by Denise Mina
Amila gave them permission to search her house but asked them to be quick and finish before her grandmother came back. Her grandma was an old hippy and not entirely enamoured of the police. Amila was about to find out why.
The police were thorough. They didn’t just look in necklace-shaped places but read through papers and examined computers. Then they called in reinforcements. By the time Amila’s grandmother came back the cops had a search warrant and brought in sniffer dogs. They began to break through walls and lift floorboards.
They had found papers linking Amila and her grandmother to a string of murders and robberies. They later found a small quantity of explosives buried under the floor of an outhouse on the periphery of the property. They had proof that Amila Fabricase’s name had been changed from her birth name: Rosa Luxembourg Berghoff.
Amila was Rena Berghoff’s daughter.
Fin reached forward and paused the podcast. ‘Why are we listening to this?’
My mind flooded with Gretchen Teigler and house fires and rape threats from strangers. ‘PUT IT BACK ON.’
‘Can we talk?’
‘No. Put it back on, Fin.’
‘I’m not interested in this. I don’t know who anyone is.’
I’d have punched him unconscious if I wasn’t driving. ‘PUT IT BACK ON.’
‘Who is Amila?’
‘Put the FUCKING thing BACK ON.’
He saw me slap tears off my cheeks. I was driving too fast on a narrow, winding road. We were skirting the edge of the deep loch, no more than a cliff edge away from the black water. Trees overhung the road and the only lights were reflections from the road signs warning of sharp turns and cliffs and rock falls.
‘You OK, Anna?’
‘Please. Put it on.’
He put it back on.
In 1986 Rena Berghoff was a debutante at a Swiss finishing school when her father, an undersecretary at the French Embassy in West Berlin, died suddenly of a heart attack. She was seventeen.
Rena came to Berlin for the funeral and never went back to school. One biographer later said she had left ‘undercooked’.
Berlin was a hotbed of radicalism at the time and Rena became involved with left-wing political groups. But she was a debutante, an aristocrat. There were rumours that she worked for the CIA, for the KGB, was doing an undercover investigation on leftist factions for Der Spiegel. No one trusted her. Rena didn’t care. She wrote: ‘The eternal companions of all clever women are mistrust and scorn.’ Pretty astute for an eighteen-year-old.
By the way, if you’re ever in Berlin and you see a woman wearing a T-shirt with ‘Mistrust & Scorn’ printed on it, that’s what that is about.
Arrogance didn’t make Rena more popular. She became a hate figure to both left and right. She gave birth to a daughter, refused to name the father and called the baby ‘Rosa Luxembourg Berghoff’. This was widely ridiculed as pompous and offensive.
When the little girl was just one, Rena’s politics spiralled out of control. An anti-apartheid demonstration outside the South African Embassy turned violent and a driver was shot, his car was stolen, and Rena and her faction were on the run.
They formed a terrorist group, Résistance Directe, and committed a string of bank robberies, a murder, took an industrialist hostage and brutally assaulted a German government minister. Their point was that the Nazis had never been purged from public life. They were still there, in high office. After two years on the run, they were all arrested in Hamburg.
Women terrorists attract a particular kind of horror. Counterterrorism officers regard them as more dangerous than men because they have often given up more, overcome more social conditioning to commit violent political acts. And officers generally train to avoid shooting women and children.
While they waited in prison for the trial to begin, all of Rena’s comrades committed suicide, hanging themselves one by one. Rena didn’t. By the time of the trial she was the only one left alive. The press characterised her a succubus.
Her trial took place in a closed court. The press were excluded to stop her hijacking proceedings to speak to the world. The photograph you can see on our website was taken as she stepped from a police van on the first day of her hearing: Rena didn’t know her trial was staring that day. She didn’t know where she was being taken. The picture was released to the worldwide press.
Found guilty at the trial, she was given eight consecutive life sentences. She issued a statement through her lawyer. She wasn’t sorry. She would do it all again. She didn’t even mention having a daughter.
Rena’s mother cut all ties with her, secretly changed the baby’s name to ‘Amila Fabricase’ and moved to the house near Lyon. At least that was what she said. At TREVI, the precursor to Europol, some detectives were convinced that fringe members of Résistance Directe had hidden out in the Lyonnais farmhouse for months. They were watching the farmhouse until Amila was seven.
Amila didn’t know her name had been changed. She grew up believing her mother and father were surgeons who died in a car crash. The police found her real birth certificate taped to the underside of a drawer in her grandmother’s office. Interpol confirmed their findings. The cops knew who she was before she did.
France has draconian anti-terrorism laws. Amila was interviewed for twenty hours. She didn’t really know what was going on. In transcripts of the interviews she still thinks it is something to do with the diamond necklace.
At this point no one knew why the Dana sank. Amila’s only real crime had been to leave the ship at a fortunate time. But she was well known in Lyon and the local press called for her release. It was in response to this outcry that the cops leaked the Rena Berghoff connection and announced that they had found a package of explosives buried on the property with scraps of DNA on it that matched Amila’s. Public sympathy evaporated. Only much later did they admit that the DNA of other members of Résistance Directe had been found on the package too and the incomplete DNA may have been Rena Berghoff’s.
