The Ice Queen: A Novel

by Nele Neuhaus

“Do you happen to know Mr. Nowak, too?” Bodenstein asked.

  “Yes, of course.” Anja Moormann nodded eagerly. Her skintight white T-shirt clearly showed her tiny breasts, and her freckled skin was taut across her bony collarbones. Pia guessed her age to be somewhere between forty and fifty.

  “I always cooked for him and his people when they were working here. Mr. Nowak is a very nice man. And so good-looking.” She emitted a giggle that did nothing for her appearance. Her upper lip seemed a bit too short, or maybe her front teeth were too big. She reminded Pia of a breathless bunny. “To this day, I can’t understand why the mistress was so unfair to him.”

  Anja Moormann might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she was curious and talkative. Pia was convinced that not much happened at Mühlenhof without her knowing about it.

  “Do you remember the day the accident happened?” she asked, trying to decide at the same time what the housekeeper’s regional accent might be. Was she from Swabia? Saxony? The Saar?

  “Oh yes. The professor and Mr. Nowak were standing in the courtyard in front of the mill, looking at some blueprints. I had just brought them some coffee, when the mistress and Dr. Ritter arrived. My husband had picked them up at the airport.” Anja’s memory was impeccable, and she was obviously enjoying being in the spotlight, since life had otherwise consigned her to the role of an extra. “The mistress jumped out of the car and flew into a rage when she saw the people in the mill. Mr. Nowak tried to hold her back, but she shoved him away and dashed straight inside and up the stairs. The new clay floor on the second level was still quite moist, and she crashed right through the floor, screaming at the top of her lungs.”

  “What was she looking for inside the mill?” asked Pia.

  “It was about something in the attic,” replied Anja Moormann. “At any rate, there was a lot of yelling, but Mr. Nowak just stood there, saying nothing. The mistress then dragged herself to the workshop, even though her arm was broken.”

  “Why to the workshop?” Pia interjected when Anja stopped for air. “What was in the attic?”

  “Oh God, tons of old junk. The mistress never threw anything away. There were six trunks, stored there, all dusty and full of cobwebs. Nowak’s people had brought everything, along with those steamer trunks, down to the workshop before they tore out the floor in the mill.”

  Anja Moormann crossed her arms, pensively pressing her thumbs into her impressive biceps.

  “There was a trunk missing,” she went on. “The mistress and her family were shouting at one another, and when Ritter got involved, that’s when the mistress exploded. I can’t repeat all the things they were yelling.”

  Anja shook her head at the memory.

  “When the ambulance arrived, the mistress screamed that if the trunk wasn’t back at the estate within twenty-four hours, then Ritter could look for another job.”

  “But what did he have to do with it?” Bodenstein asked. “He’d been abroad with the mis—with Mrs. Kaltensee, hadn’t he?”

  “That’s right.” Anja shrugged. “But somebody’s head had to roll. She could hardly throw out the professor. So poor Nowak and Ritter had to take the blame. After eighteen years! She chased him off the estate in disgrace. Now he lives in a shabby studio apartment and doesn’t even have a car. And all because of a dusty old steamer trunk!”

  A vague memory suddenly stirred in Pia’s mind, but she couldn’t recall what it was about.

  “Where are the trunks now?” she wanted to know.

  “Still in the workshop.”

  “Could we look at them?”

  Anja thought for a moment, then came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter if she showed the trunks to the police. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff followed her around the house to the low farm buildings. The workshop had been meticulously cleaned up. On the walls above wooden workbenches hung a multitude of tools, whose outlines had been carefully drawn with black marker. Anja opened a door.

  “There they are,” she said. Bodenstein and Pia entered the adjoining room, a former cold-storage space, judging by the tiled walls and the pipe channel running along the ceiling. Five dusty steamer trunks stood in a row. All at once, it dawned on Pia where the sixth one was. Anja chattered on cheerfully, telling them about her last encounter with Marcus Nowak. Shortly before Christmas, he’d appeared at Mühlenhof, ostensibly to deliver a present. After he used this pretext to gain entry into the house, he headed straight for the great salon, where the mistress and her friends were holding their monthly ‘homeland evening.’”

