The Glass Demon Read online

  There was a snap behind us as the clerk on the other side of the glass panel lifted the blind again. He said nothing but looked at us balefully and indicated the door. The old lady gave him the kind of look that would have made a barracuda swim in the opposite direction, and marched us out of the post office.

  Once out on the pavement I found that she had deftly situated herself with her back to the bright sunshine, so that my father and I were blinded by it, which only enhanced the sense of being interrogated.

  ‘You don’t have his address?’

  ‘We have the street name,’ I said, unfolding the directions. ‘But we don’t have the number, and we couldn’t find his name on any of the gates.’

  The old lady gave a condescending glance at the papers I was clutching. ‘Doch, doch, you have the right street. It’s the big house with the red roof and a birch tree at the front.’

  ‘We tried there. There wasn’t any name and nobody answered the doorbell.’

  ‘Of course not. Didn’t I tell you Herr Mahlberg was dead? How should he answer the doorbell?’ came the acid reply.

  ‘But – we have a meeting with Herr Mahlberg,’ said my father.

  ‘The only meeting Herr Mahlberg is having is with his Maker,’ she told him brusquely.

  My father looked dumbfounded. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It is a very long story,’ said the old lady severely. She pushed back her green woollen sleeve and consulted her watch. ‘Really, I should be getting back to Münstereifel…’ she began.

  My father was enough of a politician to know that this was the moment at which some offering must be laid out if we wanted any more information. He glanced about him. ‘Look, there’s a coffee shop over there.’ He raised his eyebrows knowingly. ‘Lin?’

  Obligingly I began, ‘Would you come and have a cup of coffee with us, Frau…?’

  ‘Kessel,’ supplied the old lady.

  ‘We’re inviting you,’ I added hastily, observing her expression of doubt.

  ‘Well, I suppose I might spare a quarter of an hour,’ said Frau Kessel, with the air of one granting an enormous favour.

  For someone so full of doubt she was across the road, through the coffee-shop door and installed in the best seat by the front window in double-quick time. My father ordered a coffee for himself and a soft drink for me; Frau Kessel ordered not only a large coffee but also an enormous slice of apple strudel with a great frosting of cream on it. I watched her attacking it with a sort of horrid fascination; it was like watching a lion rending a dead antelope.

  Kessel, I thought. Hadn’t the German boy, Michel, mentioned someone called Frau Kessel?

  ‘So what happened to Herr Mahlberg?’ I asked eventually, when she was licking the last of the cream from her lips.

  She looked at me, patting her lips carefully with her napkin. ‘Drowned.’

  ‘Drowned?’ I repeated. ‘I thought you said – it was someone’s cleaning lady who found him…’

  I had a sudden crazy vision of Herr Mahlberg and the cleaning lady going swimming together in the river we had seen flowing through Niederburgheim. Or perhaps she had been passing by on her way to a job, laden down with mop, bucket and kitchen spray, and had seen him from the bridge as he struggled in the water. She might have extended the mop handle to him in the hopes of saving him, but –

  ‘He drowned in the bath,’ said Frau Kessel with grim relish.

  ‘What?’ said my father.

  ‘He drowned in the bath,’ I repeated in English. ‘What happened?’ I said to Frau Kessel in German.

  Frau Kessel took a sip of coffee. ‘Nobody knows exactly. He went to a meeting the night before it happened; he was giving a little talk to the Eifel Club – something about local churches, I think.’ She shook her head, as though asking herself why anyone in their right mind would want to occupy their time with such things. Then she went on: ‘He seemed perfectly well when he gave the talk; a good friend of mine was there, you know, and she saw him. A bit dried-up-looking, she said – that’s what comes of living in the past – but no sign of illness, nothing at all. These bookworms, they can go on forever as long as they have their dusty old books to occupy them.

