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Back The One from the Other Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

The two cops put away their guns and led me into a tiled bathroom. It had been built at a time when a bathroom was not a bathroom unless a football team could bathe in it. As it happened, there was only one woman in the bath. Except for the one nylon stocking she was wearing, she was naked. The nylon stocking was knotted around her neck. It wasn’t the kind of knot that would have detained Alexander the Great for very long, but it was effective enough. The woman was dead. She had been strangled. Beyond the fact that I had never seen her before it was impossible to say more because the smell didn’t encourage delay. Both the body and the water it was lying in were a slimy shade of poisonous green. And there were flies. Curious the way there are always flies on bodies, even when it’s very cold.

“Good grief,” I said, reeling from the bathroom like a man who hadn’t seen a cadaver since medical school, instead of less than half an hour earlier. And it was my hand I put up to my nose this time. For the moment the kickers were safely in my pocket. The effect the smell had on me was real enough. I went straight back to the open window and leaned into some fresh air. But it was just as well the stench left me gagging for a moment or two. Otherwise I might have said something stupid about how the body in the bathroom wasn’t Britta Warzok. And that would have spoiled everything, in view of what the cop in the hat now said:

“Sorry to let you have it like that,” he said, following me to the window. It was now plain to see that it had been the two cops who had opened it. “It was a bit of a shock for me, too. Frau Warzok used to give me piano lessons, when I was a kid.” He pointed to a piano behind the door. “We’d only just found her ourselves when you came in. The neighbor downstairs reported the smell and the mail stacked up in her box.”

“How do you know her?” asked the other cop. He was eyeing the holdall I had arrived with, and was probably wondering what was in it.

I was inventing my story even as I told it to him, trying to fix a plausible chain of causation in my head. The body in the bath had the look of a body that had been in the water for not quite a week. That would be my approximate start point.