The Girl Who Wasn't There (11 page)

Next morning, the first thing Biegler did was to go to the remand prison. He placed the new report from the Forensic Institute in front of Eschburg.

‘Are you surprised to find that she’s your half-sister?’ asked Biegler.

‘I’m only surprised it took the investigators so long to find out,’ said Eschburg.

‘You’re not exactly making things easy for me, Eschburg.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t you want to help me, or is it that you can’t? So far I don’t even know whether the woman is the child of your mother or your father. The pathologist said he’d need your parents’ DNA for that. I’m sure the public prosecutor’s office will look at your mother first, if only because that will be easier,’ said Biegler.

Eschburg shrugged his shoulders.

Biegler waited for a while, and then took his notebook out of his jacket pocket. ‘Right, let’s begin with something else. I have another problem,’ he said. ‘Last time we talked, you told me about your neighbour in Linienstrasse.’

‘Senja Finks,’ said Eschburg.

‘My colleagues have checked up on that,’ said Biegler. ‘Obviously no one ever lived there. You had no neighbours.’

Now Eschburg did look surprised. ‘But we met. On the rooftop in Linienstrasse, in her apartment, in the hospital.’

‘Can you remember who else saw the woman? Anyone else?’

‘I don’t know… No, when I saw her I was always on my own. But the attack on her… I ended up in hospital. There must be hospital records.’

‘Yes, there are. The police found them in your apartment.’ Biegler took a sheet of pale green paper out of his briefcase. ‘This is your discharge sheet from the hospital. It says you fell and hit your head. You also had a laceration and trauma to the skull.’

‘It was an attack on her.’

‘I know, that’s what you told me. After that I asked the police to look into it. They know nothing of any such incident.’

‘Of course they don’t. I didn’t go to the police because Frau Finks asked me not to. But wait a moment… there must be an old rental agreement for the apartment.’

‘My colleagues checked that as well. A joint-stock company in Switzerland is entered in the land register as the last owner of the building. You yourself bought the building from that company, which was dissolved after the sale. The trustee in Zürich has no further files on it.’

‘Senja Finks always put the rent into my letterbox in cash. It wasn’t a large sum; we never talked about contracts.’

Biegler stood up and went to the window. He felt sorry for Eschburg; his client needed help. ‘You must understand: there never was any Senja Finks, the apartment was empty.’ Biegler was speaking slowly now. ‘I phoned your friend Sofia – she never set eyes on the woman either.’

Eschburg shook his head, seeming to cave in on himself. ‘Will you still defend me?’ he asked.

‘I can’t really refuse the brief so close to the trial. The court would then insist on my acting for you through the legal aid system. But you must tell me something about your sister now. If the prosecution moves faster than we do, we could lose the case,’ said Biegler.

‘Yes,’ said Eschburg after a while. ‘Yes, I’ll tell you about her.’

Leaving the remand prison, Biegler took a taxi to the restaurant where he nearly always had lunch. It was run by Lebanese people who made themselves out to be Italian. In spite of the ban on smoking in restaurants, there was a back room with a fireplace where guests could still smoke. Biegler sat there alone; he had agreed to meet Sofia in this back room.

He ordered a plate of spaghetti. Then he called his chambers and asked his secretary to send out the press release he had written the day before to the news agencies and the newspapers and magazines. He knew that the question of torture would soon be under discussion everywhere.

Of course, he thought, torture and the threatening and deception of a defendant occur much more frequently than is ever disclosed in court. There have always been police officers who thought that was the way for them to act. Biegler was grateful to Landau for writing her memo. Without it, he couldn’t prove the torture. No court believes a defendant who makes such a claim himself. What he didn’t understand, all the same, was why she had allowed the officer to go ahead with his interrogation.

When Sofia entered the restaurant, he stood up and waved to her across the room. Her appearance was as Eschburg had described her. The other diners turned to look at her. She doesn’t fit in here, he thought.

Sofia ordered only a tea. They talked about the demonstrations and building sites and tourists in the city. Then Biegler said, as casually as possible, ‘Did you know that the woman who has disappeared is Eschburg’s half-sister?’

‘What?’ She almost screamed it.

‘Her DNA has been investigated. There’s no doubt about it,’ he said.

