Bodenstein drove along the now familiar main street, past Richter’s grocery store and the Golden Rooster, and at the kindergarten turned left onto Waldstrasse. The streetlights were on; it was one of those days when it never really got light. He was hoping to find Lauterbach at home on an early Saturday morning. Why had the cultural minister incited Hasse to destroy the old transcripts? What role had he played in September 1997? He stopped in front of Lauterbach’s house and saw to his dismay that, contrary to his orders, there were no patrol cars or even a plainclothes vehicle to be seen. Before he could telephone the station and voice his anger, the garage door opened and the backup lights of a car turned on. Bodenstein climbed out and walked over to the driveway. His heart skipped a beat when he saw Daniela Lauterbach behind the wheel of the dark-gray Mercedes. She stopped next to him and got out. He could see from her face that she hadn’t gotten much sleep.
“Good morning. What brings you here so early?”
“I wanted to ask you how Mrs. Terlinden is doing. I’ve been thinking about her all night.” It was a lie, but Daniela Lauterbach would surely take a sympathetic interest in her neighbor. He was right. Her brown eyes showed concern and the smile faded from her weary face.
“She’s not doing well. Losing a son that way is beyond terrible. And then the fire in Thies’s studio and the corpse in the cellar of the orangerie—it was all too much for her.” She shook her head sadly. “I stayed with her until her sister arrived to help out.”
“I really admire the way you support your friends and patients,” Bodenstein said. “People like you are rare.”
His compliment seemed to please her. She smiled again, that warm, motherly smile that seemed to trigger an almost irresistible need in him to throw himself into her arms, seeking comfort.
“Sometimes I care more about the fate of others than is good for me.” She sighed. “But I simply can’t hold back. When I see somebody suffering, I have to help.”
Bodenstein shivered in the icy morning air. She noticed at once.
“You’re cold. Let’s go in the house, if you have any more questions for me.”
He followed her through the garage and upstairs into a big entry hall, a relic of the eighties in all its uselessness.
“Is your husband home?” he asked in passing, looking around.
“No.” For a fraction of a second she hesitated. “My husband is on a business trip.”
If that was a lie, Bodenstein accepted it for the moment. Maybe she didn’t know the game her husband was playing.
“I have to speak with him, urgently,” he said. “We found out that he had an affair with Stefanie Schneeberger eleven years ago.”
The warm expression vanished abruptly from her face, and she turned away.
“I know,” she admitted. “Gregor told me about it then, although not until after the girl disappeared.” It was obviously difficult for her to speak about her husband’s infidelity.
“He worried that he’d been seen during his … bit of hanky-panky in Sartorius’s barn and the police might consider him a suspect.” There was bitterness in her voice and her gaze was somber. The betrayal still hurt, and it reminded Bodenstein of his own situation. Daniela Lauterbach may have forgiven her husband after eleven years, but she had definitely not forgotten the humiliation.
“But why is that important now?” she asked in confusion.
“Amelie Fr?hlich was looking into those past events and must have found out about the affair. If your husband knew about it, he may have considered Amelie a threat.”
Daniela Lauterbach stared at Bodenstein in disbelief.
“Surely you don’t suspect my husband of having anything to do with Amelie’s disappearance?”
“No, he’s not a suspect,” Bodenstein assured her. “But we urgently need to talk to him. He did something that could have legal implications for him.”
“May I ask what that might be?”
“Your husband convinced one of my colleagues to remove the 1997 interview transcript from the official police records.”
This news obviously gave her a shock. She turned pale.
“No.” She shook her head resolutely. “No, I can’t believe that. Why would he do such a thing?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask him. So, where can I find him? If he doesn’t get in touch with us immediately we’ll have to launch a search for him. And I’d rather save him that embarrassment, given his position.”
Daniela Lauterbach nodded. She took a deep breath, keeping her emotions under control with iron self-control. When she looked at Bodenstein again, another emotion was visible in her eyes. Was it fear or rage—or both?
“I’ll call him and let him know,” she said, trying with difficulty to lend her words a casual tone. “I’m sure there must be some kind of mistake.”
