To Clear the Air
Page 19
He hears the front door close.
“Peter?”
“Here I am.”
She sits down near him on the arm of the sofa, takes his glass, and sniffs it. “I’d like one of those.” She goes to the cabinet. “They’re saying on the radio that you’ve caught him.”
His voice is weak. “Her. A young woman, twenty-two years old.”
She sits down beside him, takes off her shoes, lifts her legs onto the sofa, and lays her head in his lap. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“No, it isn’t good.” He strokes her face. “Brigitte, I’ll talk to Liefers tomorrow. I’m going to ask for a six-month leave of absence.”
“Are you sure it’s what you want? I mean, maybe you could do some kind of part-time work. You’ve never been without a job. What if you get cabin fever after a month? I don’t want you to give up your life for me. That’s not what this is about.” She reaches up and runs her hand over his balding head.
Silence fills the room, bringing with it their former trust, like an unexpected gift. For several minutes, they each think their thoughts.
“I’m not giving anything up, Brigitte. I want some distance. I love my work, but on days like this, justice is also injustice. Catching a killer means you’ve finished a job. It should make you feel satisfied, but I don’t feel that.” He raises her up by the shoulders and presses her to his chest. “You’re the most important thing to me. We’ll see this through together, and when you’re better we’ll go traveling.”
“Peter, I may not get better.”
He nods. “I know, but I can’t think like that.”
Chapter 64
Thursday, March 15, 2001
Joop van Oss: interview notes
Location: Marian Clinic, Cologne
Present: Anna Behrens, Margarete Lech (Frau Behrens’s aunt), Joop van Oss
Margarete Lech states for the record that Anna did not speak in 1967. She received therapy. After about four months, she began to speak. She talked about the men that night. Frau Lech saw a psychologist, who explained that Anna had made this story up in order to protect her love for her father. Children processed such things with the help of their imagination.
Frau Lech objected, saying Anna did not even know her father had killed her mother.
She knew it intuitively, the psychologist reassured her.
Throughout her childhood and youth, Anna received frequent psychiatric treatment, and did not drop her story for a long time. At the age of eighteen, she gained access to the police file and seemed to accept that her father had been the perpetrator.
She studied, got married, and had a child.
Her marriage collapsed after three years. She attempted suicide several times and developed a phobia about being among people. During that time, her daughter, Lena, went to Anna’s aunt, Frau Lech. When Anna was well, she lived with her. Anna no longer told anyone her “Behrens story” except her daughter. Early on, the child took over responsibility for looking after the household and her mother’s health. Frau Lech became very worried because Lena was making all the decisions at the age of seven, even deciding how long her mother could stay home and when it was time to seek medical help. She postponed this moment longer and longer, considering every admission to the hospital a personal failure on her part. In 1992, Anna had her last breakdown, and after that she appeared to stabilize.
Until early in the year 2000, when she came into the inheritance from her grandmother. She found letters from her mother and, in the village church at Merklen, when she was visiting Magdalena Behrens’s grave, a group photograph of the shooting club. The men in the picture were older, but she was sure they were the men she had seen that night. She could even remember Lüders (Uncle Ludwig) from the time before her mother’s death. The names of the other men were written under the photo. Again, she told only her daughter about what she had found.
In the summer of 2000, Lena and her mother fell out. Anna wanted Lena to go and study in a different town. She should take charge of her own life. Lena flung plates and shouted, “You need me! You can’t live without me! You can’t send me away!”
After about a week, she seemed to calm down, and applied for a place at Nijmegen. Everything seemed to go well. Both Anna and Frau Lech had the impression Lena was enjoying her studies.
Chapter 65
Monday, March 19, 2001
Preliminary medical report
Patient: Magdalena Koberg, b. Sept. 4, 1978, currently involuntarily committed to Duisburg Psychiatric Clinic
Provisional diagnosis: Endogenous psychosis, probably triggered by consumption of amphetamine. Frau Koberg is aware of what she has done, can describe it in detail, and believes she has ensured that justice is done. At present she shows neither insight nor remorse.
A course of drugs has been prescribed. The effectiveness of these measures remains to be determined.
Frau Koberg describes the events as follows:
The police did not do their duty, and her mother therefore became ill (her mother has suffered from depression and a social anxiety disorder since childhood) and has not recovered to date. She is, moreover, firmly convinced that she did what she did for her mother’s sake. The latter sent her away, and for a long time she did not understand why. When her mother showed her “her grandmother’s murderers” in a photograph, it became clear to her why she had to leave.
The following picture emerges from the patient’s accounts:
It may be assumed that Lena Koberg deliberately applied to the University of Nijmegen in summer 2000. At this time she was already taking amphetamines as an appetite suppressant. At just under six feet tall and a hundred and sixty-seven pounds, she thought she was too fat. After three months at Nijmegen she found an apartment in Merklen and moved. She applied for a work placement as a stonemason in Herr Jansen’s firm. She told Jansen she wanted to study art, with a focus on sculpture, but could not gain much practical experience at the university. She also helped Jansen with his work at the cemetery and funeral parlor. She remained registered at the university, but stopped attending classes.
Four weeks later, she got an extra job as casual help at the local bar. Here she had the opportunity to establish contact with her victims. For the next six months she planned her course of action down to the smallest detail. In November 2000 she made her first attempt, asking Gietmann to give her a ride into town. But she could not go through with it; she was too weak on that occasion. During the period after that she doubled her consumption of amphetamines and, by early March, felt she was ready. She felt ill after Gietmann’s murder, disgusted and afraid. But she pulled herself together, and the killing of Lüders came significantly more easily.
Frau Koberg’s only regret is that she was unable to “take care of” Herr Mahler (her planned fourth victim).
Frau Koberg will be confined in this institution until further notice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2011 Private
Mechtild Borrmann grew up in the Lower Rhine region of Germany, close to the Dutch border, and has lived in Bielefeld since 1983. She spent the first fifteen years of her career in a wide variety of teaching-related roles, followed by a year and a half in Corsica, before opening a restaurant in the center of Bielefeld. She has been a full-time writer since 2001, and To Clear the Air was her first novel. Silence, her third, won the Deutscher Krimi Preis in 2012 for best crime novel and was nominated for the Friedrich Glauser Prize.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Aubrey Botsford has previously translated Mechtild Borrmann’s Silence, Katia Fox’s The Silver Falcon and The Golden Throne, and novels by Yasmina Khadra and Enrico Remmert. He lives in London.
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