The Lie

by Petra Hammesfahr

  He didn’t like Blasting’s answer. “Frau Trenkler can’t do that,” he protested, “she can hardly stand up herself. And Hardenberg needs help too. He’s got a couple of broken ribs.” Again he listened, looking at her with an embarrassed grin on his face. Finally he handed the mobile back to her. “He wants to talk to you again.”

  “Listen, Nadia,” Blasting said. “The men will help you get Frau Barthel and Hardenberg in the car.”

  “Are they police?”

  “They’re from my department. You drive the other two to the nearest hospital.”

  “Why did they let Zurkeulen go?”

  “Do I really have to explain that to you, Nadia? Now do as I say. Hardenberg’s to tell the doctors they were attacked while they were out for an evening walk. That kind of thing. He’ll think up something.”

  “I want to get out of here.”

  “Nadia!” Wolfgang Blasting’s voice took on a sharp tone. “Pull yourself together. You’ve held your nerve so far. It was really something the way you let Michael get that toy. He almost had a stroke when he realized what he had in his hand. But you were fantastic, both of you. And you can manage the rest. Hand me back to Schneider.”

  Schneider said he could take Hardenberg and Frau Barthel to the hospital himself but Blasting wouldn’t have it. Schneider gave in, rang off and told his colleagues the boss needed them to help clear up. Then he turned back to her and, with flattery and high praise for her iron nerve, repeated Wolfgang Blasting’s order.

  “I’ll go with you as far as the hospital. You drive behind and if there’s a problem, flash your headlights.”

  Helga didn’t move, even when two of the men lifted her off the sofa and carried her down to the garage. Helped by Schneider, Hardenberg managed to get to his feet and, with a glance full of hatred at her, let himself be led outside. The two men carefully lay Helga down on the rear seat of the dark-blue Mercedes, then Schneider helped Hardenberg into the passenger seat, handed her the keys and got into Helga’s green Golf. His two colleagues went over to the building site opposite where they’d left their car.

  As she sat down in the driver’s seat, Philip Hardenberg said, in a strained voice, “If she dies, you’re going to die too.” What followed made it clear that he, like everyone else, assumed she was Nadia. He was beside himself with fury and went on at her uninterruptedly, as if he’d just been waiting for the opportunity, revealing things he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to know.

  Somehow she managed to follow the Golf and listen as well. Several times she was tempted to flash her lights to get Schneider to stop because she felt she couldn’t stand it any longer. At the same time she knew Hardenberg wouldn’t repeat what he’d said if Schneider or anyone else was listening.

  “You and your blasted fad for playing the good Samaritan,” he said. “First of all a poor student, then this bimbo. Is that the lot? Oh no, there’s the inventor genius, he enjoyed your largesse too. They go down on their knees before you if they get a few crumbs from your table. You need that, don’t you? A good deed now and then and you feel like Lady Bountiful.”

  He could hardly speak for the pain and every sentence he managed to squeeze out made it clear she should have been dead long ago. He’d intended to get rid of her on the last Wednesday in November. That would have been the best opportunity - in his opinion. There would have been at least two dozen witnesses to her encounter with Zurkeulen in the bank, consequently the police would have concentrated their enquiries on Zurkeulen.

  He’d intended to exploit the opportunity, without bothering to let Nadia in on his plan. After Zurkeulen had turned up with a few stupid questions in his office that Wednesday morning, Hardenberg had gone to Kettlerstrasse in the evening. Unfortunately he hadn’t been able to get into her flat. His duplicate key didn’t fit any more and she hadn’t come to the door - of course, at that time she’d been waiting for Nadia at the station.

  On the Thursday Nadia had got him to agree to two more pleasant days for her stand-in, he went on. She’d said it fitted in nicely because she had appointments for the Thursday afternoon and Friday anyway and had to be away overnight. But there had certainly been no mention of a large, airy apartment and a good job with Alfo Investment after the child was born.

  Nadia appeared not to have mentioned the fact that her stand-in was pregnant. She’d just promised to get rid of the problem herself - after her return on the Friday evening. He could still kick himself, he said, for having agreed to that. Nadia, he claimed, hadn’t dreamed of keeping her word. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her at the airport on Friday evening, nor of the Lasko woman.

  “Did you warn her?” he hissed. “Of course you did. I waited for more than an hour in the car park. Then I went to her flat, but she wasn’t there either. Instead I got into a fight with that drunken sot.” And Heller hadn’t let himself be dispatched without resistance. Hardenberg had had to take some hefty blows from him, so that Zurkeulen’s thug had only had to tap him to leave him with a few broken ribs.

  It didn’t sound as if Hardenberg had ever seen Nadia without her clothes on. It had been about money, that was all. From the moment Nadia had told him about the woman she’d encountered by the lift, he’d had only one thing on his mind: the millions he could get men like Zurkeulen, who weren’t exactly on Christmas-card terms with the taxman, to entrust to the dependable hands of the woman they would know as Susanne Lasko.

  It was clear that Nadia hadn’t been immediately enthused by his plan. She’d already come unstuck once before and didn’t want to put her marriage at risk. Hardenberg assumed “the Lasko woman” had never found out that her identity was being used to defraud investors. As Dieter had said, they only needed her ID cards, and they were easy to procure. You just went to the passport office etc. with new photos and claimed you’d lost your handbag.

  But Nadia always knew better, he went on, and didn’t want to arouse her husband’s suspicions when she stayed away overnight. That Michael would make love to his stand-in wife was something she hadn’t reckoned with. Nor was she happy with it.

  “I told you straight away it wouldn’t work. You can’t let a woman you don’t know stay in your house and not expect her to have a snoop around. She wasn’t half as stupid as you thought. Or did you let her in on our scheme on that Thursday in order to dump me? Yes, you did, admit it. There’s no other explanation. You got together with that woman because you’re never satisfied. You wanted me out of the way. I should have known you weren’t to be trusted. I should have suspected something like that was going on when I found your letters in that woman’s cupboard.

  “Perhaps I can do something to change that,” he said, imitating Nadia’s way of speaking. “How did you think it was going to work? She’d have been more than happy with half a million, wouldn’t she? You wouldn’t have had to split the proceeds with her. You sent her to the office to get the laptop. You gave her my address. You were counting on Zurkeulen getting rid of me. Where’s his money? I was in Luxembourg and it wasn’t there. But you can’t do that and get away with it, not with me, you damn bitch.”

  “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 smili
ng 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 th
ings 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.