The Lie (38 page)

“Come here, Pascal,” Andrea called.

“Come here, Pascal,” she whispered. And, hesitantly, he took the last few steps towards her. She lifted him onto her lap, showed him the photo in the paper and asked him what she should do. Going to the police and telling them it was a case of mistaken identity was out of the question. It would simply mean that Zurkeulen and Ramon would be able to read in the next edition that Susanne Lasko was in the best of health. And the logical conclusion of that was that from now on she was three years older and married to a man who wanted a divorce.

Andrea, alerted by Pascal's disappearance, came into the kitchen, leaned over the article and declared, “She looks like you, don't you think?”

“No, not at all,” she replied and turned back to the child in her lap, telling Pascal she was going to have a baby. And this started off a train of thought. Her mother! At first she ignored the fact that Nadia Trenkler could not afford to make contact with Susanne Lasko's mother after her daughter's death. What counted were the tears, the mourning, the
terrible news that must have torn a blind old woman's world apart. She had to do something at once, but she couldn't get up from the chair because of the child in her lap.

Andrea smiled in disbelief and asked, “Really? What are you going to do? Will you sue Wenning?”

“No. Why should I?” She didn't even know who Wenning was.

“What does your husband say about it?”

“I don't know,” she said, feeling she knew nothing at all apart from that one fact: Susanne Lasko was dead, probably as a result of a “talk” with Ramon.

She spent the morning as if in a trance with a barrage of flashlights picking out individual parts of a complex whole for a fraction of a second. Nadia claiming to have replacement documents. Nadia assuring her Philip had no key to her flat. Zurkeulen in the bank and his thoughtful voice in Hardenberg's office. Andrea with a bottle of oven cleaner. The telephone in Frau Schädlich's office, Nadia's fragmentary message. Andrea holding a dress shirt with a spot that hadn't come out. Andrea asking, “And tomorrow?”

“Wednesday, I think,” she said and came to with a start. It was almost two o'clock. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, in front of her a newspaper covered in biscuit crumbs and smeared with chocolate. On the floor Pascal was playing with the cut-up
Frankfurter Allgemeine
and a whisk. Susanne Lasko was dead, Jacques was in Paris, the Chopin on the piano was as complicated as ever. And she couldn't swim either.

“Should I come tomorrow or not?” Andrea asked.

She took a deep breath and came to a decision. “Of course. Come as usual. We're letting the water out of the pool, I think it needs a good scrub.”

Andrea just shrugged her shoulders, took the whisk off Pascal, gathered up the pieces of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
, stuffed them in the waste bin and left. She sat at the table a while longer, staring at the local section of the paper. Her former face could hardly be seen under the smears of chocolate.

One hour later she'd showered, given her complexion a healthy smoothness with the help of a lot of cosmetics and a lot of effort, and blow-dried Nadia's hair to the same perfection as the coiffeur himself.
Every gesture was right, her brain was razor-sharp, well aware that anything that went wrong from now on was her problem alone.

In the dressing room she decided on the trouser suit Nadia had worn when she'd rung Philip Hardenberg from the corner of Kettlerstrasse. To go with it she selected a light-brown pullover and matching slipons. For the first time she also took some of Nadia's jewellery from the leather-bound casket. She chose a double string of pearls, that went marvellously with the pullover, stuck a ring with a large pearl on her left hand and swapped her diamond ear studs for dangling pearls. Then she went to the study and made an appointment as Nadia Trenkler.

The inn she'd proposed for the rendezvous was an isolated building on her Sunday route. Every time she'd driven past with Johannes Herzog, she'd noticed the board by the door on which some dishes were written in chalk. From the car she'd never been able to read them. When she walked up to the board one hour later, she regretted her proposal.

On the deserted gravel parking lot beside the building the Alfa stuck out like a sore thumb. She was close to turning back. But then she went in, her handbag under her arm and carrying the computer case. Beside the laptop, the case also contained the lead, as well as the envelope with the printouts and the tape from the Dictaphone.

