Authors: David Thomas
For a moment she was unable to go on. I didn’t even try to prompt her. Nothing I could say could possibly be of any use.
‘We were all doing the same things,’ Schmidt finally said. ‘Well, I say that, but I don’t know for sure because … I suppose that was why Tretow didn’t want us talking: so that we would never know …’
‘What about Mariana? Did she know?’
‘Not at first, no. All she knew was that we were getting presents from the men. She was a little jealous. She used to beg Tretow to let her have a nice uncle too, but he said no. She was the precious one, the princess, so he was saving her for a true prince.’
Yes, I thought, a fat, slobbering British politician. Some prince.
‘You said, “not at first”. So she did find out in the end?’
‘We all did. Two of us talked, two boys. They were called Timmi and Marko. You know how some little boys are almost prettier than a girl? Well, that was how Timmi was. He was like a boy version of Mariana. In fact, they were very good friends. Timmi was always playing with us girls. He was very sweet, very gentle, not like the other boys. Marko was the total opposite. He was a little tough guy, not afraid of anybody, always getting into fights, even with the bigger boys. When anyone ever picked on Timmi, Marko always came to his rescue. For some reason, even though they were so different, they were very good friends. They talked about everything. So Timmi was upset by things he had to do, or the way someone had treated him. Then he talked to Marko. Anyway, Marko started telling everyone else, saying he was going to go to Mister Stinky and tell him they wouldn’t go with the uncles any more. Tretow found out and he was furious.’
Schmidt’s face crumpled. She began to cry, still trying to force the words out: ‘He … He … Oh God, I am sorry …’
‘That’s OK, take your time.’
‘He killed them … hit them again and again …’ Schmidt scrabbled on the table for another cigarette. ‘He made us look at their bodies, all covered in blood, and told us that was how we would end up if we told anyone anything at all. And he told us that he could kill us, any of us, and no one would ever care … and we believed him because he had killed Marko and Timmi and there were no police or anything. Then he cut the bodies into pieces – he did not force us to watch that, thank God – and he put them in garbage sacks and took them to the vegetable garden. He made us dig a deep hole. We had to take it in turns. Then he put the bags into the holes and we had to cover them up again. We even had to take plants from a little greenhouse that he had and plant them in the earth that we had disturbed, so that no one could see what we had done. And then, once again he told us. Do not tell anyone, ever. And to this day, I never have …’
‘Those boys … had Mariana …?’
Schmidt looked me in the eyes and gave a sad little nod of the head. ‘She had recruited them, yes. She had such charm, even then, as a little girl. I mean, I knew I was so ugly compared to her, but I didn’t mind. She had chosen me to be her friend and that was enough to make me feel a little bit special. I know that must sound stupid …’
‘No, it doesn’t, not at all. Believe me, I know exactly how you felt.’
‘Then you know she could persuade anyone to do anything for her. But she did not know what would happen, or what Tretow would do to Marko and Timmi. How could she?’
‘But once it had happened, and she saw them dead, she must have blamed herself.’
‘Yes, I would think so, although she never spoke of it.’
‘No …’
But the secret shame had been planted deep inside her, covered by layer upon layer of self-protection until, one evening in Yorkshire, a man had come to her house, smelling like Tretow, like Mister Stinky, and then the whole cycle of death and blood had been played out once again. Now I realized why Mariana had said she was guilty, why it was all her fault, why she was a
böses Mädchen
. She hadn’t been referring to Andy’s death at all. She had no consciousness of that. It was the little girl in her talking and the two boys’ deaths for which she blamed herself.
I was lost in my thoughts, so at first I did not feel Heike Schmidt’s fingers tapping on my arm …
‘Herr Crookham … Herr Crookham,’ she was saying.
‘Yes?’
‘Are the police going to the garden?’
‘Yes, the search is beginning at first light.’
Schmidt glanced out of the kitchen window at the sky just turning from black to a paler grey.
‘Then we must get going,’ she said. ‘I will save them some time. I will show them where to dig.’
