Ice Cold (15 page)

They both knew this area, they often rode out here. On almost all their days off. They came to bathe in the millstream in summer, and in autumn to pick blackberries or look for mushrooms, or just to spend a day out. Their way took them a short distance upstream along the course of the millstream. Now they decided to stop for a break, sit on the banks of the stream, have a rest, just do as they liked.

The banks of the old millstream were densely overgrown with reeds and bushes. On both sides of the stream and up the slope. Here and there narrow tracks led from the path down to the stream, to secret places for anglers, bathers, pairs of lovers. They rode on past those because they wanted to get to the old bridge, the only place where you could sit directly on the slope by the stream, which was not overgrown there. There’d been nothing left of the bridge itself for a long time now. You could see the remains of it only in the water near the bank, where the old foundations, even though they were just a few stones, kept the vegetation from spreading. It was the one place where you had a clear view of the bank and could climb down to the stream. They were planning to get off the bike and lie on a rug in the sun. They had brought a thermos flask and sandwiches, and afterwards they would go on along the stream and pick mushrooms for their mother on the way back, as they’d promised her.

Now they have reached the place and left the motorbike. Johann goes a little way down the slope towards the stream.
Then he sees the little blue hat. More of a cap really, dark blue with pale trimmings. A ribbon bow, white ribbons drifting from it in the slowly flowing water. The cap itself is caught, stuck on a piece of wood, flotsam that has ended up beside the left-hand bank of the stream, among the twigs and soil washed up there.

All he notices are the ribbons drifting in the water. The dancing white ribbons on the cap. Feeling curious, he goes closer for a better view. He climbs a little way down the slope until he can see the hat clearly. He looks at it in surprise, wondering whether to fish it out of the water, this little hat dancing on the current, and if so how. His eyes wander along the bank, but he can’t see any good place to climb in. He decides to try further up, climb down to the water there, wade out to the cap and retrieve it. It won’t be going anywhere in the meantime. It will stay where it is; the current is weak.

He walks a few paces upstream, turns up his trouser-legs, takes off his shoes. Climbs down to the edge of the bank. Leans forward to see if he’s reached the little ford. No, not yet, the bank drops more steeply at this point, the water looks to him deeper than it was near the cap. His glance wanders further along the bank. The root of a tree catches his eye. There’s something white underneath it.

Then he sees her. She is lying wedged under that root in the water. Only the white skin of her legs sticking out from under the roots is in view. The rest is out of sight.

He calls for his brother, who comes, reluctantly. Doesn’t believe what Johann called out to him. ‘You’re seeing spooks. Where is this girl in the water?’

‘Here, I can see her. Hang on to me, will you? The bank’s too steep here. You’ll have to hold me so I don’t fall in.’

Johann holds his arm out to his brother, who takes it and holds Johann firmly, bracing himself against his weight. Johann leans out as far as he can over the millstream. Looks into the deep, clear, slowly flowing water. All he can see of the body is one hand and the legs.

The hand is lying to the side of the body. There’s something gleaming silver on the wrist. A bracelet. No, a piece of wire tying it up.

‘What is it?’ Alwin asks. ‘What’s happened? What can you see?’

‘Not much,’ says his brother. ‘It’s a woman, or a girl. She must be lying face down. She’s covered with spruce branches. I can’t see anything except her legs and one hand.’

‘Let me have a go – maybe I can see more,’ says Alwin.

Johann looks for a better foothold on the bank. Cautiously, Alwin relaxes his grasp and slides down the slope too. Tries to see the girl, leans out from the bank, always taking care not to slide down it. Then he can see her too, her bare legs in the water, the glittering wire round her wrist. The wire tying the spruce branches to her body. Only now does he believe his brother, now that he sees it with his own eyes.

It is several hours before they come back with the police. They have been home to Munich, and once there they went to the police station and reported finding the dead woman.

‘Why not at the scene of the crime?’ the officer on duty asked them. ‘Why didn’t you go straight to the police in Schäftlarn?’

The brothers don’t know. They say nothing. They just wanted to get well away from what they’d found. They’d packed up their things in a hurry, Alwin tells the officer, and then Johann rode all the way home.

