The Lie

by Petra Hammesfahr

  “It’s not that sudden,” she said. “It reappeared a while ago. I just didn’t want you to get worked up about it and stop me going on the sunbed. I’m sure it’s harmless. Your skin changes during pregnancy, that’s all. Everything changes then.”

  “Yes, he said with a laugh, “even your immunity to airsickness.”

  On Wednesday morning, while Michael was in the bath, she thought about ringing Dieter and asking how things stood. But before she could bring herself to lift the receiver - perhaps to be told it was high time she disappeared - Michael came back into the bedroom.

  They went to see Phil and Pamela one more time and had lunch with them. Phil gave her a farewell kiss on the cheek. Pamela hugged her and told her she must ring often and keep her informed about how the baby was doing.

  Their plane went in the early afternoon. She might perhaps have had one last chance of disappearing in the airport throng, on the excuse of going to the toilet. But he would probably have accompanied her there and waited by the door. And she didn’t really want to get away any more, not after the last few days.

  Again it was a Boeing 737 and again it transformed her into a bundle of misery. With the stimulant the doctor had prescribed, it wasn’t as bad as on the outward journey, but it was bad enough. Michael’s concern was touching.

  Only after they’d landed did he tell her that he’d phoned Wolfgang Blasting that morning, while she was in the shower. They were already in the car park and he was putting the suitcases in the boot as he told her, “Wolfgang wants to talk to you himself, right away. He thinks you were incredibly lucky to get away from those guys in the car with the Frankfurt number.”

  Through her information the police had quickly found the owner of the black limousine. In former times Markus Zurkeulen had been a big noise in the Frankfurt underworld. More recently his influence had been seriously reduced by East-European gangs. That was presumably why he’d decided to retire, selling a number of establishments in the red-light district to a Russian - officially for a derisory sum. The actual value, Wolfgang Blasting had told Michael, would be around five-and-a-half million. He now appeared to be assuming they were just dealing with an investor who’d been swindled.

  Michael didn’t say whether he took the same view, but during the journey home he made it clear that he still had doubts about her version, namely that Susanne Lasko was the culprit. How did she think she could convince him of that when he’d seen her in the bank in Nassau? And how could a sweet-shop assistant have managed to transfer five-and-a-half million to the Bahamas? Wolfgang Blasting had told him that morning that Susanne Lasko had originally worked in banks, but her contacts wouldn’t have gone much beyond the next branch of the local savings bank, Michael said. If Susanne Lasko had ever had anything to do with investment advice, then at most she would have recommended a few government bonds. How could such a woman have persuaded a streetwise gangland boss to take up a particular investment and then cleaned him out?

  He didn’t even suspect how close he was to the actual facts. And he was sure Wolfgang Blasting saw things in the same way. “Wolfgang told me he’d gathered some interesting information on Susanne Lasko, though he preferred not to go into it over the telephone. Nor did he want me to tell you anything. It would spoil the element of surprise, he said, he can’t wait to see your face. Tell him how it really was, Nadia. Give him what he wants. Do it for us and for the baby. All he wants is to put Hardenberg behind bars for investment fraud and Zurkeulen for tax evasion. I’m convinced he’ll make sure you get away with a suspended sentence. There’s always that arrangement whereby people who agree to give evidence get a reduced sentence or even get off scot-free.”

  Even when they’d reached the country road lined with young trees he was still begging her to be sensible. It was too late for that. It would have been sensible to have said to Pamela in one of the little shops on Monday, “I just have to go to the toilet.” And then to slip out by the back door. Michael would probably have understood that.

  He was still going on at her as he turned into Marienweg. If she really loved him, now was the time to prove it. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even listen to him any more. The element of surprise, she thought. Interesting information. Yes, the most interesting information was probably the result of the DNA test. That Wolfgang Blasting didn’t want to go into that on the telephone was understandable.

  You didn’t tell a man on the telephone that the woman he was travelling with wasn’t his wife. You just made sure the man brought the wrong woman back with him. So that she could be handcuffed and taken to face the charges against her.

