ONE EYE ON THE DARKNESS Copyright Ivan Latham 2016
When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide
Don't get too close
It's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide
-- Imagine Dragons
Chapter One
The devil is real. The world denies this glibly, but it is a wary disbelief, accompanied by a nervous laugh and a glance into the dark.
-- Fr. Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
They say that bad things happen in threes. Maybe this was the reason why the night they found the body behind Club Charlotte, Frieda's key snapped in the lock of her mailbox, moments before she discovered the poltergeist had been up to its old tricks again.
She picked up the crucifix from the spot behind the front door where it had been flung. The perpetrator was getting more and more insistent. She had nailed the cross firmly to the wall this time, but it had clearly been removed as easily as if she had merely secured it with sticking tape, leaving three neat round holes in the white wall. The nails were coated with a light dusting of plaster. But more disturbing were the droplets of what looked like blood oozing from the brazen Christ figure itself. That was if she could trust her senses. Seeing, even feeling, touching, tasting meant nothing in terms of proving an objective reality. She had learned this all too well the last few weeks. Hallucinations and the solid security of the here and now overlapped and deceived each other. That was the truth of it.
She blinked. The bleeding had disappeared, confirming the nonsense that had been made of her life by her uninvited and unseen guest.
Frieda laid the crucifix down on a cupboard in the hallway. Several pots and pans cluttered the doorway to the kitchen, and a glance into the living room told her that her sofa had shifted around a metre or so out from the wall.
Her visitor was certainly becoming demonstrably more physical. At the beginning, it had been content simply to slide a piece of cutlery a few centimetres across her kitchen worktop. But in the last few days, the activity had intensified. She could only hazard a guess as to why.
Frieda stacked the saucepans into the cupboard where they belonged and shoved the sofa back into place before wearily collapsing onto it with a yawn, grinding the heels of her palms into her gritty eyes. She thought how the poltergeist's antics were more annoying than they were eerie. Certainly not eerie enough to rob her of sleep.
Or so she thought. As she opened her eyes and blinked them back into focus, the unexpected script scrawled on the ceiling in spidery trails of what looked like black marker pen floated into clarity, like the bottom of a pond once the ripples have cleared.
Three words. Only three, and seemingly random, arbitrary, but enough to chill her bones:
"Eins Zwei Drei.'
She had only herself to blame, of course. Or rather, the 'gift' that she possessed. But if it were a gift, then it was in the German sense of that word - 'poison.' It certainly felt less like a present than a pollutant, an infection for which there was no cure.
Her parish priest, confessor and friend, Father Carsten Derrick had insisted that God had bestowed her particular ability upon her, although he had failed to explain why the Almighty would do so in contravention of Church teaching. Maybe God was a God of surprises after all, just as the current Pope had claimed.
Either way, Frieda was at least grateful for Father Derrick's quiet support. She could seek sanctuary with him and share his confidence without fear of recrimination or rebuke.
What Frieda's reality boiled down to had already been snapped up by Hollywood and become a cliche. She saw dead people. Well, no, she didn't. Not exactly. It was less overt than that. Maybe that was why Father Derrick had been prepared to bend the rules in her favour. It was necromancy by proxy. Not so much an ability to see or communicate with phantoms, as it was to pick up on the echo of a life that had been shot into eternity. She was cursed to hear the legacy of the report. A reverberation that might be infused with a sense of pain or peril that Frieda could empathise with, tune into. She did not so much see dead people as hear their last pitiful Auf Wiedersehen.
And it was this same ability that had resulted in her current domestic crisis. After vowing to keep her private and professional life separate, and succeeding for several years, a few weeks ago she had in a very real way brought her work home with her.
Frieda could still recall the sense of loneliness she had felt at the murder scene. Feel it so deeply that it left her lachrymose and overwhelmed her with melancholy. The cellar lit by cold fluorescence that revealed the colder intent of a sadist who had chained and tortured his victim over a period of several days and daubed the walls in their bodily fluids. That night she had not only heard the sickening echo of a soul rent prematurely from life, she had somehow acted as a conductor for it to earth through her and follow her back to her small Muenster apartment.
That night she had sensed an emptiness so intolerable in its totality that it drained her. Maybe that is how the unfortunate soul had become attached to her. An empathy that had created a vacuum so great that the restless spirit had been irresistibly sucked into it. And now it was desperately seeking to communicate with her, like an autistic child incapable of forming its thoughts and feelings coherently, and so having to resort to clumsy actions in its frustration.
Frieda reconsidered as she lay staring upwards at the scrawl on her ceiling. The attempts to communicate, however annoying, however unsettling, were fundamentally pitiable. The Catholic church deemed that those human souls who lingered on the mortal plane were trapped in a purgatorial state, paying their dues but bound to the earth by some unfinished business. In the case of the unfortunate victim in the cellar, that business might be nothing more or less than a quest for justice. The perpetrator was still at large. The police had sought Frieda's help in the hope of her interpreting some psychic remnant at the scene to aid their search. But all that had prevailed upon her senses had been that gaping maw of loss and emptiness. As if it had so consumed the victim that he could entertain no other notion. Like a radio turned up at full volume that drowns out any other sound.
Almost randomly, Frieda recalled a tree from her childhood. The six metre monstrosity that had stood in a neighbouring garden, just across the street from her parents' house in the small Westfalian village of Ottmarsbocholt. To this day she had seen no other tree like it. It's boughs had drooped, but with none of the grace of a willow. They just hung without any sense of form or symmetry, their covering of strange deep purple leaves suggesting a disturbing air of despair and hopelessness. It represented in physical form just what Frieda had felt in that cellar. And to some degree the roots were now a part of her. She had unwittingly established some kind of organic connection, and as much as Frieda pitied the entity - she could not allow herself to call it a soul, to personify it - it troubled her.
Emotional and physical exhaustion finally overwhelmed her thoughts, and Frieda fell into a deep and, mercifully, dreamless sleep.
-- Fr. Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
They say that bad things happen in threes. Maybe this was the reason why the night they found the body behind Club Charlotte, Frieda's key snapped in the lock of her mailbox, moments before she discovered the poltergeist had been up to its old tricks again.
She picked up the crucifix from the spot behind the front door where it had been flung. The perpetrator was getting more and more insistent. She had nailed the cross firmly to the wall this time, but it had clearly been removed as easily as if she had merely secured it with sticking tape, leaving three neat round holes in the white wall. The nails were coated with a light dusting of plaster. But more disturbing were the droplets of what looked like blood oozing from the brazen Christ figure itself. That was if she could trust her senses. Seeing, even feeling, touching, tasting meant nothing in terms of proving an objective reality. She had learned this all too well the last few weeks. Hallucinations and the solid security of the here and now overlapped and deceived each other. That was the truth of it.
She blinked. The bleeding had disappeared, confirming the nonsense that had been made of her life by her uninvited and unseen guest.
Frieda laid the crucifix down on a cupboard in the hallway. Several pots and pans cluttered the doorway to the kitchen, and a glance into the living room told her that her sofa had shifted around a metre or so out from the wall.
Her visitor was certainly becoming demonstrably more physical. At the beginning, it had been content simply to slide a piece of cutlery a few centimetres across her kitchen worktop. But in the last few days, the activity had intensified. She could only hazard a guess as to why.
Frieda stacked the saucepans into the cupboard where they belonged and shoved the sofa back into place before wearily collapsing onto it with a yawn, grinding the heels of her palms into her gritty eyes. She thought how the poltergeist's antics were more annoying than they were eerie. Certainly not eerie enough to rob her of sleep.
Or so she thought. As she opened her eyes and blinked them back into focus, the unexpected script scrawled on the ceiling in spidery trails of what looked like black marker pen floated into clarity, like the bottom of a pond once the ripples have cleared.
Three words. Only three, and seemingly random, arbitrary, but enough to chill her bones:
"Eins Zwei Drei.'
She had only herself to blame, of course. Or rather, the 'gift' that she possessed. But if it were a gift, then it was in the German sense of that word - 'poison.' It certainly felt less like a present than a pollutant, an infection for which there was no cure.
Her parish priest, confessor and friend, Father Carsten Derrick had insisted that God had bestowed her particular ability upon her, although he had failed to explain why the Almighty would do so in contravention of Church teaching. Maybe God was a God of surprises after all, just as the current Pope had claimed.
Either way, Frieda was at least grateful for Father Derrick's quiet support. She could seek sanctuary with him and share his confidence without fear of recrimination or rebuke.
What Frieda's reality boiled down to had already been snapped up by Hollywood and become a cliche. She saw dead people. Well, no, she didn't. Not exactly. It was less overt than that. Maybe that was why Father Derrick had been prepared to bend the rules in her favour. It was necromancy by proxy. Not so much an ability to see or communicate with phantoms, as it was to pick up on the echo of a life that had been shot into eternity. She was cursed to hear the legacy of the report. A reverberation that might be infused with a sense of pain or peril that Frieda could empathise with, tune into. She did not so much see dead people as hear their last pitiful Auf Wiedersehen.
And it was this same ability that had resulted in her current domestic crisis. After vowing to keep her private and professional life separate, and succeeding for several years, a few weeks ago she had in a very real way brought her work home with her.
Frieda could still recall the sense of loneliness she had felt at the murder scene. Feel it so deeply that it left her lachrymose and overwhelmed her with melancholy. The cellar lit by cold fluorescence that revealed the colder intent of a sadist who had chained and tortured his victim over a period of several days and daubed the walls in their bodily fluids. That night she had not only heard the sickening echo of a soul rent prematurely from life, she had somehow acted as a conductor for it to earth through her and follow her back to her small Muenster apartment.
That night she had sensed an emptiness so intolerable in its totality that it drained her. Maybe that is how the unfortunate soul had become attached to her. An empathy that had created a vacuum so great that the restless spirit had been irresistibly sucked into it. And now it was desperately seeking to communicate with her, like an autistic child incapable of forming its thoughts and feelings coherently, and so having to resort to clumsy actions in its frustration.
Frieda reconsidered as she lay staring upwards at the scrawl on her ceiling. The attempts to communicate, however annoying, however unsettling, were fundamentally pitiable. The Catholic church deemed that those human souls who lingered on the mortal plane were trapped in a purgatorial state, paying their dues but bound to the earth by some unfinished business. In the case of the unfortunate victim in the cellar, that business might be nothing more or less than a quest for justice. The perpetrator was still at large. The police had sought Frieda's help in the hope of her interpreting some psychic remnant at the scene to aid their search. But all that had prevailed upon her senses had been that gaping maw of loss and emptiness. As if it had so consumed the victim that he could entertain no other notion. Like a radio turned up at full volume that drowns out any other sound.
Almost randomly, Frieda recalled a tree from her childhood. The six metre monstrosity that had stood in a neighbouring garden, just across the street from her parents' house in the small Westfalian village of Ottmarsbocholt. To this day she had seen no other tree like it. It's boughs had drooped, but with none of the grace of a willow. They just hung without any sense of form or symmetry, their covering of strange deep purple leaves suggesting a disturbing air of despair and hopelessness. It represented in physical form just what Frieda had felt in that cellar. And to some degree the roots were now a part of her. She had unwittingly established some kind of organic connection, and as much as Frieda pitied the entity - she could not allow herself to call it a soul, to personify it - it troubled her.
Emotional and physical exhaustion finally overwhelmed her thoughts, and Frieda fell into a deep and, mercifully, dreamless sleep.
Chapter Two
"I wanted to call to check you are okay after last night. I mean, you never get used to seeing that kind of shit."
There was a deep sigh on the end of the phone. "I should know. I've had to wallow in it for the last twenty years."
Frieda stifled a yawn as she combed her fingers through her tangle of auburn hair. She hadn't slept on the couch in ages. Now she knew why. She might as well have not slept at all.
"What time is it?" she asked blearily.
"A little after eight."
"And you want to know if I've had any revelations since I got home."
She smiled as the seasoned Kriminalpolizei detective, Tobias Schluter let out a snort. "Is that your psychic powers talking, Frau Lockner, or am I just so transparent?"
"Mm, no. And yes," chuckled Frieda. But her mirth was short lived as the image of the young girl's contorted body lying in the rubbish-filled alleyway behind Club Charlotte forced its way through her drowsiness.
"Nothing more," she said quietly, squeezing her eyes shut, but failing to diminish the power of the mutilated girl's staring eyes and bare-toothed grimace that was seared into her mind. "I'm sorry, Kriminalkommisar."
He was right. Nothing could ever inure a sane human being to that sort of horror.
What had Father Derrick once reminded her? That when Satan fell, he took a third of the host of heaven with him, so we should hardly be surprised if we bump into some of his infernal minions now and again. Frieda could readily believe that one such diabolical entity had been the artist of that horrific scene.
Schluter sighed, his disappointment evident.
"Do you think we are dealing with the same culprit?" asked Frieda.
"That's what I was hoping you might help shed some light on, Frau Lockner. At first glance, I'd say no. Our cellar boy was strung up for a week before he died, as you're aware. The killer sliced chunks off him throughout before putting the poor bastard out of his misery. Meanwhile, our girl last night was strangled and then apparently cut up postmortem by the murderer."
Frieda closed her eyes and mentally transported herself back to the rear of Club Charlotte. Once more she could hear the distant throb of the dance music pulsating in the chilly air. Had the nauseating smell of rotten food and stale urine threatening to make her heave all the more as she stood beside the lifeless body lit up by the cold white glare of crime scene lamps.
The girl was no older than nineteen, maybe twenty. Her body was twisted, asymmetric; the legs wrenched at impossible angles as though the killer had twisted them in the sockets like the limbs of a doll. One arm was flung outwards at ninety degrees, one finger pointing to the other arm that had been crudely severed and discarded about two metres from the rest of the naked corpse.
Meanwhile those eyes, and that horrific grin of exquisite terror were framed by blood-matted dark hair that had been peeled back from the skull, the scalp flayed jaggedly from the white bone with all the precision of a wolf tearing at prey.
The first impressions hit Frieda in the gut as she revisited the scene. But her gift was to move beyond them. What could she hear above the tumult of such vivid visceral horror?
Pain, despair, and loss, always loss. These were always the prominent echoes, deafening at times, but usually not so that other imprints could not be recognised in the background static caused by the snuffing out of an existence. As Frieda recollected that moment, she tried once more to make sense of it, identify any kind of coherent signature within the melee of confusion.
Happiness? Frieda cocked her head slightly like a spaniel alerted to a faint noise. She isolated it, homed in on the faint trace. Yes, she had not been mistaken. A residual contentment was coming through. And satisfaction. Sexual? Perhaps, but she could not be sure. And encompassing these echoes like a shell, a further ripple. Recognition, knowledge, affiliation. An unmistakeable awareness that could only mean one thing in Frieda's experience.
"There is something," she breathed into the telephone receiver.
"Yes?"
Frieda opened her eyes, which shone with conviction. "I didn't pick up on it at the time," she said. "But I think the girl knew her killer."
"Really knew? Casual acquaintance? What?" snapped Schluter.
Frieda frowned. "More than casual. There's a depth, an attachment, at least on the victim's part. The trace is too strong."
"Might she have been thinking of some other person at the time of her death?" Schluter asked dubiously. "Current boyfriend or even an ex-lover she's yearning for at the time of crisis?"
Frieda shook her head as the echoes became deafening. "No. There's betrayal. A strong sense of betrayal. She's confused, angry, disbelieving. She can't understand why he's doing this."
Schluter was silent for a second as Frieda emerged from her analysis, one by one mentally turning down the volume knobs of the various psychic noises until all fell silent and she was left with just the sound of her own breathing.
"All right, Frau Lockner," Schluter sighed. "It's textbook. Victim knows the killer. Never a surprise. We're doing the usual round of exes, friends of friends, family members."
He paused. "But why only pick this up now, Frieda?" he enquired curiously. "Why not last night at the scene?"
Frieda shook her head, rubbing her eyes till they were red. She felt so tired.
"It's not an exact science, Inspector," she admitted. "Not science at all in fact. Sometimes the scene is just too intense. It's a maelstrom of emotions all bombarding me at once. Sometimes only the benefit of distance can help me resolve all the various pieces of the jigsaw and see how they fit."
She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle another yawn then said, "I just hope it's of help."
"Always, Frieda," came the police officer's ready reassurance. "Always. Now go back to bed."
But although she was bone-weary and took Schluter's advice, Frieda could not sleep. She tossed and turned for an hour before finally giving up. She took a shower, threw on a pair of jeans, t-shirt and a comfortable cardigan, wove her hair into her trademark single braid and after a glance in the hallway mirror decided she looked much more presentable. Other than for the dark circles under her eyes, she looked close to human.
Had she blinked she would have missed the movement behind her. Her heart began to race as she stared at the reflection of her bedroom, and the open doorway that the almost imperceptible shadow had flit across. Might her eyes have been playing tricks? Given her weariness that was not unlikely. But with all that had been happening the last few weeks, the likeliest explanation was not a rational one.
She turned slowly and stared into the room. She sidestepped a little so that her bed came into view. Just fifteen minutes earlier she had left it unmade, the duvet scrunched up in a ball as it always was, the pillows askew and dented where her head had lain on the soft feathers of their interior. But now the covers were smooth and flat, the pillows plumped, the bed made with all the professionalism of a five-star hotel's room service.
Frieda swallowed, her lips and throat suddenly parched. She had thought that the poltergeist could not disturb her, but this unexpected helpfulness was something other than annoying, and in every way more unnerving than the attack on the crucifix, or the rearrangement of kitchen utensils. This felt more invasive. It was an intrusion upon the place where she was most vulnerable, the room where for several hours each night she lay unconscious, undefended. The making of the bed was less a sign of helpfulness, than a reminder from the entity that it could reach her anywhere, not least where she was most unguarded. It felt like a threat.
She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She told herself that she was overreacting, hyping a mischievous prank into something more. In the long history of the poltergeist phenomenon, the recorded incidents of direct physical assault could be counted on one hand. The rarity should have consoled her. But the fact that there were recorded exceptions loomed larger in her mind than the benign majority.
She grabbed her coat from the peg in the hallway, and shoved her feet into some flat shoes. She needed to get out. She needed some air.
There was a deep sigh on the end of the phone. "I should know. I've had to wallow in it for the last twenty years."
Frieda stifled a yawn as she combed her fingers through her tangle of auburn hair. She hadn't slept on the couch in ages. Now she knew why. She might as well have not slept at all.
"What time is it?" she asked blearily.
"A little after eight."
"And you want to know if I've had any revelations since I got home."
She smiled as the seasoned Kriminalpolizei detective, Tobias Schluter let out a snort. "Is that your psychic powers talking, Frau Lockner, or am I just so transparent?"
"Mm, no. And yes," chuckled Frieda. But her mirth was short lived as the image of the young girl's contorted body lying in the rubbish-filled alleyway behind Club Charlotte forced its way through her drowsiness.
"Nothing more," she said quietly, squeezing her eyes shut, but failing to diminish the power of the mutilated girl's staring eyes and bare-toothed grimace that was seared into her mind. "I'm sorry, Kriminalkommisar."
He was right. Nothing could ever inure a sane human being to that sort of horror.
What had Father Derrick once reminded her? That when Satan fell, he took a third of the host of heaven with him, so we should hardly be surprised if we bump into some of his infernal minions now and again. Frieda could readily believe that one such diabolical entity had been the artist of that horrific scene.
Schluter sighed, his disappointment evident.
"Do you think we are dealing with the same culprit?" asked Frieda.
"That's what I was hoping you might help shed some light on, Frau Lockner. At first glance, I'd say no. Our cellar boy was strung up for a week before he died, as you're aware. The killer sliced chunks off him throughout before putting the poor bastard out of his misery. Meanwhile, our girl last night was strangled and then apparently cut up postmortem by the murderer."
Frieda closed her eyes and mentally transported herself back to the rear of Club Charlotte. Once more she could hear the distant throb of the dance music pulsating in the chilly air. Had the nauseating smell of rotten food and stale urine threatening to make her heave all the more as she stood beside the lifeless body lit up by the cold white glare of crime scene lamps.
The girl was no older than nineteen, maybe twenty. Her body was twisted, asymmetric; the legs wrenched at impossible angles as though the killer had twisted them in the sockets like the limbs of a doll. One arm was flung outwards at ninety degrees, one finger pointing to the other arm that had been crudely severed and discarded about two metres from the rest of the naked corpse.
Meanwhile those eyes, and that horrific grin of exquisite terror were framed by blood-matted dark hair that had been peeled back from the skull, the scalp flayed jaggedly from the white bone with all the precision of a wolf tearing at prey.
