Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  Some instinct made me draw even further back into the shadows. At that moment Julius glanced towards the bakery and I wondered whether he had glimpsed my sly movement. He glanced away almost immediately, however, and there was no sign that he had seen anything. Another few heartbeats and he had passed in front of the bakery itself, and I could no longer see him from where I stood. I risked moving back into the room, then slipping behind the curtain on the other side to watch him walking away up the street.

  Nothing. The street was empty, the pools of yellow light under the street lamps undisturbed by his passing shadow. Unnerved, I stood there for a second wondering what to do, and then cautiously I approached the window. If I stood a metre or two away from the glass, all I could see were the opposite side of the street, the wall which bounded the river and the houses on the other side. If I wanted to look at the spot just below, I would have to go right up to the window and risk being seen.

  I moved as quietly as I could, though I knew I was wasting my time. Julius wasn’t likely to hear me moving about, although if he looked up he would see me. I went to the window and peered out.

  He’s not there, was my first thought. The street outside the bakery was completely empty. For a second I entertained the chilling idea that Julius had somehow vanished altogether, but a moment later I saw him step back into view and I felt another chill of an entirely different nature. Clearly he had been on the actual doorstep of the bakery, hidden from my sight by the little porch over the door.

  What the hell was he doing? But I didn’t need to ask that question; I knew the answer already. He had been standing on the doorstep, his nose almost touching the glass panel set into the door, staring into the bakery’s dark interior. Now he was lingering in front of the step. In a moment or two he would probably glance upwards and unless I moved very quickly he would spot me staring down at him. Already I could see his head turning as he looked around him. Any second now he would look up.

  Now was the time to slip back into the shadows, to duck behind the curtain. Instead, I made my hand into a fist and knocked as hard as I could on the glass with my knuckles.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Julius’s head snapped back as abruptly as if someone had fastened their fingers in his mop of fiery hair and yanked it backwards. I saw his angular face, the features made even sharper by the yellow lamplight, turned up towards me; his brown eyes gazed straight into mine.

  For a moment I almost faltered. Then I was fumbling with the window catch. I prayed that Julius would not take off while I was trying to get the window open. Finally I managed it. The next second I was leaning out, the night air cool on my face and the bare skin of my arms. Julius was still looking up at me. He had not moved at all and showed no sign of bolting.

  ‘Stay there,’ I said, pointing a finger at him.

  I waited for an instant to be sure that he really was going to stay there, then I was running for the door of the flat. I paused for long enough to grab my robe from the back of my bedroom door. I didn’t like the idea of confronting anyone dressed only in my nightclothes, even if it was only Julius. I unlocked the front door and thundered down the stairs, pushing my arms into the sleeves of the robe. Then I went through the cafe area, sorting through the keys as I went, looking for the right one.

  I wondered whether Julius might have taken the opportunity to make his escape, but he was still there; I could see his dark silhouette outside the front door. I wrenched it open and cannoned out into the street.

  ‘What –’ I began, and then made an effort to lower my voice. If I didn’t take care we would have every single person on the street throwing up their windows and looking out. ‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded in a furious whisper.

  Julius had opened his mouth to say something when we both heard the unmistakable sound of a window opening. It was simply the sound of a catch rattling and the scraping of a casement being pushed outwards, but as far as I was concerned it might as well have been the gates of Tartarus yawning wide to belch forth all its fiends. Before I had time to consider what I was doing, I had grabbed Julius by the lapels of his black coat and was dragging him into the bakery.

  As we stood on the threshold, both of us breathing fast and Julius staring at me in frank astonishment, we heard an indignant voice saying, ‘Who’s there?’ In the cool night air sound travelled well; I could have sworn I heard the voice’s owner breathing heavily as she surveyed the silent street. It made me think of some flat-nosed dog, a French bulldog perhaps, panting. It was not until we had both heard the sound of the window shutting again that I dared even close the bakery door. Then I turned my back on it and fixed Julius with my gaze.

  ‘Julius Rensinghof,’ I said, ‘what the hell do you think you are doing?’

  ‘I’m –’

  I didn’t let him finish. ‘You were staring in through the bakery window. It’s –’ I glanced at my wrist but of course I had no watch on; it was lying on my bedside table upstairs. ‘It’s past midnight,’ I said. ‘What did you think you were going to see?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, but I caught the nanosecond of hesitation in his voice.

  ‘The bakery’s shut,’ I said. ‘My dad’s in hospital and …’ Achim’s dead, I had been about to say, but I thought better of it. ‘Nobody’s working tonight.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why did you come?’ I demanded.

  ‘I was passing,’ said Julius defensively.

  ‘At this time of night?’

  ‘We had a gig.’

  ‘Where’s your stuff, then?’

  ‘Felix took it in the van.’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Where was the gig?’ I asked him.

  ‘Look, what does it matter?’ said Julius shortly. ‘I was just passing, OK? And I looked in to …’ He stopped.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To see that you were OK.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Julius didn’t answer. I looked into those brown eyes and there was an unreadable message in them. We might have been two travellers meeting in some strange place, with no common language, no way to communicate but guesswork.

