The Lie (48 page)

“Yes I can, just with you,” she said. “And for your information, I have all this on tape. If you open your trap once more, you'll end up inside for longer than you'd care to think. You see, I haven't killed anyone. I haven't even defrauded anyone.”

 

When she looked back, she had only a vague recollection of the next two hours. She knew it had been a few minutes before five in the morning when she'd backed Philip Hardenberg's Mercedes out of the Antoniterweg garage. And when she came to a halt in the Marienweg drive, it was shortly after seven. She must have got something done in those two hours. She'd deposited Helga and Hardenberg in Emergency at a hospital, then driven on. At one point she'd stopped on the hard shoulder because what she had come to understand made it impossible for her to drive on.

Hardenberg's bitter whispering refused to fade, even though he was no longer sitting beside her. And Nadia kept smiling and repeating her generous offer of a future free from worry, even though she had long since been consigned to the mortuary freezer. And had she looked at the list of parking charges in the multi-storey on the Friday morning, instead of taking everything to the bank, had she been able to get the Alfa out immediately after work in the evening, she would have been on time in the car park, where Hardenberg had been waiting for her. She found it impossible to get over the fact that it was only through her muddleheadedness that she was still alive.

And what had been Nadia's intentions? After all, she had rung her again at the sweet shop on the Friday morning. To warn her? Perhaps. But perhaps Nadia had gone to Kettlerstrasse on the Saturday evening to get the laptop back and to do what Hardenberg had failed to do. To get rid of her. That was the last thing Hardenberg had heard from Nadia. Early on Saturday morning she'd rung him again and said that unfortunately she hadn't managed it the previous evening. But he shouldn't get worked up, she'd gone on, there was plenty more time over the weekend. She could even make the body disappear without trace. Everything would be all right.

All right! The expression was still going round and round in her head like a tape on a loop as she walked up to the front door. She hadn't given a thought to her handbag and her keys when she'd followed Zurkeulen to his car, so for the first time she had to set the dog barking in the hall. Wolfgang opened the door. No longer was he Blasting, the dangerous policeman, he was just another friend like Jo.

Michael was standing by the rustic-style dresser in the living room, twiddling a half-full glass. He wasn't all right. He was a little drunk, a little unsure of himself, a little despairing. A little of everything. He threw his arms round her, dribbling some whisky down her neck because he hadn't put his glass down first. “You smell good and you taste even better,” he murmured. His kiss tasted of salt and whisky. “How can that be?” Her held her a little away from him and scrutinized her face.

“I've stopped smoking,” she said. “But maybe it's the hormones too.”

He nodded. “I hit him just once and he didn't get up.”

More information. And no room left for it in her brain. Michael had broken Ramon's neck. It had been Wolfgang speaking when Zurkeulen thought he'd been talking to his thug. She didn't feel sorry for Ramon. She didn't feel sorry for anything. Apart from the drops running down her neck perhaps. She freed herself from his arms, took the glass out of his hand, emptied it and said, “I need to eat something.”

Wolfgang went to the kitchen with them. Since he intended to spend the day at her desk anyway, he helped her prepare a lavish breakfast. That is, he did almost all the preparation himself because she kept stopping all the time to remember - to remember Nadia's mangled message on that Friday. She would have loved to know what Nadia had actually said. But however much she racked her brains, she could make nothing of
her last call. On the other hand, a lot did occur to her about Nadia's last hours. Clearly, despite all the tortures, she hadn't told Zurkeulen and his thug where to find Susanne Lasko that Saturday evening. Otherwise the two brutes would have turned up at Marienweg much earlier. It seemed unlikely that Nadia would have refused to reveal her own address to protect her double. For Nadia, all that mattered was Michael, she would have bet the life of her unborn child on that. Nadia must have loved him very much, at least in her final hours.

A few minutes later Michael came into the kitchen as well. The three of them sat round the table. Wolfgang hungrily devoured an omelette, several slices of toast and a bunch of grapes. She chewed away mechanically on something, with no idea what it was or how it had come to be on her plate. Andrea must have done some shopping in the last few days. It could hardly have been difficult for Zurkeulen to find out how to get into the house.

