‘What’s the matter with you, Frau Scholl?’ she asked. ‘Is your marriage quite kaput?’
No, no, Brigitte Scholl said quickly. Everything was fine. That evening, the customer’s phone rang. It was Heinrich Scholl. He said he was in Ludwigsfelde with his wife and asked her not to spread rumours.
He now had two women and both were a strain on him. One of them wanted his money; the other wanted her marriage back.
Neither of them loved him.
The retired Heinrich Scholl was leading a strenuous life, and it didn’t get any easier when he found out that Nani was working in a brothel on the side. At first, he had thought he could rescue her as Richard Gere rescues Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and tried to initiate his Thai mistress into society. Once he took her to his favourite Italian place in Ludwigsfelde and on another occasion to a friend’s birthday party. He drove all over town with her, showing her the town hall and the thermal spa. He even showed her his house, where the unfortunate Gitti was holed up.
‘I didn’t want to hide any more,’ says Heinrich Scholl. ‘I’d done that long enough, always showing other people what they wanted to see.’
Nantana Piamsuk went along with everything, as long as Heinrich Scholl satisfied her wishes. Friends and business partners of the once successful mayor followed his transformation in bemusement. Some of them treated him as indulgently as if he was a sick child; others distanced themselves; others again were at a complete loss. His childhood friend, Hans, and Steinhart the spa operator were among those who were given the manuscript of Heinrich Scholl’s book to read and shown around his flat in Berlin: kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom—and, of course, the black bra.
‘The bra was huge,’ Steinhart says. ‘I thought Scholl was just trying to impress me. As far as I know, Asian women don’t have big busts.’
‘He was so gone on this woman that he wouldn’t see reason,’ his friend Hans says. ‘Was I supposed to burst his bubble, or what?’
‘She fleeced him,’ says Rainer Fischer, who had hooked the two of them up.
‘She was calculating and devious,’ says Andreas Herrmann of the Thai women’s support organisation in Berlin.
Nantana Piamsuk took Heinrich Scholl to her native village in Thailand. Her parents met the couple at the airport and drove them to their house, which was larger and better equipped than any of the other huts in the village. Nantana Piamsuk’s family were farming people and owned several fish ponds. At the weekend there was a big wedding ceremony: a festive procession through the village. Heinrich Scholl was the groom, Nantana the bride. The next day, Scholl bought floor tiles for the living room as a present for his hosts. He discovered that the family owed almost their entire wealth to their enterprising daughter. And her German men. Who knows how many bridegrooms had been met at the airport and paraded through the village with Nani? But Heinrich Scholl was not suspicious even now. Back in Berlin, he transferred twenty-five thousand euros to Nani’s family in Thailand.
It was supposed to be a loan, but that was soon forgotten. Heinrich Scholl cleared his account, transferred the money to another, and left the statements from the empty account lying around his flat so that Nantana would see he was in the red and pay him back. But her reaction was not the one he had hoped for: she found other men to pay her bills.
Heinrich Scholl began to spy on her. ‘He always wanted to know where I was going,’ Nantana Piamsuk says. ‘He kept tabs on me and followed me. The way he saw it, I had to be with him. He called from a withheld number, or called without speaking. He called and listened and hung up. Constantly. He always knew where I was and who I was with.’ Once when a stranger came to her flat, Heinrich Scholl waited on the stairs all night and waylaid the man at dawn.
When the task of surveying his mistress got too much for him, he engaged a private detective agency to record her every move: when she went to work in her massage salon, when she got home, what clothes she was wearing, what men she met. The report the agency gave him is long and absurdly detailed, and uses abbreviations from the world of the secret services. It reads like a Stasi file. Nantana Piamsuk is referred to throughout as the target person, TP. We learn that TP leaves her massage salon at 8.57 pm, takes the U2 underground line towards Pankow-Vinetastrasse, alights at Senefelder Platz, walks towards Schönhauser Allee, enters a REWE supermarket at 9.24 pm and a Thai nightclub at 9.42 pm. In the backyard of the club there is ‘evidently a brothel business’.