The bar had a cosy, country air and was empty. A bell rang as the door closed behind her. At the back was an open sliding door into a large, gleaming kitchen. A busty woman appeared and scrutinized her from head to toe, as if she were some exotic beast. Perhaps the pearls and the mink jacket were a bit over the top. But what the woman at the bar thought was neither here nor there and for Dieter Lasko nothing could be too over-the-top.

Turning to Dieter Lasko of all people was a huge risk, but by no means as great a risk as anything she could have done herself, that much was clear to her. She didn't want Dieter to help her, just her mother. In return for all the hours she'd spent with trashy novels beside his mother's bed. Who else could she send to the old folks' home to reassure her mother? “There's no reason to be downhearted. You mustn't tell anyone, but Susanne's all right.”

Dieter arrived only eight minutes later. She was already drinking a coffee and had ordered cheese and mushrooms on toast. She should have been surprised she could even think of having a snack, but there
was no time and no room inside her head for surprise. That was entirely taken up with a mountain of hope that somehow she'd manage to bluff her way through someone else's life with the means at her disposal.

Sitting in the semi-darkness at one of the tables at the back, she wasn't immediately visible. She had specially asked the landlady to switch off the light over her table. With a shrug of the shoulders, the woman had complied. Clearly one was allowed pointless requests if one was wearing a mink jacket and a pearl necklace and was setting up a P4 with three gigahertz.

She almost didn't recognize Dieter. He was wearing grey trousers with a crease, jacket, shirt and tie to match, and had neat, blow-dried hair and bronzed skin, as if he'd come straight from the Caribbean. She'd only seen him in worn jeans and sack-like pullovers, with a pale complexion, close-cropped hair and a three-day beard.

As expected, he didn't see her at once and turned to the landlady, who reappeared through the sliding door when the little bell jangled. She couldn't make out what he said. The landlady pointed in her direction. He peered through the semi-darkness, split the bronzed skin with a polite smile and came towards her. After two or three steps, he halted.

During the drive she'd imagined his reaction to her face in a thousand different variations. Only she would never have dared to predict what it would be - not from the Dieter she knew: a man who went on fanatically about justice, law, order, dignity and God knows what, but had nothing other in mind than a good story or a new book. And he knew her from the time she'd worked in a bank. She'd always been smartly, if not so expensively, dressed and nicely turned out.

A few agonizingly long and anxious moments passed. He'd recognized her. Or had he? Three years after their divorce, preceded by six years, during which he'd seen her about as often as a child from the lowlands sees the snowman it's built, and after what he'd been put through the previous afternoon, he didn't seem sure whether to believe his eyes or not. The way his expression kept changing was spectacular. He stood there like a waxwork in the blazing sun. As he forced himself to take the last few steps, he looked as if he was about to melt away. His speech did. “Frau… err… Trenkler… err?”

She'd never heard him stutter before. The relief that it had worked with him too was like a warm wave flooding through her body. She just
nodded. Shaking his head, he sat down opposite her. “You must excuse me if I stare at you like this. The similarity is really amazing.”

“Yes,” she said, “nature can play some odd tricks.” She asked him to tell her something about her double and the circumstances that had led to her death; only then would she explain the connection between her and his ex-wife.

It was close to a miracle that Dieter accepted this. Previously one would have got nothing from him before the quid pro quo was on the table. But he was presumably still influenced by the shock and by the number of questions it left him with. Beyond that, he was convinced he was sitting facing the woman the police were already looking for, though she only realized that in the further course of the conversation.

 

The landlady brought him a coffee. He fixed his eyes on the window; his voice was still without its usual steadiness. He'd had to identify the corpse the previous afternoon. The fact that they'd traced him so quickly - and that so far no doubts as to the identity of the dead woman had been raised - was due to identity papers found in her handbag, which had also been in the waste bin: a passport, a replacement driving licence and an ID card, which, like the passport, had only been issued in the middle of September.