Michael spent minutes stirring his coffee and murmuring, “I just hit him once.”

Wolfgang put his hand on his shoulder. “Forget it. No one's assuming you hit him as hard as you could with that intention in mind. You were furious, you were…”

“No,” Michael replied, “I wasn't furious.” Suddenly he was strangely calm. He looked at her thoughtfully, sceptically. “The alarm. You didn't—”

“I couldn't,” she broke in. “Zurkeulen was right next to me. I was afraid he'd notice something.”

His speech was slightly slurred, he was more than a little drunk. But his mind was still functioning clearly. “What was there for him to notice? You want to put a jacket on, you take the hanger off the hook. There's nothing in that. Why didn't you?”

It was only then that she remembered Nadia's warning not to take the coat hanger down. The silent alarm, she thought. And she'd assumed he'd only said that in order to scare Zurkeulen into making a quick exit.

“Frau Gerling didn't feel able to do it either,” Wolfgang said.

Michael ignored Blasting's comment. “That swine asked me whether I was absolutely sure,” he said, running his eyes over her face, with that sceptical expression, as if he wanted to check every pore. She waited for her heart to start pounding or for the awareness that this was the end to express itself in some other way. But nothing happened.

“Tell me something,” Michael said. “Anything. Tell me where I sprained my ankle.”

“You poor darling,” she said. “What has that guy done to you? It was in Arosa. I'd warned you. There was more ice than snow on the piste. But you insisted on showing me how good you were on skis.”

He gave a sob and, ignoring both Wolfgang and his cup, leaned across, drew her up and kissed her. His coffee spilled over the table. There must have been a thousand other “do-you-remember?” anecdotes, she'd just been lucky that he'd chosen one of the half-dozen Nadia had provided for her. That was something of which she was all too well aware.

Wolfgang took him upstairs. Into bed with you, my lad, sleep it off and let us get some work done. He didn't actually say that, but it was clearly what he was thinking. As they went up the stairs, she heard Michael talking of the horrible thought he'd had that Zurkeulen was taking away everything that made his life worth living; that he had perhaps already taken it, since the silent alarm hadn't been set off. The thought had been driving him mad, so that it wasn't fury, it was a simple destructive urge that had made him lash out at Ramon. He knew very well that the back of the neck was a weak point and at that moment he hadn't cared whether he himself was hit by a bullet or not.

“Of course,” was the last thing she heard Wolfgang say, “I can understand that. I'd probably have reacted in the same way myself.”

Wolfgang didn't come back downstairs. She went up to join him in the study, though what followed was like dancing on a knife edge. First of all he remarked that Zurkeulen really had put an idea in Michael's head, but in his view any man would know whether it was his own wife in bed with him or whether he'd been sleeping with another woman for days. Because it must have been for several days, he said, and in such a case there was considerably more to consider than just a striking facial resemblance. Apart from that, what reason could the Lasko woman have to move in with Nadia's husband?

Wolfgang saw things rather as she had done at first. That there were a thousand things that differentiated one woman from another. Sterilization, for example. But he suspected that was a trick. “Are you really pregnant,” he asked, “or are you just trying to keep Doc happy?”

“To the first question the answer's yes, to the second, no,” she said. “And if you're going to ask me if I intend to sue Wenning, the answer's
another no. It was funny when I first noticed it. It's easy to say you don't want something when that something isn't there to want. But then suddenly there is something there you didn't expect - and at my age it's my last chance to have a child.”

He listened with an odd grin on his face, murmured, “Piece of luck, then,” and demanded information about Hardenberg's business affairs. For a while she managed to get him off that subject and even learned a few more things herself. His men had taken Ramon's body out of the house and dumped it somewhere among the flora and fauna. However, they assumed Zurkeulen would lose no time finding a replacement.

