Sisters of Berlin

by Juliet Conlin

  ‘Where’s Bekka?’ she asks – no, demands. ‘Where’s Bekka?’ she repeats when no one speaks.

  ‘I put her to bed,’ Antonia says from the doorway. ‘She was absolutely exhausted. I shouldn’t wonder if she’s caught pneumonia.’

  ‘I need to see her,’ Nina says and begins to head past her mother towards the hall, but then Franzen speaks.

  ‘Please,’ he says, and his voice tugs at her, making forward motion impossible. ‘Please, Dr Bergmann. Sit down. I need to speak with you.’

  Nina turns and takes a seat on the sofa. Her mother hovers near the door, but then decides to sit down as well.

  ‘Where’s Sebastian?’ she asks.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Nina tells her. ‘He should be here any moment.’

  She finally reached him on his mobile as she sat in the car, tearing through Berlin, her senses sharpened to a single, furious point, her whole body twitching and fizzing as if to some white-heated rhythm, the speed dial at a hundred and twenty and climbing as soon as she hit the autobahn. She’d left Kai asleep upstairs, after persuading a reluctant next-door neighbour to plug in the old baby monitor in her kitchen, claiming an emergency and that she would be back within the hour. She felt terrible, doing this, leaving her little boy to perhaps wake up alone in a dark, empty house, but she couldn’t take him along, either, not until she knew what was going on.

  She pressed Sebastian’s number, then the speaker, propped the phone on the passenger seat and waited for him to pick up – pick up, for Christ’s sake! – chanting Bekka’s fine, Bekka’s fine under her breath, while the phone rang and rang and –

  ‘Yeah, you called earlier. What is it?’

  ‘Sebastian,’ she shouted in the direction of the phone, her voice harsh. ‘Bekka’s at my parents’ house. She – she didn’t come home. She went there instead. They’ve called the police. I’m in the car. I’ll be there in five minutes. You’d better come.’

  ‘What? Slow down. What’s with Bekka?’ Despite the slur in his voice that told her he’d been drinking, his obvious alarm seeped through, making her want to cry. ‘And where’s Kai?’

  ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ she repeated. ‘Just come.’ And she reached across and switched off her phone.

  Kommissar Franzen looks across at her now. A fine, dark stubble shadows the lower half of his face, and his eyes, usually so attentive and clear, appear a little startled. Every blink seems slowed down by a millisecond.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Your daughter is all right.’

  She looks straight at him, ignoring the zillions of little black dots that now flood her vision, letting him know in no uncertain terms that no, everything is not all right.

  ‘Bekka –’ she begins, but her voice cracks and she has to clear her throat.

  ‘Bekka’s fine,’ he says, and Nina is vaguely aware of a sigh, or sniffle, coming from her mother’s direction. ‘She turned up here about an hour ago, and when I arrived –’

  ‘She was absolutely frozen through,’ Antonia interrupts. ‘In a real state. You should have seen her! Oh, I wish Hans were here!’

  Franzen puts out a hand, palm facing the floor; whether to reassure Nina or to stop her mother, she can’t tell.

  ‘She was fine when I arrived,’ he continues softly. ‘We talked – she told me what she had to say – and I agreed with Frau Bergmann,’ he nods in Antonia’s direction, ‘that she should go to bed and get some sleep.’

  ‘I had to give her Papa’s electric blanket,’ Antonia says. ‘Her feet were like ice. Why wasn’t she wearing proper boots in this weather, instead of those, those ridiculous trainers?’ She spits this out at Nina.

  But Nina doesn’t turn her head; she keeps her eyes fixed on Franzen’s face. She’s afraid she might faint and she needs his eyes to anchor her. She wants to ask him why Rebekka came here instead of her own home, but she’s afraid he might know the answer.

  Then her mother starts crying. It’s a soft, wretched noise that makes her sound like what she is: an old woman so filled with sadness that she no longer cares who witnesses her in this state. This surrender of pretence touches and unsettles Nina, and she’s reminded of the first time she saw her mother crying, when she was eight years old and her father hadn’t come home for two nights running. She and her mother were having supper in the dining room, when her mother just put her face in her hands and started crying, without warning, without explanation, leaving Nina feeling both horrified and impotent. This is how she feels now, and, like then, is frightened by her own inability to provide comfort.

