Helen Grant - The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

We stayed in Bad Münstereifel a few weeks more, long enough to see the new year in: the year 2000, although the millennium celebrations mostly passed us by. I did not see Herr Düster again, and I heard later that he had outlived his brother by only a few months. When Boris had told Stefan that Herr Düster was sick, he was right: the old man had cancer, and at the end it carried him off very quickly. I’m thankful for that.

I have often wondered about him and his brother, how the hatred between them could have led to what happened, and why it seemed to accelerate toward the end: four girls taken in one year. I think perhaps Herr Schiller knew that they were both dying, and he was determined to wreak his revenge before it was forever beyond his power to hurt his brother, Johannes.

I wonder if the fact that Herr Düster never reacted infuriated him, and drove him on? Even though Herr Düster was cast as the town villain, he never indulged in any unseemly displays of emotion. Not when the woman he had loved faded away and died. Not when his brother changed his name as a sly means of accusation. Not even on the day when (as later publicized by that inexhaustible supply of local information, Frau Kessel) he opened his front door to find a little packet on the doorstep, a packet containing a child’s hair ribbon. Or the time it was a single glove, a little girl’s glove.

If his brother had hoped to provoke him, he failed, or at any rate he failed to taunt him into any public signs of grief or anger. Herr Düster had simply called the police, as any good citizen might, and had been taken off in a patrol car, stony-faced, seemingly unmoved, to help them with their inquiries. The fact that this had been interpreted by Herr Düster’s neighbors as an arrest for abduction and murder can only have gladdened the icy splinter that was all that was left of Heinrich Schiller’s heart. He would have liked to see his brother, Johannes, torn to pieces by the citizens of Bad Münstereifel, their fists and nails and teeth the instruments of his vengeance. It must have eaten him up inside, the fact that his brother never reacted. That he never succeeded in shocking him.

The police traced the call placed by Boris on the night of our adventure; Stefan’s cousin, in spite of his almost professional burglary skills, had failed to take the simple precaution of calling from a public phone. Or perhaps the Jägermeister was responsible for this oversight. Boris made some attempt to conceal the reasons for his presence in the Orchheimer Strasse that night, but dissembling was not his strong point. He made one unfortunate remark, tried to backtrack, and tripped himself up again.

Eventually the whole story came out. It was Boris who had acquired one of Marion Voss’s shoes, by the simple expedient of paying Thilo Koch to steal one for him from the rack at the Grundschule . It was Boris and his friends who were responsible for burning it, late one night on the Quecken hill, and it was in an attempt to obtain further items belonging to the dead girls that Boris had broken into Herr Düster’s house that night.

Shamefacedly, he was forced to admit that he and his cronies had been attempting a kind of black mass, inspired more by popular television programs than any actual arcane knowledge. Hunched around the stone circle they had built in the ruined castle, they had done a little chanting and drumming, and a lot of smoking (not all of it tobacco), and attempted to raise the spirit of Marion Voss.

Did he do this sort of thing on a regular basis? the police had asked him incredulously, and Boris had had to admit that yes, he had tried it after Katharina Linden had disappeared; when nothing happened he had hit upon the idea of using possessions in the ritual belonging to the missing girls. When the police had discovered the burned remains of a shoe and connected it with the disappearances, Boris had been struck with terror, foreseeing that his involvement would propel him to the head of the list of suspects.

Unfortunately he was not even able to offer any psychic clues to the murders since the spirits of the dead girls had refused to appear at all. Who could blame them? If the dead come back to tell us anything, they are unlikely to say it to a group of scruffy strangers smoking pot at midnight in a wood, one of whom, it seems, was also too drunk to stand up. Boris claimed that he had been trying to find out where the bodies were by asking the girls themselves, but later it went around that he had been trying to get them to tell him the following week’s lottery numbers. I have no idea which of these is true, but the latter story stuck to Boris and will probably pursue him for life.

As for me, I spent a long time secretly worrying about Oma Warner’s telephone bill. Up until Christmas Eve she had still not said anything, but I did not like the way that she glanced at me, eyebrows raised, whenever the phone rang and my mother said, “It’s for you, Pia.” I had visions of her waiting until we were all assembled for Christmas dinner and then announcing it in front of the entire family: Did you know that Pia ran up a thousand pounds on my telephone bill, and me a pensioner? I tried to avoid her, as though she were a walking time bomb. If we spent too much time together, she might say something.

In Germany everyone opens their Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, a fact that my mother had long bemoaned: she said it was ludicrous letting the children open their presents at eight o’clock at night and then expecting them to go straight to bed like lambs. But then my mother was not one to give her wholehearted approval to German customs.

When we assembled for the annual exchange of gifts, Oma Warner had still not said anything. I purposely sat as far away from her as possible. Still, it was not likely that I would get away without any contact with her at all. I had to get up and hand her the little parcel of scented soap that was purportedly from me and Sebastian, and she had to hand me her gift in return.

We didn’t often see Oma Warner at Christmas, so she usually sent me an envelope with a cheery card and a twenty-Deutschmark note inside it; she got the Deutschmarks from the travel agent in Hayes. I was not surprised therefore when she handed me a little envelope, slightly fat as though something were folded inside.

“Say thank you, Pia,” said my mother, and dutifully I parroted, “Thank you.”

Oma Warner waited until my mother was looking elsewhere and mimed stop at me, putting up one ring-encrusted hand. Stop, don’t open it . I tucked the envelope into the little pile of presents I had already opened. Later, when my mother was in the kitchen swearing at the turkey in two languages, I slipped upstairs to my bedroom.

Sitting on my bed, I tore open the envelope Oma Warner had given me. Out fell what I first thought was confetti, but then realized were the pieces of a red telephone bill, torn to tiny shreds. I sat on my bed with a lapful of ripped-up telephone bill, reading the card, which read, Happy Christmas to a favourite granddaughter , and really I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

That part of my life is closed now. After more than seven years in England, German words are becoming like an unfamiliar taste in my mouth. When I think of my conversations with Stefan, with my classmates, with Herr Schiller, sometimes I remember them in English. It’s strange to think that if I have children myself one day, then whenever they visit their grandfather they will speak to him in English and he will reply to them in English too, his accent strange in their ears. We will open our Christmas presents on December 25. We won’t celebrate St. Martin’s Day at all.