by Helen Grant
I thought that the shelves of the big oven were too low for a person of Achim’s bulk to be squeezed inside, and besides, when I laid a trembling hand on the door, it was absolutely cold. Still, it was only the consciousness of Herr Hack’s accusatory gaze fixed on my back that made me open it. I looked at the empty shelves and bit my knuckle to stop myself from crying out.
‘What are you looking in there for?’ called out Herr Hack irritably. ‘How could he be in there?’
I said nothing. I closed the door again.
My own footsteps sounded unnaturally loud as I continued my tour of the kitchen. I looked at the great bowl of the dough mixer and knew that I must peer inside. I clasped my hands tight across my stomach as I went to it, as though I could hold back the nauseating fear which roiled in my gut. I was thinking about what would happen if you really did put someone inside it, and whether it would be possible to make the kitchen as clean and sterile again afterwards as it now was. Wouldn’t the walls and the ceiling be painted red, or drying brown, with the blood that sprayed out of it? You could spend not hours but days trying to clean it all up, to find every tiny drop and spurt that had splattered everything around it. It would probably get into all the tiny places in the machinery, glue up the mechanism. A tiny strangled noise came from my throat. I went right up to the mixer and forced myself to look inside.
Nothing. The interior was clean and dry, as though it had never been used. There was not so much as a sprinkling of flour in it. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it all out in a sigh.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Herr Hack impatiently. ‘Is he here or isn’t he?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said in a tight voice.
I swung around to face him, a stout, florid, double-chinned bully, inflated to bursting point with his own righteous indignation. Framed in the doorway at the other end of the kitchen, he might have been a million miles away. He still thought this was about a parked car obstructing the street. I knew it was about murder.
Outside the bakery, the delivery truck driver began to sound the horn again, repeated blasts that would soon have everyone on the street out of doors and looking for the source of the noise. I imagined them all cramming themselves into the kitchen doorway alongside Herr Hack and realized that I had to do something. I began to walk back towards him, trying to form the right words in my head before I tackled him. Achim clearly wasn’t here, I would say, so it was not the bakery’s problem. Or …
As I passed the thick metal door which led into the cold store I suddenly stopped walking. It was only a tiny thing and I might not have noticed it had my nerves not already been in a state of painful sensitivity. The pointer on the temperature dial outside the cold store had been moved. That faint pale triangle was visible again at the top of the dial, where the tip of the pointer normally was, and the pointer itself was in the six o’clock position.
I caught my breath. I had never seen the pointer in that position before. Theoretically the temperature in the cold store could be lowered right down to minus thirty degrees centigrade, but we never needed to store anything at that sort of temperature, and as far as I knew, we had never tried putting the setting down that low. I stepped up close to the dial and saw that it was indeed set to minus thirty.
No, I thought. I looked at the door, which was at least four centimetres thick, and suddenly it looked less like the anonymous door of a cold store than the entrance to a mausoleum. I reached for the handle, then hesitated.
There’s an emergency release inside, I thought. It’s not possible to get trapped in there. I grasped the handle, turned and pulled. Ponderously, the door swung open, revealing the interior.
The side walls of the cold store were lined with metal racks, which were stacked with trays of uncooked rolls, cartons containing pots of fresh cream and other perishables. The back wall was bare and propped up against it was Achim. He was stark naked. The skin which was normally pink and white was now so pale that it had assumed a greyish tint. His head was thrown back, resting in the angle between the rack and the wall, and his mouth gaped open as though one final scream had escaped with the curl of mist that had been his last breath. I thought there were clusters of ice crystals around his mouth, but I did not want to look more closely. The great pallid, hairless bulk of the body reminded me of nothing so much as the bloodless carcass of a slaughtered pig.
Little incoherent sounds were coming from my throat. I wanted to look away, to shut out the sight of the body sprawled there, but my treacherous eyes were taking in every detail, storing them in whatever mental catacombs served as the repository for nightmares. The bluish lips. The way the body was huddled, as though Achim had tried vainly to preserve the last warmth that was fading with the ebbing of his life. The white hand, rigid and inert as a clump of coral.
There was another bottle on the floor of the cold store, I noticed: the same type as the one on the surface in the kitchen. Clear glass, red label. And there was the other shoe, wedged underneath one of the metal racks.
‘What’s going on there?’ said Herr Hack’s voice close behind me. His impatience had finally overridden his qualms about trespassing.
I turned a stricken face to him, but I could find no words to describe what was inside the cold store. I simply stood back to let him see. He shot me a glance that plainly showed that he thought I was a fool and then he looked into the cold store.
‘Lieber Gott!’ said Herr Hack.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Herr Wachtmeister Schumacher arrived, his indefinite face swimming before my eyes like a wraith, his voice a distant echo in my ears. Herr Hack hauled me back out into the cafe area and I sat at one of the tables, as though nursing the vain hope that the cold coffee machine and empty cabinet would yield forth a hot sweet drink and a slice of cherry streusel. After a while another police officer came, this time a woman, and she asked me some questions. Some time after that my mother arrived, torn from my father’s side. I had no idea what had happened about the delivery van, but the horn was no longer sounding. Perhaps the driver had reversed the entire way back down the Werther Strasse, like a genie disappearing back into its bottle. I wished that time could be rewound that easily. I would have gone back, not to the moment when I had cursed Achim, but to that evening in the snack bar when I had agreed to go to the witch’s house with the others. I would have gone anywhere else, done anything else, gone home to bed even.
