The Lie (34 page)

It was a strange sight. Standing between the washing basket and ironing board, a twenty-something woman in a brightly coloured housecoat and jeans was trying to wrestle the gun off a two-year-old child. The boy was twisting and turning like an eel beside the full washing basket, giggling with delight as he sprayed the woman and the washing with his water pistol.

She stood there, rooted to the spot, as the woman finally gained the upper hand, gave the boy a slap on the fingers and started as she straightened up. “Ooh, you gave me a shock here. I didn't know you were in the house. You did say I could come today.”

With a quick glance at the child, which had started to cry after the smack, the woman gave her a guilty look. “I'm sorry, but I had to bring him. His gran's coming down with something today.”

The child turned to face her and stuck his thumb in his mouth. “Yes,” the woman said, stretching out the word. She put the water pistol in one of her pockets and, with a glance at the iron, said, “Should I maybe call it a day?”

She shook her head. It wasn't intended as an answer to the question, it was simply a response to the whole situation. Naturally the woman interpreted it otherwise and to show her zeal she said, “In that case I'll do the upstairs windows as well today. I should have done them on Friday. I'll make sure he doesn't get up to mischief.”

She just nodded and went back to the steps. A home help! She should have thought of that ages ago. Lilo had one, Ilona had one, Niedenhoff had a gardener to mow his lawn. Would Nadia, of all people, go round her mansion wielding a duster? What could the woman's name be? That wasn't the only question on her mind as she made her way back up to the hall. Why had Nadia not thought to mention that a woman came in to do the ironing and clean the windows?

“Stop that, Pascal!” the woman in the basement bawled. “You're messing up all the washing, dammit.”

She felt no urge to have a lengthy chat with someone whose name she didn't know, nor how - or how much - she was paid, but she couldn't
stand the noise. She went back down and said, “Don't shout at the poor thing. Why did you buy him such an awful thing anyway? Give it to me.”

She actually gave her the water pistol and asked, “Don't you have to go out today?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

“And what about tomorrow?”

“I don't know about that either. Unfortunately today I'm…”

She broke off. Don't explain anything until it's absolutely necessary; if she asks about being paid, say, “We'll see to that later. I have to go to the bank first.”

The woman waited a few seconds, to see if she was going to finish the sentence, then asked, “I just want to know if I should come tomorrow if you're going to be here. So far it hasn't been a problem, but if it doesn't suit you any more, I'd prefer it if you told me in advance instead of sending me home halfway through like last Thursday.”

That sounded as if, before setting off, Nadia had made sure she didn't run into someone she didn't know. But if Nadia had made sure they wouldn't meet on Thursday, she'd have done that for other days as well. Nadia must have assumed she wouldn't need her stand-in on the Monday. The realization sent a shiver down her spine.

She went back upstairs, stuck the water pistol under the pullovers, together with the imitation-leather holder, took out some clean clothes, had a shower, put on make-up to conceal how pale she was and made a further futile attempt to ring Nadia on her mobile. After that she tried Alfo Investment. Helga Barthel wasn't in the office, but then she'd said she wasn't going to be. There was no reply from Hardenberg's home number either.

She tried all the numbers stored on the phone, apart from Geneva, Munich and the lab. Five times she said, “Sorry, wrong number.” Four times she listened to a recorded message, hearing two names that meant nothing to her; the other two just gave the number that was on the display.

Sixteen was the Henseler Gallery. It was Lilo who answered. She listened to her apology for bringing the party on Saturday to an untimely end and reassured her, “Please, darling, don't worry, it wasn't as if it was a real disaster.” Jo must have managed to convince his wife that the profit he'd made from his speculation was all above board.

Seventeen was a travel agency. Saying she was Helga Barthel from Alfo Investment, she claimed her colleague, Nadia Trenkler, had told her that if she didn't appear in the office on Monday, she might have gone off on impulse, perhaps to Berlin or Nassau, and the travel agency would be able to provide the necessary information. They were very helpful but unfortunately could tell her nothing about the movements of Nadia Trenkler. No one replied on eighteen, nineteen and twenty. And Jacques's mobile had probably long since ended up in the rubbish bin with a dud battery.

When she came back downstairs again, the home help was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the regional paper. Her son was squatting on the floor turning the contents of a packet of biscuits into crumbs. Showing no sign of a guilty conscience, the woman looked up and tapped an article in the paper. “Have you seen this? Now they're cutting each other's throats. Good riddance, I say.” Then she stood up, saying now she'd get on with the upstairs windows.

The problem of what she was called solved itself when the woman told the child, as she swept up the crumbs, “Didn't Andrea tell you not to crush them up like that, you mucky pup.”

Andrea went back to the basement with Pascal. She decided to have breakfast first of all. There was a slice of ham left and she didn't need to make coffee, the pot was still half-full. To keep up appearances, she took it into the dining room, together with the regional paper and the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
. Andrea was up and down the stairs between the basement and the first floor, Pascal in one arm, the ironing in the other. She nibbled at her toast, washing it down with plenty of coffee, leafing uninterestedly through the regional paper until her eye was caught by the article in the local section Andrea had mentioned.

A woman living in a tenement in Kettlerstrasse had called the police on Friday evening because she'd been disturbed by the sound of fighting and cries for help coming from the adjoining flat. She'd assumed her neighbour had turned up the sound of his television too loud, as he often did. The police found the man on his living-room floor, dead from stab wounds. It was assumed there'd been a fight between two drunks, since shortly beforehand the victim had started a brawl in a bar where he was a regular and the landlord had thrown the two of them
out. She didn't learn Heller's first name from the article, it was just given as a full stop.

