Johanna was waiting in a taxi outside the courthouse. She asked the cabby to take them to Charlottenburg Palace. They looked out of their respective windows, not knowing what to say to each other. It was warm in the sun, but the park behind the palace lay in shade, and there was a chilly wind. An old woman was scattering birdseed on the path; she must have found some left over from winter.
‘Crows never beg for food,’ he remarked, just for something to say.
They walked side by side for a long time in silence. Johanna’s shoes were too thin for the gravel path. The pale blue copper roof of the tea house shone in the sunlight. They heard a voice coming over a loudspeaker on a tourist boat going along the river Spree. The old woman was sitting on a park bench now. She wore red woollen gloves with the fingers cut away. Her bag of birdseed was empty.
Suddenly Johanna stopped and looked at Leinen. For the first time, he noticed a little scar over her right eyebrow. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home. I don’t have to get back to London until tomorrow.’
Leinen had rented the apartment while he was still training, and he didn’t want to move; he had as much space as he needed. Two rooms, a typical old-style Berlin apartment, whitewashed walls, high ceilings, wooden flooring, a small bathroom. There were bookshelves lining almost all the walls, and books everywhere else too; they lay on the floor, the sofa, the chairs, they were piled on the side of the bathtub. Johanna looked at everything. The wooden head of a Buddha stood among the books. There was a rusty spear-point from East Africa on another shelf, and two pencil drawings hung in the corridor: the orchard at Rossthal. A few photographs stood on the windowsill: his father in a green hat, his mother outside the forester’s house. A silver-framed photo of half a dozen young men on the steps outside the boarding school; she recognized Caspar and Philipp.
They drank coffee to warm them up. They talked about Johanna’s life in London, her friends, the auction house where she worked. After a while she leaned forward over the table. Leinen took her head in his hands as he kissed her, and a plate with bread on it fell on to the tiled floor and broke. Leinen was thinking that tomorrow morning she would be going away, back to London and another life, one he didn’t know.
Around five he woke to find the room still dark. Johanna was sitting naked on the floor in front of the balcony door, her legs drawn up, her head resting on her knees. She was crying. He got out of bed and put a blanket round her shoulders.
In the morning he took Johanna to the airport. People were meeting and seeing each other off, people whose childhoods were not being destroyed by any murder trial. Johanna kissed him, checked in, went through security and disappeared behind a blank screen. He was afraid of losing her just as he had lost Philipp. Suddenly everything around him was moving sluggishly. The benches, the floor, the people, the sounds were strange and muted, the lighting was all wrong. A girl with a wheelie case collided with him before he could avoid her. Leinen stood for almost ten minutes in the airport concourse. He saw himself from the outside, as a stranger who had only a tenuous connection to him. After a while he succeeded in folding his hands and, trying to remember the size and shape of his fingers, he gradually came back to life. He went to the toilets, washed his face and looked at his reflection in the mirror until he felt more like himself again.
At the airport news-stand he bought all the papers and read them sitting in his car in the car park. The tabloids featured the trial on the front page. A traffic warden tapped his windscreen and told him he couldn’t park there any longer.
12
For the first five days of the trial, the court heard evidence from witnesses of the crime and statements from expert witnesses. The presiding judge was well prepared. She asked her questions in a thorough, experienced way, and seemed impartial. There were no surprises; the witnesses repeated exactly what they had already told the police. Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers had hardly any questions, but sometimes enlarged on a point.
Mattinger dominated the trial. The forensic pathologist was called as the first expert witness. Mattinger asked Professor Wagenstett about the angles of the gunshots, the entry and exit wounds, the marks left by Collini’s shoe, the intervals between kicks, the kicking itself, and got the professor to explain all the details as illustrated by the photographs. Leinen saw that the two lay judges were sickened by the pictures taken at the autopsy, which would surely linger in their memory. Mattinger asked questions in plain language that everyone could understand. Whenever Wagenstett used a technical medical expression, he asked for a translation, and if the forensic pathologist had none, Mattinger got him to describe what he was saying in simple words. After two hours everyone in the courtroom had a mental picture of a brutal thug forcing a defenceless old man to his knees and shooting him in the head from behind. Mattinger had not once raised his voice; he made no sweeping gestures. The old lawyer sat quietly in his place, asked straightforward questions and looked composed. He was relying on the images in the minds of everyone listening.
