The Lie

by Petra Hammesfahr

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  THE SINNER

  Praise

  Copyright Page

  Born in 1951, Petra Hammesfahr wrote her first novel at the age of seventeen. She has written over twenty crime and suspense novels and also writes scripts for television and film. Her book The Quiet Mr Genardy was her first bestseller and was made into a film. It was soon followed by The Sinner, also published by Bitter Lemon Press and her first novel to be available in English. She has won numerous literary prizes, including the Crime Prize of Wiesbaden and the Rhineland Literary Prize, and lives near Cologne.

  Prologue

  It was a horrible sight, even for the boy who, at fourteen, had already witnessed much barbarity, though not in this country. People didn’t get their hands chopped off here because they’d stolen something, nor women their fingers because they’d painted their nails. Nor were women here in danger of being buried up to the waist and stoned. And children could play without losing their legs or even their lives. The boy thought that was good, he liked living here. His sisters could go to school and he could too, of course. And after school he could be what he was: a young boy who liked playing football.

  On that Sunday at the end of November 2002 he left the little flat his family had been allocated with a ball under his arm and a bag full of rubbish in his hand. He was to put the rubbish in one of the bins beside the house. Then he was going to see if he could find a few other boys who’d play with him. But that was quickly forgotten.

  He pushed back the lid of the bin and saw the bundle of humanity lying among the refuse - filthy, scorched, covered in blood, dumped like garbage. A woman, he saw that straight away, even though she was wearing a suit like a man. They’d been here a long time now and his elder sister had started wearing trousers and painting her fingernails.

  The nails of the woman in the bin were black, both her hands had been burned black, her head was deformed and encrusted with blood, as if she’d been stoned. For a few seconds the boy stared at her. He tried to scream but couldn’t. He dropped his ball and the sack of refuse, ran back into the house and told his mother what he’d seen. She came out with him to check before she called over a neighbour who informed the police.

  The boy never found out who the woman in the bin was and why she’d been killed. The police thought they had, but they were wrong.

  Part One

  It all started one Thursday at the end of July 2002, one of those summer days in this part of the world that are only tolerable with an ice-cool drink in the shade. Susanne Lasko was standing, sweaty and nervous, by one of the four lifts in the air-conditioned entrance hall of Gerler House, a large office block. The lift arrived, the door slid open and Susanne Lasko found herself walking towards herself.

  In her external appearance the young woman who suddenly appeared before her was not identical with her. She was her height and had her figure, her eyes, her mouth. And it was her face - but with perfect make-up and framed by fashionably styled hair. The woman’s hair was a rich brown and considerably shorter than the sun-bleached mop coming down to her shoulders. Her double was wearing a light-grey, pinstripe suit with a white blouse.

  A boring colour combination, Susanne thought. But the suit and blouse were impeccable and looked as crisp as if they’d just been ironed. The handbag that was swinging from her right shoulder must have cost a fortune; a document case was tucked under her left arm. Never before had Susanne felt so shabbily dressed, so pathetic, so wretched, old and worn out.

  She was wearing a suit as well, the green one she’d bought ten years ago. She’d last worn it three years previously, when she got divorced from Dieter Lasko. It may well have been right for that, it was less so for a job interview with a superior estate agent’s. But she’d found nothing better in her wardrobe that morning.

  At the time of that first encounter with Nadia Trenkler she had two euros sixty-two cents in her purse. She’d checked before setting out to get her life going again. She’d lost her last job in January. It hadn’t been a proper job, so she couldn’t claim the dole and she was too proud to apply for supplementary benefit. She was also afraid they might draw her divorced husband’s attention to her situation or even approach her mother, who had a little money tucked away. But her mother needed that for her old age and, anyway, Susanne wanted to keep her ignorant of her only daughter’s predicament.

  During February and March she’d written countless job applications and used up all her savings. Since April her mother had been supporting her - unsuspectingly. Agnes Runge didn’t trust strangers and was no longer capable of looking after her accounts. Because she was afraid of injections, her diabetes had gone untreated for years and had resulted in blindness.

  When her husband died, Agnes Runge had been left financially secure. She had received a considerable sum from his life insurance policy, sold the house where Susanne had grown up and taken a room in a comfortable old people’s home, where she enjoyed the best of care - for three thousand euros a month. The management of her finances, which were to pay for this, she had entrusted to her daughter, happy in the belief that Susanne’s clever investments would guarantee her an old age free from worry.

  Instead, she was helping herself. Not to huge sums, no. And she was going to pay everything back as soon as she was in a position to do so. So far she’d taken sixteen hundred euros, four hundred a month. After deducting three hundred for the rent and other costs that came with the flat, she was left with a hundred for food and other necessities such as writing paper, large envelopes, photocopying and postage. She lived mainly on noodles and had to think very carefully before making more than a short journey on the tram. She had gone to Behringer and Partners on foot.