They just hadn’t thought of reporting their find to the police in Schäftlarn. It simply didn’t occur to them. Because that woman, or maybe she was a girl, had been murdered.

How did they know that? How could they be so sure the person they found was a crime victim?

The wire, she was tied up with wire. They’d both seen the wire round her legs and her hand. They’d seen it clearly.

Of course they were prepared to show the police the way. And so now, hours later, they are back in the same place for the second time that day. On this occasion in a Munich police car. They show the senior officer with them where she is. The dead girl. Wedged under the root, covered with branches. One of the policemen tries moving the branches on the dead girl’s back. He pushes at the body with a long stick. The branches stay put, they won’t be
shifted. He tries again. Tries to fish the entire body out from under the root. He keeps pushing it with the stick, but neither the body nor the branches will budge.

Only next day, when the police have finally got the girl out of the water, will they see why. They discover that the branches had been tied around her body with wire. Wrapped round it. Underneath the branches are the dead girl’s dress and coat, done up in a bundle and, like the branches themselves, lashed to her body with wire. They will find the stone that was supposed to keep the body from floating to the surface; it drops back into the water as they take the dead girl out. They will find her shoes, carried away by the current, not very far downstream but a little way from the body, like her hat.

One officer will move the branches away from her face and torso. He will see the face of a girl about twenty years old at the most. Her eye colour is brown, her eyelids only half closed in death. She has a short, snub nose. The full lips of her mouth are closed. He will see the dead girl’s dark brown hair plaited into a braid and hanging over her shoulder, falling almost down to her waist.

She is not tall, rather small and stocky. Her torn upper garments show her bare breasts.

They will take the dead girl out of the water and up the slope of the bank, and then lay her down on the grass. They will photograph her, and the pictures will show her lying there half-dressed, her stockings torn off, no knickers.
They will show the abrasions and bruises on her skin. Her torn, broken fingernails. The marks of strangulation. She is still wearing a little bead necklace. Worthless. It will fall off her and come apart only as they lay her in a lead coffin and take her to forensics. The beads will drop on the grass and lie there.

I live in Lothringerstrasse in Munich. I lodge in a small room there. It’s big enough for me, and now I’m out of work I’m thankful that I can afford it at all. The unemployment benefit isn’t much, and times are hard. My landlady Frau Lederer is a widow. She told me her husband was with the post office. Her pension is only small, so she rents a room to a lodger.

Yesterday morning, she asked me if I’d look after her cousin Frau Hertl from Wolnzach, because Frau Hertl doesn’t know her way around Munich very well, and I’d probably have time now that I’m out of work. ‘You’d be doing me a great favour, Herr Feichtinger.’

Frau Hertl was going to search for her daughter, my landlady said. The girl was here in Munich. She’d come to look for a job, like so many young girls, and she hadn’t sent any word home since arriving. Her mother was worried, so she was coming to Munich to try to find her. I said I’d be
happy to help her look for the girl. I had no other plans that day.

Frau Hertl arrived at Frau Lederer’s apartment at nine-thirty in the morning. It was Wednesday 14 October, 1931. She’d come straight from the station, she told me later.

She and Frau Lederer talked for a little while in the apartment. I wasn’t present, they were both sitting at the kitchen table. When I came in they stopped talking, and Frau Lederer introduced me to Frau Hertl. I didn’t want to stand around, so I said that if she didn’t mind we’d start at once. That was fine for Frau Hertl, and so we set off together. I was carrying a case that Frau Lederer had given her cousin. The girl Kathie had left it with her, and never came back for it, so we went off together. I asked her where she would like to go first.

‘To Number 13 Ickstattstrasse.’ She wanted to call on a Frau Bösl there. She’d heard that her daughter had been at Ickstattstrasse, she said. Frau Bösl knew Kathie from the hop-picking. She came to Wolnzach every year to pick hops.

So I took her to the address she’d given me. A lady with a small child opened the door. I assume it was Frau Bösl, because there wasn’t anyone else in the apartment and that was the name on the plate
by the door. She took us into the kitchen. Frau Hertl and me. I didn’t want to be nosy, so I stayed in the background.

