Blood Relative

by David Thomas

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

"How well do you know your wife, Mr Crookham?" Peter Crookham arrives home late from work to a bloodbath: his journalist brother, Andy, is dead - covered in knife wounds - and his beautiful young wife, Mariana, is bathed in his blood. Convinced his wife is incapable of murder, Peter vows to clear her name. Yet he is forced to question his conviction when he discovers the subject of Andy's final investigation - Mariana's past. This past, Peter will discover, is inextricably linked to one man: an elusive, mysterious figure affiliated with the then East German security service, the STASI. But this man is more than that. Much more. And so is Mariana Crookham.

Release date: October 27, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

Out on the tiny, circular dance floor a blonde and a brunette were dancing to the Bee Gees, giving it their best moves. All they needed now was some male attention. But Hans-Peter Tretow wasn’t about to oblige.

‘Well then, here I am. What do you want?’ Tretow said, turning his back on the girls. He was in his mid-twenties, dressed in a double-breasted suit and a silk kipper tie. His voice still had the brash, even cocky, self-confidence of youth. He leaned against the bar, a glass of beer in his hand, looking at a second man, who was sitting down, his tall, thin, pipe-cleaner body folded onto a stool.

The thin man said nothing. He had rocker sideburns and black hair slicked back. A caramel leather jacket with flared lapels hung from his bony shoulders and the deep shadows in his sallow cheeks darkened still further as he held a hand to his mouth and sucked on the last few usable millimetres of his cigarette.

‘Get on with it,’ Tretow insisted. ‘I’ve got business to do tonight.’

Now the thin man spoke. ‘No, you haven’t.’ He stubbed out his cigarette into a plastic ashtray on the bar. ‘You’ve got to get out. You were followed. They’ve got you nailed.’

Tretow looked angry, as though this were all somehow the other man’s fault. ‘Not possible. I’d have noticed if someone was watching me.’

‘Evidently you did not.’

‘Well then, call Günther, get him to pull some strings. He can make this go away.’

‘No chance: the investigation is too far advanced. Anyone steps in now, people will start wondering why. You’ll have to disappear.’

‘I know a place in Bavaria, right up in the mountains. I could take a break there. Take the wife and kids.’

The thin man tapped another cigarette against the bar, beating out time as he said, ‘You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t about taking a holiday. You’ve got to disappear … completely … now.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’

‘All right then, go to the mountains. Then wait to see who finds you first – the cops, or whoever Günther sends to silence you. You’ll never make it to the inside of an interview room. You know too much. He won’t let it happen.’

‘He wouldn’t dare!’ Tretow’s voice was still assertive, but there was more bluster than certainty in it now.

The thin man reached out and gripped Tretow’s lower arm hard. ‘Listen to me, you arrogant sack of crap. You must have known this could happen. You’ve got an escape plan, right?’

Tretow nodded.

‘Well then,’ said the thin man. ‘Use it.’

On leaving the club, Tretow did not return home to his wife Judith and their two infant children. Instead, he drove his smart new Mercedes 250C coupé to a grimy, run-down side street lined with lock-up garages. He opened one of them up and drove in, parking next to another car, an unwashed ten-year-old Volkswagen Beetle, painted beige: as anonymous and nondescript as any vehicle in Germany.

At the back of the unit a door led to a small, dirty, foul-smelling toilet. Tretow reached behind the low-level cistern. He pulled at two strips of black masking tape and released a clear plastic bag no more than twenty centimetres square and then tucked it inside the Beetle’s spare wheel. From a storage cupboard covered in flaking green paint Tretow removed a workman’s boiler suit, boots and donkey jacket. He put these on in place of his smart suit and tie. Then he drove the Volkswagen out of the unit, locked the doors behind him and started driving.

When Tretow reached the outskirts of the city, following the signs to the A45 autobahn, north towards Marburg, it was twenty-seven minutes past one in the morning.

He drove for two and a half hours. For three hours after that he slept in the car park of a service area beside the autobahn. When he woke, he set off again, heading east.

