Secrets on Bali Beach E-Book

Stefani Kang

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Ellen Miebach interferes
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 141

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Translation of the original version: Spuren am Bali Strand. Content: Ellen Miebach, a German hippie dropout living in Bali, is involved in a murder case by chance. Her sense of justice, coupled with a dose of daring energy, drives her determined to clear up the case. With the help of her boyfriend, she can ultimately not only find the murderer, but also experience the fascination of the Argentine tango. Volume 1 from the series: Ellen Miebach interferes.

Leseprobe

Stefani Kang

Secrets on Bali Beach

Bali Crime Story

© 2020 Stefani Kang

Verlag und Druck:tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg

ISBN

Paperback:

978-3-347-18206-6

Hardcover:

978-3-347-18207-3

e-Book:

978-3-347-18208-0

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages und des Autors unzulässig. Dies gilt insbesondere für die elektronische oder sonstige Vervielfältigung, Übersetzung, Verbreitung und öffentliche Zugänglichmachung.

1 Hopeful feelings

2 The warong on the beach

3 Silver jewellery in Celuk

4 The Bali house

5 The statement

6 On the track

7 Clear thoughts

8 The mobile phone

9 Bonnie and Clyde

10 Reality

11 A hot lead

12 The husband

13 The girlfriend

14 Marlene

15 Investigations

16 Proof is found

17 A clever strategy

18 The autopsy report

19 A detective is required

20 The leave taking

21 On Balangan Beach

22 Sabrina Veron

23 Arrival in Buenos Aires

24 Sabrina’s secret

25 Farewell to Buenos Aires

26 The journey home

27 Single-handed action

28 The solution

29 The farewell meal

30 Dream or reality?

1 Hopeful feelings

The lukewarm water of the Indian Ocean laps gently around her feet. She holds her flip-flops in her left hand while with her right she brushes a windblown strand of hair out of her face. A wonderful feeling of liberation flows through her body. She feels strong and self-confident. The walk on Berawa Beach has really done her good. Out here it’s a little quieter. There are only a few tourists out and about to enjoy the natural spectacle that is to be seen every evening. Sunset on the west coast of Bali is simply fascinating.

It is late afternoon, only a few minutes to go. She takes a deep breath. Now she knows what she has to do. It is all perfectly clear. She feels a pleasant tingling in her stomach, a feeling like being newly in love. But she isn’t. She is just happy in anticipation of what is to come.

She watches the waves breaking gently on the beach while some deeply tanned Balinese youths laugh and dance on the worn-out surfboards given to them by tourists. A few old hippies are walking their dogs, and here and there a Balinese fisherman casts his rod.

She walks and walks as if driven on by some mysterious force, and doesn’t notice how far away she has got from the general hustle and bustle. She walks as if in a trance. Her legs seem to move of their own accord. She feels no strain, no fatigue. She could go on walking for hours, but she knows that it will get dark very suddenly as soon as the orange-coloured disc on the horizon sets.

The sky is already dark red when suddenly she feels a dull thud on her head, and she falls to the ground. In her pain she just catches a glimpse of the brownish batik pattern of a sarong before she loses consciousness.

2 The warong on the beach

Ellen sits in her favourite restaurant on Batubelig Beach. She has just decided to order a seafood dish and is looking out to sea in hungry expectation, as she often does. Under the thatched roof a splendid sun is slowly sinking. The reddish orange is just merging into purplish grey.

A lot of people from many different countries are out walking in both directions. Japanese women are easy to spot at first sight. They usually wear slouch hats and are well covered up for fear of the sun. And they do have a fantastic skin.

Ellen comes from Hamburg. She has been living on Bali for some time, and in the 20 years she has built up a small business. She sells Balinese silver jewellery at Christmas markets, and she also supplies some wholesalers. Business is quite good and affords her a comfortable life. During the busy months she is in Germany. The rest of the time she spends on Bali, her island in the sun.

A lot of Europeans do the same as Ellen, people from Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland and Russia, but also Japanese and Australians. They come from all parts of the world to live here. For life on Bali is so much more relaxed and offers a better quality of life.

Ellen postpones her order a little, as she has arranged to meet Britta. She doesn’t want to order yet, but she could treat herself to a cool Bintang (an Indonesian brand of beer) while she waits.

It’s 20 past 8 already, and there is still no sign of Britta. This doesn’t strike Ellen as being at all odd, for punctuality doesn’t count for much here. Jam karet, as the Balinese say, literally “rubber time”, and in this respect all the foreigners have adapted admirably.

But she does now decide to order. A good thing, too, as it turns out, because her acquaintance won’t turn up. This doesn’t worry Ellen much. She met Britta only yesterday, quite by chance on Balagan Beach, and they spent the whole day together. They took to each other immediately, and exchanged a lot of information about themselves, much of it private.