The first impressions hit Frieda in the gut as she revisited the scene. But her gift was to move beyond them. What could she hear above the tumult of such vivid visceral horror?
Pain, despair, and loss, always loss. These were always the prominent echoes, deafening at times, but usually not so that other imprints could not be recognised in the background static caused by the snuffing out of an existence. As Frieda recollected that moment, she tried once more to make sense of it, identify any kind of coherent signature within the melee of confusion.
Happiness? Frieda cocked her head slightly like a spaniel alerted to a faint noise. She isolated it, homed in on the faint trace. Yes, she had not been mistaken. A residual contentment was coming through. And satisfaction. Sexual? Perhaps, but she could not be sure. And encompassing these echoes like a shell, a further ripple. Recognition, knowledge, affiliation. An unmistakeable awareness that could only mean one thing in Frieda's experience.
"There is something," she breathed into the telephone receiver.
"Yes?"
Frieda opened her eyes, which shone with conviction. "I didn't pick up on it at the time," she said. "But I think the girl knew her killer."
"Really knew? Casual acquaintance? What?" snapped Schluter.
Frieda frowned. "More than casual. There's a depth, an attachment, at least on the victim's part. The trace is too strong."
"Might she have been thinking of some other person at the time of her death?" Schluter asked dubiously. "Current boyfriend or even an ex-lover she's yearning for at the time of crisis?"
Frieda shook her head as the echoes became deafening. "No. There's betrayal. A strong sense of betrayal. She's confused, angry, disbelieving. She can't understand why he's doing this."
Schluter was silent for a second as Frieda emerged from her analysis, one by one mentally turning down the volume knobs of the various psychic noises until all fell silent and she was left with just the sound of her own breathing.
"All right, Frau Lockner," Schluter sighed. "It's textbook. Victim knows the killer. Never a surprise. We're doing the usual round of exes, friends of friends, family members."
He paused. "But why only pick this up now, Frieda?" he enquired curiously. "Why not last night at the scene?"
Frieda shook her head, rubbing her eyes till they were red. She felt so tired.
"It's not an exact science, Inspector," she admitted. "Not science at all in fact. Sometimes the scene is just too intense. It's a maelstrom of emotions all bombarding me at once. Sometimes only the benefit of distance can help me resolve all the various pieces of the jigsaw and see how they fit."
She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle another yawn then said, "I just hope it's of help."
"Always, Frieda," came the police officer's ready reassurance. "Always. Now go back to bed."
But although she was bone-weary and took Schluter's advice, Frieda could not sleep. She tossed and turned for an hour before finally giving up. She took a shower, threw on a pair of jeans, t-shirt and a comfortable cardigan, wove her hair into her trademark single braid and after a glance in the hallway mirror decided she looked much more presentable. Other than for the dark circles under her eyes, she looked close to human.
Had she blinked she would have missed the movement behind her. Her heart began to race as she stared at the reflection of her bedroom, and the open doorway that the almost imperceptible shadow had flit across. Might her eyes have been playing tricks? Given her weariness that was not unlikely. But with all that had been happening the last few weeks, the likeliest explanation was not a rational one.
She turned slowly and stared into the room. She sidestepped a little so that her bed came into view. Just fifteen minutes earlier she had left it unmade, the duvet scrunched up in a ball as it always was, the pillows askew and dented where her head had lain on the soft feathers of their interior. But now the covers were smooth and flat, the pillows plumped, the bed made with all the professionalism of a five-star hotel's room service.
Frieda swallowed, her lips and throat suddenly parched. She had thought that the poltergeist could not disturb her, but this unexpected helpfulness was something other than annoying, and in every way more unnerving than the attack on the crucifix, or the rearrangement of kitchen utensils. This felt more invasive. It was an intrusion upon the place where she was most vulnerable, the room where for several hours each night she lay unconscious, undefended. The making of the bed was less a sign of helpfulness, than a reminder from the entity that it could reach her anywhere, not least where she was most unguarded. It felt like a threat.
She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She told herself that she was overreacting, hyping a mischievous prank into something more. In the long history of the poltergeist phenomenon, the recorded incidents of direct physical assault could be counted on one hand. The rarity should have consoled her. But the fact that there were recorded exceptions loomed larger in her mind than the benign majority.
She grabbed her coat from the peg in the hallway, and shoved her feet into some flat shoes. She needed to get out. She needed some air.
Chapter Three
The devil's work is largely implicit. He operates under cover and in the shadows. A hellish agent provocateur, whispering deviance into the ears of men, luring them into sin.
-- Fr. Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
It was a little after nine and the rush hour traffic had started to thin when Frieda left her apartment on Weseler Strasse. She filled up her small Fiat at the nearby Westfalen tankstelle, and although it was far too early grabbed a burger and fries from the drive-through Burgerking next door to the gas station. Then she took the A43 autobahn and headed out of the city.
The road ahead was clear. Most of the traffic was on the opposite carriageway, heading into Münster at this start of another typical work day. She pressed her foot to the accelerator and the Fiat growled reluctantly at her eagerness to leave the city behind.
Frieda was a child of the German countryside, having been raised among the farms, forests and fields of rural Nordrhein-Westfalen. In her teens she had grown to hate the silence and solitude, and had yearned for the hustle and bustle and excitement of the city. University had beckoned the bright Gymnasium student, and this had been just the excuse she had needed to make her escape. She had found an affordable flatshare, and for a time the usual round of gigs and parties that comprise student life outside the lecture halls had given her a much-needed shot of excitement. But then it all seemed to change overnight.
One night, or to be more precise, one very early morning she and a group of friends had been heading home after a particularly protracted bar crawl. The streets were teeming with fellow revellers pouring out of clubs and takeaways, making it seem more like Saturday afternoon than early Sunday morning. Police officers were always a regular feature to keep the rowdiness in check, so at first Frieda and her friends thought little of the flashing police car lights outside the theatre on the corner of Neubruckenstrasse. It was a common enough sight.
It was only when they were within several metres of the scene that it became clear that the police presence signified something more serious than just the usual drunken misbehaviour. A cordon had been set up, and a uniformed officer shepherded them around the area. By the pulsing blue lights of the police car, a body could be seen lying inert beneath a white sheet on the blood-spattered pavement.
And then it had happened for the first time.
Frieda had stumbled as what felt like a huge weight, an emotional boulder, unexpectedly crashed down onto her. More than that, the burden seemed to penetrate her and explode inside her chest, her stomach her head. Billows of rage, confusion and ultimately hysteria flooded her, deluged her self-control and swamped her consciousness. She had heard a piercing shriek that froze her blood. She only discovered later that it had emerged from her own throat.
That was how her gift, her curse, had manifested itself. The echo of the deceased young theatre-goer, stabbed in the street for a few Euros and his iPhone, whose final moments had been somehow recorded in the fabric of his surroundings, had hit her in all its raw power, literally knocking her from her feet. In the years since, she had learned to brace herself against this initial blow, and to filter the emotional onslaught. But back then she'd had neither the understanding nor the emotional strength to do this. The episode had simply hospitalised her.
It was as a result of that first incident that she had encountered Schluter and Fr Derrick. The latter, as chaplain at the St Franziskus Krankenhaus on Hohenzollernring, had been interested in her spiritual welfare; while Schluter had been understandably keen to interview the crazy girl who had screamed disjointed threats and accusations into the air at a murder scene.
She had been discharged from the hospital after a week, and a battery of tests that confirmed her excellent health and state of mind. But that first terrifying experience took its toll and Frieda had slipped into a morass of anxiety and depression. Her studies suffered, one by one her friends stopped calling, and eventually only the peace and quiet of the countryside she had once so despised could offer her soul the balm it required. She had returned to the family home and gradually recovered.
Her mother had arranged a twenty-four session round of therapy, stretching over the course of a year, with a local and respected psychologist. But although Dr Bloemberg was pleasant enough, and cordial, and made her feel at ease, his psycho-babble ultimately meant and achieved little. His insistence that she summarise her life pictorially -- seated at a desk in one corner of his consulting room with wax crayons and paper like a child in Kindergarten -- seemed particularly pointless.
But Frieda had played along. Mostly she would just zone out during each fortnightly appointment, giving the appropriate responses to the doctor's satisfaction. And afterwards she would cycle off into the woods and bask in their restfulness.
Of course nature was cruel. The survival of the fittest and the law of tooth and claw meant that in the countryside death was all around her. The natural world was no idyllic paradise. In all truth, the peace she enjoyed there was a sham, a facade, a blanket thrown over reality that obscured it from her senses. If there was any place redolent with death, it was there. It should have screamed at her, made her recoil. But she heard nothing, for it was Frieda's curse to hear only the human tragedy. She did not know if this revealed more about her, or the essence of man in general. That of all creatures he alone had been made a living soul, and thus he alone created ripples in reality when that soul was ripped from the earth.
And as a result, the city she had craved had become to her a spiritual megaphone, a cacophany. This conglomeration of human beings did not just disturb the every day peace with their loud music, loud cars, loud arguments. For Frieda, the disturbance was greatest when the music and arguments stopped. When the body fell silent, the soul screamed, and no matter how hard she stopped her ears, Frieda heard every sickening decibel of that departure. And in a city of a quarter million souls, the noise never ceased.
She had occasionally wondered why she could not share in the joy of birth, of newborn souls gurgling with delight in the arms of devoted parents. But she was deaf to the delirium of life's beginning. Again it spoke to her that the passing of a soul is the greatest horror in the universe. Even in the presence of those who died in their beds and not at the hands of a psychopath, the fear cut so deeply into the ether that it tore into Frieda too. It was no mere scratch. It dug in, sliced the soul and gouged out hope.
Frieda exited the autobahn and took the road towards the village of Senden, speeding past the familiar forests of her childhood. From Senden it was only a few kilometres farther on to Ottmarsbocholt and the family home, but this was not her destination today.
Instead she turned towards Venner Moor, a popular local destination for dog-walkers and amateur naturalists. Frieda parked her Fiat on the rough patch of ground beside the beauty spot and set off through the trees. She felt raw, worn out somehow, reminiscent of the effects of that night in Neubruckenstrasse ten years before.
She breathed in the sweet damp smell of the trees and earth that surrounded her, cocooned her. For once there was no background noise, no interference. Just blissful calm.
Had Frieda known the horrors that were to come, she may have thought twice about leaving that place of sanctuary
-- Fr. Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
It was a little after nine and the rush hour traffic had started to thin when Frieda left her apartment on Weseler Strasse. She filled up her small Fiat at the nearby Westfalen tankstelle, and although it was far too early grabbed a burger and fries from the drive-through Burgerking next door to the gas station. Then she took the A43 autobahn and headed out of the city.
The road ahead was clear. Most of the traffic was on the opposite carriageway, heading into Münster at this start of another typical work day. She pressed her foot to the accelerator and the Fiat growled reluctantly at her eagerness to leave the city behind.
Frieda was a child of the German countryside, having been raised among the farms, forests and fields of rural Nordrhein-Westfalen. In her teens she had grown to hate the silence and solitude, and had yearned for the hustle and bustle and excitement of the city. University had beckoned the bright Gymnasium student, and this had been just the excuse she had needed to make her escape. She had found an affordable flatshare, and for a time the usual round of gigs and parties that comprise student life outside the lecture halls had given her a much-needed shot of excitement. But then it all seemed to change overnight.
One night, or to be more precise, one very early morning she and a group of friends had been heading home after a particularly protracted bar crawl. The streets were teeming with fellow revellers pouring out of clubs and takeaways, making it seem more like Saturday afternoon than early Sunday morning. Police officers were always a regular feature to keep the rowdiness in check, so at first Frieda and her friends thought little of the flashing police car lights outside the theatre on the corner of Neubruckenstrasse. It was a common enough sight.
It was only when they were within several metres of the scene that it became clear that the police presence signified something more serious than just the usual drunken misbehaviour. A cordon had been set up, and a uniformed officer shepherded them around the area. By the pulsing blue lights of the police car, a body could be seen lying inert beneath a white sheet on the blood-spattered pavement.
And then it had happened for the first time.
Frieda had stumbled as what felt like a huge weight, an emotional boulder, unexpectedly crashed down onto her. More than that, the burden seemed to penetrate her and explode inside her chest, her stomach her head. Billows of rage, confusion and ultimately hysteria flooded her, deluged her self-control and swamped her consciousness. She had heard a piercing shriek that froze her blood. She only discovered later that it had emerged from her own throat.
That was how her gift, her curse, had manifested itself. The echo of the deceased young theatre-goer, stabbed in the street for a few Euros and his iPhone, whose final moments had been somehow recorded in the fabric of his surroundings, had hit her in all its raw power, literally knocking her from her feet. In the years since, she had learned to brace herself against this initial blow, and to filter the emotional onslaught. But back then she'd had neither the understanding nor the emotional strength to do this. The episode had simply hospitalised her.
It was as a result of that first incident that she had encountered Schluter and Fr Derrick. The latter, as chaplain at the St Franziskus Krankenhaus on Hohenzollernring, had been interested in her spiritual welfare; while Schluter had been understandably keen to interview the crazy girl who had screamed disjointed threats and accusations into the air at a murder scene.
She had been discharged from the hospital after a week, and a battery of tests that confirmed her excellent health and state of mind. But that first terrifying experience took its toll and Frieda had slipped into a morass of anxiety and depression. Her studies suffered, one by one her friends stopped calling, and eventually only the peace and quiet of the countryside she had once so despised could offer her soul the balm it required. She had returned to the family home and gradually recovered.
Her mother had arranged a twenty-four session round of therapy, stretching over the course of a year, with a local and respected psychologist. But although Dr Bloemberg was pleasant enough, and cordial, and made her feel at ease, his psycho-babble ultimately meant and achieved little. His insistence that she summarise her life pictorially -- seated at a desk in one corner of his consulting room with wax crayons and paper like a child in Kindergarten -- seemed particularly pointless.
But Frieda had played along. Mostly she would just zone out during each fortnightly appointment, giving the appropriate responses to the doctor's satisfaction. And afterwards she would cycle off into the woods and bask in their restfulness.
Of course nature was cruel. The survival of the fittest and the law of tooth and claw meant that in the countryside death was all around her. The natural world was no idyllic paradise. In all truth, the peace she enjoyed there was a sham, a facade, a blanket thrown over reality that obscured it from her senses. If there was any place redolent with death, it was there. It should have screamed at her, made her recoil. But she heard nothing, for it was Frieda's curse to hear only the human tragedy. She did not know if this revealed more about her, or the essence of man in general. That of all creatures he alone had been made a living soul, and thus he alone created ripples in reality when that soul was ripped from the earth.
And as a result, the city she had craved had become to her a spiritual megaphone, a cacophany. This conglomeration of human beings did not just disturb the every day peace with their loud music, loud cars, loud arguments. For Frieda, the disturbance was greatest when the music and arguments stopped. When the body fell silent, the soul screamed, and no matter how hard she stopped her ears, Frieda heard every sickening decibel of that departure. And in a city of a quarter million souls, the noise never ceased.
She had occasionally wondered why she could not share in the joy of birth, of newborn souls gurgling with delight in the arms of devoted parents. But she was deaf to the delirium of life's beginning. Again it spoke to her that the passing of a soul is the greatest horror in the universe. Even in the presence of those who died in their beds and not at the hands of a psychopath, the fear cut so deeply into the ether that it tore into Frieda too. It was no mere scratch. It dug in, sliced the soul and gouged out hope.
Frieda exited the autobahn and took the road towards the village of Senden, speeding past the familiar forests of her childhood. From Senden it was only a few kilometres farther on to Ottmarsbocholt and the family home, but this was not her destination today.
Instead she turned towards Venner Moor, a popular local destination for dog-walkers and amateur naturalists. Frieda parked her Fiat on the rough patch of ground beside the beauty spot and set off through the trees. She felt raw, worn out somehow, reminiscent of the effects of that night in Neubruckenstrasse ten years before.
She breathed in the sweet damp smell of the trees and earth that surrounded her, cocooned her. For once there was no background noise, no interference. Just blissful calm.
Had Frieda known the horrors that were to come, she may have thought twice about leaving that place of sanctuary
Chapter Four
The Stick Man smiled as she screamed. His sense of schadenfreude plummeted untold depths. His delight was suffering, to watch it, to inflict it. She had been so naive to imagine that he sought some fleeting act of satisfaction with her. He sneered inwardly at the thought. That would make him no better than an animal. His motives were far more sophisticated. He desired dissolution not consummation.
"Please," she wept, trembling like the last leaf on a storm whipped tree as she hung from the pipe to which her wrists were bound. She opened her mouth to repeat her plea but it was choked by a heavy sob.
He said nothing. Just watched her, unblinking. And smiled again.
She was his salvation, his penance for the mistake of Club Charlotte. That girl had surprised him more than he had anticipated. He had badly misjudged her reaction and failed his vocation. He had hurriedly sought to make an offering of sorts, but it had been less than efficacious. But now, here, he had been provided with the lamb in the thicket. His lord had surely provided. And now the acceptable sacrifice could be made by way of atonement.
He turned, his head brushing the single naked lightbulb that lit up the cellar in a pale and sickly yellow glow. But it was enough for him to see his instruments by.
But what to choose. What would be most pleasing to his master? He tilted his head as if he had heard an answer and then selected a simple hacksaw. He nodded appreciatively. The more prolonged the offering, the greater the pleasure.
Brandishing the tool, he turned. The girl's eyes widened in horror as her captor slowly approached and stooped to grab one of her feet. She kicked desperately, evading his grasp for a few seconds, but merely delaying the inevitable.
He gripped both her ankles in the crook of his arm like a vice and the girl's breathing became faster, panicked.
"No!" she managed to scream hoarsely as he applied the edge of the blade to one of her toes. "Please, no, no, no!"
But The Stick Man just smiled again and set to work.
"Please," she wept, trembling like the last leaf on a storm whipped tree as she hung from the pipe to which her wrists were bound. She opened her mouth to repeat her plea but it was choked by a heavy sob.
He said nothing. Just watched her, unblinking. And smiled again.
She was his salvation, his penance for the mistake of Club Charlotte. That girl had surprised him more than he had anticipated. He had badly misjudged her reaction and failed his vocation. He had hurriedly sought to make an offering of sorts, but it had been less than efficacious. But now, here, he had been provided with the lamb in the thicket. His lord had surely provided. And now the acceptable sacrifice could be made by way of atonement.
He turned, his head brushing the single naked lightbulb that lit up the cellar in a pale and sickly yellow glow. But it was enough for him to see his instruments by.
But what to choose. What would be most pleasing to his master? He tilted his head as if he had heard an answer and then selected a simple hacksaw. He nodded appreciatively. The more prolonged the offering, the greater the pleasure.
Brandishing the tool, he turned. The girl's eyes widened in horror as her captor slowly approached and stooped to grab one of her feet. She kicked desperately, evading his grasp for a few seconds, but merely delaying the inevitable.
He gripped both her ankles in the crook of his arm like a vice and the girl's breathing became faster, panicked.
"No!" she managed to scream hoarsely as he applied the edge of the blade to one of her toes. "Please, no, no, no!"
But The Stick Man just smiled again and set to work.
Chapter Five
Three days later...
The headline on the front of the Westfälische Nachrichten was how Frieda learned of the latest abductee to have fallen victim to what the report claimed was a possible serial killer stalking the young people of Münster.
Twenty-one year old Art History student, Stephanie Brink had been out with friends two nights before. After a meal at a popular Chinese restaurant, the Mengu Buffet, the group had gone on to a bar where two of them had hooked up with impromptu dates. Stephanie and another girl had left the bar after a couple of hours and shared a taxi home. The taxi driver stated that he had dropped Stephanie at her apartment building on Albersloherweg at around half past midnight. But next morning Stephanie's purse was found outside the apartment by her flatmate who reported her missing.
Five minutes after taking the newspaper from her zeitungsrolle, Frieda's telephone rang.
"I take it you've seen the paper," growled Schluter. "Can you meet me at Club Charlotte? Thirty minutes? We found something."
It was only a fifteen minute car journey across the city to the nightclub on the corner of An der Kleimannbrucke and Schiffahrterdamm. Schluter was already there when Frieda arrived. He walked across the uneven patch of wasteground that served as a car park, hands deep in his overcoat pockets, collar turned up against the chill breeze and the light rain.
"Last thing we need is a fucking panic," the detective grumbled as he and Frieda stood beneath a sour sky that reflected the malevolent aura hanging over the club. "We gave the press enough to keep them happy. But not everything."
