Blood Relative Read Free Page A

giant pan into three white bowls. ‘ Viel von Nudeln für jeder ,’ she said in a cheery, almost singsong, voice: plenty of pasta for everyone. And then, more to herself, ‘ Die Männer haben Hunger. Sie müssen genug haben, zum zu essen ’: the men will be hungry, they must have enough to eat.
    Her bloodied fingers had left red smears on the white china crockery and the aluminium pan. I had a terrible vision of blood in the cooking water, like squid-ink, and as the pasta came out of the water I half-expected it to be pink. Mariana was working like an automaton, oblivious to the fact that the bowls were piled to overflowing and that the pasta spoon she was dipping into the pan was coming up with nothing but water.
    I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to feel. Grief for Andy and anger at his death; fear and concern for Mariana, mixed with love, a kind of pity and an instinctive desire to protect her; above all a total bafflement at what was confronting me. All those emotions swirled inside me, colliding and cancelling one another out until all I was left with was numbness.
    Mariana’s mood suddenly changed. Her head darted from side to side. She was obviously looking for something. ‘Wo setzte ich der carbonara Soße?’ She was wondering what she’d done with the carbonara sauce. The hob had nothing on it apart from the pan that had held the pasta. For a second, I too looked about me for the sauce, as though it could be magicked into being, that normality could somehow be restored.
    That was when I saw the knife.
    Mariana had bought a set of Japanese chef’s knives: the Ryusen Blazen series. They featured a core of powdered tool steel, sandwiched between two layers of soft stainless steel, with cutting edges honed to the thinness of a razor blade. The biggest knife in the set had a wide blade 240 millimetres long, which tapered to a point sharp enough to draw blood if you so much as rested a finger against it. It was called a Western Deba. It was lying just the far side of the three white bowls, and the last drops of stringy, semi-coagulated blood were still falling from its blade to the pure white of the Poggenpohl work surface.
    Finally, I found my voice.
    ‘What the hell are you doing?’
    ‘What it looks like. I serve the meal.’
    Finally, Mariana had spoken English, but her accent was still more Germanic than usual. She sounded like a different person.
    ‘But Andy’s dead!’
    She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
    ‘Sorry? I don’t understand. Your brother is now not coming to supper?’

3
     
    I dialled 999. When the woman on the other end of the line asked me which service I wanted, my mind seemed to scramble. ‘I don’t know,’ I blurted. ‘Someone’s dead at my house. He’s been stabbed. Somebody killed him.’
    She took my name and address and told me to stay where I was: ‘The police and an ambulance will be with you soon.’
    When she mentioned the police I thought of all the thrillers I’d read, the TV cop shows I’d seen: detectives always suspected the family first. What if they thought we’d done it? Somewhere inside I must have known that Mariana was the only possible suspect, but I was a long way from admitting that to myself or anyone else just yet. I speed-dialled my lawyer, Jamie Monkton. He handled all the practice’s contractual work. Jamie wasn’t the kind of lawyer who hung around a lot of police stations. But he was the only one I knew.
    ‘I need your advice,’ I said.
    ‘No worries,’ he replied. ‘Give me a call in the morning. Can’t talk right now, I’m afraid. We’ve got people over for dinner.’
    ‘No, this is an emergency. My brother Andrew is dead.’
    ‘Oh shit, I’m so sorry. When?’
    ‘Tonight, at the house. He’s lying on the living-room floor. There’s an ambulance on the way. They’ve probably notified the police, too.’
    ‘My God, what happened?’
    ‘He was stabbed. He was lying there when I got home.’
    ‘Stabbed? Jesus