The Sinner (54 page)

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 nothing 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."