Frieda nodded. It was a common investigative practice. Withold a small but significant piece of information to prevent hoax callers and other assorted serial whackos from wasting police time claiming to be the culprit. The tactic was the police equivalent of a security question.
"Fucking dump," Schluter hissed into the rain as they approached the squat, dilapidated single-storey building daubed in graffiti. The detective's mood was as dark as the day, but Frieda appreciated his revulsion. One did not require any psychic empathy to understand it. Club Charlotte's outward face was grim to say the least. Little if any attempt had been made in what one assumed must be years to maintain even an appearance of respectability. The peeling paint, the obscenities daubed on the walls, the sea of litter and smell of decay left Frieda bewildered as to the attraction of the place. The entrance itself was a dark maw beyond the threshold, like the open throat to the belly of some Hadean beast, waiting to swallow up those brave enough or foolish enough to step inside it. It was, as Schluter had succinctly summed it up, a dump.
Frieda followed him round to the back of the club, to where two huge bins stood overflowing with rubbish. It was here that the body of Elsa Lemmermann had been found. Again the brutal images of her mutilated body flooded into Frieda's mind. It was all she could do to stop herself fastening her eyes shut instinctively.
And like the slamming of a door, the echo of Elsa's last moments caused Frieda to jump inwardly. Her head spun and she leaned against the wall to steady herself.
"You okay?" asked Schluter.
Frieda nodded and steadied her breathing. "Yes," she said a little tremulously. Then trying to take her mind off her adverse reaction asked, "So what did you find?"
Schluter surveyed the area between the bins where the body had lain, cordoned off now and covered with a blue tarp.
"Achim Maass, our boy in the Hammerstrasse cellar, vanished on a night out with his girlfriend at Muenster's Cinestar. Last seen by her directly after their film had ended, leaving to fetch his car from the multi-storey next door."
Schluter looked up, squinting as the wind whipped the drizzle into his swarthy face. "And found on the wall next to the victim's car?"
"A moniker presumed to have been made by the killer," replied Frieda. "A simple drawing of a stick figure. His signature."
Schluter nodded. "And on the wall of Stephanie Brink's apartment building, exactly the same thing."
He cleared his throat and spat out of force of habit. "Of course this isn't common knowledge. Despite the newspaper claims, they are simply surmising. We've given no confirmation one way or the other."
Frieda swallowed as the same impression of betrayal and despair struck her. The air seemed rancid with it. She felt nauseous but fought to quell the urge to be sick.
"You found the same thing here, didn't you?" she guessed out loud and Schluter offered a grim nod.
"At first we thought not. But then directly underneath the body -- " Schluter ducked under the cordon and pulled back the tarpaulin -- "this."
Frieda took a step forward and stared down at the crude life-size drawing made in red spray paint. The stick figure exactly mimicked the position of the body beneath which it had been concealed.
"Same guy," she murmured.
Schluter replaced the tarpaulin and stood up. "Whom she knew, you believed."
"That's the impression, yes," agreed Frieda.
"And now?"
Frieda sighed as another wave of nausea washed over her. "The same."
Schluter shoved his hands back into his pockets and glanced up at the sky as it was rent suddenly by lightning.
"So what went wrong here?" he mused through a long, low rumble of thunder.
Frieda's nausea passed and she pulled up the hood of her coat as the drizzle became a downpour. But the sickness hung defiantly in the air. She doubted if even a deluge of Biblical proportions would have sufficed to wash it away.
"Why does he drag one poor sod off to a cellar and string him up for a week before killing him, and presumably do the same with the Brink girl, but here he kills in situ? Why does he veer from his M.O. here?"
Schluter was still speaking into the sky, as if addressing this query to the storm, which answered by way of another flash of lightning.
"Fear of getting caught?" suggested Frieda. "Maybe she put up a fight and risked sounding the alarm."
Schluter shook his head. "But if she knows the killer, why does she resist going with him? He's hardly likely to have told her what he had in mind to get her to come along. There's less need for coercion. And if he thinks someone may have heard her scream, why the crude ritual mutilation? According to the path lab that would have taken him at least ten to fifteen minutes. And behind a packed nightclub where any junkie looking to shoot up, or randy couple might come at any minute? It makes no sense."
Frieda noticed suddenly just how worn down Schluter looked. His cheeks were hollow, his blue eyes filled with the haunted look of a man who had seen too much and for too long. But whatever emotional pain he was carrying he never revealed it. And Frieda was deaf to the living. Only once the veil of the flesh had been rent did whatever clamour the soul made become audible to her.
Frieda stooped and touched filthy concrete. The pain of what had happened here seemed to have infused itself into the atoms of the earth and she listened more closely, raising a hand to cut short Schluter when he opened his mouth to ask what she was doing.
Betrayal. Always betrayal. It cried out to her, screamed loudest of all. And anger, revulsion. Surprise? No, more intense. A shocked incredulity.
"What was it," Frieda whispered. "What happened here?"
Trust. And a confidence broken. Surrender. A willingness to sacrifice everything. But then a profound repulsion. A force so repellant that it was sickening.
Frieda struggled to put the pieces together. All the while she had been giving voice to her thoughts and Schluter had been listening intently. He was pacing back and forth, his short dark hair plastered to his head by the rain.
He stopped suddenly and whirled to face Frieda, his tired face momentarily animated.
"What if he never intended to kill her?" he proposed. "What if Elsa Lemmermann was somehow involved with the killer on a personal level like you believe and he confided in her, thought he could trust her with his secret? But she betrayed it."
Frieda looked startled as she tried to process what Schluter had said. It was always possible that the echoes she heard might in some way reflect something of the killer's actions. The perceptions of the victim relayed to her. But the emotions she felt here were raw. The anger and betrayal was not just a perception. It was a property, an attribute, the source of the echo. It had to be Elsa.
"Or she trusted him and by discovering his secret she was betrayed," Frieda modified Schluter's theory, who nodded and seemed satisfied with the idea.
"Either wayhe kills her to keep her quiet and adds his unique calling card because that's how the sick fucker gets his kicks."
Frieda nodded slowly. It sounded plausible. But deep down she felt it was less than the whole truth She had offered Schluter the alternative version of events but she was less than convinced by it. The impetus to do so had been born merely out of a reluctance to consider the impossible.
All the while she had believed she was hearing echoes of the dead. But what if she were wrong?
The headline on the front of the Westfälische Nachrichten was how Frieda learned of the latest abductee to have fallen victim to what the report claimed was a possible serial killer stalking the young people of Münster.
Twenty-one year old Art History student, Stephanie Brink had been out with friends two nights before. After a meal at a popular Chinese restaurant, the Mengu Buffet, the group had gone on to a bar where two of them had hooked up with impromptu dates. Stephanie and another girl had left the bar after a couple of hours and shared a taxi home. The taxi driver stated that he had dropped Stephanie at her apartment building on Albersloherweg at around half past midnight. But next morning Stephanie's purse was found outside the apartment by her flatmate who reported her missing.
Five minutes after taking the newspaper from her zeitungsrolle, Frieda's telephone rang.
"I take it you've seen the paper," growled Schluter. "Can you meet me at Club Charlotte? Thirty minutes? We found something."
It was only a fifteen minute car journey across the city to the nightclub on the corner of An der Kleimannbrucke and Schiffahrterdamm. Schluter was already there when Frieda arrived. He walked across the uneven patch of wasteground that served as a car park, hands deep in his overcoat pockets, collar turned up against the chill breeze and the light rain.
"Last thing we need is a fucking panic," the detective grumbled as he and Frieda stood beneath a sour sky that reflected the malevolent aura hanging over the club. "We gave the press enough to keep them happy. But not everything."
Frieda nodded. It was a common investigative practice. Withold a small but significant piece of information to prevent hoax callers and other assorted serial whackos from wasting police time claiming to be the culprit. The tactic was the police equivalent of a security question.
"Fucking dump," Schluter hissed into the rain as they approached the squat, dilapidated single-storey building daubed in graffiti. The detective's mood was as dark as the day, but Frieda appreciated his revulsion. One did not require any psychic empathy to understand it. Club Charlotte's outward face was grim to say the least. Little if any attempt had been made in what one assumed must be years to maintain even an appearance of respectability. The peeling paint, the obscenities daubed on the walls, the sea of litter and smell of decay left Frieda bewildered as to the attraction of the place. The entrance itself was a dark maw beyond the threshold, like the open throat to the belly of some Hadean beast, waiting to swallow up those brave enough or foolish enough to step inside it. It was, as Schluter had succinctly summed it up, a dump.
Frieda followed him round to the back of the club, to where two huge bins stood overflowing with rubbish. It was here that the body of Elsa Lemmermann had been found. Again the brutal images of her mutilated body flooded into Frieda's mind. It was all she could do to stop herself fastening her eyes shut instinctively.
And like the slamming of a door, the echo of Elsa's last moments caused Frieda to jump inwardly. Her head spun and she leaned against the wall to steady herself.
"You okay?" asked Schluter.
Frieda nodded and steadied her breathing. "Yes," she said a little tremulously. Then trying to take her mind off her adverse reaction asked, "So what did you find?"
Schluter surveyed the area between the bins where the body had lain, cordoned off now and covered with a blue tarp.
"Achim Maass, our boy in the Hammerstrasse cellar, vanished on a night out with his girlfriend at Muenster's Cinestar. Last seen by her directly after their film had ended, leaving to fetch his car from the multi-storey next door."
Schluter looked up, squinting as the wind whipped the drizzle into his swarthy face. "And found on the wall next to the victim's car?"
"A moniker presumed to have been made by the killer," replied Frieda. "A simple drawing of a stick figure. His signature."
Schluter nodded. "And on the wall of Stephanie Brink's apartment building, exactly the same thing."
He cleared his throat and spat out of force of habit. "Of course this isn't common knowledge. Despite the newspaper claims, they are simply surmising. We've given no confirmation one way or the other."
Frieda swallowed as the same impression of betrayal and despair struck her. The air seemed rancid with it. She felt nauseous but fought to quell the urge to be sick.
"You found the same thing here, didn't you?" she guessed out loud and Schluter offered a grim nod.
"At first we thought not. But then directly underneath the body -- " Schluter ducked under the cordon and pulled back the tarpaulin -- "this."
Frieda took a step forward and stared down at the crude life-size drawing made in red spray paint. The stick figure exactly mimicked the position of the body beneath which it had been concealed.
"Same guy," she murmured.
Schluter replaced the tarpaulin and stood up. "Whom she knew, you believed."
"That's the impression, yes," agreed Frieda.
"And now?"
Frieda sighed as another wave of nausea washed over her. "The same."
Schluter shoved his hands back into his pockets and glanced up at the sky as it was rent suddenly by lightning.
"So what went wrong here?" he mused through a long, low rumble of thunder.
Frieda's nausea passed and she pulled up the hood of her coat as the drizzle became a downpour. But the sickness hung defiantly in the air. She doubted if even a deluge of Biblical proportions would have sufficed to wash it away.
"Why does he drag one poor sod off to a cellar and string him up for a week before killing him, and presumably do the same with the Brink girl, but here he kills in situ? Why does he veer from his M.O. here?"
Schluter was still speaking into the sky, as if addressing this query to the storm, which answered by way of another flash of lightning.
"Fear of getting caught?" suggested Frieda. "Maybe she put up a fight and risked sounding the alarm."
Schluter shook his head. "But if she knows the killer, why does she resist going with him? He's hardly likely to have told her what he had in mind to get her to come along. There's less need for coercion. And if he thinks someone may have heard her scream, why the crude ritual mutilation? According to the path lab that would have taken him at least ten to fifteen minutes. And behind a packed nightclub where any junkie looking to shoot up, or randy couple might come at any minute? It makes no sense."
Frieda noticed suddenly just how worn down Schluter looked. His cheeks were hollow, his blue eyes filled with the haunted look of a man who had seen too much and for too long. But whatever emotional pain he was carrying he never revealed it. And Frieda was deaf to the living. Only once the veil of the flesh had been rent did whatever clamour the soul made become audible to her.
Frieda stooped and touched filthy concrete. The pain of what had happened here seemed to have infused itself into the atoms of the earth and she listened more closely, raising a hand to cut short Schluter when he opened his mouth to ask what she was doing.
Betrayal. Always betrayal. It cried out to her, screamed loudest of all. And anger, revulsion. Surprise? No, more intense. A shocked incredulity.
"What was it," Frieda whispered. "What happened here?"
Trust. And a confidence broken. Surrender. A willingness to sacrifice everything. But then a profound repulsion. A force so repellant that it was sickening.
Frieda struggled to put the pieces together. All the while she had been giving voice to her thoughts and Schluter had been listening intently. He was pacing back and forth, his short dark hair plastered to his head by the rain.
He stopped suddenly and whirled to face Frieda, his tired face momentarily animated.
"What if he never intended to kill her?" he proposed. "What if Elsa Lemmermann was somehow involved with the killer on a personal level like you believe and he confided in her, thought he could trust her with his secret? But she betrayed it."
Frieda looked startled as she tried to process what Schluter had said. It was always possible that the echoes she heard might in some way reflect something of the killer's actions. The perceptions of the victim relayed to her. But the emotions she felt here were raw. The anger and betrayal was not just a perception. It was a property, an attribute, the source of the echo. It had to be Elsa.
"Or she trusted him and by discovering his secret she was betrayed," Frieda modified Schluter's theory, who nodded and seemed satisfied with the idea.
"Either wayhe kills her to keep her quiet and adds his unique calling card because that's how the sick fucker gets his kicks."
Frieda nodded slowly. It sounded plausible. But deep down she felt it was less than the whole truth She had offered Schluter the alternative version of events but she was less than convinced by it. The impetus to do so had been born merely out of a reluctance to consider the impossible.
All the while she had believed she was hearing echoes of the dead. But what if she were wrong?
Chapter Six
Sometimes the devil's means to trap a soul are more overt. Sometimes, and with increasing frequency -- a symptom of our godless age -- he invades the unwary and takes up residence.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies.'
Frieda drove home deep in thought after her meeting with Schluter. She checked her mailbox for post, realised it was probably too early, and then climbed the stairs to her third-floor apartment. As she inserted the key into the lock, she heard a dull but distinct thud from inside, and what sounded like furniture being moved.
She froze, her heart racing. Pressing her ear to the door, she listened, but the noises had stopped. She waited another minute, but still heard nothing more.
Taking a deep breath, Frieda turned the key and opened the door.
The hallway was deserted, and appeared just as she had left it. Even the crucifix was still securely in place on the wall by the door. She took a few tentative steps, glancing first into her bedroom and then into her small arbeitzimmer home office, but saw nothing amiss or out of place. The living room and kitchen looked equally undisturbed, as did the bathroom where Frieda splashed her face with cold water.
Probably just the neighbours she'd heard, she told her reflection as she stared into the mirror, but failing to believe her second alternative explanation of the day.
She turned on the coffee machine and jumped into the shower while it was brewing. A boatload of work had built up in her role as a salaried charity co-ordinator the last few days and she needed to get on top of it.
Closing her eyes, Frieda turned her face to the warm shower, smoothing back her hair and imagining the cleansing water washing away all the emotional grime she had collected. If only it were so simple, she thought, and more than a placebo, and a pretence to purity.
Then, unexpectedly, the shower stopped. She opened her eyes, blinking away the water, thinking that maybe she had inadvertently knocked the tap.
Until she felt a jet of warm water against her back.
Frieda jerked her head round and saw the showerhead hanging in mid-air behind her like some serpent charmed by silent music. She screamed and slammed open the cubicle door, tumbling out onto the bathroom floor, naked and shivering. At once the showerhead fell, and lay spurting erratically, the hiss of water almost malevolent.
And then, after a few seconds, it stopped, leaving an equally unbearable silence.
***
Father Derrick clasped Frieda's hands inside his own as he welcomed her into the presbytery.
"What's wrong?" he asked, getting straight to the matter in hand as he closed the door. "You sounded upset on the telephone."
Frieda gave him a wan smile. "I'm sorry to trouble you, Father," she apologised. "Things have just been a little intense the last few days."
But Father Derrick harrumphed and waved away her apology.
"Nothing to be sorry for, Frieda," he insisted, inviting her to take a seat in the huge sitting room and offering her some tea. "It's camomile," he said as he poured her a cup. "Good for the nerves."
He gave her a wink as he handed the cup to her, chuckling. "Almost as good as a stiff gin!"
Fr Derrick's gentle humour was infectious and disarmed Frieda's fears. She took a sip or two of her tea before recounting what had happened. It was the first that the priest had heard of the phenomena occurring in her apartment and he listened attentively.
"I am no authority on these matters," he admitted when she had finished, his rugged face creasing thoughtfully. "Vatican exorcists in their infinite wisdom would doubtless correct me. But in my experience, a poltergeist shouldn't be humoured. Officially they can be souls of the deceased. Experience tells us otherwise."
Frieda frowned. "It's become more active the last couple of days. And then with the writing on the ceiling."
Fr Derrick shook his head. "A crude method of attempting to lure you into communicating with it. And believe me, that's the last thing you should do."
"When you say...it," said Frieda quietly, "you mean...a demon?"
The thought was troublesome, and not just for the obvious reasons. Even now, and in the colder light of day and the peace of the presbytery, Frieda sought a less disconcerting line of reasoning. She considered how any malevolence she had sensed to date had been purely subjective. Her instinctive response to an impossible round of events. With the benefit of distance it was difficult for her to presume that the entity meant her harm. The recent escalation of events had certainly freaked her out, that was true. But they still struck her as more like a child-like frustration to get attention, although for what reason she could not say.
Father Derrick regarded her closely. "You think otherwise?"
Frieda put down her cup and leaned back in the broad leather armchair with a sigh.
"I don't know what to think," she confessed wearily. God, she felt so tired. "I really don't."
"And that is its aim." Father Derrick drove home the point, his tone quietly emphatic as he laced his fingers together in his lap. "To sow doubt, uncertainty. Which only suggests to me its true diabolical origin. As does the incident with the crucifix that you mentioned, for example."
Aversion to sacred objects. The classic demonic response. Frieda nodded. This stereotypical reaction by her unseen guest did not help support her own more forgiving theory.
"So what do you advise, Father?" she conceded.
"A simple blessing of the apartment to begin with," replied Derrick. "Often that is enough to resolve the situation. If not, then we can consider other options."
Frieda did not ask what those other options were, but she had a fairly good idea. The heavens had opened and rain was hammering down as she left the presbytery. She left with as many doubts as when she had arrived, and an arrangement for Father Derrick to come to her apartment the following evening to perform the blessing.
Ten minutes later, she was caught up in traffic on Servatiiplatz when her mobile rang. She glanced at the screen. Schluter, for the second time already today.
"I'm just in the car," she said, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the sound of the windscreen wipers battling the heavy rain. "I'll call you back."
"No you won't," snapped the detective. "Just get down to the station as soon as you can."
***
"His name is Lars Neusser, twenty-two years old, a wannabe fitness instructor from Hiltrup, and an ex- of Elsa Lemmermann. Always had a volatile relationship. Dated for a few months before she called it off. Her friends say he'd been trying to get back with her, but she refused and he didn't like that one bit. Got a tad angry about it, so everyone says."
Frieda stood next to Schluter, staring through the large pane of one-way glass at the muscular young man sitting in the police interview room.
"We all get angry," murmured Frieda. "But we don't all kill when we do."
"Yes, indeed," said Schluter curtly. "But not all of us are placed at the scene of the crime, Frau Lockner."
"He was there that night? At the club?"
Schluter nodded. "And having a very heated altercation according to witnesses. Lots of pushing and shoving. And threats."
"Such as?" asked Frieda.
"Such as, 'I'll fucking kill you, you bitch,' " replied Schluter grimly. "How's that for a start?"
Frieda returned her attention to Neusser who sat looking pale, lost and very boyish despite his muscular build. On the face of it, it didn't look promising for the young man. But if he had killed Elsa, then he was The Stick Man. But did he look capable of such atrocities? Then again, what was the sort of person who carried out such crimes meant to look like?
She sighed. "Okay, Kommissar Schluter," she said. "What do you want from me?"
Schluter smiled slyly. "Well now, Frau Lockner, you're my joker in the pack. No, more like my thorn in his flesh. I want you to prick him, see if he bleeds."
Chapter Seven
Schluter threw a folder containing Neusser's statement and other records of the ongoing investigation down onto the table. He never took his eyes from the suspect as he dragged out a chair so that its feet scraped the tiled floor with the same teeth-on-edge sound as nails on a chalkboard.