It was now seven in the morning. In Frankfurt, a detective coming to the end of a fruitless surveillance shift was reporting back to his boss that Tretow had not come home all night. Voices were raised, increasingly agitated phone calls were made and police across the state of Hesse were told that Hans-Peter Tretow was now, officially, a fugitive from justice. Local railway stations and airports were also informed. It would, however, take a little time to coordinate a wider, nationwide alert.

In all the fourteen hundred kilometres of border between West and East Germany, there were just three points at which motorists could pass from one country to the other. One of them was at Herleshausen, eighty kilometres west of the city of Erfurt. Tretow’s VW joined the long line of cars and trucks waiting to enter the communist dictatorship. All the drivers, passengers and vehicles were inspected by East German border control officers from Directorate VI of the Ministry of State Security, otherwise known as the Stasi. Tretow was ready. He had both his passport and Federal Identity Card. He explained that he was travelling to West Berlin where he hoped to get work on a construction site.

In order to get to there, however, first he had to cross 370 kilometres of East Germany. For this he needed a visa, which was issued not by the day or month but by the hour and minute. The East German authorities did not want anyone stopping by the side of their autobahns to pick up clandestine passengers who might wish to escape to the West. Drivers were therefore ordered to proceed down the road at a continuous eighty kilometres per hour. At this rate, the journey was calculated to take no more than four hours and forty minutes. That was, therefore, the amount of time for which Tretow’s visa would be valid. Should he arrive at the Drewitz-Dreilinden checkpoint on the south-west outskirts of Berlin any later than this, the Stasi would want to know why.

Tretow waited his turn in the interminable queue before he was finally issued with his visa and set off again. It was now nineteen minutes past ten. In Frankfurt a formal alert was being sent to West Germany’s Federal Border Guard, requesting Tretow’s immediate apprehension and arrest. The checkpoints on the western side of the Berlin Wall were included in this alert. If Tretow attempted to enter West Berlin he would be caught and returned to Frankfurt by air.

But Tretow had other plans. When he reached Drewitz-Dreilinden he joined one of several lines of vehicles backing up along the autobahn. Each line crawled towards a raised platform. On each platform stood six white wooden passport control booths, one per car, occupied by uniformed personnel.

Up ahead of the checkpoint the Berlin Wall was clearly visible, topped by barbed wire and supplemented at intervals by guard towers filled with machine-gun-toting soldiers. Beyond the wall lay an open killing field strewn with anti-personnel mines and tank-traps, and patrolled by guards with attack dogs. Beyond that space stood a second wall. Many civilizations in history, from the Chinese to the Romans, had built mighty walls to keep their enemies out. None had ever gone to such lengths to keep their own people in.

Tretow inched forward until the Beetle was lined up alongside one of the booths. As he handed over his papers he said, ‘I wish to defect.’

The passport control officer frowned, wondering whether this shabbily dressed worker in his beat-up car was playing some kind of a joke. Before he could respond, Tretow spoke again. ‘I am seeking political asylum,’ he said. ‘In the East.’

My wife Mariana was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on and yet she was so bright, so complex, so constantly capable of surprising me that her beauty was almost the least interesting thing about her. Six years we’d been together and I still couldn’t believe my luck.

That morning, when it all began, I’d told her that my brother Andy was coming to stay for the night. I said we were planning to go out for a quick pint before supper.

‘It’s Mum. Andy’s going over to see her today. He’s bothered about the way she’s being treated. He just wanted to talk about it with me and he knows you never got on with her, so … hope you don’t mind.’

I must have had a particularly sheepish look on my face because Mariana laughed in that wonderful way of hers, so carefree and full of life, but always with that tantalizing hint underneath it that she knew something I didn’t: ‘That’s fine. You guys go and have your brother-talk,’ she said, just the faintest of accents and oddities of grammar betraying her German origins. ‘I will stay home and cook, like a good little hausfrau.’

Mariana giggled again at the absurd idea that she, of all people, could ever be the meek, submissive wife. I just stood there in the kitchen grinning like a fool: but a very happy fool.

