the dappling of freckles, the warm brown eyes with an eternal question in them. I tried to imagine him terrorizing someone to death, or pushing an old woman downstairs, and I simply couldn’t do it. All the same, I mistrusted myself. Killers didn’t get away with things by being obvious maniacs; they were plausible, likeable even. That was how they got away with it.
There’s no way Julius has ten thousand euros to give away. There was no denying that; if he had, he wouldn’t still have been going about on that decrepit old bicycle.
No matter how much I thought about things, I could make no sense of them. I could dream up some tortuous route by which someone – Julius – might have made one or other of my hastily scrawled desires come true, but then the sheer impossibility of anyone granting all of them would hit me. I recalled the moment when Kai von Jülich had strolled into the bakery, with all the easy arrogance of wealth and good looks, and leaned towards me over the counter, relishing my name in his mouth like some gorgeous delicacy. There was no way anyone else could have made that happen.
I might have sat there all afternoon, going over every eventuality with the feverish persistence of a cryptographer trying to crack a particularly labyrinthine code, had the shrill ringing of the telephone not interrupted me. It was my mother, contrarily asking me to bring a change of clothes for her and whether I had left yet.
Packing my mother’s things for her did me good. The moving about brought me back to myself, as stamping brings life back to feet numb with cold. I looked at my watch and realized that the bus would be leaving from the station in fifteen minutes. As I locked the front door behind me and went downstairs with the bag, my head was full of my father and how I would find him. When I let myself out into the street I was calculating whether there was time to stop off at the florist’s.
Julius and the many masks he might be wearing had not gone from my mind; rather, it was as though I could hear a muffled conversation in the room next door: Could he possibly … How could he have …
I looked at my watch and began to walk, the ache in my ankle a distant nagging.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I returned in the middle of the evening, as dark was falling. Against all expectations, my father’s condition had stabilized, and now my mother was beginning to talk about the bakery reopening in a couple of days.
‘You had better call Achim,’ she said to me. ‘Make sure he doesn’t go off anywhere.’
Privately I wished Achim would go off somewhere, the further the better.
All the same, I was faced with a new and unpleasant dilemma. If Julius had really had something to do with the gratification of my wishes, I could not let him attack Achim, however richly Achim might deserve it. I thought it might make me an actual accessory to murder if I stood by and let it happen, knowing whose hand was going to strike the blow. This was irrational, I acknowledged. If I was prepared to accept the death and disappearance of three other people by magic, why was I so squeamish when it came to this? But the fact remained that I was. I realized that I liked – that I had liked – Julius, not in the yearning-for-the-moon way I had cared for Kai von Jülich, but I liked him all the same. I had thought he was a good person, a little too good in some ways. If he had done things – terrible things, perhaps – because of me, I would be horribly, shockingly responsible. Which meant I would have to do everything in my power to make him stop.
As I let myself into the bakery and trudged painfully back up the stairs, I made a decision. I would try to take back the curse on Achim, though how I would do this I was not sure. The original curse had vanished from the house in the woods, but maybe I could undo it with a new wish. If necessary, I would confront Julius, but I hoped that would be the last resort. If my suspicions were wrong I would look idiotic; if they were right I could not imagine what reaction a confrontation might provoke.
I let myself into the flat, which was dark and uninviting, and deadlocked the door behind me. I realized that I had hardly eaten that day, but I was too tired to care. I cleaned my teeth, dragged a brush through my hair and fell into bed. I lay on my side in the dark and slid a hand under the pillow to touch the envelope containing the banknotes. How could Julius possibly have laid hands on so much money? I asked myself, and there was no good answer, nothing that did not mean dishonesty, treachery and lies. I could no more sleep with that ominous bundle under my pillow than the princess in the story could sleep with a pea under her mattress. In the end I shoved it into the drawer of my bedside table and fell into an uneasy sleep.
This time it was 2.15 a.m. when I woke up. There was something sickening about being woken at that time of night, when I should have been in slumber so deep that it was like death. I turned on to my side and waited for the nauseating feeling of shock to subside, listening to my own rapid breathing.
I had no idea what had woken me, and for a moment I wondered whether I had simply had a bad dream, although I had no memory of one. I lay there and watched the glowing digits on the alarm clock change to 2.16. I listened. Silence.
Then I heard it, very distinctly. A crisp bang: the unmistakable sound of the kitchen door swinging shut. I knew that sound, because I heard it a dozen times a day, whenever a delivery was made to the back door or Achim stepped outside to have a cigarette. The door was heavy and it had a self-closing mechanism. You couldn’t fail to recognize that irritating smacking sound. It didn’t irritate me now, though. I was paralysed with shock, swept away on its icy flood, my feet no longer able to touch solid ground.
I lay in bed with my eyes wide, staring into the formless dark, and my heart thumping. There was no doubt about it this time. There was definitely someone downstairs. The old fears began to creep back, as stealthy and as ugly as trolls. I thought of footsteps, fleet and soundless, crossing the tiled floor of the bakery kitchen. Hands, slender and white, or perhaps – grisly thought – mere blackened sticks, clutching at the banisters leading to the flat. I thought of a thin silent figure, wrapped in black, standing motionless on the other side of the door, waiting. What would I see, I wondered, if I looked into the face hidden by the bright hair?
