Bernhard Aichner - Woman of the Dead - A Thriller

Bread, eggs, orange juice. Blum is still waiting. The children had some yogurt and then went upstairs to Karl. Blum stays where she is, holding the fort, waiting for Dunya. She has been waiting for two hours now. It doesn’t cross her mind that Dunya might not come back. She knows that Dunya feels happy here, that she wants to accept Blum’s help. Blum will make sure that she can stay in the country, she’ll manage it somehow, she’ll pull all the strings she can. But Dunya does not come back.

Dunya has hidden under a stone, thinks Blum, found the most remote cranny of this city. She will go to another place, somewhere she doesn’t know anyone. She wants to be safe, she wants to get away from that voice on Blum’s mobile phone. With a fifty-euro note in her pocket. Blum stops looking out of the window. Dunya has gone. She is only a voice now. A voice telling that story about the cellar. Blum hears it in her head. The story of Ilena, Dunya and Youn. A photographer, a priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Men in masks. A priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Blum is going to find them.

Everything is the same as it always is. The funeral service, the tears, the coffin being lowered into the ground. Blum is back at work for the first time in weeks. Reza is glad of that; he’s been struggling with a temporary assistant who irritated him. He gives Blum a hug and thanks her. Blum is glad too. It’s good to have you back. This place is nothing without you. Like water without flowers. Reza is standing there in his dark suit. He drove all night so that he could be back here in time. Blum doesn’t know what he was doing in Bosnia; he doesn’t talk about that, about anyone who is left or whether he was taking money back to his old home. Reza doesn’t say, and Blum doesn’t ask. Reza smiles at her while the priest gives the blessing, a small, almost invisible smile. We’ll make it together, we’re a team. She thinks of all the funerals they’ve arranged together, all the bodies they have prepared, all the burials they have behind them. Reza is a gift. They will wait until all the roses have been dropped into the grave, until all the mourners have said goodbye and the last of them has left the cemetery. They stand there listening to the music, a woodwind quintet, the chatter of old friends saying goodbye. Blum is looking down at the coffin. At Schönborn. And then back at Reza.

He hasn’t noticed a thing, didn’t realise that the coffins were heavier than usual. He is the one person who could have been her downfall – he could have suspected, he could have looked inside one of the coffins. But nothing like that has happened. Nothing has been different about him, no doubts, no speculation. Blum’s life will stay as it is. It almost seems to be a good thing that Schönborn is dead. Blum senses it. She doesn’t think of Mark, she doesn’t want to cry, she is thinking only of the parts of a man’s torso being lowered into the ground. She killed him. She gave him an overdose, she struck him unconscious, she put him in a refrigerator like a piece of meat. Then she butchered him like a pig.

Blum smiles at Reza; this time she smiles with her lips, lifting their corners, only very slightly. She feels no guilt or shame. Only that smile playing on her lips, barely perceptible but obvious all the same, and happy. In her mind, Blum is singing, The filthy swine is dead . The wind instruments play an old folk song. In her mind, Blum is dancing. She did the right thing and she has no regrets. Only that he can’t talk now. Can’t tell her who the others are and where she must look for them. She’d do it again without hesitation. She’d do it again. For Dunya. For Mark.

Earth falls into the grave. Blum and Reza watch as the gravedigger fills and seals the grave. It is a delightful sound, the earth on the coffin, the sound it makes when it touches the wood, when it covers what is to remain hidden. No one will ever open that grave again, no one will look for Schönborn down there. Blum’s mind is still dancing, rejoicing in the knowledge that the nightmare has a happy ending. They stay until the end, until the grave is only a mound of earth decorated by flowers. Only then do they go, Reza and Blum, to a bar where they sit drinking in easy companionship. A couple of beers, half an hour. Then she will go; she will embrace Reza and go. There’s something else I have to do , she will say. Reza will nod. Blum will walk to the Old Town, she will unlock the door of the building and go upstairs, she will open the studio door and lock it again on the inside. She will search everywhere, every nook and cranny, every hard disk, she will not stop until she has found the photos. Portraits of Ilena, of Dunya, of Youn. She will be wearing gloves, she will wipe everything she touched two days ago, no trace of her will be discovered when he is reported missing. She will delete their first meeting from his diary if he entered it. Blum will make no mistakes; she will leave unseen with the photographs, she will retreat into Mark’s study to look at the pictures. She will see what went on in that cellar. She will look into their faces, and she will cry over them, she knows that. She will hate those men more with every portrait she sees. Blum will finish her beer now, get up and embrace Reza. She will walk to the Old Town and unlock the door. There’s something else I have to do .

Karl is better now that he has let the children back into his life. He spends a lot of time with them. The children are like medicine. He and Blum agree on that as they sit side by side on the garden bench, watching them play. Every day, although they don’t know it, they keep the boat from capsizing, they make sure that their mother gets up and goes out into the day, that Karl doesn’t lie down for ever. Mark lives on in their little faces. Blum and Karl comfort themselves with that thought; it stops them giving up.

‘You’re working again. That’s good.’

‘Thank you for helping me with the children, Karl.’

‘It’s the children who help me.’

‘What would I do without you?’

‘Don’t say that. It’s the other way around. What would I do without you ? If you hadn’t asked me to live here, I’d be dying slowly in a care home.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘You know I’m right, Blum.’

‘You belong to us and we love you, Karl.’

‘And who loves you?’

‘The three of you.’

‘But there’s something on your mind.’

‘You mustn’t worry, Karl. I’m fine.’

‘There is something. I know you. It’s to do with that woman.’

‘Oh, Karl.’

‘I know I’m right.’

‘Once a cop …’

‘What is it about her? She left without saying goodbye.’

‘So? Karl, everything’s just fine. Dunya is a friend of mine from the past. She always came and went as she pleased.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘What do you mean, nonsense?’

‘She’s no friend of yours. You hardly know her.’

‘Please drop the subject, Karl.’

‘I can help you.’

‘You can and do help me by looking after the children. I can manage everything else for myself.’

‘There’s something wrong here. I can sense it.’

Blum can imagine Karl as he was before the tick made an old man of him. Unyielding, a bloodsucker himself, the sort who never stops asking questions until the truth comes to light. He was a good police officer, Mark said, he learned all he knew from him. His instinct, his persistence. But she’s not going to tell Karl a thing, she won’t confide in him, won’t put him in danger. Even though Blum knows that he would never judge her or give her away, she bites her tongue. Saying nothing, she leaves him with his dark presentiments. Blum takes his hand and presses it. Karl knows she’s stubborn and that she isn’t going to tell him a thing. He’s known her long enough. He has come to love her for all that she is and all that she isn’t. She will not tell him that she has killed a man, cut him into pieces and buried him. She isn’t going to tell him that the man was probably Mark’s murderer. That there are four more of them out there. She won’t tell him any of that. Only their intertwined fingers matter. Blum’s hand in his must be enough. Karl must trust her.