Sisters of Berlin

by Juliet Conlin

  She follows Sebastian into the living room where he flops onto an armchair and leans his head dramatically against the backrest.

  ‘Sorry. You were saying?’

  ‘Your client. Wasn’t Grünblatt the one who had to corroborate your alibi?’

  He frowns. ‘No, the guy who stood me up today was someone else.’ He waves his hand in front of his face. ‘I sorted out the dates with Grünblatt ages ago. He found it kind of funny, having to provide his legal counsel with an alibi.’ He glances up at her. ‘Get me a Coke, would you? I’m knackered.’

  ‘A “please” would be nice,’ she murmurs, annoyed at his tone, but not wanting to start another argument. He’s on a short fuse, she can tell by the tense hunch of his spine.

  ‘Oh, and some rum and a bit of ice,’ he says. ‘Pleee-ase.’

  In the kitchen, she puts the shopping away, sliding the biscuits and crisps onto the top shelf. She has to stretch to reach and comes away feeling dizzy. This morning, she weighed 52 kilos. She pours two glasses of Diet Coke, adding rum and ice to one of them, and takes them into the living room.

  ‘Here,’ she says to Sebastian and hands him the drink.

  He takes a large sip. ‘Thanks.’ He holds his hand in front of his mouth and burps quietly. ‘Kids?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘You were asleep last night when I got in,’ he says. ‘I didn’t ask you about going to Marie’s. And –’ he pauses. ‘I didn’t like to mention it in front of the kids this morning.’

  ‘Bekka knows. She knows it wasn’t an accident.’

  He sits up. ‘How did she find out?’

  ‘The internet, social media, people talking at school. Who knows? I’m not sure it matters how she found out. She’s hurting.’

  He rubs the side of his face. ‘She’s young, let’s not forget that. I’m sure she’ll cope.’

  Nina pauses, thinking of her promises to Bekka, of her child’s tears. ‘I’m glad you’re so confident about that.’

  ‘Anyway, is there lots to do?’ he continues after a moment. ‘In Marie’s flat, I mean.’

  Nina shrugs and takes a sip of Coke. ‘I – I didn’t get much done. It was difficult enough just getting inside, you know? I’ll have to go back.’

  But she’s not at all sure that he knows. Another pause, broken by a thump on the ceiling. They both look up.

  ‘Kai seems a little hyperactive,’ Nina says. ‘I hope it isn’t him reacting badly to this.’

  ‘Let’s not start looking for problems where there aren’t any,’ Sebastian says. ‘We don’t need any more drama. He’s a normal six-year old boy. They get fidgety. God, I can only imagine what I was like at that age.’ He smiles to himself.

  She has to stop herself scowling at him. Then she says, ‘I spent some time with Marie’s neighbour, Frau Lehmholz. Yesterday.’ She raises the glass to her lips. ‘She mentioned a man, a boyfriend of Marie’s. Since she split up with Robert.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. And it seems the police couldn’t care less.’

  More thumping from above. Kai must be jumping from his bed onto the floor and back again.

  ‘I’ll go and have a word with him,’ Sebastian says. ‘Just let me finish this.’ He gulps down his drink. Then he looks at Nina. ‘You were saying?’

  ‘I was just saying that the police – Maslowski – spoke with Frau Lehmholz in passing, almost. She didn’t feel that he was taking her seriously. I mean –’ She sits up straight. ‘This is a murder enquiry, not a squabble over a parking space!’ She suddenly feels like crying.

  ‘Listen, baby,’ Sebastian says. ‘They know what they’re doing. Surely it’s best if we just let them get on with it. If they don’t think that this Frau . . .’ He looks at her quizzically.

  ‘Lehmholz.’

  ‘That this Frau Lehmholz has anything important to contribute, well, then that’s their call. I doubt this is the first murder they’re investigating. Besides, it’s not as though we can tell them how to do their job.’

  Nina feels the onset of a headache behind her temples. Perhaps she should go back and ask Bernhard Klopp for help after all. Didn’t Franzen himself say that the early stage of an investigation is crucial? Anything they overlook, they might lose for good . . .

