Blood Relative

by David Thomas

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said, when I’d read him the message. ‘But it has nothing whatsoever to do with my investigation.’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s a threat. Andy’s dead. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be investigating?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’m investigating a murder that took place more than thirty-six hours before this message was sent. Whoever sent the message did not know that your brother was dead. So they can’t have killed him, can they?’

  ‘No, I realize that … but the point is, this message establishes that Andy had made enemies in Berlin. Whoever sent this message was obviously one of them. But what if he wasn’t the only one? What if there were others?’

  ‘But there weren’t, and you know it. Still, I will grant you one thing …’

  For a moment my hopes rose, only to be dashed by Yeats’ next words: ‘There appears to be someone in Berlin who very badly wants to prevent your wife’s past being uncovered. This person has issued an anonymous threat of violence. So my formal advice as a police officer to you is to take this threat seriously. I daresay you are curious to find out what your brother discovered. But limit your enquiries to his computer. Don’t do anything else. Don’t go anywhere else.’

  ‘What, because it might not be good for my personal safety? You’re making exactly the same threat as the person that sent that email.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I have no intention of doing you any harm. But I’m prepared to believe that someone else just might. Your brother got into some very murky water, Mr Crookham. Don’t go in after him.’

  I put the phone down and stared blankly into space. Another door had seemed to open, only to slam back in my face. Or maybe it hadn’t … Whatever else had just happened, it was now obvious that Andy was on the right track, even if he didn’t know it. So there was something real out there that might explain what had happened to make Mariana lash out: something I could still search for. And even Yeats had said I could start my search in Andy’s laptop. So that was what I did.

  Next to Mariana’s little-girl picture on Andy’s Scrivener corkboard were a number of cards, several of which contained links to websites. The first took me to a page on a site called StayFriends, whose logo had the slogan ‘Schulfreunde wiederfinden’, which I could work out meant, ‘Find schoolfriends again’. So it was a German version of Friends Reunited, and it was open on a page dedicated to a Berlin primary school called Grundschule Rudower.

  According to the data on the page, this school had 987 pupils listed on StayFriends, from 59 graduating classes, with 740 profile photos of individual pupils and 161 class photos. One of the latter had also been attached to the corkboard. And there, at the right end of the second row of children, was Mariana, standing between a boy with a fierce crewcut and an earnest girl with dark-brown hair whose pinched expression gave an unnerving suggestion of an angry, resentful adulthood to come.

  The girl with the dark-brown hair was called Heike Schmidt, and she was a registered member of StayFriends, as was the crewcut boy, whose name was Karl Braun: a German Charlie Brown. It went without saying that the blonde girl in the middle, the girl who became Mariana Slavik, was not listed as a member.

  I always carry a Moleskine notebook with me wherever I go, along with a couple of sharp pencils with erasers on the end. I like to take brief notes of what’s been said with clients and contractors and make drawings of any changes to the plans. On a building site, a quick sketch is worth a lot more than a thousand misunderstood words. Out of habit I started jotting down a few of the names and places Andy had come up with, taking notes of his notes. Whatever quest he had been on, it had become my quest now. Putting things down in my own writing felt as if I were taking possession of it all, grabbing the relay baton he was holding out for me from beyond the grave.

  Going back to the corkboard I followed the trail of Andy’s meticulous research. One card was a link to a complete list of Berlin primary schools, divided by districts of the city. The site was open at a page covering the Köpenick district, in which the Grundschule Rudower lay. Another card took me to a website for amateur genealogists, which gave information on all the administrative areas of Berlin, dating back more than a century. Among other things, it specified which districts had ended up in East Berlin and which in West.

  Andy had taken the eastern districts and cross-referenced them with the districts on the list of primary schools. Then he’d gone onto StayFriends and searched school after school, looking at the years when Mariana would have been there, scanning every class photo for anyone who resembled her.

