The Sinner

by Petra Hammesfahr

  Later on, when she was older but still refused to listen to anyone, least of all to him, Mechthild changed her tune to: "Oh, don't get so het up, Rudi, think of your blood pressure. Girls are like that at her age."

  Having now been married for three years, his daughter was riding roughshod over a nice, conscientious young husband. They'd had a son two years ago, and Rudolf Grovian had hoped she would come to her senses, acknowledge her responsibilities and moderate her demands.

  Only that Saturday he'd been compelled to accept, to his chagrin, that many hopes aren't worth the time devoted to them. He'd spent the afternoon at a birthday party for his wife's sister. His daughter had turned up with their grandson, but not his sonin-law.

  Rudolf Grovian overheard some scraps of conversation between his wife and daughter that aroused his direst fears. The word "attorney" cropped up a number of times, and he wasn't naive enough to persuade himself that a traffic accident or rent dispute was involved.

  He'd made up his mind to have a serious talk with his daughter during the evening, although lie knew it was pointless and would only put his blood pressure up, but he was called away before he got the chance. In his job, it happened from time to time.

  Rudolf Grovian was a detective chief superintendent and head of the homicide division. Age-wise and in other respects he could have been Cora Bender's father. As it was, he was the chief whose questions were taking her back, not forwards - thrusting her slowly but steadily back into the midst of the madness she feared more than death.

  It was a baneful encounter for both parties: the policeman who was an often irritable and sometimes guilt-ridden father in his private life, and the woman who lived with the knowledge that fathers cannot help, and that they only make things worse if they tryy

  Rudolf Grovian might have been more irritable than usual this Saturday, but he set to work with his customary impartiality and detachment.

  As soon as he was informed of the incident at the Otto Maigler Lido, lie drove to police headquarters and sent for all available officers to conduct interviews, even those who did not usually deal with capital offences.

  Although it was the weekend, things moved swiftly. The whole team was distributed around the adjoining interview rooms. Grovian conferred with everyone so as to form an initial impression of the case. His men were careful to mention every last little detail.

  But it all came down to the actual crime. There was no indication of what had prompted the disaster. In such cases, as Grovian knew from experience, the trigger was to be found either in the past or in the nature of the perpetrator. He had never dealt with or heard of a case in which a woman launched a frenzied attack on a total stranger.

  Women drowned their children, brained their husbands in their sleep or poisoned or smothered their invalid mothers in a mood of desperation. Women killed those with whom they were intimately connected, and all that Grovian heard between seven and nine o'clock on Saturday evening seemed to fit the usual pattern.

  The most important statement he obtained came from Georg Frankenberg's friend and colleague Winfried Meilhofer, a fellow physician at the Uniklinik in Cologne. Meilhofer was a down-to-earth person who, despite his shock, indulged in only one remark of a non-factual nature. According to him, the woman had attacked Frankenberg "like an avenging angel".

  Meilhofer himself had felt rooted to the spot and unable to react, he said. Besides, it had looked as if Frankie could cope with the woman by himself. After the first blow, which would definitely not have been fatal, he'd gripped her wrist.

  This was confirmed by the father of the two little girls. "I still don't understand it. A big, strong fellow, he was. He grabbed her, then he let her go! I saw the whole thing quite clearly. She didn't break free - he could easily have hung onto her, but he let her butcher him without lifting a finger. And the way he looked at her! I felt he must know her and know exactly why she was doing it."

  Winfried Meilhofer had merely shrugged when told of the man's supposition that Georg Frankenberg had known or recognized Cora Bender. "Possibly, I don't know Only the husband and child were there when we arrived. The woman turned up later - she'd been swimming, I think. I noticed her because she was staring at Frankie and Ute so oddly. I got the feeling she was startled. But I don't think Frankie spotted her. I was going to point her out to him, but then she sat down and took no more notice of us, and I paid no more attention to her. When it happened, Frankie stared at her and said something, I didn't hear what. I'm sorry I can't tell you more, Chief Superintendent. I'd only known Frankie for two years, and he seemed a quiet, level-headed person. I can't imagine he would have given a woman grounds for such crazy behaviour. `He won't hit you,' she told Ute. Frankie wasn't the type of man to strike a woman. On the contrary, he tended to put them on a pedestal."

