Free Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel Page B

cyclist, I’ve told myself.
    I’d have put her age at about twenty, twenty-five at the most. That’s why I call her a girl. Can’t describe her any closer than that, though. I’ve only seen her late in the evening, and only from behind. But I’ve recognized her straight off by her cardigan.
    It’s some dark colour, I think either black or blue. Yes, I guess it would be dark blue. A dark blue woollen cardigan. The traditional kind.
    On the Tuesday, well, I was going the same way as usual and I saw the girl again.
    It was on the same stretch of road. Just after Germering and just before the road joins the state highway. I knew her at once. From her cardigan. This time it was on her carrier.
    I couldn’t see her face. Although I tried. She put her hand up to the side of her face in case the headlights dazzled her. Though I’d dimmed them on purpose, but the headlights on my truck are strong. I was thinking: there she is again. Always the same time of day. You really could set your watch by her.
    And she was cycling on her own too.
    Then I passed her quite fast.
    About a hundred metres in front of the girl on the bike, so that’d be a little closer to Germering, I did see someone else that day. On the left-hand side of the road, looking at it from the way I was going, there was a man standing behind a tree in the wood. His bike was lying in the ditch. I could see it lying there clearly in my headlights. I sit quite high up in my cab, so you have a good view. And the headlights show everything good and clear.
    When the beam of my headlights caught the man I’d have been about ten metres away from him. All of a sudden he moved away from the tree, the way I was coming from. As if he was looking out for someone. Looking exactly the way the girl on the bike was coming.
    I said to myself: seems like he’s on the look-out for someone. At least, that’s the way it looked to me. Or as if he was watching someone but didn’t want to be spotted himself.
    I wondered if he was waiting for the girl.
    I passed him too fast to be able to describe him more closely. He wore a flat cap, I’m sure of that, though. Can’t say what else he was wearing. I drove past him at quite high speed. If I was to say howtall he was, well, I’d be guessing at that too. He was standing a little way back behind that tree, easy to get it wrong. And when he peered out like that from behind the tree he was bending his knees too.
    Soon after that I turned on to the state highway, and by the time I was on Landsbergerstrasse I’d forgotten the whole thing, it’s only just come back to my mind now you ask me about it.
    This Tuesday evening had been a quiet one for Amalia Ferch, waitress at the Lochhausen station restaurant. It was usually quiet on Tuesdays, as she will tell the police officer later. People have to be at work next day, so there’s only the regulars in the restaurant. They were sitting at their usual table, same as always. Mostly the better-off locals. They’d been playing cards, the game of ‘Sheep’s Head’, as they almost always did too. The fifty-pfennig, ten-pfennig and five-pfennig coins, no single pfennig pieces, were lying in the little saucers beside the beer-mats. They met for an evening drink most evenings, argued about politics, the Party, God knows what else. Or else they just met to play ‘Sheep’s Head’ and the other Bavarian card game called ‘Watten.’
    It was different on a Friday evening, the company was usually more mixed then. The workers had been paid their wages and were mingling with the other guests and thecard-players. Usually at separate tables, and the stakes were a little lower too. During the week many of them couldn’t afford more than a tankard of beer from the off-licence stall. They’d send their children for it. ‘And make sure you get good measure. Dad’s tired from his work today.’
    At weekends the customers changed again. That was when the people on outings from nearby Munich came. Many