50
SIX MONTHS LATER
North Yorkshire
Mariana had planted two large pots of lavender by the entrance to her vegetable garden and there were bumblebees and cabbage-white butterflies buzzing and fluttering among the scented purple flowers in the warmth of the afternoon sun. She was kneeling down, a small weeding fork in her hand, beside a bed she had planted with courgettes. Their large, bristly leaves were interspersed with the vivid orange and yellow of nasturtiums and the scarlet splashes of cherry tomatoes, clambering up a metal frame at the far end of the bed.
I watched as she put the fork down on the grass beside her and knelt there, silently, facing the life that she created. Then I closed the gate behind me. Mariana turned her head at the noise and smiled as she saw me.
‘Are you off, then?’ she said.
‘Soon,’ I replied. ‘I just came to see how you were.’ I held out the china mug in my hand: ‘I brought you a cup of tea.’
Mariana got up, dusted down her bare knees and came towards me. ‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said, giving a little mock curtsey as she took the mug.
I looked at her lovely face. It was a little thinner than it had been, frailer, with darker hollows beneath her cheekbones and faint new lines round her eyes and the side of her mouth. The life was back in her tiger-eyes, but there was a new, reflective quality, a gentle melancholy to the way she looked at the world. I leaned forward and gave her a soft, quick kiss.
‘You’re very welcome.’
‘Mmm …’ she murmured as she took the first sip from her mug. ‘Perfect.’
‘The tea or the kiss?’
Mariana laughed contentedly: ‘Both.’
‘You looked like you were a million miles away.’
A shadow of sadness crossed her face: ‘I was thinking about my father, how wrong I’d been about him all these years, how cruel I’d been to hate him.’
‘You got to see him, though. That was something.’
‘Well, to be reconciled at last, that was wonderful … but painful too. We had so little time together …’
‘I know … so are you sure you’re going to be all right?’
Mariana was five weeks into her phased release from in-patient psychiatric care back into everyday life. Week by week she would be allowed to spend more time at home until she was finally reclassified as an out-patient. Tonight would be her first night alone in the house.
On the basis of the psychiatric evidence, a detailed account of Hans-Peter Tretow’s activities provided by the Berlin police and the personal testimony of both Weiss and Heike Schmidt, the judge at Mariana’s trial had been as generous in his sentencing as we could have hoped. He had found that she had not been responsible for her actions at the time of Andy’s death and posed no further threat to society. He therefore placed her in Dr Wray’s care, leaving him to decide the appropriate form and duration of treatment, first at a low-security psychiatric unit and more recently at the private clinic where he also practised. On compassionate grounds she had also been permitted to fly to Berlin to see her father again before he died. His daughter’s presence after so many years seemed to give Rainer Wahrmann the closure he needed to depart the world in peace. Mariana and her mother had been at his bedside when he died.
‘Yes, I’ll be all right,’ Mariana answered. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘You mean, the further away I am, the happier you are?’ I teased.
‘No,’ she draped her arms around my neck and looked up at me with a gaze that seemed to reach right into my heart and soul. ‘Because you saved me.’
I didn’t know what to say. I had no easy reply to the depth of feeling in her voice. So I did the English thing and as I put my hands on the back of her hips and drew her body closer to me, I deflected her emotion by self-deprecation.
‘No, not really, there were lots of people …’
‘But it was you who believed in me. You fought for me. You were my knight in shining armour.’
I smiled wryly as I shook my head. ‘No, I’m just your husband. That’s what I’m supposed to do. And anyway, I love you. I wanted to do it.’
Mariana reached up to stroke my face with the tips of her fingers, looking deep into my eyes as she asked: ‘Do you still love me? Can you love me – the madwoman, the killer?’
‘Of course.’
She frowned: ‘How can you say that, when you know what I have done? When you know the truth about me?’
‘It’s because I know, that’s the whole point. I thought I loved you before, but really I just loved an idea of you, a fantasy. Now, though, after everything that’s happened, you’re completely real to me. I know the very worst and the very best things about you. And it just makes my feelings even deeper and stronger.’
‘I know the truth about you too,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. ‘And I love you more than you can ever know.’
We kissed again, a longer, deeper embrace, and then Mariana pulled away and said, ‘Enough of this. Time to go!’
