The wind howled around the barn, whistled through the roof beams and shook the barn door as if demanding entry. It didn’t bother Tobias Sartorius. That afternoon he had spoken on the phone with a real estate agent and set up an appointment for him to look at the property next Wednesday. By then the barnyard, barn, and the old stables had to be in tiptop shape. He began flinging old tires one after another onto the bed of the trailer. They were stacked by the dozens in a corner of the barn; his father had used them to weigh down the tarps over the haystacks and rolls of straw out in the field. Now there were no more rolls of hay or straw, and car tires were nothing but rubbish.
All day long the shadow of a fleeting memory had been haunting him; it was driving Tobias crazy that he couldn’t recall what it was. In the garage last night, one of his friends had said something that triggered a sudden association in him, but the memory was submerged somewhere in the depths of his consciousness and refused to be lured to the surface, no matter how hard he tried. Breathless, he stopped for a moment to wipe his forearm across his sweaty brow. He felt a cold breeze and turned around when he caught sight of something from the corner of his eye. He gave a start.
Three figures in dark clothes and wearing menacing masks had entered the barn. One of them slid shut the heavy iron bolt on the door. They stood there mute, fixing their gaze on him through the eye slits of their ski masks. The baseball bats in their gloved hands betrayed their intentions. Adrenaline shot through Tobias’s body from the tips of his hair to his toes. He had no doubt that two of the men were the ones who had knocked down Amelie. They had come back to get their real target, which was him. He started backing away and thought feverishly how he could escape from the three men. There was no window in the barn, no back door. But there was a ladder that led up to the empty hayloft. It was his only chance. He forced himself not to look over at it, so as not to reveal his plan to the three men. Despite the panic rising inside him he managed to stay calm. He had to get to the ladder before they were on him.
They were still about twenty feet away when he took off. In seconds he was at the ladder, climbing as fast as he could. A blow from one of the bats struck his calf with full force. He felt no pain, but his left leg instantly went numb. With clenched teeth he kept climbing, but one of his pursuers was not much slower, grabbing his foot and pulling on it. Tobias held on to the rungs of the ladder and kicked at the man with his free foot. He heard a muffled cry of pain and felt the hand around his ankle let go. The ladder swayed and suddenly he grabbed at thin air and almost lost his hold. Three rungs were missing! He glanced down, feeling like a cat perched on a naked tree trunk with three bloodthirsty rottweilers at his heels. Somehow he reached the next rung and pulled himself up with all his might; the numb leg tingled and was no help at all. Finally he reached the hayloft. Two of the guys were climbing up after him, but the third had vanished.
Tobias looked around frantically in the dim light of the hayloft. The ladder was bolted to the wooden planks, so it was impossible to tip over. He hobbled as fast as he could to the lowest point of the roof and pressed his hand up against the roof tiles. One of them loosened, then a second one. He kept looking back over his shoulder. The head of his first pursuer appeared over the edge of the loft. Damn! The hole in the roof was much too small for him to squeeze through. When he had realized the senselessness of his efforts, he ran over to the hatch; the trailer full of car tires was parked underneath. With the courage of desperation he made the leap. One of the pursuers turned around on the ladder and climbed hurriedly back down like a big black spider. Tobias slid down to the ground, ducking into the shadows under the trailer. He tentatively felt his way along the ground, cursing his mania for cleaning up. There was nothing lying around that he could use as a weapon to defend himself. His heart hammered against his chest and he paused for a second, then bet everything on one card and took off running.
They caught up with him at the moment he grabbed the bolt of the door. Their blows rained down on his shoulders and arms and the small of his back. His knees buckled and he rolled up in a ball, using his arms to protect his head. They beat him and kicked him without saying a word. Finally they grabbed his arms, pulled them apart with raw force and tore his sweater and T-shirt over his head. Tobias clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t moan or beg for his life. He saw one of the men tying a clothesline into a noose. No matter how hard he tried to defend himself, they had the superior strength. They bound his wrists and ankles together behind his back and put the noose around his neck. Tied up helpless as a package with his torso unprotected, he could offer no resistance as they dragged him roughly across the raw, icy ground to the rear wall, where they shoved a stinking rag into his mouth and blindfolded him. Panting he lay on the ground, his heart racing. The clothesline cut off his air if he moved even a millimeter. Tobias listened for sounds but heard only the storm that was still raging around the barn. Would the three be content with this? Did they intend to kill him? Were they gone? The tension eased off a bit, but his muscles were cramping. But his relief was premature. He heard a hiss and smelled paint. At the same instant a blow struck him in the face, and his nose broke with a crack that echoed through his skull like a shot. Tears sprang to his eyes and blood stopped up his nose. Through the gag in his mouth he could barely get enough air. The panic was back, a hundred times worse than before, because now he could no longer see his attackers. Kicks and blows rained down on him, and in these seconds that turned into hours, days, and weeks he became more and more convinced that they were going to kill him.
* * *
There wasn’t much going on at the Black Horse. Not all the players were present at the usual game of poker at the regulars’ table; even J?rg Richter was missing, which made his sister’s mood sink to an all-time low for the year. Actually Jenny Jagielski was supposed to go to parents’ night at the kindergarten this evening, but in the absence of her brother she couldn’t bring herself to leave the Black Horse to her employees, especially since Roswitha was out sick and only Amelie was helping her out waiting tables. It was nine thirty when J?rg Richter and his pal Felix Pietsch showed up. They took off their wet jackets and sat down at a table. A little later two more men came in that Amelie had often seen with her boss’s brother. Jenny headed over to her brother like an avenging angel, but he blew her off with a few curt words. She turned with her lips pressed tight and went back behind the bar. Angry red patches were visible on her throat.
“Bring us four beers and four Willi shots!” called J?rg Richter to Amelie. They could use a little schnapps with their beer.
“Nothing doing!” Jenny Jagielski retorted furiously. “What a scumbag!”
“But the others are paying customers,” said Amelie innocently.
“Have they ever paid you?” Jenny snapped, and when Amelie shook her head, she said: “Customers my foot. They’re nothing but freeloaders!”
It wasn’t even two minutes before J?rg himself marched behind the bar and tapped four beers. His mood was just as foul as his sister’s, and they wound up in a heated, whispered argument. Amelie wondered what was happening. A subtle sense of aggression filled the air like electricity. Fat Felix Pietsch was beet red in the face, and the other two men wore surly expressions. Amelie was distracted from her train of thought when the three missing poker players came barging in and called to her for orders of schnitzel with fried potatoes, rump steak, and wheat beer as they made their way to the round table. They hung up their wet jackets and coats and sat down. One of them, Lutz Richter, immediately began telling a story. The men put their heads together and listened attentively. Richter shut up when Amelie came over with their drinks; he waited to go on until she was out of earshot. Amelie didn’t attach any importance to the men’s strange behavior, because in her mind she was again thinking about Thies’s paintings. Maybe it would be best to do what Thies had told her, and keep silent.
* * *
He came up to the front door and took off his soaking-wet jacket and filthy shoes on the porch. In the mirror next to the wardrobe he saw how he looked and lowered his head. It wasn’t right, what they had done. Absolutely not right. If Terlinden found out, then he’d be in for it—and the other two as well. He went into the kitchen, found another bottle of beer in the door of the fridge. His muscles ached, and tomorrow he would surely have bruises on his arms and legs, the guy had fought back hard. But in vain. The three of them together were much stronger than he was. He heard footsteps approaching.
“So?” the curious voice of his wife sounded behind him. “How’d it go?”
“As planned.” He didn’t turn around but took a bottle opener out of the drawer. With a hiss and a soft plop the cap popped off the bottle. He shuddered. That was the same sound he’d heard when the nasal bone of Tobias Sartorius broke under his fist.
“Is he…?” She left the sentence unfinished. Then he turned around and looked at her.
“Probably,” he said. The rickety kitchen chair groaned under his weight when he sat down. He took a gulp of beer. It tasted flat. The others would have let the guy suffocate, but he had quickly removed the gag from the unconscious man’s mouth without them seeing. “At any rate we gave him something serious to think about.”
His wife raised her eyebrows, and he averted his eyes.
“Something to think about. That’s just great,” she said with contempt.
He thought about how Tobias had looked at them, the naked fear of death on his face. Not until they had blindfolded him was he able to join in the punching and kicking. Out of annoyance at his own weakness he had then put all his strength into the assault. Now he was ashamed. No, it hadn’t been the right thing to do.
“You weaklings,” his wife spat out. With an effort he suppressed his rising rage. What the hell did she expect from him? That he would kill a man? A neighbor? The last thing they needed now was cops sniffing around all over town and asking stupid questions. There were too many secrets that were better left alone.
* * *
It was just after midnight when Hartmut Sartorius woke up. The TV was still on—some sort of slasher movie in which screaming teenagers with eyes wide in fear fled from a masked psychopath who came after them one by one and slaughtered them with an axe and a chainsaw. In a daze Sartorius felt for the remote and turned off the TV. His knee hurt when he stood up. In the kitchen a light was on; the uncovered pan with the schnitzel and fried potatoes stood untouched on the stove. A glance at the kitchen clock told him how late it was. Tobias’s jacket wasn’t hanging in the wardrobe, but the car key lay on the shelf under the mirror, so he hadn’t driven off somewhere. The boy was really overdoing it with his manic cleaning. He wanted to be able to present the property next week to the real estate agent in the best possible condition. Hartmut had agreed with every suggestion Tobias made, but he knew that he would definitely have to talk to Claudius with regard to the agent. Claudius Terlinden was still the sole owner of the whole estate, even if Tobias didn’t like it. Hartmut went to take a pee, then he smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table. By then it was twenty minutes to one.
With a sigh he got to his feet and went into the hallway. He pulled on his old cardigan before he opened the front door and went out in the cold pouring rain. To his astonishment the floodlight at the corner of the house was out, although Tobias had installed a motion detector there only three days ago. He walked across the barnyard and saw that it was also dark in the stable and barn, but the car and tractor were there. Was Tobias out with his friends? A peculiar feeling crept up on him when he flicked the light switch at the door of the cowshed. It clicked, but the light didn’t go on. He hoped that nothing had happened to Tobias while he was sleeping comfortably in the house in front of the TV.
Hartmut went into the milk room and over to the circuit breakers. Here the light worked, because this room was connected to the house circuit. Three breakers had tripped. He switched them back on, and at once the glaring floodlights came on above the doors of the stable and barn. Hartmut crossed the barnyard and uttered a low curse when he stepped in a puddle with his felt slipper.
“Tobias?” He stopped and listened. Nothing. The stable was empty, no sign of his son anywhere. He continued on. The wind tore at his hair, penetrating the mesh of his cardigan. He was freezing. The storm had scattered the heavy cloud cover, and scraps of cloud scudded rapidly past the half moon. In this pale light the three big containers that stood next to each other farther up the yard looked like enemy tanks. The feeling that something wasn’t right grew stronger when he saw that one side of the barn door was swinging back and forth in the wind. He tried to grab the door but it was torn away by a new gust, as if it had a life of its own. With all his strength Hartmut pulled it shut behind him. The floodlight went off only seconds later, but he knew his way around the farm in the dark and went straight to the light switch.
“Tobias!”
The fluorescent tubes hummed and flickered on, and at the same moment he saw the red graffiti on the wall. WHOEVER WONT LISSEN MUST PAY! He noticed the misspelling, then he discovered the crumpled form on the ground. The shock registered in his limbs so strongly that he started to shake. He stumbled across the barn, dropped to his knees, and saw with horror what had happened. Tears welled up in his eyes. They had tied Tobias hand and foot, and the cord around his neck was so tight that it had cut deep into his flesh. His eyes were blindfolded, his face and his naked torso showed clear signs of cruel abuse. It must have happened hours ago, because the blood had already congealed.
“Oh God, oh God, Tobi!” With trembling fingers Hartmut set about untying the cords. They had sprayed one word: MURDERER! in red paint on Tobias’s naked back. Hartmut touched his son’s shoulder and gave a start. His skin was ice cold.