“I think so too,” Bodenstein agreed with her. “But the sooner we get this matter cleared up, the better.”
* * *
It had been a long time since Tobias had slept so soundly and blissfully, without a single dream. He turned over on his back and sat up with a yawn. It took him a moment to realize where he was. Last night they had arrived here quite late. In spite of a heavy snowfall Nadia had exited the autobahn at Interlaken. Somewhere she had stopped, put chains on her car, and then drove on undaunted, up the steep switchback road, higher and higher. He was so tired and exhausted that he hardly noticed what the inside of the cabin looked like. He hadn’t been hungry either, just followed her up a ladder and got into the bed, which took up the entire area of the loft. His head barely touched the pillow before he was asleep. No doubt the deep sleep had done him good.
“Nadia?”
No answer. Tobias hunched down to look out the tiny window by the bed. It took his breath away when he caught sight of the deep-blue sky, the snow, and the impressive mountain panorama in the distance. He had never been to the mountains; there had been no ski vacations in his childhood, just as there had been none to the sea. Suddenly he could hardly wait to touch the snow. He climbed down the ladder. The cabin was small and cozy, with wooden walls and ceiling, a corner bench with a table set for breakfast. It smelled like coffee, and logs crackled in the fireplace. Tobias smiled. He slipped on jeans, a sweater, jacket, and shoes, opened the door and stepped outside. For a moment he paused, blinded by the gleaming brightness. He inhaled the crystal-clear, icy air deep into his lungs. A snowball hit him right in the face.
“Good morning!” Nadia laughed, waving. She was standing a couple of yards below the steps, and her radiance competed with the snow and sunshine. He grinned, ran down the steps, and sank in up to his knees in powder snow. She came toward him, her cheeks red, her face more beautiful than ever under her fur-trimmed hood.
“Wow, is it great here!” he shouted enthusiastically.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh yeah! I’ve only seen something like this on TV.”
He trudged all the way around the cabin, which nestled against the steep slope with its A-frame roof. The four feet of snow squeaked under his shoes. Nadia grabbed his hand.
“Look,” she said. “Over there, those are the most famous peaks in the Bernese Alps: the Jungfrau, the Eiger, and the M?nch. I love the sight of them.”
Then she pointed down into the valley. Way down there, hardly visible to the naked eye, houses stood tightly packed together, and a little farther off a long lake glittered blue in the sun.
“How high up are we here?” he asked.
“Fifty-nine hundred feet. Above us are only glaciers and chamois.”
She laughed, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him with her cold, soft lips. He held her tight and returned her kiss. He felt so light and free, as if he had left all the troubles of the past years somewhere far below, down in the valleys.
* * *
The case demanded so much of his attention that he had no time to worry about his own troubles. He was glad about that. For years Bodenstein had been confronted almost daily with the dark abysses of human nature, and for the first time he recognized parallels with himself that he had previously ignored. Daniela Lauterbach seemed to know as little about her husband as he knew about Cosima. It was shocking, but apparently it was possible to live with someone for twenty-five years, sleeping in the same bed and having children, without really knowing that person. Often enough there had been cases in which clueless relatives had lived with murderers, pedophiles, and rapists and were flabbergasted when they learned the awful truth.
Bodenstein drove past the Fr?hlichs’ house and the rear entrance to the Sartorius farm to the turnaround at the end of Waldstrasse and continued up the drive of the Terlindens’ estate. A woman opened the front door. She had to be Christine Terlinden’s sister, although he couldn’t see much resemblance. The woman was tall and thin; the look she gave him testified to her self-confidence.
“Yes?” Her green eyes were direct and searching. Bodenstein introduced himself and told her that he wished to speak with Christine Terlinden.
“I’ll go get her,” said the woman. “I’m Heidi Brückner, by the way, Christine’s sister.”
She had to be at least ten years younger and, unlike her sister, seemed completely without pretensions. She wore her shiny brown hair in a braid, and her face, with the lovely complexion and high cheekbones, bore no trace of makeup. She let him in and closed the front door behind him.
