The Lie (9 page)

Johannes raced round the bends in his usual style, surreptitiously giving her sidelong glances. Eventually he asked, “Don't you feel well?”

No. She felt anything but well. She was afraid she was going to fail miserably next Sunday right from the start, on the journey out. Johannes flung the car round the next bend. “All this hurtling round corners is making me feel sick,” she said in answer to his question.

It was the first time she'd criticized his driving. He was genuinely puzzled. “Am I driving too fast?”

“I never do more than fifty on a road like this,” she said. That was the speed limit indicated on the signs they'd hurtled past only a few minutes ago.

“I'd no idea you could drive,” he said.

“I don't have much opportunity,” she explained. “I haven't got a car of my own at the moment, of course. But I've just been offered a company car; they want me to take over the courier work. I'd love to do it, only I'm afraid my lack of driving practice would mean I couldn't.”

Taking the broad hint, Johannes nobly pulled up at the side of the road. This time next week, she thought as he got out. In her mind's eye she saw the little photo of a blond man. Michael Trenkler, who else? As it was only for a few minutes, and as he wouldn't have time to devote himself to her to any extent, there really was no risk - provided she got there safely.

She slid over into the driving seat. The engine was still running, Johannes had put it in neutral and applied the handbrake. Left foot on the clutch, right foot on the accelerator, engage first, take off the handbrake. And slowly - the BMW shot out into the middle of the road.

“Easy does it,” said Johannes, leaning back and coolly crossing his legs. “You should have said something and I could have let you try sooner, I'm not fussy about letting other people drive my car. But what's this about courier trips? I thought you worked in an office?”

“Yes. But these courier firms aren't a hundred percent reliable,” she explained. “If something's urgent, you have to see it gets there yourself.”

It all sounded somewhat laboured, but at least she was driving at almost twenty miles per hour on the right side of the road. The engine protested. She changed up into second, crept up to thirty in third and managed to reach fifty without having the feeling she was at the wheel of an uncontrollable rocket. Johannes just sat there and let her get on with it, listening to her telling him how much she was looking forward to the courier trips because, of course, they were paid extra.

A little later than usual they reached the car park at the old folks' home. Johannes looked for a space and pointed. “There,” he said, indicating an empty place. The only one left. It was much too narrow for her.

“It'd be better if you parked it yourself.” she said.

“No. Any idiot can drive. You have to be able to park the thing as well. As a courier you'll have to squeeze into much narrower spaces. Try reversing in, it's easier.”

Some ten minutes later the BMW was parked between two other vehicles. Susanne got out, trembling at the knees.

“You see,” said Johannes as they went over to the building, “you can do it, no problem. See you at seven. Or let's say half past, the car park'll be fairly empty by then and you can practice a bit and drive back.”

This time next week, she thought, as she thanked him for his offer.

 

It was a terrible week, starting with her mother going on at her because she wasn't her usual chatty self. “Susanne, there's something wrong with you. Won't you tell me what it is?”

“It's just my time of the month.”

Agnes Runge was happy with that and prattled on about the little events in her life. Finally she asked Susanne how work was going and how her friend Jasmin Toppler and that nice Herr Heller were.

All at once she felt like bursting into tears. All the lies and the two thousand euros missing from her mother's account. It would have been so simple to say in January, “I've lost my job, Mother.” Her mother would have certainly supported her. And now she could have said, “Something funny happened, Mum. I've met a woman who looks exactly like me. Or, rather, now I look exactly like her. She was keen to splash out on it and now she'll pay me five hundred if I…”

This time next week! She was itching to talk to someone about Nadia Trenkler, but it was an itch she didn't dare scratch. She could still hear her mother going on about fidelity in marriage. Her father had often said, “Why don't you go dancing, Susanne. You'll see there are more men around than your roving reporter. He's never there for you. And don't imagine he sticks to his marriage vows the way you do.”

Every time her mother had jumped on him. “How can you say something like that? What Dieter does is neither here nor there. I don't think it's right for him to leave her alone all the time either. But at the altar she vowed…”

To tell her mother she was acting as stand-in for a woman who was going to cheat on her husband was out of the question.

At half-past seven she got behind the wheel of the BMW for the second time. Johannes was a mine of useful tips and she spent more than an hour, under his patient guidance, practising in the almost empty car park, going backwards, forwards, sideways into a parking space, doing three-point turns, reversing round corners and all the other driving-school manoeuvres. Then she drove out onto the country road and later - in first gear - along the acceleration lane and onto the autobahn.

Johannes kept her amused with a stream of advanced driving theory: how to get a car that's in a skid back under control, finishing off with a handbrake turn; how to travel for a short stretch on two wheels; how much you had to accelerate to jump like a horse over ditches or other obstacles, all tricks he needed for his part-time job as a stuntman. Then he even offered to come round during the week so she could practise on a piece of waste ground where he'd been working recently.

It would probably have been more sensible to take a couple of ordinary driving lessons, to familiarize herself with city traffic and learn to drive up an autobahn approach road in third gear at least. But Johannes's course in skid control was free, so she said yes.

On Monday she spent half the day with the photos: interior and exterior views of Nadia's house, parties in the neighbourhood, Nadia with Joachim Kogler, Nadia with Lilo Kogler, Nadia with Wolfgang Blasting, Nadia with Ilona Blasting, Nadia with a dozen unknown friends. For the first time it struck her that the blond man did not appear in any of the photos. Perhaps he was the one pressing the button. It was still odd.

Although she and Dieter had only lived together properly as husband and wife for a year, there were several dozen snapshots from that time and the lovely photos that had been taken on their wedding day, both outside the church and in the photographer's studio. Where they were now, she had no idea. She hadn't wanted to take them when she moved out. Ramie, her successor, had presumably thrown them away by now. But she could still see them clearly in her mind's eye: the promising young reporter in dark suit, silver-grey tie and white shirt, and herself all in white, as was right and proper, with her sumptuous bridal bouquet.