In spite of the interminable questions that pattered down on me like a relentless drizzling rain, nobody seemed to be giving any consideration to the idea that I might have had anything to do with Achim’s death. They wanted to know whether I had heard anything during the night and whether Achim had made a habit of drinking in the bakery, and they asked both my mother and myself whether he had had a history of depression and suicidal tendencies. I was unable to formulate a reply; I was remembering the laugh I had heard in the small hours, the moment I had seen the dial turned down to minus thirty and the sight of the body propped there against the wall like the hefty carcass of a slain animal. I could no more explain what I thought had happened to Achim than the fly that is struggling in a cocoon of stifling cobwebs can free itself from its gluey shroud. The more I tried to rationalize it, the more entangled my thoughts became.
Seeing that there was nothing that could be done for Achim, the emergency doctor who had arrived with the police turned his attention to me and pronounced me to be suffering from shock. The questions ceased, although I knew that this was just the ebbing of the tide; they would be back in full flood at the earliest opportunity. My mother took me upstairs, away from the cafe, whose windows were dark with the ranks of concerned citizens clustering there like the hungry dead in a zombie movie.
She saw me shivering and fetched a blanket to put around my shoulders. Then she made me sit on the sofa while she went to make me some cocoa. She was all brisk efficiency, although I suspected that this was just her way of coping. She had not seen Achim’s body. She sho
wed no desire to see it and indeed appeared to be taking refuge in treating him as though he were still alive and had committed some highly reprehensible act.
‘Why did he have to do it here, of all places?’ I heard her grumble, as she stood at the stove watching the pan of milk. ‘This will be the end of the bakery.’
Privately I doubted that. I had seen the ghoulish interest the discovery of Achim’s body had aroused and thought that as soon as we had the bakery open again people would come in droves to see the place where the death had occurred. I said nothing, however. I just pulled the blanket closer around my shoulders and stared at the floor.
That afternoon Hanna came to the flat. My mother had had to go back to the hospital, but she didn’t want to leave me alone. She didn’t ask me beforehand whether I would like someone to stay with me, or indeed whether that someone should be Hanna; if she had, I would have strenuously resisted. Instead, looking at my pale face and preoccupied expression, she made the decision for me, not wanting to give me the opportunity to say that I preferred to be alone. Perhaps she called Izzi first, but more likely she picked on Hanna because she thought that Hanna would take charge and look after me properly. Hanna always gave that impression.
When my mother showed her into the living room, however, I thought that Hanna looked a little less sure of herself than usual, as well she might. I had not forgotten the scene at the ruined house, nor my panicked flight down the hill through the woods, with my erstwhile friends in noisy pursuit. I was not going to make a fuss in front of my mother, but as soon as she had safely departed for Mechernich I intended to throw Hanna out of the flat.
The instant I heard the street door close downstairs I stood up, looked straight at Hanna and said, ‘I want you to go. Now.’
‘Steffi –’
‘I don’t want to see you. Or the others.’
‘What have I done?’ asked Hanna in an injured tone, quite unlike her normal confident manner.
I looked at her in disbelief. ‘How can you say that? After what happened in Rote Gertrud’s place?’
‘But Steffi –’
I wasn’t going to let her finish. ‘I nearly broke my ankle running down that bloody hill. I’m never going up there again and I’m never having anything to do with – with any of that again. So you needn’t come here and ask me to wish stuff for you, because I’m not going to – not ever again. And I want you to go now.’
Hanna was looking bewildered. ‘I didn’t come to ask you to wish anything for me. Your mother asked me to come.’
My conscience pricked me a little at that, but I was too angry to listen to it. ‘I don’t care. Just go.’
‘All right,’ said Hanna. She paused. ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go. But I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me who chased you down the hill. It was Jochen and Timo and Max. I called you. I tried to find you, to help you.’
‘Really?’ I said with spiteful irony. ‘And what about up at Gertrud’s house? I thought you lot were going to tear me to pieces.’
‘That was the others,’ said Hanna. She looked stricken, as though I had perpetrated some terrible injustice against her.
In spite of myself, I found my resolve weakening. It was Hanna, after all, who had risked a major row with her control freak of a father by borrowing his car to take me to the Eschweiler Tal that time; Hanna who had crouched with me in the undergrowth, praying that the figure we saw flitting through the dank woods would not see us hiding there.
‘I didn’t join in,’ Hanna pleaded. ‘Don’t you remember? I was trying to stop them hassling you. I tried to pull Max off you. I grabbed Jochen’s arm and he nearly pushed me over. It was them – Max and Jochen and Timo. I didn’t do anything. I was trying to help you.’