‘I didn’t even know he had a sister at all,’ said Sofia. ‘He’s always kept me apart from his family.’ Only now did she slip off her coat and drape it over the back of her chair. ‘What does that mean for the trial?’ she asked.

‘Murdering your sister is still a crime,’ said Biegler, continuing to eat.

Sofia shook her head. Biegler looked up.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this means that the public prosecutor’s office is carrying out further investigations. They’ll try to find out who the woman is. Or was.’

‘Please believe me, Sebastian is not a murderer.’

‘That’s what all girlfriends and most wives say,’ said Biegler.

‘Have you ever noticed how he reacts to meeting people? He always stretches his arm right out to keep them away from him. He can’t bear to touch them,’ said Sofia.

‘Hmm, well,’ said Biegler. He wondered whether to have a dessert, even though Elly had forbidden it.

‘I just don’t believe it,’ said Sofia.

‘Belief is a funny thing. I once had a client who couldn’t leave his apartment for seven years. He was afraid of company; he was another who couldn’t touch people. But he met a woman through the Internet. Somehow or other he managed to have a child with her. Then he got stranger and stranger. He couldn’t eat anything red or green, and he thought the perfume industry was persecuting him. He talked for hours to people who weren’t there and lived entirely on oat flakes. Naturally a time came when his girlfriend left him. But she was a nice girl. She visited him every week, did his shopping for him and took care that he didn’t neglect himself entirely. Then she made a mistake. She thought he ought to see their child. He strangled her, and after that he washed her hair, filed her fingernails and toenails, and brushed her teeth. He cut her skin thirty-four times with a kitchen knife, and put little pieces of paper in all the cuts. He wrote the same thing on each of them:
crown cork
. The man was arrested on the stairs coming away from her; the baby was still sitting beside its mother in the kitchen, screaming. The neighbours had seen blood on the man’s hands and called the police. He remembered nothing about it. All he remembered was touching the banisters. The banisters were the worst thing of all for him. He said they had been so dirty.’

‘What did he mean by writing
crown cork
?’ asked Sofia.

‘No idea,’ said Biegler.

Sofia stared at him and shook her head again.

Biegler shrugged and told her what he had learned from Eschburg: his half-sister came from Austria, and the village where Eschburg’s father had had his hunting preserves.

‘What will you do now?’ asked Sofia.

‘What will I do? I’ll have to go to Austria, of course, back to those absurd mountains, there’s nothing else for it. Obviously I can now consider myself Eschburg’s errand boy, so to speak. Not a particularly amusing role, if you ask me,’ said Biegler.

‘Why didn’t Sebastian tell you where his sister is now?’

‘He thought I’d understand when I was there. A peculiar answer, don’t you think?’

‘Sounds just like him,’ said Sofia.

‘I can’t stand surprises. Once, on my birthday, my wife Elly —’

‘Did he say whether she’s still alive?’ asked Sofia.

‘No.’ He liked Sofia; she’s a kind woman, he thought. He wanted to say something reassuring. ‘But he didn’t say he’d killed her, either.’ It didn’t sound quite the way he had hoped.

‘Can I come with you?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to hang around here waiting, I can’t bear it.’

Biegler wondered whether he would find her company a strain. ‘Only if you promise not to keep telling me why he isn’t the murderer.’

‘All the same, Sebastian didn’t do it,’ said Sofia. ‘He couldn’t. I know him.’

Biegler shrugged his shoulders again and asked for the bill. They said goodbye out in the street. He went a few steps, then turned back to Sofia and called after her. ‘Listen, do you by any chance know a good tree expert?’

‘What?’ asked Sofia.

‘Oh, forget it.’

He got into a taxi and went home.

Elly came back from her practice in the afternoon. Biegler had opened up the garage and was standing in it. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Elly.

‘How do we come to have so many measuring tapes?’ asked Biegler. He had beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘Nine measuring tapes, three hammers, and not a single pair of pliers. That’s peculiar.’

He was holding two cardboard boxes.

‘As bad as that?’ she asked.

He had an oil stain on his waistcoat. Elly pushed a wooden crate full of old rags and cans aside.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. He dropped the boxes, took a large white handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and spread it on the bench. She sat down. He stood in front of her, feeling like a boy.

‘So what’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Whenever you start clearing out the garage there’s something wrong.’