After five days it seemed that the rest of the trial would be mere routine. The presiding judge continued to be friendly, the court reporter with the ponytail glanced at Leinen with increasing sympathy. The interest of the press flagged; fewer journalists came to the courtroom every day. It was generally agreed in the newspapers that Collini could only be a lunatic. On the sixth day one of the lay judges, both of whom happened to be women, fell ill with a bad attack of flu, and the presiding judge adjourned the trial for ten days.
Leinen realized that he was losing the case. He had spent every evening sitting in his chambers, looking through the files. For the hundredth time, he had read the witness statements, the account of the autopsy, the reports of expert witnesses and the comments of the police detectives. The crime-scene photographs hung on his office walls; he had stared at them daily and found nothing. It was the same today. Around ten in the evening he switched off his desk lamp. He watched his cigarette smoulder and go out in the ashtray, and could smell the singed filter. Mattinger had said he should think; the answers were always somewhere in the files, you just had to read them correctly. But how, Leinen wondered, do you defend a man who doesn’t want to defend himself?
It occurred to him that he had forgotten to call his father today and wish him a happy birthday. He looked at the time and dialled the number in the dim light of the room. His father sounded the same as usual; he said he was just cleaning the shotguns, he’d been out in the game preserves all day, clearing the feed troughs.
When Leinen hung up, it was as if he could smell the gun oil. He closed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he jumped up, switched the light on and hurried over to the wall with the crime-scene photos. Page 26, Number 52: ‘Weapon: Walther P38’, a police officer had written under the photograph. Leinen examined the pistol closely; he picked up a magnifying glass from his desk. He knew that gun. Then he called his father’s number again.
Next morning, Leinen went by rail from Berlin to Ludwigsburg. He had found a trail – it was vague and faint, but it was something to follow up. At Ludwigsburg station he asked a taxi driver about the address. The cabby said it wasn’t far, he could easily walk it, but of course he’d be happy to drive him there. Inside, the car smelled of thyme and patchouli, a chain with the Eye of Fatima on it hung from the rear-view mirror. The long buildings of the old garrison town were painted yellow and pink, everything here looked neat and tidy. The driver asked Leinen where he had come from, and said that his daughter was studying in Berlin. That was a fine city too, he added, like Ludwigsburg, only bigger. They passed the town hall and the castle, and stopped outside a rather dilapidated building. Leinen got out and crossed the small square. On his left was the gatehouse, an old entrance to the city. Later, gravediggers had lived there, and for a few years it had been an educational institution for delinquent children. The narrow wall of the tall building faced the street; it used to be known to the locals as ‘the blockhouse’. It had been a prison for many years, and the prison walls sti
ll stood. The government department that Leinen had come to visit had moved there only the year before, in 2000.
Leinen had to shout his name into the intercom a couple of times; it had a loose contact. An automatic buzzer opened the rusty gate in the wall. Leinen crossed the interior courtyard to an iron door. It was unlocked. Inside the place looked as government departments always do: PVC floor covering, neon lighting, woodchip wallpaper, aluminium door handles. There were empty drinks crates outside the lodge at the entrance; the officers in their blue uniforms were friendly and sounded bored. It was all well-worn, slightly shabby, but no one was concerned about that, no one was going to renovate the place. A courteous, lanky man greeted Leinen, took him to the reading room on the first floor and explained the procedure there. Leinen had telephoned in advance. He had hardly anything to go on, just a name and a country. He had thought there was no chance of finding anything out, but the government employees had come up with what he was looking for among the million and a half index cards. Documents lay on the pale wood table, fourteen blue-grey folders, neatly labelled and stacked in a pile. An old woman sitting one chair away from him could hardly see what she was reading; she held a sheet of paper right up to her eyes and moved it from right to left to decipher it. She kept shaking her head, and sometimes she sighed.
