Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  At seven o’clock the next morning I called Hanna. I had been awake since five, my mind racing with the sick intensity of a fever dream. I had to speak to someone. I was no longer sure of the truth of what had happened that last afternoon at Rote Gertrud’s house. It was a jumble in my mind, a tangle of grabbing hands and insistent voices. Perhaps Hanna’s had been among them; perhaps she had tried to defend me, as she claimed. I couldn’t say. One thing was clear, though: it was not a good thing to be the person who stood between a killer and discovery. Julius claimed he had done it all for me, a concept I was not ready to examine in detail – it made me feel like the unwitting carrier of a disgusting disease. But although I could not follow his mind down the labyrinthine route that had led him to murder, I still did not trust the monster at the heart of the maze not to turn on me too.

  I tried Hanna’s mobile phone first, but it was switched off. After some deliberation, I called the landline. I could not imagine what Frau or Herr Landberg would say if either of them picked up the phone after being roused at this appallingly early hour, but I almost didn’t care, so long as they let me speak to Hanna.

  The phone rang twelve times and then Hanna picked it up. I didn’t bother with a preamble.

  ‘Something’s happened. Can I come over? I need to talk to you.’

  ‘No!’ Hanna sounded aghast. ‘No way.’

  ‘Why not? Please, Hanna, it’s important. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’

  ‘My parents,’ said Hanna. ‘They’re in bed.’

  I noticed she didn’t say, They’re asleep. I wondered whether Frau and Herr Landberg were sitting up and sipping cups of coffee with their ears twitching. Perhaps Hanna was on an upstairs extension and they were two metres away, she in her knitted bedjacket and he in a pair of striped pyjamas, scanning the airwaves with the efficiency of a military defence system while pretending to study the pattern on their cups.

  ‘Can you come here, then?’

  I was amazing myself with my own persistence. This was what I had needed to bring me out of my shell, I thought wryly: three deaths, a disappearance and a serial killer with a crush on me.

  There was a second’s silence. I listened to the faint crackling on the line and waited for Hanna’s reply.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said, and broke the connection.

  Fifteen minutes later the street doorbell rang. I went to the front window and looked out before I went down. I wanted to be sure that it was really Hanna and not Julius. As soon as I caught sight of her unruly dark head I left the window and went downstairs.

  ‘What’s up?’ was the first thing she said when I opened the door.

  ‘Julius Rensinghof,’ I said succinctly.

  As soon as she was inside, I closed the door again, locked and bolted it. Hanna watched me do this in astonishment.

  ‘Julius Rensinghof?’ she said. ‘That loser?’

  I opened my mouth to retort, and then shut it again. Killing three people and running a fourth out of town didn’t make Julius a winner, but I wasn’t sure whether it made him a loser either. It wasn’t something you’d dare to say to his face anyway.

  ‘We should go upstairs,’ I said, testing the door.

  Hanna was at my elbow. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  There was an edge to her voice. When I turned, the keys in my hand, she was so close to me that I had to stifle an impulse to push her away.

  ‘He killed Achim Zimmer,’ I told her.

  ‘What?’ The expression of shock on Hanna’s face might have been comical under different circumstances.

  ‘And Frau Kessel and Klara Klein,’ I added for good measure. ‘I don’t know how he got Kai von Jülich to leave town, but …’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Hanna incredulously.

  ‘He did,’ I said grimly.

  Hanna followed me as I made for the door which led to the stairs. ‘He can’t have,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes, he can,’ I retorted. ‘He told me himself.’

  ‘He confessed?’

  ‘Last night,’ I said, as we went upstairs. ‘Right here, in the bakery.’

  ‘What was he doing here?’

  ‘I didn’t invite him,’ I said. ‘He was just passing by, or so he said.’ I unlocked the door. ‘I asked him if he was here on the night Achim died and he said yes.’