Meanwhile, Frieda shot Neusser a wan smile and sat down beside the irascible detective. She realised that she had been dragged unwittingly into a game of good cop, bad cop.
"So, Herr Neusser," Schluter said slowly, making a show of opening the folder and examining the contents. Then he looked up, face rigid as stone, blue eyes boring into the pale young man "Why'd you do it?"
Neusser was taken aback for a moment. Sweat broke out on his high forehead. He swallowed nervously, his lips sounding parched.
"I didn't do anything," he denied.
"What have you done with Stephanie Brink?"
"Who?" stammered Neusser. "Nothing!"
"I'm not sure the Maass family see what happened to their son as nothing, " growled Schluter, lowering his gaze back to the contents of the folder.
But Frieda noticed that the youth looked genuinely confused. He did not strike her as being the sharpest knife in the draw; his tone was stereotypical fitness fanatic. It was hardly impossible that he was unfamiliar with the recent spate of slayings, culminating with the Brink girl. Not everyone read or watched the news, and if she was asked to be very bigoted and judge this particular book by its cover, then she would hardly imagine Neusser being a subscriber to the Muenstersche Zeitung.
"Got a bit if an anger issue by all accounts I see," pressed Schluter. He flipped a couple of papers. "Twice arrested for being a tad too handy with your fists. Previously banned from all Deutsche-Bahn trains for six months following a racially-aggravated assault at Wolfsburg bahnof."
"Hey!" protested Neusser. "That was years ago. And he called me a fucking Kraut first!"
"Shouldn't he have a lawyer present?" whispered Frieda.
Schluter looked askance at her. "He's not under arrest," he hissed. "Besides, I asked, and he refused."
He fixed his eyes back firmly on Neusser and raised his voice. "Because he says he has nothing to hide. But is that really the case, Lars? Eh?"
"It's Herr Neusser to you."
"Whatever." Schluter tipped his head towards Frieda. "My colleague here has a few questions she'd like to ask."
Neusser glared at Frieda "Who is she? She doesn't look like a cop."
Schluter tensed. It clearly hadn't occurred to him that Neusser might ask.
"Associate Scene of Crime Officer," chipped in Frieda helpfully, plucking a believable-sounding role out of the air that was not so far from the truth. Schluter gave her a grateful glance.
Neusser didn't dispute Frieda's claim and she placed her hands palms upwards on the table before she spoke. It was an old psychologist's trick she had learned by way of observation of Dr Bloemberg during her therapy sessions with him. It sent a subconscious appeal for information to the patient that they would unthinkingly respond to.
"I want to get back to your relationship with Elsa," she said quietly. "If you don't mind me asking a few questions about that."
Schluter snorted an obvious disapproval at her softly, softly approach that Frieda ignored. Neusser nodded.
"Thank you." Frieda prepared to to prick him: "Herr Neusser, why did the relationship end?"
Neusser shrugged. "She told me she preferred girls."
"She was a lesbian?"
"That's what she said," replied Neusser monotonously. "But I told her that was fine with me if she wanted some of her friends to join in."
He let out a stupid laugh and Schluter shook his head. "Oh my God," he muttered.
Neusser shrugged. "But she just told me I was a pig."
"Did you feel it was just an excuse to end it?" asked Frieda.
Neusser shrugged again. "Maybe."
"Is that why you were angry when she wouldn't get back with you? Did you feel betrayed?"
A look of surprise and then humour crossed Neusser's face. "Only when it came to the money," he answered. "The only reason I asked her to move back in was because both our names were on the lease for our flat. She said no and lumbered me with the full rent each month."
Frieda frowned. "So you just wanted her back as a flatmate? You weren't in love with her?"
"I was in love with my flat," was all Neusser replied.
"And is that what you were fighting about at the club the night she died?"
A trademark shrug. "It's what we were always fighting about."
"Did you know she was seeing someone else?"
Neusser again looked surprised, but not upset. "No. But so was I. We'd both moved on I guess," he said ruefully.
The trust issues, the deep sense of betrayal that had impressed themselves upon Frieda did not square with a basic issue of financial woes, however severe. There was emotional baggage at the murder scene so crippling that it rarefied the air. And from what Neusser had said, any depth of feeling there may have been between Elsa and him had long since disappeared.
She stopped and looked at Schluter whose face was dark but resigned.
"All right, Herr Neusser," Schluter rasped wearily, "you're free to go."
***
"What an absolute fucking waste of time!" stormed Schluter, kicking the vending machine to the disapproving look of uniformed colleagues in the canteen.
The machine finally gave in and offered Schluter the black coffee he'd ordered. Frieda followed him to a table where he crashed into a chair, she opposite him.
Schluter's worn-out look had grown significantly more pronounced. By the look of him, this case was clearly giving him sleepless nights. He downed the lukewarm coffee in one and scrunched the plastic cup in his palm.
"We haven't even left square one," he complained bitterly. "And meanwhile the Brink girl is God-knows-where having God-knows-what done to her. Fuck!"
He looked at Frieda desperately. "Can you give me something more? Anything, Frieda?"
But she was at a loss to offer him anything. She had given all she knew, all she had felt gnawing into her at that filthy, horrifying grave.
All she could do was shake her head sadly.
Schluter held her gaze for moment then pushed back his chair and stood up. Frieda made to follow but he held up a hand.
"Go home, Frau Lockner," he told her curtly. "There's nothing more you can do here."
Frieda was deaf to the living, but as she watched the dishevelled detective walk out of the canteen, she thought that if she were not, his soul would sound to her the most tormented of all.
***
Frieda returned home by mid-afternoon and finally got down to working through the backlog of emails and other correspondence that had built up in the previous few days. She had been lucky enough to land the home-based role as state co-ordinator for the new Catholic charity, Gratia on Fr Derrick's personal recommendation to the cardinal. She owed the good Father a debt of gratitude for his investment of trust in her ability to liaise with various needy causes, mostly via Skype and email, send reports to the board, and oversee the distribution of vital funds as and when they were allocated.
After a couple of hours and as many coffees, she was almost up to date with her workload when a peculiar scratching sound caught her attention. It was slight but persistent, and seemed to be coming from the bathroom.
Gripped with apprehension, she forced herself out of the office and down the hallway towards the bathroom. The door was ajar, and as she approached, the scratching sound grew louder. It was rhythmic, regular and Frieda realised now that it was not exactly a scratching sound. It was more like...sawing?
Her heart was racing as she paused at the door and leaned slowly to one side to peer through the gap. Towels, toothpaste, the toilet roll stack all came into view, but nothing that could have possibly been a cause for the continuing noise. The washing machine stood silently in a corner, and the taps were all off.
In a burst of courage or lunacy, she yanked open the door -- and abruptly the sawing sound ceased. She took a step into the bathroom, then another, peering into the corners, behind the toilet, in the gap between the shower cubicle and a cupboard. But she saw nothing out of place or out of the ordinary. And the only sound now was the patter of rain on the window of frosted glass.
She turned to leave, took one step towards the door when it slammed shut suddenly, causing her to jump back in alarm. The sawing sound started up again, becoming louder and louder so that she clutched her hands to her ears to shut it out.
Then after what must only have been half a minute but had seemed an age, it stopped again. Frieda lowered her hands slowly and turned again for the door.
Her hand had just grasped the handle when a breath of air brushed the back of her neck, and she heard a menacing throaty whisper next to her ear:
"Eins, zwei, drei."
Frieda screamed.
Meanwhile, Frieda shot Neusser a wan smile and sat down beside the irascible detective. She realised that she had been dragged unwittingly into a game of good cop, bad cop.
"So, Herr Neusser," Schluter said slowly, making a show of opening the folder and examining the contents. Then he looked up, face rigid as stone, blue eyes boring into the pale young man "Why'd you do it?"
Neusser was taken aback for a moment. Sweat broke out on his high forehead. He swallowed nervously, his lips sounding parched.
"I didn't do anything," he denied.
"What have you done with Stephanie Brink?"
"Who?" stammered Neusser. "Nothing!"
"I'm not sure the Maass family see what happened to their son as nothing, " growled Schluter, lowering his gaze back to the contents of the folder.
But Frieda noticed that the youth looked genuinely confused. He did not strike her as being the sharpest knife in the draw; his tone was stereotypical fitness fanatic. It was hardly impossible that he was unfamiliar with the recent spate of slayings, culminating with the Brink girl. Not everyone read or watched the news, and if she was asked to be very bigoted and judge this particular book by its cover, then she would hardly imagine Neusser being a subscriber to the Muenstersche Zeitung.
"Got a bit if an anger issue by all accounts I see," pressed Schluter. He flipped a couple of papers. "Twice arrested for being a tad too handy with your fists. Previously banned from all Deutsche-Bahn trains for six months following a racially-aggravated assault at Wolfsburg bahnof."
"Hey!" protested Neusser. "That was years ago. And he called me a fucking Kraut first!"
"Shouldn't he have a lawyer present?" whispered Frieda.
Schluter looked askance at her. "He's not under arrest," he hissed. "Besides, I asked, and he refused."
He fixed his eyes back firmly on Neusser and raised his voice. "Because he says he has nothing to hide. But is that really the case, Lars? Eh?"
"It's Herr Neusser to you."
"Whatever." Schluter tipped his head towards Frieda. "My colleague here has a few questions she'd like to ask."
Neusser glared at Frieda "Who is she? She doesn't look like a cop."
Schluter tensed. It clearly hadn't occurred to him that Neusser might ask.
"Associate Scene of Crime Officer," chipped in Frieda helpfully, plucking a believable-sounding role out of the air that was not so far from the truth. Schluter gave her a grateful glance.
Neusser didn't dispute Frieda's claim and she placed her hands palms upwards on the table before she spoke. It was an old psychologist's trick she had learned by way of observation of Dr Bloemberg during her therapy sessions with him. It sent a subconscious appeal for information to the patient that they would unthinkingly respond to.
"I want to get back to your relationship with Elsa," she said quietly. "If you don't mind me asking a few questions about that."
Schluter snorted an obvious disapproval at her softly, softly approach that Frieda ignored. Neusser nodded.
"Thank you." Frieda prepared to to prick him: "Herr Neusser, why did the relationship end?"
Neusser shrugged. "She told me she preferred girls."
"She was a lesbian?"
"That's what she said," replied Neusser monotonously. "But I told her that was fine with me if she wanted some of her friends to join in."
He let out a stupid laugh and Schluter shook his head. "Oh my God," he muttered.
Neusser shrugged. "But she just told me I was a pig."
"Did you feel it was just an excuse to end it?" asked Frieda.
Neusser shrugged again. "Maybe."
"Is that why you were angry when she wouldn't get back with you? Did you feel betrayed?"
A look of surprise and then humour crossed Neusser's face. "Only when it came to the money," he answered. "The only reason I asked her to move back in was because both our names were on the lease for our flat. She said no and lumbered me with the full rent each month."
Frieda frowned. "So you just wanted her back as a flatmate? You weren't in love with her?"
"I was in love with my flat," was all Neusser replied.
"And is that what you were fighting about at the club the night she died?"
A trademark shrug. "It's what we were always fighting about."
"Did you know she was seeing someone else?"
Neusser again looked surprised, but not upset. "No. But so was I. We'd both moved on I guess," he said ruefully.
The trust issues, the deep sense of betrayal that had impressed themselves upon Frieda did not square with a basic issue of financial woes, however severe. There was emotional baggage at the murder scene so crippling that it rarefied the air. And from what Neusser had said, any depth of feeling there may have been between Elsa and him had long since disappeared.
She stopped and looked at Schluter whose face was dark but resigned.
"All right, Herr Neusser," Schluter rasped wearily, "you're free to go."
***
"What an absolute fucking waste of time!" stormed Schluter, kicking the vending machine to the disapproving look of uniformed colleagues in the canteen.
The machine finally gave in and offered Schluter the black coffee he'd ordered. Frieda followed him to a table where he crashed into a chair, she opposite him.
Schluter's worn-out look had grown significantly more pronounced. By the look of him, this case was clearly giving him sleepless nights. He downed the lukewarm coffee in one and scrunched the plastic cup in his palm.
"We haven't even left square one," he complained bitterly. "And meanwhile the Brink girl is God-knows-where having God-knows-what done to her. Fuck!"
He looked at Frieda desperately. "Can you give me something more? Anything, Frieda?"
But she was at a loss to offer him anything. She had given all she knew, all she had felt gnawing into her at that filthy, horrifying grave.
All she could do was shake her head sadly.
Schluter held her gaze for moment then pushed back his chair and stood up. Frieda made to follow but he held up a hand.
"Go home, Frau Lockner," he told her curtly. "There's nothing more you can do here."
Frieda was deaf to the living, but as she watched the dishevelled detective walk out of the canteen, she thought that if she were not, his soul would sound to her the most tormented of all.
***
Frieda returned home by mid-afternoon and finally got down to working through the backlog of emails and other correspondence that had built up in the previous few days. She had been lucky enough to land the home-based role as state co-ordinator for the new Catholic charity, Gratia on Fr Derrick's personal recommendation to the cardinal. She owed the good Father a debt of gratitude for his investment of trust in her ability to liaise with various needy causes, mostly via Skype and email, send reports to the board, and oversee the distribution of vital funds as and when they were allocated.
After a couple of hours and as many coffees, she was almost up to date with her workload when a peculiar scratching sound caught her attention. It was slight but persistent, and seemed to be coming from the bathroom.
Gripped with apprehension, she forced herself out of the office and down the hallway towards the bathroom. The door was ajar, and as she approached, the scratching sound grew louder. It was rhythmic, regular and Frieda realised now that it was not exactly a scratching sound. It was more like...sawing?
Her heart was racing as she paused at the door and leaned slowly to one side to peer through the gap. Towels, toothpaste, the toilet roll stack all came into view, but nothing that could have possibly been a cause for the continuing noise. The washing machine stood silently in a corner, and the taps were all off.
In a burst of courage or lunacy, she yanked open the door -- and abruptly the sawing sound ceased. She took a step into the bathroom, then another, peering into the corners, behind the toilet, in the gap between the shower cubicle and a cupboard. But she saw nothing out of place or out of the ordinary. And the only sound now was the patter of rain on the window of frosted glass.
She turned to leave, took one step towards the door when it slammed shut suddenly, causing her to jump back in alarm. The sawing sound started up again, becoming louder and louder so that she clutched her hands to her ears to shut it out.
Then after what must only have been half a minute but had seemed an age, it stopped again. Frieda lowered her hands slowly and turned again for the door.
Her hand had just grasped the handle when a breath of air brushed the back of her neck, and she heard a menacing throaty whisper next to her ear:
"Eins, zwei, drei."
Frieda screamed.
Chapter Eight
Sadly our age is increasingly sceptical of demonic possession. The devil has done a great job of convincing the world of his non-existence, and that his day has long since passed. Possession is therefore classed as a case for the psychiatrist rather than a priest.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
"But only speak the word, Lord, and my soul shall be healed."
Frieda knelt and prayed the petition together with the handful of other, mostly elderly worshippers in attendance at the early morning Mass. She had felt the need to come here today. It was again an instinctive response, just like her reaction to the phenomena back home. Fight or flight, the old cliched evolutionary programming built into all of nature. She had flown to where she felt safest, the parental home, and by extension here, to her childhood church of St Urban.
She had not told her elderly parents anything about the poltergeist. They had been troubled enough as it was by Frieda's ear for the lingering remnants of the dead without the burden of some new revelation of spiritual unrest.
On awakening in her old room that morning, she had immediately felt soiled and dirty beside the fresh linen, the scent of pot pourri and bright sunshine highlighting the floral curtains. She had showered but the feeling remained, as though something had touched her deep down and left its filthy handprint within. It was nothing that mere soap and water could remove.
So she had arrived early at the church, pressing the priest there to hear her confession before Mass. The young pfarrer had obliged, absolved her, prescribed one Our Father and one Hail Mary as penance, and then she had remained for Holy Communion. She knew she needed to prepare herself for the coming evening, when she would return home for the blessing of her apartment, and face again whatever it was that had infested it with its presence.
If Fr Derrick was right, then she had badly misjudged the origins of the entity. It was no lost and desolate soul paying its dues. Instead, she was forced to consider an even more disturbing possibility. That the emptiness she had felt in that cellar had attracted some vestige of the evil that had occurred there. Some wraith that fed on such depravation and which had been drawn into the same void she had experienced.
The dirtiness she had felt had been part emotional and psychic detritus, and part a nagging fear that she forced down like bile. Fear that the entity had taken up residence not so much within the apartment as within her.
"But only speak the word, Lord."
Frieda repeated the plea again. Some sense of consolation settled on her, subtle but definite. It was enough to sooth her for now, here within the walls of a sacred space.
The test of its endurance beyond them was still to come.
***
Frieda heard nothing from Schluter that day, for which she was grateful. It was a timely and providential lack of contact that enabled her to focus on the evening ahead.
Still, as she drove back along the A43 and into Muenster, the WDR2 radio station news bulletin unsettled her with a report on the still missing Stephanie Brink. There was as yet no trace of the twenty-one year old student despite intensive door-to-door enquiries and appeals for witnesses.
The usual accumulation of late-afternoon, homeward-bound commuters on Weseler Strasse belied the inexplicable events taking place in Frieda's tiny corner of it. The sounding horns, the smell of petrol, made the supernatural seem very distant, unreal even. But as Frieda knew from the gift she possessed, that ethereal dimension of the universe lay only just beneath the surface. The material veneer was only skin deep. If anything, it was the supernatural world that defined the nature of human reality.
It was the old iceberg metaphor. The ninety percent that cannot be seen underpins and supports the ten percent that can be.
Frieda sat in her car directly outside her apartment building until Father Derrick arrived, her fingers drumming constantly on the steering wheel. By the time he drew up in his modest blue VW Polo just ten minutes later, any calm she had attained earlier in the day had evaporated, and her trepidation levels were going through the roof.
"Good evening, Frieda," Derrick greeted her breathlessly as he locked his car. "Sorry I'm a little late. An appointment with another of my parishioners took longer than I thought."
Late? Frieda glanced at her watch. She hadn't noticed. She felt suddenly lightheaded.
They climbed the stairs to Frieda's apartment, the echoing of their feet in the stairwell jarring inexplicably on her nerves. The air was taut so that she felt unable to breathe. It was a common sensation in the presence of death, and the discomfort in her chest grew more intense the higher they climbed.
As if he had himself sensed her discomfort, Father Derrick placed a hand gently on her arm as they reached the door and she dug in her jeans pocket for her key.
"Alles gute," he said quietly. "Everythings fine."
His words reassured her a little and the tension eased slightly.
Frieda didn't know what she'd expected to find. Given the events that had driven her from the flat the previous day, to find the place had been completely trashed in her absence would probably not have surprised her. But the exact opposite was the case. Everything was as she had left it. No displaced furniture, much less unexplained writing was in evidence. In fact there was an almost uncommon sense of cleanliness about the place, but Frieda guessed that this perception was merely a product of the bright evening sunshine streaming in through the large living room window.
And the atmosphere was surprisingly light. There was no hint of the heavy menace that had pervaded the apartment the previous night as Father Derrick followed her into the living room and set his carry case onto the small dining table.
He opened the case and removed his stole, kissing it before draping the long band of purple silk round his neck. Then he took out a vial of holy water, a leather bound Bible and smiled warmly at Frieda.
"You have a lovely home," he commented with an appreciative glance around the light and airy lounge. "Let's do our best to keep it that way for you, shall we?"
Frieda returned his smile. The elderly priest's confidence was infectious. She nodded and Father Derrick crossed himself and bowed his head. "Let us begin by saying together the Lord's Prayer."
Crossing herself also, Frieda joined in the recitation of Christianity's most famous prayer. Again she felt her nerves tighten, unable to properly close her eyes in expectation of some malevolent response to this invocation of all that was holy. But they reached the final 'Amen' with no interruption or expression of hostility.
Father Derrick proceeded to mark the doorway with the sign of the cross, using the vial of holy water as the medium for these crucifixes on the wooden frame.
"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," he repeated firmly three times, once for each of the crosses placed to the side and over the entrance.
And still nothing.
As Father Derrick moved on through the flat, Frieda trailing after him, and reciting with him every prayer, every Bible verse, she had one eye always open, looking out for the darkness she had believed dwelt there. Her expectations were still running at fever pitch, that this sense of security was a false one. That at any moment the darkness would be provoked into a rage that would swallow up the sunlight.
