by Helen Grant
‘I promised my mother I’d go to the hospital.’ The lie gave me a pang. ‘I could call you when I get back. We could go then.’
I could hardly conceal my impatience as Julius agreed to wait for my call, then took his leave. He paused for a moment as he stood in the doorway. I was standing with my fingers on the door handle, dying to close and lock it behind him, but not daring to show it too obviously. He looked at me in silence, and I thought he had something important he wanted to say, but then he simply muttered, ‘See you later,’ and was gone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
As soon as I had locked the back door I unlocked the one which led to the corridor and ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Once inside the flat, I went straight into the kitchen, picked up the phone and called Hanna’s home number.
There was no reply. I let the phone ring twenty-one times and then hung up. I tried Hanna’s mobile and it was switched off. The impatience which had tortured me while I was waiting for Julius to leave was now a full-blown sense of throbbing urgency, infecting every cell of my body like a high fever, the Ebola virus of anxiety. Where is Hanna? I paced around the flat, hugging myself, fretting. I went up and down the hallway twice, and then into the living room, where Hanna and I had plotted to hex Julius.
The notepad was still on the coffee table and next to it the ballpoint pen I had used to write the message. I thought of the abortive attempts I had made, the one ordering Julius to die and the other telling him to vanish. I had screwed them up and simply thrown them on to the floor. I should pick them up. My mother wasn’t expected home but I couldn’t leave them lying around until she did come. I went over to the table and looked for them.
Nothing. They should have stood out like snowballs in a coalhole, crumpled white balls of paper against the dark red and brown shades of the rug. But there was nothing there. I got down on my hands and knees and peered underneath the coffee table with a rising feeling of unease. There was nothing there, nor was there anything under the sofa as far as I could tell. I stood up and began to pull the cushions off the sofa, although I did not really expect to find anything – there was no logical way two balls of paper could have found their own way up from the floor and burrowed into the crevices of the sofa. All the same, I checked it thoroughly and afterwards I pulled it away from the wall and looked behind. Still nothing.
Did I throw them away and forget? I asked myself. I made myself stand still for a moment, panting and surrounded by upended sofa cushions. I thought back to that morning, when Hanna and I had been sitting here, and I had written those messages. I was almost certain that I had simply thrown the discarded ones on the floor and left them there, intending to clear them away later. And then, when I had written the final one, Hanna had asked me if I had my phone on me and I had gone off to fetch it. I had come back with the phone and Hanna had left to get the car. While I was waiting, I had drunk a glass of tap water and found a pair of sturdy shoes for walking up the hill, and I had kept checking my mobile phone for missed calls. But I didn’t remember going back into the living room to clear up those balls of paper. As far as I could see, there was only one explanation. In the twenty seconds it had taken me to find my mobile phone, Hanna had picked them up. But why would she do that?
I had a horrible feeling I knew the answer.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
This time I didn’t give up when Hanna let the phone ring at her end. I listened to twenty rings, then I hung up and dialled again. I heard the phone ringing at the other end, the receiver clutched in my left hand as I punched out her mobile number on my mobile with my right. It went immediately to the message service again. I pressed the red button and redialled.
I was calling the landline for the sixth time when Hanna picked it up.
‘Landberg.’ She didn’t sound at all flustered.
‘Hanna, it’s me, Steffi. I’ve been calling and calling you.’ I suspected she knew this perfectly well, but she simply said, ‘I was in the garden.’
I didn’t bother with any further preamble. ‘Those pieces of paper, the ones I wrote on. What have you done with them?’
‘I’ve burned one of them,’ she said calmly.
‘Which one?’
‘“Julius Rensinghof, vanish.”’
‘And the other one?’ I didn’t even like to speak those words out loud: Julius Rensinghof, die.
‘In the box in Gertrud’s house.’
Even though I had known that was what she would say, I still felt a thrill of shock. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, why, Hanna?’
‘Because you need him out of your life for good.’
‘He didn’t do it, Hanna.’ My voice was rising wildly. ‘It wasn’t him. It was someone else. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Julius.’
There was a long pause. ‘He’s a loser,’ said Hanna eventually. ‘You don’t need him, Steffi.’
‘Hanna.’ I was clutching the receiver so tightly that my knuckles were white. ‘He didn’t do it. I can’t hex someone who didn’t do anything.’
‘You already have,’ said Hanna, and hung up.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
I tried to call Hanna back on the landline, but either she was on another call or she had deliberately taken the phone off the hook. Her mobile was still diverting to the answering service.
I didn’t bother swearing or throwing the phone around. A feeling of appalling dread was welling up inside me, rising like bread dough, seeming to fill every available space until my whole body was taut with it. My head was full of images, real and imagined: Klara Klein, her immense bulk precipitated headfirst into the cherry streusel; Kai von Jülich’s mother, her handsome looks made haggard with anxiety, pleading for information about her son; Achim Zimmer, blue-lipped and rimed with ice crystals, frozen in the corner of the cold store. And Julius, how would it end for him if I couldn’t remove the curse? I tried and failed not to think of it – blood drying on skin dappled with freckles, the sharp angles of cheekbones and jaw dented and wrecked, brown eyes fixed in a final unseeing and reproachful stare.