My name’s Peter Crookham, I’m an architect and I’m forty-two years old. If I have a distinguishing feature it’s my height. I’m tall, six-three in my stockinged feet. I played rugby at school and did a bit of rowing at university: nothing serious, just my college eight. These days, I’m like every other middle-aged guy in the world trying to get his act together to go to the gym or stagger off on a run, wondering why his trousers keep getting tighter. Those love-handles: where did they come from? I have pale-blue eyes and mousey-brown hair, just starting to thin. Last summer for the first time I got a small patch of sunburn on my scalp, the size of a fifty-pence piece. ‘Poor bald baby,’ teased Mariana as she massaged the after-sun cream into my bright pink skin.

As for my face, well, when women wanted to say nice things about me they never used to describe me as hunky or handsome. They told me I had a kind smile. I was never anyone’s dirty weekend. I was the nice, reliable, unthreatening type of guy that a woman didn’t feel embarrassed to be seen with at a party. But she wouldn’t be worrying herself sick that some other girl was going to make a beeline for me, either.

Basically, I’m Mr Average. Or at least I was. Then Mariana came into my life.

Twelve hours had passed since I’d told her about Andy and now the pint would have to wait. I’d been held up on a site visit in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, eighty-odd miles from our place outside York. Heading home along the M62 I called her on the hands-free. A combination of snow-flurries, roadworks and speedcams had slowed the traffic to a crawl: an all-too familiar story for a Tuesday night in February. ‘I’m definitely going to be late,’ I said. ‘Looks like I’ll have to scrap that drink with Andy. Is he there yet?’

‘Yes, he is here,’ Mariana said. There was something strange about her voice: a flatness that I’d never heard before. Or maybe it was just a bad connection.

‘Can I have a word with him?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘he cannot talk.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Andy,’ I said, smiling to myself. The hard part was usually getting him to stop talking, particularly if he had a chance to take the mick out of me. ‘What’s he up to?’

‘He is … he is on his own phone, I think. Maybe he will call you back when he has finished. I must go now. The dinner is cooking.’

Then she hung up. And that was odd, too, because Mariana always said, ‘I love you’, or sent me what she called a ‘sweet kiss’ at the end of a telephone call. When she was feeling particularly naughty she’d say something in German and then cut the connection, laughing, before I could work out just how filthy she was being. But she never just hung up.

I wondered whether Andy had been standing nearby and made her too embarrassed to say anything. But Mariana didn’t do embarrassment. I’d learned that from the first moment I’d met her.

Maybe Andy had pissed her off. God love him, my kid brother could be an irritating little tit sometimes. A newspaper reporter has to be persistent even if that infuriates some of the people he deals with, so never knowing when to stop must have come in handy when Andy was investigating a story. But it could be a seriously annoying characteristic in a social context. That might explain Mariana’s tone of voice, though, if the flatness were just suppressed anger.

It took me about another hour to get home. Along the way I ran through a bunch of possible scenarios in my mind, working out various ways of pacifying two people who’d always got on perfectly well until now. Then I put that to one side and turned on the radio. I was the senior partner in a practice called Crookham Church and Partners – Mariana worked there too – and we got a lot of business from footballers. In our part of the world, they were just about the only people still making enough money to pay for fancy new houses. One of our clients was playing in a Champions League game that was about to kick off at Old Trafford. I might as well find out how he had got on.

Shortly before the game reached half-time, I pulled into our drive and parked the car in the triple garage. As the door automatically shut behind me I walked across the gravel towards the front door, my shoulders hunched against the freezing wind. I was just about to put my key in the lock when it swung open.

Mariana was standing there.

Her long, honey-coloured hair was tangled and matted with something liquid that had started to dry in thick, rubbery clumps, as though someone had poured paint over her head.

The stuff was on her face, too, fully dried by the warmth of her skin and then cracked by the movement of her mouth and forehead.

In the half-light of the porch it was hard to see what colour it was. But as I got closer I saw that her dress had been patterned by wild spatters of the stuff.