  ‘Frau Bergmann,’ Franzen begins, but is interrupted by the crunch of tyres on gravel in front of the house. A car door slams and then suddenly Sebastian crashes in, bringing with him the cold night. The change in atmosphere in the room is abrupt and palpable; a prickling tension appears from nowhere; there is movement, shuffling, a shifting of positions.

  ‘Where’s Bekka?’ Sebastian demands, echoing Nina’s question of some five minutes ago.

  Antonia gets to her feet, still weeping, and almost falls into him, expecting and receiving an embrace.

  ‘Nina, what’s going on?’ he says over her shoulder. He sounds angry and tired.

  Franzen stands up. ‘Your daughter is fine, Herr Lanz. I was just explaining to your wife. Please,’ he gestures to the sofa, ‘please sit down.’

  Sebastian releases Antonia from his arms and walks over to Franzen. ‘I want to know right now what is going on!’

  Nina recognises his body language. He’s looking for a fight. With her.

  ‘Please, Herr Lanz,’ Franzen’s eyes flash briefly, ‘sit down.’

  Sebastian hesitates, but then backs down and takes a seat next to Nina on the sofa. She can smell the whisky on him and knows he really shouldn’t have driven. But the state she’s in herself, who is she to judge?

  Franzen also sits down. ‘Frau Bergmann,’ he says to Antonia, who lurches, rather helplessly, where Sebastian left her, ‘Perhaps you could make us some coffee. You already know everything I’m about to tell your daughter and son-in-law.’

  Antonia sucks in her lips, giving her head a little shake to regain her composure, then leaves the room.

  ‘Where’s Kai?’ Sebastian asks, looking around as though he might find him hiding somewhere in the room.

  ‘He’s at home,’ Nina tells him. ‘He was already asleep when my mother called, so I asked Johanna from next door to sit with him.’ She doesn’t mention the baby monitor. His fuse seems short enough as it is.

  There is a brief silence; then Franzen speaks.

  ‘Rebekka told me something,’ he says, ‘which might be turn out to be significant for our investigation.’

  ‘Bekka?’ Nina asks.

  Franzen nods. ‘She told me that she recognised someone at the dinner party your parents held here on Saturday. It was one of the guests – she wasn’t sure of his name, but when she described him, Frau Bergmann knew right away who she was talking about. It was Bernhard Klopp.’

  Nina is struggling to process what he is saying. Her heart is racing and her mind is being tugged backwards and forwards at great speed. Bernhard Klopp. She starts shivering.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like a blanket?’ Franzen asks and points to a beige and brown plaid cashmere throw that’s draped over Sebastian’s side of the sofa. Nina shakes her head, but Franzen gets up and takes the throw, shaking it out before he hands it to her. She wraps it around her shoulders.

  ‘Where would Rebekka know Bernhard Klopp from?’ Sebastian asks.

  ‘She saw him several months ago. Having an argument with Marie.’

  Nina is falling, falling. She digs her nails into the sofa.

  Sebastian puts his hands over his face and rubs it several times. Then he looks up. ‘Let me get this straight. Rebekka saw this man having an argument with my sister-in-law, who is then attacked, who then dies, and Rebekka didn’t think this important to mention?’

  Franzen sighs. ‘Here’s t
he thing,’ he says. ‘Rebekka was in a bar with Marie.’ He holds up his hand as if to ward off the inevitable reaction from Nina and Sebastian. ‘She had told you that she was spending the night with a friend, but in truth, she went out with Marie. I need you to know how bad she feels about this, about lying to you, but I think we all know it’s one of those things teenagers do.’

  Nina looks over to Sebastian. He’s clenching and unclenching his jaw. He looks ready to fly into a rage, and she hopes Franzen will be able to disarm him before he does. Nina knows that if she speaks, she will just shorten that fuse.

  ‘Bekka’s a teenager, sure, but Marie –’ Sebastian shakes his head from side to side. ‘Marie was no fucking teenager. What the hell was she thinking?’ He jumps to his feet and starts pacing the floor.

  ‘I understand how you feel, Herr Lanz,’ Franzen says. ‘But it’s important we focus now on the information Rebekka has provided.’

  Nina clears her throat. ‘But Bernhard Klopp told me he hardly knew Marie,’ she says, noticing how small her voice sounds, and at the same time, realising how short and snatchy the name ‘Klopp’ feels on her tongue.

  Franzen is still looking at Sebastian, a shadow of concern on his face. He turns to Nina. ‘She was in a bar with Marie – she says she wasn’t drinking, and I believe her – and she left the table to go to the toilet. When she came back out, Marie was standing near the bar, talking to a man. She says that it didn’t look like a friendly conversation, so she wasn’t sure whether to go over to them. She says she was afraid that if there was some sort of trouble, she would get found out, and she was terrified of either of you finding out. So she hung back and waited, and then the man grabbed Marie’s wrist and twisted it. Rebekka could tell from her aunt’s expression that it must have hurt, so she decided to see if she could help, call the police if necessary, but before she got back to Marie, the man had left.’

  ‘And what did the man want?’ Sebastian asks. ‘What did Marie tell Bekka?’

  ‘Oh, she said it was just some loser coming on to her. Then they finished their drinks and went to Marie’s flat for the rest of the night. And on Saturday evening, Rebekka recognised this man among the dinner guests.’

  ‘Is she absolutely sure?’ Nina says, straining to raise her voice beyond a whisper.

  ‘She is absolutely sure. She said she knew she recognised him from somewhere when she first saw him among the guests –’

  When she spilled the drinks.

  ‘But then she told me he’d come into the kitchen during the dinner party and was asking her all sorts of questions. She was absolutely sure then that this was the man she’d seen with Marie.’

  Nina is assaulted by a series of flashes in front of her eyes. ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘About Marie. About how Rebekka was coping. But she’s very upset and her story’s a little muddled. We’ll have to confirm it, obviously,’ Franzen says. ‘I’m afraid she’ll have to make an official identification. But she was very, very sure about him, yes.’

  ‘But –’ Nina looks to Sebastian for some kind of assistance, some reassurance, but he’s still fighting his own anger. The whole time, Klopp was squeezing her for information about the investigation. The sense of betrayal is overwhelming. She can hardly push the words out. ‘But he lost a child himself.’

  Sebastian lets out a snort. ‘I’m going up to see Bekka now,’ he says and turns, heading towards the door. At that moment, Antonia appears in the doorway, holding a tray with four mugs of coffee. Nina had forgotten all about her.

  ‘No,’ her mother says, and she’s no longer a desperate old woman. ‘No. You will leave her to sleep.’

  ‘I want –’ Sebastian begins, but Antonia blocks his path.

  ‘You will sit down and think about what’s best for Bekka now. And you might like to think about why she found it so impossible to tell her parents what she told me, and why she came here tonight after wandering about in the freezing cold for hours on end, rather than going to her own home.’

  She tried to tell me. She tried to tell me but I wasn’t listening.

  Nina glances over at Sebastian. He looks deflated; he seems to have shrunk as Antonia passes by him and places the tray on the coffee table.

  ‘Fine,’ he says, ‘but I don’t want any coffee now. I’m having a drink.’ He crosses the room and pours himself a glass of whisky from a crystal decanter on the sideboard. Antonia offers coffee to Franzen and Nina, and then sits down.

  ‘This could this be the same man Marie’s neighbour saw,’ Nina says. It isn’t a question.

  ‘Possibly,’ Franzen takes a sip of coffee, ‘but I don’t want to start speculating at this point.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Antonia asks. ‘Will you arrest him?’ A look of acute pain crosses her face, as though it has only now struck her that, just a few days ago, she might have sat down to dinner with her daughter’s killer.

  ‘No, we won’t do anything tonight,’ Franzen assures her. He takes a sip of coffee and then puts his cup down. ‘We’ll need a proper statement from Rebekka, in writing, and then we’ll arrange for the identification process. I’ll speak with Frau Lehmholz again, of course. But right now, I can only treat this as a significant lead. We have no hard evidence that Herr Klopp had anything to do with Marie’s death.’

  ‘Yet.’ Antonia’s voice has regained its stiffness.

  ‘Yet, Frau Bergmann,’ Franzen says in agreement. He stands up. ‘I should be going,’ he says. ‘It’s late.’

  Nina goes to get up, but Franzen shakes his head. ‘Please stay where you are. I’ll see myself out. Perhaps you can bring Rebekka to the station tomorrow morning, say ten o’clock?’

  She nods. Her mother remains seated, staring into her cup.

  ‘Thank you,’ Franzen says, and adds, ‘I hope you all manage to get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  And he leaves. Nina hears the front door closing thoughtfully behind him.

  Her mother stands up and crosses the room towards the living room door. ‘I’ll drive Bekka home after breakfast in the morning,’ she says. ‘Goodnight.’

  32

  Sebastian and Nina are left in the room together. He’s standing at the sideboard with his back to her, drink in hand, staring at or through the black of the windowpane; she’s on the sofa, hunched beneath the blanket and the weight of tension that failed to leave the room with Franzen and her mother.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she hears herself say, before she has a chance to reflect on exactly what it is she needs to say. Something painful, she knows that much.

  Sebastian draws a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he says, still with his back to her. ‘Shoot.’

  A wash of misery engulfs her. She closes her eyes for a moment and finds it near impossible to open them again. ‘Not now,’ she murmurs. ‘Tomorrow.’

  She opens her eyes in time to see Sebastian spinning around. ‘Why wait?’ he says in a mock jovial tone. ‘Let’s talk now. Let’s talk all about it.’

  As he speaks, he waves his glass around in his hand; a few amber drops escape and begin to soak into the rug.

  ‘No, Basti, please, I’m tired. We need to go home. Kai might wake up.’

  Sebastian takes a few unsteady steps forward. ‘You know what, Nina. This is killing me. This –’ He stops a couple of feet in front of her and waves his glass around again, in an exaggerated circular movement, ‘All this is killing me.’

  She looks down at her coffee, wondering lazily if this is full-fat, semi-skimmed or skimmed milk, and realises that she is beyond caring.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she says.

  Sebastian drains his glass and returns to the sideboard for a refill. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘Big fucking deal.’

  Nina gets to her feet. When she removes the blanket from her shoulders, it’s as though she has stepped naked into a meat locker; her body heat, which was so cosily trapped beneath the layer of the cashmere throw, escapes into the air in a single inexorable wave; the hairs on her arm
s shoot upwards as if electrified; she feels her nipples contracting.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she says, squeezing out the words before her teeth start chattering.

  Sebastian turns to look at her. ‘You do that,’ he says. ‘To be honest, I’m out of ideas. I’m sick of trying. I don’t know what to do anymore. My guess is you’re enjoying your self-pity. Looks to me like you don’t want my help at all.’

  She swallows, although her mouth and throat are so dry it is almost painful. ‘What did you expect?’ she says. ‘That I’d have a good cry and forget all about her? Visit her grave once a year with some fresh flowers? Go on like nothing’s happened, or, perhaps not quite nothing, but just some minor annoyance? Shit happens and all that?’

  ‘Stop it!’ he yells. He thumps the sideboard with his fist, making her jump. ‘You’re so fucking obsessed with her that you can’t see what you’re doing to us. But I point blank refuse to sit around and watch while you drag us all down with you. Me. The kids. Our whole fucking lives.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ She’s walking along the edge of a steep cliff; she imagines falling off, plunging weightlessly through the air. The image is exquisite.

  ‘Let me tell you about dear blessed Marie,’ Sebastian says, and the set of his voice makes her want to cover her ears and scream, to drown him out, but she can’t seem to move.

  ‘That time you went to hospital to have your appendix out,’ he continues. ‘Marie came around to “help” with the children, remember?’

  She nods slowly. A high-pitched whistling noise increases in volume in her ears.

  ‘Picked them up?’ Sebastian is saying. ‘Made them fish fingers and pasta with ketchup, like I was some incompetent oaf who couldn’t cook a decent meal for his own children?’ He pauses; his voice is trembling slightly. ‘Auntie Marie and I shared a couple of bottles of Merlot one night, and then Auntie Marie unzipped my trousers and put her hand on my cock and her tongue in my ear, and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t unpleasant, in fact, it was very pleasant indeed, arousing you might call it, and do you know what I did, Nina? Do you?’