Read Bad Wolf for Free Online

Matern. At seven o’clock, Hanna had had a crisis meeting with the whole team in the conference room. Then she and Jan had met with a female freelance producer who chain-smoked for an hour and a half in a dim, stuffy lounge full of suits in a side street off Goethestrasse and kept making outrageous demands. A total waste of time.
    “Hi, Hanna.” Meike got up from the top step. Two suitcases and a carryall stood by the front door.
    “Why didn’t you call and tell me you were arriving today?”
    “I tried about twenty times,” said Meike reproachfully. “Why’d you turn off your cell?”
    “Oh, there were so many hassles today. I must have turned it off at some point. But you could have called the office.”
    She kissed her daughter on the cheek, prompting a grimace. Then she opened the front door and helped Meike take in the bags.
    Moving from Berlin to Munich seemed to have done Meike good. Since Hanna had last seen her, she’d put on a little weight. Her hair was washed and her style of clothes had normalized a bit. Maybe she was finally about to give up the late-puberty look of a homeless squatter.
    “You’re looking good,” she said.
    “You sure aren’t,” replied Meike with a critical glance. “You’re really looking old.”
    “Thanks for the compliment.”
    Hanna kicked off her shoes and went to the kitchen to get an ice-cold beer from the fridge.
    Her relationship with Meike had always been complicated, and considering this initial exchange, Hanna was no longer sure it had been a good idea to ask her daughter to fill in as a production assistant during her summer vacation. She had never paid any attention to what other people said about her, but Meike’s hostility was causing her more and more concern. On the phone, her daughter had immediately made it clear that she wasn’t taking the job as a favor, but for purely financial reasons. Still, Hanna was looking forward to having Meike stay with her over the summer. She hadn’t yet gotten used to being alone.
    The toilet flushed and Meike reappeared in the kitchen.
    “Are you hungry?” Hanna asked.
    “No. I already ate.”
    Exhausted, Hanna sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, stretched out her legs, and wiggled her aching toes. Hallux rigidus in both her big toes, the price of wearing heels for thirty years. Walking in shoes with heels more than an inch and a half high was becoming more and more of a torment, but she couldn’t resort to wearing tennis shoes.
    “If you want a cold beer, there are a couple of bottles in the fridge.”
    “I’d rather make some green tea. Have you started drinking again?” Meike ran water into the kettle, took a mug out of the cupboard, and looked in drawers until she found the tea. “Maybe that’s why Vinzenz left. How is it that you manage to scare off every guy?”
    Hanna didn’t react to her daughter’s jibes. She was too tired to get into the sort of argument that Meike used to provoke on a daily basis. She knew that the worst of the hostility would taper off after a couple of hours, so she tried to ignore her comments for the time being.
    Meike was a child of divorce. Her father, a notorious smart-ass and nitpicker, had moved out when she was only six. Since then, he had spoiled her on every other weekend and successfully incited her animosity toward her mother. His brainwashing was still working eighteen years later.
    “I liked Vinzenz,” said Meike, crossing her much too skinny arms over her meager breasts. “He was witty.”
    She had been a completely normal kid, but as a teenager she’d put on almost two hundred pounds as a result of overeating because of emotional problems. Then at sixteen, she’d practically stopped eating altogether, and a couple of years ago, her anorexia had landed her in a clinic for eating disorders. At five seven, she had weighed only eighty-six pounds, and for a long time Hanna had been expecting a call telling her that her daughter was dead.
    “I used to like him,