  ‘Scheisse.’ Hanna sounded stunned. ‘Did he say what happened?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, as we went into the flat. ‘He said he did it for me.’ I saw the expression on her face, the horrified incredulity. I wondered how much of that horror was for me, the killer’s genius. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask him for the details. I didn’t know what he was going to do – I just wanted him out. He’s dangerous. He’s off his head.’

  We went into the living room. I sat on the couch but Hanna remained standing, as tense as a pointer dog.

  ‘Have you called the police?’ she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll say. I can’t prove anything. It’s his word against mine. Anyway,’ I said, ‘what about when they ask why? If I tell them I wrote it all down on scraps of paper up at the witch’s house, either they’ll think I’m crazy or they’ll think I put him up to it, that I’m his accomplice. I wrote it down and he did it, as though I was giving him orders or something.’

  I put my head in my hands. The more I thought about it, the worse it got. What about the money upstairs? How would I explain that? There was no way anyone would believe I wasn’t involved. I was involved. I groaned aloud.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ said Hanna stubbornly. She sounded almost angry. ‘A loser like him – he couldn’t plan anything like that and carry it out.’

  ‘He confessed,’ I said.

  ‘He’s trying to make himself look big.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said.

  I was beginning to feel a little angry myself. I didn’t know how or why we were arguing about it. I simply needed Hanna to believe me, because right now I felt as exposed as a goat tethered for bait in a jungle clearing. I had no idea what was going through Julius’s mind at that instant, wherever he was, but I knew it would be a mistake to assume that he would let things lie. Suppose he really did think that he was protecting me in some twisted way – what if he decided for himself that someone was a threat? What if he turned on me?

  Hanna fell silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘What are you going to do?’

  What are you going to do? It was the very same question I had asked Julius. It was the nub of the matter. Up until that moment, the answer had not crystallized inside my brain, although I supposed it had flitted silently, a night bird, in the dark shadows at the edges of my conscious mind. Now it came to me, and before I even had time to think about it I had opened my mouth and said, ‘I’m going to hex him.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Julius Rensinghof. I sat on the overstuffed sofa with a notepad on my lap and a ballpoint pen in my hand, staring at the name on the page.

  Hexing Julius would be justice. I imagined him snooping about in the woods, maybe even following us deliberately. I supposed that if so, he had been following me, and I cringed inside. He had been in a place where he should not have been, pawing through scrawled messages that should never have been written, and he had decided to turn those outpourings of anger and fear into reality, as though they had been evil spells inked on the yellowing pages of a grimoire, and he the demon who performed them.

  ‘Die,’ said Hanna, leaning over my shoulder. She nudged me. ‘Write it. He deserves it.’

  Reluctantly I put the pen to the paper again and experimentally wrote die after Julius’s name. I wanted to see how I felt when I saw that word, whether it could possibly seem right.

  What would he do if he unfolded that message and found his own name on it? I wondered. Would he accept that this was the end of the game? The chilling idea occurred to me that he might think I was telling him to tur
n his hand against himself. I found that idea intolerable. I thought I was at least partly responsible for what he had done, if he thought in his twisted way that he had been doing it for me. The game had to end, but not like that.

  ‘No.’

  I ripped the top sheet off the pad, crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on to the floor. I put the nib of the pen to the paper again.

  Julius Rensinghof, vanish, I wrote. Almost immediately I tore the sheet off and screwed it up into a ball like the first one. Vanish, that could mean anything. Bad Münstereifel had had its own history of disappearances, and everyone in the town knew how it had ended for those who had vanished.

  Why was it so difficult to do this? The killings had to end, I knew that.

  I began again. Julius Rensinghof, leave Bad Münstereifel forever, I wrote. I read the line and reread it. If only it were possible to wish that none of this had ever happened, I thought. But it was far too late for that. This seemed to be the only solution. Swiftly I folded the paper once, twice, until it was a compact square.

  ‘Are you sure you can get the car?’ I asked Hanna.