His violent death gave her a shock that left her shaking all over and made her forget her uncertainty for the moment. Not that she'd been in any way sorry that Heller had not made an appearance on the Saturday, but the idea that at that time he was already in some refrigerated compartment…

She went out without telling Andrea. Parked in the drive was a rusty old banger with biscuit crumbs, a thermos and a child seat in the back. But there was enough room to get the Alfa out. She went to a bank and presented Nadia's ID, claiming she'd forgotten both her cheques and her bank card. They gave her a cheque she could use to access Nadia's account. She made a credible attempt at Nadia's signature, without having practised it very much. That at least solved her cash-flow problem.

When she got back, Andrea was in the bedroom changing the bed linen, which she saw as she went past. She installed herself at the desk, tried to make the telephone ring by sheer will-power and made a pretence of frenzied activity on the laptop. No message had been left on the answerphone while she was out.

Andrea and her small son left shortly after two, after Andrea had ascertained that she didn't need to cook anything but that her presence on the following day was desired. She didn't ask for payment, nor for the return of the water pistol.

The silence was almost driving her crazy. Nadia must know when her cleaner left the house, but nothing happened. One more attempt to call Alfo Investment. Only the answerphone. One more attempt to call Hardenberg's home number. Helga Barthel answered, considerably calmer than on Sunday. “I'm glad you've rung.”

Philip had also rung by then and reassured Helga. He was in Berlin, the Hotel Adlon, and everything was as it should be. Helga had been instructed to tell Nadia to transfer the money and call Philip if she had any problems with the laptop.

Claiming she was still in Geneva, she said she'd see to the money transfer immediately and that she'd had no problems with the laptop. That meant there was no need to call Philip and if he was asking Nadia to ring, that must mean she wasn't with him. But then who was she with?
And where? With Jacques in Geneva? Or with Jacques on the Bahamas? Perhaps
mon chéri
had fancied the idea of a holiday house with several acres of beach.

Once more she tried Nadia's mother, who didn't reply herself. She spent minutes arguing with a young man who could have been a private secretary or a gardener and didn't speak a word of German. He larded his French with a few English expressions to make it absolutely clear that Madame was not available for Jacques.

“Prat!” she muttered, explaining in a loud and angry voice, “Jacques does not want to speak to Madame, I want to speak to Jacques. I urgently need his telephone number.” When that got her nowhere, she summoned up her school English and tried, “I am the
Sekretärin
of Nadia Trenkler. I must a call make with Jacques. I must please have the number of the telephone of Jacques. It is very
wichtig
.”

She couldn't remember how to make it clear her call was urgent, but that didn't really bother her, his English wasn't any better. And apparently he had finally understood. At least he said something that sounded like a series of numbers, though in French, of course. She did have the presence of mind to write down what it sounded like, but when she puzzled over her notes, all she could make out was that the first two numbers were identical, probably zeros. She gave up and she didn't bother trying Nadia's mobile again either.

 

At a quarter past four she dialled number three on the stored list of numbers. She wasn't really in any state to deal with another stranger, also she had the feeling she'd forgotten something important. She trembled at the very thought that Michael or Beatrice Palewi might pick up the receiver. At least in that respect she was lucky. A young woman answered - not immediately and she didn't say her name, the first thing she did after lifting the receiver was to shout “Michael! Keep an eye on the centrifuge.” This was followed by a brief, “Yes?”

Since Michael was nearby, she didn't announce herself as his wife, she just said, as casually as possible, “Hi. Can I speak to Kemmerling?”

And the woman shouted out again, “You're wanted on the phone, Danny.”

Danny. Somehow it fitted in perfectly with her image of a computer nerd who could compress a hard disk into a stock cube. In her mind's eye
she saw a gawky young man pick up the receiver. Danny Kemmerling's voice gave no indication of his age or anything else, because he had to shout to be heard over a rising torrent of noise.

She had to shout as well in order to be understood. Pretending to be Nadia, she asked the man to say nothing about the call to Michael. Michael, she explained, had played a trick on her and she had to insert a jumper but didn't know where it should go. Danny Kemmerling promised she could rely on him to keep quiet about it, saying he was delighted to be of assistance and he'd be there in an hour.

She thanked him, then wandered round the house again, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber, nervous, wondering if she'd done the right thing. Or was it a serious error to invite into the house a man about whom she knew nothing except that Nadia didn't want him anywhere near her computer? But what Nadia wanted was of secondary importance now. She simply had to get on the computer and she didn't believe Nadia was going to arrive home in the next few hours.

Presumably at that moment Nadia was lying in Jacques's arms somewhere, laughing at the silly cow who'd swallowed the fiction of a rosy future and was now flogging her guts out to keep her cuckolded husband unsuspecting for a while longer. She would have sworn that was the truth.

Despite that, her eye automatically looked for the security screen in every room she entered. In the dining room she saw Eleanor Ravetzky's shaggy dog bound furiously across the road and into the front garden. The actress's little son dashed after it, looking apprehensively at the surveillance camera, caught the beast by its collar and dragged it back to the wrought-iron gate, where they were met by a middle-aged woman.

Barely thirty minutes later the tiny screen set in the stone wall of the drawing room flickered into life. A sleek two-seater, such as one would only expect from a person in the upper echelons of the salary scale, was parked at the kerb. The driver got out. And her heart started to pound. It was the professor, to whom she'd poured out her troubles and promised tickets for the Niedenhoff concert. At Carlo's she'd found his sympathy and understanding very agreeable. But alone in the house with him?

There was barking and growling in the hall. She thought she could see something like alarm on the tiny monitor and, since he seemed frightened of the dog, she was fairly sure she could get rid of him before
Danny Kemmerling turned up. “Sit!” she shouted and went into the hall, noisily slamming the kitchen door as she passed and shouting, “And not a sound from you.” Then she opened the front door.

The professor gave her a friendly smile. “Good afternoon, Frau Trenkler.”