For hours, the private detectives wait on the pavement outside the club. They observe Scholl’s mistress go into the yard towards the brothel at 9.49 pm and return to the club shortly before 10.00 pm. At 12.35 am one of the detectives decides ‘to go a step further and find out what TP is doing’. No sooner has he entered the nightclub than he is offered a girl, but it is not ‘TP’. Heinrich Scholl’s mistress was playing cards with friends, probably for money, and continued to play into the small hours.
It was like a spy film: Brigitte Scholl was snooping on her husband and he was snooping on his mistress. But while Brigitte was managing to keep her life together, Heinrich’s was gradually falling apart. His marriage was over, his bank balance had shrunk, and his reputation wasn’t looking too good either, after the house in Walther Rathenau Strasse was searched by police. Flight and entertainment bills from Scholl’s time as mayor had been discovered that suggested corruption. Heinrich Scholl was not at home when the investigator rang at the door; his wife was in the middle of treating a customer.
It was the biggest ignominy ever to befall Brigitte Scholl. At least, that’s what she thought. Then she was informed in an anonymous letter that her husband’s mistress was not a beautician, but a prostitute. It was the final straw. Brigitte Scholl told her friend Inge that she wanted her life back and was going to fight—for the house, not for her marriage. It was over. Brigitte Scholl had hit rock bottom; her husband still had some way to go.
In summer 2011, the spa operators cancelled their fee-based contract with Heinrich Scholl, his most important source of income. Not long afterwards, Nantana Piamsuk split up with him. This time it was for good. On previous occasions he had continued to give her money and presents, and she had come back, only to move out again soon afterwards. He made her final gifts of a laptop and an expensive ring, but it was too late; in October 2011 she packed her bags. She had found a man who lived near Dresden to take care of her. He was Scholl’s age—her new German grandad.
Heinrich Scholl says whenever he started something new in life, he always began by working out how it might end, what opportunities there were, and what risks. The remark is typical of him. In seemingly hopeless situations, he switches onto autopilot. When others lose their heads, he remains cool and unruffled; he can wait without growing impatient and knows when his moment has come. That’s how he conquered his wife, acquired his house, became mayor—and it’s how he remained mayor for almost twenty years.
He has been known to miscalculate. This has tended to happen when factors came into play that couldn’t be calculated by a machine. On such occasions, his life was temporarily thrown out of joint: he gave his notice, broke off whatever he had begun and found himself sitting in the kitchen again, back with his wife.
It happened at the car works and at the circus, and perhaps it also happened in autumn 2011, when Heinrich Scholl suddenly gave up his flat in Berlin and moved back to Ludwigsfelde. He lost control; things didn’t run to plan; his system collapsed.
No one understood why Heinrich Scholl wanted to return to his wife in Ludwigsfelde when he had been so happy in Berlin.
Herbert Walter: ‘I said to him: “You’ve got it as good as it gets in Berlin. Don’t forget that!”’
Rainer Fischer: ‘“Are you mad?” I said. “You can’t go back home.”’
Inge Karther: ‘Brigitte told me over the phone that Heiner was planning to move back in with her, bag and baggage. I said: “Well, he’s not coming back for love.”’
Heike Schramm: ‘Nobody knew why he came bac
k. Not even Gitti. She just said: “Imagine, Heike, he’s here again with all his boxes. Can you credit it?”’
Karin Singer: ‘Suddenly, word was that Heiner was coming back to Gitti. He never gave his reasons, as far as I know.’
Helga Gerlich: ‘Brigitte told me cheerfully that Heiner was coming back to her. I told her: “You don’t seriously think he’s split up with her? Do you believe in Father Christmas? Once a Thai woman, always a Thai woman.”’
Horst Karther was one of the last of Heinrich Scholl’s acquaintances to be shown round the flat in Berlin. It was in late October, not long before Scholl decided to give up his life in the city. Karther had driven his wife Inge to her class reunion in Ludwigsfelde and was to be taken on a tour of the town by the former mayor while he waited for her. That was Gitti’s plan. But Heinrich Scholl wasn’t in the mood for Ludwigsfelde and turned off the motorway towards Zehlendorf to show Horst Karther his flat.
