The Wages of Sin: A Kidnap, a Crucifixion, a Murderer on the Loose

by Inge Löhnig

  Kallweit had looked nervous when Gina had asked him for the key. There must be something down there. Dühnfort went into the laundry room. There was a washing machine, dryer and washing lines, and various detergents neatly organised on a shelf. The room was under the kitchen. Dühnfort went into the boiler room, which was presumably beneath the office. Gina had just gone back upstairs. ‘There’s nothing down here,’ she said. Dühnfort followed the narrow hallway to a meticulously tidy workshop, which was below the living room.

  The cellar had the same layout as the ground floor. In the workshop, there was a workbench and a tool cupboard. Screws and nails were organised by size in labelled plastic containers. Dühnfort went back and sat on the cellar stairs. He heard Alois rounding up the officers upstairs. ‘We’re packing it up.’

  Kallweit was good with his hands. In a niche in the cellar hallway, he’d built two shelves, which were stacked with old magazines and books. There was enough space for a third shelf, but there wasn’t one. Kallweit had finished the niche with panels at the top and bottom. They would have to be removed if he wanted to fit the missing shelf. And suddenly Dühnfort knew why there was no third shelf. He stood up and stuck his head into the wall cavity. His eyes stopped on a metal rail that ran behind the panel. A small red light was glowing beside it. Dühnfort groped around the panel and found a remote that was stored in a holder. He took it out and pressed a button. With a soft hum, a shelf began to slide to the side. A door was visible. Kallweit had a secret room in his house. It was under the garage.

  * * *

  The humming stopped. Dühnfort put the remote down on one of the shelves and sat on the cellar stairs. Deep in thought, he looked at the painted grey metal door. From upstairs he heard Gina and Alois’s voices. Alois was ordering the other officers to leave the house.

  ‘You coming, boss?’ Gina called down into the cellar. I need to brace myself before I open this door, Dühnfort thought. He heard Gina coming down the cellar stairs. He knew the sound of her footsteps.

  ‘What’s keeping you?’ She sat next to him on the stairs and followed his gaze. ‘There’s nothing here.’ In a single bound she was at the shelves and examining the structure. ‘It works with a remote?’

  Dühnfort nodded. Gina found the remote and made the shelf slide out in front of the door.

  ‘Where are you, guys?’ Alois called from upstairs. Gina made the shelf slide back again. Alois came down the stairs.

  Dühnfort stood up. ‘It’s up to me to decide when we shut up shop.’ Alois was a step above him on the cellar stairs. ‘The men that were securing the property have to go back to their posts. Send one back to Kallweit’s bedroom. The others should wait in the buses until we need them. We’ll go in there on our own first.’ Dühnfort gestured to the door.

  Alois whistled softly through his teeth. ‘What a smooth operator.’ Gina made the door disappear behind the shelf again. ‘Your intuition was right, congratulations.’ He patted Dühnfort on the shoulder. Gina made a face. Dühnfort understood it. Alois’s superior attitude was slowly getting on his nerves.

  ‘Call Buchholz. We need him here.’

  Alois looked at the door and then at the display on his phone. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said and went upstairs.

  ‘Do you want to, boss, or can I?’ Gina asked.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He and Gina both pulled on latex gloves. She walked ahead of him into the room.

  The first things that struck Dühnfort were the darkness, the pleasant temperature and the freshness of the air. Kallweit must have installed a ventilation system in there. Gina turned on the light. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Certainly not this. Dühnfort was staring into a ship’s cabin. Mahogany and brass everywhere he looked.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Gina said. ‘Well hello, sailor.’

  A red-and-white lifebelt was hanging on one wall beside an oil painting of a barque in a choppy sea. Old oars were leaning in a corner with a coil of ship’s rope beside them. A scuffed steamer trunk served as a bar. Shiny glasses and bottles hung and stood in specially designed holders. On the opposite wall were two brass portholes that looked out not onto the sea but onto two stretches of wall that had been painted light blue. Beneath them was a mahogany double bed and a pair of bedside tables. Fine wooden cubes with recessed brass fittings. One of the tables caught Dühnfort’s attention. There was a projector mounted on top. It was set up so that it could project images or films onto the ceiling. Dühnfort looked up. There was a sort of sail up there, not attached to a mast but stretched out directly overhead, above the bed. A screen. Dühnfort didn’t want to imagine what sort of films and images Kallweit watched as he lay on this bed or what he did there, but he very much hoped Kallweit was alone when he did it.