  I was astonished at the obsessive effort that must have taken. But as Andy used to joke, ‘It’s not always easy to tell the difference between an investigative reporter and a stalker.’ Plenty of girlfriends had left Andy when they realized there was no date so important that he would not cancel it at a moment’s notice if he got a promising lead. Nor was it easy for women to accept that he would remember every last detail of the story he was working on but forget anything and everything about them.

  The search for that photo had only been one small part of his effort. Another card contained records of all his travel expenses: the easyJet flight from London Gatwick to Berlin-Schönefeld; the two-night stay at a hotel called the Mercure an der Charité, on what was once the eastern side of the Wall; assorted cash payments for meals, cab fares, metro tickets and so on. He’d taken an early-morning flight out and an evening one back, giving him three full days’ work. But that, as would soon become clear, had not been nearly enough.

  All the notes Andy had jotted down as he was working were filed on another card: notes that included his own commentary on what he was doing or discovering. It felt as though Andy’s dry, sarcastic voice, given a low, rasping edge by the cigarettes he was always trying (not very hard) to give up, was whispering in my ear, like a kind of haunting as I read:

  Leads 1: School

  – Braun: Only two listed in online Berlin phonebook: odd, expected more.

  – Braun 1: away in Mali on UN humanitarian work, the do-gooding twat.

  – Braun 2: no idea what I was talking about, barely spoke English but swore never heard of Grundschule Rudower.

  – 8 Heike Schmidts, plus half-dozen Heike Schmidt-Somethings … NB: woman could be married by now. Prob’ly not, face like that!

  – Schmidt UPDATE: third HS I called v. edgy. Said yes had gone to GR school, but denied knowing any girl called Mariana. When I described kid in pic, HS refused to talk. Quote: ‘You must not ask me about these things!’ Slammed phone down. GOTCHA!!

  – Schmidt UPDATE 2: went to home listed for HS in phonebook. Apartment building. HS answered buzzer. Threatened to call police.

  – QUESTION: there’s definitely something going on … but what?? And what still so scared of 25 years later??

  How I wished I could talk to Andy. I wanted to show him the email and ask the next obvious question: had Heike Schmidt been frightened by the same person who’d threatened him? And was it just coincidence that the threat against him had followed his contact with Schmidt?

  I jotted those questions down in my notebook, feeling the thrill of the intellectual chase, understanding for the first time in my life why Andy had become so obsessed by the stories he worked on.

  The next section of his notes was headed:

  Leads 2: Birth Certificate

  Unbelievable! No central records office for Germany. So much for Kraut efficiency!! So …

  – Birth certificates are issued at the place of birth.

  – Addresses are registered at office called the Einwohnermeldeamt.

  – Can follow people through those offices because have to give previous and next address.

  – In East Germany same thing was called ZMK = Zentrale Meldekartei.

  – Oh … great … NOW they tell me … There is a central Berlin office for birth certificates.

  – QUESTION: who could fake documents in E. Germany?? Was there organized crime (cf. Russi
an Mafia) and/or resistance movement? Otherwise has to be people in charge of system = Stasi.

  – QUESTION: or was name changed in West? When did she go to West? Ask Pete … how? What reason for question?

  UPDATE: see chart for certificate trawl …

  I followed the trail to a separate document and once again was given an insight into the thoroughness with which my brother went about his business.

  He’d started out trying to find any record of a Mariana Slavik, born on 14 June 1980. There was no such certificate.

  So then he’d asked whether any girl called Mariana Slavik had been born at any time, five years either side of that date. Again, he’d not found any record of any such birth. A note next to that information read: ‘NO Mariana Slaviks anywhere. Less than 150 Slaviks in whole German phonebook. Plus, Mariana is weird spelling. Usual way is Mariane, with an “e”. Where is this bloody woman???’

  In order to find her, Andy had widened his search. He looked at all the girls born on 14 June 1980. There were twenty-eight of them in all, whom he’d arranged alphabetically from Renate Alback through to Heike Zuckerman, with all the data about parents, place of birth and so on that the certificates provided.

  None of the girls was called Mariana, or Slavik. Three of them, however, had asterisks by their names: Marinella Knopf, Mariamne Schwartz and MariaAngelika Wahrmann.