‘I simply don’t understand him,’ said Biegler.

‘Don’t understand who?’

‘Eschburg. The artist. I don’t understand what he’s doing.’

Elly lifted a can of dried-up paint out of the wooden crate. ‘Do you remember putting that soap-box together for our son?’ she asked.

‘I do remember how complicated it was,’ said Biegler.

‘The instructions said that children of twelve and over could put it together,’ said Elly.

‘I’m still sure that was a printer’s error,’ said Biegler. ‘It wasn’t a particularly good soap-box.’ He sat down beside her.

‘But it was a nice colour,’ said Elly.

He looked at her. Even now, twenty-eight years later, he couldn’t understand why she had decided to marry him. His clothes were never spotlessly neat and clean. He felt clumsy beside her, awkward and heavy.

‘I think I’m getting old, Elly,’ he said.

‘You were always old,’ said Elly. She put the can of paint back again, and wiped her fingers on a corner of his handkerchief.

‘And it was better when telephones were still attached to cables,’ said Biegler.

‘Tell me about this Eschburg,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know. The man’s accused of murder, he’s confessed. He’s in remand prison and the press is writing appalling stuff about him. Yet none of that seems to trouble him at all. The police think he’s a cold fish. I don’t know that it’s as simple as that. He has something that protects him from prison.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you remember the neighbours in our first apartment? The old man who lived all by himself. I went to see him once. He was sitting in his tiny kitchen in a suit and tie. He’d laid the table perfectly: tablecloth, silver cutlery, wine glass, napkin. He was even wearing cufflinks. He sat alone in his kitchen like that every day, although there was no one there to see him. He did it because he wanted to keep up standards. That old man with his cufflinks was like Eschburg. There was something untouchable about him.’

‘That’s how you look to most people,’ said Elly, after a while. ‘When you were a young lawyer, a number of people thought you were a snob.’

‘A snob?’

‘Well, so you are a little bit. On our first date, we went to the theatre, even though you hate the theatre and have no idea what it’s about. You just wanted to impress me. In the middle of the play you whispered to me that Oedipus was the first detective in the history of the world – a man investigating himself without knowing it. Then you said we’d all do the same. You were absolutely certain of yourself. Maybe that’s it:
certainty
. Anyway, I found that very attractive.’

‘Really?’ He smiled at her. She still looks like a girl, he thought.

‘Don’t get any ideas, Biegler,’ she said.

The following morning, Biegler and Sofia boarded the first flight to Salzburg. Biegler complained of the cramped seats. He was not a battery chicken, he said.

A woman in the seat beside Biegler’s ordered curry sausage, pieces of meat swimming in brown sauce, regenerated in a fan oven for fifteen minutes at 150 degrees. The flight attendant put her hand on Biegler’s shoulder and asked whether he would like a sweet or a savoury snack. Biegler began losing his temper. The chief cabin steward came and introduced himself as the purser on board this plane. Biegler informed him that the term purser derived from the Christian seafaring tradition, and indicated that such an officer was in charge of provisions for the journey, but no one could really speak of provisions in this airborne cage.

Sofia tried to calm Biegler down. Biegler said the man had begun it.

‘Why did you become a lawyer, Herr Biegler?’ she asked.

‘I’m no good as a musician,’ said Biegler.

‘Come on, that’s not an answer.’

‘The other answer is a long story, and I wouldn’t like to bore you.’

‘You aren’t boring me,’ said Sofia.

‘Well, maybe it’s not so complicated after all; a time came when I realized that a man belongs only to himself. Not to any God or any church, not to any state, only to himself. That’s his liberty. And that liberty is a fragile thing, sensitive and vulnerable. Only the law can protect it. Do I sound over-emotional?’

‘A little,’ said Sofia.

‘That’s what I believe, all the same.’

‘And what will you do when this case is over?’ asked Sofia.

‘Tackle my next brief, of course. Why?’ asked Biegler.

‘Won’t you get tired of it some day? Don’t the constant attacks on you in the press bother you?’

‘Acting for the defence in court isn’t a popularity contest,’ said Biegler.

‘But don’t you sometimes want to branch out? Go into politics, for instance? Well-known lawyers sometimes do that.’

‘Go into politics?’

‘Yes, the internationally important questions of the day —’

‘The more internationally important a question is, the less it interests me,’ said Biegler.