Among Nadia's photos was one with “wedding” written on the back, though without that she certainly wouldn't have recognized it as a wedding photo. It hadn't been taken outside a church or in a photographer's studio. Whether the building, the steps of which Nadia was hurrying
down, was a registry office, was impossible to say. No flowers, no white dress, not to mention a bridal veil and wreath. In her elegant suit, her handbag under her left arm, it looked as if Nadia were just coming out of a business meeting. There was another figure a few steps above her, rather blurred, but apparently wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Perhaps the bridegroom, perhaps just some passer-by.

In the evening she spent two hours driving on the bumpy but completely empty waste ground where there was no danger of her colliding with trees or other road users. Johannes did not teach her how to drive according to the Highway Code. Instead he got her to try several tricks that were as useful for driving in normal traffic as a freezer in Greenland.

At first he found her much too timorous. After he had repeatedly assured her his BMW was used to much rougher treatment, she became a little more daring. And he praised the speed with which she picked things up and her quick reactions.

On Tuesday she went for a long walk to calm her nerves. When she got back, she found Heller lurking on the stairs like an evil omen. Hands in his pockets and a broad grin on his face, he told her, “That guy came to see me recently, your opinion pollster.”

“How nice for you,” she said, trying to get past.

He took a step forwards and blocked the way. His grin became suggestive. “He was trying to tell me he only screws students. He said he was a student himself, doing the survey was going to pay for his next semester.”

“I'm not interested,” she said.

Heller's grin broadened. “Well you should be. He was a snooper, you can take it from me. Look what I found after he'd gone.” He took one hand out of his trouser pocket and held it out. In the palm was a something like a small battery, those tiny round ones you put in your watch. “That's a bug,” Heller insisted.

“You ought to watch a nature film or a variety show now and then, instead of all those horror videos,” she said, squeezing past him and hurrying up the stairs.

On Wednesday she flogged Johannes's BMW round the bumpy waste ground again. On Thursday he let her practise in heavy traffic. On Friday evening he got her to scare the pants off HGV drivers on the autobahn with her overtaking. On Saturday she practised Nadia's
walk, Nadia's smile, Nadia's way of speaking, her mocking pout, her sparing but deft gestures and her defiant toss of the head until she was getting dizzy. She felt she had mastered them really well. The only thing that was still beyond her was the - to her ears - slightly deeper tone of Nadia's voice.

On Saturday night she dreamed of Michael Trenkler. It started off as a romantic dream of an excursion to the Eifel hills, but the outing ended in the empty disused factory, where he hit her again and again with the butt of a pistol and threatened, “If you move, you're dead.”

The worst thing was that it was Heller who found her. He played the heroic rescuer and demanded his due reward.

On Sunday morning she found that her period had finished. About time too. After lunch she had a good shower, applied her make-up, did her hair and put on the clothes Nadia had bought for them in the boutique and which had so impressed Johannes Herzog the previous week.

The weather was pleasant and she took her time going to the multi-storey, but she was still there before three. Nadia had suggested they meet on level two, but the red Alfa Spider wasn't there, nor on levels one and three, which she checked, just to be sure. She went back out again and strolled up and down outside the entrance.

When it was getting to four o'clock, she began to wonder whether Nadia was going to come. All sorts of things could have happened during the week. Perhaps Nadia had had a heart-to-heart with her husband, or he didn't have to go into the lab that day. She wondered whether she should ring up, she remembered Nadia's number from the visiting cards. She'd always had a good memory for numbers. She decided to wait until half past. A few minutes before her self-imposed deadline, the Alfa appeared.

She ran back and up to level two, somewhat out of breath. Nadia had got out and gave a sigh of relief when she saw her coming. “I'm sorry,” she said, flustered, “I thought I wasn't going to be able to make it.”

“I won't be able to get there by five,” Susanne said.

“There's no need,” Nadia said. “We had one hell of a row. I wouldn't want you to have to go through a sequel.”

Nadia took the remote control for the garage out of the car. It was new and very complicated, one of Joachim Kogler's inventions, the
prototype. Whether it would find a market was doubtful, but Nadia was fascinated by the technological toy and spent five minutes explaining how it worked, emphasizing that she always drove into the garage because of the important data on the laptop she kept in the car.

There followed a further lecture, this time on the house alarm system. It was permanently switched on and had to be deactivated pretty quickly since it went off if the code wasn't keyed in twenty seconds after entering the house. Since Susanne would be coming in through the garage, she had no time to lose. The keypad was in the hall closet where they kept their coats. It was on a black box that was hidden behind a leather jacket. She was to push the jacket to one side - on no account was she to take the hanger off the hook - and key in the combination.

Then Nadia took off her two rings and Susanne slipped them onto her finger. Nadia took out her ear studs and Susanne put them through the holes she'd had pierced. Nadia took off her watch and put on Susanne's. Nadia opened her handbag, took out her mobile, a packet of cigarettes and a disposable lighter then picked up Susanne's bag. The cigarette case and the gold lighter stayed in Nadia's bag.

“You don't have to smoke today,” Nadia said. “Not later on either, if you don't want to. It's enough if you light one and put it down in the ashtray. I do that quite often.”

“When should I be back here?” Susanne asked.

“Not here,” said Nadia. “I'm going to call a taxi and go to your flat. You've no objection, I hope?”

She shook her head. Nadia took a laptop bag and the document case from the back seat of the Alfa. “I've brought something to stop me getting bored. Take as much time as you need. It doesn't matter when I get home. Michael will probably spend the night in the lab. How many driving lessons have you had?”