Page 16 of Anatomy of a Killer
Eva shakes her head as if I’d asked her a question. Her face is so contorted with pain that her tear-stained mascara is running in oddly crooked lines.
‘And okay, then there’s the acquaintance who ran into my father on a walk near the last crime scene,’ I continue breathlessly. ‘But that could have been a coincidence, couldn’t it? Turn it round and you could also say my father ran into this acquaintance. So why isn’t he under suspicion? I admit, the newspaper articles in his desk give the wrong impression, but he’d kept them for his lecture series, for God’s sake! He was analysing these articles as part of his research, because that was his specialism: “Evil in humans as an anthropological, cultural and historical constant, and philosophical views of death”. I was always really impressed by the weightiness of the topic. And very proud of him because his lectures and seminars were in great demand. Most students found his approach cool, apart from this one girl, a prissy nerd. . .’ My thoughts are racing at such speed that my speech can hardly keep up. ‘She complained to the dean because she thought what my father was doing was disrespectful, verging on abuse of the dead children for’– here I make air quotes– ‘“study purposes”. Discussions with the university management ensued and the complaint was officially recorded. But that dozy woman– I expect she’d watched too many serial killer documentaries– she only had to go to the police too, didn’t she? My father was questioned, and of course he was able to point out to the officers that sciencehasto use material from real life to produce findings that can be taken seriously. It was relatively easy to convey this to the police. Back then, at least. And finally, there’s the photofit image that was put together from details provided by a woman who claimed to have seen Saskia with a strange man.’ I thrust the picture above my head. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’ I say, waving it around so it rustles noisily in the air. ‘Look at the nose: far too small and broad. Then this bloated chin and the close-together eyes. It looks more like your dad than—’
‘Please stop!’
‘Or Ludwig, that would be a great Ludwig, wouldn’t it? Do you remember Ludwig? He used to come here often—’
‘Ann! That’s enough!’
I recoil and blink as if I’d been dreaming. Eva wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing the lines from the mascara that’s run. Her face now looks sooty, as if she’d just escaped a major fire in the nick of time.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she whispers.
‘So am I, Eva. . . We can’t change the fate of these poor girls. But we can—’
‘I’m sorry for you.’ Without taking her eyes off me, she pulls up the left sleeve of her jumper as if in slow motion. ‘You saw it too, Ann. The same thing ten times, each girl.’ She puts her right index finger on her wrist and traces an invisible line to her elbow. My heart is vibrating; I no longer feel individual beats, just a pervasive tension.
‘But. . . but that’s crazy.’
‘Really?’ She grabs my left hand and turns it so my wrist is facing upwards. We both look at my scar. Now we know how the girls were killed. It wasn’t the photographs from the crime scenes that showed us– it was difficult to make out anything in them due to all the blood– but the other pictures in the brown envelope. Small, stiff bodies, their wounds cleaned, lying on cold metal tables in forensics labs.
The killer slit the girls’ wrists.
I was six when my mum died of leukaemia. My mind doesn’t have more than a few flickering images of a bald woman lying in a bed. I remember she was always weak, jittery, and had to take a mountain of medicines. Sometimes she let me tip out the contents of her pill box and then rearrange them again. We’d pretend that I was Cinderella sorting through the peas. I nonetheless loved her very much– not for what we did together, for that wasn’t much; our world played out in a hospital room– but for the feeling she gave me. Because she was so sick that each new day seemed to her like a miracle, she treated me as if I were one too. It was very different with my father back then. Not that he was cold or unapproachable. But there was something mechanical about him, which is probably quite normal if you’ve got to function all the time. And he did. He bore the responsibility for a terminally ill wife and a little child.
But then it was just the two of us. He told me stories from the other place Mum was now– happy and healthy– a wonderful garden beneath a permanently blue sky. I tried to imagine her going for walks there amongst knee-high flowers with blooms the size of cabbages, and her having long hair again, long blonde hair that glistened in the sun. I’d never seen her like that in real life; for me she was only ever ill and bedridden. All the same, I didn’t cry for my mum. I didn’t admit to myself that I missed her, or was angry because I felt betrayed by a version of her I’d never had the chance to meet. In fact, I showed no emotion at all, until the point came when I didn’t feel anything either. Noticing that something wasn’t right with me, my father got very worried. He took me off to child psychologists and bereavement experts, and kept asking me how I felt. He wanted to know everything in great detail, wanted me to describe at length what was happening inside me, every tiny nuance. But there wasn’t anything. One day– it was summer and very hot– I fell off my bike on the gravel path behind our house. A large, sharp stone dug into my left wrist. Eva, who was there, immediately started screaming and ran off to get my dad. I just sat there, watching the blood run down my arm, marvelling at the pain I felt. After all those months I’d spent as if numbed, this was like a release. I didn’t want it to subside, the pain. I wanted to scream and cry and explode with this feeling. I twisted the stone deeper into the wound. At that moment Eva came back with Dad. . .
‘Are you out of your mind?’ I jerk my hand away. ‘My father almost lost it because he was worried his six-year-old was a suicide risk. It took him years to finally realise that it was just a stupid, one-off thing. Do you imagine he’d do something that reminded him of this? Of one of the most traumatic episodes in his life?’
‘Those are your words,’ Eva says, making a dismissive gesture. ‘All I did was point out that your wrist was cut too, once.’
‘But it wasn’t my father who did that, it was me!’
Eva doesn’t respond. Her mascara-smeared face makes me aggressive.
‘Just say something!’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’
‘I can see we’re not going to get anywhere like this. So let’s leave your dad out of it for the time being and take a neutral approach.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We’ll start at the beginning. With serial killers, the first victim often plays a crucial role. Later, the choice of victim may be random, but the killer often has a close connection or even personal relationship to the first one.’
‘You mean Larissa?’
Eva nods. ‘What do we have on her?’
Together, we sift through the documents that are explicitly about Larissa. I want to divvy them up and get cracking, but Eva begs me to make her a coffee. The wine and all the emotion have made her quite woozy. When I come back from the kitchen, she’s sitting on the floor, deep in piles of paper.
‘Right, Larissa lived with her pregnant mother, one-year-old half-brother and her stepfather in a block of flats in Hellersdorf. As you know, she’d been missing for three months when her body was found by the Weihenpfuhl. Apart from size 42 footprints, there were no leads, so the official investigation was soon called off. But the stepfather believed he had a lead. He suspected a friend of the family. . .’ She puts out her hand and wiggles her fingers. I don’t understand what she’s getting at to begin with, but then realise that I’m still holding her cup of coffee.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I say, giving it to her. ‘What sort of friend?’
Eva takes a sip. And another. I’m getting nervous. I grab the top sheet of paper from the pile in her lap and skim the statement made by Larissa’s stepfather. At a party a few months before Larissa disappeared, he caught the said friend sitting with Larissa on her bed and brushing her hair.
