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Chapter One
If anyone were to ask me, “What is the root of all evil?” I would say not “Money” but “Food.” It was food—specifically the lack of it—that killed my sister, or at least assisted at the death. And the old man that day in the orchard in Niederburgheim was the only person I have ever seen who died of eating an apple.
He was lying in the long grass, and all we could see of him at first was a checked shirt and the worn knee of a pair of blue overalls. We all thought he was asleep.
“Just nip out of the car and ask that man in the grass,” said Tuesday.
“I think he’s asleep,” I said doubtfully.
“I’m sure he won’t mind,” she replied in a severe voice. “And shut the door when you get out, will you? It’s windy and I don’t want my hair—”
I slammed the car door, cutting her off in mid-sentence, and waded through the tall grass. It was the end of a long, hot summer and the grass was dry and brittle, with a pleasant smell like hay.
“Entschuldigen Sie bitte?” I called, peering at the recumbent figure.
There was no reply. I could almost feel Tuesday’s impatient gaze pecking at my back.
“Entschuldigen Sie bitte?” I repeated, more loudly.
For a moment I thought I saw movement, but it was only the wind ruffling the grass. A fat bumblebee buzzed past close to my face and instinctively I put up a hand to ward it off. I took a step closer to the supine figure in the grass. He was a very sound sleeper, whoever he was; perhaps he’d had too much beer with his lunch. I could see part of that lunch lying close to his outstretched hand—a large, rosy-looking apple with a bite mark standing out palely against its reddish skin. I took another step closer.
Behind me, the car door opened. “What are you doing?” called Tuesday crossly.
I didn’t reply. I was standing there with the dry ends of the grass pricking my bare legs and the breeze lifting the ends of my dark hair, my mouth dry and my eyes round with shock. I was looking at the corpse at my feet. At the corpse. Gray-blue eyes iced over with Death’s cataracts, blindly staring at the summer sky. Mouth gaping open, although its owner clearly had nothing to say, ever again. And at the side of the close-cropped head, a dent, an obscene crater in the smooth curve of the skull. Red on the stalks of the yellow grass. Blood. I was nearly standing in it.
There was a clunk as the car door closed again, and I heard Tuesday picking her way toward me, cursing to herself. Vegetation crunched under her feet. As she came up behind me I heard her draw breath to speak and then suddenly hold it. A hand clutched my shoulder; Tuesday was hanging on to me, her other hand clamped over her mouth.
“Oh, my God,” she squeaked out eventually. “Is he dead?”
My throat seemed to have constricted; I tried to speak but no words came. Instead I nodded.
“Should we take his pulse or something?” said Tuesday in a choked voice.
“I don’t think there’s much point,” I managed to say.
I looked again at the red on the grass, and then down at my bare toes in their sandals. I took a step backwards, Tuesday staggering back with me. Her nails were digging into my shoulder.
“What do we do?” she croaked.
“Get Dad,” I suggested.
I resisted the temptation to push her off; the nails were hurting. I felt oddly numb looking down at the body. It didn’t seem real, more like some sort of strange tableau, an illustration for an accident-prevention poster. An apple tree with a wooden crate sitting underneath it. A ladder pushed up against the tree trunk. The scarlet apple with the scalloped bite mark on it. And sprawled in the grass, the body. Already my imagination was making patterns out of the scene. The old man—he looked ancient, about ninety to me—had been picking apples. Maybe he’d forgotten that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He’d clambered up the ladder and started work, reaching up among the leafy branches to twist the apples off their twigs. Then he’d seen that red apple—the one now lying on the ground—and hadn’t been able to resist. He’d plucked it, taken one bite, and then—either because he had only one hand free or because he was savoring the apple too much to look what he was doing—he had overbalanced and fallen off the ladder. Thump. Straight onto the hard earth. One clumsy dive onto a log or an unforgiving stone: lights out. So much for the benefits of healthy eating.
Tuesday let go of my shoulder and staggered back toward the car. My father had opened his own door by now and was shouting something to her. I watched her veer from side to side, as though she had had one too many cocktails. She put up a hand as if trying to ward him off. I hoped she’d have the good sense to tell him to make Polly and Ru stay in the car.
I glanced back at the man lying in the grass. Again that feeling of unreality swept over me. It seemed so incongruous, him lying there stone dead with the apple just a few centimetres from his outstretched hand, as though he might suddenly sit up and take another bite. My gaze slid reluctantly back to that terrible dent in the side of his head. I thought of the force required to crack someone’s skull like that, and for a moment I feared I would throw up my service-station sandwiches. I turned my head away, and as I did so something caught the light and winked brightly at the edge of my vision.
In spite of my rising nausea, I couldn’t resist taking another look. At first I saw nothing at all, but then the breeze stirred the lower branches of the apple tree, and with the shifting of shadow and light I saw something flash again in the grass. For a moment I did not understand what I was seeing, but then I realized it was glass—all around the lifeless body of the man, the earth was sparkling with broken glass. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time, and anyway my mind was full with the enormity of seeing a dead person lying there in front of me. It was only later, when I remembered the tale of Bonschariant—the Glass Demon—that I began to wonder.
Chapter Two
I was still standing at the same spot, watching the shards of glass winking in the sunlight, when my father came up beside me.
“Did you touch anything?” was the first thing he asked.
I shook my head, shuddering at the thought of touching those lifeless hands or, worse, that battered head. You’ve got to be joking.
“Let’s go, then.”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“Get in the car, Lin.”
He had already turned and was starting to walk away.
I glanced at the figure on the ground once more before half-running after my father. “Dad? Are we going to find a police station, then?”
“No.”
I stopped short. “But we have to.”
He paused and shot me an uncompromising look. “No, we don’t.”
“But—there’s a dead body.”
“I know there’s a dead body.”
“Don’t we have to report it or something?”
“Someone has to report it. But it isn’t going to be us.”
“But, Dad—”
“Look, Lin,” said my father grimly, “we didn’t kill the old boy, did we? He probably just fell off his ladder, had a heart attack or something. There’s nothing we can do for him, otherwise of course we would go for help. But he’s dead, and if we get involved we’re going to be spending hours, maybe days, in some German police station. So just come and get in the car, will you?”
“What if it wasn’t an accident?” I blurted out.
My father stared at me. “Of course it was an accident. What else could it be? Someone’s hardly going to come and mug an old man when he’s halfway up a tree picking apples, are they? Now, get in the car.”
As we reached the car he opened the rear door and held it for me. “Come on, move. I want to get away from here.”
Reluctantly I climbed in.
“That was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Tuesday was saying. She was huddled in the front seat with a tissue clamped to her nose.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to that old man too, I thought as the car pulled away from the roadside with a screech of tires. I twisted round to look through the back window, trying to catch a glimpse of the figure in the grass by the tree, but we were already too far away for me to make out the blue-clad knee or the checked shirt.
I slumped back in my seat. I tried to work out how I felt about what we had just seen and done. I had just seen a dead person—a corpse. I had been close enough that I could have touched it. Him, I reminded myself. Him, not it. I still felt strangely detached. Perhaps a reaction would come later. Or perhaps, I thought, listening to the sobs from the front seat, Tuesday was having the hysterics for both of us.
Neither she nor my father had noticed the glass lying glittering around the old man’s body like some unearthly and unseasonal frost. After a while I put it from my mind too, believing—wrongly, as it turned out—that it had nothing to do with us at all.
