A Darker State

by David Young

  ‘Cause of death, I would guess, is asphyxiation,’ she continued. ‘But not through drowning. No bruising round the neck, so at this stage I would say not through strangulation.’

  ‘What then? Pillow across the face?’ asked Tilsner.

  The woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know . . . yet.’ Then she lifted the left arm back up and gestured to the wrist. Then did the same to the body’s right arm. ‘See the marks here?’

  ‘Weights again?’ asked Schwarz.

  The woman shook her head. ‘Restraints. Cutting into the skin as this poor boy struggled against them.’

  Tilsner furrowed his brow. ‘So he was tortured?’

  The woman held up her hand. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. And that’s enough questions, thank you. I’ve told you all I know at this stage.’

  ‘So we have no idea who this youth was, or indeed why the powers that be at Keibelstrasse have seen fit to send Schmidt and myself down here?’ Tilsner wasn’t entirely sure who he was directing this question to.

  Schwarz shook his head. Then his face lit up. ‘Ah, no. There is one other thing. On the other side. Can you show him, Gudrun?’

  The pathologist lifted the body up by its left arm again, rotating it slightly to expose the underside of the left shoulder blade. A tattoo. Some sort of emblem permanently etched in black ink on the dead youth’s skin.

  ‘We’ve no idea what it is,’ said Schwarz. ‘It looks a bit like the Greek letter pi.’

  Schmidt, who’d lapsed into a morose silence – similar to the one he’d maintained in the Wartburg – now spoke up. ‘More likely to be Cyrillic, here in the Republic, surely? It looks a bit like a letter ‘L’ . But it’s still not quite the right shape.’

  Tilsner kept silent. He hadn’t helped his children with their Russian lessons, and he certainly hadn’t studied it at school. In fact, he hadn’t done much of any worth at school at all, what with the war. But that didn’t stop his brain working. There was something about the tattoo that was familiar.

  ‘Of course,’ said the pathologist, ‘it’s incomplete.’

  ‘What do you mean, incomplete?’ asked Schwarz, a note of annoyance in his voice. ‘You didn’t mention that before.’

  ‘No, I had a better look. This is one area of the body where the skin has detached. Or where a fish has had a nibble. Or . . .’

  ‘Or what?’ asked Tilsner.

  ‘Or where part of the design was deliberately cut off.’

  ‘To make it look like something else?’

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Fenstermacher. ‘I can’t speculate as to motivation.’

  ‘But how much of the design has disappeared?’

  Fenstermacher was still partially holding up the body, but with her muscular arms it seemed to take little effort. ‘Hard to say. Except if you look at the top and bottom of our Cyrillic “L” or Greek “pi” or whatever it is, you’ll see the top, bottom and left-hand side are all smoothly curved.’

  Schmidt looked excited, some of his old enthusiasm for the job temporarily overcoming whatever was weighing him down. ‘On that basis, Comrades, I would say all that’s left is the left-hand third of the design. It must, surely, be a circle, and the other two thirds are missing.’

  For the first time in several hours, Tilsner felt a great love for his Kriminaltechniker colleague again. Because this was the key to his mental block. The image at the back of his mind suddenly became clear.

  An image from a town at the east – the far east – of the Republic. Bordering the Oder river. Bordering Poland. As near to Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow as it was possible to get without actually leaving the borders of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. So yes, perhaps the Cyrillic ‘L’ guess of Schmidt’s had some significance.

  But this wasn’t an ‘L’ .

  It wasn’t ‘pi’.

  Instead, Tilsner knew the design showed two linked, cursive initials. Not one. And Roman – not Greek or Cyrillic.

  And Tilsner knew the other letters in the puzzle too. But as the others scratched their heads and furrowed their brows, he wasn’t going to let on that he knew the solution.

  *

  Some thirty minutes after leaving the lakeside, Tilsner and Schmidt watched rows and rows of Plattenbauten – concrete slab apartment blocks – rise up from the surrounding countryside of the Upper Lausitz. It was almost as though they’d gone back in time a few months to their previous case in Halle-Neustadt. Another new, model socialist town – although this one existed as a dormitory for lignite miners, rather than chemical workers.