  Andy had obviously highlighted them as being the closest to Mariana, but he clearly wasn’t convinced that meant very much, because just below the list he’d written:

  – Follow these up … all of them … will have to make 2nd trip back Berlin … BOLLOCKS!!!

  – QUESTION: what if birth-date is fake, too? Kid would still want to keep same birthday, surely – parties, prezzies, etc. – but easy change one or two years either way … check them too, next trip?

  – BIG QUESTION: HOW DO I TELL PETE ABOUT ALL THIS??

  – Talk to Mariana first? Maybe she has reasonable explanation …

  – NO … MUCH BIGGER QUESTION: WTF hasn’t P noticed any of this himself? She must be the greatest shag of all time to pull the wool over his eyes so well.

  I put my pencil down and closed the laptop. The bubble of excitement I’d felt just a few minutes earlier had suddenly deflated, replaced by something much closer to humiliation. In my head I could hear Chief Inspector Yeats asking me, ‘How well do you know your wife, Mr Crookham?’

  I looked again at Andy’s question to himself – ‘Talk to Mariana first?’ – and as I did so, my dreams of proving Yeats wrong seemed like nothing more than pathetic schoolboy fantasies. There, in writing, were words that seemed to support the precise scenario that he had suggested as Andy arrived at our house, bursting with ideas, and discovered I wasn’t there. It was easy to imagine him unable to stop himself asking Mariana endless questions about something, driving her to the point where she suddenly lashed out, and …

  No! That couldn’t be it!

  Of course, Andy was right, up to a point. I had accepted everything Mariana had said to me without question. And yes, shagging had something to do with it – I felt like I’d won the lottery every time I saw her naked. But that really wasn’t the most important thing. It was more that I believed we had something magical, a charmed life, and I hadn’t wanted to do anything that would break the spell. So I didn’t question her about her family or her past. Instead, I always described my family to her in a way that suggested there wasn’t really so much difference from the distance between Mum, Andy and me and the total chasm between Mariana and her background. That way our dysfunctional families bound us together and increased that fantastic sense of being a little team: us against the world with no distractions anywhere.

  I loved the woman, all right? Sometimes that means wanting to know every single scrap of information about the person you adore. But in our case it had meant keeping the curtain between us and the outside world tightly shut, for fear that any light should be let in upon the magic. But as any honest magician will tell you, his tricks are not real. They’re all just a matter of distraction and illusion. So now I had to ask myself: had our marriage been an illusion, too? And once I saw through the trick, what the hell was I going to find?

  20

  If I’d understood Dr Wray correctly, Mariana did not consciously know what had traumatized her. But maybe her subconscious had let slip some clues: something in her words or behaviour that had indicated something was wrong, but that I would have missed, or ignored at the time.

  That night, over dinner in the hotel restaurant, I found myself going back into the past, taking out all those echoes of happier times and looking at them afresh. I thought about what it must have been like for Mariana to be the product of not one dictatorship but two. She had grown up in a land that had gone straight from Nazism to Stalinism, and though she had only been ten when the Berlin Wall came down, it was always obvious that she had some sort of race memory of oppression and a visceral hatred of anything that resembled it.

  She called herself a ‘neo-liberal’, meaning that she loathed communism, socialism, in fact any form of politics that even hinted at state control or the loss of personal freedom. Stories about the spread of CCTV cameras or the use of spy chips in rubbish bins provoked an anger in her that went far beyond obligatory suburban outrage. She never, ever, talked about the specifics of her East German girlhood, but the Stasi were always bogeymen in her eyes. ‘They are still out there, all of them,’ she would say. ‘The people who led this system are free today … they are police officers, lawyers and politicans and they are laughing in our faces. Someone should find them and shoot them in the head.’

  Moments like that were very rare, sudden flashes of lightning across a sky that was otherwise calm and sunny. Now, though, the violence of her speech took on a new significance. Just like the email that Andy had been sent it was a reminder of the deeper, darker culture of violence from which it came. And as one thought unfurled into another through a mind relaxed by a bottle of rich red wine, another memory came to me, bearing another clue to her personality.