I was thinking about something else too. My friend Hanna and her part in what was happening. Dumpy, sensible, assertive Hanna, who could always be relied on in a crisis. Except that now I sensed she was playing quite another role and she was closer to the eye of the storm than I could ever have imagined.
I remembered her peculiar eagerness for me to hex Frau Kessel, the brightness in her eyes when we had talked about it. At this very moment I had in my possession just over ten thousand euros in cash and it had been Hanna who had urged me to wish for it. Now she had wrested control from me altogether. She was the one who wanted Julius dead, even if it was my handwriting on the death warrant. Did she know something that I didn’t? I wondered whether it would achieve anything if I returned to the ruined house in the wood to take back the curse. But would I need Hanna to take it back too? Hanna who wouldn’t answer my calls …
Think, I told myself. You have to do something. If you don’t, what’s going to happen to Julius?
I did think. How long would it take me to get to Hanna’s? It was a shorter distance on foot than by car. The Landbergs lived in a large detached house on a single-track road which ran along the side of the hill skirting the town. Narrow and steep, petering into a forest track at the far end, it was not the sort of road anyone drove up for pleasure and was all but impassable in winter. However, there was a footpath running directly to it from the town centre. If I took that I could be there in less than a quarter of an hour, ten minutes if I was quick about it and even less if I ran.
I was downstairs, out of the bakery and running up the street before I had time to question the wisdom of what I was doing. There were many more people out and about now. The other bakeries and the tourist shops were all open. ‘Vorsicht!:’ screeched somebody as I nearly cannoned into them. I shook my head and ran on.
I can still save this situation, I told myself. I just have to get there in time.
I had only ever been to the Landbergs’ house a handful of times in all the years I had known Hanna. I remembered it as a gloomily impressive place, like an exhibition crammed with the most expensive and monstrously ugly pieces of furniture the world’s most deluded carpenter could dream of. It also seemed to be much further away than I remembered. I laboured up the footpath with my lungs bursting and my heart thumping. It was a sunny day and pretty soon I was perspiring. Worse, the footpath was overhung with unkempt summer grasses and I guessed that they would be alive with blood-sucking ticks. There was nothing for it, though. If I went round by the road it would take four times as long to reach Hanna’s place. I emerged on to the single-track road which led to the house, ineffectually brushing at my arms and legs, gulped in a great breath of air which seemed disgustingly tepid, and ran on, my shoes slapping on the worn tarmac.
The house was right at the end of the road, just before it petered out into an overgrown forest track that was blocked off by a heavy wooden barrier. I stood by one of the stone pillars which flanked the gate and tried to catch my breath. The gate itself was closed and probably locked, but I thought I could climb over it without too much difficulty. There was a buzzer on one of the pillars next to the letter box, but I didn’t bother pressing it. If Hanna wasn’t answering the phone it was unlikely she would simply open the gate.
Peering over the gate, I could see that the drive was empty. There was no sign of Herr Landberg’s Mercedes, though I was not sure what this meant. Had Hanna taken it out again, trying to avoid me? If so, how had she settled it with her parents? It was inconceivable that she could keep borrowing the car right under Herr Landberg’s large aquiline nose. Perhaps the Landbergs were away. Certainly the garden looked as though it had not been tended for a while; the tubs of flowers outside the house were dead from lack of watering. When I had called her about Julius, she had told me they were there, in bed, but now I wondered.
I took hold of the gate, stuck the toe of my shoe into one of the gaps in the ornate metalwork and swung myself up on top. From my vantage point I stared at the front of the house, but there was no sign of movement anywhere. I dropped down on to the Landbergs’ driveway, horribly conscious of the crunching sound my feet made as they landed on the gravel. Then I walked right up to the front door.
I didn’t really expect to find it unlocked but I tried the handle anyway. Then I lifted the old-fashioned knocker and let it fall once, twice. I listened but I could hear nothing inside – no footsteps hurrying towards the door, not even the furtive sound of someone creeping away to hide. I stepped back and looked up at the front of the house. The shutters were down on some of the windows but not all of them. For a moment I thought I glimpsed movement at one of the upstairs windows, but then I realized it was only sunlight flashing on the panes.
The sun was full on the front of the house and it was terribly hot now. My throat was dry and there was a sour taste in my mouth. Worse, there was a detectable tang in the air, sweetish and foul, the scent of something putrefying in the heat. I guessed that it must come from the Landbergs’ dustbins, unemptied and festering in the summer weather. Doing my best to breathe through my mouth, I knocked on the door again, three times, willing Hanna to open up.
You can’t avoid me forever.
Still nothing. I gazed at the neatly painted wooden panels that presented such an impenetrable barrier. Should I try breaking in? I could imagine the state of apoplexy into which Herr Landberg would certainly be catapulted if I dared to break one of his windows. Should I give up the venture and try to make my own way to the Eschweiler Tal? I was already tired, thirsty and half sick with the heat.
