The Lie Page 10

  “No,” she said. “There won’t be a next time. I’ve seen the insurance policy. My voice sounds different from yours, but when you’re dead you can’t speak. Find someone else for your little game.”

  Nadia gave her a blank stare. Then, after a few seconds she started to laugh out loud. “You think I was going to kill you just to collect a million?” It sounded as if a million was little more than petty cash.

  Nadia shook her head, still laughing. “There’s just one reason I need you, Susanne, and one reason alone: the one I told you. Our voices are as identical as all the rest. The only difference is in your own ears, it’s the body’s resonance that causes it.”

  At this Nadia took a small Dictaphone out of her computer bag, switched it on and said, “Say something.”

  “What should I say?”

  Nadia shrugged her shoulders and picked up her handbag. “Did you take your money?”

  “No. It was only for a few hours.”

  Nadia counted out five hundred euros and placed them on the table. “But they count as triple time with all the trouble you had.”

  The Dictaphone was still running. Nadia switched it off, rewound it and let her hear that there was no difference between their voices. “Does that reassure you? Now show me your fingers.”

  Hesitantly she stretched out her hand. Nadia took off the makeshift bandage, looked at the cuts and said they didn’t need sewing. “They’ll leave some scars,” she said. “Have you got a sharp knife?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Nadia went into the kitchen and fetched a small knife from the drawer. After examining Susanne’s cuts carefully, she drew the knife twice over her own fingers. It made a soft hissing noise.

  Susanne felt sick when she saw the blood trickling down Nadia’s hand. It spilled onto the floor and soaked into the old carpet. “Are you out of your mind?” she stammered.

  “Only at the full moon,” said Nadia. When she went on it was in an insistent tone. “We’ve got this far, Susanne, you can’t let me down now. In fortnight’s time I’m going for a weekend away with my friend. It’s already agreed. I know it’s not easy, the alarm system’s a bit awkward. But it’s not the alarm you have to cope with, it’s Michael. That worked. And the next time there won’t be any other difficulties, I swear. I’ll change the codes so there’s no problem.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes of Nadia’s bleeding fingers. And every drop soaking into the carpet was another reason to say no. She really could have done with the money, but the idea that Nadia might cut herself and she would have to take a knife to herself to restore the likeness… Shaking her head firmly, she took off the rings and pulled the studs out of her ears, which by now were throbbing fiercely. She put the jewellery on the table beside the money and took off the watch. “No,” she said.

  Nadia must have realized she was deadly serious. With a look of frustration on her face, she wrapped a handkerchief round her bleeding fingers, gathered up the jewellery, put the laptop and Dictaphone in the computer bag, tucked the document case under her arm and went to the door. There she stopped.

  “I’ll pay you a thousand for each weekend. You won’t have to take any more of your mother’s money, you’ll even be able to pay back everything you stole from her.”

  It was moral blackmail. When she showed no reaction, Nadia said, “Think about it, Susanne. A thousand for each weekend, that’s two thousand a month. When did you last earn that much? We’ll meet on Thursday. In the multi-storey again.” After that command, Nadia closed the door behind her.

  Susanne stared at the patches of blood on the old carpet, while in her mind’s eye she saw herself strolling round the white mansion. She heard the asthmatic wheezing of her second-hand fridge, saw her threadbare couch, her whole shabby flat and the money on the table. A thousand, after the mess she’d made of it! A lie about her mother falling ill would have been decidedly cheaper. But perhaps Nadia’s mother was dead, or Michael got on very well with her. Whatever, the business must be damned important to Nadia.

  Immersed in thought, she went into the bedroom, took off the bloodstained clothes and put on some of her old things. Then she scrubbed at the expensive dress for a while. The blood would wash out of the clothes. She didn’t bother with the carpet, it merged in with the lurid pattern and the grime of years.

