The Lie (30 page)

She thought she was hearing things. Röhrler? He couldn't mean the young man who'd got her last employer to fire her in January. Blasting kept his eyes fixed on her face, waiting for an answer. But before he could pressurize her, Lilo appeared, asking in dulcet tones, “Did I promise too much, darling?”

“Looks like it,” said Blasting. “Röhrler's horrible demise didn't even wring a tired grin from her.”

Lilo gave her an expectant smile. “A hammer blow, isn't it?” She did, indeed, feel something like a little hammer inside her head, felt the blood draining from her brain. She needed a chair, she had to sit down! Of course it was the Röhrler who'd collected the envelopes with undeclared earnings from Herr Schrag. She'd told Nadia about him the first time they'd been for a walk in the woods. Nadia must have tipped off Blasting and now Röhrler had had a fatal accident!

“That miserable wretch,” said Lilo, getting worked up. “Went round like justice personified and was the worst kind of lowlife himself.”

“Well, not quite that bad,” said Blasting, unmoved. “Röhrler was just a courier. He didn't try to rip off the bank, like you.” He grinned at her. “There's one thing I never understood. Why didn't you do a bunk while
the going was good? Hadn't you got enough? Or was it your love for Doc that kept you tied to home-sweet-home?”

She could hardly understand what he was saying. Inside her head was a confusion of whispering voices. Röhrler in Schrag's office asking, “What are you doing here? You've come down in the world and no mistake.” Michael saying, “If you screw up again or make a hash of things with Hardenberg.” Zurkeulen demanding his money back, the whole two hundred thousand. “Do a bunk” echoed round and round in her brain. Then everything suddenly went black. She wasn't even aware that she managed to produce a couple of reasonably comprehensible remarks.

When she woke from her faint, she was lying on a sofa in a strange room. On the wall immediately above her was a milling throng of grotesque faces, one above the other. In the first few seconds she had difficulty sorting out her senses. Her eyes ran over the colourful spectacle on the wall, but at the same time they were in the queue at the bank and on the black limousine parked in the street and at the airport with Nadia scurrying off. Her ears were trying to listen to Röhrler, Zurkeulen, Michael and Wolfgang Blasting all at the same time. And the little hammer had beaten her brain to a pulp. Do a bunk!

A woman was bending over her. She had seen her face earlier in the crowd. She was wearing an Indian sari and holding a phial under her nose which gave off a pungent stench. When she coughed and pushed the hand with the phial to one side, the woman turned to the door and announced, “She's still in the land of the living.”

Lilo came hurrying in, bubbling over with concern and discreet reproaches because her blackout had brought her lovely evening to an abrupt end. It wasn't even twelve and most of the company had already left. Voices and noises from the hall signalled the departure of another group. Placing her hand on the back of her neck, the woman in the sari lifted up her head and poured some herbal infusion with a disgusting aftertaste down her throat. Ilona Blasting appeared in the doorway to tell everyone, “I got him at his brother's. He's on his way.”

This was immediately followed by Joachim Kogler's voice. “What did you think you were doing, tanking her up like that.”

“Now just a minute,” Blasting replied. “I offered her a glass of champagne. She's grown-up enough to say no. Anyway she only took a sip.”

“And you had to drag up the old stories to get her to take a proper swig,” Kogler said.

Listening with interest, the woman in the sari drank the rest of the revolting infusion. Lilo took the cup from her and said, “Thanks, Hannah, you've been a great help. You'd better go and get your coat, your taxi should be arriving any minute.” Hannah left the room, albeit reluctantly. Lilo sat down on the edge of the sofa and stroked her forehead. “How do you feel, darling?”

All that she could feel was a black hole in her brain with the voices echoing in the blackness. “The old stories are back on the agenda,” Ilona Blasting asserted. You heard what she said.”

“You keep out of this,” said Joachim Kogler in a loud voice. “She was completely confused. And we all know who we have to thank for that. Your husband's methods are common knowledge round here.”

