The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

for her arrival. Dr Zellweger evidently felt it best to leave his wife alone with Ellen to break the story and withdrew to his study.

“You must forgive me,” she said. “I could find no ginger biscuits.” (Ellen was touched by the way she always considered every little detail, like the good Swiss hostess she was.) “But try these. They’re a local speciality called Läckerli. Made with honey and spices, à la cannelle.”

Ellen tried one.

“They’re delicious. With cinnamon,” she said, savouring the biscuit with particular relish after the long journey back from Cologne. “I love honey and cinnamon and all those gingerbread spices.”

It was when they were sitting there over tea and Läckerli – as if this was the most natural thing to do when someone’s life had gone haywire – that the story came out. Such as it was.

A man answering Frank’s description, the same man the police had identified earlier as Frank Eigenmann, had apparently been found in the Kolping house. As Dr Zellweger had already intimated, ‘found’ was not quite the right word: although the man had checked into the house, he had since disappeared again; he had not checked out, his things were still in his room, but no one knew where he was. The man had apparently been behaving very strangely, and the concierge at the Kolping house called the police – whether this was because of his strange behaviour or because she was afraid he had done a bunk without paying his rent was not quite clear.

Most worrying of all, when they searched the room, they found things which they had reason to believe were stolen. And it was this latest twist that particularly disturbed Dr Zellweger. Apparently, a man had gained access to the home of a disabled old woman a few days earlier, had entered her bedroom, scared the living daylights out of her and walked off with things that have now turned up in the hotel room.

“Ellen, your husband is in a very unstable condition. And it is important that we find him before he does damage to himself, or to someone else. If there is anything you know which can help us, please tell Urs before it’s too late.” She paused, hopeful for a clue from Ellen. And Ellen sensed that Marthe was waiting for something very particular.

“What can I say?” Ellen asked in desperation. “I’ve already told you our entire history.”

“You know, this Kolping house is located close to what you might call the less wholesome part of town. Is it possible your husband may be taking drugs?”

“That’s absurd. He keeps fit. He plays squash. You don’t do that if you take drugs.”

“Perhaps if we knew why he went to Cologne….”

But Ellen’s thoughts were already moving in a different direction and had long since left Marthe and her husband’s interrogations far behind. Other questions were occupying her mind. The place where Frank was supposed to be staying had caught her imagination. At last something concrete, a physical contact of sorts.

Ellen needed to get inside the place, to see the things he left behind. She was sure that if she could get into that room, she would somehow be able to prove once and for all that it was not her Frank they were talking about. When she suggested this to Dr Zellweger, he took to the idea with a bubbling enthusiasm.

“I’m surprised the police didn’t suggest it themselves,” he said. “Of course, we must get permission from them first, but I’m sure it can be arranged. Naturally they are wanting to speak with you anyway.”

Dr Zellweger managed to get the necessary permission the very next day. So, together with a rather sour-faced policeman who was introduced to Ellen as Kommissar Staehelin and reminded her of Malcolm with his pencil-thin moustache, Dr Zellweger and Marthe took Ellen to the Kolping house to see where Frank was said to have lodged. It lay on the other side of the river. The streets they walked through to get there from the police station had a deeply uncomfortable feel about them. Ellen could not help noticing the used syringes that lay in the gutter, the run-down bars and groups of shady-looking people loitering outside. This was not the Switzerland she had been expecting.

The house itself lay the other side of this less wholesome part of town, close to a church and a square surrounded by large late nineteenth-century townhouses. It was so at odds with the unsavoury streets they had just walked through that Ellen could not help feeling this was a special tour put on especially for her benefit – that they wanted to drive home the message that Frank was probably on drugs. It was an absurd idea. But the seamy streets they had taken her through gave it a plausibility that stuck in Ellen’s mind.

As Kommissar Staehelin explained to the concierge on the desk who they were, the elderly lady became carried away by an increasingly crotchety impatience. She began to lay into him with a barrage of words that were completely incomprehensible to Ellen. But the message was clear enough, as Dr Zellweger confirmed afterwards.

Her huffy outburst, he explained, was the umbrage of a woman worried about who was going to pay the money that was owing to her. Even with Kommissar Staehelin’s presence, they would have been no match for this piqued old dragon had it not been for Marthe. With the winning way that Ellen had come to appreciate in her, she managed to placate the old dear sufficiently to invest her with the human features she was no doubt born with, but which she obviously preferred to suppress for the purposes of her job. And once Marthe had extracted the key from her, the four of them took the stairs up to the second floor.

“You must not think badly about her,” Marthe said defensively, as if she felt the old lady was letting her country down. “She surely has many problems with the drug addicts on the