  Winfried Meilhofer went on to mention an allusion Frankie had once made to a girl he'd known and fallen head-over-heels in love with as a first-year student. Apparently, the girl had been killed in an accident.

  "He didn't expressly say so," said Meilhofer, "but I gathered from the way he spoke that he was present when the girl died and took a long time to get over it. I don't think he had another affair until six months ago, when he met Ute. Till then he lived for his work."

  Meilhofer went on to recall an incident that typified Georg Frankenberg's attitude to women and his profession. Just over six months ago they had lost a patient, a young woman who died of a pulmonary embolism after a routine operation. You had to accept that such things happened, but Frankie couldn't. He went berserk and broke two of the girl's ribs in his efforts to revive her. Afterwards he got drunk and wouldn't go home.

  Unwilling to leave him on his own, Meilhofer had accompanied him to a bar. Music was playing in the background. Frankie had maundered on about their dead patient and his inability to understand how a young woman could die on them from one minute to the next. Then, quite suddenly, he'd started to talk about his music - about the wild, lost weeks he'd spent playing the drums in a combo. How a friend had talked him into it, what a great mistake it had been and how he would have done better to concentrate on his studies.

  It was hours before he'd allowed Meilhofer to take him home. Once there he reverted to the subject of the girl he'd loved and lost. Then he showed Meilhofer the tape Ute had played beside the lake. He played it too, beating out the rhythm in the air with his fists. "I have to listen to it every night," he said. "When I do, she's here beside me. I can feel her, and when I feel her I can go to sleep."

  A strange man, Georg Frankenberg. Very earnest, very conscientious, subject to occasional bouts of depression and overly fond of fast cars. One might have been forgiven for suspecting that his hold on life was tenuous. Meilhofer had more than once been afraid he wouldn't survive the weekend. Then Ute had jolted him out of his melancholia.

  Having obtained this information about the victim, Rudolf Grovian was hoping to learn something about his killer's background from Gereon Bender. They had offered to drive Cora's husband home out of consideration for the little boy, intending to follow and interview him there.

  Gereon Bender had vehemently opposed this. He didn't want to be the great exception among the witnesses. Go home with a police escort? Impossible! If everyone else had been summoned to headquarters, he insisted on going there too. The child would present no problem, he said, nor did he. The little boy was very good. He sat on his father's knee, nibbling a biscuit, and only once asked for his mother. "Where's Mummy?"

  The child's piping voice lodged in Rudolf Grovian's memory for days, like a thorn in his flesh. "I've no idea why she snapped so suddenly," Gereon Bender told him. "I don't have a clue. All she ever said about her past was something about an accident. We didn't have any problems, though. She clashed with my father occasionally because she wouldn't knuckle under to him. She always got her way, and she always said she was very happy with me." The latter statement didn't entirely accord with the facts.

  Berrenrath, the uniformed constab
le who had been one of the first to reach the scene of the crime, had overheard something of interest. When Cora Bender was being shepherded away from Georg Frankenberg's body, her husband had shouted and sworn at her. Quite unruffled, she'd turned to him and said: "I'm sorry, Gereon, I should never have married you. I knew what I was carrying around inside me. Now you're rid of me. You would have been in any case, after today. I was going for a swim."

  An informative remark, Rudolf Grovian thought. He had drawn his own conclusions from it and collated some points that seemed to confirm them: two independent allusions to an "accident" in years gone by and two statements which, although dependent on personal impressions, reinforced his suspicion that the victim and his killer had met before that afternoon at the Otto Maigler Lido.

  It didn't at first occur to Grovian that Georg Frankenberg's reaction to the attack on himself might simply have stemmed from shock and surprise. He proceeded on the obvious assumption.

