The Collini Case Read online

  ‘Hmm …’ Leinen nodded.

  ‘You know something? I roll the shutter up at five every morning, put the light on and wait for the chilled truck to arrive from the factory. I push the prepared dough into the convection ovens, and then all day, from seven onward, I’m selling the stuff that was delivered. When the weather’s bad I sit inside, when it’s fine I sit here in the sun. I’d rather make real bread in a real bakery, with real equipment and real ingredients. But it just isn’t that way.’

  A woman with a Dalmatian passed them and went into the shop. The baker stood up and followed her. A few moments later he came back, bringing two glasses of iced water.

  ‘See what I mean?’ asked the baker.

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have a proper bakery again some day. I did have one, but I lost it in the divorce. Now I work here, that’s all there is to it. Simple.’ He emptied his glass of water in a single draught and crunched an ice cube. ‘You’re a lawyer, you have to do what lawyers do.’

  They sat in the shade and watched the passers-by. Leinen thought of his father. In his world, everything seemed clear and simple, there were no secrets. His father had not wanted him to become a defence lawyer. It was no profession for a decent man, he had said, everything legal was too complicated for that. Leinen remembered a duck shoot one winter. His father had fired his gun, and a mallard crashed down on the ice of the pond. The dog his father had at the time was still young, and had run off to retrieve the duck without waiting for his master’s signal. The ice in the middle of the pond was thin, the dog broke through it, but he wasn’t giving up. He swam through the ice-cold water and brought the duck to land. Without a word, his father took off his jacket and rubbed the dog dry with the lining. He carried him home in the jacket. For two days, his father sat in front of the fire with the dog on his knees. When the animal was better, he gave him to a family in the village. He’d never make a gun dog, he had said.

  Leinen told the baker that he was probably right, and went home to his apartment. That evening he called Johanna. He said he had no option, he’d have to go on with Collini’s defence. He had persuaded his client to confess to committing the crime, but that was as much as he could do. It was a long conversation. Johanna was furious at first, then helpless, and finally desperate. She kept on and on asking why that man had done it. She called him only ‘that man’. She was crying.

  ‘Shall I come over there to see you?’ he asked, when they’d said everything there was to say. She did not reply for a long time. In the silence, he heard her wooden bangles clicking against each other.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘but I need time.’

  When they ended the call, he felt tired and lonely.

  Two weeks later Fabrizio Collini confessed to the murder. The interrogation room in the old building in Keithstrasse was cramped: two pale grey desks, a window, mugs of luke-warm coffee. Collini’s chair was too small for him. Two police officers had prepared the interrogation, the files from the public prosecutor’s office lay in front of them, with yellow Post-its on the pages that they wanted to ask about. The older officer was head of this department of the murder squad; he had three grown-up children and a weakness for chocolate. Thirty-six years in the police had made him not cynical, but calm and composed. He saw defendants as human beings, got them to talk and listened to them. The other police officer was still new here. He had come in from the drugs-related crimes department, and he was nervous. He went to the shooting range more often than his colleagues, his shoes were polished to a shine every morning, and he spent his leisure time at the gym.

  This younger officer put a folder of pictures in front of Collini: photographs of the scene of the crime on yellow cardboard, over-sharp shots of the murder victim’s shattered head. Leinen was just about to protest when the older officer told his colleague that the pictures weren’t necessary; Collini was confessing to the crime anyway. He tried to pick up the folder, but Collini had put his large hands on it and was pressing it down on the desk. When the older officer let go of the folder, Collini pulled it towards him and opened it. Leaning forward, he looked at every single picture. He took his time. No one in the room said a word. When he had finished, he closed the folder and pushed it back over the desk. ‘He’s dead,’ said Collini, looking down at the desk. Then he told them how he had pretended to be a journalist and fixed a date for an interview with Meyer’s secretary, and how he had then gone into the hotel suite and killed him. Asked about the murder weapon, he said he had bought it at a flea market in Italy.

