The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

their bedroom.”

“Maybe he turns into a wolf.”

“And nobody notices a wolf in the middle of the street?” I asked sarcastically.

“Or a cat. A big black cat with glowing eyes.”

“Like Pluto, you mean?” I suggested.

Stefan gasped. “Of course.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really.” Stefan looked at me, his face alight with the advent of a new idea. “Listen, has anyone ever seen Herr Duster and Pluto at the same time?”

“How should I know?”

“I bet they haven’t.” Stefan considered. “You remember that time we were at Herr Schiller’s, and Pluto got in, and Herr Schiller just went mad? Like the cat was a devil or something.”

I thought back; Stefan was perfectly right. A sliver of cold slid through me.

“That’s crazy,” I said, shaking my head. Pluto was just a cat. A very large, very mean-tempered cat, but just a cat all the same. He had made Herr Schiller jump, that was all…

The bell rang for the end of break and as we went inside I dismissed the idea from my mind altogether; it is only in retrospect that I believe that was the point when the germ of an idea began to sprout, the idea of somehow getting into Herr Duster’s house and searching for the lost girls, searching for the truth.

Chapter Twenty-four

At last the school term had finished, my time at the Grundschule had come to an end, and now the glorious vista of Gymnasium without Thilo Koch was opening before me. But first there were six weeks of vacation to get through, four of which were to be spent in the exotic environment of Oma Warner’s semidetached house in Middlesex. My mother loaded me up with gifts for Oma Warner, and then put me on an airplane at Koln-Bonn airport. Oma Warner picked me up at the airport at the other end, and that was that. I was caught, with no prospect of parole for four whole weeks. Once we were in the taxi, I handed over the little parcels for Oma Warner like a prisoner giving up his personal possessions before being incarcerated.

“Ooh,” said Oma Warner, peering into one of the little bags. “What’s this then, Pia?”

“I think it is to eat,” I said.

“Dear me, I hope it isn’t one of those smoked sausages,” she said doubtfully.

“Mmm,” I said noncommittally.

I hazarded a glance out the taxi window. England seemed very much the same as last time we had visited: an endless vista of gray streets, slick with rain. Even though it was summer, it was still drizzling. Everyone seemed to be scuttling along leaning slightly forward as though trying to push their way through the wind and wet. My mother claimed there were parts of England that made Bad Munstereifel look like the Ruhrgebiet, an area of Germany legendary for its factories and coal mines; she described villages with chocolate-box thatched cottages and old Norman churches, and rolling hills and meadows with cows dozing under trees. Looking out at Middlesex, I wondered whether she had got it mixed up with some other place.

Added to my woes was the fact that I was divorced from everything going on at home in Germany. Supposing they found one of the missing girls? Or they caught someone-Herr Duster, for example-disposing of evidence of the crime? Deprived of facts, my imagination ran riot, and I imagined the police bursting into his house on the Orchheimer Strasse and finding him crunching up the bones between his teeth. They would drag him away screaming, and when they searched him in the police station they would find that his body-the bits hidden by his clothes-was all covered in black fur. No one would ever see Pluto again, of course. And when they looked in his fridge, it would be full of bottles of blood-

“What are you thinking about?” asked Oma Warner.

“Nothing,” I said.

A week passed, and then another, and I resigned myself to captivity. Oma Warner’s house was a prison, but it was quite an interesting one; there were three bedrooms and a box room to explore, as well as the dining room with its cabinets full of curious ornaments and old photographs in frames. In the living room there was a dark wood bookcase crammed full of novels by Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer; Oma Warner was a fiend for romance.

“You can read one if you like,” she said, coming up behind me suddenly as I was perusing a cover depicting a flame-haired woman in a green velvet dress repulsing three lovers at once. I almost jumped out of my skin, and slid the book back onto the shelf as quickly as I could.

“No, thank you,” I said.

Oma Warner cocked her head and stared at me with her bright old eyes, like an intelligent bird. “Suit yourself.” She held something out to me. “There’s a letter for you from Germany.” She turned the envelope over in her hands. “From Stefan Breuer, it says.” She chuckled, handing the letter to me. “Got yourself a swain?”

“A what?”

“A boyfriend,” said Oma Warner, raising her eyebrows meaningfully.

“No,” I said shortly. Mentally, I added another imprecation to the long list of curses I had heaped on Stefan’s head since our unwilling partnership began. StinkStefan; trust him to embarrass me again. Only he could drop me in it from a distance of five hundred kilometers.

I went upstairs to the bedroom Oma Warner had given me, and closed the door. Before I opened the letter I turned it over as Oma Warner had done, and examined it as though for clues. Stefan had dire taste in stationery, or perhaps he had purloined it from his mother; it was decorated with simpering mice, prancing along a graduated background of pink and yellow. With all that dripping sentimentality, it was no wonder Oma Warner had taken it for a love letter. Stefan had addressed it to Mrs. Pia Kolvenbach.

I opened the letter and read as follows:

Liebe Pia,

Are you having a good time at your grandmother’s? I went to the summer camp last week but it was not as good as last year. They wouldn’t let us go anywhere out of sight. Something happened on Wednesday. A group of people went to Herr Duster’s house and shouted at him. The police came and told them to go home. Boris says Herr Duster is going to die. I wanted to tell you about it. It’s a shame you’re not here. I asked if I could telephone you but my mother said No.

Dein, Stefan

I read the letter through again. A thousand questions came seething up in my brain. Who had gone to Herr Duster’s house, and why? I wondered whether Frau Kessel’s accusations against the old man had finally become common currency, and whether she had been among those who gathered on his doorstep. Somehow I thought not; at ten I was years off understanding adult behavior, but even I could see that Frau Kessel’s favored modus operandi was the behind-the-hand remark, the whisper behind closed doors. I could not see her as the leader of a torch- bearing lynch mob.

Stefan’s letter was infuriating in the details it left out. The police had come-but what had they done, apart from telling everyone to go home? Had they arrested anyone-Herr Duster himself, for example? And what did it mean, Boris said Herr Duster was going to die? Was it a threat? I read the letter again, but there was nothing else to be gleaned from it. I went downstairs.

“Oma? Ich meine… Granny?”

“Yes, dear?” Oma Warner was enthusiastically scrubbing out the oven but she stood up when I came into the kitchen.

“Can I telephone?”

“Well, your mother’s going to call you this evening, Pia. Can’t it wait?”

“Mmm.” I looked at Oma Warner, then away at the cluttered countertop. “I wanted to telephone…” I thought about it. “A friend.” I hoped she would assume it was a female friend. But Oma Warner was not that slow.