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  ‘I don’t know exactly when the system was shut down. Judging by Sarkov’s reaction, it or the owner still seems to be a client. But since I’ve been here, and that’s around nine years, there has definitely been no activation. Let alone an alarm.’

  ‘So who’s that supposed to be now? A ghost?’

  ‘Or maybe a malfunction . . .’

  ‘Hmm,’ Gabriel grumbles and cranes his neck. On the right, an open entrance gate emerges from the darkness. A weathered 107 is mounted to one of the brick posts. ‘I’m here. Let me go for now and I’ll be in touch later.’

  ‘All right. My greetings to old Ashton if you find him haunting the place,’ Cogan says and lets out a cackle.

  Gabriel puts his phone away and rolls in between the brick posts of the opened gate. The gravel entryway has knee-high weeds.

  A villa that’s been uninhabited for nearly thirty-five years and the gate is wide open?

  The gravel crunches under the tyres. Overgrown hedges alternate with dark fir trees. A large half-timbered mansion rises up from behind the treetops with its decorated bay windows and two towers pressed up against it. The villa looks like an oversized witch’s house.

  Moist air rises from the ground and evaporates. Above the entrance, the red light from the alarm system rotates like a fire detector and makes the misty air glow.

  Goddamned haunted house, Gabriel thinks.

  As always, when he stands in front of a building that he wants to enter, he has to think about the cellar, how the stairs leading down to it will probably look. The hair on the back of his neck stands up and he peers up at the roof.

  This house is old, and in old houses the alarm systems are usually in the cellar.

  Chapter 3

  Berlin – 1 September, 11.22 p.m.

  Liz fights her way through the packed pub towards the exit. Dr Robert Bug, the news director for TV2 is standing by the bar and doesn’t move even a centimetre back, so that Liz has to brush up against him to get past. Bug grins and pushes his whole body up against her, grazing her breasts. ‘Well, well, would you look at that – our very own Miss Top Journalist!’ he exclaims, staring unabashedly down at her. ‘Didn’t you want to send me the synopsis for your new documentary?’

  I’ll only send you something if the other stations don’t take it, Liz thinks. ‘I’m still researching,’ she says with an empty smile. That she had just heard about one of Bug’s intrigues minutes before makes the whole thing even more disgusting.

  She pushes the door open and steps outside. Mist rises from the wet street as rainwater flows from the gutters into the storm drains. The door closes behind her and the noise of the Linus subsides. The neon sign above the entrance bathes Liz in an orange glow, the yellow lamps on their posts beside the door do the rest. The fires of purgatory.

  For a moment, Liz closes her eyes and sucks the damp air deep into her lungs. A gust of wind blows through her chin-length red hair. It’s unruly and sticks out of her head in a sort of orderly chaos, as if she had sprayed a can of hairspray into it immediately after waking up. The cool wind does her some good. Inside, the air was hot and rancid, and downright stank. Lately, she smells things that she would’ve never noticed before: armpit sweat, cheap deodorants, lingering cigarette smoke or the sour note of coffee on the breath. The smell of strangers forces its way in and there is nothing she can do about it.

  She finds herself thinking of Gabriel and how good his skin smells, even if he never wears the cologne that she gave him – or any cologne, for that matter. She feels the growing warmth between her legs and hurries to suppress the thought, especially to avoid renewing her disappointment from their telephone conversation.

  Liz glances back at the pub. Through the high glass windows, she can see Bug’s fleshy face at the bar and his thick brown hair. Mr News. She is immediately back in work mode. The most peculiar stories always take place where you least expect it, she thinks. For example, late at night in the men’s toilet.

  The men’s lavatory stinks nauseatingly of urine but, unlike the overcrowded Ladies is empty. Disgust is relative. And her need is absolute – not least because of her current state. When she pushes open the door to the men’s loo, one of those prim and proper girls glares at her from the women’s queue as if she had scabies. Liz is familiar with the look and hates it. Her mother and younger, picture-perfect sister Charlotte had that same expression on their faces whenever they looked at her. For her mother, everything was wrong with Liz, just as everything was right with Charlotte. The situation had only been made worse by the fact that her sister had also married into the British aristocracy and was now donning fascinators and showing off at Ascot.