  “Homeland evening?” Bodenstein asked.

  “Yes.” Anja Moormann nodded eagerly. “Once a month they met, Goldberg, Schneider, Frings, and the mistress. If the professor was away, they would meet here; otherwise, they met at Schneider’s place.”

  Pia glanced at Bodenstein. That was certainly informative. But at the moment, they were interested in Nowak.

  “I see. And what happened then?”

  “Ah yes. Well.” The housekeeper stopped in the middle of the workshop and scratched her head. “Mr. Nowak accused the mistress of owing him money. He said it very politely—I heard it myself—but the mistress laughed at him and gave him an earful, like—”

  She broke off mid-sentence. Around the corner of the house glided the black Maybach limousine. The tires crunched on the newly raked gravel as the heavy vehicle drove right past them and stopped a few yards farther on. Pia thought she could make out someone sitting in the backseat behind the tinted windows, but the horse-faced Moormann, today in his proper chauffeur’s uniform, got out alone, locked the car with the remote, and came over to them.

  “The mistress is unfortunately still indisposed,” he said, but Pia was sure that he was lying. She noticed the brief glance he exchanged with his wife. How must it feel to be a servant of the rich, to lie for them and keep so many secrets? Did the Moormanns hate their boss? After all, Anja hadn’t displayed much loyalty in the way she had behaved.

  “Then please give her my heartfelt greetings,” said Bodenstein. “I’ll call again tomorrow.”

  Moormann nodded. He and his wife remained standing in front of the door to the workshop and watched Bodenstein and Pia go.

  “I know he’s lying,” Pia said quietly to her boss.

  “Yes, I think so, too,” said Bodenstein. “She’s sitting in the car.”

  “Let’s go open the door,” Pia suggested. “Then she’ll make a fool of herself.”

  Bodenstein shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “She’s not going anywhere. Let her think we’re a little dim-witted.”

  * * *

  Dr. Thomas Ritter had proposed the Café Siesmayer in the Frankfurt Palmengarten as the site for their meeting, and Bodenstein assumed that he was ashamed of his apartment. Vera Kaltensee’s former assistant was already seated at one of the tables in the smoking section of the café when they came in. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and jumped up as Bodenstein headed directly toward him. Pia guessed he was in his mid-forties. With angular, slightly asymmetrical facial features, a prominent nose, deep-set blue eyes, and thick, prematurely gray hair, he was not ugly, but not conventionally handsome, either. Yet his face had something that might cause a woman to take a second look. He looked Pia up and down briefly, seemed to find her uninteresting, and turned to Bodenstein.

  “Would you rather sit at a nonsmoking table?” he asked.

  “No, this is fine.” Bodenstein took a seat on the leather banquette and got straight to the point.

  “Five members of your former employer’s social circle have been murdered,” he said. “In the course of the investigations, your name has come up several times. What can you tell us about the Kaltensee family?”

  “Who do you want to know about?” Ritter raised his eyebrows and lit another cigarette. There were three butts in the ashtray already. “I was Vera Kaltensee’s personal assistant for eighteen years. So naturally I know a great deal about her and her family.”

/>   The waitress arrived at the table, handed out menus, and had eyes only for Ritter. Bodenstein ordered a coffee, Pia a Diet Coke.

  “Another latte macchiato?” the young woman asked. Ritter nodded casually and cast a quick glance at Pia, as if wanting to make sure she’d noticed what effect he had on the opposite sex.

  Stupid fool, she thought, giving him a smile.

  “What led to the disagreement between you and Dr. Kaltensee?” Bodenstein asked.

  “There was no disagreement,” Ritter insisted. “But after eighteen years, even the most interesting job eventually loses its appeal. I simply wanted to do something else.”

  “I see.” Bodenstein acted as if he believed the man. “What line of work are you in now, if I may ask?”

  “You may.” Ritter smiled and crossed his arms. “I’m the editor of a weekly lifestyle magazine, and I write books, as well.”

  “Oh, is that so? I’ve never met a real writer before.” Pia gave him an admiring look, which he registered with unmistakable satisfaction. “What sort of things do you write?”

