The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  ‘The court will decide on that,’ said Landau.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Biegler.

  ‘This is a serious matter,’ said the presiding judge. ‘I have been a judge for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never had a case involving torture before. If that accusation turns out to be true, then of course we won’t be using the confession.’ The presiding judge’s voice sounded harsh. ‘However, I agree with Frau Landau. The court will be able to assess the accusation of torture in the context of the trial itself. Before your client makes his statement, Herr Biegler, we will hear what the police officer has to say, and perhaps also Frau Landau herself as a witness. The question is whether your client will repeat his confession.’

  ‘I haven’t discussed that with him yet,’ said Biegler. ‘But I don’t think you have a case here at all. You don’t have a body. You don’t even know who’s supposed to have been murdered. I know that, once before, this court tried a case of murder when no body could be found. But in that case, there were witnesses who saw what happened, and hundreds of clues…’

  ‘There were even photographs of the body,’ said the presiding judge.

  ‘Yes, indeed. But there’s nothing of the kind here,’ said Biegler.

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Landau. ‘We have the victim’s call to the police. In addition we have the sadistic porn films, the handcuffs, whips, autopsy equipment, traces of blood left in the hire car, the torn dress in the dustbin, and so on. Those clues are independent of your client’s confession.’

  Biegler liked the way Landau was fighting back. I’d do just the same in her place, he thought.

  ‘So far we know only about a single call from an unknown woman,’ said Biegler. ‘But we know nothing about the woman herself. It could be a joke. Or an attempt to cast false suspicion on my client. Eschburg is very well known, and like all people in the public eye he’s constantly exposed to such nonsense. You can’t build anything on that. As for your other so-called clues – it’s not forbidden to have any of those items, is it? And the dress: do you really know why it was torn? Or who tore it? Do you seriously think a court will lock a man up for twenty-five years on such evidence?’

  ‘Your client can ask himself our questions,’ said Landau.

  ‘Now you really are being ridiculous,’ said Biegler.

  ‘The court will assess the evidence as a whole, not individual parts,’ said Landau.

  ‘It’s interesting that you always know so precisely what the court will do, but —’

  ‘That will do.’ The presiding judge interrupted Biegler. ‘You don’t have to present a plea here.’

  ‘May I smoke?’ asked Biegler.

  ‘Certainly not. This is a public building,’ said Landau.

  ‘In fact, it’s not a public building, we’re in my office,’ said the presiding judge. ‘All the same, no. But you can have another biscuit.’

  Biegler shook his head. He already had heartburn.

  ‘I don’t want to anticipate the trial, Frau Landau,’ said the presiding judge. ‘But I’m afraid you ought to look at the files again. The body of evidence is, in reality, thin.’

  ‘Evidence can’t yet be purchased in specialist shops,’ said Biegler.

  ‘Don’t be so arrogant,’ said Landau.

  ‘No?’ Biegler lost his temper. ‘My client has been remanded in custody for seventeen weeks. You have been investigating the case for months without being able to put anything reasonable forward. You act as if my client’s liberty were a can of cat food. Your interrogating officer threatened him with torture. That hasn’t appeared in the press, a state of affairs that will now change, my dear Frau Landau. You have exposed Eschburg’s private life to public scrutiny. You have ensured that no one will ever buy his pictures again. But you say nothing about the most important feature of these proceedings. And then you sit there with your legs crossed, accusing me of arrogance?’

  ‘Calm down, please, Herr Biegler,’ said the presiding judge. ‘We don’t know how that information became public property.’

  ‘We don’t have to know. It came out in the course of investigations, and Frau Landau is responsible for the course of those investigations. At this point in the proceedings, the defendant is under the special protection of the state. But at the moment it looks – never mind which newspaper you read – as if he were guilty without a shadow of doubt. So how do you expect me to calm down? The biased information policy of the public prosecutor’s office is outrageous: I have read the entire file of press reports, and there is not a word about the threat of torture. It’s beyond my understanding. And then again, if we’re talking about omissions: the charge can’t be reconstructed. What is this trial aiming at? A murder without a body is a problem that can hardly be resolved for a start. But how about a murder case in which we don’t even know who the victim is supposed to be? That’s downright absurd,’ said Biegler.

  The presiding judge smiled. Biegler did not like that.

  ‘Perhaps you won’t have to go to the specialist shops for evidence after all, Frau Landau,’ said the presiding judge, smiling again. ‘The court has asked the medical experts to look at the bloodstains again. There was just one little detail, probably overlooked inadvertently. Previously, Herr Biegler, your client’s DNA was not compared to the DNA of the presumed victim. That’s really a standard part of forensic medicine, but it can be forgotten now and then.’

  ‘I don’t understand a word of this,’ said Biegler. Landau herself was looking at the presiding judge.

  ‘We’ve had that oversight remedied. Yesterday evening the Forensic Institute sent us the report.’ The presiding judge passed copies to Landau and Biegler. ‘The identity of the missing woman is at least partly explained. To sum up briefly: the unknown girl is Eschburg’s half-sister.’

  5

  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.’