Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘They were separated, I suppose. I found Hänsel on eBay. He’s a collector’s item.’

In her little sister voice, she said, ‘But is he our Hänsel?’

Danny lay the doll across her palm. She inspected the elbows, the knees, and the head. Hänsel’s cheeks were expertly freckled. His eyes, however, were dead.

‘I know what you’re looking for,’ Danny said.

‘There are no holes.’

‘There were never any holes,’ he said. ‘There were never any strings.’

The half-remembered notes of a music box picked through the tower. The turning tower.

Ich ruf zu Dir.

I call to thee.

‘Danny, how can you even look at me?’

She had never told her brother, face to face, that she loved him. Not once. But, at this realisation, her eyes stopped on something that reset her thoughts.

A man stood at the vanishing point of the curving deck. He wore a black leather jacket, buttoned, and an English flat cap, reversed. His hips were slanted and his eyes easy. His grin was too broad; it underscored his awkwardness. Even at this distance, Jem could see the bruise beneath his right eye, and it reminded her of the steady right hand of Saskia Brandt. What was he doing here? She had last seen him half-senseless against a pew in the Trinity Church. A man propped up by his desperation. He began to walk towards them.

She whispered, ‘It’s Wolfgang.’

‘Your friend from uni?’

Wolfgang no longer seemed like the player who could cut coke with any number of household chemicals when the con work dried up. His eyes were bloodshot. On top of everything, thought Jem, he was probably going cold turkey. The three of them made a strange triangle. The twins kept their backs to the panorama while Wolfgang, his face cooled by the light, smiled with a patience that bordered on British.

‘This is Danny,’ she said.

Wolfgang shook his hand. ‘Jem talks about you all the time. Big Danny.’

‘Hello, Wolfgang. Guyliner? You shouldn’t have.’

The German chuckled, touching a hand to his bruise and said nothing more. The expectation shifted to Jem, but she could not voice her questions for Wolfgang without presenting a version of herself that she wanted to withhold from her brother. She sipped her coffee and tried to read Wolfgang’s demanding eyes. The silence was interrupted by her vibrating phone, number withheld. She mumbled an apology and took the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego. ‘The person who has just joined you is wearing a device that transmits your conversation by radio.’

She blinked.

‘ What? ’

‘The man is wearing a ‘wire’. He is ‘bugged’.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘Say ‘who’.’

Jem switched ears and looked at the horizon. ‘Who?’

‘I would advise you and your brother to leave immediately. Now say, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.’

‘Sorry. Wrong number.’

Ego hung up. There was no dialling tone. Just emptiness. She kept the phone to her ear and tried to assemble a plan, but she was panicking. Wolfgang must have been arrested in the Trinity Church. And here he was, wearing different clothes. So the police had let him go back to the apartment to change. Had that been why she’d found the police officer waiting outside the apartment? It had to be one of those plea-bargain things. But what had Wolfgang offered the police? Saskia? Jem?

She looked at Danny. If she tried to leave the tower with him, he would be incriminated. She didn’t know what to do. She said, ‘He’s wearing a wire.’

‘A wire?’ Danny raised his eyebrows and turned to look, down, on Wolfgang.

The hustler gunned his charm. He laughed. ‘Clever girl. I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re as smooth as your friend Saskia, aren’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Tease,’ he shot back. His apparent good humour only emphasised his malice. ‘The police talked to you outside my apartment yesterday. They know about Saskia, the meeting at the church, and the officer she assaulted. They know that she tried to frame me. There’s nothing they don’t know. She bought your ticket to Milan, for Christ’s sake.’

Danny put two fingers on Wolfgang’s collarbone. ‘Step back from my sister.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Jem.

Wolfgang looked beyond them. ‘ Scheisse ,’ he hissed. He frowned into the turning crowd. Jem followed his eye until she saw the smartly-dressed police officer who had stood in the rain outside Wolfgang’s apartment. He had one arm around a telescope, and it flopped skyward as he forged towards them, craning around the children and prams, skirting the hooked teenage couples, apologising to the adults.

Jem’s phone vibrated. It was a text message from Ego.

We’ve been found. I’m under attack. Leave immediately.

Before Jem could sort her thoughts—found by whom? The police? How could Ego be under attack when he was in her purse?—the officer gripped her upper arm. She yelped and the phone tumbled to the floor. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are under–’

Danny had put his hip into the punch. It landed between the policeman’s jaw and his ear. He fell against Jem. In the bubble of interest that spread from the punch to the crowd, she remembered Saskia turning in the night wind, reaching for her.

‘Take my hand.’

The policeman struggled upright. He did not release his grip on her and, for a moment, the two stood like dancers on the brink of a tango. His glasses were designer, she noted. He was furious.

‘You’re not called Nancy Drew.’

‘And?’

‘Both of you are under arrest.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Danny. ‘You tried to attack my sister.’

‘I am an officer of the police.’

‘How the fuck should we know?’

The man twisted his neck. The cartilage clicked. He withdrew a wallet and flapped it open. ‘Karel Duczyński, Inspector, Bundeskriminalamt – the Federal Criminal Police Office.’

‘Your mother must be very proud. I’m Danny. This is Jem.’

Jem’s phone rang again. She looked at the inspector, who nodded.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello, Jem.’ It was Cory. ‘Good location for a meeting. Plenty of radio interference, and people.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I see you’ve met the inspector.’

Jem cupped the handset and said to Duczyński, ‘He can see us. The man you should really arrest.’

‘Who?’ He looked at her with suspicion, but there was clearly something truthful in her expression—fear, perhaps—and she was relieved when he opened the holster of his sidearm.

She turned back to the phone and said, ‘What now?’

‘I don’t know where you found an Ego-class computer, but I want you to put it on the observation deck and leave. It will have the information I want. Forget about me and Saskia. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

As she cut the call, the three men looked at her with expectant expressions, but she ignored them, looking vainly for Cory in the crowd.

‘Well?’ asked Danny.

Jem’s phone buzzed again. She looked down at it. Another text message from Ego.

I’ve thought of something.

Abruptly, a siren split the air and sprinklers opened, dropping icy water on all. Some people hunched and swore. Others shouted urgent questions about fire exits at the barman, who shouted back and waved his arms towards the stairwells. Two waiters hurried down from the restaurant and directed people into lines. Meanwhile, the water continued to fall from the sprinklers with such energy that it seemed to reflect from the floor.

Jem shaded her eyes and tried to take a breath without swallowing water. Her focus remained on the faces in the crowd. Which one was Cory? Was he even here? Intuitively, she was certain that he had been on the observation deck when he made the phone call.