1 – Lost

One spring morning Lothar Schoenhofer piled up his collection of film memorabilia and left it out for the refuse collectors. Eight days later he gazed through the kitchen window at the bins and felt an embryonic regret. After a week of sensory deprivation his world was beginning to stir one sensation at a time: cold bathroom tiles, strong filter coffee, the zips and Velcro of his weatherproof coat, the rain washed aroma of April.

Beyond the bins, a wall separated the kitchen courtyard from the stables and the office where a greater sense of grief continued to linger. When he was ready, Lothar reminded himself, he would do something about that office.

Gabby Schoenhofer followed her husband outside like an exhausted shadow. She was awake, but semi-comatose; her medication imposing the numbness she needed to deaden the pain. Sitting next to Lothar in the car and transfixed by the dashboard, she occasionally muttered to herself, compiling a list of tasks to organise around the stables. Tasks she would never do. Gabby gnawed the ragged pink flakes of her nails and Lothar noticed for the first time the prominent lines on the back of her hands. His wife was visibly ageing at a rate he had never known.

They arrived at the mortuary in Bamberg to identify their daughter’s body and prepare for the burial. The director offered a hesitant handshake glazed with sweat, dithered between his office and the waiting room, and babbled a confused message about hold ups and disappearances. Gabby didn’t respond to the words, but Lothar heard them and his sensitivity, frail and uncertain, teetered on the lip of another dark chasm. . . .

“Please explain again how our daughter’s body has disappeared.”

“I’m trying to establish what has happened, but the police in Rotterdam and here in Bamberg are not being very helpful.”

“I don’t care whose fault it is, I want to know.” Lothar waited for the director to make eye contact.

“I’m very sorry, Herr Schoenhofer, I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“Get someone here who can.”

“Kriminalkommissar Tollmann is on his way. . . . “

“Tollmann? Where is he? He should have been here when we arrived. If this is a police matter that bastard should have informed us before we turned out. He should have come to our home. He should have saved us this indignity.” Lothar’s voice increased until Gabby’s frail hand settled across his own.

“I’ll call him again, see where he is.” The director ducked into his office.

Gabby sat down, grasping Lothar’s fingers. “I want her back,” she whispered. “Take her home.”

Lothar rolled his hand across her knuckles. “She’s coming home. We’re not leaving without. . . .” He wanted to say his daughter’s name. Not her formal name, Frieda, her pet name; the name Gabby didn’t approve of. But the name Frodo was too much and Lothar’s eyes flooded with tears.

The director returned and stood sideways at the door. Kriminalkommissar Tollmann entered with his hands spread across the lower hem of his coat. His short reluctant strides suggested guilt for being late and leaving the director to endure Lothar’s reaction to the news. “Herr Schoenhofer, Frau Schoenhofer.” His handshake was refused. “Please accept-“

“Where is our daughter?”

Tollmann cleared his throat and sat down. He produced a folded document from an inside pocket. “Please, if you could sit down, Herr Schoenhofer. One of the reasons why I’m late is because I’m trying to make sense of what has happened.”

“What do you mean?” Lothar remained standing. “What’s that?”

Tollmann placed the document on his lap and waved his hands across it. “This is a report . . . it’s heavily redacted . . . but Frieda has disappeared from the mortuary in Rotterdam.”

“How? Are you saying someone has stolen her body?”

“It’s difficult to ascertain, Herr Schoenhofer, but,” Tollmann pinched the skin between his eyes and squinted.

“But what? For Christ’s sake talk to us.”

“I was able to contact a friend of mine, an officer in Rotterdam. He’s not really a friend, more of an acquaintance. It was off the record. Frieda’s . . .your daughter’s body was in storage for twelve hours and a technician allegedly heard a noise. From that point the official details, the eye witness accounts, they weren’t recorded. The police won’t say what has happened or what the technician experienced. But anecdotally, and I can’t verify-“

“Get to the point.”

“The technician on night duty heard a noise, a commotion. He investigated. The noise was coming from one of the refrigerated cabinets. Frieda’s cabinet. They’re saying Frieda wasn’t dead.”

Lothar felt the vacuum of the mortuary, its unnerving silence. The silence of his daughter’s disappearance. “Why won’t they speak to you?”

“I have no jurisdiction to question anyone in the Netherlands.”

“Why won’t they talk? You’re German. She’s a German citizen. What about Interpol, the investigator at the press conference? I thought arrests had been made.”

“Interpol issued a red notice, but that was related to the murder, not the disappearance.”

The news forced Lothar down to earth, pushing him into the chair next to Gabby who hadn’t budged. “What else did they tell you? What other anecdotes?”

“It almost scared the technician to death. This is something that has never happened before.”

“No. This is a joke. This will not stand.”

The director hovered at the edge of the room like a doorman.

“Perhaps they disturbed the people who took her,” said Lothar. “She is a German citizen, Herr Tollmann. If you cannot bring her home, I expect you to arrange for someone else to bring her home. We’re not leaving here until one of you tells us where she is.” He took hold of Gabby’s hand again. “If we have to sleep on these chairs we are not going home without our daughter.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Pardon?” Lothar’s question pushed the director away from the door. Abandoned to the storm Tollmann’s fingers quivered when he tried to fold up the document. “You’ll do your best? You’re not trying to find a leak in the plumbing, you’re looking for our daughter. What do you think this is? Some technical error? A missing suitcase? You think our daughter is a piece of luggage?”