  Tilsner slapped his hand on the Wartburg’s steering wheel. ‘You see, Jonas, if we’d chosen to become brown coal miners, we could have had brand new flats like those ones.’

  Schmidt didn’t respond. Still in his grumpy fug, thought Tilsner.

  Tilsner had been following Schwarz’s car, until they’d lost him at a junction soon after Senftenberg. But the local police captain had given him detailed directions to the mortuary, and they found their way without trouble. Tilsner just hoped the prospect of seeing a dead body being sliced open might spark some life into his colleague. Forensic scientists seemed to revel in that sort of thing. And whatever was weighing Schmidt down, he shouldn’t be letting it affect his work.

  *

  When they arrived at the mortuary in the local hospital, they found that Fenstermacher had wasted no time, and had already set to work. But that wasn’t the only surprise. Tilsner recognised a familiar face. His old boss.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Tilsner whispered, sidling up to Müller as she watched the pathologist making incisions in the youth’s body. ‘I thought you’d become a permanent childminder.’

  ‘Don’t you mean, “I thought you’d become a permanent childminder, Comrade Major.” ’

  Tilsner rubbed his brow. ‘Major? Are they throwing around ranks and promotions like confetti?’ He felt a momentary flash of annoyance – he’d thought that he might have been top dog in this new specialist crimes unit. Instead, he was still Karin’s deputy – they just both had new ranks. And, he began to realise, that suited him just fine. Too much responsibility usually meant you ended up with too much of the blame when things went wrong.

  ‘Careful, Comrade Hauptmann.’ Müller grinned, then added quietly: ‘I’ve the power to demote you if I wish, just like that.’ She clicked her fingers to emphasise the point.

  The sound attracted an angry glare from the pathologist. ‘I do appreciate silence when I’m working, you know. It helps one to concentrate, especially if you’re wielding one of these.’ She nodded to the scalpel in her fist.

  Fenstermacher then bent back over the body and began to make a cut through the upper section of the youth’s neck. Once she considered the incision large enough, she plunged her hand into the cavity.

  ‘Aha,’ she exclaimed, with what Tilsner felt was an inappropriate amount of glee. ‘Just as I thought.’ She held out a piece of red material, covered in mucus and dried blood, then waved it from side to side. ‘I couldn’t understand how this young man had died through asphyxiation and yet the usual signs of death by drowning, or strangulation, were absent. Here, ladies and gentleman, is our answer.’

  ‘And what exactly is the answer, Comrade Fenstermacher?’ asked Müller.

  ‘He couldn’t breathe. And so he died. And he couldn’t breathe because he’d had this sock stuffed down his windpipe.’

  Tilsner fought the temptation to clutch at his own neck, and instead took several deep breaths. Normally he was unmoved by violent deaths – he’d seen much worse as a teenage boy in the war. But he could see Müller’s face had gone pale too.

  ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a way to go.’

  ‘Yes, unpleasant,’ agreed the pathologist. ‘And something that – due to the gag reflex – would be impossible to self-administer. So we have our answer and, perhaps, all of you many police officers haven’t had a wasted journey. Because this boy was most definitely murdered. Murdered in a
particularly sadistic way.’

  3

  Six months earlier (March 1976)

  Pankow, East Berlin

  ‘C’mon, speccy. Show us what you’re going to do about it.’

  I peer at what’s being waved in front of my face.

  My spectacles.

  I know they’re there, but I can’t see them clearly. Just an unfocussed blob, like so many objects.

  My spectacles with the centimetre-thick lenses.

  They have to be that thick at the edges to allow sufficient concavity in the centre – sufficient concavity to finally give the world a hard-edged precision, rather than the blur it is without them.

  I thrash my hands around trying to grasp them. But it’s useless.

  ‘Please give them back, Oskar,’ I plead. Although I can’t see my tormenter’s face with any clarity, I know who it is from his voice.

  ‘Please give them back, Oskar,’ he repeats in a high-pitched whine. Then drops the glasses to the floor. The next thing I hear is the crunch of breaking plastic and glass as a foot stomps down on them.

  ‘Whoops. Sorry, queer boy. That was a silly place to leave your specs, wasn’t it?’