  When he confronted Cora Bender shortly after nine o'clock, he saw a tremulous picture of misery with a bruised and bloodstained face, one eye swollen shut and the other flickering with unadulterated panic. "She'll sing like a canary, chief," Berrenrath had told him. "She insists on confessing - wants to get it off her chest. She tidied up your office. If I'd let her, she'd have waxed and polished the floor for you." Berrenrath's knowledge of human nature was generally reliable.

  Grovian had taken it for granted that she would promptly burst into tears and implore his sympathy - that she would supply a rational motive for her act by recounting the tragic story of a love affair that had turned out to be a big mistake - or something of the kind.

  Within minutes, however, he was finding it hard to preserve the studiously calm and affable manner that had always served him so well. He had a momentary urge to thump the desk with his fist and call her to order. "Does that answer your question fully enough?" What cheek!

  She sat facing him like a block of granite. He couldn't see her heart thumping or the reddish-grey mist in her brain. She still hadn't answered his last question. It seemed she was going to make good her threat: "That's all I'm saying." He waited for her expression to match the words and harden. But it didn't.

  The tension on her battered face abruptly eased, her gaze turned inwards, the hands on her lap relaxed their iron grip and lay there as though forgotten. For a minute or two she was just a nice young woman in a white T-shirt, denim skirt and sandals, the next-door neighbour to whom one would happily entrust one's children for a few hours, the heart and soul of her father-in-law's family firm, worn out after a hard day's work.

  He eyed her irresolutely and addressed her twice by name. She didn't respond. For a moment he felt an uneasy chill run down his spine. The contusions on her face disturbed him. There was something not quite right about her, despite her repeated denials - that was beyond question, although he ascribed this more to her physical than her mental state. He couldn't see that her mind was balancing on a knife-edge. But several hard punches to the head...

  "I thought he was going to kill her," Winfried Meilhofer had said. Grovian couldn't exclude the possibility that she'd sustained some internal injury that was manifesting itself only now, several hours after the event. One occasionally heard of such things happening after a fight. If she collapsed in his office ...

  He shouldn't have relied on what she'd said. The woman did need a doctor. She probably needed one that would also sound her out on her putative intention to commit suicide.

  Although it wasn't like him to pass the buck, he suddenly wished the district attorney had come and made the decision for him. Carry on questioning her, remand her in custody or take her to the nearest hospital, have her head X-rayed so as to preclude any subsequent charges of negligence.

  The DA was engaged on another case. A man had been arrested in a Cologne bar on suspicion of having split open his girlfriend's skull with an axe. The DAs response to Grovian's phone call had been faintly indignant: "I'm in the middle of an interrogation. I'll come and pick up the papers tomorrow morning. When you're through with the woman, take her to the examining magistrate in Briihl. All clear so far?"

  Nothing was clear so long as she disclaimed all knowledge of her victim. However, the witnesses' statements would be sufficient for the examining magistrate. Everything else could be left to an expert psychologist. One was bound to be called in. Let him break his teeth on her.

  Something inside Rudolf Grovian urged him to offload her as soon as possible. There was something about her that not only infuriated but - although he would never have admitted it - disconcerted him. The longer he remained silent, the more clearly he felt it: a first smidgen of doubt. What if she were telling the truth?

  Nonsense! A respectable wife and mother, stabbing a total stranger for some trivial reason? Out of the question.

  She was toying with her wedding ring. A residue of dried blood was still visible under her fingernails. She began to dig it out. Her hands started trembling again. She raised her head and looked at him. A child's expression, helpless and forlorn.

  "Did you ask me something?"

  "Yes," he said, "I did, but you seem to be past concentrating. I think we'd better call it a night, Frau Bender. We'll talk again tomorrow"

  That was the best solution. She might be more amenable after a night in the cells. Equally, she might use the time for another attempt to carry out her original intention. Going for a swim, indeed! But there were other methods. He would have to instruct his men to watch her incessantly. The smallest pointer in that direction would clinch the matter as far as he was concerned. Like when his daughter announced her intention of getting married. He'd breathed a sigh of relief and told himself: "Peace at last."