But the blessing proceeded unopposed, every room sanctified by sacred texts and holy water, with only the occasional muted sounding of a horn intruding from out on the busy street. To seal the blessing, Father Derrick recited the traditional prayer to St Michael, invoking the protection of this chief of archangelic beings. Then the priest closed his Bible with a satisfied smile that Frieda returned.
"And that, as they say, is that," he said, patting Frieda's arm before removing his stole and packing it back neatly into his case. He turned back and pressed the jar of holy water into Frieda's hand.
"Keep this," he urged. "And pray often. Cling to Christ. We have swept the room today. But it needs to be occupied now by the Spirit of God."
Frieda nodded. For once she felt nothing, heard nothing. There was a quietness she had not been privy to in a long time. No background noise, no static to trouble her. It was as though a shutter had been pulled down over the world.
"Good night, Father," she said as she saw the priest out. "And thank you."
Another angry motorist somewhere outside on Weseler Strasse sounded their horn, but that was the only noise to break the peace.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
"But only speak the word, Lord, and my soul shall be healed."
Frieda knelt and prayed the petition together with the handful of other, mostly elderly worshippers in attendance at the early morning Mass. She had felt the need to come here today. It was again an instinctive response, just like her reaction to the phenomena back home. Fight or flight, the old cliched evolutionary programming built into all of nature. She had flown to where she felt safest, the parental home, and by extension here, to her childhood church of St Urban.
She had not told her elderly parents anything about the poltergeist. They had been troubled enough as it was by Frieda's ear for the lingering remnants of the dead without the burden of some new revelation of spiritual unrest.
On awakening in her old room that morning, she had immediately felt soiled and dirty beside the fresh linen, the scent of pot pourri and bright sunshine highlighting the floral curtains. She had showered but the feeling remained, as though something had touched her deep down and left its filthy handprint within. It was nothing that mere soap and water could remove.
So she had arrived early at the church, pressing the priest there to hear her confession before Mass. The young pfarrer had obliged, absolved her, prescribed one Our Father and one Hail Mary as penance, and then she had remained for Holy Communion. She knew she needed to prepare herself for the coming evening, when she would return home for the blessing of her apartment, and face again whatever it was that had infested it with its presence.
If Fr Derrick was right, then she had badly misjudged the origins of the entity. It was no lost and desolate soul paying its dues. Instead, she was forced to consider an even more disturbing possibility. That the emptiness she had felt in that cellar had attracted some vestige of the evil that had occurred there. Some wraith that fed on such depravation and which had been drawn into the same void she had experienced.
The dirtiness she had felt had been part emotional and psychic detritus, and part a nagging fear that she forced down like bile. Fear that the entity had taken up residence not so much within the apartment as within her.
"But only speak the word, Lord."
Frieda repeated the plea again. Some sense of consolation settled on her, subtle but definite. It was enough to sooth her for now, here within the walls of a sacred space.
The test of its endurance beyond them was still to come.
***
Frieda heard nothing from Schluter that day, for which she was grateful. It was a timely and providential lack of contact that enabled her to focus on the evening ahead.
Still, as she drove back along the A43 and into Muenster, the WDR2 radio station news bulletin unsettled her with a report on the still missing Stephanie Brink. There was as yet no trace of the twenty-one year old student despite intensive door-to-door enquiries and appeals for witnesses.
The usual accumulation of late-afternoon, homeward-bound commuters on Weseler Strasse belied the inexplicable events taking place in Frieda's tiny corner of it. The sounding horns, the smell of petrol, made the supernatural seem very distant, unreal even. But as Frieda knew from the gift she possessed, that ethereal dimension of the universe lay only just beneath the surface. The material veneer was only skin deep. If anything, it was the supernatural world that defined the nature of human reality.
It was the old iceberg metaphor. The ninety percent that cannot be seen underpins and supports the ten percent that can be.
Frieda sat in her car directly outside her apartment building until Father Derrick arrived, her fingers drumming constantly on the steering wheel. By the time he drew up in his modest blue VW Polo just ten minutes later, any calm she had attained earlier in the day had evaporated, and her trepidation levels were going through the roof.
"Good evening, Frieda," Derrick greeted her breathlessly as he locked his car. "Sorry I'm a little late. An appointment with another of my parishioners took longer than I thought."
Late? Frieda glanced at her watch. She hadn't noticed. She felt suddenly lightheaded.
They climbed the stairs to Frieda's apartment, the echoing of their feet in the stairwell jarring inexplicably on her nerves. The air was taut so that she felt unable to breathe. It was a common sensation in the presence of death, and the discomfort in her chest grew more intense the higher they climbed.
As if he had himself sensed her discomfort, Father Derrick placed a hand gently on her arm as they reached the door and she dug in her jeans pocket for her key.
"Alles gute," he said quietly. "Everythings fine."
His words reassured her a little and the tension eased slightly.
Frieda didn't know what she'd expected to find. Given the events that had driven her from the flat the previous day, to find the place had been completely trashed in her absence would probably not have surprised her. But the exact opposite was the case. Everything was as she had left it. No displaced furniture, much less unexplained writing was in evidence. In fact there was an almost uncommon sense of cleanliness about the place, but Frieda guessed that this perception was merely a product of the bright evening sunshine streaming in through the large living room window.
And the atmosphere was surprisingly light. There was no hint of the heavy menace that had pervaded the apartment the previous night as Father Derrick followed her into the living room and set his carry case onto the small dining table.
He opened the case and removed his stole, kissing it before draping the long band of purple silk round his neck. Then he took out a vial of holy water, a leather bound Bible and smiled warmly at Frieda.
"You have a lovely home," he commented with an appreciative glance around the light and airy lounge. "Let's do our best to keep it that way for you, shall we?"
Frieda returned his smile. The elderly priest's confidence was infectious. She nodded and Father Derrick crossed himself and bowed his head. "Let us begin by saying together the Lord's Prayer."
Crossing herself also, Frieda joined in the recitation of Christianity's most famous prayer. Again she felt her nerves tighten, unable to properly close her eyes in expectation of some malevolent response to this invocation of all that was holy. But they reached the final 'Amen' with no interruption or expression of hostility.
Father Derrick proceeded to mark the doorway with the sign of the cross, using the vial of holy water as the medium for these crucifixes on the wooden frame.
"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," he repeated firmly three times, once for each of the crosses placed to the side and over the entrance.
And still nothing.
As Father Derrick moved on through the flat, Frieda trailing after him, and reciting with him every prayer, every Bible verse, she had one eye always open, looking out for the darkness she had believed dwelt there. Her expectations were still running at fever pitch, that this sense of security was a false one. That at any moment the darkness would be provoked into a rage that would swallow up the sunlight.
But the blessing proceeded unopposed, every room sanctified by sacred texts and holy water, with only the occasional muted sounding of a horn intruding from out on the busy street. To seal the blessing, Father Derrick recited the traditional prayer to St Michael, invoking the protection of this chief of archangelic beings. Then the priest closed his Bible with a satisfied smile that Frieda returned.
"And that, as they say, is that," he said, patting Frieda's arm before removing his stole and packing it back neatly into his case. He turned back and pressed the jar of holy water into Frieda's hand.
"Keep this," he urged. "And pray often. Cling to Christ. We have swept the room today. But it needs to be occupied now by the Spirit of God."
Frieda nodded. For once she felt nothing, heard nothing. There was a quietness she had not been privy to in a long time. No background noise, no static to trouble her. It was as though a shutter had been pulled down over the world.
"Good night, Father," she said as she saw the priest out. "And thank you."
Another angry motorist somewhere outside on Weseler Strasse sounded their horn, but that was the only noise to break the peace.
Chapter Nine
Munster Hauptbahnof was typically busy, and no one paid any undue attention to the unremarkable figure standing between a vending machine and a photo-booth in the long central thoroughfare to which steps leading from the various platforms descended. Commuters, tourists and interlopers from all over Germany and beyond swarmed down these stairs and past him without so much as a glance, like a column of ants, each lost in their own particular world, each pair of eyes so insular and parochial.
But The Stick Man was more than alert, more than a casual onlooker. His eyes roamed the throng feverishly, although his bodily demeanour betrayed nothing of his sense of urgency. It had been two days now. A sacrifice was demanded.
His eyes locked on a petite dark-haired girl in fashionably torn jeans and a hooded top who had separated slightly from the crowd like some careless animal wandering from the herd that invited predatory attention. She had slung her rucksack over one shoulder and was struggling with a small suitcase.
The Stick Man tensed imperceptibly and prepared to make his move. But as he was about to exit the shadows, a young man who appeared to be his potential victim's boyfriend appeared. He kissed the girl affectionately before picking up her case and taking hold of her hand. In a few seconds they had disappeared into the crowd.
Desperation threatened to seize The Stick Man, but he would not allow it to take control. He suppressed the rising panic and forced it down with a fury born of a disgust at his own weakness. This was not what the Master expected. It was not what he deserved.
The Stick Man steeled himself. He would not fail. And he would not fail because his lord and master would provide. All he needed to have was patience, and a little faith.
A clamour of new voices added themselves to the hustle and bustle of the station, and a surge of passengers poured down the steps leading from platform fourteen, almost directly opposite The Stick Man's position.
He surveyed the crowd calmly, locking down the last vestige of panic, and ignoring the merciless hunger of the addict seeking a next fix. His piercing eyes narrowed, darting from one person to the next, seeking the slightest vulnerability that he could exploit to the master's advantage.
And when the opportunity presented itself, it was almost ridiculously easy. So easy that it could only have been the master's doing.
The blond young man who had halted to use the vending machine was digging into his pockets for coins. His search produced a five euro note, and he gave it a forlorn look. He hesitated before smiling sheepishly at The Stick Man.
"Excuse me, I don't suppose you have change?" he asked, a slight American tone to his voice
The Stick Man nodded and returned the smile. The cost of this offering was cheap at the price. But its eternal value was beyond measure.
But The Stick Man was more than alert, more than a casual onlooker. His eyes roamed the throng feverishly, although his bodily demeanour betrayed nothing of his sense of urgency. It had been two days now. A sacrifice was demanded.
His eyes locked on a petite dark-haired girl in fashionably torn jeans and a hooded top who had separated slightly from the crowd like some careless animal wandering from the herd that invited predatory attention. She had slung her rucksack over one shoulder and was struggling with a small suitcase.
The Stick Man tensed imperceptibly and prepared to make his move. But as he was about to exit the shadows, a young man who appeared to be his potential victim's boyfriend appeared. He kissed the girl affectionately before picking up her case and taking hold of her hand. In a few seconds they had disappeared into the crowd.
Desperation threatened to seize The Stick Man, but he would not allow it to take control. He suppressed the rising panic and forced it down with a fury born of a disgust at his own weakness. This was not what the Master expected. It was not what he deserved.
The Stick Man steeled himself. He would not fail. And he would not fail because his lord and master would provide. All he needed to have was patience, and a little faith.
A clamour of new voices added themselves to the hustle and bustle of the station, and a surge of passengers poured down the steps leading from platform fourteen, almost directly opposite The Stick Man's position.
He surveyed the crowd calmly, locking down the last vestige of panic, and ignoring the merciless hunger of the addict seeking a next fix. His piercing eyes narrowed, darting from one person to the next, seeking the slightest vulnerability that he could exploit to the master's advantage.
And when the opportunity presented itself, it was almost ridiculously easy. So easy that it could only have been the master's doing.
The blond young man who had halted to use the vending machine was digging into his pockets for coins. His search produced a five euro note, and he gave it a forlorn look. He hesitated before smiling sheepishly at The Stick Man.
"Excuse me, I don't suppose you have change?" he asked, a slight American tone to his voice
The Stick Man nodded and returned the smile. The cost of this offering was cheap at the price. But its eternal value was beyond measure.
Chapter Ten
For all the devil's ploys and schemes, even scepticism cannot always quell the nagging doubt that suggests maybe man doesn't have the universe all figured out quite as well as he imagines.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
Frieda awoke to the sound of rain lashing the window. The glow of a street lamp cut a shaft of amber light across her otherwise darkened bedroom, bisecting it cleanly and accentuating the shadows beyond its touch.
She checked the time. The clock at her bedside read a little after two-thirty a.m. in exaggerated blood red digits.
Frieda had slept fitfully, her dreams troubled, dark, disturbing. Elsa Lemmermann's leering grin of torment still hovered in her vision, and some residual scream of desolation echoed in her mind like the reverberation of a cannon shot. Several times she had been dragged into an unconsciousness hemmed in by stark walls smeared in blood and excrement, with the butchered corpse of the Maass boy hanging in the doorway to her nightmarish prison, blocking her exit and hollering accusations and profanity.
And each time she had awoken, breathless, sweating, the peace that Father Derrick had seemingly won for her already a distant memory.
White light played in one corner of the room, illuminating her IKEA wardrobe before gliding smoothly across the wall as the car to which the headlamps belonged sped past her apartment building.
Frieda froze, her eyes glued unblinkingly to the spot by the door where the headlight glow had terminated, and where the outline of a figure she could swear had been standing was now once more shrouded in shadows.
Sweat trickled down Frieda's spine as she struggled for control. She fought to steady her breathing and clutched at her reason as tightly as she was holding on to her duvet. She told herself not to be stupid, that she was tired and that in all probability her burning eyes were deceiving her. All the things she had been telling herself for weeks. And all things that had proven to be untrue.
The air in the room felt suddenly rarified, as though something had sucked the atmosphere from it, replacing it with a chilled emptiness that made Frieda's lungs heave for oxygen. She gasped and climbed awkwardly out of bed, staggering to the window. She twisted the handle and hauled the window open, a swirl of rain and wind buffeting her face but failing to relieve her discomfort.
"Eins, zwei, drei."
The words rode on the stiff breeze gusting into her room. They might have been a part of it, some auditory equivalent of making sense out of inkblots. But there was a clarity and an insistence about them that caused Frieda to spin round, almost falling in the process. Her eyes scanned the shadows. She saw nothing, but there was rage there.
The air was thick with fury. The viscocity dragged her own senses down into its heart, overwhelmed and swamped them until it felt as if her self-control was lost to her. Then some strange impetus, a force like a charging bull that seemed both external to her and part of her found her thrown physically across the room. She clawed the air but there was nothing to prevent her slamming into the wall, pinned to it a metre above the floor. As much distance separated her from the ceiling and she hung there limply, every bone in her body numb from the impact. Blood poured from her nose, and she gulped helplessly for air.
"Bitch! Fucking bitch! That bastard? Here?"
She was horrified when she realised the staccato and profane accusation was spewing from her own mouth. Her mind was awash with blind panic. She could not think. She did not have the capacity to formulate the smallest rational thought, to make even a token attempt at taking control.
She heard herself scream, a hoarse, blood-curdling expression of the emotional storm raging within. A storm so intense that it raked the depths of her being, tearing at it with howls of rage, billows of violence and waves of sorrow that crashed over the wreckage made of her soul.
"Torment me? Rid of me? Burn me? Why? Bitch!"
Her fists began to pound the walls without her consent, against her will, until the knuckles were a bloody pulp. The cacophanous emotional tempest was unbearable. Images flickered through her fevered brain, memories that were not hers. Disjointed scenes that she tried to process but could not retain. The momentary, fleeting scenes filled her with despair, and reduced her to racking sobs, and a grief that endured beyond the images which ended as though someone had pressed a pause button in her brain.
The glare of car headlamps once more played over the wall, and Frieda heard the roar of an engine that some boy racer had clearly modified, and was now putting through its paces on the deserted Weseler Strasse. It was a touch of the rational world that still existed beyond this preternatural mayhem, and Frieda attempted to focus on it, use it as an emotional anchor. Like a salmon struggling upstream against the current, she fought to centre herself, to resist the relentless psychic maelstrom that had engulfed her so viciously. At first her effort seemed in vain; the opposing emotional surge seemed set to sweep her on and on until as such time as it relinquished its hold. If it ever would.
Something gave. Frieda felt it, the fist in which her mind was clenched slackening, allowing her to sieze back a fraction of control. It was nominal, minimal, a hairline crack in an otherwise impervious adamantine wall. But Frieda probed it, digging into it with the last of her emotional reserve; hacking at it desperately, not daring to ease the assault for as much as a millisecond for fear that her assailant would regain total domination.
The internal war began to swing in her favour. She had dug and gouged and tore at the sliver and it gaped now, a way out. She poured her essence into it, her consciousness merging little by little with the silent darkness beyond. The rage that had engulfed her receded, and as Frieda made her escape from its failing grip, she felt the tone change. No longer rage now, but fear. Terrible fear. It tried to articulate itself through her one final time, but Frieda had severed the connection sufficiently to disallow another invasion, another involuntary use of her body, another psychic rape. She could hear the scream, the awful holler of a desolate spirit, but that was all. Deeper into the hole she crawled, the cry dissolving into nothing as finally Frieda reached safety.
As the nighttime peace on the deserted street outside was once again shattered by the returning boy racer, Frieda's body slid down the wall, her bloodied nose and mouth trailing a dark streak down the white woodchip wallpaper. A long sigh like a departing soul parted her broken lips before she crumpled into a bruised and beaten heap, and lay as still as death.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies'
Frieda awoke to the sound of rain lashing the window. The glow of a street lamp cut a shaft of amber light across her otherwise darkened bedroom, bisecting it cleanly and accentuating the shadows beyond its touch.
She checked the time. The clock at her bedside read a little after two-thirty a.m. in exaggerated blood red digits.
Frieda had slept fitfully, her dreams troubled, dark, disturbing. Elsa Lemmermann's leering grin of torment still hovered in her vision, and some residual scream of desolation echoed in her mind like the reverberation of a cannon shot. Several times she had been dragged into an unconsciousness hemmed in by stark walls smeared in blood and excrement, with the butchered corpse of the Maass boy hanging in the doorway to her nightmarish prison, blocking her exit and hollering accusations and profanity.
And each time she had awoken, breathless, sweating, the peace that Father Derrick had seemingly won for her already a distant memory.
White light played in one corner of the room, illuminating her IKEA wardrobe before gliding smoothly across the wall as the car to which the headlamps belonged sped past her apartment building.
Frieda froze, her eyes glued unblinkingly to the spot by the door where the headlight glow had terminated, and where the outline of a figure she could swear had been standing was now once more shrouded in shadows.
Sweat trickled down Frieda's spine as she struggled for control. She fought to steady her breathing and clutched at her reason as tightly as she was holding on to her duvet. She told herself not to be stupid, that she was tired and that in all probability her burning eyes were deceiving her. All the things she had been telling herself for weeks. And all things that had proven to be untrue.
The air in the room felt suddenly rarified, as though something had sucked the atmosphere from it, replacing it with a chilled emptiness that made Frieda's lungs heave for oxygen. She gasped and climbed awkwardly out of bed, staggering to the window. She twisted the handle and hauled the window open, a swirl of rain and wind buffeting her face but failing to relieve her discomfort.
"Eins, zwei, drei."
The words rode on the stiff breeze gusting into her room. They might have been a part of it, some auditory equivalent of making sense out of inkblots. But there was a clarity and an insistence about them that caused Frieda to spin round, almost falling in the process. Her eyes scanned the shadows. She saw nothing, but there was rage there.
The air was thick with fury. The viscocity dragged her own senses down into its heart, overwhelmed and swamped them until it felt as if her self-control was lost to her. Then some strange impetus, a force like a charging bull that seemed both external to her and part of her found her thrown physically across the room. She clawed the air but there was nothing to prevent her slamming into the wall, pinned to it a metre above the floor. As much distance separated her from the ceiling and she hung there limply, every bone in her body numb from the impact. Blood poured from her nose, and she gulped helplessly for air.
"Bitch! Fucking bitch! That bastard? Here?"
She was horrified when she realised the staccato and profane accusation was spewing from her own mouth. Her mind was awash with blind panic. She could not think. She did not have the capacity to formulate the smallest rational thought, to make even a token attempt at taking control.
She heard herself scream, a hoarse, blood-curdling expression of the emotional storm raging within. A storm so intense that it raked the depths of her being, tearing at it with howls of rage, billows of violence and waves of sorrow that crashed over the wreckage made of her soul.
"Torment me? Rid of me? Burn me? Why? Bitch!"
Her fists began to pound the walls without her consent, against her will, until the knuckles were a bloody pulp. The cacophanous emotional tempest was unbearable. Images flickered through her fevered brain, memories that were not hers. Disjointed scenes that she tried to process but could not retain. The momentary, fleeting scenes filled her with despair, and reduced her to racking sobs, and a grief that endured beyond the images which ended as though someone had pressed a pause button in her brain.