I grabbed her again. ‘One more kiss?’
She slapped my chest playfully: ‘No, no, no!’ and I let go of her with an exaggerated look of despair on my face.
‘I must be getting on with my gardening,’ Mariana said, all brisk and businesslike now that her need for reassurance had been satisfied. ‘And you must start driving if you are going to get there in time for dinner. Vickie will be very cross if you are late for your big reconciliation.’
‘All right, all right, I know when I’m not wanted …’
‘Send her my regards, though I know she will not want them. And Pete …’ Mariana reached out and took my hand. ‘Drive safely. Come back to me safe and sound. I never want to be without you again.’
‘I will,’ I said and pulled my hand away. But she gripped me tighter.
‘There’s something I want you to know. I wrote to Doctor Reede. When I get out I am going to see him about my operation. I know it is very, very difficult. But if it is at all possible, I want to have it reversed.’
‘That’s … that’s wonderful,’ I stuttered, trying to control the surge of emotion her words had released in me: a joyous, exultant feeling of hope, combined with a dread that seemed like an echo of the pain that the discovery of Reede’s original letter had brought me.
‘Can I ask … I need to know … why did you do it? I mean, without telling me, or anything?’
Mariana looked at me with anguish in her eyes. ‘I don’t know. I wish I could give you a good explanation, but I didn’t even have one at the time. I think maybe I felt that I didn’t deserve children, though I didn’t know why. And there was a fear, too … this terrible black fear … I thought …’ She was suddenly on the verge of tears, ‘I thought I would do them harm – that they would not be safe with me. But I did not understand why …’
I took her in my arms again and she buried her head against my chest. ‘You understand now, though, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘And you know that it wasn’t your fault, that you were a victim.’
She nodded, her head still down. I felt her take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she raised her head and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand. And now I want us to have children.’
51
The churchyard that had been so bare and dead on the day we buried Andy was now filled with reminders of the constant renewal of life. The trees were all in leaf, the trim lawn between the gravestones had the lovely summer smell of new-mown grass and the air was filled with birdsong. The Norman church, which had seemed so bleak on the morning of the funeral, now exuded a comforting sense of permanence. Nine hundred or more years had passed since it was first built. Generation after generation had been baptized and married within its walls then laid to rest in its graveyard, and here it still stood and would stand for countless generations still to come, a place of peace in which to take one’s final rest.
I am not a religious man and I cannot believe in a God who knows and cares about me, or a soul that lives forever. But I like the rituals of church, the comforting reassurance of a hymn I have known since my earliest boyhood and that special church scent of dust and old wooden pews. So I went inside and knelt for a minute to gather my thoughts before I walked back out to the place where Andy was buried.
I stood for a moment and looked at his stone, then I got down on my haunches and placed some flowers in a vase at its base. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt shy, uncertain, almost embarrassed. But there was no one else in the churchyard and nothing to stop me talking. Alive or dead, he was still there and he was still my brother.
‘I know it’s been a while, but I had a lot to do,’ I said. ‘I was trying to make things better … well, as much better as they could be, anyway …
‘Oh Christ, I wish you were here with me now, mate. I wish we could go down to the pub, have that pint we were meant to have, you know, that night, and just have a laugh. All the way down in the car, I was wondering what to say, but now I’m here I don’t have a clue, except … I’m so sorry, Andy. I’m just so, so sorry …’
And then my shoulders heaved, my breath caught in my throat and for the very first time I wept for my poor, dead brother …
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Not surprisingly, this book could not have been written without the unfailing kindness, generosity and assistance of Germans: three in particular. The London-based consultant psychotherapist Bernd Leygraf was invaluable in explaining the mechanisms by which buried childhood pain can explode into adult violence, and the passing on of the burden of sin or suffering from one generation to another. In Berlin, Matthias Willenbrink, director of the AXOM Group of detective agencies, was a superb guide to the city and its recent history, a fount of great stories about detective work and an insightful observer of the way in which ex-Stasi operatives have transitioned into private detectives. Further thanks go to Jochen Meismann of the Condor detective agency, in particular for his description of German bureaucracy as it applies to birth certificates.