  As if on cue, the telephone rings.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Nina says, jumping up. Perhaps it is Franzen, returning her call.

  ‘Nina?’ her mother asks. ‘It’s me. I’ve had a call from the police. They’ve brought in Jakob Fraunhofer for questioning.’

  ‘What?’ Nina’s breath catches in her throat. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ her mother replies. ‘Kommissar Franzen just called and said they’ve brought Fraunhofer in to assist with their enquiries and that he doesn’t have an alibi. That’s what Herr Franzen said, anyway. Who is this man? Do you know him?’

  ‘No. No idea.’

  Sebastian has come to stand next to her. He looks at her questioningly. She waves her hand at him and turns away.

  ‘Franzen mentioned him to me, too. But I’d never heard the name before,’ she says to her mother. Sebastian comes around to face her and mouths Who is it?, but she ignores him.

  ‘Well,’ her mother continues, ‘I thought I’d let you know. I can’t quite believe they might have the man who – who did this to Marie.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me, Mama,’ she says quietly. She hears the sound of Kai bouncing down the stairs. ‘I have to go now. Please call if you hear anything else.’

  ‘I will. Goodbye. And love to the children,’ she says and hangs up.

  Nina is shaking as she puts down the phone. She turns to Sebastian just as Kai comes in.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Sebastian asks.

  ‘Papa!’ Kai shouts and runs towards his father.

  Sebastian scoops him up and twirls him about. ‘Hi Tarzan,’ he says. ‘How’s my best boy?’ He looks at Nina over Kai’s shoulder.

  ‘That was my mother,’ she says. ‘The police have brought a man in for questioning. Jakob Fraunhofer. The one in the writers’ group that Franzen mentioned the other day.’

  ‘There’s a boy in my class called Jakob,’ Kai says brightly. ‘He used to be my best friend, but now he’s not anymore.’

  ‘I know, Tarzan,’ Sebastian says. ‘I met him at your birthday party, remember?’ He lifts Kai’s jumper up and blows a noisy kiss on his stomach as Kai laughs. Then he says to Nina, ‘We’ll talk later, all right?’

  She nods and takes herself to the kitchen to start preparing dinner.

  *

  Later that evening, Sebastian goes to the study to work and Nina heads upstairs with a bottle of Diet Coke. The bubbles give her heartburn, but the caffeine curbs her appetite. She kneels on the floor and pulls out the journals, letters and photo album she slipped under the bed when she returned from Marie’s. She feels a bit silly hiding them, but she doesn’t want anyone else to look through them. The thought that the police have read Marie’s private letters is repellent enough.

  She starts with the photo album, which feels like it might be fairly harmless. It is a large album, covered in a soft green fabric – Marie’s favourite colour – which Nina put together in the days before digital photography. It was her gift to Marie when she, Nina, moved out of their parents’ house.

  *

  June, 1999

  ‘You’re really going, then,’ Marie said. Her voice wobbled although Nina could tell she was trying to keep it steady. They were standing outside in the pouring rain waiting for Nina’s friend to come with a VW campervan and collect her boxes.

  ‘Yes, but you’ll come and visit me,’ Nina said, wishing Marie, whose short dark hair clung damply to her face like a feathered frame, would go back inside and not make this so hard. ‘You can sleep over sometime. It’ll be fun.’ She tried to hide her relief as the VW drove slowly up the gravel path to the house. ‘I’m only twenty minutes away on the U-Bahn.’

  ‘You’re leavi
ng me!’ Marie screamed and ran inside. ‘I hate you!’

  A week after Nina moved out, she brought Marie the photo album as a peace offering. She hasn’t seen it since then; in fact, she’d forgotten all about it. She flicks through the first few pages – pictures of Marie as a baby, of Nina holding her awkwardly in her arms, Marie’s first day at kindergarten – but the gently faded images aren’t as harmless as she thought. It’s a sisterly past that makes her want to sob, and so she closes the album and puts it down beside her on the bed. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and takes a sip of Coke from the bottle. The letters are in a folder on top of the journals. The first letter is from Robert. Nina doesn’t open it. She decides to return it to him as soon as she can.