The glare of car headlamps once more played over the wall, and Frieda heard the roar of an engine that some boy racer had clearly modified, and was now putting through its paces on the deserted Weseler Strasse. It was a touch of the rational world that still existed beyond this preternatural mayhem, and Frieda attempted to focus on it, use it as an emotional anchor. Like a salmon struggling upstream against the current, she fought to centre herself, to resist the relentless psychic maelstrom that had engulfed her so viciously. At first her effort seemed in vain; the opposing emotional surge seemed set to sweep her on and on until as such time as it relinquished its hold. If it ever would.
Something gave. Frieda felt it, the fist in which her mind was clenched slackening, allowing her to sieze back a fraction of control. It was nominal, minimal, a hairline crack in an otherwise impervious adamantine wall. But Frieda probed it, digging into it with the last of her emotional reserve; hacking at it desperately, not daring to ease the assault for as much as a millisecond for fear that her assailant would regain total domination.
The internal war began to swing in her favour. She had dug and gouged and tore at the sliver and it gaped now, a way out. She poured her essence into it, her consciousness merging little by little with the silent darkness beyond. The rage that had engulfed her receded, and as Frieda made her escape from its failing grip, she felt the tone change. No longer rage now, but fear. Terrible fear. It tried to articulate itself through her one final time, but Frieda had severed the connection sufficiently to disallow another invasion, another involuntary use of her body, another psychic rape. She could hear the scream, the awful holler of a desolate spirit, but that was all. Deeper into the hole she crawled, the cry dissolving into nothing as finally Frieda reached safety.
As the nighttime peace on the deserted street outside was once again shattered by the returning boy racer, Frieda's body slid down the wall, her bloodied nose and mouth trailing a dark streak down the white woodchip wallpaper. A long sigh like a departing soul parted her broken lips before she crumpled into a bruised and beaten heap, and lay as still as death.
Chapter Eleven
"Heilige Scheisse!"
Joe 'Papa' Ratzinger swore as he turned into Hansaring and was hit full in the face by a sudden blast of wind and rain. He struggled to keep his balance, but he was no match for the heavy delivery cycle loaded with morning newspapers. It skewed sideways, taking Joe with it, and sent him sprawling on the pavement.
"Verdammt! Fuck!" he swore again, wishing for the millionth time that he worked in a cosy office somewhere, like his younger brother, Kurt, away from the elements. But that would never happen. Kurt was the brainier twin -- the Gymnasium's former sweetheart, and pride of Munster University. Meanwhile, Joe had nothing to show for his time in the Hauptschule. His only claim to fame was sharing his name with the pontiff. Whoever sat in the Vatican, he would always be 'Papa' to his friends. But he could hardly take credit for that.
Using language that would normally never be heard crossing papal lips, at least not in the middle of the street at four in the morning, Joe began to get up. His grazed palms smarted, and his right knee throbbed. He hoped that he could still ride the bike. He could not risk jeopardising his job as a Zeitungzusteller. Newspaper delivering was a shit job; but at least it was a job, and a guaranteed and regular source of much-needed income.
He turned to pick up his cycle. Several newspapers had fallen out of a panier and were plastered to the wet pavement. Joe swore again and pulled the hood of his waterproof coat tighter over his head. That was at least fifty cents' worth of pay in the gutter if he didn't have enough reserve papers to cover the loss.
He bent and hauled the delivery cycle up, noticing that its fall had also toppled a couple of wheelie bins standing at the kerbside. More language spilled from Joe's lips as he briefly considered leaving the rubbish strewn in the gutter. It was tempting given that he was pissed off and pushed for time. But he had no idea who might be watching even at this early hour. Any grouchy old insomniac bastard could be peering from any of the windows of the old apartment buildings either side of the street, and wouldn't think twice about grassing him up to the police.
"Scheisse!" he growled again, the rain dripping from his beard. For the sake of five minutes, it wasn't worth the risk.
The early morning sky was paling in the few gaps between the boiling rain clouds as Joe began to gather the scattered rubbish together, cursing constantly as the wind and rain hampered his attempt. He managed to scoop up a bundle of paper that stank like shit, clutching it tightly to his chest to stop it flying away into the wind.
He all but succeeded. Had the car not suddenly roared out of nowhere, screeching out of Albersloherweg, radio blaring, then he would not have jumped back, and the small, foul-smelling packet would not have fallen again to the ground.
"Fucktard!" Joe hollered after the receding car. Fucking boy racers!
Fuming, he bent to retrieve the stray parcel. By the dim grey light, he saw that some small, mouldy-looking Frankfurters had spilled from the bundle of paper. They were clearly the source of the parcel's ungodly smell. Joe thanked his lucky stars he was up to date with his Hepatitis B and Tetanus jabs. The shit you were exposed to on the streets just beggared belief. This time it was just someone's rotting leftovers. But there could be old syringes or worse concealed in this crap.
Joe snatched up several of the sausages. He hesitated as he moved to drop them in the bin. They felt uncharacteristically hard, even by German standards. And stiff, coarse. Just weird.
He opened his hand, peered down, and recoiled with a yell.
"Christ!" he coughed, his stomach heaving as the severed fingers fell back into the gutter.
Joe 'Papa' Ratzinger swore as he turned into Hansaring and was hit full in the face by a sudden blast of wind and rain. He struggled to keep his balance, but he was no match for the heavy delivery cycle loaded with morning newspapers. It skewed sideways, taking Joe with it, and sent him sprawling on the pavement.
"Verdammt! Fuck!" he swore again, wishing for the millionth time that he worked in a cosy office somewhere, like his younger brother, Kurt, away from the elements. But that would never happen. Kurt was the brainier twin -- the Gymnasium's former sweetheart, and pride of Munster University. Meanwhile, Joe had nothing to show for his time in the Hauptschule. His only claim to fame was sharing his name with the pontiff. Whoever sat in the Vatican, he would always be 'Papa' to his friends. But he could hardly take credit for that.
Using language that would normally never be heard crossing papal lips, at least not in the middle of the street at four in the morning, Joe began to get up. His grazed palms smarted, and his right knee throbbed. He hoped that he could still ride the bike. He could not risk jeopardising his job as a Zeitungzusteller. Newspaper delivering was a shit job; but at least it was a job, and a guaranteed and regular source of much-needed income.
He turned to pick up his cycle. Several newspapers had fallen out of a panier and were plastered to the wet pavement. Joe swore again and pulled the hood of his waterproof coat tighter over his head. That was at least fifty cents' worth of pay in the gutter if he didn't have enough reserve papers to cover the loss.
He bent and hauled the delivery cycle up, noticing that its fall had also toppled a couple of wheelie bins standing at the kerbside. More language spilled from Joe's lips as he briefly considered leaving the rubbish strewn in the gutter. It was tempting given that he was pissed off and pushed for time. But he had no idea who might be watching even at this early hour. Any grouchy old insomniac bastard could be peering from any of the windows of the old apartment buildings either side of the street, and wouldn't think twice about grassing him up to the police.
"Scheisse!" he growled again, the rain dripping from his beard. For the sake of five minutes, it wasn't worth the risk.
The early morning sky was paling in the few gaps between the boiling rain clouds as Joe began to gather the scattered rubbish together, cursing constantly as the wind and rain hampered his attempt. He managed to scoop up a bundle of paper that stank like shit, clutching it tightly to his chest to stop it flying away into the wind.
He all but succeeded. Had the car not suddenly roared out of nowhere, screeching out of Albersloherweg, radio blaring, then he would not have jumped back, and the small, foul-smelling packet would not have fallen again to the ground.
"Fucktard!" Joe hollered after the receding car. Fucking boy racers!
Fuming, he bent to retrieve the stray parcel. By the dim grey light, he saw that some small, mouldy-looking Frankfurters had spilled from the bundle of paper. They were clearly the source of the parcel's ungodly smell. Joe thanked his lucky stars he was up to date with his Hepatitis B and Tetanus jabs. The shit you were exposed to on the streets just beggared belief. This time it was just someone's rotting leftovers. But there could be old syringes or worse concealed in this crap.
Joe snatched up several of the sausages. He hesitated as he moved to drop them in the bin. They felt uncharacteristically hard, even by German standards. And stiff, coarse. Just weird.
He opened his hand, peered down, and recoiled with a yell.
"Christ!" he coughed, his stomach heaving as the severed fingers fell back into the gutter.
Chapter Twelve
Drugs and mind-melting medications are poured down the throats of the possessed with the aim of bringing their psychoses into line. All in the name of progress. For the sake of a so-called enlightenment run amok, lives are sacrificed on the altar of secularism, like the children of old condemned to Molech.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies.'
An Anne Geddes photograph hangs on the wall, a black and white print of a newborn cocooned within the petals of a rose. Another more abstract picture hangs in another corner, a multi-coloured spiral reminiscent of a Minoan puzzle.
The sun is shining, and a cluster of six ripening apples is perfectly centred in the large window frame. Somewhere, in a neighbouring garden, a water feature -- a fountain maybe -- adds a soothing and melodious background score to the August afternoon.
Dr Bloemberg shifts his focus from the computer screen to her; back to the screen, then back to her. He's typically relaxed, as casual as his attire. The loose slacks and Polo shirt reflect the laid-back demeanour of the fifty-something psychologist. But there's something different about him today....
Ah, yes, the glasses. They're a new addition to his outfit. Black-rimmed, almost Michael Cane-ish. She can't decide whether they suit him or not.
"So, Frau Lockner," he says finally, speaking with a deliberation that tells her he is choosing his words carefully. "How does it feel?"
She doesn't respond right away. She merely frowns.
"I'm sorry?" she replies after a long pause. "I'm not quite sure what you mean."
He shrugs, almost as if any answer she might give is ultimately of no consequence to him. A quasi-disinterest to ease the patient's mind.
"Your ability," he clarifies. "When you hear these 'echoes,' as I believe you refer to them. What do you feel?"
She swallows. Feel? She is still nonplussed by the doctor's enquiry. The sensory overload, the hammerblow of trace emotion is so intense that it is more pertinent to ask what she does not feel when using her ability She follows this line of thought when answering.
"Peace," she begins. "There is none. Just turmoil. Like I'm not in control. I try to rein it in, try to focus, and I manage for the most part."
Her voice breaks. She is drained. She has no reserves to draw on to counter the dark melancholy that seems to always brood over her. She starts to cry.
"But it's like I'm always on the edge," she gulps, choking back a sob. "Always on the verge of slipping. Like it's too much for me."
She coughs and sniffs, and runs the back of a hand across her running nose. The tears abate with a suddenness that surprises her.
"It is too much for me," she confesses. "I just want to run."
The psychologist has been listening intently to every word, occasionally nodding. Now he leans back, nodding more emphatically, the leather swivel chair creaking beneath him.
"Lack of control, or at least the fear of it, is typical of panic disorder," he says. "So what you say does not surprise me. There are a number of techniques one can use in order to bring down your anxiety levels."
She stares back at Bloemberg mutely. She is facing two enemies -- her 'gift', and a sceptical world. One siezes her as it wills, and the other mocks her testimony to its detrimental effects, explains it away, ridicules her. Had she been born in centuries past, her end would doubtless have been a burning stake. But the twenty-first century still burns its heretics, only with the flames of derision.
Bloemberg drones on and she typically listens without hearing. She is adrift on the restless sea of her own thoughts. In a dark place where the sun is shrouded by a million disembodied souls, and the sound of reason is drowned out by the cacophany of their lament.
She remembers how the Bible speaks of the dead as a cloud, and their cries to God as smoke, incense, rising up to Him. The thought overwhelms her, reminds her that her ability drags her into a world which mere men were never meant to be a party to.
It is a burden beyond endurance to be privy to the tortured hollering of the dead intended only for the ear of God.
-- Fr Carsten Derrick, 'Homilies.'
An Anne Geddes photograph hangs on the wall, a black and white print of a newborn cocooned within the petals of a rose. Another more abstract picture hangs in another corner, a multi-coloured spiral reminiscent of a Minoan puzzle.
The sun is shining, and a cluster of six ripening apples is perfectly centred in the large window frame. Somewhere, in a neighbouring garden, a water feature -- a fountain maybe -- adds a soothing and melodious background score to the August afternoon.
Dr Bloemberg shifts his focus from the computer screen to her; back to the screen, then back to her. He's typically relaxed, as casual as his attire. The loose slacks and Polo shirt reflect the laid-back demeanour of the fifty-something psychologist. But there's something different about him today....
Ah, yes, the glasses. They're a new addition to his outfit. Black-rimmed, almost Michael Cane-ish. She can't decide whether they suit him or not.
"So, Frau Lockner," he says finally, speaking with a deliberation that tells her he is choosing his words carefully. "How does it feel?"
She doesn't respond right away. She merely frowns.
"I'm sorry?" she replies after a long pause. "I'm not quite sure what you mean."
He shrugs, almost as if any answer she might give is ultimately of no consequence to him. A quasi-disinterest to ease the patient's mind.
"Your ability," he clarifies. "When you hear these 'echoes,' as I believe you refer to them. What do you feel?"
She swallows. Feel? She is still nonplussed by the doctor's enquiry. The sensory overload, the hammerblow of trace emotion is so intense that it is more pertinent to ask what she does not feel when using her ability She follows this line of thought when answering.
"Peace," she begins. "There is none. Just turmoil. Like I'm not in control. I try to rein it in, try to focus, and I manage for the most part."
Her voice breaks. She is drained. She has no reserves to draw on to counter the dark melancholy that seems to always brood over her. She starts to cry.
"But it's like I'm always on the edge," she gulps, choking back a sob. "Always on the verge of slipping. Like it's too much for me."
She coughs and sniffs, and runs the back of a hand across her running nose. The tears abate with a suddenness that surprises her.
"It is too much for me," she confesses. "I just want to run."
The psychologist has been listening intently to every word, occasionally nodding. Now he leans back, nodding more emphatically, the leather swivel chair creaking beneath him.
"Lack of control, or at least the fear of it, is typical of panic disorder," he says. "So what you say does not surprise me. There are a number of techniques one can use in order to bring down your anxiety levels."
She stares back at Bloemberg mutely. She is facing two enemies -- her 'gift', and a sceptical world. One siezes her as it wills, and the other mocks her testimony to its detrimental effects, explains it away, ridicules her. Had she been born in centuries past, her end would doubtless have been a burning stake. But the twenty-first century still burns its heretics, only with the flames of derision.
Bloemberg drones on and she typically listens without hearing. She is adrift on the restless sea of her own thoughts. In a dark place where the sun is shrouded by a million disembodied souls, and the sound of reason is drowned out by the cacophany of their lament.
She remembers how the Bible speaks of the dead as a cloud, and their cries to God as smoke, incense, rising up to Him. The thought overwhelms her, reminds her that her ability drags her into a world which mere men were never meant to be a party to.
It is a burden beyond endurance to be privy to the tortured hollering of the dead intended only for the ear of God.
Chapter Thirteen
If you blinked, you might have missed the Kriminalkommisariat in Alter Steinweg. It was markedly unprepossessing. Had it not been for the grubby plaque stating just what the purpose of the building was, one could have been forgiven that nothing more remarkable than a call centre lay behind the doors of the bland four-storey structure. Visitors to Münster walked past it in broad daylight without as much as a glance. The nearby Prinzipalmarkt, with its attractive cobbled streets, and the imposing edifice of Lambertikirche
looming over the picture-postcard Old City blinded them to the shabby police station.
But for Frieda the place was anything but unremarkable, anything but bland. As she climbed painfully from Schluter's car, she flinched as her senses attuned themselves to the aura that had attached itself to the place. Like some loudspeaker, it blared like a siren, as if the building reverberated with the murder and violence that it was committed to investigating and amplified it. As though a thousand victims of injustice had left their imprint in the brickwork, and its very foundation was death.
Even the multistorey carpark across the street wailed to her. It had, after all, seen its own fair share of suicides and violent crimes that had left an indelible residue in the fabric of the Parkhaus.
Schluter took her arm with a gentleness she would not have imagined him capable of and guided her as she limped awkwardly across the street.
"And you're sure there's nothing you're not telling me, Frieda?" he pressed her for the tenth time at least. "Because we can nail the bastard who did this to you. Seriously."
Frieda shook her head and immediately winced as the gesture sent a burning pain down one side of her bruised neck.
"I've told you everything, Kommissar," she croaked, her voice almost gone. "Please believe me."
The imploring tone of her voice may have been more than she had intended. But she needed someone to exercise just a little faith for once. A mustard seed-sized amount would do just now.
The smell of stale coffee was the first thing that struck Frieda as they entered the Kommissariat. She welcomed the sensory diversion, and she held on to it for as long as she could, centering herself, focusing. She had never been more thankful for the aroma of old arabica.
Uniformed officers and Schluter's plain-clothed colleagues shot her curious glances as they passed. Frieda realised what a state she must look. When Schluter had shouldered his way into her apartment, he had found her a bruised, bleeding, shivering mess lying like a ragdoll on the bedroom floor. It had taken him ten minutes to rouse her, and she had finally burst into wakefulness with a scream that had caused even Schluter to flinch. She had raised her lacerated arms against him, blind to her friend, her instincts primed only to defend herself from another onslaught.
It had taken Schluter at least twenty minutes to calm her down, and another hour to bathe and dress her wounds. The detective had wanted to call an ambulance or drive her to accident and emergency, but Frieda had insisted that it was not necessary. In reality, she would have given anything to recover in a safe hospital bed, having her injuries tended to. But part of her feared that physical recovery by this route might be costly. Apart from Schluter she could count on no one believing her version of events. Her medical records would reveal her treatment with Dr Bloemberg, and the men in white coats could well make the unthinkable decision that committed her to the grim, institutionalised future that haunted her nightmares.
Schluter led her down a corridor to a grubby lift that carried them up two floors, to where the incident room dedicated to cracking The Stick Man murders was located. Three of Schluter's colleagues were waiting for them, and their expressions hardened as she entered the room.
"Fucking great," one growled, not caring to mask his disgust. "Nothing like progress."
"Looks like she's forgotten her crystal ball, though," sneered another.
Schluter didn't react, at least not at first. The comments were nothing Frieda hadn't already heard a thousand times before, but they still stung. No matter how many times she was the brunt of such ridicule, the pain of it never abated. It hurt as much as her physical injuries.
After making sure she was comfortable in her chair, Schluter whirled, confronting his colleagues.
"Full of shit today, aren't we?" he challenged. He glared at one. "Still reading your horoscope, Lothar? Eh? Because last time I noticed, that's the page you head for first when you see a newspaper!"
The detective grumbled at the riposte, but Schluter was already moving on. "And what about you, Hedwig? Still going to church? And, Marius. For a sceptic, you have some very questionable tattoos."
The atmosphere in the room could have been cut with a knife, but Schluter seemed oblivious. He glared for a few moments, as though daring some kind of reaction. When none came, he cleared his throat and drew attention to a huge whiteboard on one wall. It was covered in untidy notes made in black marker pen, with occasional red arrows directing attention to various photographs situated amid the scrawl.
"Despite your cynicism, Frau Lockner has already been of significant help to this enquiry," claimed Schluter as he took off his trenchcoat and threw it over the back of her chair.
Frieda shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Schluter was flattering her, being kind to defend his decision to include her on the case. She appreciated his need to save face in the eyes of his colleagues, but she felt sceptical eyes boring into her again.
"We found the Brink girl," sighed Schluter. "Or what was left of her at least."
Frieda's stomach heaved. She did not know if it was caused by the detective's grim revelation, the effects of her injuries, or a little of both. Her eyes locked with Schluter's.
"Hansaring, early this morning," he answered in response to the question in her gaze. "Most of her had been put out with the rubbish. The rest of the body was strung up in the cellar."
Schluter turned to the board and gestured to several photographs set in a circle around the name 'Brink.'
"Don't peer too closely," he advised. "It wasn't pleasant. The worst yet, in fact. No place for you, Frau Lockner. At least not yet. God knows how long it will take to clean the mess up."
Frieda felt her stomach lurch again.
"I want to help," she rasped regardless, trying to ignore her nausea and the burning pain in her muscles and joints.
"Well i guess they could use an extra mop and bucket," spat Lothar, causing Schluter to clench his teeth and spin on his heels.
"Get the fuck out!" he roared. "Now! All of you! Fucking pieces of shit!"
Lothar glared back, his face white, livid. With his close-cropped blond hair, he resembled an albino, so white had his pallor become. Frieda held her breath, waiting for an explosion of temper and testosterone that never happened. Lothar simply swung out of his seat and stormed out, Hedwig and Marius trailing after him.
