The Strawberry Picker Somewhere in Northern Germany a serial killer is on the loose. Anthea Bell translates an extract from Der Erdbeerpflücker, a gripping crossover thriller by German novelist Monika Feth. The dead girl lay in the undergrowth, naked. She was on her back. Her arms hung down beside her body. Her right leg was bent at a slight angle, her left leg was stretched out. Her hair had been cut off. One loose strand still lay on her shoulder, others had blown away and were wrapped around the stalks of plants or caught on the rough bark of trees. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the sky. As if, at the moment of death, her principal emotion had been surprise. Some children had found her. A boy and a girl, brother and sister, the boy ten years old, the girl nine. Their parents had forbidden them to play in the wood. They played there all the same, and had been terribly punished with a sight they would never in their lives forget. They ran away screaming. They stumbled, still screaming, over meadows and pastures, clambered over fences, crawled under barbed wire. As they were taking a short cut through the brickworks yard, one of the workers stopped them. He listened to what they told him, sobbing and weeping, called the police, and took the children to the police station, where the secretary made them cocoa and rang their mother. The corpse turned out to be an eighteen-year-old girl. She had been raped. Seven stab wounds were found on her body. The first of them, straight into her heart, had killed her. The murder victim came from Hohenkirchen, near Eckersheim. She was still at school and lived with her parents. One of the police officers who had been at the crime scene was able to identify her. He knew her parents and volunteered to break the news to them. Her mother collapsed at the door. The woman’s husband led her to the living-room sofa and put a blanket over her legs. Then he clapped the policeman on the shoulder and offered him a schnapps. People can act that way when they’re in shock. They do the strangest things. Once the police officer had met a woman who, on hearing that her husband had died in an accident, went into the kitchen, ladled cold chicken soup into a plate and ate it greedily, as if she hadn’t had a good meal for ages. The girl’s name was Simone. Simone Redleff. The whole village went to her funeral. It was the biggest funeral anyone had ever seen in Hohenkirchen. The whole of her school year came. The girls had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths, the boys surreptitiously wiped tears away with the backs of their hands. They were all still in shock. Death had come too suddenly, out of the blue. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was its terrible, unsparing violence. You often heard of such dreadful things, but at a distance. If such violence could happen to someone they knew, the mourners seemed to be thinking, where would they be safe themselves? In the crematorium chapel they played pop songs chosen by a friend of the dead girl. The tunes filled the room with a sense of desperate sadness, among all the flickering candles and the flowers smelling of death. Outside, the sun shone down as if nothing had happened. But nothing would ever be the same again. * The murder of 18-year-old Simone Redleff, as Detective Superintendent Bert Melzig of the Bröhl CID said at the press conference, has many features in common with the murders of two young girls a year ago in the north German towns of Jever and Aurich. Neither case has yet been solved. Melzig would not give any detailed information while police inquiries are still in progress. * He was worn out, but nonetheless he didn’t sleep long. He liked the half-dreams that came into his mind between sleep and waking, but he hated and feared them too. At the moment he feared them. He tried desperately to think of something else. He couldn’t do it. The images kept coming back like boomerangs. He still felt the excitement. No other emotion was anything like as strong. Oh, girl, he thought, why did you let me down? Because on closer inspection she hadn’t been a fairy at all, not even really pretty. Her voice had sounded squeaky with fear, like a bird’s. It had infuriated him. He hated shrill voices. You could hear the fear in them. He hated the sweat of fear too. Her hands had been all slippery. Not that he really believed in fairies. He wasn’t a child any more. And a fairy would have been more powerful than he wanted. She had to be like a fairy. Like the fairy in the story-book he had as a child. Slender. With soft, shining hair. Beautiful. Big eyes. Long lashes. You didn’t see details at a distance. You saw them only when you were just half a metre away from each other. And by then it was usually too late. He kept finding something that took him by surprise, something he wasn’t prepared for. Even a mole in the wrong place could destroy the image. The girl in Jever had smelled of tobacco smoke. She’d even offered him a cigarette! She’d smiled flirtatiously, she put her head back and blew smoke in the air, never guessing that she’d already signed her death warrant. Groaning, he turned over on his other side. He was glad he’d taken a room in this little pub and wasn’t staying at the farm with the others. The room was small and ugly, and instead of a bathroom it had a shower cubicle so small he could hardly move in it. It was right under the roof and hot from the sun in the evening. The window looked out on the chimney next door. But the rent was within his budget and he didn’t have to give up his freedom. Above all, he could dream safely. His dreams were not the sort you could have in a dormitory. It was difficult to hide the uneasiness that often made him wake suddenly, drenched in sweat. And he couldn’t risk talking in his sleep. No, it was better here. Almost perfect. If only he could drop off to sleep. He needed his sleep to get through the days. To maintain his façade. Of course the cops had been snooping around, asking the strawberry pickers questions. And they’d be back. As soon as they had some definite clue. He turned on his back and linked his hands behind his head. But they wouldn’t find anything. They wouldn’t get him. They’d never done it yet. He smiled in the darkness. Soon afterwards, he was asleep.

Monika Feth was born in Hagen in 1951. She is a highly successful children’s writer and four of her books have been filmed. Her 2003 novel Der Erdbeerpflücker (C. Bertelsmann Jugendbuch Verlag) is a thrilling read for both teenagers and adults. English sample reproduced by kind permission of Transworld Publishers Ltd., London.