‘I’m sorry.’ Leinen remained courteous. He put his notepad back in his briefcase. ‘Fabrizio Collini has confessed to the crime. He’s not going to say any more.’
The police officers protested, but Leinen was not giving way. The older man sighed and put his files together; he realized there was nothing he could do. The younger police officer wasn’t giving up. When the bulletproof minibus came to the police station in the late afternoon to take the prisoner back to jail, he got into the back seat with Collini. He could talk even without his lawyer present, he told him. Leinen was certainly a nice lad, but young and without any experience of murder cases. Young lawyers often failed to give their clients the right advice, he said, they just made matters worse.
Collini didn’t even look at him; he seemed to be asleep. But when the officer moved even closer and addressed him by his first name, Collini turned to him. Even sitting down, he still towered a head and a half above the officer. He bent his massive head over him and whispered, ‘Go away.’
The young police officer slipped over to the other corner of the minibus, Collini leaned back and closed his eyes again. They said nothing for the rest of the drive, and after that no other police officer tried speaking to the prisoner except in the presence of his lawyer.
Even before the interrogation, the usual investigations had begun. The police did all they could to build up a picture of Collini. He had come to Germany from Italy in the 1950s as a guestworker. He had started as an apprentice at the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart, took and passed his journeyman’s exam there, and had then stayed with the firm until his retirement two years ago. The Mercedes personnel file contained hardly any entries on him; the records showed that he was conscientious, reliable and seldom off work sick. Collini was unmarried. He had lived at the same address in Böblingen for thirty-five years, in an apartment block built in the 1950s. He had sometimes been seen with a woman; his neighbours said he was a quiet, friendly man. He had no previous convictions, and was indeed entirely unknown to the Böblingen police. The investigators heard from his former colleagues at work that he always spent his holidays with relatives near Genoa, but the Italian authorities couldn’t tell them anything either.
The examining magistrate issued a search warrant for his apartment. Again, the police found nothing there to suggest murderous tendencies. It was the same with their investigations of his finances; his affairs were all in order. A request for official assistance went to the Italian police in an attempt to identify the gun, but there was no indication that it had ever been used to commit a crime before.
Although the investigators followed up every lead, after six months they were still exactly where they had been at the start: they had a victim, they had a killer who confessed to the crime, and that was all. The chief superintendent in charge of the investigations reported to Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers regularly. In the end he could only shrug his shoulders. In view of way the crime had been committed, he said, the motive surely had to be revenge, but he could find no link whatsoever between the victim and the killer; Collini was as shadowy a figure as ever. And when, finally, Collini also declined to be examined by a psychiatrist, so that the latter could give an expert opinion, there were no more leads for further investigations by either the police or the public prosecutor’s office.
Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers gave the murder squad as much time as he could. Something surprising did occasionally turn up during investigations, a small detail that explained everything. You had to be patient and keep calm. But in this case nothing changed, everything stayed exactly as it had been from the first. Reimers waited for months before he finally sat down at his desk, read everything through again, wrote his closing comment and then the murder charge. Of course he didn’t have to know Collini’s motive in order to charge him with murder – if a defendant chooses to say nothing, that’s his affair, and no one can force him to talk. But Reimers didn’t like loose ends. He wanted to be able to sleep easy at night in the knowledge that he was doing the right thing.
Before he left his office that evening, he placed the files and the murder charge in a wooden ‘files box’, a table comprising several compartments, which had been invented by the old Prussian administration. The next day they would be collected by an officer and taken away. The murder charge would be stamped, someone would take it to the regional court post room, and it would be given a criminal court reference number. Reimers had done his work, the matter would take its course, and it was now out of his hands. But he felt uneasy on his way home.
The months after the arrest of Collini ran smoothly for Caspar Leinen. He was mentioned several times in the local newspapers, and new clients came along: he was briefed as defence counsel in six trials for drug dealing, one for fraud, one for embezzlement within a company, and a case of violent affray in a bar. Leinen worked meticulously, he was good at questioning witnesses, and he didn’t lose a single case during this time. Word was getting around the criminal courts that he was a defence lawyer to be reckoned with.
He visited Collini in remand prison once a week. His client never expressed any wishes and never complained. He was always calm and courteous, but he would not answer any of Leinen’s questions about his motive. Although Leinen kept explaining that this was no way to make a sensible case for the defence, Collini either remained mute or, sometimes, said that no one could do anything to change matters now.
Mattinger and Leinen often met in the evening for an hour on the balcony of the old lawyer’s chambers, where Mattinger would smoke his cigars and talk about the great criminal trials of the 1970s. Leinen liked listening to him. They never mentioned the Collini case.
9
Two days after the murder charge had arrived at Leinen’s chambers, Johanna called him. She sounded strange as she told him they had to talk, and could he come to Munich. Leinen drove from Berlin to Munich in the old Mercedes that his father had given him. He parked the car outside the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on Maximilianstrasse, where the Meyer firm kept two rooms at the front of the building – rooms with the expensive view – permanently booked for its guests.
They met that afternoon at the Munich branch of Meyer Engineering Works. The conference room, the big oval walnut table, the green curtains – he knew them all. As a child, he had often been here with Meyer. He would sit at that table, reading and waiting for the old gentleman to come back and fetch him. Now Johanna was sitting where her grandfather used to sit. He went over to her and kissed her on both cheeks. She was in a grave mood, and didn’t look at him. No one touched the biscuits neatly arranged on porcelain plates.
The company lawyer was a small man given to sudden, quick movements; his cufflinks clinked against the tabletop as he talked. After five minutes it was clear to Leinen that there was no point in this meeting. The company lawyer didn’t know anything. He said they had even looked through the firm’s archives, but had found nothing, not even an invoice from or to any Collini. He kept repeating remarks of the kind that tend to come up in such conversations: ‘I’m right with you there,’ and, ‘We can decide on that close to the time,’ and, ‘Let’s stay in touch.’ He had asked Leinen here only because he wanted to know what the defence was planning, and when he realized that Leinen was as baffled as he was, the conversation came to a swift end.
Leinen crossed the street to the hotel. His bag was already in his room. He undressed and went into the bathroom. He took a shower so hot that it hurt, and slowly relaxed. When he came back into the room, naked, Johanna was standing at the window; she must have a spare key. She had drawn one of the curtains back just a little way and was looking out at the street, a shadowy outline against the blue-green sky. In silence he came up behind her, in silence she leaned against him, her hair on his chest. He put his arms round her, and she caressed his hands. It had been snowing outside; the cars went gliding by silently, the roof of a tram was white. After a while he pulled down the zip of her dress, slipped it off her shoulders and undid her bra. On the street below a man carrying his purchases out of a shop opposite slipped, steadied himself before falling, but dropped his bags, and small, orange cardboard boxes fell in the snow. Caspar kissed the back of her neck, her throat was warm; she took his hands and pressed them to her small breasts. She reached round behind herself and began caressing him there. The man in the street picked up his packages and hailed a taxi. Johanna turned round, her lips parted, and Caspar kissed her; her cheeks were wet, he tasted the salt. She took his face in her hands and held it; for a moment they stood still. Then she turned to the window again, arms leaning on the cover of the radiator, and straightened her back. He came into her, saw her shoulder blades, her white skin, the thin film of moisture on her back, and everything was fragile, simultaneous and final.