Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

On top of the knocking, the angry men would shout threats and swear at him.

‘I know you’re in there, you little fuck! Open the door or I’ll burn your house down!’ they would scream. Some threw bricks through the windows, while the teenager sat cowering in his bedroom corner, covering his ears. When his father came home conveniently late, he would find his son in tears, but he only laughed and called the boy a pussy.

To this day Detlef would feel his heart jump when someone knocked at his door, even though he knew the callers were harmless and had no bad intentions. But now? Now they were once again knocking for him . They wanted him . They were like the angry men outside back in his teenage years, insisting he came out. Detlef felt hunted. He felt threatened. It did not matter why they came. The fact was that they tried to force him out of his sanctuary, and that was an act of war to the sensitive emotions of the widower.

For no apparent reason, he went to the kitchen and took the paring knife from the drawer. He was perfectly aware of what he was doing but relinquished control. Tears filled his eyes as he sank the blade into his skin, not too deep, but deep enough. He had no idea what drove him to do it, but he knew he had to. By some order of a dark voice inside his head, Detlef ran the blade a few inches from one side of his forearm to the other. It burned like a gigantic paper cut, but it was bearable. When he lifted the knife, he watched the blood ooze quietly from the line he had drawn. As its little red line became a trickle on his white skin, he took a deep breath.

For the very first time since Gabi died, Detlef felt at peace. His heart slowed to a mellow rhythm, and his worries drifted out of reach — for now. The tranquility of the release fascinated him, making him grateful for the knife. For a while, he looked at what he had done, but despite his moral compass' protests, he did not feel guilty for doing it. As a matter of fact, he felt accomplished.

“I love you, Gabi,” he whispered. “I love you. This is a blood oath for you, my baby.”

He wrapped a dish cloth around his arm and washed the knife, but instead of replacing it he tucked it into his pocket.

“You just stay right there,” he whispered to the knife. “Be there when I need you. You are safe. You make me feel safe.” A twisted smile played on Detlef’s face as he reveled in the serenity he felt all of a sudden. It was as if the act of cutting himself had cleared his mind, so much that he felt positive enough to put some work into finding his wife's killer with some proactive investigation.

Detlef walked over the broken glass of the sideboard without caring to bother. The pain was just another layer of agony piled on to that which he already was already suffering, making it somehow trivial.

As he had just know n to cut himself to feel better, he also knew that he had to find his late wife's appointment book. Gabi was old-fashioned that way. She believed in physical notes and calendars. Even though she had used her phone to remind her of her appointments, she had also put everything down in writing, a most welcome habit now that it could serve to point out her possible killers.

Rummaging through her drawers, he knew exactly what he was looking for.

“Oh God, I hope it was not in your purse, baby,” he muttered through his frantic searching. “Because they have your purse, and they will not give it back to me until I go out this door to talk to them, you see?” He kept talking to Gabi as if she was listening, the privilege of the lonely to keep them from losing their mind, something he had learned by watching his abused mother when she endured the hell she had married into.

“Gabi, I need your help, baby,” Detlef moaned. He sank down on a chair in the small room that Gabi had used as her office. Looking at the books piled everywhere and her old cigarette box on the second shelf of the wooden cabinet she used for her files. Detlef took a deep breath and composed himself. “Where would you have put a business diary?” he asked in a low voice as his mind flipped through all the possibilities.

“It has to be someplace where you could easily access it,” he frowned, deeply in thought. He stood up and imagined it was his office. “Where would be convenient?” He sat behind her desk, facing her computer monitor. On her desk, she had a calendar, but it was blank. “I suppose you would not write it here because it is not for the world to see,” he remarked, going over the objects on the surface of the desk.

A porcelain cup with her old rowing team's logo held her pens and a letter opener. A flatter bowl contained several flash drives and trinkets like hair elastics, a marble and two rings she had never worn because they were too big. To the left, an open packet of throat lozenges sided with the foot of her desk lamp. No diary.

Detlef felt the misery take him again, distraught at not finding the black leather-bound book. Gabi's piano stood in the far right corner of the room, but the books there had only sheet music in them. Outside he heard the rain fall, befitting his mood.

“Gabi, any help?” he sighed. The phone on Gabi's file cabinet rang and startled him half to death. He knew better than to pick it up. It was them. It was the hunters, the accusers. It was the very people who saw his wife as some suicidal weakling. “No!” he screamed, shivering in rage. Detlef grabbed an iron bookend from the shelf and hurled it at the phone. The heavy bookend mowed the phone off the cabinet with immense force, leaving it smashed on the floor. His reddened watery eyes leered at the broken device and then moved to the cabinet he had damaged with the heavy bookend.

Detlef smiled.

On top of the cabinet, he found Gabi's black diary. It had been lying under the telephone all along, obscured from view. He went to pick up the book, laughing manically. “Baby, you are the best! Was that you? Huh?” he mumbled affectionately as he opened the book. “Did you call me just now? Did you want me to see the book? I know you did.”

He flicked through it impatiently, looking for the appointments she had written down on the date two days ago when she died.

“Who did you see? Who saw you last besides that British fool? Let’s see.”

With dried blood under his nail, he ran his index finger from the top downward, carefully perusing every entry.

“I just need to see who you were with before you…” he swallowed hard. “They say you died in the morning.”

8.00 — Meeting with intelligence people

9.30 — Margot flowers bh plotC

10.00 — David Purdue Ben Carrington office abt flight divert Milla

11.00 — Consulate remember Kiril

12.00 — Call for Detlef’s dentist appointment

Detlef's hand reached up to his mouth. “The toothache is gone, you know, Gabi?” His tears obscured the words he tried to read and he slammed the book shut, held it tightly against his chest, and collapsed in a heap of woe, sobbing his heart out. Through the blacked-out windows, he could see the flashes of lightning. Gabi's small office was almost completely dark now. He just sat there, weeping until his eyes dried up. The sadness was overwhelming, but he had to pull himself together.

‘Carrington office,’ he thought. ‘The last place she visited was Carrington’s office. He told the media he was there when she died.’ Something prodded at him. There was more to that notation. Quickly he reopened the book and slammed on the desk lamp switch to see properly. Detlef gasped, “Who is Milla?” he wondered out loud. “And who is David Purdue?”

His fingers could not move fast enough as he paged back to her contacts list, roughly scribbled on the hard inner cover of her book. There was nothing for a ‘Milla', but at the bottom of the page, there was the web address of one of Purdue's businesses. Detlef immediately went online to see who this Purdue was. After reading through the ‘About’ section, Detlef clicked on the ‘Contact’ tab and smiled.