The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta Page B

wouldn’t let go of her hand, dragged her behind her instead, into the main stairwell and up the sweep of the stairs. It was all Lieschen could do just to keep up. She didn’t think she had ever run quite as fast as this.

Chapter 7
    Anton Beer opened the door to the bell’s shrill ringing and found Zuzka and the child there, standing winded hand in hand. Zuzka reached out a palm and – mistaking the gesture, his mind still busy with the files he had been studying – he took and shook it, gave the ghost of a bow. Then he felt her tug, jerky and insistent, and became aware of the spasms in her breathing. Beer searched her face, found her habitual nonchalance wiped from her features. She had been crying, he saw, the cheeks were still wet, tears and sweat beading on her upper lip.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked, but was answered only by her tug.
    ‘But you must come inside,’ he murmured, shaking off her grip and stepping to one side. It was the child who marched in, crooked neck bent forward as though she were leaning into the wind.
    ‘There is a woman who is lying in bed,’ Anneliese told the doctor, her own emotion audible only in her lack of modulation. ‘On the other side of the yard. Her back’s full of holes, and she has lovely green eyes.’
    ‘But where?’
    ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I will show you.’
    Without waiting for Beer’s reaction, she chose a door at random and headed left, into his study. His desk was there, standing at the centre, the chair facing into the room. The desktop was covered with police files, a glass of brandy rising from their midst, his cigarette still smoking in its ashtray.
    The child spent no time taking in her surroundings. She ran to the window, parted the curtains, stuck her head through the open frame. ‘Over there,’ she shouted, rising to the tips of her toes and pointing deep into the courtyard, her chest pressing hard into the windowsill. ‘But you can’t see, ’cause the tree is in the way.’
    ‘You mean the side wing?’
    ‘Yes. Shine-a-man lives there. I saw him tonight.’
    He nodded, confused, made to return to Zuzka whom they had left in the hallway, still gathering her words. He nearly collided with her in the doorway to his study.
    ‘We must go at once,’ she said. ‘Help that poor girl.’ Again she reached for his hand. This time he let her.
    ‘Is it the man with the trumpet? Has he done something to her?’
    ‘I pinched her,’ said Zuzka, ‘to see if she was alive. She didn’t even flinch.’
    ‘But who? You really must slow down. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’
    The fingers in his palm were cold and hurt him with their pressure. It was very different from how she’d held on to him the previous night. Beer pulled himself free, took the glass of brandy from his desk and placed it into Zuzka’s hands.
    ‘Here, drink this. And sit down on the couch. Now tell me what is going on.’
    Slowly, by increments, he got the story out of her. She told him how she had gone across the yard that afternoon to talk to the man they had observed; how she’d offered him medicine for his sick wife (‘Medicine?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Colloidal silver,’ she told him, as though expecting he would praise her for the wisdom of her choice); how she had been turned away, rather rudely, but seen enough to notice a body lying at the back of his flat. So she had decided to return, had broken in, in fact, and found a woman there; had thought her dead until she’d opened her eyes. (‘Did she say anything?’ ‘Nothing at all. Her back looks like she’s been whipped.’) He refilled her glass and listened to her description of the injuries; the green of the woman’s eyes; the image in some smut magazine she had found lying around on the floor. Even now, in her agitation, she was wresting poetry from those moments of fear, spoke more than she had to, paused for effect. She was less effusive when he pressed her for answers on some matters of