Bernhard Aichner - Woman of the Dead - A Thriller

A man of eighty-four has hanged himself. Reza and Blum have cut him down from the roof rafter, and now he is lying in the cool room. Nela is painting a picture, Uma has an upset tummy. Now it is mid-September and everyday life has taken over. Massimo has phoned several times. Some teenagers, drunk, have found Herbert Jaunig’s head, and the papers are full of it. At first the teenagers thought the thing in the plastic bag was a football. Blum watched as they tipped it out of the bag and kicked the priest’s head. She saw them freeze; one of them threw up. Now she is reading all about it in the paper. Father Herbert Jaunig has been brutally murdered and beheaded. And the world doesn’t know what to make of it.

Blum is sitting at the breakfast table with the children. There’s a photo in the paper of the cathedral forecourt, cordoned off with police tape. She holds a slice of bread and home-made jam, remembering yesterday. Uma and Nela are undressing, running round the apartment with nothing on. You get undressed too, Mama, please. Blum eats her bread and jam. She looks at the girls. How carefree they are, how untroubled. There are moments when they don’t think of their father, when they act as if nothing has happened. But still, they have lost Mark; that is their reality. The head of the man expected to become bishop is only a newspaper story, a crime that shakes this little provincial city, a topic on which the public can wax indignant. But, to her children, it is nothing more than that. Blum smiles, and helps herself to another slice of bread and jam.

She doesn’t know what will happen now. Jaunig’s head will probably be embalmed or frozen, they’ll store it in the Forensic Medicine department and search frantically for his body. The Church will call for a funeral. But Jaunig’s head will stay in the freezer for months, even years. His body won’t be found because the sharks have eaten every last morsel. Nothing will lead back to the cellar or to Blum. No one believed Dunya; they said her story had been dreamt up for the benefit of the police. Nothing will emerge from police investigations. His friends and acquaintances will be questioned, but none of them will be proved guilty. The real murderer will remain unknown.

Blum will stay a little longer, watching the children, and then Karl will take over, while she and Reza attend to their corpse, the hanged man. Hagen used to say: work early in the day keeps troubles away. Hagen and Herta. Schönborn. Jaunig. Four people are dead. Blum breathes deeply in and out. She has a clear conscience, she’d do it all again. She’d even sleep with Massimo. He was there when she needed him. Still, when the phone rings and she sees his name on the display, she wonders whether to pick up. This is the fifth time he’s called. Her hesitation is brief; then she hears his voice.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘At sea.’

‘Why?’

‘Massimo, please don’t do this.’

‘I miss you.’

‘Don’t you have enough to keep your mind off that at work? It sounds as though all hell has broken loose.’

‘You’re right about that.’

‘What exactly happened?’

‘I don’t know, Blum, but it’s pretty perverted.’

‘I hear they beheaded him.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Who’d do a thing like that?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘And who, for God’s sake, wants to murder a priest?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out.’

‘Make sure you do.’

‘I could come round and see you after work.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In the presbytery.’

‘How long for?’

‘Oh, a long time.’

‘I’ll come and find you.’

‘You can’t, Blum, I have to work.’

‘Just for a moment, I just want to see you.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘Well … it’s number five, Domplatz. Phone me when you get here.’

‘What would I do without you?’

Massimo doesn’t send her away from the apartment that was Jaunig’s presbytery. And Blum wants to know what’s going on there, whether anything might lead to Dunya, might give her away. She told Massimo that she misses him. Needs him. Then she got straight into her car. He took her briefly in his arms. Blum wanders round Jaunig’s apartment among men in white overalls. She knows many of the police officers here; they’ve come to barbecues in her garden. She said she had to speak to Massimo, and they let her in at once. She is familiar with the work of crime scene investigators. The number of bodies she has collected for forensics is too high to count. The men in white overalls are looking for traces, taking fingerprints and DNA samples. The whole department is in action, packing up everything that might provide a clue. But they don’t know what they are looking for, she can tell that from Massimo’s face. It is a mystery to them. A priest who has become a murder victim, a man with no enemies, a man who gave himself to the service of God. Who would want to harm him, who would have any reason to burn and behead him, then hang his head on the cathedral door like a memento? All they can do is look for leads, talk to his friends and acquaintances, investigate his life, search for inconsistencies. Guessing nothing untoward, they go through the apartment. Guessing nothing untoward, Massimo kisses her on both cheeks, right then left. Let’s go and have a quick drink at the wine bar , he says. Please let me stay a little longer , she says.

Blum manages to persuade him. She wants to stay because of Mark, she says. She likes to remember him by the work he did. She sees him in her mind’s eye. Normally he’d have been here, putting evidence in bags, taking fingerprints. Since Jaunig was found yesterday morning Mark would have been working steadily, just as Massimo is now. This case is at the forefront of everyone’s mind: the Church, the politicians and the congregation are all demanding answers. Blum hears them expressing their horror, their fear of a monster in their midst. Jaunig has been executed, and they are looking for the judge who sentenced him to death. They are looking for Blum.

She sits inconspicuously at Jaunig’s desk. We’ll soon be finished here, says Massimo. Blum’s eyes wander round the room, she sees everything that he saw. Herbert Jaunig will never sit here again, he’ll never take a book off that shelf again, never pray again. Never rape again. Blum has made sure of that. She sits there, satisfied, watching. It was right that she didn’t ask Massimo for help. How could he have helped her? He’d have had to go against all his beliefs, lie for her and cover up a crime. She can’t and doesn’t want to make him do that. This is her story, not his. She started it and she will see it through to the end.

After ten minutes Massimo asks her to leave. He accompanies her down the stairs, puts his arms around her and kisses her greedily. His lips are suddenly on hers, his tongue is in her mouth, his body is very close. Blum lets it happen. She doesn’t feel a thing. It’s only his desire, his hands on her, him whispering what he wants. How difficult it is for her to push him away, tell him she can’t, he must understand that she is thinking only of Mark. But she is thinking of Jaunig too. Of the men who took Mark away from her, tore him and his tenderness away. She won’t stop looking, she will find the others as well. The clown, the cook, the huntsman.

He grabbed her by the arm just after she had said goodbye to Massimo. She wanted to sit in the wine bar for a moment and think. About the kiss. About what she had seen in the priest’s apartment. She had embraced Massimo, then gone into the wine bar and ordered a glass of white. A glass of wine before turning her attention to the next man she would take out, her next corpse. She had just taken the first sip of wine when Schönborn was there beside her. His fleshy fingers were grabbing her forearm, announcing that he meant business.