“Hallo!” she exclaims suddenly when she recognizes an old acquaintance, “Are you still around? They sit down together and start gossiping. The evening passes quickly, and the rendezvous with Britta is soon forgotten.

The warong on the beach

A Bintang at sunset

3 Silver jewellery in Celuk

Ellen is sitting in the silver factory sorting her range of goods. This is the most important part of her work. She has to check whether her jewellery has turned out as ordered.

It always takes a lot of time, this long trip from Seminyak to Celuk on her scooter. It’s not a pretty route. It follows the outer tangent of the capital Denpasar with its heat, congestion and dirty urban smog.

In Celuk the atmosphere is quite different. No rush, friendly, infectiously cheerful faces everywhere. Well, okay, there is heavy through-traffic on the main street, but all in all Celuk is a cosy handicrafts village, specialising mainly in silverwork, very laid-back, in a word: unhurried. There is a wide range of shops and workshops selling traditional artefacts, jewellery and cult objects, but also a great variety of modern design. The Balinese are gifted artists, but they are also talented businesspeople, that is to say, they are flexible enough to go along with the wishes of their customers. That is the main reason why their businesses have been in existence for many years and have made the town rich.

She jokes with the silversmiths going about their work next door. The dexterous craftsmen sit on the floor manufacturing wondrously filigree pieces of jewellery, always with a heavily sugared coffee beside them and a cigarette in the corner of their mouth.

“It’s getting late, I’m famished”, Ellen thinks, when she finally makes up her mind to go home. She puts on her leather jacket and her helmet, and reaches automatically into her pocket for her mobile for a quick check of her mails.

“Strange that there’s no message from Britta,” she thinks, “I’d have thought that she would have texted me to apologise for not turning up. Well, well!” And off she sets again, back towards Canggu. Travelling along the main road is definitely no walk in the park.

But it is a pleasure to catch a glimpse now and again of the rice fields on both sides of the road, the few that remain here in this densely populated part of the island. It is rush hour the roads are more than usually congested. She interrupts her trip on the Gatsu, where there are so many little food stalls.

She stops directly in front of her sate ayam stall. Here, you get delicious grilled chicken kebabs. Ellen treats herself to a quick belated lunch.

Actually, Ellen has long been a vegetarian, but she sometimes finds the aroma of the peanut sauce together with the grilled chicken kebabs irresistible, especially when her stomach is rumbling.

She sits on the wooden bench and is brought her kebab served on a banana leaf, accompanied by a lime water on ice. The stall owner knows her and says with a smile, “Selamat makan, Miss Ellen.

4 The Bali house

When she reaches her house in Batubelig, Ellen jumps under the shower, if “shower” is the right word. The shower is a white-tiled basin, about 60 cm square and 80cm high. The water in it is at “room temperature”, in other words it’s neither warm nor cold. On the white-tiled wall there hangs a pretty coconut ladle for scooping the water out of the tub and pouring it over your body. The whole thing is called a mandi. This is the traditional Balinese shower.

If you have your shower in the afternoon as the natives do, it’s very refreshing and healthy. But if you have it in the evening when the water is too cool, you get masuk angin, in other words you become ill, says Made (pronounced with the stress on the e), Ellen’s pearl of a housekeeper.

Ellen loves her mandi, which is surrounded by its own little garden. The orchid- and fern-covered natural stone wall screens Ellen from prying eyes and affords her a wonderful view when she is sitting on the toilet.

Ellen’s house is idyllically situated in the rice fields in the middle of a tropical garden, surrounded by palms, hibiscus and banana perennials. A narrow winding gravel pathway leads to the patio of the house. It’s an old house. Ellen leased it many years ago. The house has no modern knickknacks such as the villas in her neighbourhood have nowadays. Material luxury is something Ellen has never missed.

Her living room and the kitchen are contained in an area of about 45 square metres, closed by a wall to the west and south respectively. The other two sides are open, and can only be shut by means of a bamboo blind to be used only when it is raining. A little staircase leads past her bathroom to her bedroom on the wood-beamed upper floor.

The upper floor is her private realm. It has inbuilt glass windows and there is a lockable door. So she feels fairly safe.

The whole house is roofed over with an alang alang roof, a thatched roof. It makes for a pleasant room temperature, making air conditioning unnecessary. The skylights are not glazed. Instead, they are equipped with a carved lattice which keeps unwelcome intruders out while ensuring an adequate cross-ventilation.

This is Ellen’s favourite place to hang out. From here she has quite a nice view over the rice fields. On clear days you can see in the far background the holy mountain Gunung Agung, a spectacular sight.

A long time ago, in the first five years of her time on Bali, she had lived in Legian, in a little losmen room, a guest room within a family complex. As soon as she had the chance to take out a 30-year lease on this pretty little house, she had jumped at the opportunity. At that time, Batubelig was well off the beaten track and thus affordable. It’s different today. Now it’s one of the most popular and most expensive areas in Bali. Other reasons why Ellen moved to Batubelig were its closeness to the beach and the presence of friends in the neighbourhood.

