Abel nodded. “Hair-cutting day. I’m wondering what will happen when I switch this thing on.”

“Buzz cut,” Anna said.

He nodded again. And then Anna stood up and took the trimmer from his hands and set it aside. “If I promise not to stab and kill you with them, and to stop drinking till I’m done,” she began, “would you give me those scissors? I don’t want you to look like someone you’re not. Ever again.”

“Tell me … where’s that sweatshirt of mine?”

She reached into her backpack, grinning. “Linda washed it. I only realized when it was hanging on the line.”

He shook his head. “Just be careful, Anna Leemann,” he said seriously, “that you don’t try to change me into someone I’m not.” But he gave her the scissors anyway, and she stepped behind the sofa, took the comb, and started pulling it through his hair, like he’d done to Micha’s before. Snow hair, ice hair, was it white in summer, too? She couldn’t remember—she hadn’t looked at him once last summer. He’d been there, at school, but not existing. The sound of the cutting blades made her shiver.

“Magnus asked me to tell you something … from him,” she said. It was just as well he had to keep still now, she thought, because then he also had to listen to her. “My father … We’ve been talking about a few things. Not about everything, not about Sören Marinke, for example. But about the fact that your mother left … and that money isn’t exactly raining down from the sky. I know you don’t want charity. Don’t move, I’m dangerous with these scissors. But he said he’d like to offer you something. He’d lend you the money, and later, when you’ve finished school, when you have a job … you can pay him back. He’d be in no hurry to get the money. You could pay it back, slowly, no matter how long it took. It would be a loan without interest, not like a bank … that would be the advantage …”

Abel didn’t say anything. For a while, there was only the sound of the scissors. Outside, cars were racing by. Anna heard her own breath. She heard the pounding of her heart. Finally, she put scissors and comb on the table. “That’s it. Done. Not a buzz cut but still shorter than before.”

“Thanks,” he said. She followed him into the bathroom and looked into the mirror from behind him. He was smiling. “You should think about becoming a barber. I mean … I know that’s why you’re taking finals. Ha! Look, I’m not sure about your father’s offer. I mean, I don’t know him.”

“No,” Anna said. “Me neither, to be honest. I just know that he likes feeding the birds in our yard and that he loves my mother. That’s all.”

“More than I’ll ever know about my father,” Abel said. “I don’t even know his name. About university … I told you we only have that one account. Well, that’s not quite true. We do have another one. One that was opened a long time ago. For school. I don’t work only so that we have something to live on. I also work to be able to put money into that account, so that, later, everything can be different … for Micha … that’s what matters most, that things will be different for her than from how they’ve been for me. It’s not enough, of course, the money in that account, not yet. I’ll think about your father’s offer. Give me some time.”

“Okay.” She put her arms around him and kept looking into the mirror, looking at the two of them. “Do you have to go out tonight?”

“No.” He looked down at her arms slung around him. She thought he’d remove them, but he didn’t. “The only thing is … I’d like to go out to the beach,” he said. “People say they come back, don’t they?”

“Who?”

“Murderers. They come back to the site of the murder. Now, at night, when nobody else is at the beach … maybe we’ll meet someone there. Maybe not … maybe it’s crazy. Probably it is.”

“It is,” Anna said. “But I’ll go with you. And you know what else we’ll take along? That bottle of wine. If we don’t meet a murderer, we can sit in the snow and drink wine. I feel like doing something stupid tonight.”

The beach lay in the light of a vague half-moon, long and gray. Up in the night sky, clouds chased each other. It was windy and ice-cold. Anna wore one of Abel’s sweaters under her coat. They walked along the beach side by side. Abel had stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his military parka. Anna knew that she wasn’t allowed to touch him now. There were too many unwritten rules. She carried the wine bottle in her backpack. She would try to change these unwritten rules, to rewrite them, to loosen their hold … The police tape, senseless in the night, was singing in the wind like a violin out of tune, a strange, unreal sound. The square separated from the rest of the beach by the tape was like a grave. They stood there for a while, at the rim of the pit that no longer held a body. How long would they leave the tape there? What was it good for now? The snow had long since covered old footprints, and now there were new ones—dozens, hundreds of new ones. Maybe the police were hesitant to remove the tape out of respect, respect for the dead, as if his death would become a fact only when this last reminder of him had vanished—the senseless tape between the senseless metal poles stuck in the sand. The taped-off grave was at the far end of the beach, near the little hut where the university surfing program kept its boards in the summer. One of the two official entrances to the beach was behind it. In the summer, you had to buy a ticket to enter. Right behind the entrance gate, the woods—the Elisenhain—used to begin, its high beech trees towering over the farthest sand dunes. Now there weren’t many beeches left, and instead a tarred driveway led through tidy yards to a new housing development, the one where Gitta lived. The woods had receded and now began behind the development, on the far side of Wolgaster Street.

Anna wondered if the murderer had come from the woods. If he had walked through the neighborhood, past the sterile, modern block in which Gitta lived, past its huge glass windows, past the few trees leftover from former times … if he had walked through the gate in the fence that was open to everyone in winter, had hidden behind the surfers’ hut to wait for his victim … “At night,” she said. “I imagine it happened at night. Or someone would have seen it.”

She let her eyes wander along the beach, and, for a moment, she thought she saw someone at the other end. But there was no one.

She must have been mistaken. And if there was someone lurking behind the surfers’ hut right now, someone with a weapon …? And if someone was waiting in the dark shade under the trees, behind the fence …? If someone was standing near the houses closest to the beach, holding a pair of binoculars, looking their way …? The island of the murderer was empty. He was close, very close. It was as if she could feel his eyes on her.

“Abel,” she whispered. “What are you thinking about?”

He had clenched his fist around the police tape and was staring down into the pit from which they’d pulled Sören Marinke’s body. “I’m wondering if he had children,” Abel said. “Strange. I didn’t think about that before.”

“They didn’t say anything about children on the news. So I think probably not.”

“Or a wife. A girlfriend. Anybody. Anybody who cared about him. I wonder who’s crying for him.” He shook his head. “Let’s go. There’s nobody here. It was a stupid idea to come.”

Black shadows filled their footprints in the beach like puddles, the blackness grabbing their ankles as they walked. At the other entrance, closer to the mouth of the river, Abel took Anna’s hand. Their bicycles stood next to the lonely little ticket counter, but they left them there and walked on, over to the small fishing harbor off the bank of the river. In summer, a few sailing boats were docked near the fishing boats, and it was here that Anna had met Rainer when he’d lured Micha onto a boat that wasn’t his. Now there were only a few stray cats tiptoeing along the docks; maybe some of them were blind. Where the wind had cleared the dark ice of snow, the half-moonlight was reflected in the frozen river.