The Lie (19 page)

The doors out onto the landing and to the bathroom were open. She listened to the silence in the house, thought she could hear a faint ticking somewhere. His alarm clock in the bathroom or just the pulse throbbing in her ears. The buzzing, thrumming noise rose and fell. What a day! And what a night! Panic, excitement, release, triumph and the certain
knowledge that she could stand in for Nadia as a wife in absolutely every respect.

At some point or other she fell asleep, perhaps at three, perhaps not until four. Since there was no clock in the bedroom, she had no way of telling. Contrary to expectation, her sleep was calm and dreamless. When she woke up, she was alone in the bed. The room was flooded with daylight and she'd neither heard the shutters going back up nor noticed him getting out of bed.

It was depressing. Friday the thirteenth, she thought briefly. But that wasn't it. It was just the return to normality: waking up and being alone. No, it was worse than usual because she'd known what it was like to go to sleep with a satisfied husband. She'd thought she'd wake up beside him, have a few minutes with him, the time to make it clear to him that the previous night was nothing special, that it wasn't worth talking about.

What if he asked Nadia that evening, “Did you see the doctor?” What if he said, “You were so different yesterday.” What if he made any comment that gave the game away? There were a thousand ways he could let out that she hadn't played the sulky wife, but simply his wife. There was no way of preventing it. And she had to, she really had to.

The memory of the night was still fresh in her mind. And the desire for a reprise correspondingly strong. But what if Nadia found out? She instinctively knew now why Nadia had given her advice on how to keep Michael at arm's length. After the previous night's experience, her tips no longer seemed designed not to make things easier for her stand-in. A fling with a little laboratory mouse might be forgivable, but a woman who was a mirror image of herself was much more of a danger.

In order to force herself to snap out of the wretched feeling that, while she'd supplied the clearest possible proof that the deception had been successful, she'd still failed, she got up quickly, smoothed out the sheets, put the bedspread over them and went to the bathroom. The alarm clock had gone from the shelf. A glance at Nadia's watch showed that it was a quarter past nine.

In the shower she tried to think up some arguments. If she went about it in the right way, she might even manage to make it seem an advantage. “I took the tampons out and kept saying no, but he just ignored it. When I realized I couldn't stop him without arousing his suspicions, I did what I could to make sure he didn't notice. And he didn't notice.” Then she'd
just have to wait and see how important her extramural pleasures were to Nadia if it meant supplying her husband with a replacement for bed and board.

She had a long shower, rubbed Nadia's cream over herself from head to toe, used Nadia's make-up and took a skirt and blouse of Nadia's from the dressing room to save the grey suit. Then she went to tidy up the television room but couldn't bring herself to go in. The towel was still on the couch, the cushions, his clothes and the other towel on the floor. It brought everything so vividly back to mind that she had to close the door quickly to stop herself bursting into tears.

At ten she was sitting in the kitchen having breakfast. When she came down there'd been two letters, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and the local paper on the table. The letters were addressed to Nadia. One had the address of a hotel in Nassau on the envelope, the other came from a Swiss bank in Zurich. She put them on one side, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
as well, and leafed apathetically through the local paper.

At eleven she was sitting at Nadia's desk. With no great enthusiasm, she started up the word-processing package in order to delete her invitation from Behringer and Partners. With the night still coursing though her veins, it was the action of a woman who didn't know what to do, filling in time. She called up the menu. For simplicity's sake she'd named the file Lasko. It was at the top of a list of nine. The other eight all had the same name and were numbered consecutively: Alin 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Unintentionally she let the cursor slip onto the second line and clicked on it, bringing Alin 1 onto the screen. The imposing letterhead of Alfo Investment immediately caught her eye. She registered the name Markus Zurkeulen with an address in Frankfurt. She had already seen the name on the torn-up sheet of paper with the large numbers that she'd taken out of her waste bin and put together like a jigsaw puzzle.

The text of the letter didn't tell her very much: “We are sure we have a range of products that will meet your aspirations. My colleague will contact you in the next few days and she will give you any information you require.” It closed with the usual best wishes and the name of the writer - Philip Hardenberg.

Now she remembered where she'd heard the name Philip before. She saw herself walking across the reception area at Behringer's, she saw Frau Luici cover the mouthpiece of the telephone with one hand,
she heard her whisper, “Hardenberg”. And the six-foot giant with the receding hair grabbed the receiver and said, “Hi, Philip.”

A call from the man Nadia was working for as a favour at precisely the moment when she was coming out of nice Herr Reincke's office, filled with the justified hope that she had finally found the job she so desperately needed. But only two days later the letter of rejection arrived! And now she was stuck here because Nadia needed a stand-in sulky wife in order to enjoy a couple of carefree days with her lover.

Coincidence? She didn't think so. What if Nadia had already been wondering about being able to spend a worry-free night with her lover when she got into the lift on that Thursday at the end of July? What if the only reason Nadia couldn't seriously consider such a night was that it might endanger her marriage? What if Nadia had had a revelation when the lift stopped and she found herself face to face with herself? In that case - bloody hell, Nadia had certainly been quick out of the blocks to take advantage of the chance meeting! Without giving a thought to the needs of the woman in the green suit, she'd set Philip Hardenberg on Behringer to make sure someone else got the job.

That suddenly made everything seem so mean, so despicable. So far there wasn't a scrap of proof. But the way the six-foot giant had behaved supported her suspicion. She could still hear him saying, “May I know why you're so interested in this property?”

Property, she thought bitterly. And then he'd talked about water damage. Hardenberg had arranged some insurance for him and now Behringer wanted a juicy pay-out for the favour.

She called up the other files in the folder. They all had the same content and the same date: 02/08, the Friday when she'd met Nadia in the Opera Café for the first time. The addressees were different - the names she knew from the torn-up Alfo Investment sheet. One was missing. Presumably it had been replaced in the folder by her Lasko file.