“I'd keep quiet if I were you,” Ilona Blasting countered. “Before you know it you could be suspected of conspiracy to—”

“What d'you mean?” Joachim Kogler broke in angrily. “Are you suggesting—”

Ilona Blasting interrupted in her turn. “I'm not suggesting anything, I'm stating facts. As long as you butter her up, you're allowed to have a finger in the pie. Wolfgang's made a few enquiries. The Deko Fund's all window dressing with nothing behind, my dear. And two hundred are—”

Lilo shot up off the couch. “For your information, it was only fifty.”

“That was Maiwald's share,” Ilona countered. “Jo could very well imagine you'd be investing in art again and hang a few more symphonies on your walls. Michael said—”

“Say it's not true, Jo,” Lilo demanded.

Joachim Kogler said nothing of the sort. Instead, he came into the room, asked if she felt better and helped her to sit up. She felt dreadful about being the cause of such a scene. In the hall Wolfgang Blasting said, “Come on, Ilona, we're leaving. Can't you keep your big mouth shut for once? Delightful evening as usual, Lilo.”

Lilo accompanied the Blastings to the door, then came back, her eyes fixed on her husband. Her breast swelled as she took a deep breath, but before she could speak, Joachim said, “We'll talk later. Nadia needs rest.”

“No!” Lilo folded her arms across her breast. “We'll sort this out while she's still here. Whether it was fifty or two hundred's a secondary matter.
What I want to know is where the money came from. I've heard what I've heard. And Michael said she was absolutely determined to buy the house over there. I don't want any nasty surprises.”

“If you say one more word,” Joachim Kogler replied, keeping his voice calm, “that's what you'll get on the spot. What's wrong with her wanting to buy a little house—”

“Little?” Lilo asked. “Michael was talking about several acres and their own beach, Have you any idea what something like that costs in the Bahamas? You can't pay for that out of petty cash.”

“It was only a little beach,” she murmured. “And the house wasn't very big. It was just a beach bungalow, very small and basic.”

“That's OK, Nadia,” Joachim Kogler said gently, helping her up off the sofa.

Jo, she thought. Not Joachim, he hates that. With one arm round her waist, he led her to the door, across the hall and out to Nadia's front door. The tingling of the cold night air was like a thousand needles on her face. She could still feel the weakness in her knees and the thump thump of the little hammer behind her forehead. Do a bunk! As Jo unlocked the door for her, she murmured, “What do I do now?”

“First of all have a good sleep,” he advised her in fatherly tones. “Give me a quick ring when you wake and I'll come and we can talk. Don't do anything silly, promise me that.”

She just nodded. He gave her an encouraging smile, put the bunch of keys in her hand and wished her good night.

It was like being in a trance, but she made it to the bathroom and was soon in bed. She heard Nadia make her generous offer, two thousand a month, a nice apartment, a great job with Hardenberg - and heard her own hysterical laughter. The next moment she was asleep.

 

It was daylight when she woke. Nadia's watch showed a few minutes to nine. She felt nauseous and dizzy. She staggered into the bathroom and then to the telephone in the study. Dialling 01 gave her the Alfo Investment answerphone together with a display of the complete number. 02 had two zeros in the prefix. A woman, oldish from her voice, answered, “We?” At least that's what it sounded like to her. Automatically she said, “Good morning. Excuse me for troubling you, but I urgently need to speak to Nadia—”

Hardly had she said the name than the woman launched into a long complaint - in French. She quickly rang off. 03 was the lab. 04 produced a number with the Munich prefix, as did 05. In both cases she replaced the receiver before anyone could answer.

At the sixth number the response was an answerphone with the same female voice as on the taped message for Alfo Investment. Helga Barthel. This time she just gave the number on the display and said, “We are unavailable at the moment, please—”

It was a quarter past nine, perhaps too early for a Sunday morning. She was about to ring off when the recorded message was interrupted with a distraught, “Philip?”

“Hi, Helga,” she said, ready to hang up if anything awkward should crop up. “It's me, Nadia.”

