Not Dead Enough

54

Because of a problem with a baggage door, the plane took off half an hour late. Roy Grace spent the entire journey bolt upright in his seat, which he didn’t even think about reclining, staring out through the window at the rivets on the bulbous grey metal of the starboard engine casing.

For two interminable hours in the air he had been unable to concentrate on anything for very long, to pass the time, other than memorizing part of the street map of Munich city centre. The cardboard box containing the plastic wrap and empty box of the unpleasant cheese roll he had eaten out of sheer hunger, and the dregs of the second bitter coffee he had drunk, wobbled on his tray as the plane bumped through clouds, finally starting its descent.

He was frustrated about the loss of those precious thirty minutes, eating into the very short time he had ahead of him today. He barely noticed the hands of the stewardess reaching down in front of him and removing the detritus of his breakfast as he stared at the landscape now opening up below him.

At the vastness of it.

Butterflies swarmed in his stomach as he absorbed his first-ever sights of German soil. The patchwork of brown, yellow and green rectangles of flat farmland spread out over a seemingly endless, horizonless plain. He saw small clusters of white houses with red and brown roofs, copses, the trees an emerald green so vivid they looked like they had been spray-painted. Then a small town. More clusters of houses and buildings.

A great, yammering panic was building up inside him. Would he even recognize Sandy if he saw her? There were days when he could no longer recall her face without looking at her photograph, as if time, whether he liked it or not, was slowly erasing her from his memory.

And if she was down there, somewhere in that vast landscape, where was she? In the city that he couldn’t yet see? In one of these remote villages beneath them that they were slowly passing? Was Sandy living her life somewhere in this vast open landscape below him? An anonymous German hausfrau whose background no one had ever questioned?

The stewardess’s hand appeared again in front of him, pushing up the grey table and rotating the peg to secure it. The ground was getting closer, the buildings bigger. He could see cars travelling along roads. He heard the captain’s voice on the intercom, ordering the cabin crew to take their seats for landing.

The captain then thanked them for flying British Airways and wished them a pleasant day in Munich. To Grace, until these past few days, Munich had just been a name on a map. A name in newspaper headlines in the deepest recesses of his mind. A name in television documentaries. A name in history lessons when he had been at school. A name where distant relatives of Sandy, whom she had never met, in a past she had been disconnected from, still lived.

The Munich where Adolf Hitler had made his home and been arrested as a young man for attempting a coup. The Munich where, in 1958, half the Manchester United football team had died in a plane crash on a snow-covered runway. The Munich where, in 1972, the Olympic Games were grimly immortalized by Arab terrorists who massacred eleven Israeli athletes.

The plane banged down hard and, moments later, he felt the seat belt digging into his stomach as it braked, the engines roaring in reverse thrust. Then it settled down to a gentle taxiing speed. They passed a windsock, the hull of an old, rusting plane with a collapsed undercarriage. There was an announcement on the intercom about passengers with connecting flights. And it felt to Roy Grace that every single one of the butterflies in his stomach was now trying to make its way up his gullet.

The man in the seat next to him, whom he had barely noticed, switched on his mobile phone. Grace dug his own out of his cream linen jacket and switched it on too, staring at the display, hoping for a message from Cleo. Around him he heard the beep-beeps of message signals. Suddenly his own phone beeped. His heart leapt. Then fell. It was just a service message from a German telecom company.

During the restless night, he had woken several times, and lain fretting about what to wear. Ridiculous, he knew, because in his heart he did not feel he would see Sandy today, even if she really was there, somewhere. But he still wanted to look his best, just in case . . . He wanted to look – and smell – the way she might remember him. There was a Bulgari cologne she used to buy him, and he still had the bottle. He’d sprayed it on this morning, all over himself. Then he’d dressed in a white T-shirt beneath his cream jacket. Lightweight jeans, because he had looked up the temperature in Munich, which was twenty-eight degrees. And comfortable sneakers, because he’d figured he might be doing a lot of walking.

Even so, he was surprised by the cloying, sticky, kerosene-laced heat that enveloped him as he walked down the plane’s gangway and across the tarmac to the waiting bus. Minutes later, without any baggage, shortly after ten fifteen local time, he strode through the comfort of the quiet, air-conditioned customs hall into the arrivals hall, and instantly saw the tall, smiling figure of Marcel Kullen.

Cropped wavy black hair, some flopping loose over his forehead, a wide grin on his genial face, the German detective was dressed in Sunday casuals, a lightweight brown bomber jacket over a yellow polo shirt, baggy jeans and brown leather loafers. He clamped Grace’s outstretched hand firmly with both hands, and said, in his guttural accent, ‘Roy, nearly was not recognizing you. You are looking so young!’

‘You too!’

Grace was so touched by the warmth of the greeting, from a man he had never really known that well. In fact he was so overwhelmed by the emotion of the occasion that he found himself, suddenly and very uncharacteristically, close to tears.

They exchanged pleasantries as they walked through the almost empty building, across the black and white chequerboard tiled floor. Kullen’s English was good, but it was taking Grace time to get used to his accent. They followed a solitary figure pulling an overnight bag on wheels, past the striped awning of a gift shop and back outside into the cloying heat, past a long line of cream taxis, mostly Mercedes. On the short walk to the car park Grace compared the almost suburban calm of this airport to the hurly-burly of Heathrow and Gatwick. It felt like a ghost town.

The German had just had his third child, a boy, and if there was time today, he very much hoped to bring Grace to his home to meet his family, Kullen informed him with a broad grin. Grace, sitting in the cracked leather passenger seat of the man’s ancient but shiny BMW 5-series, told him he would like that a lot. But secretly he had no desire to do that at all. He had not come here to socialize, he wanted to spend every precious minute finding a trail for Sandy.

A welcome current of cool air blew on his face from the asthmatic-sounding air conditioning, as they headed away from the airport, driving through the rural landscape he had scanned from the plane. Grace stared out of the windows, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of it all. And he realized he had not properly thought this through. What on earth could he hope to achieve in just one day?

Road signs flashed past, blue with white lettering. One bore the name of Franz Josef Strauss airport, which they had just left, then on another he read the word München. Kullen continued chatting, mentioning names of the officers he had worked with in Sussex. Almost mechanically, Grace gave him the download on each of them, as best he could, his mind torn between thinking about the murder of Katie Bishop, worrying about his relationship with Cleo and trying to concentrate on the task in front of him today. For some moments his eyes followed a silver and red S-bahn train running parallel with them.

Suddenly Kullen’s voice became more animated. Grace heard the word football. He saw on his right the massive new white stadium, in the shape of a tyre, the words Allianz Arena in large blue letters affixed to it. Then beyond it, high on what looked like a man-made mound, was a solitary white wind-farm pylon with a propeller attached.

‘I show you a little around, give you some feeling for Munich, then we are going to the office and then the Englischer Garten?’ Kullen said.

‘Good plan.’

‘You have made a list?’

‘I have, yes.’

The Lieutenant had suggested that before he came Grace write down a list of all Sandy’s interests, then they could go to places she might have visited in pursuit of them. Grace stared down at his notepad. It was a long list. Books. Jazz. Simply Red. Rod Stewart. Dancing. Food. Antiques. Gardening. Movies, especially anything with Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen and Pierce—

Suddenly his phone was ringing. He pulled it from his pocket and stared down at the display, hoping to see one of Cleo’s numbers.

But the number was withheld.