  About a quarter of an hour later there was a knock at the door. She assumed it would be Nadia, coming back to try and persuade her again. But on the landing were Jasmin Toppler and Heller. Jasmin, in her leathers and with her helmet under her arm, was at the door, Heller a little further back. As she opened the door, she heard him say, “…left half an hour ago, in a new Jaguar.” Jasmin tapped her forehead and said, “He’s been seeing things.”

  Heller flushed with rage. “But I did see her,” he objected. “She was wearin’ diff’rent things, that expensive clobber again. I hate to think what she’s been up to of late. I think I saw her before, in a white Porsche. ’S a while ago now. It wasn’t parked outside. I was—”

  Jasmin cut him short. “Pissed as a newt as usual. You don’t need to tell us that.” Then Jasmin turned to Susanne and asked if she had a minute. She asked Jasmin in, so as not to have to argue with Heller.

  He was drunk, but not so drunk that he could be persuaded he’d been seeing things. His window looked out on the street. If he’d seen Nadia come out of the building and drive off, even his addled brain would tell him that there must be two women. Which was the case, of course. As she closed the door, she heard him mutter, “So that’s it. There’s two of ’em. Very handy. You could get up to all sorts of tricks and always have an alibi.” He giggled and went down to his flat, still muttering to himself.

  Jasmin was standing in the living room. The money was still on the table next to the blood-smeared knife and the saucer full of cigarette ends. She was looking at them with a thoughtful expression on her face. Susanne quickly went past her, picked up the money and put it in the cupboard.

  As she closed the cupboard door, Jasmin said, “Er, tomorrow I’m flying off on holiday for four weeks,” and told Susanne that the friend who’d promised to water her plants had broken her leg and was in hospital. “So I thought you might be good enough to do it, if it’s no trouble and I gave you the key?”

  She hadn’t been listening properly, she still felt dazed by Nadia’s increased offer and just nodded. Jasmin gave a grateful smile, went up to her flat and came back with some Elastoplast, with which she bandaged her cuts. Again her eyes were drawn to the knife and the saucer. But she asked no questions and, to judge by her leather suit, she hadn’t been at home during the last few hours.

  When she was alone once more, Susanne took the things into the kitchen, washed the knife and tipped the cigarette ends into the rubbish bin. Only then did she see the tiny scraps of paper in the bin. She fished them all out, blew off the cigarette ash and took them into the living room.

  There was no particular reason why she did it, not even curiosity. At first it was just something to occupy her. With a great deal of patience, she managed to put the sheet of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle. At the top was an imposing letterhead: “Alfo Investment”. She’d seen that somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. At the very bottom was a row of figures in small writing: telephone number, fax, bank account details. The tears in the paper meant she couldn’t decipher them all, but they stuck in her mind. In the middle of the sheet were more numbers, written by hand in relatively large letters.

  There were nine in total, all of them seven-figure numbers, each preceded by a name. The figures were listed in descending order. The smallest, the one at the bottom, was 1,300,000. At the top, alongside the name Zurkeulen, was 5,730,000. The total came to a little over twenty million, a sum of money that was beyond her imagining, if it was euros. “A million on death” briefly came to mind. After that she had no idea what to think.

  For a while she just sat there, staring at the scraps of paper. Her cuts were throbbing unpleasantl
y. Everything went through her mind again, like a film being played backwards. Until it came to Michael Trenkler. He was leaning back against the front door, looking at her with that expression of fear and suspicion in his eyes. “I’m not going through all that again,” he said, expressing exactly what was going through her mind. On the other hand, could she afford to pass up the chance of two thousand euros a month simply because she had some - possibly completely absurd - misgivings? And she could do something to counter those misgivings.

  She took the pad she used for her applications and started: “On 25/7 I met Nadia Trenkler in Gerler House.” Then she wrote down everything that had happened since then, even Heller’s crazy claim that the opinion pollster had been a snooper. She concluded with the disparities: blood group, birthmark and fractured skull, and put the sheets in a large envelope, adding the scraps of paper with the names and figures.

  Then she wondered where she could deposit it. To hand it to her mother saying, “If I stop coming to visit, get someone to read this to you and take it over to the police,” would give Agnes Runge a heart attack. She didn’t know a lawyer she could ask to look after this “life-insurance policy”. Her divorce lawyer had been a scrawny little bastard, always in a hurry and only interested in his fee. Basically there was only one person who would make proper use of her notes, if the worst should come to the worst, despite the way she still felt about him: Dieter Lasko. But it would be a mistake to send him the envelope. He’d just tap his forehead and tell Ramie, “I suppose Susanne’s spending all her spare time reading crime novels now.” She had to think of another way. And another way did occur to her.

  On Monday Jasmin Toppler gave her the key to her flat then got into a taxi, together with a large suitcase. Five minutes later she was hiding her envelope underneath Jasmin’s bedlinen. She’d stuck it down and written her husband’s name and address on it, as well as a message to Jasmin, asking her to hand it over to Dieter if she should suddenly give up her flat and forget to ask for it back. It might sound ridiculous and Jasmin’s reaction might be the same as Dieter’s. But it reassured her.

  After she’d done that, she turned her attention to another aspect. If she was going to stand in for Nadia for any length of time, she simply had to be better prepared. In the days that followed she wrote down everything that occurred to her that seemed important: what she absolutely had to know, what she ought to know on top of that and what it would do no harm to know.

  As requested, she met Nadia in the multi-storey on Thursday. When, to be on the safe side, she mentioned her notes, Nadia simply gave an amused smile. Her questionnaire, on the other hand, she found a prudent precaution. With relief she said, “So you’re going to do it,” confessing that she’d felt she couldn’t ask her to learn masses of dates and events off by heart on top of everything else. Since she was only going to show Michael the cold shoulder, it had seemed superfluous. But, of course, it would do no harm if she was prepared for possible emergencies.

  They took a drive in the country in the Porsche. Nadia told her a few anecdotes that occasionally cropped up in conversations with Jo and Lilo or Wolfgang and Ilona. If some topic cropped up where she had nothing to say, it should be enough to put them off with a “Don’t remind me of that.”

  She wouldn’t come into contact with other people, Nadia said, since she herself didn’t have a lot to do with the people in the two houses opposite. One belonged to Niedenhoff, a pianist who’d only moved in at the beginning of the year and who was mostly away on concert tours. An actress lived in the other. They hardly ever saw her, she was a bit eccentric, grotesquely attached to her dog; she lavished twice much attention on it as on her son. Her real name was Eleanor Ravatzky, though she had a different stage name.

  Celebrities everywhere, Susanne thought, at least on the other side of the road. A pianist and an actress. That would explain why she’d felt she’d seen the flustered-looking woman somewhere before.

  Nadia gave her a few details about herself. She’d been born and had her early schooling in Düsseldorf, where she’d also lived and worked for some time later on. Her parents had moved to Geneva years ago. That was where her mother came from. Her father was completely occupied with his work, he didn’t even have time for a short telephone conversation. Her mother was very much involved in cultural life and she never got round to ringing up to ask how her daughter was either. There should be no surprises from that side.

  Michael’s parents lived in Munich, though they originally came from Cologne. Paul, Michael’s brother, had gone to Bavaria ten years ago because of his work and their parents had joined him there. Paul was married to Sophie and they had one son, Ralph, who was now eighteen. Susanne would have nothing to do with them. There might be a telephone call, but the answerphone was always switched on to take incoming calls.

  The last time Nadia had seen Michael’s family had been shortly after their wedding. They hadn’t invited their families to the marriage ceremony, but to please Michael they’d organized a celebration some time later, putting their relatives up in a hotel because at the time they didn’t have a house with guest rooms. It had been an unmitigated disaster. Ralph had done nothing but get up to mischief and his grandmother had taken his side all the time. After that, Nadia had decided to keep the family ties as loose as possible and they didn’t exchange visits. Michael had come to share her view that too much family was not good for their own peace and quiet.