  Leinen sat beside his client, now and then correcting a phrase that the police officers were about to put on record, but otherwise he drew little stick men on a notepad. He had explained to Collini that a defendant could always keep silent, but if he confessed to the crime the judge had to take it into account and pass a more lenient sentence. That didn’t apply to murder, for which the sentence was always life. But in a case of manslaughter the confession was a help.

  After two hours the police officers had no more questions to ask about the crime itself. Leinen got to his feet and told them that the interrogation was now over.

  ‘If you don’t mind, we were about to come to the heart of the matter – your client’s motive, Herr Leinen. We have to talk about the motive,’ said the older police officer.

  ‘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.

  Much later, tired, their passion spent, they lay on the bed and talked about Philipp, about Rossthal and their summer, until gradually the words died away. In his sleep, Caspar Leinen clenched one hand into a fist, as if trying to hold on to something transient.

  He woke early. Johanna was lying on her back, her head in the crook of his elbow, breathing calmly and regularly. Leinen watched her for a long time, then stood up, got dressed in the dark, wrote her a note and quietly closed the door behind him. The lobby was crowded and noisy; a reps’ conference was being held in the hotel.

  He went out and boarded a tram. The passengers looked tired, some of them were asleep in their seats, condensation clouded the inside of the windows. He got off at the Tivolistrasse stop, walked across the English Garden and went through the snow to the Kleinhesseloher See. Right in the city centre, not a kilometre from the street, he saw them: little grebes, tufted ducks, common and red-crested pochards, mallards, coots, grey and bar-headed geese, and a flock of carrion crows. In his childhood, his father had taught him about birds. Ravens, he had said, know everything. Leinen swept the snow off a park bench, sat down and watched the birds until the cold had hardened his face and made his shoulders stiff.

  In the late afternoon, he called for Johanna at the Munich branch of the Meyer Works. They drove in his car to Rossthal, where they were planning to look through Hans Meyer’s private papers in search of answers. Rossthal was only an hour’s drive from Munich, or just over an hour, but when they arrived it seemed like another world. The house and grounds lay in the snow, the wintry light was tinged with blue. They drove over the circular forecourt and parked at the foot of the steps going up to the house. Frau Pomerenke, Meyer’s last housekeeper, opened the door. She came down the steps, a little unsteadily, and hugged Johanna with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, Caspar,’ she added, ‘how good to see you home again too.’ She had lit a fir
e in the big hearth, and said there was supper for them in the kitchen, they’d only have to warm it up. Then she withdrew to her own two rooms next to the housekeeping office, and later they heard her TV switched on there.

  Johanna and Leinen walked through rooms where the furniture and lamps were shrouded in white dust sheets. The shutters were closed. It was cool and quiet. Only the grandfather clock in the library ticked away; someone was still winding it daily. In the study, light fell through a crack between the curtains and divided the top of the desk into broad strips. This was where Hans Meyer used to read the newspapers every day. They were always ironed first in the kitchen, so that they would stay crisp and the printer’s ink wouldn’t come off on his hands. The two of them stood in the room, motionless, looking at the desk. Johanna tore herself away from the sight of it first; she put her arms round Leinen and kissed him, and he felt as if she wanted to assure herself that they were alive.

  They took the dust sheets off the desk and found its two drawers unlocked, containing nothing but notepaper of various sizes with matching envelopes, a collection of pencils, two old fountain pens, a dictating machine with empty cassettes. On the shelves stood countless files, neatly labelled: accounts, household records, invitations, business and private correspondence, all filed by years and alphabetically. They sat on the two dark green sofas, leafing through a whole series of photograph albums, also arranged in chronological order. Leinen remembered how Philipp and he used to look at them: family parties, safaris in Africa, hunting in the Austrian mountains. They knew most of the faces in the pictures. Johanna found a cuttings book labelled ‘Caspar Leinen’. Hans Meyer had stuck documents sent to him by Leinen as a child into this album: certificates that he had won in the National Youth Games, beginner’s and advanced swimming certificates, second place in the boarding schools’ downhill skiing championship. Later, Hans Meyer had got his company’s legal department to send him the essays and discussions of verdicts that Leinen had written in legal journals. They too were inside that file in their transparent folders. Sometimes Meyer had highlighted a sentence or added a question mark to a paragraph.