Page 65 of Anatomy of a Killer
It was him, Ann. It was your father.
No. Nonononono. ‘So who kidnapped Sarah? And killed Kerstin? Nathalie!’
With a firm shove, she pushes me out of the house and closes the door.
Despair. (Ann, 11 years old)
Despair is a bad feeling. It’s like sitting on a small raft without a mast, sail or paddle, and just drifting on the sea in the middle of the night. Everything’s dark and you can’t see the shore and you don’t have any hope, because there’s no wind and so there are no waves either. All you can do is wait to see what happens, and maybe pray. But God doesn’t always hear you.
I stagger down the outdoor steps as if I’d been badly injured. My mind is wrapped in swathes of apathy. I can see Jakob rushing towards me, but it doesn’t feel real, more like a scene from a film.
‘What happened?’ he asks, though his voice barely reaches me. I want to return to the world behind my closed eyelids, want it to be intact again. I want to be five again, happy and unsuspecting. But most of all I want my asthma spray.
‘Ann?!’ Jakob again. He manoeuvres my body down the remaining steps as if it were a bulky piece of furniture. I wonder how he could have got here so quickly, but then I reckon he must have made his way to the house when I ended our conversation.
‘It’s all right,’ I croak when we’re at the bottom.
But Jakob doesn’t believe me; he can hear the whistling in my breathing, the rattling in my chest, and it sounds really horrible, critical. ‘Oh God! Sit down!’
Not wanting to, I drag myself onwards, desperate to get away from this house, away from Nathalie and Lenia and the mother and the dead cat, further and further, down the hill. Jakob is frantically prancing about beside me. I wheeze, flounder and eventually my knees give way in the middle of the path, as if someone had kicked me from behind. Jakob kneels beside me, cradling my head in his hands.
‘Asthma,’ I whimper.
‘What? Shit!’ Letting go of my head, he reaches in his trouser pocket for his mobile.
‘No!’ I punch the air: my protest against his intention to call for an ambulance. ‘Really, I’ll be better again in a sec.’
He hesitantly slips the mobile back in his pocket while I breathe against the constrictive feeling in my chest, in on one, out on two, again and again. And indeed it does get better.
‘What happened in there?’ Jakob says, pointing back to where Nathalie’s house is a mere outline, black against the moonlight.
I shake my head and put out a hand so he can help me up. ‘The air. I think the house is full of mould.’ Jakob pulls me to my feet. ‘It must have been too much for my asthma.’
‘That’s all? I heard shouting.’
‘I got a fright. She was sitting behind the house in the pitch-black, digging a grave for their dead cat.’
‘At this time?’
‘Parents do that sort of thing,’ I say, shedding a tear. ‘Once my father drove three hours from Berlin to the Baltic in the middle of the night just after we’d got back from holiday. I’d left my diary at the hotel and almost had a breakdown.’
Jakob wrings his hands impatiently. Right now he’s not interested in the diary of my fourteen-year-old self. But what happened inside Nathalie’s house.
Decisions, my Beetle. . .
The head. The heart.
I shrug. ‘I’m sorry about tonight. It was a total non-starter. The name Marcus Steinhausen seemed to ring no bells at all. And she knows the weekly market in Nestorstrasse from a visit to friends in Berlin.’ Sluggishly I get moving again, back towards the village. My jeans are soaked and sticking to my legs. I’m walking as if I were made of wood.
Jakob catches up with me. ‘So we’re no further than we were before. The only difference being that her mouldy house almost killed you. What now?’
‘No idea. I’m just completely shattered.’
There are two parts to me. One is numb, the other hurting. I stare at the ceiling, doubling up inside. Jakob’s lying next to me, snoring softly. Every time I move, I find myself sticking to him in some way. He’s not wearing a T-shirt and he’s sweating. I don’t want to feel his bare, warm skin, but the bed is too narrow to get away from him. It was his idea to spend the night in the same room. In view of the situation, it’s safer, he said, and I expect he also wanted to be there to support me, sensing I was a bit of a mess. Maybe he was hoping for more too. So I told him that the fool I’m still hung up on goes by the name of Zoe. He found that exciting, which is still the best reaction you can expect from many people to a woman loving another woman. Normally this gets me worked up. Butnormallyno longer exists; it’s an adverb from a forgotten time.
Now everything is just surreal. Supposedly my father is the ribbon murderer; it’s actually him, in all seriousness, unquestionably, it really, really, really is him. Nathalie said this to my face without leaving the slightest room for doubt.Lenia is sure. The nose, the mouth, the grey hair. She recognised him. It was him, Ann. It was your father.
Oughtn’t I to hate him now? Be livid? Feel as if my entire existence had been betrayed? Instead I feel more like I’ve got a hangover. A state that’s unpleasant but only temporary. And yet I know that Nathalie wouldn’t have had any reason to lie to me. On the other hand, I still have my doubts as to whether a profoundly traumatised child can be taken seriously as a witness. The only positive side to this is that Nathalie hasn’t gone to the police with Lenia. She hasn’t made an official statement that might incriminate my father, and, in my estimation, she won’t for the time being. She just wants some peace for her daughter. My head is buzzing; I need some peace and quiet too. Finding a position in which I can feel as little as possible of Jakob’s body despite the lack of space, I try to get some sleep. In my dream my father is chasing Larissa Meller through the woods. I’m there too, helping him.
