The kitchen was gloomy, cool, like it seemed to be holding its breath. Reinhardt paused again and focused on that cupboard he remembered from his first time. The one with the big double doors, padlocked shut. He took the lock in his hands. It was a big, old-fashioned lock, a round hole in it for a key. He rattled the ring, and the shackle came loose from the lock. He froze, stared at it, then turned the lock in his hands and slipped the shackle through the ring. The padlock sat heavy in his hand, and he realised as he pushed the shackle down into the lock, then pulled it out again, that it would not work without a key. Someone had tried to put it back on the door but without the key it would not lock shut and so they had left it, made it seem nothing had happened. He pulled the doors open, looking into a deep space that was all but empty save for a ladder standing against one wall, an old broom, and a few boxes. Nothing else.
Reinhardt’s mouth twisted as he stepped back. He had been so sure… He frowned, looked closer. The ladder was not standing against the wall. It was too upright. It was fixed to the wall. He looked up, seeing where it vanished into the ceiling. He reached up with his fingers and pulled at what looked like a latch, and the ceiling swung down, suddenly, releasing a wash of light that etched out the inside of the cupboard. He ducked, took the weight on his hands, then manoeuvred it past his head, looking up. The ladder continued up into the light. He exchanged a quick glance with Padelin, then began pulling himself up.
The ladder passed through a flimsy ceiling, into a space braced by a crisscross of beams, then up into a small room, bare of any furnishing, only one thing in it. The floorboards creaked softly under his weight as he crossed over to a tall rectangle of light and looked out into Marija Vukic’s bedroom. There was creaking from the ladder as Padelin began to haul himself up. His head poked up, and then his shoulders heaved up and around, and the two of them stood squeezed into the small space, Padelin swearing quietly under his breath.
Reinhardt felt a lurch in his stomach, like one feels at the edge of a great height. A camera stood on a tripod, mounted in front of the mirror, its lens like a wet, black eye. He swallowed in a dry throat and reached out to open the film case, but it was empty.
12
Reinhardt thought about the ransacked darkroom as he stared at the camera. He thought about Anna, who thought the Feld shy;gendarmerie were looking for pictures. Not pictures. Film. A film, he thought, glancing over at the bed, that probably showed Vukic’s murderer. Whoever killed Vukic must have found out about this, or what she liked to do, and taken everything she had, just in case. He thought about the disassembled camera in the studio at Jelic’s apartment, the chemical smell of the place.
‘I need to get back to headquarters,’ said Padelin. ‘Can you drive me back?’
‘Christ, Padelin!’ exclaimed Reinhardt. Padelin’s eyes went flat. ‘This is important! Whatever happened here on Saturday night, it was probably filmed. And someone’s got it. We need to search this place again. Question the maid. The gardener. The handyman, if there was one.’
The muscles in the sides of Padelin’s jaw clenched, once. ‘I need to get back,’ he grated, ‘and report this.’
Reinhardt clenched his jaw as well, then sighed and nodded. ‘Very well.’ Taking a last look around, he followed Padelin down the ladder and back out of the house to the kubelwagen. Padelin balled and rolled his fist again, flexing it back and forth. Reinhardt gestured at Padelin’s hand. ‘You all right there?’
‘Fine,’ replied the detective as he got into the car. ‘I couldn’t punch him. Jelic. My fists hurt too much already.’
Reinhardt said nothing during the drive back into town. The day was sweltering hot, and the heat was only slightly alleviated by the wind of the kubelwagen’s speed. He pulled up outside police headquarters, where Padelin got out. Two policemen on duty outside the entrance stopped talking to look curiously over at them.
‘Padelin,’ said Reinhardt. The detective turned to face him. Reinhardt felt a weight in his chest. A weight of words, and feelings, about how people like them, people with authority, should behave. But he knew he would get nowhere with them, and so he tamped down hard on them, pushing and squeezing those words and feelings down. ‘I am going to try to speak with Major Gord. You recall, the soldier that Mrs Vukic mentioned she thought knew her daughter.’ Padelin nodded. ‘Are you interested in accompanying me to that interview?’
‘Reinhardt,’ he said, a sense of finality obvious in his voice. ‘I am available. But I think my investigation will be ending soon. I am confident we have a suspect for Vukic’s murder.’
‘Fine,’ sighed Reinhardt. He looked away a moment, then back. ‘One thing you might consider, however, is finding out how many places in Sarajevo could possibly develop a film like the one that might have been shot at Vukic’s place.’ Padelin stared back at him, expressionlessly. ‘Not many, I would think. Might be worth your while checking up on them.’
‘What about where we just met Jelic?’
‘Exactly,’ said Reinhardt, taken aback that Padelin had given it any thought at all.
Padelin stepped back, shrugging into his jacket and pulling the knot up on his tie, and nodded goodbye. Reinhardt watched him walk up the steps into the building and saw the way the two policemen on duty straightened as he approached, saluting him, one going so far as to shake his hand. They smiled at each other as they resumed their hipshot stance and slouch against the wall, knowing looks, a thumb jerked in the direction Padelin had taken.
Reinhardt stared at them and then at the white-knuckled grip he had on the wheel. He forced his hands to relax, to unclench, and then continued back to HQ, where he parked and walked up to his office, trying not to think about the bottle of slivovitz – the local plum brandy – he knew was in the bottom drawer. Looking at his in tray, he sifted through the usual correspondence, his mind elsewhere. He sat in his chair, the leather squeaking as he settled himself, his hand going to his knee. Glancing up, he stared at the map of Bosnia that hung on his wall, his eyes wandering from Sarajevo, east to Gorazde, then south, down to Foca, Kalinovik, Tjentiste, imagining the forces gathering there for the upcoming operation.
‘Your case,’ he muttered. ‘Your case.’ In his mind, he saw those two policemen again, the respect they had shown Padelin. Their new hero. They must have someone, he thought. Someone who had confessed. Vukic’s killer, who they would parade. Hendel’s killer, well… Maybe they would pin that one on the poor bastard as well. Otherwise, they would just leave Hendel to the Germans. He felt a cold sweat break out over him at the thought of what that must mean, at what must have been going on in the cells under police headquarters, while he wandered back and forth across Sarajevo. Padelin had to know, must, that whoever they had did not do it.
Reinhardt jerked away from the desk, away from the drawer with that bottle. He knew he was prevaricating, shying away from the discomfort he had felt about the way Padelin had behaved. God only knew, he thought to himself as he stared at the map’s contour lines and rubbed the ridges of his scarred knee, he had seen and heard and read of enough horror in his four years back under the colours to last him a lifetime. It was not that, he knew. Padelin was a policeman. Policemen, he still believed, should not act that way. Policemen, he still wanted to believe, despite all he had seen over the past few years, could be better than the system and the laws they served.
He had clung to that belief as long as he could, until the time, that one and only time, he had raised his fist to a suspect. That moment when the temptation, the pressure to conform, to be just like all the others again became too strong to resist. That one time, down in the cells under Alexanderplatz, knowing he could wipe away the sneer of that criminal with his fists, the goading from the other policemen to do it, do it, and he had. Then how he had run through Berlin’s darkened streets, hammering on Meissner’s door. Cowering in the corner of the colonel’s drawing room with a bottle clutched to his chest as Meissner watched him from beside the fire, and the decision was made. The flight back to the army. Back to his first home.