  Gina was standing in front of a desk with a flat-screen monitor. She started up the computer and typed on the keyboard. ‘I can get into the general area for the operating system and programs,’ she said. ‘But the vast majority of the hard drive is password protected.’

  ‘We’ll take it with us. Meo will be able to crack it.’ Meo was one of the computer specialists at Munich CID, known for his persistence when it came to making computers give up their secrets.

  On the shelves behind the desk, Dühnfort found child-pornography magazines and DVDs. Kallweit probably traded photos over the internet. His cleverly adapted cooler bag made it possible for him to creep up close to his victims and get good-quality photos. No doubt they were much in demand.

  Gina searched the sea chests. Dühnfort opened a cupboard and was faced with about twenty grey cardboard archive boxes. They were labelled with names on the front. He took out the box labelled ‘Kevin’ and put it on the table.

  Alois came in. ‘Forensics will be here in twenty minutes.’ He looked round curiously.

  ‘Your respectable citizen has just become a suspect,’ Gina said, taking a pile of magazines out of the box and looking up at him.

  ‘Have you actually found any pictures of Jakob?’ Alois asked.

  Dühnfort opened the box and pulled a postcard-format photo album from one of the compartments inside. It contained about a dozen photos of one boy in chronological order over the course of eight or nine years. The first one showed Kevin at around three years old, in swimming trunks and with a dummy in his mouth. The photos ended with the onset of puberty. Dühnfort pictured Kallweit hiding in bushes and hedges, in cornfields and meadows, lying in wait for his unsuspecting victims.

  Alois was now at the desk, trying to get into the computer.

  ‘Would you please wake Mr Kallweit. We’ll take him with us. And send three officers down here. With boxes. There’s a lot to pack.’ Dühnfort saw how Alois was about to object but then swallowed it down. He left Kallweit’s cabin frowning and without a word.

  Dühnfort looked through the rest of the box: a green dummy, a stripey T-shirt, an inflatable armband and a pair of boy’s dark blue swimming trunks. The trunks had a light-coloured stain on them. It looked like dried snot. When Dühnfort realised what it actually was, he felt sick to his stomach.

  ‘Look!’ Gina called. ‘It’s right here.’ She was kneeling in front of an open drawer in the side of the bed and pulled out the cooler bag. ‘Pretty devious.’ She took the bag over to Dühnfort. ‘What is it? You look like you just ate a rotten fish.’

  ‘He collects trophies. Kallweit is a fetishist,’ Dühnfort said and pushed Kevin’s box towards her.

  Gina looked at the swimming trunks. ‘Did he use those to have a wank?’ she asked. ‘That’s vile.’

  Dühnfort searched through the cupboard and found Jakob’s box. He placed it on the desk and took off the lid. The box had the same set-up as Kevin’s. The photo album was still thin. The first photo showed Jakob in a playground. In the next photo, he was with some other boys in a paddling pool. Dühnfort saw the kindergarten in the background. He kept flipping through. His heart began to beat faster. ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘We have him.’ It was a photo of
Jakob and Dennis. They were fighting in a sandpit.

  ‘Let me have a look,’ Gina said. ‘He took a photo of Jakob just before he disappeared,’ she noted. ‘Are we good, boss, or are we good?’

  ‘If I might play devil’s advocate,’ Dühnfort said, ‘I should point out that this photo shows that Kallweit did photograph the boy, and when he did so. It is not proof of the kidnapping.’

  ‘Have I ever told you that I love your ebullience and boundless optimism?’ Gina said.

  Dühnfort nodded. He was a serious person; he lacked the lightness of being. He saw pitfalls and problems everywhere, thought about things a thousand ways when just one would do. Well, that’s how I am, he thought, and I’m unlikely to change any time soon.