I looked at Hanna, at her pale, earnest face, and I cast my mind back to that afternoon at the house in the woods. The whole incident was a blur in my memory, a tangle of thrusting hands and grabbing fists and insistent voices. I could distinctly recall Timo taking hold of my jacket again, as though he thought there might be another envelope stuffed with euro notes hidden somewhere inside it, and I remembered Jochen’s face, close to mine and distorted with ugly emotion. But what had Hanna been doing at the time? She had been there, I knew that, and she had been shouting as loudly as the rest of them, but what had she been saying? I thought she had been somewhere there in the fray, pushing and tugging, but she might have been trying to get the others off me, as she claimed. I really wasn’t sure any more.
I didn’t say anything, but I had stopped ordering Hanna out of the flat. She studied my face and I saw her features relax as she sensed that I was no longer sure of my ground.
‘Honestly, Steffi,’ she said, ‘I wanted to help. I would have stopped them if I could. But you know what Max is like.’
I did know what Max was like, although frankly I was more nervous of Jochen, whose anger seemed ready to spill over into actual manhandling at any moment. I shrugged non-committally.
‘It’s all finished anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m not going up there ever again. Not for Max, not for anyone.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ said Hanna.
She put out a hand and touched my shoulder. I didn’t shake her off, but neither did I react. Part of me felt as cold and immovable as marble, and I wanted her to sense that. I wondered whether she would say anything about the money, which was still stuffed into the drawer in my bedroom, hidden and unlooked at, like the guilty evidence of a crime.
‘Please,’ said Hanna at last, ‘don’t be mad at me.’
I looked at the floor and sighed. Then I looked back at Hanna and said, ‘OK.’ I saw her start to smile tentatively, felt that she was about to step towards me, and I held up a hand as though to ward her off. ‘But I’m not wishing anything for anyone else, not even you.’
I sat back down on the sofa, all my anger draining out of me. It was exhausting being that furious with someone; my body felt as though it had been working as hard as if it were fighting off a virus.
After a moment Hanna sat down too, on one of my father’s overstuffed armchairs. For a little while neither of us said anything. I thought about Hanna, about the things she had risked for me, and why she had done them, and I thought about the curses I had made against people, people who were now dead. I thought about Achim and his threat to make me ‘like’ him, about Frau Kessel and Klara Klein, and about my sister, Magdalena, and my mother telling me I would break my father’s heart. I felt like a drowning person, drawn deep into the depths of a whirlpool. I no longer knew which way was up, which way went towards the airy light and which towards the darkness that meant the end of everything. I leaned forward and put my head in my hands.
The armchair creaked as Hanna got up. A moment later I felt a light touch on my back.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I managed to say.
Through the curtain of light hair falling over my face I could see Hanna squatting in front of me.
‘Was it you who found Achim?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And he was … already dead?’
‘Totally,’ I said, and found myself stifling a nervous urge to laugh. ‘He was … frozen. I think he was frozen solid, actually. Like a leg of lamb or something.’ My stomach lurched queasily at that. ‘He was definitely … dead.’
‘What did the police say?’
‘Oh.’ I shook my head restlessly. ‘They asked me about a million questions. Like, was Achim depressed or had he ever threatened to kill himself? Had I heard anything during the night?’
‘What did you tell them?’ asked Hanna.
‘I didn’t tell them anything.’ I shook back my hair and glanced at her. ‘I wasn’t going to tell them we hexed Achim, was I?’
‘No,’ she said quietly. Her eyes met mine. ‘What do you think happened to Achim?’
‘I don’t think he killed himself,’ I said. I remembered the sound I had heard, muffled but audibl
e enough, the sound that had sent me scurrying back to bed, where I had pulled the covers over my head to block it out. The wild laughter, harsh and unrestrained as the howl of a wolf. ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The following day was Saturday. In the middle of the morning the silence in the flat was broken by the sound of the street doorbell. I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of orange juice and staring out of the window at the brilliant crimson flowers in the window box at the side of another building. Ten thousand euros, I was thinking, and the enormity of it was too much to comprehend. Ten thousand euros and a dead man in the cold store of the bakery. It was a mystery I couldn’t fathom, with no solution that I wanted.
I wasn’t expecting anyone and at first when I heard the bell I was inclined to ignore it. But whoever was outside was pretty determined. The bell went again and again, an irritable buzzing that was hard to ignore. I drained the glass of juice, put it down on the table and went to investigate.
As I walked through the deserted bakery I could see the shape of someone standing at the door, the bright summer sunshine rendering them a silhouette. The buzzer sounded again, insistently, and I clicked my tongue in annoyance. I couldn’t imagine what the caller wanted; the CLOSED sign was up, the lights were off and the bakery didn’t just look shut, it looked positively dead, with no chance of an imminent resurrection.
I unlocked the door, pulled it open and found myself face to face with a woman perhaps ten years older than I was, with light brown hair in a short gamine crop. She was dressed a little more formally than the majority of summer visitors to the town, in a dark skirt and blouse. She looked as though she was on her way to a christening or a job interview. She was holding a bundle close to her. I looked more closely and realized that it was a baby, just a few months old, with a fluff of hair so blond that it was almost white.