Free The Dark Meadow by Andrea Maria Schenkel Page A

the young woman back then and wasprobably leading a merry life now, maybe with a wife and child. The man who certainly didn’t have to toil like him day after day; could be he had a good, secure income. While he, Matthias? He’d never really done anything very bad, and yet it was downhill all the way with him. To this lot he was only a knife-grinder, a good-for-nothing, a gypsy, and who bothered to know that he’d usually tried to be honest?
    They just won’t let you get anywhere, he said to himself.
    Still dazed with alcohol, he tried getting up from the chair again. Finally he was standing on both feet, although his legs were still shaky. Slowly and carefully, he felt his way in the dark over to the door. It was bolted. From there he made his way to the bench under the window.
    On many days it would simply have been better to stay in bed in the morning and not get up at all, and yesterday had been one of those days. Everything had gone wrong from the morning onwards, even as he was still on the way from Einhausen to Finsterau. Some bastard had left a board with nails in it lying in the road. He hadn’t seen it and had driven his Lloyd 600 over it. Result, a flat tyre. After he had changed the wheel and looked around him, slowly smoking a cigarette, he had noticed it. He and his car were at the very place in Finsterau where the road forked, andif you took one way you reached the place where the young woman had been murdered not long after the war.
    He opened the window.
    He ought to have turned back there and then. Such places were never good news. It hadn’t been a coincidence: it couldn’t have been.
    She’s still haunting the place, he thought. Out there the poor soul can’t find peace. No wonder I got a flat tyre at that very place yesterday. Oh, Lord God and all the holy sacraments, now my jacket’s caught on something.
    He tried at length to get his jacket free. He pulled and tugged, and as he did so the cigarettes and lighter he’d been looking for fell out onto the windowsill. He picked up both and scrambled through the window frame into the open air, where he lit himself a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply. He had a stale taste in his mouth, and his throat was sore.
    God, he thought, what a thirst I have. Even tobacco tastes bad.
    He flicked the cigarette away, and left.

Theres
    â€˜Johann’s lawyer called the priest. He said I was to tell you it’s urgent, and could you come over here to the telephone? He said he’d ring again in an hour’s time.’
    The priest’s housekeeper was still out of breath as she stood at the door. Theres took off her overall, got her jacket, slipped into the shoes standing ready and hurried over to the presbytery with the housekeeper.
    Over the phone, the defence lawyer told her that they had moved Johann from prison and sent him to the mental hospital. It was better for him that way, said the lawyer. He had been going downhill more and more with every passing day, until finally the doctor in the prison infirmary said he couldn’t be responsible for the outcome if he stayed there any longer.
    â€˜This is a prison, not a madhouse,’ he had said. The infirmary simply was not designed for cases like Johann, which made his stay there unreasonable both for Johann himself and for his fellow prisoners. The doctor had spoken to the public prosecutor and the judge, and all three had already had their doubts about Johann and whether he was right in the head. In all the conversations they’d held with him they hadn’t come a step closer to the actual course of events during the crime. For him personally, as his defence counsel, said the lawyer, that meant that the case had never been easy. After further discussion they had come to the conclusion that no one with all his wits about him could murder his daughter and grandson in such a barbaric manner. And in all the weeks and months that had now passed only a