  He looked at the remaining contents of the box. Kallweit had also collected trophies from Jakob. Dühnfort pulled out a green jumper with a dinosaur patch and a white T-shirt. The T-shirt had a cartoon character on it wearing a hard hat. The writing under the character said ‘Bob the Builder’.

  * * *

  Agnes stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in Anselm’s office while he got them something to drink. She wanted to take a look at the documents for the book. They had set an appointment the previous day when he helped pull up the roots of the spruce with the winch and tractor.

  Agnes could see her hazy reflection in the windowpane. She had dressed as she used to for appointments with agencies. She wore a stylish trouser suit and had pinned her hair up and even put on lipstick. She wanted to appear competent to her first client. But Anselm didn’t seem to have noticed how she looked. Agnes stared out across a field of daisies, poppies and buttercups that stretched all the way to the white walls of the churchyard. There was a greenhouse between two apple trees and a log cabin further back, by the churchyard wall.

  Anselm returned with a tray. ‘Apple juice?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  He filled a glass and handed it to her. ‘The papers are here.’ He led her to a long table on which a stack of slipcases had been neatly laid out. They contained the documents, which had been organised into chapters. Anselm explained how the manuscript was structured.

  He might as well have started with Adam and Eve, Agnes thought, surprised. He’d actually begun with the end of the last Ice Age and had gone on to cover the Roman conquest and the Christianisation of Bavaria before finally getting to the founding of Mariaseeon.

  ‘Who is the target audience for this book?’ She had assumed it would be for both tourists and locals, but now it seemed to be more of a scholarly work.

  ‘The history of Mariaseeon, its agricultural life, law and taxes are all typical of this area. So the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of farming culture in Bavaria.’

  ‘So, a rather wide-ranging audience,’ Agnes said. She had a broad idea of how she might combine all the elements into a handsome, easy-to-read book: it would be large-format and highly illustrated and designed to make it as easy as possible for the reader to navigate and absorb the wealth of information it contained. A fine-looking object that would convey both the beauty of the village as it was today as well as the hard work and austere lifestyles of farmers in earlier times. Anselm had collected a variety of old photographs and documents, making such a design perfectly feasible.

  She shared her idea with him but was met with a lack of understanding. He wanted a small-format design with numerous tables and lists of dates. There was to be a lot more text than images and he wanted the images to be kept small. She couldn’t make him understand that such a book would be difficult to read and hard to digest, and that it presupposed that the reader already had a deep interest in the subject matter.

  ‘But I don’t want it to be fast food,’ Anselm said. ‘The book is a pet project of mine, it doesn’t have to make a profit. Those with an interest in the subject will read it.’

  So, Anselm fell into the ‘difficult client’ category, as Agnes had suspected. But, well, he was the customer. He had very specific ideas that were entirely feasible. He was the author and knew exactly what he wanted. Just like Rainer, Agnes thought.

  ‘Do you think you can adhere to these guidelines?’

  ‘No problem. I’ll do you a sample and an estimate, so that you know what you’re getting for your money.’

  ‘That’s not so important. The main thing is that it’s exactly as I envisaged it.’ Anselm looked at her. ‘If this project goes well, there’s another project down the line for you.’

  Well, great, Agnes thought. Two difficult jobs on the cards. But she was actually glad that she had managed to restart her career so quickly. She was not in a position to be picky and there were always going to be difficult customers. ‘Another book?’ she asked.

  Anselm nodded. ‘About the chapels of the Bavarian Oberland. Some of them have quite astonishing histories.’ He told her about the Chapel of Our Lady, which one of his ancestors had built in gratitude at having been saved from great danger, and how it had been visited by countless miracle seekers over the centuries.

  ‘Are there votive paintings in there?’ Agnes asked. Ever since her student days, she had been interested in naive art.

  Anselm nodded. ‘Are you interested in them?’

  ‘I’m intrigued by the variety of styles used. Some of them pre-empt developments in mainstream art. I once saw a panel that was over two hundred years old but had markedly surrealist characteristics.’

