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‘Well, what have you decided, Leinen? Are you going to defend Collini?’

‘I’m not sure yet. I’ve just been at the autopsy. It was grisly.’

‘Yes, it always is. You don’t want to see the corpse as a human being. On the table it’s only a subject for scientific study. Once you understand that, the process actually becomes interesting. But one probably never gets over the shock of it entirely.’

Leinen examined Mattinger. His skin was brown, deep lines ran horizontally and vertically across his forehead, there were crow’s feet at the corners of his bright eyes. Leinen had read somewhere that in spite of his disability, Mattinger had sailed solo from Hamburg to South America a few years ago.

‘Once again, if you do defend him, how do you estimate your chances?’

‘Poor. Bloodstains on his clothing, powder marks left on his hands, his fingerprints on the gun and the cartridge cases, on the desk and the bedstead in the hotel. He called the police himself and sat in the hotel lobby waiting to be arrested. There’s no other potential murderer in the frame. So… it probably won’t be a defence expecting an acquittal.’

‘Maybe you can get the charge reduced from murder to manslaughter.’

‘As I understand it, Hans Meyer was shot from behind. That suggests murder. But I don’t know enough yet. It depends what Collini says. And whether he’ll testify in court at all.’

‘How about the motive? The newspapers are saying that nothing is known about the motive.’ Mattinger suddenly turned to Leinen and looked directly at him.

Those eyes of his are hypnotic, thought Leinen. ‘That’s right, and I don’t know anything either. Hans Meyer was a thoroughly decent man. I have no idea why anyone would want to shoot him.’

‘A decent man, eh?’ Mattinger turned away again. ‘They’re few and far between. I’m sixty-four and I’ve known only two thoroughly decent men in my entire life. One of them has been dead for ten years and the other is a monk in a French monastery. Believe me, Leinen, people aren’t black or white… they’re grey.’

‘Sounds like a stock phrase,’ said Leinen.

Mattinger laughed. ‘The older you get, the more you find that clichés are sometimes right.’

The two men drank coffee, each pursuing his own thoughts.

‘It’s too late for it today,’ said Mattinger after a while, ‘but you should go to see your client tomorrow and ask him if he wants you to defend him.’

Leinen knew that the old lawyer was right. His client had been in prison for days and he hadn’t even asked him yet why he had killed Hans Meyer. Then he realized that he was almost dropping off to sleep. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I must go home. I was working all last night and I’m really tired now.’

Mattinger rose to his feet and accompanied Leinen to the door. Leinen went down the broad staircase of the building, which dated from the 1870s: red sisal carpet on the stairs, green marble walls. On the last landing he turned to look back once; he hadn’t heard the door of the chambers close. Mattinger was still standing up there in the doorway, watching him.

8

The Royal Remand Prison had been built in 1877 and repeatedly modernized since. It was a redbrick building, with three floors arranged in a star shape around a circular central hall. These days it was known as Moabit Remand Prison. Offenders remanded in custody had been accommodated here for over a hundred and twenty years; the cells were only a few square metres large, each containing a bed, a table, a chair, a cupboard, a washbasin and a toilet. Fabrizio Collini was Prisoner No. 284/01-2, Section II, Cell 145. The woman officer behind the glass pane looked for the name on her list. Leinen showed her the document with the district court’s decision, and she entered his name on another list. Collini could now receive post from him uncensored by a magistrate. She called a prison officer and asked him to bring Collini in to see the lawyer.

Leinen waited outside one of the small interview rooms used by lawyers. Police officers escorting inmates passed him. They discussed the prisoners as if they were inanimate objects: ‘Where are you taking yours? Mine’s on his way back from the doctor…’ It wasn’t that the officers despised the prisoners; most of them didn’t even want to know what offences they were charged with. They just spoke, as they always had, a simple language.

Fabrizio Collini came down the corridor. Once again, Leinen was intrigued by his size; he couldn’t even see the officer following Collini. They went into the interview room. It was painted with yellow gloss to two-thirds of the way up the walls; it contained a Formica table, two chairs and a washbasin. There was a small window high up on the front wall of the room, an empty biscuit tin did duty as an ashtray, a red alarm bell was fitted beside the door. The place smelled of cigarettes, food and sweat. Leinen sat down with his back to the window, Collini sat opposite him. He was wearing the blue prison uniform; the murder squad had taken his own clothes away.

Leinen told his client about his friendship with the Meyers, and watched Collini’s heavy, bony face. Collini did not react.

‘We have to clear this point up, Herr Collini. Is my friendship with the Meyers a problem for you?’

‘No,’ said Collini. ‘He’s dead. I’m not interested in it any more.’

‘Not interested in what?’

‘Meyer and his family.’

‘But you’re probably going to be charged with murder. You could get a life sentence.’

Collini placed both hands on the table. ‘Well, I did it.’

Leinen stared at the huge man’s mouth. It was true, Collini had done it. The man had shot Meyer in the head four times; it was his fault that the forensic pathologists had cut up Caspar’s friend and turned him into a legal case. The man had kicked Hans Meyer’s face until the heel came off his shoe. Leinen remembered that face: the lines on it, the thin lips, Meyer’s laughter. The law expects too much of me, thought Leinen, I can’t defend this man, I can hardly bear to look at him. ‘But why did you kill him?’ asked Leinen, pulling himself together.

Collini was examining his hands. ‘I did it with these hands,’ he said.

‘Yes, you did it. But why? You must tell me why.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I can’t defend you by telling the court that.’

The shadow of the steel grating in front of the high window stood out indistinctly on the yellow wall. From the corridor, he heard the woman officer calling prisoners’ names out in the corridor. Collini took a packet of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, tapped a cigarette out of it and put it in his mouth. ‘Do you have a light?’ he asked.

Leinen shook his head.

Collini got to his feet and went over to the washbasin, then to the door, then back to the washbasin again. Leinen realized that Collini was searching for a lighter, and suddenly he was sorry he didn’t have one on him.

‘Would you be prepared to make a confession? If we lose on the murder charge, that would still give the court grounds to reduce your sentence. Would you do that?’

Collini sat down again. His eyes seemed to be fixed on a certain point on the bare wall.

‘Would you at least do that? You only have to say how you killed him. Not why, only how. Do you understand me?’

After a long pause, Collini said, ‘Yes.’ Simply, ‘Yes,’ that was all. He rose to his feet. ‘I’d rather go back to the cell now.’

Leinen nodded. Collini went to the door. They didn’t shake hands. Their conversation had lasted less than fifteen minutes.

The police officer on duty was waiting outside for him, a stout man with a fat neck, his light brown uniform shirt stretched taut over his paunch and showing his vest between the lower buttons. He looked at Collini’s chest and spoke as if to empty air. ‘Right, off we go.’