  What is he not telling me?

  ‘Julius,’ I said slowly, ‘do you pass by here often at night? This late, I mean – or even later?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment and I had the impression he was deliberating.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually, watching me as narrowly as I was watching him.

  I was beginning to feel acutely conscious of the fact that we were alone in the bakery. My skin was prickling and I did not think it was the result of my brief foray out into the cool night. He had the opportunity, I was thinking. He probably passes the bakery in the small hours a dozen times a month, after gigs and practice sessions. People who live on this street are probably used to seeing him, if any of them are up that late. Nobody would think anything of it, if they saw him passing by on a particular night.

  The more I thought about it, the more my unpleasant suspicions hardened into certainty. It was like looking at the pattern in the wallpaper when you were feverish; you began to see shapes in it – people, animals – and once you had seen them, you couldn’t unsee them again. They would cavort up and down the walls of your sickroom until you closed your eyes just to shut out the nauseating sight of them.

  But how could he have done it? I asked myself. There were no signs of a struggle. If he shut Achim in the cold store, he – Achim – could have used the emergency release inside to let himself out afterwards. Memory struggled to reassert itself: the sight of the great pallid bulk of Achim’s body flashed before my mental eye – the scum of ice crystals at the mouth, the stiff white hand. I did my best to beat it down. Who cares how he did it? I thought. Worry about that later. Right now you have other things to worry about, like the fact that it’s the middle of the night and you’re alone in here with him.

  Julius was still looking at me and still he said nothing. I knew
that the most sensible, safest thing to do would be to end the conversation now – encourage him to leave. I could pretend I was tired, sick, anything. I could discuss it with Hanna in the cold light of day and we could decide between us what to do about Julius.

  I knew what was sensible and yet I found myself saying, ‘Did you pass by the night it happened?’

  ‘The night what happened?’ said Julius automatically.

  ‘The night Achim died.’

  Julius took a step towards me and I found myself involuntarily backing away. There was that same strange look on his face again, as though he wanted to say something but lacked the words.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to answer that?’ he said.

  The street door was at my back. It opened inwards and I wondered how long it would take me to turn, pull it open, stumble outside into the street. Longer than it would take Julius to cross the space between us, that was for certain.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, marvelling at the conviction in my voice.

  ‘All right,’ said Julius.

  In the dim yellowish light coming through the windows from the street lamp his face was all angles and hard lines; he might have been a figure in a medieval sculpture, hewn from the solid stone. I was painfully conscious of the fact that he was a head taller than I was. I felt like a supplicant before some looming statue.

  ‘I was here,’ he said. ‘The night Achim died.’

  Oh, Julius.

  For a moment I was struck as dumb as I had ever been as a shy little girl, fighting for the right words. I was horrified, and not a little afraid, and part of me was even relieved, because there was an explanation that was not utterly insane, but most of all I was sad. There had been a time when I thought Julius was a good person, when I had shied away from telling him the worst about myself because I thought he had seen something better in me and I couldn’t bear to destroy that. Now I thought that the darkness came from Julius, and that it was far worse than anything I had seen in myself, because I had merely wished death on Klara Klein and Frau Kessel and Achim Zimmer, but Julius’s hands had been the ones which somehow struck them down.

  I felt all of this and I could express none of it. I looked at Julius’s face in the amber light and I knew it but did not know it. I simply said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of you,’ he said. Another step closer and he had taken me by the shoulders, as though he wanted to hold me there, at arm’s length, and study me. ‘Don’t you know that?’ he asked me.

  I had a terrible feeling that he was about to try to kiss me. There was a time, not so very long before, when I might have welcomed it, but now I felt as though I would be pressing my lips to the bloodstained maw of a vampire. I pulled away, but gently, afraid to provoke him.

  ‘I didn’t want any of this,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ said Julius with emphasis.

  He had me literally backed into a corner, I realized. I had the glass-fronted display cabinet to my right, a table to my left and the door at my back.

  No, I wanted to say, but I knew it would be a lie. Klara Klein – I had had nothing against her, but as for Frau Kessel and Achim Zimmer, I had wanted both of them out of the way. There was no denying it. If Julius had done the deeds, I had supplied the volition.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked him.

  In spite of my fear, I recognized my own role in the sorry events that had brought us to this pass. I recognized the rightness of whatever retribution hovered above my own head.

  ‘Do?’ repeated Julius, as though the question gave him pause. ‘I’m not going to do anything.’

  ‘It was murder,’ I said bluntly.

  I thought I saw him flinch. I was deliberately brutal; let the consequences be damned. Julius would do whatever he wanted, follow whatever strange impulse had led him to kill to gratify someone else’s wish. What I said now was probably irrelevant, but I was determined to tell the truth.

  He didn’t erupt into a savage rage or try to deny it. He said, ‘I think about it all the time. It’s not murder if it’s self-defence.’