She switched on the laser printer. It spewed out the letters one after the other. She had no idea what use she could make of them. She wasn't important enough for Philip Hardenberg or for Behringer to get them to admit to collusion. And a minor insurance fraud would be impossible to prove. There was no point in fantasizing about going to Behringer with the letters and getting confirmation of the truth. And if that was what had happened, if Nadia had done her out of the job, then she owed her
more than the truth, much more than a thousand euros for standing in for her once a fortnight.

A woman who lacked for nothing, who had everything others could only dream about. A woman who hadn't the remotest idea what it was like to have to steal from your mother just to cover your supply of noodles for the next thirty days and the rent for a filthy hole beside the railway track, where she was constantly pestered by an alcoholic with a criminal record. This woman had had the cheek to exploit a little hole in her mother's nest egg in order to put moral pressure on her - and that after she was the one who'd made it impossible for her to fill the hole by honest means. If that was what had happened, then Nadia had robbed her of a future reasonably free from financial worries and the prospect of a secure old age.

 

For a few minutes she felt a mixture of impotence and raging fury, which swept away all thoughts of the night and the emotions Nadia's husband had aroused in her. After a while, fury came to dominate the mixture. Two alternatives. Either: “From now on you'll pay me…” Or? There was nothing in “or” for her personally, but she liked it better. If preserving her marriage and keeping her husband in the dark were really so important to Nadia: a phone call to the lab and a frank discussion with Michael.

His contract only had the address of the pharmaceutical firm, no telephone number. And she didn't think he would be back home before she had to leave. If the technician had turned up on time and repaired Olaf, there would surely be a lot to keep him occupied.

She started her search for an address book or list of telephone numbers in the desk drawers. There she came across the Dictaphone Nadia had used to allay her fear their voices might sound different. It didn't appear to have been used since then - when she switched it on, the first thing she heard was Nadia speaking the brief text of the letters and then herself asking, “What should I say?” After that Nadia spoke again. And even if there wasn't any difference in the voices, the question whether she'd taken the money and her answer must make it clear to anyone that there were two women speaking.

With the Dictaphone in her hand, she went to the next room. This time the towel on the couch and the bottle of massage oil caused her no inhibitions, she simply ignored the objects that bore witness to her night
with Michael. She spent more than fifteen minutes looking for a way of making a copy of the tape. It couldn't be done on the stereo system. In one of the drawers of the cupboard where the massage oil was kept she did find several tiny cassettes, but they wouldn't fit into the Dictaphone, so that ruled out taking the original tape.

It was a while before she realized they were replacement tapes for the answerphone on the desk. Suddenly she knew what to do. She swapped the cassette in the answerphone for one of the replacement tapes and dialled the house number on her mobile. The telephone beside the bed rang just twice, then Nadia's voice on the answerphone could be heard in the study. After Nadia's message and the bleeps, she switched the Dictaphone on and held the mobile against it. The recording quality of her copy was poorer than the original, but that didn't bother her.

After that she had a look through the contents of the second drawer in the little cupboard. She didn't find a list of telephone numbers but, right at the back, underneath an accumulation of odds and ends, there was an envelope which had been soaked in some dark liquid. The address was unreadable, all that could be made out was the sender: Nadia; the postmark: posted in August two years ago in Cologne; and a stamped message:
Retour à l'expéditeur
.

The envelope had been opened. In it were two sheets, handwritten, unfortunately in French, and also stained with the same dark liquid. The beginning was legible:
Jacques mon chéri
. That suggested to her an intimate letter to a lover. What was there to say that the dark-haired man at the airport was the first with whom Nadia had been unfaithful to her husband? The fact that the letter had been returned to sender could only mean that
mon chéri
had refused to accept delivery. In other words had terminated his affair with Nadia.

She took the two sheets back into the study. The computer had long since switched to standby, but pressing the space bar immediately reactivated the word-processor. She typed out everything in the letter that was legible. It fitted on one page, which she printed out.

Before continuing her search for the telephone number of the laboratory, she made herself something to eat, just a ready meal. Taking the plate back up to the study, she went through countless folders, hoping to find a list of telephone numbers. Everything that looked as if it might be a written document she sent to the printer, including the ninth letter
with Philip Hardenberg's best wishes. The addressee was called Maringer and was the one with the smallest sum on the Alfo Investment list. The rest consisted of reports on various, mostly foreign, companies with a positive assessment of their future prospects. She looked in vain for the three letters Nadia had sent her.

After about two hundred pages had piled up, the paper in the printer ran out. She took a large envelope from the desk drawer, addressed it to herself, put all the printed pages and the tiny cassette with her copy from the Dictaphone in it and, with a touch of irony, put Dieter Lasko as the sender. She couldn't find any stamps, so she treated herself to: “postage to be paid by addressee”. There was too much paper to take in her handbag or any other way without Nadia noticing.

Next she used the mobile to dial the number of the hotel in Luxembourg to find out the name of the dark-haired man at the airport. A young woman answered and told her, in excellent German, that Frau Lasko had already checked out. She asked about the man accompanying Frau Lasko, claiming it was an extremely urgent business matter. The woman at reception knew nothing about a man. Frau Lasko had had a single room, she said. That wasn't surprising for a married man on a business trip. But however much she insisted, the otherwise friendly receptionist refused to reveal the names of male guests in the nearby single rooms.

When Michael came back shortly after three, she was still going through the folders, hoping to find personal letters or anything else she could use to open his eyes. The window was open because of the odd smell from the printer. When she heard the car in the street, the cursor was highlighting something of which only Nadia knew the contents. But it was her last chance. She clicked on the file, at the same time watching the monitor as the garage door rose.