  Part Five

  She felt terribly sick as she went into the hall. She just managed to climb the stairs to freshen up a bit. Less than half an hour later Wolfgang Blasting was in the living room. He had been burrowing away while they’d been in Paris. It took a while before she realized what he was saying and that it wasn’t all over. He still had no idea who he was talking to. All he’d done was to fill out the picture.

  He didn’t think it necessary to pass his information on to the murder squad, he said. He wouldn’t put it past them to go rushing round like bulls in a china shop. It really wasn’t a case for simple-minded detectives and, anyway, he wanted to keep her out of the firing line. And not just out of neighbourly feeling. He wanted something from her, first and foremost access to her computer. The CDs were quite nice, he said with a grin, but not what he needed to nail Hardenberg and Zurkeulen.

  “I can understand that you had certain concerns and therefore only copied harmless files,” he said. “But you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, Nadia. I’ll have a look at everything and immediately forget anything that in any way incriminates you. OK?”

  She just nodded. The knot in her insides gradually loosened, allowing her to breathe more easily. Wolfgang Blasting went on. From what he had found out so far, there was nothing to suggest a sweet-shop assistant could not have transferred five-and-a-half million abroad on Hardenberg’s behalf. The Lasko woman, as he commented disparagingly, but with a certain respect, had gone about it very cleverly.

  She’d been leading some kind of double life. On the one hand there was the retiring, poorly-off Susanne Lasko known to her mother and her neighbours in Kettlerstrasse. “But,” Blasting went on, “there were some clothes lying around which an out-of-work woman couldn’t afford. She’d only had a proper job for a short time after her divorce. No one knows what she lived on after that, but it must have been regular work. At least she behaved as if it was, went out in the morning, came back in the late afternoon and paid the same measly little amount into her bank account every month. Until January. In August she opened a second account and immediately the money started rolling in. She opened it with twenty thousand in cash, applied for a credit card straight away, paid for her purchases with it, for hired cars. The last was a burgundy Rover 600. It was parked two streets away from her flat. The guys in the murder squad have taken it in. That knocks the story of a car borrowed from an acquaintance on its head.”

  He gave her a grin, a friendly one. “Heller didn’t dream up those fancy cars. In October she twice hired a Jaguar and earlier, in September, she had a Mercedes for two days. From the mileage she did she must have used it to go to Luxembourg; Zurkeulen’s money was paid in there on the twelfth. The usual trick: take a briefcase across a frontier where there are no checks any longer. You don’t take five-and-a-half million on a plane. We don’t yet know when she was in Nassau. She never left from a German airport, my guess is she drove to Amsterdam or somewhere when she had to fly. A really clever girl. But presumably she was following Hardenberg’s instructions. And he’ll have lent her his Porsche now and then.”

  And in Wolfgang Blasting’s opinion Susanne Lasko knew perfectly well she was getting involved in something risky. “She took special driving lessons,” he said. “From a stuntman. And oddly enough, the reason she gave for needing them corresponded precisely to her work: acting as a courier.�
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  It was incredible how well her fabrications were working out in retrospect - for Nadia. Michael was listening, head bowed. Wolfgang Blasting went on: now the murder squad were assuming it was all to do with drug smuggling. Was it Dettmer who’d given them the idea - drug crime was his area after all? It was impossible to say, but as long as they believed that, they couldn’t do any harm. The investigation into the Heller murder had come to an impasse.

  “I believe it’s possible,” Blasting said, “that Heller had to be got rid of because he’d seen Hardenberg with the Lasko woman. Hardenberg must have gone to see her in her flat more than once. But we’ll look into that when we’ve sorted the rest out. Can I come and work on your computer tomorrow?”

  “No problem,” she said, only with difficulty keeping her tone casual. The Lasko woman! Perhaps that was what really made it clear to her what it meant to live as Nadia Trenkler. Disowning her own self.