  The other letters, five of them, addressed to Marie in untidy handwriting, are from an American pen pal from her teenage years. Nina finds herself smiling. She’s unexpectedly touched that her sister kept them. Marie was loath to hoarding, to keeping ‘stuff’ from the past that she felt only weighed her down. So why did she keep these letters? Was she planning to get back in touch at some point? For a suffocating moment, Nina feels the weight of responsibility of tying up all the loose ends Marie couldn’t help but leave behind. Her thoughts drift to a painful place and it costs her effort to rein them back in.

  Next, she turns to the journals. The first contains Marie’s notes on short stories she had written, some poems, and what appear to be shopping lists. The second journal looks fairly new; only the first thirty pages or so have been written on. Chunks of prose, scribbles in the margins, words crossed out, corrected, and then crossed out again. It’s hard to decipher in places, but Nina is fairly sure that it’s the beginning of a novel. The story is entitled simply, “Working Title”, with the claim to authorship by ‘Dora Diamant’. This makes Nina smile. Dora Diamant was Franz Kafka’s lover, and as a teenager, Marie declared this to be her future nom de plume. She dumped it later, of course, going on to publish stories under her real name, in small literary magazines and online anthologies, but obviously the name remained a private fancy. Nina reads on; it takes her a while to find her way in, but the prose is dark and beautiful and powerful, and she soon becomes engrossed in what seems to be a story about the son of an unofficial Stasi collaborator, who suspects his father of betraying his mother. Nina is so absorbed that for a moment, she’s in another place – a gloomy world of mistrust and anguished passion – entirely. And then the writing comes to an abrupt end, and she’s filled with a pointed new sadness, the terrible realisation that this story will forever remain unfinished.

  She squeezes her eyes shut, but can’t close her ears to the rush of blood racing to her head. The sleeve of grief she has been wrapped up in tightens even further. It’s over. A deep ache soaks through her and she knows she didn’t tell Bekka the truth when she promised it gets easier. It doesn’t.

  She hears Sebastian’s footsteps on the stairs and closes the journal. Quickly, she shoves Marie’s stuff under the bed, switches off the bedside lamp and slips under the covers. When Sebastian puts his head around the door a moment later, Nina’s eyes are closed and her breathing is deep and regular.

  15

  Jakob Fraunhofer works for Siemens as an electrical engineer and lives alone in a one-bedroom flat in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. He writes plays for the screen and for theatre, but has yet to find someone willing to produce his work.

  ‘How old is he?’ is Nina’s first question when Franzen tells her this information. They’re sitting in her living room, facing each other across the coffee table. Nina is wearing yoga pants and a chunky woollen jumper and has covered her knees with a blanket. This morning, she felt so light-headed and breathless getting out of bed – her heart felt as though it were crawling – that she decided to call Anita and close the practice for the day. The four patients she was due to see (a worryingly small number, but all the easier to reschedule) would have to come later in the week. Franzen hadn’t seemed to mind coming to her house when she suggested it on the phone.

  ‘He’s twenty-nine,’ Franzen replies. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Nina shrugs. ‘I thought he might be older.’

  Franzen is leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. ‘Why would you think that?’ he asks. He keeps his eyes on her face. When he arrived earlier, he didn’t let his eyes travel around the room, like a normal visitor might do, but instead looked only at her, or at the coffee cup she handed him, or at the armchair before sitting down, as though focusing his attention on what was important. And yet, he gives the impression that he doesn’t miss a thing. Nina doesn’t doubt, if he were required to close his eyes and describe the room, he would get every detail right, from the collection of antique encyclopaedias on the bookcase, the Bauhaus floor lamp in the corner, to the photo of her and Marie on a beach in Greece ten years ago that hangs behind the door.

  Her heart races for a moment, stops and then picks up its sluggish pace. She feels queasy. She shivers, aware that he can see the tremor of her body.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Franzen asks.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Why would you think Herr Fraunhofer is older?’ he asks again.

  Nina looks at him for a moment, holds his gaze. It should feel awkward, this wordless eye contact, but it doesn’t. The way he looks back at her makes her feel safe. She decides to tell him. ‘I went to visit Frau Lehmholz. Marie’s next-door neighbour.’

