The Sinner (40 page)

Cora Bender's transfer from the remand centre to the district
hospital compelled the judicial authorities to appoint an attorney
for her. Her family had so far made no move in that direction.

Her husband and her parents-in-law seemed to have forgotten
her existence. Her aunt, the qualified nurse, was in north Germany,
keeping watch over an elderly, dying man who was past helping. As
for her mother, nothing could be expected from that quarter.

The district court at Cologne kept a list of attorneys available
for pro bono work. One of them, Eberhard Brauning, was highly
regarded for his courtroom technique. His friends, who included
several judges, called him Hardy. Thirty-eight years old and
unmarried, he shared a house with his mother Helene, the only
woman in his life who really mattered to him.

Helene Brauning had for many years worked in the same field
as Professor Burthe. Frequently called as an expert witness, she
had only twice failed to prevent the imposition of a term of
imprisonment. She had specialized - and not only in court - in
cases of severe mental disturbance. Her retirement two years ago
had been prompted in part by the fact that she'd found it more and
more depressing not to be able to help people, only to keep them
under lock and key.

To Eberhard Brauning, psychiatry and psychology were doubleedged swords. Mentally deranged offenders had fascinated him
since his earliest youth, but only in theory. In real life he abhorred
them. Fortunately, however, they tended to be the exception in his
daily routine.

If a husband killed his wife while drunk or consumed with
jealousy, Brauning could handle it. If a hitherto inoffensive office
clerk raped a female colleague after a firm's party, he could act for
such a man, despite his personal distaste.

Eberhard Brauning liked calculable reflexes and comprehensible
motives. He required candour but not necessarily remorse. If
remorse was also on offer, he welcomed it; but lie could cope just
as well with denial.

None of these things could be expected from the creatures
to whom Helene Brauning had devoted half her life. They
inhabited a world to which lie had no access. Their behaviour
could provide the makings of a lively conversation with his
mother in the evening. Where his work was concerned, however,
he preferred cases in which a client's circumstances and mental
state were clear-cut.

To the examining magistrate, the Frankenberg case appeared to
be one such. A young woman had killed her erstwhile lover in the
presence of a dozen or more eyewitnesses. Having at first denied
knowing the man, she had later, when pressed by the interrogating
officer, come clean about their relationship and her motives. Since
then she had attempted suicide.

The district attorney's file was almost complete. All that was
missing was the psychologist's report, but that could take a little
while longer. Professor Burthe was snowed under with work.

Also missing was a signed confession, because the young woman
had retracted her original statement and was once more stubbornly
disclaiming all knowledge of her victim. It was obvious what she
hoped to achieve, and Eberhard Brauning was just the man to
convince her that prison was preferable to a lunatic asylum.

To Brauning, Cora Bender's current detention in a psychiatric
ward was adequately explained by her attempted suicide. Paper
handkerchiefs! That idea entailed some ingenuity. He considered
it an extremely clever ploy and relied on the personal impression
of the examining magistrate, who had described her as cold and
unfeeling. He also realized, however, that the magistrate was loath
to take a risk.

Having requested a sight of the file, Brauning was issued
with copies of all the available documents five days after Georg
Frankenberg's death. That was on Thursday. Early that evening he
began his perusal of the file by studying the witnesses' statements
made shortly after the killing and later amplified with details not
directly related to the incident itself.

The victim's behaviour seemed as clear to him as it had to the
gullible paterfamilias who had put it on record. A note had been
subsequently added to the file containing Cora Bender's personal
particulars. A sister, Magdalena Rosch, had died five years ago of
cardiac and renal failure. Brauning attached no importance to this
addendum.

He felt fleetingly uneasy while reading the transcripts of the
tapes. Either Cora Bender had been in a state for which mental
confusion was a very mild description, or she'd staged a firstclass performance for the benefit of the officer interviewing her.
Although lie inclined to the latter view, lie would have liked to hear
his mother's opinion. Unfortunately, Helene had already gone to
bed by the time lie laid the file aside. It was long past midnight,
and he didn't have time for an exhaustive discussion when they
breakfasted together the next morning. He merely mentioned that
he'd landed a new and extremely interesting case: yet another
woman who imagined that the district hospital was a sanatorium.