In Salzburg they hired a car and arrived in the mountain village two and a half hours later. They stopped outside the Golden Stag on the marketplace. Biegler rang the doorbell. When no one came to open the door they walked round the house. The garden gate was open. Biegler saw a man with a pockmarked face and grey stubble sitting outside the house. He was about to wave when a dog jumped up at him. There was no avoiding the animal. Biegler fell against the posts of the garden fence. Their sharp points dug into his back.

The man with the pockmarked face shouted, ‘Down, Rascal.’

The dog took its forepaws off Biegler’s shoulders, looked at him and wagged its tail. The man came over. Biegler straightened his clothing.

‘Good boy, Rascal, good boy,’ said the man. The dog lay down on the ground.

‘I wouldn’t call Rascal a good boy myself,’ said Biegler. His back hurt.

‘He likes you,’ said the man. ‘He usually bites at once.’ The man seemed to be expecting a compliment for Rascal in return.

Sofia bent down to pat the dog. ‘What breed is he?’ she asked. ‘He’s so pretty.’

‘Pretty? You think this dog is pretty? He’s a monster,’ said Biegler.

‘Bernese mountain dog,’ said the man. ‘The best dog for these parts.’

‘We’re looking for the landlady,’ said Biegler. He still had dog hairs on his face.

‘She’s inside the inn.’

‘We rang the bell,’ said Sofia.

‘The bell’s out of order,’ said the man. ‘Who are you?’

‘Biegler, lawyer, from Berlin. And I’m allergic to dog hair.’

‘So?’ said the man. He looked Biegler in the face and grinned. Biegler grinned back. They stood like that for a while, until at last the man gave up. ‘Wait here.’ He went into the inn by the back door, hardly lifting his feet as he walked.

Sofia helped Biegler to pick the hairs from his clothes. The dog leaned against Biegler’s legs, wagging his tail. ‘He keeps looking at me,’ said Biegler.

‘He likes you, that’s what it is,’ said Sofia.

‘He has too much hair.’

A few minutes later the pockmarked man re-emerged from the house and waved them inside. They went through the kitchen into the main room. The tables were light oak, the walls panelled with wood. The place smelled of fresh bread and floor polish. A woman came towards them; she was in her early forties, blue-eyed.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘My name is Biegler, and I’m a lawyer,’ said Biegler.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re here because of Sebastian von Eschburg.’

The woman turned, looked at the man who was still standing by the door, and raised her chin. He shuffled out of the room. She waited until he had gone.

‘Please sit down.’ She pointed to a table, but remained standing herself.

‘Has anyone from the police been here?’ asked Biegler.

‘Why the police?’ asked the woman.

‘Or the press?’

‘No, not the press either. For heaven’s sake, what’s this about? I read about Sebastian’s arrest, but what’s that to do with me?’

‘Excuse me,’ said Biegler, ‘but could I have some water, please?’

‘Of course.’ The woman looked at Sofia. ‘Would you like something to drink as well?’

‘Water too, please,’ said Sofia.

The woman went behind the bar and came back with a bottle and three glasses. She poured the water standing, and then sat down with them.

‘What has happened?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry, but that’s what I have to ask you,’ said Biegler. ‘Sebastian’s father is also the father of your daughter, am I right?’ He was watching her. Her upper lip trembled slightly, that was all.

‘How do you know?’ she asked.

Biegler waited. He imagined her life in this village. It couldn’t be easy to be a single mother here. A wooden cross hung near the stove. We invented gods because we were lonely, he thought, but even that was no good.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ the woman said after a long pause. Then she began to tell her story. It was like a dam breaking. She told them how she had met Sebastian’s father. That had been over twenty years ago, when she was nineteen. Her father, who was the village innkeeper, had bought a new car, a convertible. Sebastian’s father had hired the car, and she had gone for a drive with him. He had opened the roof, although it was already autumn.

‘He drove so fast,’ she said, ‘he laughed and fooled around. He had such slender hands, and soft hair almost like a girl’s. We went to the lake, we listened to the radio and looked at the water.’

‘And then you stopped looking at the water,’ said Biegler.

She nodded. She had been very much in love with him, she said. After four years she became pregnant. She hadn’t planned it, she said, it just happened. They used to see each other only when he came here to hunt. He didn’t want to lose her, but neither could he leave his family.

