Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

So far, so Google.

But in his closing paragraph Dirk insisted on originality. Having argued that the inclusion of grave goods was by no means a practice which had died out after Christianization Dirk Seehof went on to refer to the more recent and local example.

“The distinguished old gentleman who might well have been a further fatality when an explosion devastated Manduvel Books on Trinity Place last week was cremated with grave goods. It was his wish to depart with three precious Latin manuscripts, either from his own collection or perhaps the three items missing from the antiquarian inventory, as reported by his successor at the Bookshop.”

Elsa Brundt was never Lessinger’s successor. She had only chosen to sit in his cubicle and pretend that she was.

Lessinger collected no handwritten manuscripts, only incunabulae, precious examples of the earliest secular printing. He would never dream of letting any one of them be destroyed.

Oh, for sure it made a half-decent story. I wondered what Rudiger Reiß would make of it. At our asparagus dinner I had had the impression that the Manduvel man didn’t take Dirk seriously, almost yawning when our boy detective went off on a long rant about the merits of Scandinavian noir and its influence on contemporary crime fiction.

Dirk. Cute, yes. Big dick, smaller brain.

The colour of Bea’s old Toyota could be called a kind of grey or a kind of beige and could be seen as fitting.

But for two things.

The engine of the Corolla had been tuned and equipped with new motor management electronics (tweaked with confident skill by Bea herself) boosting its output from 90 to 120 horsepower. That I had long known, and that Bea Schell was inclined to drive like a demon.

But new that morning as Bea climbed out of the car in the short driveway of the Weinfelden house was the look of the driver. She was the ‘greige ghost’ no longer.

Somehow I expected her to shout. She spoke a bit louder than before, though.

Her drop-crotch sweatpants (smiley yellow with an aqua strip down the legs) hung low beneath angular hip-bones. The cropped teeshirt was inky black, printed in white proclaiming an affinity with the Sam Houston Institute of Technology , the four big initials boldly legible when her bottle-green and very long grungy cardigan fell open.

Chucks? Red? Whither the always-shiny Bea ballerinas?

Long ash-blonde hair? Now urchin short and a full shade lighter, with faux-Versace sunnies where there had always been her Alice band. We were on the far side of the Looking-Glass now. Bea is as tall as I am, she has the broader shoulders and I the narrower hips. I knew she had formerly resorted to cleverly engineered underpinnings to emulate a cleavage more opulent than either mine or her own when not artificially boosted. No more. Today she looked incredibly sexy, I realized.

“I know what you all used to call me. Meet Bea ‘two-point-zero’, Thea!”

Dirk’s appearance also called for explanation. When he lowered the top of his grey hoodie I saw that while his face was not quite as colourful as his fiancée’s outfit it wasn’t far off. A laceration shone red. A closed eye was almost black and extensive bruising had hues of dark green and blue. The bandage on his jaw was a pale aqua colour and yellowish tincture of iodine had been applied to places which looked as if they might hurt quite a lot.

“Ouch! Partner look… colour coordination taken a step too far. What the hell happened to you?”

He drew a deep, uncomfortable breath and concentrated on getting out of the Toyota.

Bea’s account delivered on his behalf was succinct.

They had arranged to meet for a pizza. Bea had driven from her workplace on the south side of the city. Dirk had rode on his cherished fixie bike, on which he was the scourge of pedestrians, other cyclists and motorists alike. Using their respective modes of transportation they had headed after dinner for home and bed, the latter destination stressed by Bea Schell.

Right. Still possessive, even if two-pont-zero.

“There was a collision.”

But it had been a very minor one, enough to unsaddle Dirk, but not more. Except in that it left him dazed and tottering when fallen upon by three young thugs who proceeded to give him a thorough beating. The punishment could have continued but for the arrival on the scene of two buffed gays walking their Staffordshires. They turned out to be medical students.

Maxvorstadt, the university neighbourhood next to the district where I live, is not a hotbed of crime, not a place where muggings are commonplace. Munich is proudly Germany’s safest large city. And nothing, not even Dirk’s fixed-gear velocipede (which was almost as valuable as he thought although I mocked it as beacon of pretentious hipster fad-following), had been stolen.

“There are a lot of haters of guys who ride fixies. Or… were they the infuriated brothers of some girl…”

“Very funny, Thea,” said Bea.

Dirk sighed.

“I know you think I have a runaway imagination. But… it could have been a warning… well, maybe I shouldn’t have posted that latest story.”

“It is no longer online. I saw to that,” his fiancée added.

“You can do stuff like that?”

I had always suspected that Bea could do devious digital things of which most of us were incapable. Her high-tech employer, Segirtad GmbH, was in Pullach, cheek-by-jowl with firms in the avionics sector, pioneers in green energy, as well as a well-known cutting-edge sound recording studio where I once attended a session with my earnestly anarcho-rastafarian albino musician. The building where Bea worked was bland, modern and very secure. Programs for automated stock trading, for actuarial computation, for number-crunching of big data involved a high degree of confidentiality, Bea had pointed out, adding disingenuously that she was a mere nonentity in the accounts department. Sure. The ‘greige ghost’ was (among other things, I guessed) a wicked code jockey, whatever else her new iteration might turn out to be.

The intelligence agency of the German government, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, is also headquartered in Pullach.

Bea Schell laughed.

“And now I even look like a hacker! How cool is that?”

Not so cool, I thought. She’s a year older than I am but Bea now looked like a teenager. She was edging into the spotlight I had always considered my own personal space, reserved for someone flamboyant, kick-ass, intelligent, sexy, although at the moment also apprehensive.

The turret bedroom that old Frau Steinemann had prepared pleased what the housekeeper took to be the engaged couple, although she did give a young people nowadays sigh. Their balcony had room for a small table and four chairs.

From the elevation at which Aunt Ursel’s house stood the view when the Föhn wind blew was breathtaking. Under a blue sky of unbelievable clarity distant peaks seemed miles closer than they were. I pointed out Säntis, rising two-and-a-half kilometres above sea level. Bea nodded, shading her eyes with her hand to admire the stupendous vista.

Closer there was a lawn below and to one side of the house, bisected by a driveway big enough for cars to turn round to face the tall gates. At the top of the upper lawn were three beehives.

“What’s that?” Bea asked, pointing to a quirky landscaping feature, a low box hedge. It was cruciform, the planting outlining a nave, chancel and transepts, although it took up little more space on the lawn than a decent sized summer house might have required.

“My grandfather never got round to building the chapel he had in mind…”

Dirk was not to be distracted from his Kindle. How many thrillers and crime stories were held in the digital archive of the device I did not know. But I knew he was currently collating examples of beatings inflicted as ‘warnings to people not to meddle in things which were not their concern’. Did he seek kinship with fictional figures thus horribly maltreated, their suffering described sometimes in graphic detail by Child or Deaver or Harvey, Brookmyre or Jardine or Rankin, Larsson or Larsson or Larsson and God knows how many others? If warning it had been, he had got off lightly. A tooth was chipped but only his face had been punched. The bruising on his hip had been the result of his fall from his bike. Had his assailants known what splendour lurked there, his crotch might have been deemed worthy of a kick or two out of pure envy. What a dreadful pity that would have been.