The Whole Truth

CHAPTER 76

THERE IS NEVER A GOOD DAY to bury someone. Even when the sun is shining and the air is warm, there is nothing whatsoever positive about laying a cold body in the cold earth, particularly someone with three bullet holes that cut her life short by at least four decades. And in Wisbach there was no sun, no warmth. The rain was coming down in sheets and buckets as Shaw and Katie sat in the car at the graveyard that was set next to a small church.

They’d flown into Frankfurt that morning and driven over. Going through airport security in Dublin the alarms had sounded when Shaw had stepped through the metal detector. The wand the security guard ran over him homed in on his left arm.

“Roll up your sleeve, sir,” the guard had ordered, an edge to his voice.

When his gaze hit the row of metal staples revealed under the bandage, he flinched.

“Damn, does that hurt?”

“Only when I roll up my sleeve,” Shaw answered.

At the gravesite the rain had turned the mound of fresh earth next to the six-foot-deep hole into a mud pile. Anna’s coffin and the people here paying their respects were under a large tent set up next to the gravesite to keep them reasonably dry.

Shaw had decided not to join the mourners. He’d spotted Wolfgang Fischer’s lumbering figure, Natascha next to him. Neither looked very tall today. They seemed bent, destroyed. So Shaw just sat in the car. And watched them lower the coffin into the grave. Wolfgang nearly collapsed with grief. It took several men to get him back to the car.

Next to him Katie felt tears slide down her cheeks as she watched. Thank God, she thought, that I don’t have to write death lines about this. She looked at Shaw. His gaze was impassive, his eyes dry.

“It’s so sad,” she said.

Shaw didn’t answer. He just kept watching.

Half an hour later the last person had left and the gravediggers moved in, tempest and all, to plant Anna in the earth of Wisbach for good.

Shaw got out of the car. “You remember what to do?”

She nodded. “Just be careful.”

“You too.”

He shut the door, glanced around, and headed to the hole in the earth, trying not to think about the much bigger one in his heart.

He pulled some euros from his pocket and asked the diggers, in German, to give him some time alone here. No doubt happy to be relieved of their wet duty, they took the money and fled.

Shaw stood next to the grave and looked down at the coffin. He did not want to visualize Anna inside that box. She didn’t belong there. He spoke in quiet tones to her, saying things he should have said while the woman was alive. He had many regrets in his life. The most devastating by far was not being with Anna when she needed him most.

“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry. You deserved a lot better than me.”

He grabbed a shovel and spent the next half hour filling in her grave. He felt it was his task to perform, no one else’s. He was soaked through to the skin by the time he was done, but didn’t seem to notice.

He looked at the headstone. It gave Anna’s full name, Anastasia Brigitte Sabena Fischer. Her dates of birth and death. And the phrase at the bottom in German, “May our beautiful daughter rest in peace.”

“Rest in peace,” Shaw said. “Rest in peace for both of us, Anna. Because I don’t see peace ever coming my way again.”

He knelt down in the mud, his head bowed.

As he did so the two men stepped clear of the trees, guns in hand.

The car horn instantly split the silence of the cemetery and then Katie slid down in her seat.

Startled, the two men ran straight at Shaw.

A split second later the rear glass of the car Katie was in was shattered by a gun blast.