“I want the truth,” I say. “I deserve the truth.”
For a second or two, we stand there, looking at one another. The air between us seems to vibrate. The moment drags on painfully; I endure it. Then Victor Lenzen looks away.
“Let’s not talk here,” he says.
He sets off down the hall and I follow him. His house is large and empty. It looks as if he were about to move out — or as if he’s never really moved in.
I wonder what he’s thinking as he walks ahead of me, feeling my presence behind him. The fact that I’m here means that I’ve seen through him, that it’s not yet over for him, that it’s going into the next round.
He’s making an effort to appear calm. But his thoughts must be going haywire. We walk along a corridor hung with large-format grainy black-and-white photographs. The sea at night, the back of a woman’s curly head, a snake shedding its skin, the Milky Way, a black orchid and the astute-looking face of a fox accompany me on my way. Then we climb a short flight of free-standing stairs to Lenzen’s living room.
A designer lamp in metal and Perspex bathes the room in cool light. There is no television. There are no bookshelves, no plants. Just leather, glass and concrete. Designer furniture, two leather armchairs, a glass table and abstract art in blue and black. A faint smell of cold smoke hangs in the air. There is an adjoining open-plan kitchen. The room leads onto a balcony that is shrouded in darkness.
“Please,” Lenzen says. He indicates an armchair. “Sit down.”
“You should be aware that other people know I’m here,” I say. It is my only trump.
“If I don’t get in touch with them, they’ll come and look for me.”
Lenzen’s cold eyes narrow. He nods ponderously.
I take a seat. Lenzen sits down opposite me on the other armchair. We are separated only by the coffee table.
“Would you like a drink?” Lenzen asks.
He seems confident that I am unarmed. Presumably because he sank my gun in Lake Starnberg.
“No, thanks.”
I won’t let myself be distracted — not this time.
“You aren’t surprised to see me,” I say.
“Not really.”
“How did you know I’d come?”
“I guessed you weren’t anything like as ill as you made out,” he says.
He shakes a cigarette out of a packet that’s lying on the coffee table and lights up.
“Would you like one too?” he asks.
“I don’t actually smoke,” I say.
“But the main character in your book — she smokes,” says Lenzen and places a cigarette on the coffee table between us, along with his lighter.
I nod, take the cigarette, light up. We smoke in silence. A cigarette-long grace period (it seems we’re both thinking the same) before we bring this to an end. I smoke mine down to the last millimeter before stubbing it out, steeling myself for the answers to my questions.
I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that Lenzen is going to give them to me now that the time for games is over.
“Tell me the truth,” I say.
Lenzen doesn’t look at me; he’s staring at an indeterminate spot on the floor.
“Where were you on 23 August 2002?”
“You know where I was.”
He lifts his gaze. We look each other in the eyes, like all those years ago. Of course I know where he was. How could I ever have doubted it?
“How did you know Anna Michaelis?”
“Are we really going to carry on like this? With these stupid questions?”
I swallow. “You knew Anna,” I say.
Lenzen lets out a deep rumble — his mirthless version of a laugh. “I loved Anna,” he says. “But did I ‘know’ her? To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. Probably not.”
He snorts, grimaces, then throws back his head and lets it circle, making his vertebrae click. He lights another cigarette. His fingers are trembling. Only slightly. I try to digest his words.
I hear Julian’s voice in my head: “A crime of passion. So much anger, so many knife wounds, always point to a crime of passion.” And my reply: “But Anna wasn’t in a relationship. I’d have known.”
Oh, Linda.
“You were…” I find it hard to say it, as if it were incredibly lewd. “You were in a relationship with my sister?”
Lenzen nods. I think of the small, flat smartphone, taped to my chest in a makeshift fashion and now recording everything, and I wish he’d reply. But he shows no sign of doing so. Only sits and smokes. Still he avoids looking me in the eye. And I realize that things have changed. Now he’s the one who can no longer endure my gaze.
“May I ask you a question?” I begin.
“That’s what you’re here for,” says Lenzen.
“Why did you come to my house?”
Lenzen stares into space. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” he says.
I twist my mouth wryly.
“The call to my editor: a famous author wanting to be interviewed by me. I didn’t know what was going on. I was vaguely familiar with the name Linda Conrads from the cultural pages, but apart from that it meant nothing to me.”
Lenzen shakes his head.
“The literary editor was offended at being ignored. He wanted to interview you himself, of course. I didn’t care. I was looking forward to the interview.”
Lenzen gives a bitter laugh. He takes a nervous drag on his cigarette and carries on talking.
“Ah well. Our trainee arranged a date for the interview and I got an advance copy of the book to prepare myself.” I’m quivering.
“So I read it. You know, the way you read something you have to read for work. Whenever I could snatch the time: on the train, on the escalator, a few pages in bed before going to sleep. I skipped a lot. I don’t much rate crime novels — the world is brutal enough as it is; I can do without books full of…”
He realizes how wrong that sounds coming from him and breaks off.
“I didn’t notice,” he says at length. “Until the chapter where it happens, I didn’t notice.”
I despise him for avoiding the word “murder.” He says nothing for a moment, gathering his thoughts.
“When I read that chapter…It was funny. I didn’t understand at first. I expect my brain didn’t want to understand and put it off for as long as it could. The setting seemed familiar to me, in an unpleasant, disturbing way. Like something I might have seen in a film once — completely unreal. I was on the train at the time. When I realized — when it became clear to me what I’d read — it was…funny. It’s odd, when you suddenly remember something you’d repressed. At first I wanted to put the book down and think of something else — forget all about it. But the first domino had fallen and, one by one, the memories were coming back. Then I got bloody furious.”
He looks at me. His eyes scare me.
“I had tried so hard to forget that night. So hard! And I had almost succeeded. I…you know…you live. You work. You don’t sit around thinking about the past. At least, not all the time.”
He loses the thread, buries his head in his hands, plunges into thought, surfaces again and forces himself to carry on talking.
“I haven’t been walking around all day every day for twelve years thinking to myself that I’ve killed somebody. I…”
He’s said it. My hands are trembling so much I have to press them flat on my thighs to keep them still. He’s said it! He said that he killed somebody.
Lenzen breathes in and out.
“But I did. I did. And the book reminded me that I had. I had almost forgotten. Almost.”
In stunned shock, I watch Lenzen bury his head in his hands once more, chastened and self-pitying. Then he straightens up again. I don’t know why, but he seems to have made up his mind to answer all my questions. Maybe because he thinks no one would believe me anyway. Or because it does him good to talk. Or maybe because he made up his mind a long time ago that he wasn’t going to give me the opportunity to tell anyone.