  “Novels, mainly,” he replied vaguely. He had crossed his legs and tried in vain to give an impression of nonchalance. His eyes kept straying to his cell phone, which was lying next to the ashtray on the table.

  “We’ve heard that your parting with Mrs. Kaltensee was not quite as amicable as you want us to believe,” Bodenstein said. “Why, exactly, were you let go after the accident at the mill?”

  Ritter didn’t reply. His Adam’s apple twitched up and down. Did he honestly think the police were so clueless?

  “In the dispute that led to your termination without notice, apparently a trunk with unknown contents was involved. What can you tell us about that?”

  “That’s all nonsense.” Ritter made a dismissive gesture. “The whole family was jealous of my good relationship with Vera. I was a thorn in their side because they were afraid I might have too much influence on her. We parted on completely friendly terms.”

  He sounded so convincing that Pia wouldn’t have doubted him if it hadn’t been for Anja Moormann’s account.

  “Then what’s all the fuss about this missing trunk?” Bodenstein sipped at his coffee. Pia saw a flash of anger in Ritter’s eyes. He kept toying with the cigarette pack. She would have preferred to take it away from him; he was infecting her with his nervousness.

  “I have no idea,” he replied. “It’s true that a trunk was supposedly missing from the storeroom at the mill. But I never saw it and I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Suddenly, the young woman behind the buffet dropped a stack of plates, which shattered with a crash on the granite floor. Ritter jumped as if he’d been shot, and his face went snow-white. His nerves seemed to be in a bad way.

  “So do you have any idea what might have been in this trunk?” Bodenstein asked. Ritter took a deep breath, then shook his head. He was obviously lying—but why? Was he ashamed? Or was he trying to avoid giving them any cause to suspect him? Without a doubt, he had been treated badly by Vera Kaltensee. The humiliation of his dismissal without notice, done so publicly, had to be hard to bear for any man with a shred of self-respect.

  “What kind of car do you drive, by the way?” Pia asked, changing the subject abruptly.

  “Why?” Ritter gave her an annoyed look. He went to get another cigarette out of the pack but found it empty.

  “Pure curiosity.” Pia reached in her purse and set an unopened pack of Marlboros on the table. “Please, help yourself.”

  Ritter hesitated for a moment but then took one.

  “My wife has a Z three. That’s what I’m driving.”

  “Also last Thursday?”

  “Possibly.” Ritter snapped open his lighter, lit the cigarette, and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. “Why do you ask?”

  Pia exchanged a quick glance with Bodenstein and decided to take a wild shot. Maybe Ritter was the guy with the sports car.

  “You were seen together with Robert Watkowiak,” she said, hoping she wasn’t wrong. “What did you discuss with him?”

  Ritter’s almost imperceptible flinch signaled to Pia that she was on the right track.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked irritably, confirming her suspicion.

  “You may have been one of the last people to speak with Watkowiak,” she said. “At the moment, we’re working on the assumption that he was the murderer of Goldberg, Schneider, and Anita Frings. Maybe you know that last weekend he took his own life with an overdose of prescription drugs.”

  She noticed the relief that passed briefly over Ritter’s face.

  “I heard that.” He let smoke escape from his nostrils. “But I had nothing to do with it. Robert called me. Once again, he had a problem. At Vera’s request, I’ve helped him out of a jam often enough, so he probably thought I could help him this time, too. But I couldn’t.”

  “And it took you two hours with him in the ice-cream parlor to tell him that? I don’t believe you.”

  “But it’s true,” Ritter insisted.

  “You visited Goldberg in Kelkheim the day before he was shot. Why?”

  Ritter glibly lied, looking Pia straight in the eye. “I used to visit him often. I don’t remember what we talked about that evening.”

  “You’ve been lying to us for the past fifteen minutes,” Pia said. “Why? Do you have something to hide?”

  “I’m not lying,” Ritter replied. “And I have nothing to hide.”

  “Then why don’t you simply tell us what you really wanted at Goldberg’s house and what you talked about with Watkowiak?”

