The Times Literary Supplement said of The Murder Farm, "With only a limited number of ways in which violent death can be investigated, crime writers have to use considerable ingenuity to bring anything fresh to the genre. Andrea Maria Schenkel has done it in her first novel." The first author to achieve a consecutive win of the German Crime Prize, Schenkel has won first place for both The Murder Farm and Ice Cold. The Murder Farm begins with a shock: a whole family has been murdered with a pickaxe. They were old Danner the farmer, an overbearing patriarch; his put-upon devoutly religious wife; and their daughter Barbara Spangler, whose husband Vincenz left her after fathering her daughter little Marianne. She also had a son, two-year-old Josef, the result of her affair with local farmer Georg Hauer after his wife's death from cancer. Hauer himself claimed paternity. Also murdered was the Danners' maidservant, Marie. An unconventional detective story, The Murder Farm is an exciting blend of eyewitness account, third-person narrative, pious diatribes, and incomplete case file that will keep readers guessing. When we leave the narrator, not even he knows the truth, and only the reader is able to reach the shattering conclusion.
Release date:
June 3, 2014
Publisher:
Quercus
Print pages:
208
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He enters the place early in the morning, before daybreak. He heats the big stove in the kitchen with the wood he has brought in from outside, fills the steamer with potatoes and water, puts the steamer full of potatoes on a burner.
He walks out of the kitchen, down the long, windowless corridor and over to the cowshed. The cows have to be fed and milked twice a day. They stand side by side in a row.
He speaks to them quietly. He is in the habit of talking to animals while he works in the shed with them. The sound of his voice seems to have a soothing effect on the cattle. Their uneasiness appears to be lulled by the regular singsong of that voice, the repetition of the same words. The calm, monotonous sound relaxes them. He’s known this kind of work all his life. He enjoys it.
He spreads a layer of fresh straw over the old one, fetching it from the barn next door. There is a pleasant, familiar smell in the shed. Cows don’t smell like pigs. There’s nothing sharp or assertive about their odor.
After that he fetches hay. He gets that from the barn, too.
He leaves the connecting door between the barn and the cowshed open.
While the animals feed, he milks them. He is a little worried about that. The cows aren’t used to being milked by him. But his fears that one of them will refuse to let him milk her had been unfounded.
The smell of the cooked potatoes drifts over to the cowshed. Time to feed the pigs. He tips the potatoes out of the steamer and straight into a bucket, and then he crushes them before taking them to the pigs in their sty.
The pigs squeal when he opens the pigsty door. He tips the contents of the bucket into the trough and adds some water.
His work is done. Before leaving the house he makes sure the fire in the stove is out again. He leaves the door between the barn and the cowshed open. He pours the milk from the cans straight on the dunghill. Then he puts the cans back in their place.
He would go back to the cowshed that evening. He’d feed the dog, who always cringes away into a corner, whimpering, when he arrives. He’d tend the animals. And while he worked he would always take great care to give a wide berth to the heap of straw in the far left-hand corner of the barn.
Betty, age 8
Marianne and me always sit together in school. She’s my best friend. That’s why we always sit with each other.
Marianne specially likes my mama’s yeast dumplings. When my mama bakes those dumplings I always take one to school for Marianne, or to church if it’s a Sunday. I took her one that Sunday, but then I had to eat it myself because she wasn’t at church.
What do we do together? Well, we play games, like cops and robbers, catch, hide and seek. In summer we sometimes play shops at my house. We make ourselves a little stall by the kitchen garden fence. Mama always lets me have a tablecloth and we can put things out on it: apples, nuts, flowers, colored paper, anything we can find.
Once we even had chewing gum, my auntie brought it. It tastes lovely, like cinnamon. My auntie says the children in America eat it all the time. My auntie works for the Yanks, you see. And now and then she brings us chewing gum and chocolate and peanut butter. Or bread in funny green cans. Once last summer there was even ice cream.
My mama doesn’t like that so much, because Auntie Lisbeth’s boyfriend comes from America, too, and he’s all black.
Marianne’s always saying her papa is in America as well, and he’s going to come fetch her very soon; she’s sure he is. But I don’t believe it. Because Marianne does tell fibs sometimes. Mama says you shouldn’t tell fibs, and when Marianne tells another of her stories we quarrel. Then we usually each take our things away from the shop and we can’t go on playing and Marianne goes home.
The Christ Child brought me a dolly for Christmas, and Marianne was very envious. She only has a really old one; it’s a wooden dolly and it used to be her mama’s. So then Marianne started telling stories again. How her papa is coming soon to take her away to America. I told her I wouldn’t go on being her friend if she kept telling so many fibs. After that she didn’t say anymore about it.
Sometimes we go tobogganing in the meadow behind our farm. There’s a hill that is great for tobogganing; everyone in the village always goes there. If you don’t brake in time you shoot right down into the hedge. Then there’s usually trouble at home. Marianne has to bring her little brother along sometimes, when she’s looking after him. He clings to your skirts all the time. I don’t have a little brother, just a big sister, but that’s not always much fun either. She often makes me really mad.
When Marianne’s little brother fell over in the snow he started crying and he’d wet his pants, too, and then Marianne had to go home and there was bad trouble. Because she hadn’t looked after him properly and he’d wet his pants again and so on. Then she was very sad in school next day and told me she wanted to go away because her grandpa is so strict and so is her mama.
A few days ago she told me the magician was back. She’d seen him in the woods, she said, and she knows he’ll take her to her papa. Yes, she said, she saw the magician. She told me that story once before, last autumn, right after school began and I didn’t believe her, there’s no such thing as magicians, and you bet your life there’s no such thing as magicians who can magic you a papa who’s supposed to be in America. So then I quarreled with her again and she cried and said there is so a magician, and he has all colored bottles in his backpack and other colored things and sometimes he just sits there humming to himself. So he must be a magician, just like in our reading book at school. Then I shouted, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” and she cried and ran home. And because she wasn’t in school on Saturday and she loves my mama’s yeast dumplings so much, I took one to church for her on Sunday. But she wasn’t there either. Mama said because none of them were there maybe they’d gone to visit family. Over in Einhausen where her grandpa’s brother lives. So I just ate the dumpling myself.
Marianne lies in bed awake. She can’t get to sleep. She hears the wind howling. It sweeps over the farm like the Wild Hunt. Grandma’s often told her stories about the Wild Hunt and the Trud, an evil spirit in female form. She always tells them on the long, dark, frosty nights between Christmas and New Year.
“The Wild Hunt races on before the wind, fast as the storm clouds or even faster. The huntsmen are mounted on horses as black as the Devil,” Grandma had told her. “Wrapped in black cloaks. Hoods drawn right down over their faces. Eyes glowing red, they race on. If anyone’s rash enough to go out and about on such a night, the Wild Hunt will pick him up. At the gallop,” said Grandma. “Just like that—got ’im!”
And she made a snatching movement with her hand, as if seizing something to extinguish it.
“Got ’im! And they take the poor fellow high up in the air and sweep him away with them. Up, up, and away to the clouds, they sweep him right up into the sky. He has to go with the stormy wind. The hunt never lets him go again, the hunt howls and laughs with scorn. Ho, ho, ho,” laughed Grandma in a deep voice.
Marianne could almost see the Wild Hunt picking a man up and laughing as it carried him away.
“And what happens then, Grandma?” Marianne asked. “Doesn’t he ever come down again?”
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