“Please wait here.”
She left and was gone for quite a while. Bodenstein studied the paintings on the walls, which were doubtless also done by Thies. They resembled the pictures in Daniela Lauterbach’s office in their ghastly apocalyptic gloom: contorted faces, screaming mouths, chained hands, eyes full of fear and torment. Footsteps approached and he turned around. Perfectly coiffed blonde hair, a vacant smile on a face that showed no sign of her age.
“My deepest sympathy,” said Bodenstein, holding out his hand.
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.” She seemed not to bear a grudge that the police had been holding her husband for days. Nor had the suicide of her son, the fire in the studio, or the discovery of Stefanie Schneeberger’s mummy left any visible traces. Astounding. Was she a master of repression or was she taking such strong tranquilizers that she hadn’t yet taken it all in?
“Thies has been missing from the hospital since this morning,” he said. “He didn’t happen to come home, did he?”
“No.” She sounded worried, but not excessively concerned. Bodenstein hadn’t yet told her about what he found so strange. He asked her to tell him more about Thies, and was taken downstairs to his basement room. Heidi Brückner followed at a distance, silent and wary.
Thies’s room was friendly and bright. Since the house was built on a slope, big picture windows gave him a great view of the village. There were books on the shelves and stuffed animals sitting on a couch. The bed was made and nothing had been left carelessly lying around. The room of a ten-year-old boy, not of a thirty-year-old man. Only the pictures on the walls were extraordinary. Thies had painted portraits of his family. And here it was evident what a wonderful artist he was. In the portraits he had captured not only the faces of the people but also their personality in a subtle way. Claudius Terlinden had a friendly smile at first glance, but his body language, the expression in his eyes, and the colors in the background lent the painting an ominous tone. His mother was painted rosy and bright, and at the same time flat and two-dimensional. A picture without depth for a woman with no real personality. Bodenstein thought the third picture was a self-portrait until he remembered that Lars was Thies’s twin brother. It was painted in a totally different style, almost blurred, and showed a young man with still unfinished features and uncertain eyes.
“He’s helpless,” Christine Terlinden replied to Bodenstein’s question of how Thies got along. “He can’t cope with the world on his own, and he never carries any money. He can’t drive a car either. Because of his illness he shouldn’t have a driver’s license, and it’s also better that way. He can’t assess danger.”
“And people?” Bodenstein looked at Christine Terlinden.
“How do you mean?” She smiled in bewilderment.
“Is he able to assess people? Can he tell who is sympathetic to him and who isn’t?”
“That … is not something I can judge. Thies doesn’t speak. He avoids contact with other people.”
“He knows very well who means him well and who doesn’t,” said Heidi Brückner from the doorway. “Thies is not mentally handicapped. Actually we don’t really know the full extent of his abilities.”
Bodenstein was surprised. Christine Terlinden didn’t answer. She was standing at the window looking out at the cloudy gray of the November day.
“Autism,” her sister went on, “can manifest itself in a wide range of ways. You simply stopped challenging him at some point, and instead stuffed him full of medications so that he’ll stay calm and not cause any problems.”
Christine Terlinden turned around. Her already motionless face now seemed completely frozen.
“Excuse me,” she said to Bodenstein. “I have to let the dogs out. It’s already eight thirty.”
She left the room, her heels clicking on the stairs.
“She’s escaping back to her everyday routines,” Heidi Brückner noted with a hint of resignation in her voice. “She’s always been like that. And she’ll probably never change.”
Bodenstein looked at her. There seemed to be little love lost between the two sisters. So why was she here?
“Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
He followed her upstairs to the entry hall. Heidi Brückner stopped to make sure that her sister was nowhere to be seen, then strode over to the wardrobe and took out a purse that was hanging on a hook.
“I intended to give this to a pharmacist friend of mine,” she explained softly. “But under the circumstances it seems better that the police have it.”
“What is it?” Bodenstein asked curiously.
“A prescription.” She handed him a folded piece of paper. “They’ve made Thies take this stuff for years.”
* * *