  I can feel the tears start to sting my eyes. I get down on my knees and scrabble round to retrieve what I can of the broken pieces.

  The second time it’s happened this year.

  Mutti and Vati will be furious.

  But as I’m thinking about that, I feel the first blow to the side of my head, then another, then more to my back and bum. I roll into a ball with my hands clasped behind my skull, elbows protecting my face, willing them to stop. Then a shout.

  ‘Oi! Krüge! Leave him alone. And you lot. Pick on someone your own size.’

  ‘Ah shut up, Winkler. You’re just another queer boy like him.’

  I keep my elbows wrapped around my face till Jan Winkler prises them off. Oskar’s friends laugh, but the laughter fades as they all move away, their sadistic urges temporarily sated.

  ‘It’s OK, Markus. They’ve gone now. Here, I’ll help you clear up, though I’m afraid these are wrecked. Are you OK?’

  I brush myself down. Feel my heart rate start to settle. Thankful that I have one friend here at Oberschule Pankow Ernst Thälmann. ‘Bruised. Nothing broken, I don’t think.’ I flex my arms. There’ll be swelling by the morning. A black eye. But what hurts most – as usual – is my pride, or what’s left of it.

  ‘They’re just bullies,’ says Jan. ‘It’s best to try to ignore them.’

  I try to focus on his face, but can’t. I know what he looks like anyway. A pretty-boy face. All the girls fancy him, but Jan Winkler just ignores them. And that makes them fancy him even more.

  ‘Here. Take my arm,’ he says. ‘I’ll help you home.’

  I’m grateful for the help. Grateful, too, in an odd way, to Oskar Krüge in that he waited till the end of the school day – the end of the school week – to pick me out for his sadistic games. At least I don’t have to go back into class and invent some stupid excuse.

  I know I could walk unaided, but I rather like having Jan holding me. He seems to pull me along effortlessly. Most things are effortless to Jan Winkler. Top of the class. Destined for university. Unlike me. I know I’m a disappointment to my People’s Police forensic scientist father. Jan’s as clever as my father expected me to be. Each week, when Kriminaltechniker Jonas Schmidt quizzes me over Sunday lunch, I can feel the disappointment radiating from him as I recount how well I’m doing – or rather how well I’m not doing – in various subjects. How he would love to have a son like Jan Winkler.

  *

  Jan bundles me onto the tram, so we get home quicker.

  ‘Isn’t this out of your way?’ I ask him.

  ‘Don’t worry. What are friends for if they can’t help out in times of need? I’m sure you’d do the same for me.’

  Yes, yes, of course I would, Jan, I think. The difference is you’d never get in a situation like that. I think all this but say nothing.

  ‘Cheer up, Markus. Oskar will have forgotten all about it by Monday. I’ll look out for you.’

  *

  The disapproval on my mother’s face as she opens the apartment door couldn’t be clearer.

  ‘Don’t be too harsh on him, Frau Schmidt,’ says Jan. ‘I challenged him to a run and there’s a bit of rough ground on the way back. Markus caught his foot and fell over. I think he’s all right, but I’m afraid his specs aren’t.’ He hands the broken pieces of glass and plastic to Mutti even though all three of us know they aren’t repairable. But I’m thankful. Thankful he didn’t tell the truth about the bullying. If Mutti went to the school, if Oskar was hauled in front of the head teacher, it would only make things ten times worse and mean the next beating probably would result in broken bones, not just wounded pride and a smashed pair of glasses.

  ‘Hmm,’ sighs my mother. ‘Well, thank you for helping him back at least, Jan. I bet your mother doesn’t have to put up with this sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got into my fair share of scrapes during my time, Frau Schmidt, don’t you worry about that.’

  I’ve already stumbled ahead into the flat, eager to get into the bathroom to check the damage, when Jan shouts to me before my mother has a chance to shut the door in his face.

  ‘What are you doing this weekend, Markus? Do you fancy hanging out together tomorrow? I’m expecting the delivery of my new scooter.’

  My mother’s ears prick up at that. ‘I don’t want you riding on the back of a motor scooter, Markus. And certainly not without your glasses.’

  ‘Mum,’ I sigh.