  Liz walks into the men’s toilet and wishes that some unspeakable illness would strike Ms Prim and Proper, or at least a bladder as unbearably small as her own. It’s unbelievable, but the space in her stomach seems to be shrinking already.

  The door swings shut behind her, muffling the noise of the pub. She chooses the cleanest of the three cubicles and locks it behind her.

  Just a moment later, a new wave of noise rushes in as someone else enters the dirty, yellow-tiled WC. She immediately recognises Bug by his voice, which floats atop the pub noise like the foamy crest of a wave. Apparently, he needs a quiet place to make a phone call.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Bug says, ‘that’s not what was agreed, Vico.’

  Vico? Liz pricks up her ears and holds her breath. By Vico, he was probably referring to Victor von Braunsfeld, the owner of the BMC media group, including TV2.

  ‘No, no. I don’t mean to complain at all,’ Bug hastens to say, ‘of course this is a step forward, I can see that, but as director, I could promote the station in a completely different way.’

  Liz’s eyes widen. Bug – director?

  ‘What kind of timeline are we looking at?’ Bug asks.

  It’s quiet for a moment.

  ‘I can live with that if you give me . . . what? No, it’s just loud here. Get people talking?’ Bug let out a raunchy-sounding laugh. ‘You can count on it – I already have something in mind. It’ll be the perfect storm. The newspaper boys will write their fingers to the bone, the hypocrites will moan and groan and everyone will be glued to their tellies.’

  The perfect storm? Liz thinks. That could only mean a new television format, some kind of mediocre rubbish.

  ‘What?’ Bug asks. ‘Oh, her. Yes, yes, I know. The documentary was great. I’m on it, she’s already offered me the next one.’

  A smug grin flashes across Liz’s face. It seemed Bug was just talking about her. Roughly a year ago, she accomplished a small miracle: she made a three-part documentary about Victor von Braunsfeld. He was one of the richest men in the country and consequently had prevented any media coverage on himself for the last decade.

  ‘No, on that I will have to disappoint you,’ Bug said. ‘A permanent position is not her thing, she just doesn’t want that. She prefers to freelance.’

  No surprise, you ass, Liz thinks. With a boss like that . . . ‘Yes, yes. I know that she’s good, don’t worry, I’ll try to get her another way.’

  Liz raises her eyebrows.

  ‘All right. I’ll see you tomorrow for the formalities. Good night.’ Bug hangs up and lets out an exasperated sigh. ‘Damn bitch. Soon he’ll be inviting her to Carpe Noctem . . . she probably sucked out the old man’s brain while she was at it.’

  Liz doesn’t flinch. It was nothing new for Bug to hit below the belt. But what did he mean by Carpe Noctem?

  When she hears the loud splashing in the urinal, she imagines the face Bug would make if she were to step out of the cubicle at that moment and give him a friendly ‘hello’.

  Even now, out on the street, she has to grin at the thought of it. Liz takes a deep breath and replays Bug’s conversation in her head. She catches herself trying to construct a story out of it already. Not because she really believes that she’ll be able to turn it into a TV report, but much more out of habit �
�� and curiosity.

  She had been driven by this curiosity since she was a small child, but in her mother’s eyes, Liz had always focused on the wrong things. Liz was like her hair – red and unruly.

  When Liz was nine, her father, Berlin’s senior public prosecutor Dr Walter Anders, had caught her in his office rummaging through the files from his criminal cases out of curiosity.

  At dinner, she had constantly had questions, but they were mostly just laughed off. Not only because she had been nine, but much more because she was a girl. Liz had hated being a girl. And if her father ever actually answered one of her questions, he usually looked at her brother Ralf, who was four years older, as if there were a spotlight always fixed on him.

  As a gift for graduating high school, Ralf had been given a two-week trip to New York in addition to a brand-new VW Golf. He had managed to get a B average and had been duly celebrated.

  Liz had graduated three years later with an A.