  ‘I can show you the chapel,’ Anselm said. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  ‘If it’s not too much bother.’ Agnes felt he was only offering out of politeness. ‘I don’t want to disturb your work.’

  ‘You’re not disturbing me. I’ll let you know when I have the time,’ Anselm replied. He accompanied her to the farm gate, said goodbye and shook her hand. His felt warm and a bit rough.

  ‘You have very cold hands,’ he said. Again, Agnes noticed the melancholy that was etched around the corners of his mouth.

  * * *

  At home, she wiped off the lipstick, went into the bedroom and changed her clothes. You got all dolled up, Rainer would have said. It always sounded a bit disparaging coming from him. He liked it best when she wore jeans and a jumper. I didn’t spend much money on clothes during our marriage, she thought suddenly. She’d only indulged in a bit of luxury when Rainer took her to official business events, which was not very often. Like when they had an evening invitation from an important business partner and she’d bought a sexy dress for the occasion. It was black and figure-hugging but with a conservative neckline. She looked stunning in it, despite her voluptuous figure. When Rainer saw her in it, he flipped out. She was running around like a prostitute. He pulled a conservative trouser suit out of the wardrobe. She put it on and it made her look ten years older.

  In some ways, he was rather uptight, she thought, as she took jeans and a T-shirt out of the wardrobe. She looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. There was still a bit of lipstick in the corner of her mouth. She removed it. The brownish-red lipstick was also new. Rainer had forbidden her from wearing make-up. He liked her better without make-up and she surely didn’t want to make herself more beautiful for other men, he would say with a smile. Agnes cringed at the memory. What was going on with her today? Why was she thinking about the things that made Rainer look uptight and possessive? She suddenly felt terrible.

  He had loved her. Her, of all people. She was neither beautiful nor particularly charming, and didn’t have the wit that other women had. But she was professionally very successful. Back then. Is that what Rainer had found desirable in her? Agnes pushed aside these thoughts and went down to her office. She started up her Mac, went to the website of an association of graphic designers, downloaded the membership application, filled it out, faxed the signed copy back and ordered a copy of their recommended rates of pay for design services. She had no idea what she could earn as a freelancer these days. After all, she’d been away from the profession for more than
eight years. Rainer had insisted that she give up working until Yvonne was old enough to go to school. Agnes had hoped that by the time Yvonne was in kindergarten, she could go back to work on an hourly basis. As a freelancer, she could divide up her time as necessary. But Rainer got his way and she understood why he felt so strongly about it. After his parents’ divorce, he was passed around among his relatives. His father went to South Africa, where he built up a sales network for a German company. His mother worked for a pharmaceutical company and was always travelling. Eventually, his grandparents and aunt took it in turns to look after him. He never felt at home anywhere. ‘You’re my home,’ he once said. ‘You give me what I’ve been looking for, without my knowing it was missing. Security. I didn’t know it. I love you for that.’

  Agnes swallowed the lump that had lodged itself in her throat.

  She had understood why Rainer wanted her to take care of Yvonne full time. He wanted to give his daughter an excess of what he’d never had. So she put her professional aspirations to one side. But she had at least continued to design what little advertising material Rainer needed for his company, so she hadn’t entirely missed the various developments in graphics software.

  Suddenly, Agnes’s fingers began to tingle, her mouth went dry and it felt like she had carpet pile on her tongue. She swallowed hard. The panic was rising. She rushed into the kitchen and quickly drank a glass of water. That was better. What was that? she wondered, but immediately cast the question aside and went back to her office. After all, she had things to do.

  Anselm had given her a CD with all of the text files. She could use it to calculate the scope of work. She pushed the disk into the computer. After two hours of intensive work, she had put together a rough overview. Based on that, she could come up with a price estimate, but she first had to wait for the association’s recommended rates. She stood up, massaged her tense shoulders and went into the kitchen. She made herself a cappuccino to drink on the terrace. On her way out there, she went through the living room. The space still seemed strangely empty. Tomorrow I’ll drive to Ikea, she thought, and buy curtains and a rug. And suddenly she felt like the house was doing her some good. Something had been set in motion that had been standing still for a year. Something in her had repositioned itself. It was like a tectonic shift.