He eventually accepted that she couldn't tell him all he wanted to know. Whether he believed her when she said she'd had nothing to do with Hardenberg's shady deals was quite another matter. He opened the SLA file and pointed to the initials AR. “Most people lack imagination and choose code words with personal associations,” he said. “If you'd set up this account, I'd bet on Arnim Röhrler. But if you've got nothing to do with it…”

He broke off. Perhaps he'd noticed her hesitation. Of course she'd had something to do with Röhrler. It was quite possible that Nadia had chosen Röhrler's initials. When she remained silent, Wolfgang went on. “Her mother's called Agnes Runge. She had no other relatives. It could be an absolute disaster, but I think we should try it.”

“What do you mean, ‘we'? I don't want anything to do with it.”

“You'll have to give us a hand, I'm afraid,” he said. “None of my men would make a convincing Susanne Lasko.”

He was about to go on, but he was interrupted by the telephone. The answerphone was still switched on. First of all Nadia's voice was heard, then Dieter's, saying, “I've got some interesting information for you, Susanne—”

As if it was his own phone, Wolfgang picked up the receiver and switched off the answerphone, so she could no longer hear what Dieter was saying. He kept his eyes fixed on her face. He didn't say who he was, he didn't say anything, he just kept listening attentively. He watched her, deep in thought, as she got up and left the room.

She went to the bedroom, got into bed with Michael and put his arm round her. He was so fast asleep he didn't notice. “Hold me tight,” she murmured. She had no idea what story she should tell them when
Wolfgang came through the door, no longer a neighbour, friend and helper, just a policeman.

 

It was quite a long conversation. In the first three or four minutes she heard Wolfgang Blasting give several brief answers and couldn't understand why Dieter didn't hang up once he realized it wasn't her on the line. Finally Wolfgang Blasting expressed his thanks. After that all was quiet in the study for a while. It seemed he still had things to do on the computer. Perhaps he wanted to get the full picture before he arrested her.

But when he finally appeared in the doorway, he was still Wolfgang. Dieter hadn't called to talk to Susanne, but to talk about her. He had no idea she was back. Wolfgang had contacted him some days ago to find out more about Susanne Lasko. Very early that morning, when she was still parked on the autobahn hard shoulder trying to come to terms with how close her brush with death had been, Wolfgang had rung Dieter from the study, explained what had happened and told him he could be contacted at that number for the rest of the day.

“I'm going to see Lasko,” he said. “He's willing to help us as far as he can. If we get nowhere with Agnes Runge, perhaps he can give us some other idea for AR. Apart from that, I need him to nail Hardenberg. I'm sure we can cook something up.”

His intention was to get Dieter to make precisely the statement that she had been refused, namely that shortly before her death Susanne had passed incriminating evidence on to him, in a closed envelope, of course, which was only to be opened if she should die.

“It always works,” Wolfgang said. “You wouldn't believe how many people fall for such a hackneyed ploy. But Lasko wants to meet you, he was very insistent. So, are you coming along?” he grinned. “There's nothing for you here at the moment. Doc's downed four double whiskies and he won't be able to get it up for the rest of the day, that's for sure.”

No more than an hour later he was parking outside her ex-mother-inlaw's house. It had changed a lot over the last few years. New façade, new windows, a new roof - and no more flowers in the front garden, where she'd spent hours on her knees pulling out the weeds. Dieter had gone for the low-maintenance option: a lawn.

He dutifully started in surprise when he opened the door, and gave her a textbook wide-eyed stare. “Frau Trenkler?” When she nodded, he said, “Herr Blasting did warn me, but it's still quite a shock.” Then he stood aside and gestured them into the house.

It was small, it was cramped. It hadn't struck her like that before. She'd been sorry to leave it. Now it looked like a doll's house that had been relegated to the attic when you grew out of dolls. Everywhere Ramie had put signs of her sovereignty. It was also very clear that there was a young child in the house. Even in Dieter's study there were toys lying around. But he'd sent his wife and daughter out, to the supermarket or somewhere.