  It was an evening after work, two or three years ago. Mariana and I were having a pint with Nick. He amazed me by saying that he’d decided to go to a therapist. ‘I need help,’ he said, with a vulnerability that I’d never heard in him before. ‘I mean, chasing skirt, never settling down, notches on the bedpost and all that … it’s fair enough when you’re twenty, even thirty. But I’m turning forty this year and I’m in serious danger of becoming a sad old lech … So I think I need some help.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  Nick snorted derisively, thinking I was taking the mick.

  ‘No, I mean it,’ I assured him. ‘Takes a lot of balls to admit there’s something wrong and even more to do something about it.’ I raised my glass: ‘Here’s to you … you sad old lech!’

  Nick laughed and knocked his glass against mine. Then he looked at Mariana, who’d not said a word, and asked, ‘How about you, M? You ever had your head examined?’

  His tone was perfectly friendly, but he couldn’t have provoked a more venomous response if he’d trodden on a rattlesnake. ‘Never!’ snapped Mariana. ‘Psychiatrists are all liars … all of them! They pretend they can read people’s minds when it is all just bullshit. How can they see inside my head?’

  ‘Whoa!’ said Nick, rolling his eyes at me. A minute or two later we were very deliberately talking about sport and letting Mariana calm down in her own time. The subject of psychiatry was never mentioned again. But as I sipped my wine, one idea about heads became associated with another glossed-over memory from our earliest days together.

  I said we were married a year after we’d first flirted, that day in the car outside the Blacks’ house. That’s true. But it’s not the whole story. It wasn’t exactly a smooth, linear process. Nor was this the first time I’d been unable to communicate with Mariana.

  After her first few weeks as an intern at our practice, she went away on holiday,
then back to college to study for her postgraduate degree. There was just one catch. She didn’t give me her address. She changed her phone, too. The only way we could communicate was via email and instant messaging.

  It was an incredibly manipulative way of playing hard to get, since she completely controlled the terms of our communication. At first, though, I was too giddy with excitement to care. Our hours of online chat revealed a woman who was clever, funny, well-read, filled with curiosity and original ideas and, above all, totally unabashed about sex. She was blatantly, graphically, hilariously frank about what turned her on and she provoked me into my own outbursts of personal pornography: a filthy honesty that I’d never dared to express to a woman before. As her messages popped up on my screen like darts from a dirty-minded Cupid, I was a junkie, a crack-whore for Mariana’s strange, artificial substitute for love.

  One night as we were chatting she added a new, visual element to our communications. She’d just told me how she’d gone with some university friends to see a Sheffield United match at Bramall Lane. To prove the point she emailed me one of those pictures of a group of people, laughing hysterically, that make one feel hopelessly cut off from their private joke. Mariana was playing peekaboo from behind a guy’s shoulder, just her red-and-white-striped bobble hat and a huge pair of Jackie O sunglasses visible, like the cutest Where’s Wally in the world.

  The next picture came later that week as a response to me complaining about a lousy day at work. She wrote back:

  – AH, POOR BABY. WAIT A MOMENT I CHEER YOU UP!!

  A couple of minutes later a message arrived in my email inbox with a jpeg file attached. I opened it to find a picture of Mariana. She was at the beach, at one of those playgrounds for bodybuilders and fitness freaks, hanging from a pair of gymnast’s rings. The picture was taken from the side and showed her spectacular body in profile like a magnificent pendant sculpture. Her left leg was vertical, the toes arched down like a ballerina en pointe, while her right was pulled up, the knee bent to form a perfect triangle. Her back and stomach were sleek and lean, the dazzling seaside light glinting off her tanned, sun-creamed skin. Her breasts, in a polka-dot bikini top, swelled beneath the tensed muscles of her arms, behind which I could just catch a glimpse of her forehead beneath a tumble of golden hair. My reply was hardly inspired: