But making that clear to her wasn't his job any more. As for what Johannes Frankenberg had told them, the court would have to decide. "My son wasn't to blame for this ..."
Innocent he undoubtedly was. Grovian remembered what Grit Adigar had said about Magdalena's beauty and nature's way of compensating for her physical defects. Unfortunately, nature had failed to allow for her willpower, which had lured a man to his doom. Grovian could only see the matter in that light. Had lie been able to, he would have given Magdalena a piece of his mind. To him, she was on a par with the irresponsible idiots who choose a stretch of motorway on which to end their lives and those of a few innocent victims.
Georg Frankenberg had been a serious young man who only pursued his hobby at weekends. And because his parents disapproved, he and his two friends devoted themselves to their passion in secret at his grandmother's house in Wedel, a Hamburg suburb.
That house, his mother's parental home, had been empty for months. It was on the market, but no prospective buyer had yet been willing to pay the asking price. Georg often drove there at weekends to check that all was well - or so he said, but his mother had long suspected that he was motivated by something more than filial duty.
There was this friend of his, the tubby little youth from Bonn, Ottmar Denner. Georg had brought him to Frankfurt on two occasions, and Fran Frankenberg hadn't cared for the sly, selfindulgent look in his eye. Then came that Saturday in May ...
Frau Frankenberg had made several attempts to reach her son at his student digs in Cologne but without success. Shortly after midday she called the house in Wedel, and who should answer the phone but Ottmar Denner!
"Hey, Billy-Goat!" he blurted out. `About time too! I thought you'd sunk without trace again. I've been waiting for you to call for a good hour. Get a move on and pick up a bottle of hooch on the way, Frankie forgot again. We'll get some coke this evening - make a real night of it. Hey, man, cat got your tongue?"
Frau Frankenberg had hung up without a word and insisted on driving to Hamburg right away. "I knew something was wrong," she told her husband, "but this is too much. You're going to give Georg a serious talking-to."
They got there at two in the morning. The front door was open. Georg was sitting on the cellar floor with a naked girl's bloodstained head in his lap, saying over and over again: "She wouldn't breathe, she wouldn't! She suddenly stopped breathing."
Johannes Frankenberg didn't understand what his son meant. Although badly injured and unconscious, the girl with her head on Frankie's lap was definitely alive -just! His wife didn't realize that another girl must have been there until she noticed a second heap of discarded clothes. It wasn't until three days later that Georg revealed that Hans Bueckler and Ottmar Denner had removed her naked body shortly before his parents arrived.
Denner and Bueckler had wanted to take Cora too, but Georg wouldn't let them. "I didn't kill the girl," he kept insisting. "She suddenly stopped breathing."
Heart failure, thought Grovian, or the exertion had proved too much for her aneurysm, and it burst. At all events, it had been a natural death - and possibly, from Magdalena's point of view, a happy one. Frankie had given her what she'd always wanted.
What Cora Bender had described sounded like an attempt to resuscitate her. Grovian was reminded of the young female patient Winfried Meilhofer had mentioned, the one whose ribs Frankie had broken because lie couldn't come to terms with her death. Perhaps he had seen her as a second Magdalena. The Saviour, thought Grovian. That's what he had been. He had delivered Magdalena from her sufferings and Cora from her burden of responsibility. But he couldn't rid her of her sense of guilt. On the contrary, his death had rendered her guilty under the law
She was still weeping. Over an hour went by before she finally turned to him and asked: "How could anyone forget such a thing?"
He shrugged. "Frau Bender, you must speak to Professor Burthe about that. Ask him; I'm sure he'll be able to explain it."
"But I'm asking you. How could I forget such a thing?"
"It happens to a lot of people," he said after a moment or two. "You often encounter it after an accident. All they remember is that they were approaching a road junction. They've no idea what happened after that."
`Approaching a road junction," she murmured. "Or driving home just before eleven at night." She started shaking her head again. She was silent for several minutes. The next time she spoke there was a trace of bitterness in her voice. "Five years!"