  Franzen nods.

  ‘She told me she’d seen Marie with a man, a tall man, who appeared to be her boyfriend. And he was older than her, Frau Lehmholz said. To be honest, I was wondering why this man hasn’t figured in your enquires.’

  Franzen continues to look at her. He doesn’t blink. The way he’s leaning forward, taking her in, is unsettling and calming at the same time.

  He says, ‘I’m glad you told me. I’ll go and speak with Frau Lehmholz. Kommissar Maslowski has already visited her, but he said she seemed – how should I put it – slightly confused. She wasn’t sure what day of the week it was. And witnesses, even younger ones, can often be unreliable.’ He smiles; a warm, kind smile. Nina feels a sudden longing to trust him. ‘But I will certainly go and speak with her,’ he continues. ‘Did she tell you anything else?’

  ‘No.’ She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. ‘Not really. Is Fraunhofer the main suspect, then?’

  ‘He is assisting us with our enquiries.’

  She waits for him to go on. When he doesn’t, she feels oddly deceived. She’s just told him all she knows, after all. ‘Is that all you’re going to tell me?’ She speaks louder than she means to. ‘Why Fraunhofer? Have you got any evidence linking him to the attack? Fingerprints, DNA or something?’

  She’s staring at him now. He holds her gaze and then blinks slowly, disarming her, and she feels something inside her dissolve.

  ‘We did find his fingerprints in Marie’s flat,’ he says, ‘but we know the writing group met there once in a while, so that’s not surprising. We’re still waiting for the results of the DNA marker testing. It should take a couple of days until we know if he was the father of Marie’s baby. Listen, Dr Bergmann –’

  ‘It sounds so formal when you say that,’ she interrupts. ‘Can you call me Nina, please?’

  He breathes out. ‘I’m sorry, I’ll have to insist on the formality,’ he says softly. ‘I think it’s best, under the circumstances.’

  She turns away, embarrassed. She can’t look at him, wants to pull the blanket over her head and hide.

  ‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ he says, getting up. ‘Camomile? Or peppermint?’

  ‘Camomile, please,’ she says in a small voice.

  He goes into the kitchen. Nina listens as he fills the kettle, opens one, two, three cupboards looking for where she keeps the tea, then two cups being placed on the counter. The kettle is old and full of limescale, and it makes a dreadful noise while boiling. She reaches out for a box of tissues beside her
on the sofa and realises Franzen is standing right behind her. She didn’t hear him come in and she tenses.

  ‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he says. ‘I’ve left the tea to brew.’ He comes around the sofa and crouches down in front of her, so that his face is almost level with hers. It reminds her of something she does with Kai. They’ve never been this physically close before.

  ‘I hope I didn’t make you feel uncomfortable,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, taking in how he smells faintly of apples and peppermint. ‘It’s all right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m just –’

  ‘A lot of emotions can surface when something like this happens,’ he continues, speaking very softly. ‘I just don’t want you getting more hurt than you already are.’

  She looks down at her hands. The wedding band is loose on her ring finger. ‘I’m the one who should apologise,’ she says and gives him a weak smile.

  ‘Jakob Fraunhofer,’ he says, ‘claims to have been in love with Marie. Apparently, they spent the night together some months ago and he has been dedicating his work to her ever since, in the hope that she might eventually reciprocate his feelings. That’s how he put it. As far as we’re concerned, he had an unhealthy interest in her. He denies having attacked her, but he has no alibi and appears to have a motive. We released him after questioning and advised him to be in contact with a lawyer, and he remains the focus of our investigation. And that’s all I can tell you at the moment.’

  He stops talking. Nina has to resist the impulse to lean her body into his. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  *

  As soon as Kommissar Franzen has left, Nina goes upstairs with the overbrewed tea he made her. She gets into bed, leans over the side and pulls out the folders from underneath. She knows what she’s looking for and finds it immediately. Carefully, she teases the letter out of the envelope. The postmark is dated the third of August.

  Hi Marie,

  Feels strange, putting pen to paper – for me at least. I’m sure it’s normal for you, haha. I was going to email, but thought hey, why not write a proper letter! Gives me a chance to put my thoughts in order.