  She had got a make-up kit and her mother insisted upon helping her pick out a dress for the graduation ball. Liz had felt out of place as soon as she’d entered the boutique. The strapless dress that her mother had bought her had cost 4,299 marks and looked like something an opera diva would have worn. Liz had hated it from the very first second. She had felt like a scarecrow wearing it and had fought against it tooth and nail, but her mother had still had them wrap it up.

  The morning before the ball, she had woken up with a stomach ache. Her mother had come into her room, dress in hand.

  ‘I am not putting that thing on,’ Liz blurted out. ‘You can forget it.’

  ‘Oh yes, you are,’ her mother responded, ‘whether you like it or not. It makes no difference to me. You will wear this dress.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That’s enough,’ her mother cried. ‘Either you put on this dress, or you aren’t going.’

  ‘Then I just won’t go,’ Liz fired back like a pistol.

  Her mother stared at her. ‘Fine,’ she said and then smiled. ‘Then you will pay me for the dress. Every last mark.’

  Liz’s mouth hung open. You mean 4,299 marks? ‘I didn’t even want it. You gave it to me.’

  ‘Think about it. Either you put it on or I’ll get the money from your savings account.’

  Liz had looked at her mother in disbelief. She had been squirreling away every mark she had into her savings account for years so that she could afford a trip or a car after graduation. She had suspected that her graduation gifts wouldn’t be as opulent as Ralf’s, but this was really unbelievable!

  Furious, she had stormed out of the house and run aimlessly through the city until she had found herself standing in front of a dingy shop. The shop owner was a barrel of a man and stank of nicotine and sweat.

  Four hours later, she was back home, peaky, but with a smile at the corners of her mouth. That evening she had willingly put on the dress she’d hated so much.

  Her mother’s first reaction had been a triumphant smile. That is, until her eyes had dropped to Liz’s exposed neckline. Above the edge of the dress, she caught sight of a small freshly inked tattoo of a skull with two crossed swords beneath it and a knife between its grinning teeth.

  Her mother had gasped. She had been livid and slapped her daughter across the face, spraining her hand in the process.

  Liz had gone to the ball in a simple black dress with a high neckline.

  The next morning, she had emptied her savings account and then piled some firewood on the freshly mown grass of her parents’ garden. She had placed the dress on top of a pile of all the other skirts and dresses from her wardrobe. Everything had seemed so calm when she set the heap aflame. Black smoke and an acrid stench enveloped her.

  With a leather jacket and a couple pairs of jeans and jumpers in her suitcase, she had moved out, got a job, enrolled at university to study journalism, scored an internship at the prestigious Von Braunsfeld Academy for Journalism and finished with top marks.

  Her father reacted as he always had: he didn’t. To top it all off, ‘journalist’ ranked very low on his scale of respectable professions.

  A couple of years later, Liz had been at a bar at an editorial department party with her editor-in-chief and told him all about her father.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he laughed. ‘You’ve essentially followed in his footsteps. Lawyer or journalist – it’s all the same, just a different playing field. In either case, you have the same investigative streak as him and the same relentlessness when it comes to catching the bad boys.’

  Liz had been astounded by the thought of it.

  And when one of her documentaries had been nominated for a major journalism award three years ago – though the prize went to someone else – her mother quite unexpectedly got in touch. ‘Well, Elisabeth?’ she asked pointedly. ‘Was it worth it?’

  She still wishes she had won the prize back then. Then at least her mother wouldn’t have called.

  Liz sighs and tries to figure out whom she could ask about Bug’s strange phone call. Usually, she’s a walking address book, but her head is strangely empty at the moment.

  Pregnancy Alzheimer’s? Already?

  ‘Oh, screw it,’ she mumbles. ‘Time to go home.’ Her watch says it’s 11.25. She had imagined this night differently. And, damn it, Gabriel had promised her that much.

  She can feel how annoyed she is that Gabriel isn’t there – and that’s what annoys her the most. Not long ago, she would’ve simply shrugged and buried herself in her work.

  She walks past the taxis and climbs the stairs up the train platform. She hates getting stuck in conversations with taxi drivers. She prefers the anonymity of public transport, where she can look silently out into the night or watch the people around her, as if she were on a distant island. Taking the train at night is one of the few quiet moments she has.