She heaved a tremulous sigh. "For five years I believed I'd killed my sister. Everyone thought so. My father, Margret, Grit. No, not Grit. She always said she didn't think me capable of it. But she also said she didn't think I'd taken drugs, when I only had to look at my arms to believe it whether I wanted to or not."
Abruptly, she flung her arm out sideways. It landed on top of the steering wheel.
"Careful, Frau Bender!" he yelled. His palms went moist. The speedometer was reading ninety. The crash barrier loomed on their left, a column of trucks on their right.
She took no notice and left the arm where it was. "Why did he do it?"
He slowed down gradually, unable to decelerate fast without risking a collision with the driver behind. Then he took hold of her arm and replaced it on her lap. "Don't do that again unless you mean to kill us both."
"Why did he do it?" she repeated.
"You must know that."
"No!" she snapped. "I don't know why. He didn't have to make a mess of my arms to put Frankie in the clear. He need only have said I'd walked out in front of his car. I so dearly wished it had been a normal accident. He also said I had vaginal lesions. I can't have had; Johnny didn't rape me. Why did he tell me such a thing? My God, I can still hear him: `The circumstances and nature of your injuries allow of only one conclusion.' Why did he say that?"
She was absolutely beside herself. He wished she would calm down. He couldn't pull over onto the hard shoulder: there wasn't a gap between the trucks. "You must know why, Frau Bender."
"Yes, I do, but I want to hear if you know too. Go on, tell me. Go on! I've got to hear it once from someone else. It doesn't help if I only think it."
It went against the grain. He had left his emotions behind and was all policeman once more. A satisfied policeman who had done a good job. As such, he didn't want to put any words into her mouth and send her back to Burthe with a ready-made opinion.
But then, despite himself, he said: "He wanted to prevent you from going to the police. He couldn't depend on your amnesia being permanent. If a drug-addicted whore remembered what had happened in the cellar, who would have believed her? After all, nearly six months had elapsed. Only he, his wife and his son knew that you'd been confined to bed in his house all that time. And now, Frau Bender, calm down. Discuss everything with Professor Burthe when we get back. I'll have a word with him too and with the DA and the examining magistrate. I'll tell them all what we learned from Herr Frankenberg."
They'd learned a great deal, starting with the first aid administered in the cellar. Then came an hours-long drive through the night. Frankie had sat in the back with her head pillowed on his lap and his fingertips on her throat, feverishly announcing, every few minutes, that he could still feel her pulse.
Only experts could gauge how great a risk there had been that she wouldn't survive the journey. What would have happened to her if that tiny little flame had gone out?
Perhaps they'd hoped it would. Not Frankie, his parents. Professor Frankenberg could then have saved himself the trouble of breaking his son's arm. Just another dead woman lying beside the road, stripped and unidentifiable like the poor creature on Luneburg Heath. Whether the latter really was Magdalena, only Ottmar Denner and Hans Bueckler could say - if they could be found.
"I shouldn't have taken her with me," she said, breaking in on his thoughts. "I knew I shouldn't have, I knew it perfectly well. Perhaps I didn't care if she died, I was so obsessed with Johnny. My mother always said the desires of the flesh bring nothi
ng but disaster."
"Your mother is deranged, Frau Bender," he said. "She always was."
"No," she murmured, "not always. Margret told me once . She broke off. "What will happen to Margret?"
She gave him no time to reply. "Look," she said eagerly, "can't we put it this way? I told Johnny my sister was at home in bed and I'd run into this other girl in the car park. We can stick to that story. No one can disprove it."
"Frau Bender, do me a favour and take your aunt's advice to heart. Think of yourself for once. I'm not the only one who heard what you said. Quite apart from that, Professor Frankenberg knows from his son that the girl's name was Magdalena, and you yourself told him you had to get home to your invalid sister."
"Of course, that proves she was at home, and Frankie couldn't have known otherwise. The girl told him her name was Magdalena and she was my sister, but that was just a game - I'd arranged it with the girl in the car park. The doctors at Eppendorf will confirm that it couldn't have been my sister. Magdalena was far too ill to leave the house. That'll work. You only have to want it to."
He shook his head. "It won't work, Frau Bender. You can't keep your aunt out of this."
"But she only did it for my sake - she can't be locked up for that. Promise me you won't arrest Margret"
He could promise her that with a clear conscience. Margret Rosch didn't come within his sphere of jurisdiction; his north German colleagues would have to deal with the matter. Besides, what could she be charged with? It wasn't a punishable offence to arrange a burial - or rather, a cremation. He remembered now.
Grit Adigar had spoken of it. Everything had been done in the regulation manner. First a cremation, then the scattering of the ashes. A private ceremony. Only Margret had known what was in the urn. Grit Adigar had seen the ashes trickle into the sea.
He wondered whom or what they'd sent to the crematorium and whether, as was customary, someone had taken a last look into the coffin. Then he had a sudden, scalding recollection of what she'd said about Margret's theft. Damnation! It was absurd, but it could hardly be proved at this stage, if no one had noticed five years ago that a body had gone missing somewhere.
He couldn't help smiling. With a little skill and imagination ... Margret Rosch had plenty of both. She's right, he thought. It not only could work; it was bound to do so, what with Magdalena's medical history, Grit Adigar's testimony, and Hans Bueckler. As for Achim Mick, who had made out the death certificate, he would sooner bite off his tongue than admit that he had stood beside an empty bed and his girlfriend had had to organize a dead body.
She stood at the window, staring out at the bleak day. It had rained that morning, and everything was cold and damp outside. It was February now, and her last day behind bars had come. She knew that, but she couldn't believe it.
"I'll pick you up early in the afternoon, Frau Bender," Eberhard Brauning had told her on his last visit. "I'm afraid I can't give you an exact time."
A few minutes either way didn't matter. She had plenty of time - far too much, in fact. The others had none. The professor had spared her a bare fifteen minutes shortly after lunch. Lunch was mashed potatoes, mushypeas and an emaciated leg of chicken with flabby skin. Afterwards Mario had escorted her to the professor's office. He wanted to explain a few more things and express his good wishes for the future. He had authorized her release, provided she underwent a course of therapy.
She had ceased to be important to anyone including the judiciary. Cora Bender had never been brought to trial. No indictment for murder or even for manslaughter. No life sentence. That might have put things right in some way, but nobody was interested in what she thought.
She had only made it as far as the examining magistrate's office. In view of the psychologist's report, the district attorney had requested that no proceedings be initiated. Cora Bender was "not criminally responsible", he said. A conviction was unlikely in any case.
But they had all been interviewed. Rudolf Grovian, Johannes Frankenberg - even Hans Bueckler, whom the police had run to earth in Kiel. She hadn't set eyes on him, and it was better that way.
Recalling that night in May five years earlier, Hans Bueckler stated under oath that lie and Ottmar Denner had left the house in a hurry after discovering that Georg Frankenberg had killed a girl. Who the girl was, he didn't know All he could remember was that he and Denner had picked up two girls at a disco who claimed to be sisters but weren't. Hans Bueckler didn't know what had happened to the dead body or the other girl. His story could not be disproved.
The psychologist's report dealt at length with the scene in the cellar and in even greater detail with Cora Bender's black soul. Born guilty, she had served nineteen years' imprisonment in a medieval dungeon. But the ultimate criminal was a father. No, not her father - hers didn't come into it. The real culprit was Frankie's father, although the psychologist's report didn't say so. Only her attorney did.
Eberhard Brauning had been magnificent. With his mother's active support, he had composed a speech and delivered it to the examining magistrate as if he were in court. He hadn't been able to keep his promise, however. No limited term of imprisonment. She'd been sent back to the psychiatric ward, there to wait until the professor considered her mature enough to think for herself again.
The time had gone quicker than she'd expected. On the bed behind her reposed the small suitcase Margret had brought to the chief's office an eternity ago, or at least in another life.
She thought of Margret's little apartment. Margret couldn't offer her more than a place on the couch, and the shower room was so small, you grazed your knees on the door when you sat on the toilet. A fresh start in the place where she had once begun to live again. She would leave it in the morning and return there in the evening. It would be almost like going off to work, except that this time she would be attending a day clinic instead of waiting table in the cafe on Herzogstrasse.
The professor was convinced that she would make it because Margret was her ideal of a woman with revolutionary views. He was also convinced that he had brought her to the point denied her five years earlier. That wasn't altogether correct - the chief had brought her to that point - but she didn't contradict the professor, not wanting to offend him or prompt him to revise his opinion of her progress yet again.
Eberhard Brauning had said: "We're entitled to feel extremely satisfied, Frau Bender."
She wasn't satisfied. She could still see Frankie's face, see the way he'd looked at her and let go of her hand, see him release his wife's hand shortly before, hear him say: "No, Ute, that's enough. Not that, give me a break!" Ute had done nothing to him.
During one of her sessions with Burthe, the professor had said that Frankie had sought his own death. She'd pondered that remark for a long time but had come to no conclusion.
Brauning turned up just before four o'clock. He offered to carry her suitcase, but she declined. She said goodbye to Mario and followed him outside.
"I had another word with your husband yesterday, Frau Bender," he said when she was sitting beside him in the car. "I got nowhere, I'm sorry to say."
She shrugged, staring straight ahead. Gereon had filed a petition for divorce. She hadn't expected anything else, although she'd hoped, in view of the fact that she hadn't really done anything bad until that moment beside the lake . . . "It doesn't matter," she said. "I thought he might have reconsidered it, that's all, but if his mind is made up there's nothing to be done. Perhaps it's better this way. Water under the bridge."
Brauning nodded and concentrated on the traffic. "Must I be there?" she asked. "I'm sure you can settle matters without me. Just say I have to be at this clinic all day long. I'm only allowed out in the evening. Tell Gereon I want the fitted kitchen and my personal belongings. And the right to see our child now and then, not often and not for long. A few hours once a month would do me. While I'm still living at Margret's, Gereon could drop in with him after work. I just want to see if the boy's all right."
She didn't
expect a reply, nor did she look to see if Brauning nodded. "How long is this therapy likely to take?" she asked after a brief silence. `A year? Two years?"
"I can't say, Frau Bender. It depends on a number of things. Mainly, of course, on you."
"That's what I thought. Everything depends mainly on me, it always does." She gave a low laugh. "In that case, I'll do my best. I can't stay with Margret forever, and it's not worth looking for a place of my own. I must get home as soon as possible. Any news of my father?"
He didn't know what to say. Rudolf Grovian had undertaken to inform her that her father was dead. "Leave it to me," he'd said. "I'm her scapegoat in any case." He had told her shortly before their visit to Frankfurt, Brauning knew that for a fact.
She stared at the road ahead. "I guessed Gereon wouldn't withdraw his petition. Anyway, it'll be best if I go where I'm needed. I've decided to look after my father -wash him, comb his hair, feed him and do whatever else one has to do for a bedridden old man. I'll also send for my mother. They'll have to let me have her back if I ask, won't they? She isn't dangerous - she wouldn't harm anyone. And then I'll make sure Magdalena gets her cremation. I don't know how I'll manage it, but I will, even if I have to dig her up in the middle of the night. I'll manage it somehow."
She fell silent for a few moments, then started to smile. "Don't worry," she said, glancing at him sideways, "I didn't mean that. The chief said it would be desecration of the dead or something. I've no wish to desecrate or disturb anyone, and I haven't forgotten where my father is. I'll never forget anything again, I'm afraid. It's purely theoretical. I like to imagine myself sitting beside his bed, talking to him. I'd like to have explained everything to him."
She squared her shoulders, and her voice hardened. "Don't forget about the fitted kitchen. I'm going to have it dismantled and carted off to Buchholz right away. And my personal belongings. I don't want any money, I've got enough. I've also got a house and a car. They're old but they're still there, and someone's got to see they don't go to rack and ruin. Can you imagine what the front garden looks like? The front garden and the curtains were Father's pride and joy. It didn't matter to him so much what the house looked like inside, but the curtains had to be spotless. Herr Grovian said everything looked clean and tidy on his last visit, but that's a long time ago."
The Sinner Page 36