This time there was a pair of knickers hanging in the bathroom.
The men had known each other for almost fifty years. They had spent holidays together with their wives and children. The conversation they had on this occasion was unusually frank, at least on Heinrich Scholl’s side. He told his holiday mate how happy he was in Berlin, talked to him about the love of his life, Nani, and showed him photos of Thailand. He also mentioned that she cheated on him and how jealous it made him. At the end, however, Heinrich Scholl suddenly announced that it looked as if he’d be moving home.
Horst Karther thought he’d heard wrong. He knew from his wife that Brigitte Scholl wanted to separate from her husband. ‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘You don’t give up a flat like this, and you know Gitti; you’ll have no say in anything if you move back. That’s how it was in the past, and now it’ll be even worse. She’ll gloat if you have to go back.’
Heinrich Scholl said he supposed he’d just have to put up with that, Horst Karther recalls, and he mentioned some shares he’d lost. He’d been badly advised by his bank manager—and his girlfriend was costing him a pretty penny too.
‘Why don’t you get divorced?’ his friend asked.
A divorce was too expensive for Heinrich Scholl. He’d made inquiries of a lawyer: if he and Gitti divorced, he’d have to give her half of his pension.
This corresponds roughly with calculations Heinrich Scholl had made in his diary a few weeks before, later found by the police when they searched the house. ‘For the life I’m leading, “our” income isn’t enough!’ Scholl writes. ‘We have 3800 euros together. If, as is looking likely, it comes to divorce, I will have 1800 euros after forty-seven years of marriage. Three years’ experience has shown that the business isn’t profitable. If anything, contacts and commissions are dropping off. We have no appreciable savings from the past years, which means we’re increasingly in the red/ burden for me! Reserves exhausted. Endless knock-on effect! I’m the only one who can do anything about it!’
A few days after the class reunion in late October, Frank came to visit his parents in Ludwigsfelde. They got onto the subject of the flat in Berlin; the rent was just under six hundred euros a month. Frank worked out how much money his father had spent on it over the past years: it represented a significant cost. Heinrich Scholl nodded, saying he was planning to give it up and return to Ludwigsfelde to live with his wife. Frank had the impression then that his parents were getting on better with one another.
Heinrich Scholl gave notice of his intention to leave the flat at the end of the year, but moved out a month earlier. His landlady was just as surprised at the precipitate move as everybody else. ‘It all happened at such incredible speed,’ she says. She knew of Heinrich Scholl’s marital trouble and what good it had done him to live in his own flat. ‘He said he was a baby getting to know life for the first time—those were his words.’ Heinrich Scholl didn’t mention his financial straits to the landlady, but told her he was moving back in with his wife because of an operation that might leave him in need of care.
It was not a particularly warm welcome. The unfaithful husband stood outside the house in Ludwigsfelde with his removalist’s boxes. When Brigitte Scholl saw the boxes, she told him he could take half of them away again immediately. Scholl’s things were loaded back into the car and driven to his friend Herbert’s barn. The rest he deposited in the converted cellar of their house, where he and his wife had once danced with his social democrat friends from Lichtenrade.
It seemed a lifetime ago. There hadn’t been a fire in the fireplace for years. The cellar was used for washing and ironing; Heinrich Scholl had his painting workshop down there, and Brigitte Scholl a small room where she kept the equipment for her moss arrangements. Otherwise it was a place for storing things that were only rarely used: Heinrich Scholl’s mountaineering gear, his football boots, the Christmas and Easter decorations, toys for the grandchildren, and all those little things you don’t throw out because they might come in useful at some point—among them, Gitti’s sunhats, and shoelaces from Heinrich Scholl’s old trainers. Everything was neatly hung up or packed in cardboard boxes and labelled. Brigitte Scholl was a fastidious woman; everything in her house had to be neat and tidy and in its place. She employed two cleaning women: one for the house and one for the cellar. The cleaners were not allowed to move the furniture, and for reasons of hygiene they were not to pour the cleaning water down the loo, but had to empty it into the gutter outside the house.