  I couldn’t imagine what the pompous Herr Landberg would do if he discovered his daughter had borrowed his precious Mercedes for the second time and driven it up the Eschweiler Tal, with its bodywork-flaying carpet of small sharp stones.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanna. ‘Don’t worry. My parents aren’t even going to notice it’s gone.’

  She smiled at me slyly and for a moment I thought I saw a flicker of that excitement I had seen on her face when she and Max were urging me to write down another of those cursed wishes. Hanna wanted to do this; she desired it with the compulsion of a gambler hanging on the roll of the dice. Even now that we both knew who and what were at work, now we knew that there was no magic in it except the dark sorcery which turns twisted thoughts into deeds, she still could not resist the lure of it.

  I began to think that I should not have asked her for help, that I was dragging her back into something as unhealthy as a drug habit. I should have gone to Rote Gertrud’s house myself, even if it took me half a day to walk there and back. But what if he’s there? I thought of the lonely hours it would take me to trudge the length of the Eschweiler Tal and back, and the tangled undergrowth I would have to force my way through to get to the ruined house. I imagined myself jumping at every tiny snap and rustle among the undergrowth, turning with my heart in my mouth every time the wind moved the branches. And I would be right to do so, because there was nothing to say that Julius was not up there in the woods at this very moment, waiting for me. I thought that I would feel so much better if Hanna were with me and we had the reassuring solidity and speed of Herr Landberg’s Mercedes to carry us to and from the Eschweiler Tal.

  ‘When do you think we can go?’ I asked her.

  She looked at her watch. ‘Might as well go as soon as possible. There aren’t many people around this early.’

  ‘Shall I come with you?’

  ‘No,’ said Hanna. ‘I’ll bring the car here, OK? Just wait. I’ll sound the horn – no, we’ll have everyone looking out if we do that. I’ll phone. Have you got your phone?’

  I went off to my room to fetch it. When I came back, Hanna was just emerging from the living room. It was not until later that day – very much later – that I asked myself what she had been doing in the twenty seconds she was alone.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Hanna returned with the car more quickly than I had expected. I slid into the passenger seat with a feeling of déjà vu. The last time I was in Herr Landberg’s car, I had been on my way to curse Achim Zimmer, my mind a maelstrom of disgust and anger and dread, my only coherent thought the desire to stop Achim. The remembrance made me sick at heart. How many times had I been up to the ruined house in the woods impelled by reasons that had seemed incontrovertible, impulses that had felt irresistible, swearing each time that this would be the last? Give me this one last thing and I’ll never ask for anything again … But I had kept on asking and my wishes had been fulfilled. I leaned my head against the car window and tried to blot out the memory of Julius’s face the night before in the bakery, the way he had tried to telegraph some unspoken message to me, his features sharp and intense. How was it possible that he had done all this and for me? I shuddered at the idea.

  The streets of Bad Münstereifel were deserted at this early hour of Sunday morning and we made rapid progress. Within a couple of minutes we had passed through the gate in the medieval wall and were heading towards the Eschweiler Tal. I had travelled this same route with Kai von Jülich, in that gleaming red car of his, which it was commonly supposed had carried him to some more exotic location than Bad Münstereifel. I supposed that Julius must know where Kai was. If my plan worked and Julius really did leave the town, Frau von Jülich might never know the answer to her questions. I wondered whether the truth was something she would really want to know. I could not think of any benevolent means by which Julius, who was so badly off that he went about on a rattletrap bike, could influence someone as rich and self-assured as Kai von Jülich to desert his comfortable life and take off somewhere without telling anyone.

  How did he get Kai to ask you out, then? came the uncomfortable reply. The more I thought about it, the more questions began to arise, nibbling at the edges of my certainty like a shoal of sharp-toothed fish. I realized with despair that there were no answers to any of them. Unless I was prepared to confront Julius, I would probably never know the truth. He confessed, I reminded myself. That was the fact of the matter. Julius had confessed and there had to be an end to it, here and now.