  ‘Well, my friend said the talk was quite interesting if you like that sort of thing, and afterwards there were questions, so I suppose Herr Mahlberg would have got home quite late. Nobody knew anything was amiss until ten o’clock the next morning when the cleaner went in. She had her own key – I must say, Herr Mahlberg was very trusting,’ said Frau Kessel with a sniff. ‘She called for Herr Mahlberg but there was no reply, so she thought he must be out. She didn’t even go upstairs for the first hour; she was busy on the sitting room and the kitchen. Herr Mahlberg, being a bachelor, had simply no idea how to keep a kitchen tidy; she said it always took her ages to get it sorted out. Greasy pans on the stove and empty bottles in the sink, can you believe it? These bookish types are always the worst – excuse me, Professor,’ she added, giving my father a ghastly smile.

  ‘Anyway, after she’d finished the downstairs she went up to do the bathroom. The door is opposite the top of the stairs, and the very first thing she noticed when she got to the top was that it was only ajar, not open as it normally was. She could see a shoe on the floor, a man’s outdoor shoe, and it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Herr Mahlberg was actually in the bath and hadn’t heard her come in. Of course it would be dreadful if she barged in and he was in the bath, but she couldn’t really see her way to knocking. In the end she went and did the bedrooms first. She said she took as long as she reasonably could, and made a bit of noise on purpose with the broom, in the hopes that Herr Mahlberg would hear her and make himself decent. Still, she didn’t hear a sound from the bathroom, not even a splash.

  ‘Finally, when she’d finished every other room in the house, she went and stood on the landing outside the bathroom and said, “Excuse me, Herr Mahlberg.” There was no reply. She looked through the gap in the doorway and she could still see the shoe, and on the other side of it there was a puddle of water. That was when she started to think that something had happened. It wasn’t just a little puddle, the sort you make if you get out of the bath and you’ve forgotten to put the bath mat down; there was a positive lake on the bathroom floor. The other thing she noticed was that it was quite cold standing there – you’d expect warm air to be coming from the bathroom if someone had just run a hot bath, wouldn’t you? But she couldn’t see any steam at all. She started to feel a little worried about Herr Mahlberg. Still, she didn’t like to go in.

  ‘She tried calling him again, but there was still no reply. In the end she knocked on the door and it swung open. Not completely, but enough that she could see a leg – Herr Mahlberg’s leg, hanging motionless over the side of the bath. It was horribly pale. She said she just screamed out his name, and he didn’t move, so she knew it was an emergency and she just ran into the bathroom.

  ‘He was lying in the bath, dead. The water was nearly up to the top and Herr Mahlberg was lying there with his head right under the water and his dead eyes staring up at her through it. She said she just about screamed the place down – fit to wake the dead, you might say, though much good it did Herr Mahlberg – and then she pulled herself together and tried to haul him out of the bath. She couldn’t get him right out, but she managed to get his head above water. It was no use, though,’ said Frau Kessel, with unmistakable satisfaction. ‘He was as stiff as a board and stone cold, with his mouth and his eyes open, staring at her. She said she could hardly bear to touch him – it was like trying to haul up a sack of wet cement – but she had to try. Anyway, it was clear she couldn’t do anything to help him, so she had to let him go so that she could go and call the police.

  ‘It was then she realized that she was bleeding. She was wearing house shoes – the open-toed sort – which she always did when she was cleaning, and a bit of glass had got into one of them and cut her on the big toe. She’d been so shocked by what she’d seen that she hadn’t ev
en noticed it. She was standing in a pile of broken glass. It was all over the floor. She had to cover the cut up before she could go downstairs to the telephone, otherwise she would have bled all over Herr Mahlberg’s rug, not that he would have cared at that point, poor man,’ added Frau Kessel with grim relish.

  ‘Glass?’ I said.

  Thoughts whirred in my head like a flock of birds. For a split second I was back there, in the orchard in Niederburgheim, looking down at a corpse surrounded by glittering shards of glass – a corpse we had abandoned, which was perhaps lying there now, at the mercy of the elements. I could feel my face burning and prayed that I was not actually blushing. I had the unpleasant feeling that if the old lady noticed anything was wrong she would be able to reach right into my brain with those bony fingers and remove the guilt-soaked memory for examination like a pathologist lifting an organ from the thorax of a dead body. Surely she could see what we had done?