  "No, no," she said quickly, "I'm fine. It's just that there are so many things going through my head at the same time." The tremor in her hands intensified, communicating itself to her arms and shoulders. "Forgive me for not being with it. I couldn't help thinking of my husband. It really upset him. I've never seen him so angry."

  She sounded as if she'd put a dent in his bumper. Noticeably flagging now, she stared at her hands. She seemed wholly intent on preserving her composure. He wondered what would happen if she lost it. A fit of weeping? The truth at last? Or a repetition of the scene beside the lake?

  His doubts recurred, somewhat more pronounced this time. What the devil was she? A young woman suddenly confronted by some distasteful reminder of her past, or one of those walking time bombs that convey a normal, innocuous impression for years on end, only to explode for no discernible reason? Would she attack him?

  He was closer to her than his sidekick, Inspector Werner Hoss: the man in the sports coat, who was seated behind his desk like a graven image. Hoss was duty officer tonight, and he wasn't normally as reticent. But then, he normally agreed with everything Grovian said. Not this time, though.

  When the three of them had been standing outside the door - when Berrenrath had predicted that the woman would sing like a canary, and Grovian briefly outlined his opinion of what had happened, based on his assessment of the witnesses' statements - Floss had shaken his head. "I don't know It would have to be one hell of a coincidence. A woman is unhappy in her marriage and plans to kill herself. Just then, she bumps into someone she once had an affair with. I can imagine something inside her snapping when she was confronted by what the Frankenbergs were up to."

  Cora's voice jolted Grovian out of his deliberations. "Please might I have some coffee now?" she asked in a timid, humble voice.

  He felt tempted to refuse. No, no coffee until we've wrapped this up. Come on, young woman, tell us what's going on in your head. You can't act as if you'd merely swatted a wasp that was trying to snack on your ice cream. You meant to drown yourself out there, didn't you? But a man had to die first. The man was young - he'd made it his vocation to save lives - and you attacked him like a rabid dog. Why?

  Instead, he asked: "Would you like something to eat as well?"

  "
No thanks," she said quickly. `Just some coffee, please. I've got a headache, but it isn't too bad- I mean, I'm in full possession of my faculties. You needn't think I'll claim I was in such a state I didn't know what I was doing or saying."

  Her assertion was inaccurate. She felt like someone on a roller coaster. Her thoughts roamed from Gereon to her father, from her father to her mother, from her mother to Magdalena, from Magdalena to the subject of guilt. She didn't want any coffee, just a breather in which to estimate the height of the mountain that had so suddenly loomed up in front of her.

  Too much was happening all at once. She was overwhelmed with old memories and new impressions. Nothing remained of the peace and contentment, the boundless relief of those first few minutes. It wasn't over - she hadn't filled that yawning hole. Still in the midst of it, she seemed to feel its black walls steadily converging on her.

  "How long have you had this headache?"

  Rudolf Grovian rose to his feet with a mixture of resignation and reawakening professional ambition. It was a question of intuition and experience. He must carry on! Her voice, demeanour and sudden submissiveness were familiar to him - he'd encountered them a hundred times before. First they acted defiant, then they recognized the hopelessness of their position and tried to gauge, by making some innocuous request, how much goodwill they'd already squandered.

  He went over to the coffee machine, took the jug and held it under the tap. Behind him he could hear her tremulous breathing.

  "Only a few minutes. But it really isn't too bad."

  "So you didn't have it at the lido?"

  "No."

  "We ought to call a doctor and get him to look at your injuries," he suggested.

  "No!" She spoke like a stubborn child refusing to put on a warm scarf. "I don't want a doctor, and if I don't want one, you can't call one. Doctors can't examine people against their will. That would be common assault."