  ‘It’s OK, Frau Schmidt. I’ll make sure I look after him. He can hang on tightly to me. And it’s not very powerful. We won’t go far.’

  My mother’s resistance crumbles in the face of Jan’s pretty-boy charm. It’s the same for all women and girls. He just has a way with them. I wish I could learn a few tricks from him.

  ‘Oh all right, then. As you say, I suppose it’s not his fault he’s broken his glasses, again. And he has got a spare pair, although they’re old ones and not as strong.’

  ‘Great. That’s a deal, then. I’ll make sure he doesn’t come to any harm. You can rely on me, Frau Schmidt.’

  ‘I hope I can, Jan.’

  ‘So, Markus. Ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning at mine, OK? Don’t be late.’

  *

  ‘Wow.’ That one word of exclamation is enough. Jan beams with pride.

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ he says.

  Even though with my old pair of glasses things aren’t quite as sharp as they should be, I can tell this is an impressive machine. I run my hand over the gleaming, mustard-painted metal of the teardrop-shaped fuel tank.

  ‘Isn’t there a huge waiting list for these, like for Trabis?’ I ask. ‘My dad had to wait years for his car, even though he works for the police.’

  ‘There is, yes, but my dad managed to swing it.’

  I’m never very sure what Jan’s father does for a living, other than that he’s a fairly high-up official. Not police, not government, but something like that. Jan will never say. I always feel myself reddening in his father’s presence. He has the same personal magnetism as Jan, and it’s from him – rather than his mother – that Jan gets his striking good looks.

  ‘What’s it called?’ I ask, aware of the naive note of wonder in my voice.

  ‘It’s a Simson S-50. The latest model. They only started producing them last year.’

  ‘Are you going to give me a ride?’

  ‘Soon. Some friends are coming round first and then we’re all heading off together.’

  Jan thinks I’ll be excited by this news, but I’m not. It makes me slightly apprehensive. I’m never good with new people. I break out in a cold sweat at the slightest embarrassment, and especially hate being asked questions about myself. My life’s so boring. They’ll all be cool, no doubt with the latest motorcycles. I’ll just be the hanger-on.

 
‘I thought we were just going for a short trip in the Hauptstadt?’

  ‘Nah. Live a little, Markus. It’s a lovely day. I’m taking you abroad.’

  ‘Abroad?’ I have ridiculous visions of a group of us getting together and jumping the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier on the bikes. Motorised Republikflüchtlingen. I don’t want anything like that. I don’t want to embarrass my father any further. He’s angry enough about my school results as it is. ‘My mum won’t like that, Jan. Maybe I’d better not come. Couldn’t you just give me a quick ride round the block before the others arrive?’

  He ruffles the hair on the top of my head. It feels strangely intimate. ‘Nonsense, young master Schmidt. You’re riding with me. Guest of honour, no less. And don’t worry. It’s not far.’

  ‘But you said abroad!’

  ‘Ach, I was only joking. How would we go abroad from here? We’re not about to scale the Wall, are we?’

  *

  When the others arrive with their gleaming machines, I feel strangely relaxed. They gather round Jan’s bike, admiring and stroking it, just as I had minutes earlier. And instead of mocking me, as Oskar Krüge would have done, I seem to be the object of their envy, because I’m the one being allowed to ride pillion on the new Simson S-50.

  Jan has a smart set of figure-hugging black leathers to go with the new bike. I climb aboard behind him as he revs the engine, not knowing where to put my hands. He grabs them from behind and folds them round his middle. It feels strange, almost as though it should be his girlfriend doing something like this. Not his speccy, bullied, teenage male friend.

  ‘Hold on tight and don’t let go,’ he shouts, trying to make himself heard above the roar of the engine and through the helmet he’s lent me. That’s what my mother had insisted on when I set off that morning. That I wear a helmet, even though most of Jan’s mates haven’t bothered. ‘The only other thing you need to remember is to make sure you lean with me as I corner,’ Jan says. ‘I’ll be leaning into the corner. Sometimes, if it’s your first time, it seems unnatural, and you might feel as though you want to lean the other way. Don’t. Just lean the same way I do. Remember that, hold on tight and we can’t go wrong. I promise.’