‘Darling?’ I didn’t know what else to say.

Then she stepped away from me, back into the house and the light, and I could see that the colour was a deep crimson, darkening in places to a purple black.

And now I knew what it was that had sprayed her entire body; that had drenched her hair and her dress; that clung to her face, her arms and her hands; that had been smeared across the flagstones behind her as she walked.

Mariana was covered from head to toe in blood.

We stood there silently, motionless, maybe four feet apart. Mariana looked at me but seemed to see nothing. Her tawny, tiger eyes, flecked with gold and green, had always sparkled with intelligence and life. Now they were blank and her face lacked any expression. She seemed entirely indifferent to the state she was in. She just said, ‘Hereingekommen’, the German for, ‘Come in’, turned and walked back into the house.

From the back she looked almost normal. She was clean.

Our house was a barn conversion. The way we had designed it, the garage and main entrance were at the rear of the building. A hallway served as a repository for coats, umbrellas and boots. At the far end an internal door led you beneath the sinuous glass and metal curves of the staircase to the showpiece heart of the house, a huge, open-plan living space, open to the full height of the building.

The kitchen area was to the right. The units were ‘Modern Purism’ by Poggenpohl: Mariana’s choice and another one of her surprises. I’d expected something warm and natural, but their sleek, unsentimental efficiency made the kitchen look less like the heart of a family home than an office for cooking in.

Maybe she’d been trying to tell me something. We were so busy perfecting other people’s homes, there’d been no time to give our own place the love and attention we lavished on our clients’. For them we were obsessive about detail. We’d go to any lengths, take any amount of trouble to source the perfect tile, tap, door handle or work surface. When we worked for ourselves, though, it was more a case of getting the basics in fast, and adding all the personal touches later. To make life simpler and quicker we’d bought most of the furniture from the Conran Shop, everything chosen in a single Saturday afternoon. Three Naviglio leather sofas formed a square whose fourth side was a massive fireplace. The dining table was walnut, as were the matching chairs.

All but one of the walls were painted in Casablanca by John Oliver: a soft, dusty, soothing and completely inimitable white emulsion. The far wall, however, was almost entirely glass, with spectacular views across the North Yorkshire countryside. At night the glass became a shining black backdrop against which we played out our lives.

Or a death, as it was in this case.

Mariana turned right into the kitchen. ‘Ich muss die Nudeln retten bevor sie überkochen,’ she said.

Apart from the odd dirty joke, we’d always spoken English. Mariana used to say she preferred it to German, which she only half-jokingly called ‘Hitler’s language’. But out of embarrassment at my own incompetence and just wanting to do something for her I’d spent a few months playing a Speak German course in the car. I’d picked up enough to get the gist of what she was saying. She was worried that the pasta was about to boil over.

I didn’t reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the right words. I was simply incapable of speech.

Andy was lying almost directly in front of where I stood, about halfway to the far wall. His face was frozen in an expression of fear and bafflement. His pale-blue, button-down shirt was punctured with stabs, though they were nothing compared to the terrible open wound that had cut his left thigh open almost to the bone.

Andy had died at the centre of a spreading, swirling eruption of blood. It lay on the floor in puddles and smears whose patterns showed the thrashings and spasms of his dying limbs as clearly as angel wings in the snow.

The blood was not confined to the floor. It had been flung across the canvas-white walls like the first scarlet spraying of a Jackson Pollock painting. It was dripping from the fancy leather sofas – one of them in particular was doused in it – and the wheeled bookcases that stood on either side of the fireplace. It soiled our creamy rugs. There was even a single scarlet handprint on the glass opposite me. The floor beneath it was a messy confusion of bloody footprints. Andrew must have reached out for support. Or perhaps it had been Mariana. Maybe she had gone to help him. Maybe that was why she was covered in blood. I mean she couldn’t have … no, that wasn’t possible. Not Mariana.