  “Because I can hardly remember,” Ritter said, trying to talk his way out of it. “It must have been something trivial.”

  “By the way, do you know Marcus Nowak?” Bodenstein interjected.

  “Nowak? The guy who restores buildings? Not really. I met him once. Why do you want to know?”

  “That’s odd.” Pia took her notebook out of her pocket. “Nobody in this case seems to know the others very well.”

  She leafed a few pages back.

  “Ah yes, here it is: His wife told us that you and Professor Kaltensee met several times with Marcus Nowak at his office after the accident in the mill and your termination without notice. And for hours at a time.” She fixed Ritter with her gaze, and he was visibly uncomfortable. With the arrogance of a man who considers himself smarter than the majority of his fellow human beings, especially the police, he had completely underestimated Pia, as he was now forced to realize. He glanced at his watch and decided on an orderly retreat.

  “Unfortunately, I have to go,” he said with a forced smile. “An important appointment in the editorial office.”

  Pia nodded. “Please don’t let us keep you. We’ll ask Mrs. Kaltensee about the real reason for your termination. Maybe she also has some idea what you discussed with Mr. Watkowiak and Mr. Goldberg.”

  The smile froze on Ritter’s face, but he said nothing. Pia handed him her business card.

  “Call us if the truth happens to occur to you.”

  * * *

  “How did you get the idea that the man in the ice-cream parlor might be Ritter?” Bodenstein asked as they walked through the palm garden on the way back to their car.

  “Intuition.” Pia shrugged. “Ritter looks like the type who would drive a sports car.”

  For a while, they walked side by side without speaking.

  “Why do you think he was lying to us? I can’t imagine that Vera Kaltensee would fire her longtime assistant, who knows so much about her after eighteen years, all because of a missing trunk. There must be more to it.”

  “But who would know?” Bodenstein said.

  “Elard Kaltensee,” Pia suggested. “We ought to visit him again anyway. The missing trunk is in his bedroom, right next to the bed.”

  “How do you know what’s in Elard Kaltensee’s bedroom?” Bodenstein stopped and looked at Pia with a frown. “And why didn’t you mention this earlier?”
/>
  “I didn’t think about it until we were in the workshop at Mühlenhof,” Pia replied, defending herself. “But I’m telling you now.”

  They left the palm garden and crossed Siesmayerstrasse. Bodenstein unlocked his car with a press of the remote. Pia already had her hand on the door handle when her gaze fell on the building across the street. It was one of those elegant apartment houses from the nineteenth century with a carefully restored facade from the industrial age. Those spacious classic apartments went for sky-high prices on the real estate market.

  “Take a look over there. Isn’t that our baron of lies?”

  Bodenstein turned his head.

  “It certainly is.”

  Ritter had clamped his cell phone between his ear and shoulder and was fumbling with a bunch of keys as he stood at the bank of mailboxes by the front door. Then he unlocked the door, still on the phone, and vanished inside the building. Bodenstein closed the car door. They crossed the street and examined the mailboxes.

  “So, there’s no magazine office here.” Pia tapped on one of the brass nameplates. “But somebody named M. Kaltensee does live here. What could that mean?”

  Bodenstein looked up at the facade. “We’ll soon find out. First let’s drive over and visit your favorite suspect.”

  * * *

  Friedrich Müller-Mansfeld was a tall, slender man with a snow-white fringe of hair around a pate dotted with age spots. He had a long, furrowed face and red-rimmed eyes, which were unnaturally magnified by the thick lenses of his old-fashioned glasses. He had traveled to visit his daughter on Lake Constance and returned only last night. His name was one of those on the long list of residents and staff of Taunusblick, and Kathrin Fachinger harbored no great hope that she’d learn more from him than from the residents she’d already questioned. She politely asked the elderly gentleman the usual routine questions. For seven years, he had lived next door to Anita Frings, and he displayed the appropriate sorrow when he learned about the violent death of his neighbor.

  “I did see her on the evening before I left,” he said in a hoarse, shaky voice. “She was in very good spirits.”

  He grasped his right wrist with his left hand, but the tremor could not be overlooked.