She was being held without charge until the police saw the wreck dive video and the hole blown in the bow. The damage came from inside the engine room, in an area where there shouldn’t be anything combustible. To them this was confirmation of the use of explosives. Amila came from a terrorist family. She had explosives on her property.
When a narrative chimes with pre-existing beliefs, it can seem so self-evidently true that all conflicting evidence is discarded.
Amila was charged with three counts of murder, among other things. She was tried under terrorism legislation, in a closed court, with lower evidentiary standards. They didn’t even need to come up with a motive. It was just because of terrorism, that blank Scrabble tile that can mean anything at all.
Despite her cast-iron alibi, no appeal was ever lodged. Only months after Amila’s conviction, Sabine opened the bakery they had been saving up for. Where did that money come from?
How did Amila turn off the Dana’s radio and motor out of port and into the Atlantic when she was sitting in departures? How did she restrain the Parkers when she was in the air?
It has been suggested that she used the disabling painkillers to poison the Parkers. This makes sense. It would explain why they were sitting passively in a stuffy dining room, not eating, with the door closed. But how could she administer the drugs? She couldn’t have put anything toxic in the champagne: the bottle was opened after she left. She couldn’t have poisoned the food: it arrived on board while she was in the airport. Remember, she didn’t even know which restaurant the food was coming from. The captain arranged it while she was in the taxi to the airport. She couldn’t have poisoned the plates or pots because she couldn’t know what they would order.
This crime could only have been committed by someone on board.
The question the police never, ever asked was this: did someone on board do it? Specifically, did Leon do it? Why was he never a suspect? Was it because of his powerful wife? We’ll explore this in the next episode when we ask: w
hat’s the deal with Gretchen Teigler?
Do you LOVE to cook but rarely find the time? Our sponsors, Fast’n’Fresh–
The episode ended as we reached the top of the loch. The music rose and fell as we drove along a straight road through a forest of pines. I turned the fog lights on, cutting through the pitch-dark, turning the road ahead into a grainy computer game.
Gretchen Teigler paid Sabine off. It seemed impossible that someone could get away with all of this, do all of this, walk around and breathe and marry and shop and do all of this. And Hamish was in Porto with Estelle and I wasn’t going to live with my girls any more and my picture was on Twitter with my door in the background, my front fucking door, where my kids lived, where a fire could happen, a suspicious house fire. I was driving faster and faster.
‘Anna? I think we need to talk.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Why are you driving so fast? Where are we going?’
‘Adam.’
‘I don’t know if you’re safe to drive.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘…’
‘Fuck right off.’
I can’t quite recall what happened then. The road went blurry and there was a crunch, a skid and a loud ‘BOMP’ and the car stopped moving forward. It gave out a grinding growl.
I looked over. Fin Cohen’s body was slumped over the dashboard but his face was missing. I had killed him. I blinked. His head had been swallowed by the airbag.
19
‘FIN?’ I THREW MY arm out and slapped his shoulder, adrenaline-clumsy. ‘Shit! Fin?’
He jerked back, gasping, a diver coming up for air.
‘Are you dead?’
The question was redundant but he assured me he wasn’t dead anyway and I told him that neither was I.
Neither of us was even hurt and the car was fine. We were both very surprised. I was so surprised that I was trembling too much to drive for a while. So we sat quietly. Cohen folded the airbag neatly and sat it on the dashboard like a dishcloth he wanted to dry.
He kept saying it would be all right, like an idiot. He was trying to be reassuring but all I heard was how naive he was and how I shouldn’t have bothered force-feeding him in the restaurant. He had been pictured with me. He had no idea of the shitstorm we were in. Teigler didn’t care about truth. No one did. And what was Trina Keany doing telling the truth in a world where that would get you killed in a house fire? We were in terrible danger. She was powerful and vicious.
But Fin thought I was upset about Hamish and Estelle and I did him the kindness of letting him think that. He said that they had been having an affair for months. I think I knew that. He knew from the start and he had stayed away from me because he didn’t want to be implicated in their deceit. It started when he was first hospitalised.
‘My eating removes me from life, sometimes. I wasn’t there for her,’ he said.
I looked at him and said it was kind of obvious. He nodded, ashamed. All of that seemed very small and luxurious so I said, ‘Well. We’ve all got our thing.’
‘I heard you read obsessively.’
I snapped angrily, ‘Is that what she says?’
Unwilling to fight he held his hands up in surrender and looked away. He took a deep breath.
I looked out of the windscreen. The night was pitch black. I must have slapped the headlights off. The only sign of civilisation a little window of yellow light far up a distant hill. Above us the dark sky was a blanket of fulminating charcoal. My girls would find out what they did to me, those men. Those things they did to me back then. My little girls. I wanted them ignorant and innocent. I wanted them to go swimming and eat vegetables. That past life had felt like something vivid but imagined, something that happened to someone else, centuries ago, only now it wasn’t. The break between my two lives had been so complete. I was just dealing with what was before me, not what was behind me, day to day, hitting my marks.
‘I mean, Anna,’ Fin said carefully, ‘you will meet someone else. You’re still an attractive woman.’
