Not Dead Enough

hedge on their right and trees on their left, then came into a small square, with a cobbled pavement and other ivy-clad houses, and if it weren’t for the left-hand-drive cars and the German writing on the parking signs, it could have been somewhere in England, Grace thought.
    The Kriminalhauptkommisar swung into a parking space and switched off the engine. ‘OK, us start here?’
    Grace nodded, feeling a little helpless. He was not sure exactly where he was on his map, and when the German helpfully pointed a finger, he realized he had been looking in the wrong place entirely. He then pulled out of his pocket the one-page map that Dick Pope had printed from the internet and faxed him, with a circle showing where he and his wife had seen the person they believed was Sandy on their day in this city. He handed it to Marcel Kullen, who studied it for some moments. ‘ Ja , OK, super!’ he said, and opened his door.
    As they walked down the dusty street in the searing morning heat, it was clouding over. Grace, removing his jacket and slinging it over his shoulder, looked around for a bar or a café. Despite the adrenaline pumping, he felt tired and thirsty, and could have done with some water and a caffeine hit. But he realized he didn’t want to waste precious time, he was anxious to get to that place, to that black circle on the fuzzy map.
    To the only positive sighting, in nine years, of the woman he had loved so much.
    His pace getting more urgent with every step, he strode with Kullen towards a large lake. Kullen navigated them across a bridge and left along the path, with the lake and a wooded island on their right and dense woodland to their left. Grace breathed in the sweet scents of grass and leaves, savouring the sudden delicious coolness of the shade and the slight breeze from the water.
    Two cyclists swerved past them, then a young man and a girl, chatting animatedly, on roller blades. Moments later a large French poodle bounded along, with an irate man with a centre parting and tortoiseshell glasses running after it, shouting out, ‘Adini! Adini! Adini!’ He was followed by a very determined-looking Nordic walker in her sixties, wearing bright red Lycra, teeth clenched, walking poles clacking on the tarmac path. Then, rounding a bend, the landscape opened up in front of them.
    Grace saw a huge park, teeming with people, and beyond the island now the lake was far larger than he had at first realized, a good half-mile long and several hundred yards wide. There were dozens of boats out on the water, some of them elegant, wooden, clinker-built rowing boats, and the rest white and blue fibreglass pedalos, and flotillas of ducks.
    People crowded the benches that lined the water’s edge, and there were sunbathing bodies lying everywhere, on every inch of grass, some with iPods plugged into their ears, others with radios, listening to music or perhaps, Grace thought, trying to shut out the incessant shrieks of children.
    And blondes everywhere. Dozens. Hundreds. His eyes moved from face to face, scanning and discarding each one in turn. Two small girls ran across their path, one holding an ice-cream cornet, the other screaming. A mastiff sat on the ground, panting heavily and drooling. Kullen stopped beside a bench on which a man with his shirt completely unbuttoned was reading a book, holding it at an uncomfortable-looking arm’s length as if he had forgotten his glasses, and pointed across the lake.
    Grace saw a sizeable, attractive – if rather twee-looking – pavilion, in a style that might have been interpreted from an English thatched cottage. Crowds of people were seated at the beer-garden tables outside it, and to the left there was a small boathouse and a wooden deck, with just a couple of boats tied up, and one pedalo pulled out of the water and lying on its side.
    Grace suddenly felt his adrenaline surging at the realization of what he was looking at. This was the place! This was where Dick Pope and his wife, Leslie, reckoned they had seen Sandy. They had been out in one of those wooden rowing boats. And had spotted her in the beer garden.
    Forcing the German to quicken his pace, Grace took the lead, striding along the tarmac path that girded the lake, past bench after bench, staring out across the water, scanning every sunbather, every face on every bench, every cyclist, jogger, walker, roller-blader that passed them. A couple of times he saw long, fair hair swinging around a face that reminded