Brauning arranged a meeting with his client as soon as he got to
his chambers. He was firmly resolved to make it clear to her that
a full confession would be likely to render the court more lenient.
Early on Friday afternoon, at three o'clock precisely, a door was
unlocked, and he saw her for the first time.

She was standing by the window in a plain skirt and a simply cut
blouse, both of them creased and grubby. She wore no stockings,
so the feet in her flat-heeled shoes were bare. Her hair looked as if
it hadn't been in contact with water or shampoo for several days,
and her face, when she slowly turned towards the door ...

Brauning involuntarily caught his breath, assailed for the first
time by doubts about his assessment of the situation. Such apathy!
Her eyes reminded him of the glass eyes in the head of an old teddy bear he'd dearly loved as a little boy. They'd been quite big,
those button eyes, and when he held them to the light he could see
himself reflected in them -just himself and his bedroom, nothing
more. They never revealed any stirrings of emotion inside old
Teddy's straw-filled frame.

The briefcase in his hand seemed to have doubled in weight. He
slowly expelled the breath he'd been holding, swallowed once and
said in a studiously calm, deliberate tone: "Good afternoon, Frau
Bender. I'm your attorney, Eberhard Brauning."

She looked him up and down, betraying no emotion of any
kind.

"My attorney?" she said in a low, expressionless voice.

"The court has appointed me to safeguard your interests. Or, to
put it more simply, to conduct your defence. You know what you
stand accused of?"

He could have sworn, from the way she was standing there, that
she didn't know Nor did she answer his question. "It's rather warm
in here," she said, turning back to the barred window "The sky looks
cloudy, though. Not the weather for a swim. I should have stayed
in the water the first time. I'd have forgotten everything by now - I
could be leading a peaceful life with the man down below"

She drew a long, tremulous breath.

"We talked about it this morning, the professor and I. The fact
that I wanted to live with the man in the lake. And on Friday I said
to him, `You're wrong, my friend, it's Monday already.' But today
is Friday, isn't it? I asked the professor this morning, and lie said
today is Friday."

She was silent for some seconds. Then she turned her head and
eyed him appraisingly over her shoulder. "Or was he lying? If you
want to do me a great favour, tell me he was lying. These quacks
are a curse. When you think they're telling the truth they're wrong,
and when you think they're wrong they're telling the truth. For
instance, one of them told me I was a drug-addicted whore who
only had sex with perverts."

She gave a little shrug. "He wasn't wrong, unfortunately. Perverts
simply pay better, and I had to raise a lot of money in a hurry. It all depended on me - she asked me to do it. She wanted me to pay
for her heart with my body."

A rueful smile brought her face to life for an instant, but it vanished
as quickly as it had come. "I would have done anything for her," she
went on. "I'd have ripped out my own heart and given it to her if I
could, and she knew it. She knew a lot about messed-up types like
me. She knew I was so messed up, I wouldn't have cared."

Eberhard Brauning could only stare at her and try to make some
sense of her effusions. Heart, sister ...

She nodded to herself, lost in thought. "But I couldn't do that
for her. I was only sixteen, and I'd never gone to bed with a man
before. I wept. I prayed all night long that she'd think of another
idea. And do you know what she told me? `You've no need to fuck
anyone, you idiot. Normal sex doesn't pay well. SM, that's the only
thing that makes real money. You wouldn't have to offer your pussy
to scum like that. All you need to do is give the dirty old men
a regular walloping. Thrash them with a whip. Kick them in the
crotch, stick pins in their peckers - that's what they enjoy' But I
couldn't torture old men either. The very idea!"