"Fucking animals," Schluter growled as the door slammed. "I'm sorry you had to see that, Frieda."
She shrugged. She was so, so tired. Always so tired.
"No matter," she lied. Her head swam and she had to force down bile that had fountained into her throat. "Why did you bring me here?"
She needed desperately to focus. Whatever Schluter wanted from her, despite her ailing body, she would seize it for the sake of her state of mind.
Schluter dragged up a chair and sat on it the wrong way, arms draped over the back, fingers laced.
"We've found a crucial witness to the Brink murder," he said slowly. The care with which he seemed to be speaking, selecting his words momentarily reminded Frieda of Dr Bloemberg. "Someone you know very well. Very well indeed."
Frieda froze, frowning. Knew? Her already troubled mind swirled with confusion as she opened her mouth to speak. For a few seconds she gaped silently until she managed to force the question out.
"Who?" she whispered, her voice bereft of strength.
Schluter chewed at the corner of his lip thoughtfully before finally saying, "You, Frieda. You."
looming over the picture-postcard Old City blinded them to the shabby police station.
But for Frieda the place was anything but unremarkable, anything but bland. As she climbed painfully from Schluter's car, she flinched as her senses attuned themselves to the aura that had attached itself to the place. Like some loudspeaker, it blared like a siren, as if the building reverberated with the murder and violence that it was committed to investigating and amplified it. As though a thousand victims of injustice had left their imprint in the brickwork, and its very foundation was death.
Even the multistorey carpark across the street wailed to her. It had, after all, seen its own fair share of suicides and violent crimes that had left an indelible residue in the fabric of the Parkhaus.
Schluter took her arm with a gentleness she would not have imagined him capable of and guided her as she limped awkwardly across the street.
"And you're sure there's nothing you're not telling me, Frieda?" he pressed her for the tenth time at least. "Because we can nail the bastard who did this to you. Seriously."
Frieda shook her head and immediately winced as the gesture sent a burning pain down one side of her bruised neck.
"I've told you everything, Kommissar," she croaked, her voice almost gone. "Please believe me."
The imploring tone of her voice may have been more than she had intended. But she needed someone to exercise just a little faith for once. A mustard seed-sized amount would do just now.
The smell of stale coffee was the first thing that struck Frieda as they entered the Kommissariat. She welcomed the sensory diversion, and she held on to it for as long as she could, centering herself, focusing. She had never been more thankful for the aroma of old arabica.
Uniformed officers and Schluter's plain-clothed colleagues shot her curious glances as they passed. Frieda realised what a state she must look. When Schluter had shouldered his way into her apartment, he had found her a bruised, bleeding, shivering mess lying like a ragdoll on the bedroom floor. It had taken him ten minutes to rouse her, and she had finally burst into wakefulness with a scream that had caused even Schluter to flinch. She had raised her lacerated arms against him, blind to her friend, her instincts primed only to defend herself from another onslaught.
It had taken Schluter at least twenty minutes to calm her down, and another hour to bathe and dress her wounds. The detective had wanted to call an ambulance or drive her to accident and emergency, but Frieda had insisted that it was not necessary. In reality, she would have given anything to recover in a safe hospital bed, having her injuries tended to. But part of her feared that physical recovery by this route might be costly. Apart from Schluter she could count on no one believing her version of events. Her medical records would reveal her treatment with Dr Bloemberg, and the men in white coats could well make the unthinkable decision that committed her to the grim, institutionalised future that haunted her nightmares.
Schluter led her down a corridor to a grubby lift that carried them up two floors, to where the incident room dedicated to cracking The Stick Man murders was located. Three of Schluter's colleagues were waiting for them, and their expressions hardened as she entered the room.
"Fucking great," one growled, not caring to mask his disgust. "Nothing like progress."
"Looks like she's forgotten her crystal ball, though," sneered another.
Schluter didn't react, at least not at first. The comments were nothing Frieda hadn't already heard a thousand times before, but they still stung. No matter how many times she was the brunt of such ridicule, the pain of it never abated. It hurt as much as her physical injuries.
After making sure she was comfortable in her chair, Schluter whirled, confronting his colleagues.
"Full of shit today, aren't we?" he challenged. He glared at one. "Still reading your horoscope, Lothar? Eh? Because last time I noticed, that's the page you head for first when you see a newspaper!"
The detective grumbled at the riposte, but Schluter was already moving on. "And what about you, Hedwig? Still going to church? And, Marius. For a sceptic, you have some very questionable tattoos."
The atmosphere in the room could have been cut with a knife, but Schluter seemed oblivious. He glared for a few moments, as though daring some kind of reaction. When none came, he cleared his throat and drew attention to a huge whiteboard on one wall. It was covered in untidy notes made in black marker pen, with occasional red arrows directing attention to various photographs situated amid the scrawl.
"Despite your cynicism, Frau Lockner has already been of significant help to this enquiry," claimed Schluter as he took off his trenchcoat and threw it over the back of her chair.
Frieda shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Schluter was flattering her, being kind to defend his decision to include her on the case. She appreciated his need to save face in the eyes of his colleagues, but she felt sceptical eyes boring into her again.
"We found the Brink girl," sighed Schluter. "Or what was left of her at least."
Frieda's stomach heaved. She did not know if it was caused by the detective's grim revelation, the effects of her injuries, or a little of both. Her eyes locked with Schluter's.
"Hansaring, early this morning," he answered in response to the question in her gaze. "Most of her had been put out with the rubbish. The rest of the body was strung up in the cellar."
Schluter turned to the board and gestured to several photographs set in a circle around the name 'Brink.'
"Don't peer too closely," he advised. "It wasn't pleasant. The worst yet, in fact. No place for you, Frau Lockner. At least not yet. God knows how long it will take to clean the mess up."
Frieda felt her stomach lurch again.
"I want to help," she rasped regardless, trying to ignore her nausea and the burning pain in her muscles and joints.
"Well i guess they could use an extra mop and bucket," spat Lothar, causing Schluter to clench his teeth and spin on his heels.
"Get the fuck out!" he roared. "Now! All of you! Fucking pieces of shit!"
Lothar glared back, his face white, livid. With his close-cropped blond hair, he resembled an albino, so white had his pallor become. Frieda held her breath, waiting for an explosion of temper and testosterone that never happened. Lothar simply swung out of his seat and stormed out, Hedwig and Marius trailing after him.
"Fucking animals," Schluter growled as the door slammed. "I'm sorry you had to see that, Frieda."
She shrugged. She was so, so tired. Always so tired.
"No matter," she lied. Her head swam and she had to force down bile that had fountained into her throat. "Why did you bring me here?"
She needed desperately to focus. Whatever Schluter wanted from her, despite her ailing body, she would seize it for the sake of her state of mind.
Schluter dragged up a chair and sat on it the wrong way, arms draped over the back, fingers laced.
"We've found a crucial witness to the Brink murder," he said slowly. The care with which he seemed to be speaking, selecting his words momentarily reminded Frieda of Dr Bloemberg. "Someone you know very well. Very well indeed."
Frieda froze, frowning. Knew? Her already troubled mind swirled with confusion as she opened her mouth to speak. For a few seconds she gaped silently until she managed to force the question out.
"Who?" she whispered, her voice bereft of strength.
Schluter chewed at the corner of his lip thoughtfully before finally saying, "You, Frieda. You."
Chapter Fourteen
One question had been bothering Frieda ever since she had regained her composure to find Schluter patching her up. Why had the detective been motivated to break down her front door? Now, barely able to form the words, her mouth was so parched, she asked him.
"A neighbour phoned the station, reporting the commotion coming from your apartment," he said. "I was standing right next to the guy who took the call and recognised the address. I drove straight round here and the neighbour let me in to the apartment building. There was no answer when I knocked on your door, and the neighbour said that the noise had stopped suddenly just a few minutes before. I wasn't about to waste any more time knocking."
Frieda was sweating but she felt intolerably cold. She shivered as she tried to recall the events of that night prior to her awakening, beaten and bloodied, in Schluter's arms. But the memory eluded her. More than that. She doubted that the memory even existed to be recalled. A sudden wave of panic washed over her and she felt like running. Her breathing stalled for a second, then became irregular. But she faced down the threat of hyperventilation and somehow won.
Schluter sighed and closed his eyes. Frieda had no idea if the reaction was to shutout his memories of that night, or to better recollect them. When his eyes opened again, and she saw the pain reflected in them, she had her answer.
"You were a mess, Frieda," he growled, and Frieda heard his voice crack with an emotion she was unfamiliar with. "And your place was wrecked. You were just lying there, mumbling, crying, sometimes hysterical. You were bleeding everywhere. I thought -- "
Schluter paused and took a deep breath before continuing. He had paled andlooked suddenly ill.
"I thought you'd been raped," he said quietly, closing his eyes again as though giving voice to his fear hurt him.
Frieda swallowed. The detective did not realise just how close to the truth he was. She could not have felt more violated if she had fallen victim to such a fate.
"I don't remember," she whispered.
"What do you remember?"
It must have been the tenth time that Schluter had asked, but she humoured him. She
knew he was looking for something to ground his emotions, to hold on to.
"There was a presence. It was overwhelming. Like it was sucking the life and breathout of everything. I think I saw it. Then --"
Like Schluter before her, she hesitated. "Then it was inside me," she murmured. "AndI had no control. I was suffocating. I could hear myself screaming but it sounded distant, as if I was listening to a conversation through a wall."
"What did you mean about me being a witness?" she broached, suddenly remembering the root reason for this conversation. "How is that even possible?"
Schluter held her gaze for a moment then stood up and returned his attention to the white board plastered with photographs and scrawl.
"The remains of Stephanie Brink were discovered early this morning by a newspaper delivery guy," he began, and rammed his finger down onto a map of the city that occupied the upper left corner of the board. "Here."
"Yes, you said," Frieda said flatly. "Hansaring."
"The poor sod's still downstairs," Schluter went on, as though he hadn't heard. "Called 112 just after four-thirty a.m. Which was about a half hour after I found you."
Schluter folded his arms and looked down at Frieda. "And half an hour after you had already told me the address."
Frieda swallowed painfully. "What?" she croaked.
"Like I said, you were jabbering when I broke into your flat. I thought it was just gibberish, until I realised that it was actually just disjointed. A lot of stuff about pain and darkness. And you kept saying the same thing over and over every few seconds: 'Hansaring. Too late.' "
It wasn't possible! But even as the thought instinctively flashed in her mind, she appreciated the absurdity of it. The possible was being constantly redefined through the lens of her experience. The line drawn to denote one man's impracticality was far from wide enough to prevent her from striding right over it on her walk through her world.
"Of course, I wanted to race round there right away, but I couldn't. I was still arguing with you about the need to go to the hospital when the news came through."
Frieda nodded limply. One thing she did recall was Schluter's phone ringing.
"The station confirmed that human remains had been discovered in just the location you had specified. Now, call me stupid, but from my past experience of our working together, that has to be more than coincidence."
Frieda feared she was slipping into irredeemable insanity. No, worse than that, she felt as though she had toppled over the edge and was hanging by a last fraying thread of cognisance over the maw of madness. That she had been seized irretrievably by a force too powerful to resist as it gleefully dragged her to hell.
What now? What did Schluter expect from her?
Either her expression explicity conveyed her weary question, or else Schluter was more sensitive to her mood than she would have imagined. His own expression seemed to harden as though he were slipping on a mask, reverting to the clinical detective after several minutes of emotional connection that had proven to Frieda that he was actually human.
"I have no idea what happened to you, Frieda. What is happening. But whatever it is, it's my only lead right now. You are my only witness."
"But I saw nothing," Frieda protested.
"You felt it. Something. Heard something. Some echo, as you call it."
"Which I don't recall now."
Schluter reached into his pocket and removed a tiny plastic bag, which he held up in front of her between forefinger and thumb. Frieda squinted and saw that its contents caught the light of the incident room.
"So we need to jog your memory," Schluter said.
"What is it?" Frieda asked, but she already knew the answer. Her senses tingled as they always did in proximity to the residual energy that saturated a crime scene. But she did not want her belief hardened to cold reality by Schluter. She would prefer to remain in the dark about its origins and entertain the belief that she was imagining things.
"A means of breaking this case, or of breaking me," Schluter said grimly. "Stephanie Brink's bracelet."
"Wouldn't that ordinarily be of some interest to your forensics team?"
Schluter never flinched. "It would be, if they knew it existed."
Frieda shifted in her seat, feeling vicarious guilt. Schluter was right. If anyone ever found out he had removed evidence from a crime scene, he'd be finished. Beyond redemption.
"Ends and means," Schluter said flatly, again seeming to sense her unease. "Sometimes the only way is to bend the rules."
"What do you expect from me?" asked Frieda. "I've told you, this is not an exact science."
"I'm not interested in science, Frieda. Science is just more rules, and rules are a pain in the fucking arse. Thinking outside the box is what I need to do through you."
Psychometry was the word used to describe the technique whereby clairvoyants and mediums used everyday objects owned by the deceased to pick up on the impressions that they stored. It was a practice that differed from Frieda's ability only in terms of scale and magnitude. Where your typical psychic might hear a whisper of a detail, Frieda heard a bomb blast. She had never focussed her attention so narrowly on a single item before. Usually, she was plunged into the depths of horror that clung to a crime scene like a stangnant abyss. It typically surrounded and engulfed her. Applying her ability to an item removed from this environment was like trying to appreciate the context of a piece of coral brought up from the seabed. Yet in principle she admitted that the end result should be no different.
And Frieda's empathy was not solely with the dead. She appreciated the pressure that Schluter was under to get a breakthrough in this case. The media was having a field day, and people were genuinely frightened. It was a situation that could finish the Kommissar, so Frieda could wellunderstand his taking this risk.
"Not here," Frieda said finally.
"What?"
Frieda sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. It felt lank and greasy. Altogether she had a sense of a creeping degradation, a rottenness she feared would in time sap all the life and goodness out of her.
"If you want me to try this, then we need a neutral spot. There's too much going on here."
"Okay," Schluter agreed, without hesitation. It was clear he was prepared to put up with whatever conditions she set if it meant the chance of cracking this case. "Where?"
Where indeed. Reluctant as she was to even entertain the thought, there was only one place she knew that was devoid of the spiritual detritis that would otherwise interfere with the energies that were potentially stored in the bracelet. A place untainted and untouched that had so often been her sanctuary and place of refuge. But after this, it may never feel the same for here again.
Schluter was not the only one preparing to take a risk for the sake of exorcising the darkness haunting the city.
"A neighbour phoned the station, reporting the commotion coming from your apartment," he said. "I was standing right next to the guy who took the call and recognised the address. I drove straight round here and the neighbour let me in to the apartment building. There was no answer when I knocked on your door, and the neighbour said that the noise had stopped suddenly just a few minutes before. I wasn't about to waste any more time knocking."
Frieda was sweating but she felt intolerably cold. She shivered as she tried to recall the events of that night prior to her awakening, beaten and bloodied, in Schluter's arms. But the memory eluded her. More than that. She doubted that the memory even existed to be recalled. A sudden wave of panic washed over her and she felt like running. Her breathing stalled for a second, then became irregular. But she faced down the threat of hyperventilation and somehow won.
Schluter sighed and closed his eyes. Frieda had no idea if the reaction was to shutout his memories of that night, or to better recollect them. When his eyes opened again, and she saw the pain reflected in them, she had her answer.
"You were a mess, Frieda," he growled, and Frieda heard his voice crack with an emotion she was unfamiliar with. "And your place was wrecked. You were just lying there, mumbling, crying, sometimes hysterical. You were bleeding everywhere. I thought -- "
Schluter paused and took a deep breath before continuing. He had paled andlooked suddenly ill.
"I thought you'd been raped," he said quietly, closing his eyes again as though giving voice to his fear hurt him.
Frieda swallowed. The detective did not realise just how close to the truth he was. She could not have felt more violated if she had fallen victim to such a fate.
"I don't remember," she whispered.
"What do you remember?"
It must have been the tenth time that Schluter had asked, but she humoured him. She
knew he was looking for something to ground his emotions, to hold on to.
"There was a presence. It was overwhelming. Like it was sucking the life and breathout of everything. I think I saw it. Then --"
Like Schluter before her, she hesitated. "Then it was inside me," she murmured. "AndI had no control. I was suffocating. I could hear myself screaming but it sounded distant, as if I was listening to a conversation through a wall."
"What did you mean about me being a witness?" she broached, suddenly remembering the root reason for this conversation. "How is that even possible?"
Schluter held her gaze for a moment then stood up and returned his attention to the white board plastered with photographs and scrawl.
"The remains of Stephanie Brink were discovered early this morning by a newspaper delivery guy," he began, and rammed his finger down onto a map of the city that occupied the upper left corner of the board. "Here."
"Yes, you said," Frieda said flatly. "Hansaring."
"The poor sod's still downstairs," Schluter went on, as though he hadn't heard. "Called 112 just after four-thirty a.m. Which was about a half hour after I found you."
Schluter folded his arms and looked down at Frieda. "And half an hour after you had already told me the address."
Frieda swallowed painfully. "What?" she croaked.
"Like I said, you were jabbering when I broke into your flat. I thought it was just gibberish, until I realised that it was actually just disjointed. A lot of stuff about pain and darkness. And you kept saying the same thing over and over every few seconds: 'Hansaring. Too late.' "
It wasn't possible! But even as the thought instinctively flashed in her mind, she appreciated the absurdity of it. The possible was being constantly redefined through the lens of her experience. The line drawn to denote one man's impracticality was far from wide enough to prevent her from striding right over it on her walk through her world.
"Of course, I wanted to race round there right away, but I couldn't. I was still arguing with you about the need to go to the hospital when the news came through."
Frieda nodded limply. One thing she did recall was Schluter's phone ringing.
"The station confirmed that human remains had been discovered in just the location you had specified. Now, call me stupid, but from my past experience of our working together, that has to be more than coincidence."
Frieda feared she was slipping into irredeemable insanity. No, worse than that, she felt as though she had toppled over the edge and was hanging by a last fraying thread of cognisance over the maw of madness. That she had been seized irretrievably by a force too powerful to resist as it gleefully dragged her to hell.
What now? What did Schluter expect from her?
Either her expression explicity conveyed her weary question, or else Schluter was more sensitive to her mood than she would have imagined. His own expression seemed to harden as though he were slipping on a mask, reverting to the clinical detective after several minutes of emotional connection that had proven to Frieda that he was actually human.
"I have no idea what happened to you, Frieda. What is happening. But whatever it is, it's my only lead right now. You are my only witness."
"But I saw nothing," Frieda protested.
"You felt it. Something. Heard something. Some echo, as you call it."
"Which I don't recall now."
Schluter reached into his pocket and removed a tiny plastic bag, which he held up in front of her between forefinger and thumb. Frieda squinted and saw that its contents caught the light of the incident room.
"So we need to jog your memory," Schluter said.
"What is it?" Frieda asked, but she already knew the answer. Her senses tingled as they always did in proximity to the residual energy that saturated a crime scene. But she did not want her belief hardened to cold reality by Schluter. She would prefer to remain in the dark about its origins and entertain the belief that she was imagining things.
"A means of breaking this case, or of breaking me," Schluter said grimly. "Stephanie Brink's bracelet."
"Wouldn't that ordinarily be of some interest to your forensics team?"
Schluter never flinched. "It would be, if they knew it existed."
Frieda shifted in her seat, feeling vicarious guilt. Schluter was right. If anyone ever found out he had removed evidence from a crime scene, he'd be finished. Beyond redemption.
"Ends and means," Schluter said flatly, again seeming to sense her unease. "Sometimes the only way is to bend the rules."
"What do you expect from me?" asked Frieda. "I've told you, this is not an exact science."
"I'm not interested in science, Frieda. Science is just more rules, and rules are a pain in the fucking arse. Thinking outside the box is what I need to do through you."
Psychometry was the word used to describe the technique whereby clairvoyants and mediums used everyday objects owned by the deceased to pick up on the impressions that they stored. It was a practice that differed from Frieda's ability only in terms of scale and magnitude. Where your typical psychic might hear a whisper of a detail, Frieda heard a bomb blast. She had never focussed her attention so narrowly on a single item before. Usually, she was plunged into the depths of horror that clung to a crime scene like a stangnant abyss. It typically surrounded and engulfed her. Applying her ability to an item removed from this environment was like trying to appreciate the context of a piece of coral brought up from the seabed. Yet in principle she admitted that the end result should be no different.