The hand I stretched out to switch on the bedside lamp was trembling. I sat up and listened with strained attention for any sounds from below. Nothing. I felt my nails digging into my palms and realized that I had balled my hands into fists. I made myself relax.
Calm down, I said to myself. Maybe it’s a burglar. A real, flesh-and-blood burglar – or at any rate, some stupid kid messing around, someone who doesn’t realize the most valuable thing in those kitchens is Dad’s secret Florentiner recipe.
I got out of bed as silently as I could and padded over to the bedroom door. It’s the same time as before, said an insidious little voice at the back of my mind. Just past two. I glanced back at the digital clock, which read 2.18. It’s not kids. You know it isn’t.
I paused, irresolute. I could call the police; that was the logical thing to do if you thought you had a break-in downstairs. But suppose it wasn’t a burglar? Suppose I called out the police and there was nothing to see in the kitchen, because the person who was down there, the person who was haunting me, couldn’t possibly exist at all? In that case I would be better off calling old Father Arnold and telling him to come round with his Bible and a bottle of holy water.
I opened the bedroom door. The hallway light was off, but the light spilling from my room was sufficient for me to pick my way to the front door without bumping into anything.
Check the door is locked. I k
new I had locked it, I could remember doing it, and yet I still had a paranoid fear that it was unlocked. I put out a hand and tested the door handle very carefully, anxious to avoid making any sound that might draw attention to me. The door was locked fast. I drew the keys out of the lock, wincing at the rattle they made, and held them in my closed fist, as though there were some danger of them springing out of my hand and reopening the door by themselves. Then I listened again.
There had been nothing since that distinctive sound of the kitchen door closing. Now I began to doubt myself. Had I heard something else – a car backfiring on the distant bypass, a neighbour slamming a bedroom window shut? I hesitated, then made up my mind. If there was anything to see downstairs, I would find it in the morning. Doubtless there would be nothing, or perhaps simply a utensil that had fallen from its hook again, like last time. I turned to go back to my room, taking the keys with me, and it was then that I heard it.
Down below, in the dark of the bakery kitchen, someone laughed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
I thought I would never sleep again after hearing that laugh: high, wild, exulting, less an expression of mirth than the cry of some predatory thing. I huddled in my bed with the light on and my mobile phone clutched in one hand, though I did not know whom I would ring, even if the thing that shrieked out its horrid glee were to pound on the door of the flat, seeking entrance. I listened, wide-eyed, and I whispered half-forgotten prayers, but I never heard the voice a second time, though the expectation of hearing it was almost more than I could bear. At length the sustained tension petrified me as effectively as a Gorgon’s glare and I fell asleep in spite of myself.
When I awoke it was seven o’clock and someone was sounding a horn in the street outside the bakery with irritable insistence. I was debating whether to put my head underneath the pillow and try to get back to sleep when I heard the doorbell.
‘Scheisse,’ I said crossly to thin air, and threw off the duvet.
I had no intention of going down and opening the street door in my nightclothes. Instead I went into the living room, opened the window and peered out.
I thought I would find some irate deliveryman standing on the doorstep below, but the first thing I saw was a car parked in the street outside the bakery. It was a battered-looking white Audi, a vehicle I recognized as belonging to Achim Zimmer. My heart sank. He must have jumped the gun and turned up for work without being asked. I wondered why he had left his car there, though. In the next few hours the street would be busy with delivery vans. In fact, there was one behind the car already and, as I gazed down at it, the horn sounded again.
Someone stepped back from the bakery doorway and looked up at me. I saw that it was Herr Hack from one of the shops further down the street.
‘Hey,’ he shouted up. ‘You need to get that car moved.’
‘It’s not mine,’ I tried to say, but he was already pressing the buzzer again.
I closed the window and went to the bedroom, where I hastily dressed. I was not sure what was going on downstairs, but clearly there was going to be no peace until Achim had moved his car. I didn’t bother brushing my hair or cleaning my teeth. I would gladly have gone downstairs looking like a bag lady if it kept Achim at arm’s length.
When I got to the street door, Herr Hack’s face was beginning to assume an alarming hue. He left off pressing the buzzer when he saw me coming and started to tap on the glass door with a fleshy forefinger, as though he would have liked to poke me in the eye with it. The first thing he said when I opened the door was, ‘I should call the police. It’s an obstruction.’
‘It’s not my car,’ I said.
‘It’s parked outside your bakery.’
‘It’s Herr Zimmer’s,’ I said. ‘My father’s assistant.’ Indignation made me bold. I looked him in the eyes. ‘I didn’t park it there.’
‘Move it,’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ I pointed out. ‘I don’t have the keys.’
‘Where is Herr Zimmer?’ demanded Herr Hack. He peered over my shoulder, as though Achim might somehow have concealed his substantial bulk behind me.