  Four and a half miles in the heat and exhaust fumes. Her mouth was dry and her body soaked in sweat, her blouse was sticking to her sides and her feet aching a little in her black court shoes. But it was bearable, she was hardly conscious of it. Until the moment when the lift doors slid open she was completely occupied with her great hope. A personal interview! Only someone who has gone six months without a wage coming in and two and a half years without health insurance, without pension contributions, only someone whose every job application has been returned with a curt letter of rejection, or not at all, can appreciate what that meant.

  “Are you young, dynamic, motivated?” Behringer and Partners had asked in their advert, declaring, “Then you are the person we are looking for. We can offer… We expect…” At thirty-seven Susanne Lasko didn’t feel old. Her dynamism had probably suffered a little during the last few months, but she was certainly motivated - and she was willing to learn.

  She was a quick learner and she would definitely even be able to cope with a computer as long as she was allowed to get on with it in peace. In her last regular job - three weeks with an insurance company - she’d failed miserably with the word-processing package, because a young colleague had insisted on giving her jokey tips instead of a handbook.

  And foreign languages. At school one of the teachers had realized she had an exceptional gift for languages. They just had to put her next to the child of an Italian immigrant for half an hour and she was speaking the same broken German as if she’d been doing it all her life. Naturally that wasn’t sufficient for business use, nor the little English she’d learned at school either. And apart from a few expressions, she had no knowledge of French at all, which Behringer and Partners also required.

  And that is what she had told them in a detailed, not to say brutally frank application - not, it has to be said, with any great expectations. That they were intervi
ewing her despite that surely justified her great hopes. All the way there she had worked out what she must say to the personnel manager, if there was one. Then for the next few minutes she completely forgot everything she’d prepared.

  She stared at the woman in the pinstripe suit who, for her part, looked her up and down in stunned astonishment. People pushed past them, grumbling or with irritated expressions because they were in the way. No one seemed to notice that by the lift two women were facing each other who looked more alike than some pairs of identical twins. Perhaps the difference in the way they were turned out meant it wasn’t so obvious to others as it was to them.

  For, despite her painful experiences, Susanne well remembered the way she had looked when she had still been in regular employment, suitably dressed with unobtrusive make-up. And presumably Nadia Trenkler would have seen her own face in the mirror when she was going through a bad time herself.

  Nadia was the first to recover her composure. With an exclamation of disbelief and a muttered, “That’s impossible,” she introduced herself and said, smiling, “We must have a coffee and find out which of our fathers is responsible.”

  Susanne couldn’t imagine her father doing anything wrong. He’d been a decent, honest man right up to his sudden and too-early death. She didn’t know Nadia Trenkler’s father, of course, but she did know her own mother very well. For Agnes Runge marital fidelity was an article of faith and what the woman with her face was suggesting was out of the question.

  And she didn’t want to discuss it with Nadia Trenkler. In those first minutes she genuinely didn’t. It had nothing to do with some premonition, it was just the general situation. Nadia Trenkler was clearly at the top of the ladder, of which she desperately needed to clamber onto the bottom rung, if she was to get out of the poverty trap.

  “I’m in a hurry,” she said. “I’ve got a job interview.” This last statement slipped out against her will, perhaps because she had such little opportunity to talk to other people.

  “At Behringer’s?” Nadia asked, surprised.

  Not for one second did Susanne wonder how her double had come to make such an accurate guess. She nodded automatically.

  “It won’t go on for ever,” said Nadia. “I’ll wait.”

  Now Susanne shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want you to wait. I don’t want to have a coffee with you, nor to talk about my father or yours. I don’t want to know who you are. Can’t you understand? It’s enough for me to know who I am.”

  And that was something that was crystal clear to her. If she didn’t get the job as secretary with Behringer and Partners it was more or less the end of the line for her. All that was left for a woman of her age and with her background was hope and the determination not to let herself be ground down. Only unfortunately there was very little in the way of job opportunities.

  The day was coming when she would be compelled to resort to the small ads in the vacancies section of the Saturday paper if she wasn’t going to ruin her mother completely. Cleaner wanted - three hours per week. Waitress required - temporary, two evenings. And that would be the end. It was a matter of simple arithmetic. To keep body and soul together and at least be able to afford health insurance again, she would need several such jobs. That would scarcely leave her any time at all to write applications and go to job interviews. Ignoring Nadia Trenkler, she went to the next lift. The one they were standing by had long since departed.

  “Pity,” she heard the woman with her face say.

  She went up to Behringer’s on the fifth floor, still feeling shabbily dressed, wretched, old and worn-out. A deep-pile carpet, even in the lobby - on it an acrylic-glass desk and behind that a young woman looking like a catalogue illustration for correct business dress. She didn’t look particularly dynamic, in fact she was clearly struggling with the problem of how to explain to someone of Susanne’s appearance that Behringer’s didn’t do properties in the lower price range. The receptionist’s tentative smile froze when Susanne told her she had not come for help in finding an apartment.

  She was still feeling churned-up inside from the brief encounter with her spitting image and the light in which it had made her see herself. She was almost grateful that she was made to wait. It was a good quarter of an hour before she was shown in to see the office manager. He was called Reincke, a pleasant young man with a thin moustache who had familiarized himself with the details of her situation.