‘That’s the way men are,’ she said. ‘When my belly grew bigger and everyone could see it, he talked of nothing else, he didn’t know what to do. He wept and discussed it this way and that, and then wept again. His thoughts were hopelessly entangled.’

That was when he began drinking, she said. Drinking spirits, the hard stuff, here at the inn. She knew drinkers, she knew there was no helping them.

‘It was bad enough for me, but I think it was even worse for him. My father took it calmly; he said we could bring the child up here,’ she said. ‘After a while I stopped going up to the hunting lodge. I thought that was the best thing to do, before it all tore him apart entirely. Perhaps that was wrong; I sometimes think so now. And when my daughter was born I was on my own.’

The woman emptied her glass. She had stopped talking as suddenly as she had begun. Her upper lip was trembling again. Biegler brought his cigarillos out of his pocket.

‘May I?’ he asked.

She pushed an ashtray across the table. Biegler lit himself a cigarillo. Sofia was going to say something but Biegler shook his head. The woman looked at the floor, and then watched him smoking.

‘And then I heard that he had killed himself,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t know until he was already buried because no one at his home knew about me. People said he’d shot his head away. He never saw his daughter.’

I must go on, thought Biegler. ‘But they kept showing your daughter’s photograph on TV. Why didn’t you get in touch with the police?’

‘What photograph?’ asked the woman.

Biegler drew the photo that Eschburg had taken out of the file.

The woman took the picture. ‘Yes, I’ve seen that. But who is it of?’

Sofia and Biegler stared at the woman. She’s not lying, Biegler reflected. He was furious with himself. He must have overlooked something or other.

‘I thought that was your daughter,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen this girl before.’ She looked at the photo again. ‘The mouth is a little like my daughter’s, but that’s all.’

The mouth is like her daughter’s, thought Biegler; maybe there’s another illegitimate daughter?

‘Sebastian is accused of her murder,’ said Sofia.

‘Good heavens, no,’ said the woman. ‘Sebastian could never harm anyone.’

‘Do you know him?’ asked Sofia.

‘He’s been here a few times. He inherited his father’s hunting lodge. His mother wanted to sell it but his father had transferred it to his son for life.’

‘Has he ever been here with your daughter?’ asked Biegler. He had let his cigarillo go out, something that very seldom happened.

The woman nodded. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said, and left the room. After a couple of minutes she came back. She was carrying a cardboard box. She put it on the table and opened it. Sofia took out the papers it contained: they were pictures of Eschburg’s exhibitions, newspaper cuttings, interviews, critical assessments of his work.

‘This belongs to my daughter,’ the woman said. ‘She collected everything she could find about Sebastian before she saw him for the first time. He meant the right sort of life to her. She was furious with her father, although she never met him. She used to scream and rage and curse everyone here. I can see why. A stranger can’t understand what it’s like, growing up in a village like this without a father. She always wanted to get away.’

‘And then?’ asked Biegler.

‘She met Sebastian just after her sixteenth birthday. I couldn’t dissuade her. She went to the opening of his exhibition in Rome. After that they were here together twice,’ said the woman. ‘They got on well, they’re very like each other. Before she left she said she’d be part of his art for ever now.’

‘Before she left? You mean died?’ asked Sofia, and Biegler nodded.

‘What makes you think that?’ asked the woman. She looked at the two of them. ‘No, she left to go to Scotland. Sebastian is paying for her to study at a boarding school there – it’s called Gordonstoun. She wants to study art history later,’ she said.

‘What?’ Biegler and Sofia exclaimed at the same time.

‘When did you last speak to her?’ asked Biegler.

‘Yesterday,’ said the woman.

‘Then she’s alive?’ asked Sofia.

‘Of course she’s alive.’ The woman sat very upright at the table and stared at Sofia and Biegler. ‘Has something happened to her? You ask such odd questions.’

‘No,’ said Biegler. ‘Nothing has happened to her.’

‘Can you tell me what she meant by saying that about his art, please? My daughter won’t say,’ said the woman.

‘I have no idea,’ said Biegler. He straightened his shoulders, and stood up. ‘I’m sorry we had to ask all those things,’ he said. Then he went out into the garden.