  Wolfgang Blasting left. Michael saw him out, then came back and looked at her with a pained expression on his face. “I’m sorry. I really am terribly sorry, darling.”

  He didn’t have to explain what he was being sorry about, after the sermon he’d given her on the way home. On 12 September Susanne Lasko had been on her travels and Nadia Trenkler at home. It all came back to him now. It had been a great evening and a fantastic afternoon on 13 September. He had wrongly suspected her. That the bank she’d gone to while they were on holiday on the Bahamas had been the very bank where Zurkeulen’s money had been deposited - pure coincidence. “Can you forgive me?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You’ve forgiven me a thing or two in the past. Am I wrong, or would you even have been able to accept the fact that I’d killed someone?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave an embarrassed smile. “I don’t know. At first I thought I could never come to terms with that. Then I thought, every child needs its mother. And now I’m just glad I don’t have to wrestle with that problem any longer… Will you make us something to eat? Escalope, but just with mushrooms. Then we’ll have a swim. It’ll do you good.”

  “No,” she said. “Then we’ll go to bed. That’ll do me even more good.”

  It was almost midnight when Michael finally put out the light. He quickly fell asleep. She lay there a while. She could feel the ring he’d put on her finger in Paris. Somehow it seemed to mean he belonged to her now. Then she thought of her mother and briefly of Dieter, who was probably surprised or concerned that she hadn’t rung him from Romania during the last few days. Telling herself she’d ring him in the morning, she fell into a troubled sleep shortly after one. At some point she was woken by a familiar sound. The metallic click of the central locking as the alarm system was switched off.

  There was a slight difference in sound between switching on and switching off, and by now she’d heard it often enough. Once it had been Andrea, mostly it was Michael. At first she didn’t wake fully but dozed on, assuming it was early morning and he was setting off for the lab. It was the muffled cry that didn’t fit into that and suddenly she was completely awake. As she sat up, she felt Michael still beside her.

  It was dark in the bedroom, the door out onto the landing closed. Clumping steps were coming up the stairs. Someone was making sure they were heard. She shook his shoulder and whispered, “Michael, wake up, there’s someone in the house.” A narrow strip of yellow appeared under the door. A movement sensor had activated the landing light. She shook his shoulder again, more vigorously this time, and whispered more urgently, “Michael.”

  He didn’t move until the door opened. A bright beam of light swept round the room and settled on her face, dazzling her. From the landing came the sound of a stifled exclamation, followed by a hoarse voice saying, “Will you shut your trap.” There was a sound like a groan and a dull thump. The bright light meant she couldn’t make anything out, but it became clear what was happening when she heard Markus Zurkeulen’s voice saying, in reproving tones, “Must you be so impetuous, Ramon?”

  Finally Michael sat up beside her, blinking in the light. “What’s going—”

  The hoarse voice broke in. “Take it easy, mister. One false move and I’ll blow your brains out.”

  The two of them were standing in the doorway. She only recognized them when the ceiling light went on. With a polite smile, Markus Zurkeulen came closer. Ramon stayed where he was. Michael made a sideways movement, as if to pick up the telephone beside the bed. Ramon told him not to do anything stupid. “Otherwise it’s curtains for you.”

  Once more Zurkeulen reproved his companion and suggested he adopt a different tone, pointing out that a serious conversation was impossible in that kind of crude German. “I’m trying my hardest to teach him good manners. Unfortunately his poor upbringing keeps coming through.” His polite tone was almost worse than the gun Ramon had in his right hand.

  She was sitting there, upright and naked, and all she could do was stare at the gun. She felt as if she’d been transported back into the second bank robbery and the muck of the abandoned factory. Michael took the sheet, pulled it over her breasts and pressed her hands to it. “Get out,” he ordered Zurkeulen.

  “Certainly,” Zurkeulen replied, as he got to the bed. His eyes were still fixed on Michael, not on her. “It is not in my own interest to take up too much of your time.” He emphasized the “your”. “If you would be so good as to leave me alone with the lady for a few minutes.”