  “Does he never go to see his parents?” Susanne asked incredulously.

  “Rarely,” said Nadia and went on to several other points. The sailing holiday that had been mentioned had been quite nice. Contrary to Susanne’s assumption, Nadia didn’t have a yacht of her own. Kemmerling, whom Michael had spoken of, had let them borrow his. Nothing special had happened: a lot of water, a lot of boredom, but on the whole it had been relaxing.

  The ring with the striking blue stone had been a present from Michael for their fifth wedding anniversary. She must never take it off; it sealed, so to speak, the renewal of their marriage vows. From that Susanne deduced that the big crisis in Nadia’s marriage must have been two years ago. Nadia didn’t say much about it and what she did sounded bitter.

  “When I first met him all he had in the world was three pairs of socks and a grotty room he shared with a physics student. He was supporting himself with part-time jobs and would probably have taken several more years just to get his first degree. Now he has two doctorates and you’ve seen his lifestyle. It doesn’t make it easy to take it when he suddenly starts thinking he might have missed out on something.”

  Nadia stared fixedly at the path through the trees in front of them, but after a few seconds her expression relaxed and she recounted a few more anecdotes which Michael was in the habit of recalling with a “Do you remember?” Apart from that there didn’t seem to be a great deal of conversation chez Trenkler. They only rarely talked about Michael’s research and almost never about Nadia’s job, since, being one of the old-fashioned kind, he didn’t like her going out to work at all.

  Although Susanne would not have anything to do with her professional activities, Nadia explained that fortunately, after Michael’s infidelity, her despair and a certain amount of excessive drinking, she’d come across an old acquaintance who had set up as a financial consultant. Insurance, financing construction projects, short-term loans for small businesses, that kind of thing. A little investment advice too. At the moment he couldn’t afford to take anyone on full-time, so Nadia helped him out, as a favour, but also to take her mind off her domestic problems. Since then she’d been able to delude herself two or three times a week into thinking she was an independent woman. Given Michael’s income, she wasn’t financially dependent on what she earned.

  These details built up into a consistent overall picture and provided a satisfactory answer to Susanne’s questions. When they got back to the car, Nadia picked up a bundle of papers off the rear seat. She had made a list of her own. Every security lever, every movem
ent sensor, every heat sensor, every monitor, every locking device, every “if-then” was on it. “Do you think you can manage all that?”

  “I think so,” she said, then told Nadia that she went to see her mother every two weeks and that she’d like Nadia to arrange her weekends away accordingly.

  “No problem,” said Nadia.

  Shortly after nine they were back in the city. Nadia stopped two streets away from Susanne’s flat and gave her a new mobile phone with a battery charger so that she could contact her by phone if necessary. “If everything goes as we arranged, we’ll meet in the multi-storey on Friday week at four. I’ll let you know if there’s any change, so you won’t be hanging around waiting to see if I’m going to come.”

  Hardly had she closed the door of her flat behind her than the mobile rang. Nadia had forgotten to give her the PIN she needed to enter after it had been switched off. She gave her the four digits and wished her a good night’s sleep. It was a good night’s sleep. With Nadia’s explanations going round in her head, she dreamed her way through several episodes in her life.

  On Friday she had another session on the sunbed. On Saturday it rained. She didn’t buy a newspaper. Instead of the vacancies pages, she studied Nadia’s notes and learned everything off by heart. With two thousand euros a month coming in, looking for work wasn’t that urgent. But she didn’t intend to give it up entirely. As soon as her weekends as Nadia’s stand-in had become a matter of routine, she would put some intensive effort into finding work. She abandoned the idea of asking Nadia to help her. If Nadia was only working for an acquaintance as a favour, she was hardly in a position to use her influence to get someone else a job.