It appeared, Dieter said, that Susanne had lost her papers in the middle of August and applied for replacements. He couldn't say whether the police had found an older ID card or the original driving licence in the flat. Nor did he know anything about a flight bag in the waste bin, only that they'd searched in vain for the keys to the outside door and to her flat, and assumed the murderer must have taken them.

He couldn't tell her anything about the circumstances of her death, he went on. He'd seen the autopsy report, but that raised more questions than it answered. Susanne had not simply been run over. Both hands had had petrol poured over them and been set alight - not post mortem. And she'd been subjected to a few further acts of brutality before the car had finished off the job. She'd been run over twice. The time of death was late on Saturday evening or during that night; more precisely they couldn't say.

“The police hoped I could give them some useful information,” he said, “but I was unable to help them. Since our divorce I'd had no
contact with Susanne and I don't know with whom or in what she'd become involved.”

Finally he dragged his eyes away from the window. “The police are looking for an acquaintance of Susanne's who used a pretext to lure her away from her work on Thursday. On Friday a woman - presumably the same - rang the shop again and put a car at her disposal. That doesn't necessarily have to be connected with the murder. Perhaps the two women just went out shopping together on the Thursday. But the police would naturally like to talk to the acquaintance.”

He stared at her, as if challenging her to admit it was her. When she said nothing, he went on with his account. He told her about Heller, who'd been stabbed to death on the Friday evening - by a fellow boozer with whom he'd had a fight in the bar earlier, the police believed. They were also assuming there was a connection between the two cases. Two tenants of the same building so soon one after the other, a connection was an obvious conclusion. The more so as, according to her mother, Susanne had been a close friend of Heller. She must have sunk pretty low after the divorce, Dieter said, to get involved with a violent alcoholic who had a criminal record.

Had she been killed because she'd seen Heller's murderer? In their statements her colleagues in the shop had said she'd seemed nervous on the Saturday. But if she seen something, why hadn't she gone straight to the police? And if it was the same murderer, who was just getting rid of a dangerous witness, why the tortures? Why had her flat been broken into and wrecked? Dieter had the impression the murderer was looking for something. Why had no one in the building heard anything? True, if a train was going past outside, it would cover a lot of noise, breaking crockery, perhaps even cries for help.

She'd been wounded in the flat, Dieter explained. There were splashes of fresh blood that corresponded to old patches on the carpet. That she'd let the murderer in herself could be ruled out. Had she been in when he came? She'd gone out early on Saturday evening. Someone in the neighbouring building had seen that, but no one knew when she'd come back.

One question after another. The big mystery for Dieter was his ex-mother-in-law's statement. Agnes Runge swore by all that was holy that she'd talked to her daughter on the phone on Saturday evening. By
that time Susanne was long-since dead, so couldn't have been out on a motorbike trip with her “friend” Jasmin Toppler. Jasmin Toppler had spent the whole weekend with other motorbike fans at the Nurburgring, but hadn't seen Susanne since the Friday. She denied they were friends, they just did each other the occasional favour, that was all. Had Agnes Runge got the day wrong? That would have been understandable after the shock of such news. But why had Susanne lied to her mother left, right and centre? About her “friend”, about an office job she didn't have; she'd even pretended the drunk, Heller, had a piano.

She kept the smile on her face, though it was an effort. That it looked very strained as she heard this information didn't give her away. Dieter finished by explaining, “Susanne always lived in a dream world and tended to overestimate her ability to deal with critical situations. Perhaps she'd been influenced by the countless trashy novels she'd read in which there's always a happy ending.”

She decided to bring the farce to an end and to risk it. “Very informative, your assessment of me.”

He was struck dumb. When he recovered, he wavered between anger and denial. “I'm sorry, Frau Trenkler, but this isn't the moment for silly jokes.”