Melanie Raabe - The Trap

Lenzen straightens up, taking his hand off his stomach. He turns to face me once more. His eyes are red; he looks older. His laughter lines have vanished. I can see him fight the impulse to wipe his mouth on the sleeve of his smart shirt. I can smell the pool of vomit at his feet.

I squash my pity and tell myself it’s a good thing. The more ill at ease he feels, the better. His situation is humiliating and that rankles — good! I hold the gun so tight that my knuckles stick out white. Lenzen stares at me in silence. A trial of strength. I’m not going to be the first to speak. I want to see how he turns the situation now. The way out is clear; the cards are on the table. He has to confess.

It is silent. Outside, the sky flickers. I hear my breathing and I hear Lenzen’s, gasping and fitful. Thunder follows. Apart from that, it is quite still.

Lenzen closes his eyes, as if by so doing he could release himself from this nightmare. When he opens his eyes, he begins to speak. At last.

“Please listen to me, Frau Conrads,” he says. “There’s been some mistake! My name is Victor Lenzen. I’m a journalist. And a family man. Not a particularly good one, but…”

He’s losing focus.

“I abhor violence. I’m a pacifist. I’m a human-rights activist. I’ve never harmed anyone in my life.”

His gaze is penetrating. I waver.

“You have to believe me!” he says. But I must not doubt.

“If you lie to me once more, I’ll pull the trigger.”

My voice sounds strange. I don’t know whether I really mean it.

“If you lie to me once more, I’ll pull the trigger,” I repeat. Lenzen says nothing — he simply stares at me.

I wait, as the storm grows closer and the wind gets up. I wait a long time and I realize that he’s decided not to talk to me anymore.

It’s over to me.

23

JONAS

A feeling for whether a case would be solved quickly or not at all always took hold fast. Jonas’s gut instinct told him that the case concerning the elfin woman who had been found stabbed to death in her flat was not going to be solved as rapidly as his colleagues assumed. They expected either the jealous lover or the piqued ex to be charged, especially as there had been an eyewitness.

But a sense of unease was creeping over Jonas, so black and heavy that it left no room for optimism. True, everything smacked of a crime passionnel , and there was an identikit picture of the culprit. But no one from the victim’s circle of friends and relations had recognized the picture. How was that possible, if it was a crime of passion? Of course, a secret affair was a possibility. But that wouldn’t have been like Britta Peters.

Jonas took a deep breath and entered the conference room. It smelled of a peculiar mixture of PVC flooring and coffee. The entire team had already assembled: Michael Dzierzewski, Volker Zimmer, Antonia Bug and Nilgün Arslan, a much-loved colleague recently returned from maternity leave. The room was filled with murmurs as they discussed yesterday’s football match, trip to the cinema or evening in the pub. The inevitable fluorescent lighting was on, even though it was broad daylight.

Jonas switched it off and stepped in front of the group.

“Good morning all,” he said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say. Volker!” He pointed to the man in jeans and a black polo shirt.

“I had a word with the victim’s landlord,” Zimmer said.

“We’d heard from a neighbor that Britta Peters had complained about the man gaining access to her flat without her agreement.”

“We remember all that,” said Jonas impatiently.

“Well, the only crime this landlord — a certain Hans Feldmann — has committed is boring his son and daughter-in-law to death with three hours of photos from his recent trip to Sweden.”

“He has an alibi?” Jonas asked.

“Yes, his son and daughter-in-law stayed the night with him.”

“Couldn’t he have slipped out briefly?”

“It’s possible,” Zimmer replied. “But if the eyewitness’s statement is to be believed, it wasn’t Hans Feldmann she saw: he’s over seventy.”

“Okay,” said Jonas. “Michael?”

“The ex-boyfriend can be ruled out too,” said Dzierzewski.

“Britta’s teenage sweetheart?” asked Bug.

“That’s the one. The two of them had been together for a long time and it seems it wasn’t a pretty breakup. But he split up with her, not the other way around.”

“Okay, that makes him less suspicious,” said Jonas.

“Doesn’t mean he’s off the hook.”

“I’m afraid he is. He was away, you see — with his new flame, a certain Vanessa Schneider. A romantic holiday to the Maldives.”

“Okay, keep going — what else?” asked Jonas.

“A quick question about the ex-boyfriend first,” said Nilgün.

“Does anyone know why he dumped her?”

“He thought she was cheating on him,” Dzierzewski replied. “But her sister and all her girlfriends swear that that’s nonsense and that he was only looking for an excuse because — I quote—‘he’s a cowardly bastard.’”

“All right,” Jonas replied. “Cowardly bastard or not — he’s out. Anything else?”

“Not much,” said Antonia. “No other partners, no ex-boyfriends, no trouble at work, no debts, no enemies, no arguments. You could pretty much say that Britta Peters was an incredibly dull person.”

“Or an incredibly good one,” said Jonas. The team was silent.

“Okay then,” he said. “The only thing we can do now is carry on looking for the mystery man observed by the eyewitness at the scene of the crime.”

“ Allegedly observed,” said Antonia Bug. “I think the sister’s lying. I mean, please, even the identikit artist says she sounded as if she was making the face up as she went along.”

Jonas sighed.

“Some people aren’t good at faces,” he said. “Especially not in stressful situations. And why should Sophie Peters have killed her sister? She alerted the police as soon as she found her. There was no blood on her clothes. Even the stab wounds inflicted on the victim suggest the culprit was much bigger than Sophie Peters — and, in all probability, a man. Besides…”

“I know all that,” said Antonia Bug, interrupting him, “and I didn’t say I thought Sophie Peters killed her sister. But what if she’s covering for the murderer? You’re not telling me you believe this story of the mystery man.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know — maybe her fiancé. Do you remember how Sophie Peters reacted when I asked her the reason for the argument she’d had with him?”

Jonas thought of the removal boxes in Sophie’s flat. Her fiancé was moving out. What were the implications of their breakup?

“Sophie Peters and her fiancé have split up since,” said Jonas.

A murmur went around the room. Antonia Bug slapped her thigh.

“There you are,” she cried. “There you are!”

Jonas held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“Do we have any reason to believe that Sophie Peters’s fiancé was having an affair with the murder victim?” he asked.

Volker Zimmer was about to say something, but Bug was faster.

“A good friend of Britta Peters told me that said fiancé, Paul Albrecht, was madly in love with Britta, and that Sophie Peters knew it. Britta Peters apparently told her herself.”

“Sorry, folks,” said Zimmer, finally making himself heard, “but I’m afraid I have to take the wind out of your sails. I checked on the fiancé yesterday. He did indeed have an argument with Sophie Peters on the night of the crime. But after she’d gone off in a huff to be consoled by her sister, he took himself to the pub and went on such a bender with two colleagues from his solicitors’ office that the landlord had to kick all three of them out and call them a taxi. It can’t have been him. He’s definitively out.”