The Lie Read Online Free Page A

Three years later they got married, moving in with his mother. And that was the beginning of the end.
    Naturally it wasn’t all Dieter’s fault. A year after they were married she gave up her job after a bank robbery, which, it turned out, had been carried out with a toy gun. It would have been the right time to have a child. But it was not to be. Her mother-in-law became bedridden following a stroke and, shortly afterwards, Dieter started going to international trouble spots as a freelance journalist. It was probably preferable to the running battles at home.
    For six years she’d looked after the house and garden, and taken her mother-in-law on fictional journeys to the castles of princes who regularly fell in love with their chambermaids. Dieter, meanwhile, had seen a war-torn world from the front line, and on his rare trips home he found she was becoming more and more of a cabbage.
    By the time his mother died, they had nothing to say to each other. Dieter had found another woman in one of the trouble spots: Ramie, a translator, twenty-four and already pregnant with his child when he brought her home. Susanne was thirty-four, without children and convinced that after six years she’d fully got over the trauma of the bank robbery.
    At this point Nadia gave a snort of contempt and said, “Parasites, that’s what they are. Let their wife finance them while they launch themselves on a high-flying career, then take her for every penny.”
    â€œNo, it wasn’t like that,” Susanne protested.
    â€œBut you said he was a freelance journalist,” Nadia insisted. “You had to support him financially when he wasn’t working.”
    â€œNo,” she said. She’d told the man doing the opinion poll something like that but had forgotten it by now. “For a start I had no income of my
own. He even voluntarily paid a lump sum so I could get a flat in the city and furnish it.”
    â€œHe did, did he?” said Nadia. “And you haven’t seen him since your divorce?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œNo other contact? Not even an occasional telephone call?”
    â€œI haven’t got a telephone. And we wouldn’t have any more to say to each other than we did three years ago.”
    Nadia nodded thoughtfully but said nothing more. After a few seconds Susanne went on with her story. After the divorce she’d applied for a job with her former employer - with her heart in her mouth and a shot of schnapps in her belly. Her father had sworn by schnapps in stressful situations. It worked for her as well. She was taken on - for three months.
    The first month was taken up with familiarizing herself with the changes that had taken place over the years. Everything in the bank was done by computer now, but she could cope with that - more or less. In the second month she was already working at the counter. At times she was nervous, watching the door rather than what she was doing. Twice some money was missing at the end of the day. The second time it was a significant sum.
    The manager agreed with her that the five thousand marks she’d recorded as paid in must in fact have been a withdrawal. She’d presumably pressed the wrong key. They relied on the honesty of the customer, unfortunately in vain. She’d had to make good the loss. The money was to be deducted in three instalments from her salary. But it never came to that.
    She was transferred from the counter to the customer-service desk. One Thursday she went down to the basement with a middle-aged man called Schrag. He came regularly on Thursdays in the late afternoon to deposit something or take something out.
    Herr Schrag ran a small electrical business from which he barely made a living. His accounts made grim reading. Whether things looked any better in his deposit box, no one knew. On that particular Thursday he came back from his deposit box with a brown envelope, which he put in his inside jacket