The whole situation was suddenly absurd. Sitting in a crashed car with a starving man and my life shattered, Gretchen Fucking Teigler back in my life, and Leon, dead. But Fin thought I could still pull. There was always that. Absurd.
I started laughing. And sobbing. Great bubbles of snot bursting from my nose. I banged the steering wheel with an open palm until it hurt. This went on for a long time, until the skin was raw.
Fin Cohen sat still. He reached forward at one point and touched the carefully folded airbag, as if to check it wasn’t going to blow up in his face again.
Finally, I managed to stop laughing. I wasn’t shaking any more either. I wiped my face dry with my sleeve and looked out of the window. God, what a fucking mess.
‘I want a cigarette.’ I didn’t say it to him, I just said it.
He reached into his pocket and took out a beige leather tobacco pouch, a flat wallet held closed with a thong. It was quite a beautiful thing, old, very soft and smooth. He rolled a very thin cigarette and gave it to me and lit it for me with a lighter.
Some cigarettes are nice, some are exquisite, this was more than that. It was a reunion with my old bad-ass self. I hadn’t smoked since I left Skibo.
I breathed in, drawing grey stain down through my lungs, enjoying the damage it was doing me. Could I disappear again? Just run away and start again for a third time? But Pretcha’s photograph showed my front door. That’s where they would look for me and if they didn’t find me they would find my girls.
I could go ahead and kill myself, that seemed reasonable for a second, but then I realised that Pretcha’s photo would be the last sighting of me. The tweets below told the story of who I had been. Hamish would find out about my past and one day he’d have to tell the girls. When they grew up they’d go looking for me and read the newspapers and the court reports. That’s how they would remember me. Not kissing their hair or cupping warm water to rinse soapsuds off their little backs. Not waiting at the school gate in the rain for them. They’d remember their mother as beaten and victimised. A troubled fantasist, a lonely drunk, mad, no wonder she killed herself. And I’d seen how my dad’s suicide hollowed out my mum, how hard it was for her to get past it. Because of what he’d done, suicide was my reflexive thought when I was in a corner. I’d be passing that on to them.
What else could I do?
I couldn’t ask the police for help. Gretchen Teigler was too powerful. I wanted to slap her, run at her and slap her face. It gave me a little lift to think that. I’d been running away from her for nine years and thought about running towards her. Turn up on her doorstep and confront her. There would be no reason to go after the girls if I turned up at her door. It was dangerous but remember, I was suicidal. It was a fantasy at that point. She was reclusive and paranoid. I didn’t think I would get anywhere near her.
I asked Fin for another cigarette and he gave me one. I smoked and imagined Teigler’s face, her cheek pinking from a slap, what I might say to her.
‘We need petrol,’ I said, restarting the car.
I backed out of the ditch, the wheels scattering stones over the tarmac.
‘Headlights,’ said Fin.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, flicking them on. ‘Because then we’ll be safe.’
We drove in silence.
I was exhausted, lost in thought, almost relieved, to be honest, contemplating something life-threateningly reckless. I’ve met people that nothing much ever happened to. They live in the same place, they go on holiday, come back, eat food, day after day. No ups, no downs. I used to wonder if they were lying or unobservant or had somehow arranged their fate that way. But it’s just random dumb luck. Too much has happened to me. Too many lives. Too many events. I can’t take in any more.
‘Why do you read all the time?’
Fin’s voice startled me. I’d actually forgotten he was there.
‘I don’t read all the time. Sometimes I listen to audiobooks.’
&n
bsp; ‘Estelle said you’d read while you were changing for yoga and sometimes she’d leave you at home and come back hours later and you’d still be in the hall, with your coat on, reading.’
‘Isn’t it good to read?’
‘Isn’t it good to watch your weight?’
That was unexpected. He was making a joke.
I asked, ‘When did your food thing start?’
He sighed. ‘The band got big. Everything went crazy. I just got focused on that one thing. I could control it and I couldn’t control anything else. It’s hard to feel so judged and criticised when your identity is just starting to form.’
‘No carapace,’ I said and he liked that.
I told him that I read to self-medicate. That I find the world a bit much sometimes. Podcasts are like reading when you need to use your eyes and hands, and he said yeah, yeah, that’s kind of what his eating was like. Self-medicating. But then it took over and he couldn’t stop. ‘It’s a chemical spiral. It gets so that it feels like the only thing that matters. Controlling it. Eating isn’t like a book, though, you can’t just put it down.’
I didn’t say so but I’ve read books I couldn’t put down, not always because they were good either, I just couldn’t stop reading. Once I was reading a book and finished it by mistake (I hadn’t noticed the last 140 pages were an index) and then had nothing to read. In a blind panic I went back to the start and read it again.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least you’ve got one thing that makes you feel good.’
‘Yeah,’ he smiled at me, ‘I’ve got one comfort and it’s killing me. It’s all so public. It feels as if there are lots of consequences. People see it, young people, and when I’m failing I feel responsible for things I can’t control. And I don’t want being sick to be all I’m known for, you know? Being ill to be the only thing I put out in the world.’