She put a hand over her mouth. Her deliberate nodding was
succeeded by an equally deliberate shaking of the head. "She said
I should simply think of Father and the way he'd got off on me.
She said she'd only wanted to stop me getting hysterical when
I showed her how he'd felt between my legs. That was the only
reason why she'd told me it meant nothing. `Feeling between your
legs to see if you'd wet the bed? A glance at the sheets would have
been enough.' I knew she was a beast when she said that. Still,
everyone tries to survive in their own way, don't they? She only
wanted to live."

Brauning managed a nod. "So do we all," he said.

She nodded too. "I ought to have done it. A lot of people
genuinely enjoy being hurt and humiliated - you're only doing
them a favour. I could have got her off my back in a legal way. I
had to get rid of her somehow or other. She would never have died
of her own accord, but after an operation she could have lived on
her own, she wouldn't have needed me as much. Why didn't I do it while there was still time? Why did I only do it when she was
dead? Was I trying to kill two birds with one stone? Apologize to
my father and, at the same time, be able to say: `Hey, you up there,
look at me. I'm doing it, you see? I'm doing it for you."'

She looked at him, and a spark began to glimmer in the depths
of those glassy eyes. Not a spark of life, though, only of torment.

"I did it," she said with a long sigh. "But not in the way she'd
suggested. I could never have brought myself to stick a pin in
someone's penis. I swapped roles and offered my own flesh instead,
but even that I couldn't handle. In order to endure the filth I was
exposed to, I shot up. Sounds logical, doesn't it? I think it does,
thoroughly logical, but the chief doesn't believe me. Do you?"

Brauning had an urge to hammer on the door and ask to be let
out. To be spared the sight of those eyes, in which the spark was
now glowing more brightly. To be released from this room - even,
if possible, from this assignment. Cardiac and renal failure! That,
he supposed, had been an error - not the only error in this case,
and he had let himself in for it.

Instead of hammering on the door, he started to whistle a tune in
his head. A cheerful tune. It had steadied his nerves even as a boy,
this soundless whistling.

The beds in the ward were neatly made up. You could only tell
they'd been used from the pillowcases, which were stained and
creased like Cora Bender's clothing.

She had been silent for at least a minute. He didn't notice this
until she followed the direction of his gaze and grinned. "Looks as
if I've got company here, doesn't it?" she said sarcastically. "Don't
be deceived by those beds, they're just a ploy. The only people I've
seen here so far are the nursing staff, the professor and the chief. I
imagine they're testing me to see if I'm still in my right mind, or if
I'll start talking to non-existent people."

The change caught him wholly unprepared. Her voice and even
her expression were suddenly those of someone amusing herself at
other people's expense. They'd played a trick on her and failed to
discern that she'd seen through it long ago, so she was fully entitled
to laugh at their stupidity.

"On the other hand," she said with a shrug, "maybe it's because
I sleep too much. I only have to lie down and I doze off in two
seconds flat. You could fire a gun in my ear, and I wouldn't wake
up - they always have to shake me in the mornings. The professor
thinks it's a bad sign, my sleeping so much and enjoying it into the
bargain. He must have read that sleep is death's little brother."

She laughed derisively. "But that's nonsense, the little brother
idea never occurred to me. I shared a bedroom with the big brother
for years. What's more, I welcomed it when Father moved next
door and the big brother moved in with me. People are so stupid
sometimes, it ought to be prohibited."

Brauning had already breathed a sigh of relief and was looking for
a way of introducing the speech he'd prepared when she suddenly
blinked. Her next words were uttered in a voice as bemused and
apathetic as it had been at first.

"I'm sorry, you probably don't know what I'm talking about. I
don't know myself, sometimes. My head isn't always as clear as
it might be. They keep pumping me full of some shit or other.
The professor claims it's just something to counter my depressive
symptoms, but they're a bunch of liars in here, believe me."

She squared her shoulders. "But I'll make it," she said, sounding
thoroughly wide awake. "I always have. I used to say, if someone
gives you a kick in the backside, it's an incentive to move on. Or
don't you agree?"