The Lie
Page 42
There was no reason to refuse, but she couldn’t go with him. His unexpected appearance had triggered off a whirl of contradictory emotions. After all the months, she thought she’d left the worst behind her. But the only things that had really faded were his hands on her throat and the icy cold.
He stayed in the nursery for almost half an hour. Then he came back - holding the baby. He claimed it had been awake. She didn’t believe him for a moment. He sat down in the armchair again, his daughter in his arm.
“If you expect me to apologize, I’m going to have to disappoint you,” he said. “I expect an apology from you.”
“I’ve done nothing I have to apologize for.”
He gave a harsh laugh and, looking down at the baby, said, “No? And what do you call this here? That was the twelfth of September.”
“Or the thirteenth,” she said. “Given the way my life’s gone, I rather assume it was the Friday. And I’ve already told you how it came about. If you’d left me alone on the Thursday it would never have happened.”
He let that go. Getting worked up, he said, “I’ll never understand why she did it. But I would like to know why you agreed to go along with it. What did your think you were doing, getting into bed with a stranger and letting his wife pay you for it? She did pay you, didn’t she? How much did she offer?”
“I’m sure I wasn’t as expensive as your studies,” she said.
With a derisive grin, he declared, “You seem to have learned a lot from her.”
“I hadn’t any choice. Will you go now, please.” She took a step towards him and stretched out her hands for the baby. “Give her to me.”
“No!” He shook his head. “First of all I want an answer. If you were there on the twenty-eighth of November, then it was you in the bath on the Friday morning. And I’m sure she didn’t pay you to tell me you loved me and to hurt yourself with that confession. In that moment why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“And how would you have taken it - in that moment? D’you think you’d have been over the moon?”
She got no answer to that. “Have you any idea,” he asked, “what it feels like to have lived with a stranger, a woman you don’t know, and not notice for weeks? And if there hadn’t been all that nonsense with Jacques, who knows how long it would have gone on for.”
He was too loud, the baby in his arms began to whimper.
“Give her to me,” she asked again.
He didn’t react, but went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “When we came back from Paris, I thought it was the best time we’d ever had together. Everything was different, that was what it was of course. But actually it was the way I’d always wanted things to be with her. I thought she’d finally seen reason. Why didn’t you clear off in Paris, as your ex urged you to? Why did you take the risk of staying with me? You didn’t do it for the money alone, did you?”
She thought she knew what he wanted to hear. But she’d already told him that. And he hadn’t believed her. When she didn’t reply, he took a deep breath. “I don’t even know what to call you.”
“You don’t need to rack your brains over that if you go now.”
He looked at the moaning infant. Finally he got up and handed her the baby. But he didn’t leave, he followed her into the nursery and stood beside the table, watching as she changed its nappy. She decided to leave breast-feeding it until he’d gone. But he still didn’t go and she couldn’t let her child go hungry because of his obstinacy.
He only left the nursery when she put Laura back in the cradle. She stayed there for a moment, waiting for the front door to open and close. There was silence. When she went back into the living room he was standing by the balcony door, looking out. He must have heard her steps, for he turned round. His voice sounded firm, assured, as if he’d thought out what he was going to say carefully. “I’ve let you have what you wanted, her name, even her money. In return, I want the child.”
“Sorry,” she said, “you’re not Rumpelstiltskin.”
He smiled. “No, but I do have a few cards up my sleeve and I’m not going to be done again and certainly not done out of my daughter. We’re not legally divorced. If you want to sue for divorce, I’ll fight for custody of the child - and no holds barred. I wouldn’t hesitate to cite your drink problem or the reason why you lost your job. There’s a whole load of reasons I could give why you’re totally unsuited to bringing up a child.”
“My drink problem?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it. I’ve never had a drink problem. Are you trying to play the macho man? It would have been better if you’d done that with her. You tried to kill me. How do you think a divorce judge will respond to that?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I could tell them who you really are. But I don’t want to do that. I want to…” He broke off and started again. He didn’t know how to put it, he said. It was only the baby that mattered. The baby was very important to him. But it wasn’t just that. He wasn’t going to say he loved her, because he hated lying. He just wanted her to come back and give him a chance to see if he could love her.
During the past few months he’d had plenty of time to think - about his feelings for Nadia, about the two days in September, the Friday morning in November, the time in Paris, which she hadn’t used to make a bid for safety. He didn’t want to live with an illusion, just with the woman whom he had thought all the time was Nadia.
THE SINNER
Petra Hammesfahr
Cora Bender killed a man on a sunny summer afternoon by the lake and in full view of her family and friends. Why? What could have caused this quiet, lovable young mother to stab a stranger in the throat, again and again, until she was pulled off his body? For the local police it was an open-and-shut case. Cora confessed; there was no shortage of witnesses. But Police Commissioner Rudolf Grovian refused to close the file and started his own maverick investigation. So begins the slow unravelling of Cora’s past, a harrowing descent into a woman’s private hell.
Hailed as Germany’s Patricia Highsmith for her bittersweet family crime novels where the innocence of childhood collides with horrors enacted by adults, Petra Hammesfahr has written a dark, spellbinding novel which stayed at the top of the bestseller list for fifteen months.
PRAISE FOR PETRA HAMMESFAHR AND THE SINNER
“The best psychological suspense novel I have read all year.”
Daily Telegraph
“This hauntingly insightful and sensitive German bestseller goes straight to the heart of the greatest mystery of writing about crime: the why.” The Guardian
“Explicit discussions of religious and sexual obsessions set this work apart from standard psychological fare. Dubbed Germany’s answer to Patricia Highsmith, Hammesfahr should win new fans with this novel.” Publishers Weekly
“Demonstrates why she is one of Germany’s bestselling writers of crime and psychological thrillers. It’s grim, delves deep into the human psyche, and keeps you gripped.” The Times
£8.99/$14.95/C$16.50
CRIME PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
ISBN 978-1-904738-25-1
www.bitterlemonpress.com
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in German as Die Lüge by
Wunderlich, Rowohlt Verlag GmbH,
Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2003
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England
© Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2003
English translation © Mike Mitchell, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without written
permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the author and the translator
have been asserted in ac
cordance with the Copyright,
Designs, and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978-1-904-73860-2
Typeset by Alma Books Ltd
Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd,
Reading, Berkshire