With a sudden overwhelming feeling of frustration I seized the knocker again and hammered at the door, sending a series of sharp cracks reverberating through the house like thunder. In the silence that followed I listened, ears straining for the slightest sound. There was nothing. If Hanna was inside listening to my frenzied knocking, she was a cooler hand than I was, staying still and silent. I could hear nothing but my own ragged breathing.
Try the back door.
I stepped away from the house and looked up again, hoping to see someone behind one of those windows. I turned my head and it was then that I noticed the up-and-over door of the double garage. It was open – not wide open, but the lower edge was perhaps four centimetres from the ground, as though someone had intended to close it but had not quite succeeded. From a distance you could barely see that the door was not closed. There was just enough clearance that a rat might have crept in underneath, but that was all.
Now I found myself looking up at the windows again, this time praying that nobody was looking out. If I could get into the garage, there was probably a connecting door to the house and that one might not be locked.
Instinctively I kept close to the wall, so that anybody who happened to look out of the upper windows would be unable to see me. As I approached the garage door I realized that I was involuntarily holding my breath. There was that smell again, sickly sweet and cloyingly pervasive, the ripe scent of rotting organic matter. As I tried to suck in a shallow breath through gritted teeth, it was disgusting. I imagined bin bags filled with stinking food remains piled up inside the garage, the seams splitting to release their noisome contents. What on earth had been happening here?
I pinched my nostrils shut with one hand, then grasped the bottom edge of the garage door with the other and heaved. The door moved up and over, sliding into place above my head. The vile stench burst forth like a poisonous cloud, but that was not the thing that made me stand there with my eyes wide and my hands clamped to my mouth as though trying to smother a scream.
The Landbergs’ silver-grey Mercedes was parked in there, all right. And next to it was Kai von Jülich’s red sports car.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
I stared at Kai’s car, feeling as though my eyes must start from their sockets and my brain turn to mush in my head. I could make no sense of what I was seeing. For a while Kai von Jülich’s departure from the town had been the main topic of conversation in Bad Münstereifel. His own mother had come to see me to ask if I knew where he had gone. How was it possible that his car had been parked here all the time?
That smell seemed to be closing in on me, huddling against me with insinuating warmth, pressing itself greasily into my eyes and nose and mouth. I bit my knuckle, willing myself not to gag. All the time my gaze was flickering back and forth over the red sports car and I was noticing things that I would really rather not have noticed. The scarlet bodywork was as perfect as ever, although the layer of dust on it suggested that the car had not been taken out for weeks, but the windscreen was a mass of streaks and smears. It looked as though something had exploded inside the car, something wet and soupy, with little chunks of unidentifiable matter in it, and it had all dried on the inside of the glass.
There was something else too, barely visible through the filthy windscreen. Something hunched and slumped and topped with a tangle of what might have been yellow straw.
Somewhere deep inside me there might have been a rational train of thought telling me to call the police and let someone else deal with this, to back away and run, run, run. But it was lost, like a tiny figure waving in a desolate landscape glimpsed from a plane a thousand metres above. As though from a vast distance, I watched my own right hand reach out, grasp the handle of the driver’s door and pull.
The door opened easily and that smell roiled out, a thick stink of garbage and cheese which brought the bile up into my mouth. I looked at what was sitting behind the wheel of the sports car, then I turned away and really did throw up, every breath sucking in more of that disgusting smell, the stink of corruption, until I had vomited up everything in my stomach and was simply heaving uselessly in great cramping spasms.
The thing that had been Kai von Jülich was slumped over, what was left of the face mercifully hidden against the dashboard of the car. I saw one dark and mottl
ed hand, the bones threatening to break through what remained of the flesh like the peaks of stones breaking through cracked earth, and I had no desire to look any further. What I wanted most of all was to shut the car door again, to get rid of the stench, that terrible, clinging, gut-wrenching stench.
My hand was on the door, groping for the handle, when I saw it. A crumpled sheet of paper, closely covered with handwriting, stuffed down the side of the bucket seat. Suicide note? Confession? I might not have touched it – I quailed at the thought of touching anything in that stinking sarcophagus – but something caught my eye. At the corner of the paper was a logo I recognized. Before I had fully thought about what I was doing, I reached out and grabbed it. Then I did close the door and stumbled back out of the garage, sucking in the clean air in great gasps, trying not to think about what I had been breathing when I was in there, the tiny molecules of unspeakable matter that must be tainting the atmosphere. If I thought about that I would throw up again and my stomach was already a taut band of pain.
Driven like a threatened animal by some instinctive need to hide, I staggered around the corner of the house and there I sagged against the wall, turning my face to the cool stone. Dead, dead, I thought. The full horror of it was only now bursting in on me. Even when I had seen Achim Zimmer’s body, vast and greying, propped against the rear wall of the cold store, it had been nothing like this. Achim had still looked like a person, whereas Kai – I didn’t want to think what he looked like. This was no longer a game; it had never been a game. We had been messing about with things we had not begun to comprehend, like children swinging on the gate that opens into the blackness of eternity.