  First she takes the metro one stop to Alexanderplatz, and then the U8 towards Wittenau. When she transfers at Gesundbrunnen to the S41 Ringbahn, Berlin’s circular railway, a wave of fatigue crashes over her and she sinks into the plastic seat. ‘Please stand back,’ the train speakers rattle, as always. The lights over the doors flash bright red, then the train rumbles and jerks into motion.

  Liz’s eyes drift across the nearly empty coach. On a row of seats ahead on the opposite side, two young guys in dirty jeans are huddled together and looking at her. They got on at the same time as her. One of them looks like a real pizza face.

  At Schönhauser Allee, a very young mother with a screaming baby in her arms boards the train. Pizza Face rolls his eyes. When the train jerks forward, the girl stumbles onto the seats directly beside Liz. The baby cries even louder and the girl starts anxiously rummaging through her shoulder bag.

  ‘Shut that monster up, it’s annoying,’ Pizza Face says.

  The girl nervously crouches down. Then she discreetly pulls up her T-shirt and presses the little bundle up to her chest. The crying is muffled to a dull scream when the little mouth is pushed against her breast.

  Liz feels sympathetic towards the girl. The boys are repulsive.

  The girl’s face twists with pain as the baby bites down on her nipple. The two young men watch in disgust. ‘Man, with those dried-up tits, I’d be screaming, too,’ the second one proclaims and wipes a string of mucus from his nose with his sleeve. The spotty one grins.

  Liz stares at the girl, then back at the two guys. What she really wants is to jump up and give the two of them a piece of her mind. Her heart starts pounding. Everything inside her screams: don’t do it!

  The train comes to a screeching halt at Prenzlauer Allee. Pizza Face leans forward and hisses at the girl: ‘Get lost! Get your arse out the door.’

  Liz stands up. Her green eyes sparkle. ‘How about you get lost.’ Her voice could be firmer and she tries to ignore the protests coming from her stomach. ‘Or else shut up and leave her alone.’

  Stunned, Pizza Face stares at her. He is twenty at most. The stench of alcohol wafts over from his mo
uth. The other guy looks away, out the window and through his reflection into the night. ‘Well . . .’ the spotty one says deliberately slowly, ‘I guess you didn’t mean that, bitch. But if you’re just a bit nice to me, then maybe I’ll let the slag keep on riding.’ His eyes linger on Liz’s breasts. Part of the skull tattoo peeks out of her top. The guy with the runny nose gives a dumb grin. There’s an open schnapps bottle in his left hand, wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  ‘If you shitheads touch anyone here, I’ll make a huge scene.’ She gestures up towards a security camera hanging under the beige-painted ceiling. ‘And I can’t wait to see what happens then. I bet you’ve already got into a lot of trouble with the police. Even done some time in your youth? Or maybe community service?’

  The spotty one’s grin fades. He opens his mouth to reply, but the other guy elbows him in the side. Pizza Face’s mouth closes again.

  Feels good, Liz thinks. Brilliant, actually. Except that her knees are still trembling. She catches a grateful look from the girl and smiles back. The baby is still sucking hungrily, and is quieter.

  Without realising it, Liz lays her hand on her summer coat and her slightly curved stomach underneath. Despite all of the uncertainty, she has also warmed to the idea. At the beginning of her pregnancy, she felt as if she’d been thrust into deep black water. But now it feels good – like she’s swimming up to the surface after years under water, her hands reaching out into the clear air.

  When she gets off at Landsberger Allee near Friedrichshain Park, the two young men get off the train too. Shit. She walks faster and turns from Landsberger Allee onto Cotheniusstrasse. The footsteps behind her fall silent. The two boys seem to have gone off somewhere. Nonetheless, she quickens her pace until she is standing at the front door of her building.

  She doesn’t notice the large olive-coloured delivery van with black-tinted windows on the other side of the street. She also doesn’t see the man behind the steering wheel, peering in her direction. Had she done so, a single look in his eyes would have warned her without a doubt: go inside. Lock the door. Get help!