After the courteous man had gone away, Leinen, still standing, picked up the first folder. He hesitated to open it. He could see the bus stop from the window. A schoolboy was fooling around there with his girlfriend; they were laughing, messing about, then kissing again. At last Leinen took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. He sat down and took a sheaf of thin, yellowed papers out of the folder.
That evening he took a room in a cheap boarding house near the station. At night he listened to the endless goods trains passing, while the traffic lights outside his window bathed the room by turns in red, amber and green. He stayed in Ludwigsburg for five days. Every morning at eight he walked the short distance back to the reading room. He bought himself a travel guide, and realized that the history of the city was the history of the wars it had known. In 1812, the Württemberg army came here, almost sixteen thousand men, fighting for Napoleon; nearly all of them died in Russia. In the First World War a hundred and twenty-eight officers and four thousand one hundred and sixty men of the Old Württemberg Regiment died ‘on the field of honour’, as the wording carved in stone on a war memorial said. In 1940 the film Jew Süss was made in this city, because the real-life Joseph Süss Oppenheimer had lived in Ludwigsburg.
Leinen sat in the reading room, the stack of folders at his place rising higher every day, his notes filling page after page, notepad after notepad. He asked for so many photocopies that the reading-room staff began to groan. Leinen always worked through until evening, he didn’t stop for a break; his eyes were red-rimmed. At first the files seemed strange to him; he hardly understood what he was reading. But gradually all that changed. There in the large, bare room the paper came to life, it all reached out to him, and by night he dreamed of the files. When he drove back to Berlin he had lost all of two kilos in weight. He carried boxes full of photocopies into his chambers, went to his apartment, drew the curtains and lay in bed all weekend. On Monday he visited Collini in remand prison. And when, seven hours later, Leinen left the prison again, he knew what he must do.
13
On the day before the trial was to continue, Mattinger gave a party to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. Leinen arrived late for it; he had been working in his chambers up to the last minute, preparing for the next day in court. He had to park his old car some way off. He passed a long line of expensive vehicles before he reached the gate to Mattinger’s property, showed a security man his invitation and went into the courtyard.
Mattinger had invited over eight hundred guests. A large marquee had been put up on the lawn going down to the lake outside the house, a band was playing jazz, there were countless candles in coloured-glass lanterns on the two terraces, in the grass and on the landing stage. Mattinger had hired a large boat that put in there from time to time to take guests out on the lake.
Leinen recognized several actors, a woman TV presenter, footballers, a well-known hairdresser and the chairman of the board of a bank who had been released from remand prison two days before. He helped himself to something from the buffet; he’d eaten almost nothing for two days. The band played well, he had a CD of the girl singer. He listened for a while. When the musicians stopped for a break, he went in search of Mattinger, couldn’t find him, and went out on the landing stage. Large wickerwork seats with white cushions stood on the platform where the boats were tied up, the faint light of the candle lanterns showing their outlines. He was alone. There was mist above the Wannsee. It was cool for this time of year. A few boats drifted slowly on the water. Mattinger’s house, on the slope above, was brightly lit and reflected in the lake. Leinen turned up the collar of his dinner jacket. He took his father’s silver case out of his pocket and lit a cigarette. The water lapped against the wooden posts of the landing stage.
‘Good evening, Herr Leinen. Mattinger said that if you were here, this was where I’d probably find you. He obviously knows you very well.’
Leinen turned his head as he sat there. It was Baumann, the company lawyer from the Meyer Works. He was holding a glass, and he wore a dress shirt with a wing collar. Even in the dark, his face still looked red. Leinen stood up to shake hands. Baumann sat down on another wicker seat beside him.
‘Nice house Mattinger has,’ said Baumann. ‘I can’t wait to see the firework display on the lake.’