  I kept that thought in my mind as we parked the car and made our way up the hillside, forcing our way through brambles and ferns under the shadows of the trees. The last time ever, I promised myself, as the grey bulk of Gertrud’s house came indistinctly into view, its crumbling walls merging into the dank vegetation around it. I tried to think of the task as a necessary evil, something to be carried out as dispassionately as a surgical procedure, and yet still as I stepped through the doorway into the shell of the house I felt like putting my hands over my eyes to blot out the sight of the scrawled messages on the walls, each one of them a silent scream.

  Hanna stood beside me, scanning the mutilated walls. She said nothing, but simply waited while I retrieved the carved box from the floor. It lay on its side, propped against a chunk of masonry. It looked as though it had been kicked there, which I supposed it had, when I had struggled with the others. I saw that the catch had burst. The scraps of paper which had been inside were scattered on the ground. There seemed no point in checking whether the one wishing for my father’s recovery had gone or not. I didn’t think Julius could have any influence over that.

  I dug the folded paper from my pocket and put it into the box. The lid wouldn’t shut properly any more, I noticed; the hinges were bent too. Probably Max or Jochen had actually trodden on it. I put the box on the ground and placed a stone on top of it to keep the lid down. Then I turned and, picking my way over the broken stones which lay everywhere, left the ruined house.

  It was only once I got outside that I realized Hanna wasn’t with me. I waited for a moment and then I went back, but she came out to meet me.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and we set off down the hill.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  When Hanna dropped me off at the Werther Tor, the town was beginning to come to life. People were moving about the cobbled streets, on their way to mass at the church of Sts Chrysanthus and Daria or to one of the open bakeries for their morning rolls. It would simply be too conspicuous to drive up the Werther Strasse in Herr Landberg’s Mercedes, and hardly worth the risk, since I had only a few hundred metres to walk to reach home.

  We had not spoken much on the way back to the town. I had half expected Hanna to ask me about the money, which was still crammed into the little drawer of my bedside table. Either I had misjudged her, however, or she had other things on her mind. She didn’t menti
on it at all and was preoccupied for most of the drive. When she let me out at the Werther Tor I thought she seemed to be on the point of saying something, but there was another car close behind us and she had to pull away immediately, leaving me standing alone in the shadow of the great stone gate.

  I walked up the street, doing my best to look as though I had been up to nothing more suspicious than taking an early-morning stroll. Although there was a freshness in the air, the sky was a clear bright blue. I thought it was going to be a fine summer’s day. The waitress at the Italian ice cream parlour was opening up the striped awning in front of the shop. She nodded and smiled at me as I passed and, in spite of myself, I felt my spirits begin to lift. Up there in the woods, in the mouldering wreckage of a dead woman’s house, the world seemed bleak and menacing, a tortured labyrinth of winding corridors and dead ends leading inexorably to confusion and darkness. In the bright sunshine, however, the memory of the ruined house and what we had done there seemed unreal. Even the fear of running into Julius was diminished. This was broad daylight, after all, and I knew nearly every one of the people gazing out from shop doorways or strolling past with paper bags of bread rolls tucked under their arms. I even knew the sleek ebony cat that lay sunning himself on the cobbles, descendant of the inky-black tomcat who had terrorized the town’s lapdogs when I was a child. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it really is possible to put it all behind me. Perhaps this is the end of it.

  I followed the bend in the street and I was within a hundred metres of the bakery’s front door when I saw it. I don’t suppose anyone else would have recognized it: just an old black bicycle, flaking rust, so battered that the owner hadn’t even bothered to chain it up to anything. It was leaning against the wall by the river. There was no sign of Julius anywhere near it, but I knew better than to think that he had abandoned it. He must be somewhere very close by. I didn’t bother to scrutinize the street ahead. Heart pounding, I turned on my heel and walked back the way I had come, doing my best to look nonchalant, although my cheeks were burning and I was sure that the shock I felt must be evident from my face.