  “Certainly not,” Michael said, placing his arm protectively round her shoulders. “And you’re running out of time. The police should be here any minute. The silent alarm goes direct to the station.”

  Without warning, Zurkeulen took a swing at him with the back of his hand, splitting open Michael’s lower lip. “How unfortunate,” said Zurkeulen, looking at his hand. “I’m afraid I don’t always have my reflexes under control. It must be because I can’t stand people trying to pull the wool over my eyes.”

  She saw and heard everything, but she was incapable of thought. Being constantly dragged backwards and forwards between apparent security and acute danger had so worn her down that she could have wished herself back in one-and-a-half rooms with no prospects. The encounters with Heller on the stairs had been easier to put up with and, above all, she’d known where she was with him.

  Zurkeulen told his companion to take Herr Trenkler to the bathroom. The swelling on his lip, he said, would not be so bad if he bathed it in cold water. Given the gun that had long since been pointing at him, Michael realized he had no chance against the two men. He got out of bed but didn’t go to the bathroom, he went to the dressing room instead. Before opening the door, he said to Zurkeulen, “Don’t you dare touch my wife.”

  With a smile, Zurkeulen enquired, “Are you absolutely certain this lady is your wife?”

  Michael spun round and stared, first at Zurkeulen, then at her. Ramon grinned and licked his lips with relish. She couldn’t even breathe as she felt the blood seep out of her brain.

  “I recently had the pleasure of meeting another lady who insisted she was Nadia Trenkler and was unable to help me for that very reason,” Zurkeulen explained.

  “You killed that woman!” Michael whispered, but in the tense atmosphere it echoed like thunder in her ears.

  “No, no,” said Zurkeulen, “I would never think of killing a woman. There are too many pleasant things one can do with a woman.” He ran his eye over her face and her hands clutching the sheet to her breast. “Now may I ask you to grant me a few minutes with your wife?”

  He pointed to the dressing room and jerked his head at his companion. Then he came round the bed and looked down at her, a smile on his face. “Nadia Trenkler,” he said, following it with a sigh. “If your husband’s convinced of that, then I suppose I’ll have to accept it. Presumably a man will sense whom he’s sharing his bed with.”

  He sat down beside her. Ramon was still standing in the doorway. He looked almost as if he was expecting a special performance he didn’t want to miss. />
  “Ramon.” Zurkeulen was insistent. “Will you please go and keep an eye on Herr Trenkler. I would like to ensure he doesn’t do anything stupid.” Then he grasped her wrists and pulled her hands and the sheet down. The smile stayed as his eye moved downwards from her face. “Pretty,” he said. His eye was followed by a hand in a black leather glove. “And very sensitive, aren’t they?”

  She didn’t feel it at all, her attention was entirely focused on Ramon as he crossed the room and went into the dressing room with the gun. And the red stain on the manager’s shirt quickly spread. “No!” she cried. “Leave my husband alone. If you—”

  Zurkeulen put his other hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he said. All was quiet in the dressing room. Gradually she felt the leather on her left breast, the painful pressure of his hand. “You’re hurting me.”

  He squeezed harder. “That’s my intention. It could get even more painful. It’s up to you whether it does or not.”

  Perhaps it was the pain that kept the panic at bay. Perhaps it was the certainty that Zurkeulen wouldn’t hesitate for one moment to kill her - and Michael, and the person who’d helped him get into the house and must be lying on the landing. She was convinced it was Jo. He hadn’t returned the house key and he knew how to operate the alarm system.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Six million.”

  It would definitely have been more sensible to say, “OK, I’ll give you the money.” For Nadia it would have been more sensible, not for her. “We haven’t got that much in the house,” she said. “Have a look if you don’t believe me. The safe’s in the loft, I’m sure my husband will be glad to open it.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. And as he’d done to Michael, he struck out unexpectedly with his left hand again, so hard that she flew back into the pillows. She could taste blood, her lip was swelling. At the same time his right hand squeezed her breast so hard she couldn’t repress a cry.