  After they had talked about her lack of foreign languages and computer skills, he leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “I don’t want to anticipate any decision the management might come to, Frau Lasko, but what I can say is that we have already discussed your application. There are four others, all from ladies who are younger and—” He broke off, suddenly embarrassed. “We’re looking for someone who will not leave after a short time for family reasons, if you understand what I’m getting at. That does not seem to be a danger in your case. If, then, you were prepared to give up your time during the initial period to acquire the necessary skills… There are, for example, courses in foreign languages in which right from the beginning not a word of German is spoken; you learn very quickly. Naturally we would bear the costs.”

  If was practically a job offer, she thought, hastening to assure him that she would be delighted to devote all her spare time to acquiring the necessary skills. With a pleased smile, Herr Reincke accompanied her to the door of his office. “You’ll be hearing from us very soon,” he promised.

  She was walking on air as she crossed the lobby. The smile she gave the young woman behind the desk was one for a colleague and friend. She looked round, feeling almost as if she belonged there already. The telephone on the acrylic-glass desk rang and one of the office doors opened. Automatically she halted and looked back. The receptionist picked up the receiver and said, “Behringer and Partners. Luici speaking.” A man appeared in the doorway.

  She smiled at him, hoping to catch his eye and thus influence the senior management in her favour. His imposing appearance alone suggested he was important. He was six foot tall, with receding hair. His bulky physique hid most of the luxurious interior of his office and the two visitors sitting at a coffee table. She merited nothing more than an uninterested glance as he turned to the receptionist.

  Frau Luici was saying, “Herr Behringer is in a meeting at the moment, could you try again later?” The tall man asked who it was. Putting her hand over the receiver, Frau Luici whispered, “Hardenberg.”

  “I’ll take it,” said the man, clearly Behringer himself. He positively grabbed the receiver from Frau Luici and asked in effusive tones, “Hi, Philip, what is it?”, in the same breath telling the receptionist to get drinks for his visitors. Frau Luici leaped up and hurried into an adjacent room, presumably a small kitchen.

  Susanne kept her eyes fixed on the giant at the telephone and saw him give a gasp of surprise. Frowning, he gave her a quick look, as if he were surprised she hadn’t moved. “By what devious route did that come to your ears?” he asked, adding, “May I know why you’re so interested in this property?”

  Then he listened, gave a short laugh and said, “That could be done, assuming an appropriate quid pro quo. There are other offers on the table and there’s been water damage recently.” As he listened, he finally gave her a smile. She nodded to him and went to the door, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Out in the street she felt a slight regret that she’d rejected her double’s offer. In her euphoria she felt there’d have been nothing to lose in having a coffee with Nadia Trenkler, perhaps an iced coffee. This heat! Her mouth was still dry, only now did she notice it again. She’d presumably not have had to worry about the fact that she only had a few coppers in her purse. Nadia Trenkler would surely have insisted on paying and might even have driven her home. She wouldn’t have had to inflict another four miles’ wear and tear on her old court shoes.

  It was early evening by the time she reached her dilapidated flat in Kettlerstrasse. One and a half rooms
- she’d managed to squeeze a narrow bed and a similar wardrobe into the “half room” - plus a mini-kitchen with a mini-balcony, a mini-bathroom with shower and the one square yard behind the door that the lease dignified with the name of “vestibule”. A local train rattled past outside. Once the noise had died away, she flung open the window, went into the kitchen and drank two glasses of water.

  At seven she cooked her daily ration of noodles and carefully brushed her teeth as soon as she’d finished: without health insurance, cleaning her teeth was an absolute must. At eight she switched on the TV, stretched out on the couch and dreamed of her future. Once she had a regular income again, had plugged the hole in her mother’s nest egg and put away a little for a rainy day, the first thing she’d do would be to buy a new fridge, then look for a larger, above all quieter flat, perhaps even go away on holiday.

  On Friday she bumped into Heller by the apartment letter boxes. She only knew his surname and he was the only person she was at all acquainted with in the tenement apart from her immediate neighbour, Jasmin Toppler. She got on well with Jasmin, they said hello and exchanged a few words whenever they happened to meet on the stairs. Jasmin Toppler was in her late twenties, an energetic but friendly woman. Heller, on the other hand, was an obnoxious type, whom she tried to avoid. He grasped any opportunity to shower her with abuse. He was about the same age as her and had the front second-floor flat. It was rumoured that he had several convictions for car theft, grievous bodily harm, attempted rape and other offences.

  When she came down the stairs to check her mail, he was standing by the open door, a can of beer in his hand. He heard her footsteps and turned round. He gestured towards the street with his free hand. “One fucking hot motor,” he said. She had no idea what he was talking about and since he regularly applied expressions like “hot” and all variants of “fucking” to her, she ignored him. “An MG,” he declared. “Saw it from the window. The third time it’s driven past. And slowly, as if he was looking for something.”