  Thankfully for me, my father stepped in. He seemed to have recovered from the initial shock of discovering that his main contact here in Germany had died without imparting his knowledge to a wider audience than a backbrush and a rubber duck. Still, he wanted to probe for information, to be sure he had understood what had happened.

  ‘And what would glass…’ he began in his faltering German.

  ‘Be doing on the bathroom floor?’ supplied Frau Kessel, wagging a forefinger at us. ‘That is the question, isn’t it?’ Abruptly she drew back the finger and leaned towards us, like an elderly eagle straining forward on its perch. ‘Gin,’ she hissed.

  My father and I looked at each other.

  ‘They say he had a bottle of gin in there with him,’ said Frau Kessel.

  She sat back and looked at us expectantly.

  ‘He was drinking in the bath?’ I ventured.

  ‘He was drinking everywhere,’ retorted Frau Kessel. ‘Berta – that’s my friend who was at his talk that night – saw him drink two glasses of schnapps, saw it with her own eyes. He went home and started on the gin. Couldn’t even have a bath without taking the gin up there with him. Drank too much and drowned. It’s obvious. The bottle fell out of his dead hand and broke on the floor,’ she added dramatically.

  ‘So…’ began my father.

  ‘So,’ she supplied triumphantly, ‘as I told you, you cannot meet Herr Mahlberg, Herr Professor. Nobody can meet him at all.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We drove back to the Kreuzburg in silence. My father glared ahead at the road, his face set. I stared out of the window, fidgeting and not daring to say anything in case it provoked an explosion. My father had spent the short walk back to the car ranting about his ‘evil luck’ – first the professorship had slipped from his grasp, and now this had happened, the sudden death of his best contact in Germany. He wasn’t sorry for Herr Mahlberg; he was mad with him. I felt a hollow pit in my stomach. Was this going to mean another move? My father’s post at the university was being kept open for him, but we still had the rest of the sabbatical year to get through.

  I hadn’t managed to scan any of the local headlines either. I tried to console myself with the thought that had there been any reports of British families heartlessly leaving dead bodies lying in orchards, Frau Kessel would have been the first to tell us.

  The car made a sharp turn on to the track which led into the woods. As we passed beneath the trees I thought I saw something move in the undergrowth – a bulky brown shape. A deer? My eyes were still adjusting to the reduced light under the overhanging trees. I could not make out what it was. I twisted in my seat, but whatever it was had gone.

  ‘Can you hear something?’ said my father suddenly.

  He reached down and switched off the air-conditioning. We strained our ears, listening.

  ‘No-o-o…’ I began, and stopped. There was something, a sound which was growing in volume and urgency. Sirens.

  My father glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Shit.’ Abruptly he pulled over on to the side of the track. I turned just in time to see the gleaming red bulk of a fire engine bearing down on us. A moment later it had thundered past, making the car vibrate with the rumbling of its passing. My father and I looked at each other.

  ‘Does this track go anywhere else but the castle?’ I asked, with a rising feeling of dread.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  My father didn’t say anything else, just put the car into gear and gunned the engine, so that the car leapt forward out of the space, throwing up clods of earth and bits of broken plants. I clung to the door handle as the car roared along the track, bouncing over potholes and skidding slightly on the gravel. There was what seemed like an age of suspense as we followed a long straight section of track through the forest, then suddenly we had turned a corner and come out into the open area in front of the castle. I was relieved to see that there was no black column of smoke rising from it anywhere. The fire engine was parked at an angle in front of the castle gate.

  The moment my father had stopped the car we both ripped the doors open, leapt out and ran for the gate. My father wasn’t fit, and I made it to the gate first.

  The first thing I saw, to my relief, was Tuesday, with Ru in her arms. Polly was standing next to her, barefoot and with one of my father’s jumpers on; I guessed she’d had to leave the house suddenly. My gaze moved from Polly to the house.

  ‘Oh no,’ I breathed.

  It was clear what had happened. A small tree standing very close to the corner of the house had caught fire; the tree itself was a blackened skeleton, and a great sooty patch spread over the stone wall beside it, as though a dark fungus were trying to consume the house. I had a dim recollection that the tree had been a dead one; the branches and twigs had been brittle and leafless. No doubt it had burned magnificently, and the house could easily have gone up too. The wooden frame of the little window nearest to the conflagration was already brown and scorched.