I shrugged. ‘He isn’t supposed to be here today.’
‘The car must be moved,’ said Herr Hack with relentless persistence. ‘I need that delivery.’
As if on cue, the horn sounded again behind us.
‘I can’t carry all those boxes up the street myself,’ Herr Hack told me truculently.
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ I said under my breath.
‘What did you say?’
But I had already turned to go into the bakery. Achim would certainly be in the kitchen, so let him come out and deal with this in person. To my annoyance I heard Herr Hack follow me inside, huffing and puffing with indignation as though he had been required to climb the foothills of the Himalayas with a twenty-kilo pack. I pretended not to notice and went to the door which led to the kitchen, hand outstretched to pull it open.
It was locked. That pulled me up sharply. I pressed down the handle and yanked at it again, but it was absolutely fast. Funny. I supposed that Achim had used the back door as usual, but even so he normally unlocked the door to the cafe area. Perhaps he hadn’t come in to work; perhaps he had just come in to pick something up.
Why is his car abandoned outside, then?
There was no answer to that. I turned on my heel, brushed past Herr Hack and went back to the street door to collect my bunch of keys, which was still hanging in the inside lock. I found the kitchen door key, fumbled it into the lock and pulled the door open.
The kitchen was cool and empty. The fluorescent lights were off and the light which came through the frosted windows was flat and grey. The habitual aroma of baking had faded to a stale memory. I thought of crumbs and dust settling.
I cleared my throat. ‘Achim?’ I said, moving further into the kitchen. There was no reply. Now I had a view of the back door, I could see that it was closed. There were no keys in it.
Where is he?
I was aware of Herr Hack’s stout figure in the kitchen doorway. His outrage was not sufficient to carry him over the threshold of that holy of holies, but all the same he was almost visibly throbbing with the desire to give Achim a piece of his mind. I was not sorry that he was here. Herr Hack was profoundly irritating, with his red face and his jabbing forefinger, but for some reason I was glad not to be alone. I had an uneasy feeling, a swarming sensation in my gut which recalled the frantic and miniature activity of an overturned ant heap.
Something’s wrong.
I rounded the end of one of the metal units and something caught my eye, a flash of colour against the dull grey of stainless steel. There was a tall clear bottle with a bright crimson label standing on the metal surface. Vodka. What’s that doing here? I stretched out my hand to pick it up, but then I thought better of it. Without thinking, I rubbed my hand on the leg of my jeans, as though I had sullied it simply by reaching for the bottle.
There was someone in here last night, I thought, but the realization gave me no relief. If someone had broken in for the hell of it, intent on a little drunken mayhem, they wouldn’t have left the place in this pristine condition; things would be broken or disarrayed. I shivered, remembering the wild laughter I had heard in the darkness of the small hours. I could make no sense of it, but I was beginning to be afraid.
I continued my cautious exploration of the kitchen, all the time acutely conscious of that incongruous bottle standing there like a sentinel. What did it mean? I had my eyes on the far end of the kitchen, scanning it for anything which might give me a clue. I wasn’t looking down and so I almost stumbled over something that was lying in the middle of the tiled floor. I looked down and then I stared.
It was a shirt. I was pretty sure it was a man’s shirt and, as I looked at it lying there, with the arms pulled inside out as though someone had tugged it off in a hurry, I recognized it as one I had seen Achim wearing. It wasn’t a work shirt, it was a loathsome patterned thing that even
a clothing bank would have spat out.
So Achim has been here, I told myself. So what? Maybe he came in, changed into his baker’s whites and then … disappeared? It didn’t make sense.
‘Hurry up,’ grunted Herr Hack from the doorway, as though finding Achim and getting him to move the car were simply a matter of increased effort on my part.
Now I was moving about the kitchens more quickly, my glance darting from the bare worktops to the tiled floor and back again. There was something else on the floor, half hidden behind the leg of one of the units. A man’s shoe, lying on its side. I stopped, gazed down at it and felt a cold prickle of apprehension.
Achim might have changed his shirt here and forgotten the old one, but he wouldn’t leave one shoe behind.
Suddenly I understood, quite clearly, that Achim was dead. The curse had fallen upon him, just as I had wished. Except that now I would dearly have loved to have taken it back. Klara Klein dropping dead of a weak heart in her villa up in Mahlberg or Kai von Jülich vanishing into thin air, that was one thing. Hunting for a corpse in the very building where I lived and worked was quite another.
Dread welled up inside me, black and suffocating. Every pace which took me further through the kitchen might reveal something that I desperately didn’t want to see. I remembered tales I had heard from the other girls who worked in the bakery, and from students at the college: the man who had committed suicide when drunk by plunging himself head first into one of the industrial mixers, the body that had been found charred to the bone in an oven. I cringed at the thought of having to see anything like that, of being the one who found it, and yet I kept on moving. How could I explain to Herr Hack that I thought Achim was lying here dead somewhere, because I had wished it? Sick with apprehension, I pushed myself on. There was nothing to do but keep looking.