“I didn’t say that, Herr Schoenhofer.”

“Where’s the other joker gone?” Lothar bounded out of the room and hunted for the director. His footsteps echoed like gunshots down the wood-floored corridor until he found the director cowering in his office chair, phone to his head, glancing with fear at the door and Lothar’s angry arrival.

“I’ll call you back. . . .”

“You know how this system works.” Lothar sat down uninvited. “A Dutch couple could have a daughter lying here in Bamberg. How could she go missing?”

The director took a deep breath. “I can’t answer that, Herr-“

“Imagine it then. What would happen? How would you deal with her repatriation?”

“The department would liaise with the embassy to repatriate the body. We would arrange transportation. There is a hypothetical risk the body might be lost in transit, but. . . .”

“But what?”

“It’s never happened to my knowledge, Herr Schoenhofer.” His eyes pleaded for understanding. “These things just don’t happen.” He dropped his hands onto the leather writing surface of the desk. They landed with a soft concluding thud, the sound of hope diminishing. “Herr Schoenhofer, have you considered the possibility that all this is a hoax?”

“Hoax?”

Behind the director, below the window of his office, a small cabinet displayed a model stagecoach steered by a grizzled John Wayne and pulled by an ugly looking horse. Lothar recognised the model from an old western film. “Where did you get that?”

“The stagecoach, I don’t know. My. . . .”

“Your what?”

“I’m sorry, Herr Schoenhofer. It was a gift from my daughter.” The director stretched towards the stagecoach, clicked a concealed switch and a tiny voice shouted ‘gidyup.’

Both men sat for a moment separated by embarrassment until Lothar remembered the conversation. “Tell me your bright idea about a hoax.”

“Yes. Your daughter was on business in Rotterdam. She was there to do business with the management company of a rock band who. . . .”

“Go on.”

“Well, they have a history of elaborate hoaxes.”

“My daughter would not become part of something like this without telling us.”

“No, but-“

“Put us through this? The police. Being woken at four in the morning to be told, and I should add, told without a hint of compassion by that bastard back there, that she’s been murdered. To see it all replayed, repeated in newspapers, on television, on the internet,” Tollmann clattered into the door frame of the office, “because of a fucking hoax.”

The director shielded his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Lothar charged over to Tollmann. “You think this is a hoax?”

“Your daughter didn’t tell you everything, Herr Schoenhofer. I’ve told you I’m trying to establish what has happened.”

“You’re not trying hard enough.”

“There’s only so much I can do, it’s happened in another country. . . .”

“I don’t care. . . .”

An emerging self-confidence lifted Tollmann’s shoulders and straightened his back. “I’m sorry to tell you this now, but Frieda was under investigation. The director’s suggestion is not as crazy as you’d like to think.”

Lothar grabbed Tollmann’s shoulder and shoved him across the corridor. “You know what I think-“

“It was a convenient way to escape.”

“What?”

Tollmann made no attempt to release himself. “Frieda was under investigation.”

“No.”

“Frieda was under investigation, Herr Schoenhofer. Conspiracy to influence members of public office. Embezzlement, blackmail.”

“Why are you doing this?” Lothar’s tears welled up again.

“Frieda was under investigation for the murders of Theo Wenders and Simon Frenzel, Herr Schoenhofer.”

In the melee and the blindness of fury Lothar pinned Tollmann to the wall and trapped Gabby behind him. Her disbelief hovered above Tollmann’s shoulder.

Lothar snarled, “You want to distract me from your own incompetence.”

“And you don’t want to acknowledge the truth about your daughter.” Tollmann struggled to speak with Lothar’s hand across his throat. “Disappearing is one of the many deceptions she’s capable of. The woman was a cunning criminal, Schoenhofer.”

“My daughter is dead, you fucking-“

“I don’t believe she is. She corrupted everything she touched in Bamberg. Interpol wanted to speak to her. She was part of a bigger criminal network and you either chose to ignore it or she kept it all from you.”

“You fucking liar. . . .”

Tollmann uttered every word with vengeance and Lothar forced him harder against the wall until the two of them buckled at the knees, dragging the director down with them. “Your daughter,” Tollmann spat, “your beautiful daughter, far from being the angelic individual you would like to believe, was a vicious wicked killer.”

“No she was not.”

Gabby escaped from under the weight of Tollmann’s body and tugged at her husband.

“And I haven’t even started on the witchcraft.”

Lothar’s energy dimmed, but Tollmann wouldn’t stop.

“I guess you didn’t know anything about that, eh? Pretending to be a witch, running round in fancy dress, haunting the Ransahlhof. She and a bunch of other psychopaths. They’ve made my life a misery, Schoenhofer. If you ask me, Schoenhofer, she takes after her crook of a father. She had a great mentor in you. That bitch is better off where she is. . . .”

The punch, when it landed, shattered the bridge of Tollmann’s nose, and with his energy spent Lothar collapsed sobbing into Gabby’s arms.

Tollmann straightened himself out. “I’ll find your daughter, Frau Schoenhofer, but to make the arrest.” Without acknowledging Lothar’s distress or the director’s outrage Tollmann walked away leaving a trail of blood along the mortuary corridor.