Up to now I had been numb, as though my brain had been overwhelmed, unable to process the torrent of sensory and emotional information with which it had been flooded. I’d never in my life seen a dead body before. Our father died when I was twelve and Andy was five, but Mum wouldn’t let us see him. She said it would be too upsetting. So I had no idea until then how utterly changed the human form is by the absence of life, how absolute the difference between existence and its termination can be. A corpse bears no resemblance whatever to an actor lying still and trying not to breathe. A corpse that has bled out is doubly emptied: the stuff of life has left it as well as the spirit.

Finally, the reality of Andy’s death seemed to register, like a website that takes an age to upload but then flashes all at once on the screen. I actually reeled back a couple of paces, as though I’d received a physical blow, and that was probably just as well because it took me away from the corpse and the blood. So when I threw up all over the floor in front of me none of the vomit corrupted the evidence.

I straightened up, wiping the spit and puke from my mouth, and walked over to the kitchen sink. I turned on the tap, caught some water in my cupped hands and used it to rinse out my mouth. A second handful was splashed over my face.

Mariana was almost close enough to touch, standing by the hob, ladling spaghetti out of a giant pan into three white bowls. ‘Viel von Nudeln für jeder,’ she said in a cheery, almost singsong, voice: plenty of pasta for everyone. And then, more to herself, ‘Die Männer haben Hunger. Sie müssen genug haben, zum zu essen’: the men will be hungry, they must have enough to eat.

Her bloodied fingers had left red smears on the white china crockery and the aluminium pan. I had a terrible vision of blood in the cooking water, like squid-ink, and as the pasta came out of the water I half-expected it to be pink. Mariana was working like an automaton, oblivious to the fact that the bowls were piled to overflowing and that the pasta spoon she was dipping into the pan was coming up with nothing but water.

I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to feel. Grief for Andy and anger at his death; fear and concern for Mariana, mixed with love, a kind of pity and an instinctive desire to protect her; above all a total bafflement at what was confronting me. All those emotions swirled inside me, colliding and cancelling one another out until all I was left with was numbness.

Mariana’s mood suddenly changed. Her head darted from side to side. She was obviously looking for something. ‘Wo setzte ich der carbonara Soße?’ She was wondering what she’d done with the carbonara sauce. The hob had nothing on it apart from the pan that had held the pasta. For a second, I too looked about me for the sauce, as though it could be magicked into being, that normality could somehow be restored.

That was when I saw the knife.

Mariana had bought a set of Japanese chef’s knives: the Ryusen Blazen series. They featured a core of powdered tool steel, sandwiched between two layers of soft stainless steel, with cutting edges honed to the thinness of a razor blade. The biggest knife in the set had a wide blade 240 millimetres long, which tapered to a point sharp enough to draw blood if you so much as rested a finger against it. It was called a Western Deba. It was lying just the far side of the three white bowls, and the last drops of stringy, semi-coagulated blood were still falling from its blade to the pure white of the Poggenpohl work surface.

Finally, I found my voice.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘What it looks like. I serve the meal.’

Finally, Mariana had spoken English, but her accent was still more Germanic than usual. She sounded like a different person.

‘But Andy’s dead!’

She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

‘Sorry? I don’t understand. Your brother is now not coming to supper?’

I dialled 999. When the woman on the other end of the line asked me which service I wanted, my mind seemed to scramble. ‘I don’t know,’ I blurted. ‘Someone’s dead at my house. He’s been stabbed. Somebody killed him.’

She took my name and address and told me to stay where I was: ‘The police and an ambulance will be with you soon.’

When she mentioned the police I thought of all the thrillers I’d read, the TV cop shows I’d seen: detectives always suspected the family first. What if they thought we’d done it? Somewhere inside I must have known that Mariana was the only possible suspect, but I was a long way from admitting that to myself or anyone else just yet. I speed-dialled my lawyer, Jamie Monkton. He handled all the practice’s contractual work. Jamie wasn’t the kind of lawyer who hung around a lot of police stations. But he was the only one I knew.

‘I need your advice,’ I said.

‘No worries,’ he replied. . . .