And Frieda's empathy was not solely with the dead. She appreciated the pressure that Schluter was under to get a breakthrough in this case. The media was having a field day, and people were genuinely frightened. It was a situation that could finish the Kommissar, so Frieda could wellunderstand his taking this risk.
"Not here," Frieda said finally.
"What?"
Frieda sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. It felt lank and greasy. Altogether she had a sense of a creeping degradation, a rottenness she feared would in time sap all the life and goodness out of her.
"If you want me to try this, then we need a neutral spot. There's too much going on here."
"Okay," Schluter agreed, without hesitation. It was clear he was prepared to put up with whatever conditions she set if it meant the chance of cracking this case. "Where?"
Where indeed. Reluctant as she was to even entertain the thought, there was only one place she knew that was devoid of the spiritual detritis that would otherwise interfere with the energies that were potentially stored in the bracelet. A place untainted and untouched that had so often been her sanctuary and place of refuge. But after this, it may never feel the same for here again.
Schluter was not the only one preparing to take a risk for the sake of exorcising the darkness haunting the city.
Chapter Fifteen
There was a moment that The Stick Man arrived at in the execution of his duty that he relished. A moment that was inevitable, the anticipation of which was enough to thrill him immensely, while its realisation sent him into an almost orgasmic abandon.
He shuddered with excitement as his latest victim wept, 'Kill me. Please, kill me.'
The plea was almost inaudible, devoid of strength, and The Stick Man thrilled at the pitiful imploring that betrayed irredeemable desolation. Such desolation crowned the sacrifice. It was the fire from heaven which consumed the offering and assured acceptance. And for this reason The Stick Man rejoiced.
The plea came again. It was even weaker this time and faded into nothing before it could be fully reiterated. The Stick Man stepped out of the shadows and into the pool of sallow light which illuminated his holocaust, wire cutters in hand.
The sacrifice was almost complete. Almost.
"Some are born eunuchs, and some are made eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake," he said, kicking open his victims legs as he hung helplessly from the ceiling, casting a lonely shadow over the bloody cellar floor.
He shuddered with excitement as his latest victim wept, 'Kill me. Please, kill me.'
The plea was almost inaudible, devoid of strength, and The Stick Man thrilled at the pitiful imploring that betrayed irredeemable desolation. Such desolation crowned the sacrifice. It was the fire from heaven which consumed the offering and assured acceptance. And for this reason The Stick Man rejoiced.
The plea came again. It was even weaker this time and faded into nothing before it could be fully reiterated. The Stick Man stepped out of the shadows and into the pool of sallow light which illuminated his holocaust, wire cutters in hand.
The sacrifice was almost complete. Almost.
"Some are born eunuchs, and some are made eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake," he said, kicking open his victims legs as he hung helplessly from the ceiling, casting a lonely shadow over the bloody cellar floor.
Chapter Sixteen
Frieda stared blindly out of the rain-lashed window as Schluter exited the autobahn. The weather reflected her mood, a blanket of grey, unrelenting misery spread over her soul and finding its external expression. Grave misgivings weighed heavily upon her, a sense of guilt at the violation she was about to commit for the sake of preventing a greater crime.
Schluter seemed to share her mood, although their drive was punctuated by bursts of his attempted smalltalk, as though he was occasionally encouraged by the thought of getting the breakthrough he desperately needed. But the conversation would inevitably die after a few minutes as Schluter descended from his momentary mountaintop.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the autobahn, they were in the heart of the Westfalian countryside, and pulling on to the unpaved parking ground at Venner Moor. The rain had stopped as they left the car and followed a narrow track into the trees that bowed in mourning under the leaden sky. Their boughs wept as they passed beneath, as though they understood the impending violation and grieved
The trail ran out, swamped beyond a fallen branch where it plunged beneath a pool of dark water. Frieda halted and turned to Schluter who had followed her wordlessly until now.
Her face was pale, accentuated by the strands of her wet red hair that snaked out from beneath her hood. She held out her hand and Schluter took the bracelet from his pocket. He pressed it almost gingerly into her palm as if he expected the contact to knock him off his feet. But the bracelet lay curled in Frieda's palm as benign as anyone would expect an inanimate object to be. Anyone apart from a jumpy psychic empath, and a seasoned detective who felt like he had lived too long and seen too much. Frieda stared down at the coil of delicate silver filigree set with vivid aquamarine stones that seemed to glow with some strange internal fire, defiant of the gloomy glade in which they stood. The stones captured Frieda's attention, held it, drawing her in with the unspoken promise of secrets yet to be revealed. The allure was as irresistible as a siren's song and took Frieda to a place where her own thoughts faded into a singularity at the very core of her being. A singularity around which new thoughts began to circle and form. Moths to a flame.
"The view from the window is surprisingly clear. I can see all the way to the river today."
Schluter took a few seconds to absorb what Frieda had said, then shook his head nonplussed.
"What?"
"Usually the leaves are in the way."
"Frieda, what do you mean?"
The rain had started again, beating an irregular rhythm on the canopy above. The already grey light dimmed, and a sigh of wind chilled Schluter and forced him to dig his hands deeper into his pockets.
Despite the inclemency, and despite her earlier mood, now a small smile played at the corners of Frieda's lips. Her eyes were wide, still locked on the bracelet which she held with a reverence usually reserved for a communion wafer.
She could hear Schluter, but only distantly, as a noise she could easily dismiss from within the reverie that the fire burning in the bracelet had drawn her into. She retained the capacity, the wherewithal to respond, but lacked the will.
The connection she had established was vivid. Thoughts that were not her own, which she was not generating, and memories which had no source in her own experience flickered through her mind with a clarity that affected all her senses. The imprints were so strong as to be palpable, immersive. There was no coherency, and she sought to find some, to control the rush of information. It was as though someone had plugged in a CD player and set it to random, with the tracks racing at a hundred kilometres an hour. But her quest for order and structure was hindered by a beatific aura she had not expected and could not resist. It was an inertia that sapped her will, her motivation to do anything except just be.
"Frieda?"
Schluter's persistence began to sour the blissful apathy in which she drifted, embittering it. She tried to ignore the sullying, but an irritability forced itself to the surface.
"The perspective is totally subjective," she spat. "How can anyone say the artist meant this or that?"
She was struggling for control, and as the apathy waned, Frieda realised that the bitterness had nothing to do with Schluter's distant questioning. She felt a sickening churn in the pit of her stomach, reminiscent of the effect that the previous night's possession had wrought within her.
Why had she even agreed to this, so soon after having been so mercilessly violated? It was not that the impressions were any more potent than those she felt at the scene of a crime; just that there were more of them, and these surged over her soul in a relentless torrent. A torrent that was made up not only of sweet water, but of stagnant surges. The bracelet had so effectively stored a whole library of its owner's life experience.
"Concentrate, Frieda!" snapped Schluter in her face. "Focus!"
She jumped as Schluter's words finally broke through the remnants of the cocoon that had wrapped itself around her. The rain had started again and the drenched canopy of leaves over their heads offered little shelter, heightening the sense of misery.
Stephanie Brink had been a student of Art History. Frieda recalled this fact and used it as lens to make sense of the impressions, of the involuntary bursts of information she had uttered. Schlüter's interruption had catapulted her out of the strange reverie and she rallied herself, steeled her concentration, focused. Now instead of drowning in the information contained in the bracelet, she was above it, aloof, so that she was able to read the data more coherently. Various emotional traces presented themselves to her, and she could hone in on or dismiss them as she willed. There was much laughter, much joy, the legacy of a life in love with its passion, a soul that lived and breathed art. But then the tone changed.
It was so subtle, a thread of disquiet that began to run through the joy, tainting it, the way a drop of ink might swirl and sully a pool of fresh water. As much as she wished to ignore it, Frieda new that she had to take hold of the thread and follow it to whereever it might lead.
Attaching her mind to the trace, Frieda gave chase. Her stomach churned as if she had just crested a hill and had begun the descent down the far side. She was in pursuit but maintained control, attached to the trail but detached from its influence and the speed of the descent.
"You need to speak to me, Frieda," prompted Schlüter, hunching up his shoulders against the weather.
She nodded ever so slightly, anxious not to lose the connection she had established, even though the change in mood was filling her with trepidation.
"She was happy." Frieda's words were part information, part mourning for a vibrant life cut off so soon.
"That's the general impression we were given," agreed Schluter. "Friends, family, everyone said she was the life and soul."
Frieda frowned. "And yet, there's something more, buried deep. Really deep."
"What is it?"
"I can't tell. It's subtle, but definite.."
"What do you see?"
The detective was still referring to her ability in terms of the visual rather than the empathetic. This wasn't sight. It was far more vivid than that. It was experience, hard and raw.
"I don't understand it." Frieda frowned. "There's so much happiness and contentment, and then something more morose woven into it. "But it's like...."
She hesitated and Schluter heaved an impatient sigh. "Like what, Frieda?"
"Like there's two different sets of emotions. Utterly separate. They have no relation to each other at all."
"Well, no one can be happy all of the time," reminded the detective. "Happy one day, down in the dumps the next. Maybe bipolar."
"No," snapped Frieda emphatically. "No, you don't understand. Two different sets of emotions belonging to two separtate people."
Her breathing was heavier, labouring under a sudden strain. She shot Schluter a glance. "This bracelet didn't only belong to Stephanie Brink."
Schlutershrugged. "Family heirloom. Handed down."
"No," insisted Frieda. "When I say unrelated, I mean unrelated. There would be some overlap, a connection between the two traces if it were familial."
She paused. "If the bracelet had been given to her as a present, maybe that would account for it. Or if she had bought it secondhand."
But something still didn't ring true about this theory. The darker trace had pulled her deeper into its stream and it was beginning to overpower the initial positive traces she had read. A sense of deep, dark depression, like suddenly being plunged into a crater whose rim blocked out the light of the sun. There was a sudden craving, a gnawing hunger, and such, such wretchedness. The comparison with the earlier joy and life was so stark that it hurt. The trace had become a torrent, and a torrent potent with horror and abomination. It both repelled and fascinated Frieda, and some involuntary motor response saw her hand close so tightly over the bracelet that blood began seeping between her fingers.
And then, just as thunder cracked overhead, her hand flashed open and the bloodied bracelet dropped to the waterlogged woodland floor.
Schluter seemed to share her mood, although their drive was punctuated by bursts of his attempted smalltalk, as though he was occasionally encouraged by the thought of getting the breakthrough he desperately needed. But the conversation would inevitably die after a few minutes as Schluter descended from his momentary mountaintop.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the autobahn, they were in the heart of the Westfalian countryside, and pulling on to the unpaved parking ground at Venner Moor. The rain had stopped as they left the car and followed a narrow track into the trees that bowed in mourning under the leaden sky. Their boughs wept as they passed beneath, as though they understood the impending violation and grieved
The trail ran out, swamped beyond a fallen branch where it plunged beneath a pool of dark water. Frieda halted and turned to Schluter who had followed her wordlessly until now.
Her face was pale, accentuated by the strands of her wet red hair that snaked out from beneath her hood. She held out her hand and Schluter took the bracelet from his pocket. He pressed it almost gingerly into her palm as if he expected the contact to knock him off his feet. But the bracelet lay curled in Frieda's palm as benign as anyone would expect an inanimate object to be. Anyone apart from a jumpy psychic empath, and a seasoned detective who felt like he had lived too long and seen too much. Frieda stared down at the coil of delicate silver filigree set with vivid aquamarine stones that seemed to glow with some strange internal fire, defiant of the gloomy glade in which they stood. The stones captured Frieda's attention, held it, drawing her in with the unspoken promise of secrets yet to be revealed. The allure was as irresistible as a siren's song and took Frieda to a place where her own thoughts faded into a singularity at the very core of her being. A singularity around which new thoughts began to circle and form. Moths to a flame.
"The view from the window is surprisingly clear. I can see all the way to the river today."
Schluter took a few seconds to absorb what Frieda had said, then shook his head nonplussed.
"What?"
"Usually the leaves are in the way."
"Frieda, what do you mean?"
The rain had started again, beating an irregular rhythm on the canopy above. The already grey light dimmed, and a sigh of wind chilled Schluter and forced him to dig his hands deeper into his pockets.
Despite the inclemency, and despite her earlier mood, now a small smile played at the corners of Frieda's lips. Her eyes were wide, still locked on the bracelet which she held with a reverence usually reserved for a communion wafer.
She could hear Schluter, but only distantly, as a noise she could easily dismiss from within the reverie that the fire burning in the bracelet had drawn her into. She retained the capacity, the wherewithal to respond, but lacked the will.
The connection she had established was vivid. Thoughts that were not her own, which she was not generating, and memories which had no source in her own experience flickered through her mind with a clarity that affected all her senses. The imprints were so strong as to be palpable, immersive. There was no coherency, and she sought to find some, to control the rush of information. It was as though someone had plugged in a CD player and set it to random, with the tracks racing at a hundred kilometres an hour. But her quest for order and structure was hindered by a beatific aura she had not expected and could not resist. It was an inertia that sapped her will, her motivation to do anything except just be.
"Frieda?"
Schluter's persistence began to sour the blissful apathy in which she drifted, embittering it. She tried to ignore the sullying, but an irritability forced itself to the surface.
"The perspective is totally subjective," she spat. "How can anyone say the artist meant this or that?"
She was struggling for control, and as the apathy waned, Frieda realised that the bitterness had nothing to do with Schluter's distant questioning. She felt a sickening churn in the pit of her stomach, reminiscent of the effect that the previous night's possession had wrought within her.
Why had she even agreed to this, so soon after having been so mercilessly violated? It was not that the impressions were any more potent than those she felt at the scene of a crime; just that there were more of them, and these surged over her soul in a relentless torrent. A torrent that was made up not only of sweet water, but of stagnant surges. The bracelet had so effectively stored a whole library of its owner's life experience.
"Concentrate, Frieda!" snapped Schluter in her face. "Focus!"
She jumped as Schluter's words finally broke through the remnants of the cocoon that had wrapped itself around her. The rain had started again and the drenched canopy of leaves over their heads offered little shelter, heightening the sense of misery.
Stephanie Brink had been a student of Art History. Frieda recalled this fact and used it as lens to make sense of the impressions, of the involuntary bursts of information she had uttered. Schlüter's interruption had catapulted her out of the strange reverie and she rallied herself, steeled her concentration, focused. Now instead of drowning in the information contained in the bracelet, she was above it, aloof, so that she was able to read the data more coherently. Various emotional traces presented themselves to her, and she could hone in on or dismiss them as she willed. There was much laughter, much joy, the legacy of a life in love with its passion, a soul that lived and breathed art. But then the tone changed.
It was so subtle, a thread of disquiet that began to run through the joy, tainting it, the way a drop of ink might swirl and sully a pool of fresh water. As much as she wished to ignore it, Frieda new that she had to take hold of the thread and follow it to whereever it might lead.
Attaching her mind to the trace, Frieda gave chase. Her stomach churned as if she had just crested a hill and had begun the descent down the far side. She was in pursuit but maintained control, attached to the trail but detached from its influence and the speed of the descent.
"You need to speak to me, Frieda," prompted Schlüter, hunching up his shoulders against the weather.
She nodded ever so slightly, anxious not to lose the connection she had established, even though the change in mood was filling her with trepidation.
"She was happy." Frieda's words were part information, part mourning for a vibrant life cut off so soon.
"That's the general impression we were given," agreed Schluter. "Friends, family, everyone said she was the life and soul."
Frieda frowned. "And yet, there's something more, buried deep. Really deep."
"What is it?"
"I can't tell. It's subtle, but definite.."
"What do you see?"
The detective was still referring to her ability in terms of the visual rather than the empathetic. This wasn't sight. It was far more vivid than that. It was experience, hard and raw.
"I don't understand it." Frieda frowned. "There's so much happiness and contentment, and then something more morose woven into it. "But it's like...."
She hesitated and Schluter heaved an impatient sigh. "Like what, Frieda?"
"Like there's two different sets of emotions. Utterly separate. They have no relation to each other at all."
"Well, no one can be happy all of the time," reminded the detective. "Happy one day, down in the dumps the next. Maybe bipolar."
"No," snapped Frieda emphatically. "No, you don't understand. Two different sets of emotions belonging to two separtate people."
Her breathing was heavier, labouring under a sudden strain. She shot Schluter a glance. "This bracelet didn't only belong to Stephanie Brink."
Schlutershrugged. "Family heirloom. Handed down."
"No," insisted Frieda. "When I say unrelated, I mean unrelated. There would be some overlap, a connection between the two traces if it were familial."
She paused. "If the bracelet had been given to her as a present, maybe that would account for it. Or if she had bought it secondhand."
But something still didn't ring true about this theory. The darker trace had pulled her deeper into its stream and it was beginning to overpower the initial positive traces she had read. A sense of deep, dark depression, like suddenly being plunged into a crater whose rim blocked out the light of the sun. There was a sudden craving, a gnawing hunger, and such, such wretchedness. The comparison with the earlier joy and life was so stark that it hurt. The trace had become a torrent, and a torrent potent with horror and abomination. It both repelled and fascinated Frieda, and some involuntary motor response saw her hand close so tightly over the bracelet that blood began seeping between her fingers.
And then, just as thunder cracked overhead, her hand flashed open and the bloodied bracelet dropped to the waterlogged woodland floor.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Frieda was tired, more tired than she could ever remember being before. She felt sapped of energy, drained to the core. The events of the last twenty-four hours had taken a toll that she had no more reserves to meet. And this physical destitution did little to calm her state of mind. At Venner Moor she had been exposed to the raw essence of the evil that until then she had but glimpsed. Wretched and abominable, it had reached into her and tightened its grip around what she felt was her ever-failing sanity.
She picked at the edges of the plaster that Schlüter had stuck over her palm. The wound beneath smarted, but it was a whisper beside the emotional scream that still resounded inside her heated brain.
"Did you know that more people believe in God than they do the devil," she remarked in an almost whimsical tone so that Schluter looked as though he were unsure whether she was inviting a reply. A few seconds later she asked, "Why do you think that is?"
Schluter rammed the gearshift of his Sandero into fifth and accelerated onto the Autobahn. The rain was showing little signs of abating and the wipers were fighting a losing battle against the flood washing over the windscreen.
"Because they're naive," he growled, causing Frieda to look across at him.
"So you believe?" she asked, slightly surprised.
Schluter's profile was set like stone, as though the horror he had gazed upon all these years had touched him irrevocably like Medusa.
"What I believe is that this world is fucked," he spat. "No matter what we do, that won't change. People are shot through with so much crap that even the best of them would rather kick the living shit out of someone rather than lend a helping hand. You don't need the devil with a world as fucked up as that."
Frieda sat in silence. The intensity of the outburst had been like slap in the face.
Frieda sat in silence. The intensity of the outburst had been like slap in the face.
"Back there," she said finally, with a slight jerk of her head, "was like nothing I've ever felt before. I'd swear it wasn't anything human."
Schluter sighed. "You're tired, Frieda. We both are."
"No, you don't understand. Listen to me!"
"I'm done listening for one day," Schluter returned heavily and turned up the car radio. Frieda just stared hard for a few seconds as a Peter Fox track blared from the speakers, but nothing was loud enough to drown out the horror she had encountered at Venner Moor.
***
Strangely, Frieda felt nothing as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. It was as though she had been tranquilised, rendered incapable even to summon the fears that should have been racing through her mind, and were not. She passed a neighbour on the way up, who could not meet her weary eyes, and made an exaggerated attempt to pull her coat tighter around her body, as if she were trying to avoid a contagion.
Her apartment door was ajar, the wood around the lock broken where Schluter had made his frantic entry. She pushed it open, even here feeling nothing except utter mental and physical exhaustion. The hallway floor was a mess, the pale laminate covered in wood splinters and Schluter's muddy size forty-five prints. But Frieda could not have cared less as she hung up her coat and dragged herself into the living room, crashing onto the sofa with a heavy sigh.
She awoke undramatically. She must have slept for hours because the last dregs of daylight were waning. Her muscles protested as she stretched, but she held the posture. She was emotionally numb and the physical discomfort made her feel alive. The apartment was unexpectedly peaceful. She had not been disturbed before waking at this moment, and she had no reason to believe that whatever had now interrupted her dreamless state had been anything other than the natural end of rest.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and as they came back into focus, they took in the spidery scrawl she had not yet cleaned from the ceiling: Eins Zwei Drei. She might have dismissed it as she had done the first time she had seen it, attaching no more importance to it than a parent who discovers their toddler has smeared lipstick over a mirror. But something kept her attention focussed on the words.