Her living room consists of a decorative oversized bamboo sofa with bluish-green cushions. Thick seat cushions in the same shades are scattered around it, all of them assembled on a filigree rattan mat. A rectangular glass top supported by gigantic carved wooden fruits, a manga, a durian, a manggis and a pineapple, serves as a table. All this is fairly old. She bought the furniture in the Galeri Ikat, an interior design shop dealing in furniture, traditional woven fabrics and all sorts of fine goods.

On the table there stands an outsized earthenware dish with flowers from the garden. Made, her pembantu, her housekeeper, and her husband Wayan, keep the house and the garden in tiptop shape, do the shopping, run messages and see to minor repairs. They are worth their weight in gold. Without them, life on Bali wouldn’t be nearly as idyllic.

Besides Made is Ellen’s constant adviser in manners and etiquette. Made gives her valuable tips on how to behave on Bali. Ellen is grateful to her for this background knowledge, for again and again she sees how foreigners who do not have this information give unintentional offence, which gives rise to tension with the Balinese.

Whereas her house used to be the scene of frequent extravagant parties, that is now much more seldom the case. All her friends have grown undeniably older and the wild hippy times are over. Nowadays they come together more demurely in one or other of the countless eating places.

Her mobile rings and she supposes that it’s the silversmith to tell her that she has forgotten her ledger in Celuk. She glances at the display, but it’s her old friend Dieter, whom she has happened to meet again after a long time. “Hi, Dieter, nice to hear from you. What’s up?”

“Hallo, Ellen. Have you heard? They found a body on the beach this morning. It’s a German woman. A woman with orange hair.”

Ellen turns pale and has to sit down. Her mouth is dry. Slowly she speaks into her mobile:

“Dieter, I think I may know this woman. I met her on Sunday on Balangan Beach. Haven’t you seen her too? Please, let’s meet.”

5 The statement

Less than 10 minutes later, Ellen arrives at her warong. She hangs her helmet on the rear-view mirror as everyone does and enters the little bamboo hut. Dieter is already sitting in it with a cool Bintang in his hand. She is a little nervous. This is not how she had imagined the sunset to be. But that’s how it is.

“Apa khabar Wayan, minta satu Bintang kecil,” she tells the waiter in passing. She sits down at Dieter’s table and places her bag on the empty chair beside her.

“Hi, Dieter,” she breathes, opening her scarf, “Let’s have the details,”

Dieter tells her that he was jogging this morning on the beach when he saw a crowd of people in the distance, about as far away as Eco Beach. Even from this distance he recognized the orange hair. He ran up to the scene in time to witness the attempts to revive the woman, which were however unsuccessful. She was already dead. She was fully clothed, so that it can’t have been a bathing accident. Probably suicide, the police surmised, or heart failure.

“O no, that’s not possible! Suicide? Definitely not. She was so cheerful and full of beans, even if there was the occasional hint of a melancholy smile.”

Ellen distinctly remembers that moment when she watched Britta in silence, those few seconds when Britta’s eyes took on a glassy look while she looked out to sea.

“But she had so many plans! Heart failure? Possible, but unlikely. She was much the same age as us. What should we do now? I shall go to the consulate straight away tomorrow to make a statement. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Okay”, says Dieter, “I’ll come with you.”

“That’s nice of you. I’ll take you up on that. Let’s set off tomorrow at 9 o’clock, okay?”

The next morning Ellen staggers somewhat drowsily downstairs. Her dog Schlingel feels challenged to follow her and overtakes her in the middle of the staircase, upsetting her balance a little. She manages to steady herself, thus narrowly avoiding a fall. Abruptly she’s awake.

“Selamat pagi Made”, she calls.

She hears Made pottering about in the kitchen, and it’s not long before her devoted housekeeper emerges from the kitchen with Bali coffee and a banana pancake complete with honey and lemon.

“Selamat pagi ibu Ellen,” she calls back. “Has ibu Ellen heard that a German woman was found drowned on the beach yesterday?”

“Yes, Made, I’ve heard that, and I’m sure I knew this woman.”

“They say it must have been suicide, for the woman was fully clothed. Tourists don’t go swimming with their clothes on like us,” says Made with conviction in her voice and curiosity in her look.

“Yes, that’s odd. But I didn’t get the impression that this woman had problems. I’m going to the consulate today to make a statement.”

“Why don’t you go straight to the police?” Made blurted out.

“O Made, you know what the police are like. They ask you all sorts of questions until you feel you’re the culprit yourself. I’d rather talk to the consulate. Then they can take the matter up.”

The sound of a motor approaches the driveway. Schlingel bounds barking through the garden.