Immediately the words poured forth in relief. “Thank God for that! Why didn't you ring sooner? Why didn't you say anything on Thursday? Then it wouldn't have happened.” Before she could ask what had happened, Helga Barthel apologized that through her ignorance Michael had been told about Geneva, going on to complain that no one ever told her what was really going on.

“That's OK,” she said to stem the flow of words.

Helga Barthel calmed down a little. “Are you at home? Can you come over?”

“Unfortunately not,” she said, “I'm still in Geneva. There's a small problem and I urgently need to ask Philip—”

“He said he had to go to Berlin,” Helga Barthel broke in, before she could put her foot in it by saying something about the laptop malfunctioning and having forgotten Philip's home number which, as became clear from the further course of the conversation, would immediately have been recognized as wrong. When Helga went on, it became clear that it was Hardenberg's home number she'd called and that Helga and Philip, though not married, lived together. And Helga was terrified something might have happened to him.

From one moment to the next Helga sounded as if she was close to tears as she told her how Philip had taken her to her sister's on Friday because, he claimed, he had to fly to Berlin that evening. “I was supposed to spend the whole weekend there, but I'd forgotten my pills, so I took a taxi home, just before eleven. He was in the bath, white as a sheet. He'd
been sick, had a cut on his face and bruised ribs. His story was that he'd had a fall at the airport and missed his flight.”

“Which you didn't believe.”

“No,” Helga wailed. “There's trouble with Zurkeulen. Did the guy lose more than his investment in Joko Electronics? When he turned up here on Wednesday he said something about Lasko. That was all I heard. Is that the furniture company you checked before you went on holiday? They haven't gone bust, have they?”

“No,” she said, shuddering at the memory of Zurkeulen's tight grip and his companion's lascivious grin. “I don't know what you heard on Wednesday, but Zurkeulen has nothing to do with Lasko. And anyway, I've sorted things out with him.”

“I thought you were in Geneva,” Helga said, uncomprehending.

“Yes. Zurkeulen's here too.”

“Don't lie to me, Nadia,” Helga wailed. “He was here, knocking at the door yesterday, together with the funny guy that always drives him. I didn't let them in, it was already past eleven and I was alone in the house. Philip left yesterday morning. He told me to go and stay with my sister but I refuse to be kept out of the way when there's something up.”

“Yesterday was Saturday,” she said. “It was Friday we were talking about. That was when I met Zurkeulen. He didn't say he was flying back.”

“And why were you going on at each other like that on Thursday?” Helga wanted to know. “It was only that stupid laptop you were arguing about.”

What Helga had said so far had done nothing to dispel her own fears. And the information she managed to elicit by means of carefully uncompleted sentences, soothing words and a stern “Now calm down and tell me things as they happened” made sense - highly alarming sense.

She learned that there must have been a violent argument between Nadia and Philip Hardenberg on Thursday afternoon. Helga hadn't really heard what it was about. Philip had clearly fobbed her off with prevarications and she would have liked her to tell her the real reason.

She also picked up that Philip had been doing anything but renting a spacious apartment for a mother-to-be at Behringer's on Thursday afternoon. Behringer had insured a few properties through Alfo Investment and had summoned Philip regarding a claim for damages.

She also learned that Philip had reacted in a very odd way when he'd returned from Düsseldorf on Thursday evening and Helga had told him Nadia had come back to the office to collect the laptop. When he heard that, Philip had rung Nadia. He'd sent Helga out of the room on some pretext but naturally she'd listened at the door and gathered that it was to do with Zurkeulen and that furniture firm - Lasko - which was clearly not in as good shape as Nadia had maintained.

Helga, suppressing the tears, begged her, “Nadia, tell me honestly, is there something fishy going on? Did you talk Zurkeulen into taking some dodgy shares? And it's Philip who has to face the music? I'm pretty sure it was Zurkeulen's thug who beat him up on Friday evening. And where is he now? I keep ringing him on his mobile but he doesn't answer.”

“Don't let that worry you,” she said, “those things are rubbish. Mine's given up the ghost too. He'll be in Berlin, like he said. Do you know when he's due back?”