It was also for reasons of hygiene that her husband had to use the bathroom in the cellar after moving back, rather than the one next to her salon. It would be best if he slept down there too, in among all his files. The files drove Brigitte Scholl up the wall. She decided to ask one of her customers, an accountant, to go through her husband’s stuff and throw away what was no longer needed. She asked her friend Inge whether she didn’t have any use for Heiner’s books.
It was just as Horst Karther had predicted. Brigitte Scholl let her husband move home, but she gloated over his defeat and made him suffer more than ever. It is hard to say what his reaction was. The days and weeks after Heinrich Scholl’s return from Berlin are something of a mystery.
He was as busy as ever, attending to a Chinese delegation interested in developing business parks, setting up a planning office for the company that was to expand the thermal spa, and stepping into the breach when a reader cancelled shortly before the traditional Christmas reading at the municipal library. At the end of the reading, he wished his audience a merry Christmas—from him and his wife.
Heinrich Scholl says it was a good time, even at home; his wife had become more tolerant and gave him more freedom than before. But Brigitte Scholl told her friend Inge that her husband had grown more strong-willed and taken to answering her back. When she said, ‘Heiner, fetch this, fetch that,’ he’d stand his ground and hurl abuse at her, Inge says.
The police found emails to Nantana dating from this time on Scholl’s computer. He writes how much he misses her and begs her to ring him. ‘Why don’t you ring? Please ring me—I’d like to hear your voice, at least. Kisses, Henry.’ On 31 October, one of the days when Heinrich Scholl was clearing out his flat in Zehlendorf, Nantana’s Berlin flat was burgled. The thief let himself in with a key and stole almost exclusively gifts from Heinrich Scholl, mainly expensive handbags. Heinrich Scholl denies burgling his mistress. ‘That’s rubbish,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t risk it in broad daylight. Why on earth would I fetch the bags back?’
Nantana Piamsuk, however, suspects him. It scared her, she says; she moved to Saxony, in south-east Germany, to live with her new man, but told Scholl she was in west Germany. When he discovered the truth, she booked a flight to Thailand and left in early December.
She was fleeing Heinrich Scholl. But she couldn’t shake him off.
Scholl texted Nantana Piamsuk relentlessly, telling her he wanted to visit her, or claiming he was already in Thailand. She deleted his messages without reading them. She entered a convent and had her hair shaved off. Someone attempte
d to break into her new boyfriend’s flat back in Germany. The man received a threatening letter assembled from newspaper fragments: ‘If only you’d left the tart in the brothel. Now your wife’s turning in her grave a second time.’
The author of the letter couldn’t be traced. Scholl says he had nothing to do with either the burglary or the letter, but the police later found an entry in his diary from 6 December. The address of Nantana Piamsuk’s new boyfriend had been noted down and crossed out. The same address had also been entered into Scholl’s sat nav. The police also searched his computer, looking through his files and browser history, and discovered the name of Nantana Piamsuk’s new lover three-hundred-and-twenty-five times—that and a copy of the obituary notice the man had issued after his wife’s death six months before.
Heinrich Scholl, coolly calculating technologist, farsighted mayor and model husband, seemed to have vanished. He later said he hadn’t wanted to lose touch with Nani and wanted to get his money back, but he acted as if the ground had opened up beneath him.
While his mistress was on another continent, Scholl sat at home in Ludwigsfelde, feverishly rewriting his love story. He had been working on the manuscript for years, continually updating it. The love story of a businessman with marital problems had given way to a kind of erotic novel in which Heinrich Scholl had rewrought his brothel visits with fond attention to detail. Henry, the hero was called, sharing the author’s pseudonym. Henry Sanders was a tireless lover, a Casanova. Now the book was to be published at last—by Christmas at the latest, Scholl told his publisher. At the eleventh hour he changed the name of Henry’s mistress from Tanja to Lydia, because a friend had thought Tanja too Russian-sounding.
The Scholl Case Page 11