  Firemen were moving about in the courtyard; as my father went over to speak to Tuesday I watched one of them kicking through the ashes under the remains of the tree. Then I noticed someone else, standing a little way from Tuesday and Polly. The boy from the farm – Michel – the one with the mud-coloured eyes. I heaved a sigh.

  ‘Sprichst du Deutsch?’ said someone. It was one of the firemen, hulking in a heavy jacket and helmet.

  ‘Yes,’ I said in German, and was rewarded with a grunt which might have been approval.

  ‘It’s safe,’ he said. ‘They can go back in.’

  ‘Fine.’

  I didn’t trust myself to say any more. I trudged over to where my family were standing in a little huddle, looking sorry for themselves. Tuesday had handed Ru to Polly and was clinging to my father. Unlike Polly, she had managed to evacuate the house in a coordinated outfit and matching lipstick. I gave Michel a cursory nod and went straight up to Polly.

  ‘What happened?’

  Polly looked at me helplessly. ‘I don’t know, Lin. Tuesday was upstairs looking for something and I was in the kitchen making Ru a drink. He was sitting on the rug, just playing. I kept thinking I smelt burning but I couldn’t see any smoke or anything. I thought maybe I’d burned Ru’s milk or there was something sticking to the ring on the stove top. I lifted the pan up but there wasn’t anything. I went back into the living room to call Tuesday and ask her if she could smell anything, and then he burst in.’ She indicated Michel.

  ‘What, him?’ I gave a sideways glance towards Michel.

  He saw me looking and began to blush furiously. I looked away; a horrid suspicion was beginning to rise in the pit of my stomach like a wave of nausea. I’d seen the way Michel looked at me. I did not even want to contemplate that he might have had something to do with starting the fire, so that he could rush in and play the hero.

  Polly didn’t notice my confusion. ‘Yeah, he just burst in through the front door, yelling something – it sounded like fire –’

  ‘Feuer?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. He picked Ru up off the r
ug and then he grabbed me by the arm and started trying to drag me to the door. I didn’t know who he was – I thought he was mad or something and I started yelling, so Tuesday came downstairs to see what was going on, and then she smelt the smoke too. I just grabbed Dad’s jumper – couldn’t find any shoes – and we ran outside.’ She turned to look at the smoking remains of the tree. ‘That whole tree was on fire. It was like a bonfire. That window frame started smoking too. We thought the whole house was going to burn down. Tuesday was going crazy – she kept trying to call Dad on her mobile phone but she couldn’t get a signal. She was swearing her head off and then she threw it at the wall.’ Polly raked her hands through her sand-coloured hair. ‘Then Michel – that’s what he said his name was – said he’d run back to the farm and call the fire brigade.’ She glanced at him. ‘He speaks really good English.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I tried not to look at Michel. ‘Did he say what he was doing here in the first place?’ I said in a low voice. It was not low enough; he heard me.

  ‘I came to ask if you want to come to school with me,’ he said in English. ‘You know – a lift.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, thanks. It’s nice of you, but…’

  ‘There’s no bus from here,’ said Michel. He was giving me that look again.

  ‘My parents will drive me,’ I said firmly.

  I didn’t give him the opportunity to argue; I turned away and walked over to look at the charred remains of the tree, hoping he would take the hint.

  It was a pitiful sight, brittle and blackened. A phrase I had read in a story once ran through my head: It’s a case of cremation. The thought made me feel rather sick. I did not want to think what might have happened if the entire house had gone up.

  The ground around the tree was a mess of ash and scorched wood. If I had not stood there for so long, my back resolutely turned to Michel, I might not have noticed it. Glass. You could hardly see it at first – it was not glittering, like the glass which had frosted the earth in the orchard, it was dull and discoloured. Gazing at the jagged shards, their gleam dulled to an opaque glaze by the fire, I was irresistibly reminded of teeth. No; not teeth – fangs. Fangs of glass.