  Self-defence? I stared at him. Achim Zimmer must have weighed about 110 kilos, much of it fat, but solid all the same. If it came to an honest fight between him and Julius, I supposed that every blow Julius struck would be self-defence. But Julius should not have been inside the bakery the night Achim died; he had been trespassing. And then it had hardly been an honest fight, had it? – shutting someone who was drunk inside a cold store, assuming that was what he had done.

  ‘You should go to the police,’ I said.

  ‘Should I?’ asked Julius, as though it were a rhetorical question. The remoteness of his tone sent a chill through me.

  ‘Putting it off will only make things worse,’ I said. I tried to sound reasonable, as though we were discussing something trivial like a dentist’s appointment, but I could hear the waver in my own voice. ‘You should go to them – now.’

  ‘Isn’t that up to you?’ said Julius. He didn’t try to touch me again, but I knew he was watching me, observing my face.

  Was I imagining it or was there a threat in his words? Suppose I said, Yes, I’m going to the police, right now. I’m going to go upstairs and dial 112 and when they get here I’m going to tell them who murdered Achim Zimmer and Frau Kessel and Klara Klein? What then? What would he do?

  ‘I’m not going to tell them anything,’ I said, as firmly as I could.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  If I’m not?

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said, and looked straight at him with as much conviction as I could muster. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone anything.’

  In the moment of silence that followed, I could feel the future – my immediate future – flickering between two possibilities, as clearly as if it were a weathercock, creaking back and forth in opposing gusts of wind. I held my breath.

  Finally Julius said, ‘It’s over, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He stepped closer to me again and I wondered whether I had misread the situation, whether he had not decided to trust me after all. Before I could react, his arms were around me. He didn’t try to kiss me; he didn’t say a word. He hugged me tightly, fiercely, as though he was trying to hold on to me forever, and I just stood there, motionless, barely daring to breathe, as though a carnivorous animal, a wolf or tiger, had me between its paws.

  I don’t know how long we might have stayed like that, a frozen tableau, looking for all the world like two long-parted lovers reunited, if we hadn’t been interrupted. A car was coming up the Werther Strasse, the bright beams of the headlights wavering as it rumbled over the cobblestones. The lights washed over the wall by the river and the empty tables outside the bakery. I hazarded a look.

  ‘Police,’ I said.

  I could have tried to get the door open at that moment – run out into the street waving my arms – but I hesitated. I still didn’t fancy my chances of managing it before Julius grabbed me, and if I didn’t make it, what then? We would be alone again and this time Julius would have no reason to trust me.

  I was standing there irresolutely when Julius dragged me away from the door, back into the shadows. His hand was still gripping my upper arm as I watched the car go by, its blue and silver livery turned dull in the lamplight. The blue light was switched off. I couldn’t see who was at the wheel. Herr Wachtmeister Schumacher was sitting in the passenger seat, but he seemed half asleep. At any rate, he didn’t even glance at the bakery as the car went past. If he had turned his head even a fraction he might have seen two faces staring at him from the shadows: the killer and his muse, returned to the scene of the crime. Instead he yawned and was borne onwards, unheeding.

  ‘I should go,’ said Julius, when the police car had turned the corner at the end of the street and vanished from sight. ‘If anyone sees us, they’ll ask questions.’

  He sounded utterly calm and might have been speaking about the weather. I simply nodded. If he wanted to go, I dared not say anything which
might make him change his mind. I opened the door and looked out. The street was deserted once again. A moment later Julius pushed past me and was gone, with one backward glance which I did my best not to meet.

  I closed the front door very quietly and locked it. There were bolts at the top and bottom, which we rarely ever used, but now I slid them both home. I was afraid to look out through the glass panel at the street beyond and yet afraid not to. I thought that Julius might change his mind and come back to the bakery. I imagined looking up and seeing his face staring at me from the other side of the glass, skin sallow in the lamplight, eyes glaring with savage intensity. I tried the door handle to check that I had really locked it and saw that my hands were trembling.

  I took the keys and went back upstairs to the flat, where I locked myself in, taking care to close the deadlock. Then I went around and let down all the shutters. I closed the ones overlooking the street last, so I could check that there was nobody there, no figure clad in a long dark coat with winking metal buttons standing under the street lamp or lurking in the shadows. Julius, I thought dismally. How is this possible? If Julius were capable of murder, I would never be able to trust anyone again; my mother might be a poisoner, slipping hemlock into the Sahnetorte, or my father the Lothario of the town, harbouring more sinister passions than his avowed dedication to Florentiner biscuits. The people I saw every day on the street and in the cafe, was their respectability just a veneer, were they all harbouring noxious secrets?

  From my vantage point at the window I could see the empty space on the cobblestones where my sister, Magdalena, had parked her car earlier in the day. It was as easy as that for her; she had just slipped behind the wheel and driven away.

  I let down the last shutter and blocked Bad Münstereifel from sight.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE