Self's punishment by Bernhard Schlink Page B

hid her uncertainty.
    ‘Do you know anything about murder?’
    Carefully I put the cups down and sat myself behind the desk.
    ‘I’ve worked on murder cases. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Peter is dead, Peter Mischkey. It was an accident, they say, but I simply can’t believe it.’
    ‘Oh, my God!’ I got up, paced back and forth behind my desk. I felt queasy. In the summer on the tennis court I’d destroyed a part of Mischkey’s vitality, and now he was dead.
    Hadn’t I ruined something for her, too, then? Why had she come to me anyway?
    ‘You met him just that one time playing tennis, and he did play pretty wildly, and it’s true, he was also a wild driver, but he never had an accident and drove so confidently with such concentration – what happened doesn’t fit.’
    So she knew nothing about my meeting with Mischkey in Heidelberg. Nor would she refer to the tennis match that way if she knew I’d turned Mischkey in. It seemed he’d told her nothing, nor had she, in her role as Firner’s personal assistant, discovered anything. I didn’t know what to make of that.
    ‘I liked Mischkey and I’m terribly sorry, Frau Buchendorff, to learn of his death. But we both know that not even the best of drivers is immune to road accidents. Why don’t you believe it was an accident?’
    ‘You know the railway bridge between Eppelheim and Wieblingen? That’s where it happened, two weeks ago. According to the police report, Peter skidded out of control on the bridge, broke through the railings, and crashed down onto the tracks. He had his seatbelt on, but the car buried him beneath it. His cervical vertebra was broken and he was killed on the spot.’ She sobbed convulsively, brought out a handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘Sorry. He drove that route every Thursday; after his sauna at the Eppelheim baths he rehearsed with his band in Wieblingen. He was musical, you know, played the piano really well. The section over the bridge is straight as an arrow, the roads were dry, and visibility was good. Sometimes it’s foggy but not that evening.’
    ‘Are there any witnesses?’
    ‘The police didn’t trace any. And it was late, around eleven p.m.’
    ‘Did they check the car?’
    ‘The police say everything was fine with the car.’
    I didn’t have to enquire about Mischkey. He’d have been taken to the forensic medicine department, and if any alcohol or heart failure or any other failure had been ascertained the police would have told Frau Buchendorff. For a moment a vision of Mischkey on the stone dissection table came to me. As a young attorney I often had to be present at autopsies. I had a sudden image of his abdominal cavity being stuffed with wood shavings and sewn up with large stitches at the end.
    ‘The funeral was the day before yesterday.’
    I considered. ‘Tell me, Frau Buchendorff, apart from the details of the event, do you have any reason to doubt that it was an accident?’
    ‘In recent weeks I often barely recognized him. He was morose, dismissive, turned in on himself, sat at home a lot, hardly wanted to join me on anything at all. Once he even threw me out, just like that. And he evaded all my questions. Sometimes I thought he had someone else, but then again he’d cling to me with a kind of intensity he hadn’t shown before. I was at a complete loss. Once, when I was especially jealous . . . You’ll think, perhaps, I’m not coping with my grief and am being hysterical. But what happened that afternoon . . .’
    I topped up her cup and looked at her encouragingly.
    ‘It was on a Wednesday that we’d both taken off to spend more time together. The day started badly and it wasn’t the case that we wanted to spend more time with one another; actually I wanted him to have more time for me. After lunch he suddenly said that he had to go to the Regional Computing Centre for a couple of hours. I knew very well that wasn’t the truth and was disappointed and furious and could feel his frostiness and