Frau Hertl asked straight away if her daughter Kathie had been here in Ickstattstrasse, and whether Frau Bösl had any idea where she was now. Yes, she’d been here, young Kathie had. But only for two days. She’d been looking for a job in those two days, but she hadn’t found anything. It was very hard to find a job these days. And then Kathie had moved in with an acquaintance. She couldn’t have stayed here any longer, not in this little apartment.

The child sat on Frau Bösl’s lap all the time she was talking to Frau Hertl, munching a piece of brown bread and staring at the strange lady. What was the name of Frau Bösl’s acquaintance, Frau Hertl asked, and where could she find her?

The acquaintance’s name was Mitzi Zimmermann. ‘Mitzi lives in Mariahilfplatz. Number 29. But you could always ask in Gruftstrasse too. Near the arch. I don’t know what number.’ Because the woman who lives in Gruftstrasse goes to Wolnzach for the hop-picking every year too. Perhaps she knows Kathie, says Frau Bösl, and then perhaps can tell us her whereabouts. ‘She could have gone there.’ But there was no point in going to Gruftstrasse
before evening, because the woman was out all day.

So Frau Hertl thanked Frau Bösl and asked if she owed her anything for giving Kathie board and lodging in her apartment for two days. But Frau Bösl waved that aside and said it was all right.

When there was no more to discuss, we stood up and said goodbye. We were on the stairs when Frau Bösl came after us. ‘Kathie left her umbrella with me, and she didn’t come back for it.’ She gave Frau Hertl the umbrella, and before she could say any more Frau Bösl ran back into her apartment because the child in there had begun crying. Frau Hertl went downstairs carrying the umbrella, and I followed her. Then we went on to Mariahilfplatz and Mitzi Zimmermann.

We found Mitzi Zimmermann in her apartment. She wasn’t alone, there was a man in the apartment too. I think he was Mitzi’s husband, but I don’t know, because he didn’t introduce himself. He seemed very much at home there in Mitzi’s place. Then we sat on the sofa in the kitchen living-room, Frau Hertl and I. With Mitzi and the man opposite us. He was very dark-haired, and he did all the talking. Mitzi sat beside him and said hardly anything. Yes, said the black-haired man, Kathie had stayed here for two days. ‘Until Saturday evening. Then she left. She said she was going to a relation in
Pasing. It was Pasing she said, wasn’t it?’ He nudged Mitzi Zimmermann, dug his elbow into her ribs, and she nodded and agreed, ‘Yes, Pasing, that’s what she said.’

Frau Hertl couldn’t believe it, because they had no relations in Pasing, nowhere Kathie could have gone. ‘There aren’t any Hertls in Munich except in Denning. None in Pasing. Did Kathie really say Pasing?’

Mitzi Zimmermann discussed it with the black-haired man and after a while they agreed yes, it could have been Denning, but they couldn’t be sure of it. After that Mitzi Zimmermann just sat there in silence again.

Frau Hertl said she had the address of the Denning Hertls in her handbag, and couldn’t Mitzi or the gentleman tell her any more about her daughter? Who had she been mixing with, where had she been going while she stayed here with them? After all, she’d stayed there for two days, she must have said something about it. ‘Or perhaps you saw my Kathie with someone?’ They couldn’t give her any name or address to help her further.

They’d seen her necking with a fellow, a driver he was. She was wild about him. From what he’d seen, said the black-haired man, he’d guess there was something going on between them. ‘It’d be a
shame if the girl fell into the wrong hands. She’s a pretty girl, there’s many a pretty girl has come to grief before now.’

Frau Hertl asked Mitzi whether Kathie might be with this driver, and did she know his name and address? She begged her to help her find her daughter. Mitzi Zimmermann only swore. ‘Good Christ, how in hell would I know the address?’

Frau Hertl wasn’t giving up, she asked her again and again. Maybe Kathie really had told Mitzi Zimmermann more in the two days she stayed with them, and they just couldn’t remember it. Please would they think again? She was so worried about her daughter.

‘There’s nothing more to talk about. Kathie wasn’t here long, and she didn’t tell us anything. I didn’t ask any questions either. I really can’t help you.’ There was only Kathie’s little black handbag, she’d left that here, Mitzi had only just remembered it. She got up and went into the next room. It would be on the window sill just where Kathie left it, she said.