‘There’s probably too much mist for a good view of it,’ said Leinen.
‘Yes, maybe. How’s the trial going?’
‘So-so,’ said Leinen. He didn’t want to talk about it. He looked out at the black lake again.
‘I’d like to make you a proposition,’ said Baumann.
‘A proposition?’
‘It’s like this: I don’t mind what sentence your client gets. Indeed, I couldn’t care less.’ Baumann crossed his legs.
‘That’s certainly the correct attitude.’ Leinen didn’t like this conversation.
‘I’ll be perfectly frank, Herr Leinen. We know you’ve been to Ludwigsburg.’
Leinen looked at him.
‘Give up the brief. That’s the best thing for you to do,’ said Baumann.
Leinen did not reply. He waited to hear more.
‘I’ve been a practising lawyer myself, you see. I know how hard a man works, how ambitious he feels. You stake everything on a case like this, you feel it’s the most important thing in the world. If you were just any young lawyer I wouldn’t bother, but in a way you’re part of the Meyer family, you have a future ahead of you, and …’
‘And?’
‘… and you can extricate yourself from this trial without any difficulty. The Meyer Works will pay for a mandated defence counsel, we already have someone in mind who’d do it. Then you’d be automatically released from the case and rid of your brief.’ Baumann’s voice hadn’t changed, it still sounded friendly. The big boat was so close now that you could hear its passengers through the mist. A woman cried out aloud and then laughed. The navigation lights lit up the landing stage, and were reflected in Baumann’s glasses.
Baumann leaned forward and placed his hand on Leinen’s arm. Now he was talking to him almost as if he were a child. ‘Don’t you understand, Herr Leinen? I like you, you’re just starting out, you have your whole career ahead of you. Don’t spoil it all now.’
‘Please, Herr Baumann, just enjoy the party. This isn’t the place for such a discussion.’
Baumann’s voice sounded forced, as if he were speaking under great stress. ‘Listen, we don’t know what you’ve been digging up in Ludwigsburg … we don’t want to know, either. But we’re anxious for this trial to come to a swift end. Every day in the glare of publicity is damaging to the company.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘Yes, you can.’ Baumann’s breath came noisily. ‘Make no plea in court, just let the trial come to an end. Quietly, do you see?’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘We’d speak to the court ourselves and explain that we’d agree to a lenient sentence.’
‘I don’t think that has anything to do with it.’
‘And in addition we’d pay compensation for your client’s cooperation.’
‘You’d do what …?’
‘We’d pay. A considerable sum, to bring the trial to an end quickly.’
It was a moment before Leinen could take it in. His mouth was dry. They had decided to buy a man’s past.
‘You’d pay me to refrain from defending Collini properly? Do you really mean that seriously?’
‘It’s the suggestion of the board,’ said Baumann.
‘Does Johanna Meyer know about this?’
‘No, it’s a matter between the company and you.’
All this could only mean that they were afraid, thought Leinen. He had got things right, not that knowing it gave him any satisfaction.
‘Come on …’ The beam of a small searchlight on the boat briefly fell on Baumann’s red face. ‘Look at it this way: you have chambers at the back of a building, your car is fifteen years old, and you’re wasting your abilities on small-time drug pushers and brawls in bars. We’re on good terms with a bank that happens to have a problem in Düsseldorf at the moment; it looks like being the biggest insider-dealing trial of the post-war era. If you like you can represent one of the defendants. You’d earn good money: the daily rate is 2,500 euros a day, plus additional expenses. The main trial will last a year, at least a hundred days. We’ll help you if you like. We can also offer you other briefs. Think about it, Herr Leinen. What you do now will determine the rest of your life …’
Baumann went on, but Leinen had stopped listening. The mist was getting thicker, a wind rose. He heard the cry of a mallard in flight overhead, but he couldn’t see the bird. He interrupted Baumann. ‘I’m not accepting your offer.’
The Collini Case Page 7
