The Collini Case Read online

  After a few hours they felt hungry and went off to the kitchen. There was roast beef, and the new bread that the cook had baked for them, still warm from the oven. They talked quietly, because sounds had a false note to them in the dark. Johanna talked about her marriage. Her husband had been there for her when her parents died, she said, day after day he had sheltered her from loneliness and death. But gradually everyday life had caught up with her. A moment came when she didn’t like to see him there at breakfast, she told Leinen; she’d known that would pass off by evening, but at breakfast the next day she didn’t like to see him facing her again. She’d put up with that for two years, and then it was no use any more. For some time now they had been living their separate lives, she in London, he in Cambridge. It hadn’t worked out as she had expected.

  Later, they took the dust sheets off the old grand piano. Johanna played the Blüthner, but it was out of tune and sounded tinny and wrong in the empty house. Still later, they went up to the room that had been hers as a girl. They slept together under mountains of covers, falling asleep slowly, close to one another, feeling the warmth of each other’s skin. Shipwrecked sailors on a raft, thought Leinen. And then he realized that they were not ‘in love’, that was a meaningless concept – this was simply the way they were.

  When he woke up, he thought he could hear the barking of the dogs in the morning, as he had in the old days, and the clatter of crockery in the dining room, and for a moment Philipp was there with him. He looked just as he always had at that time of day: pale, his hair untidy, in pyjamas and with his dressing gown unbelted. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth; he smiled and waved. Leinen sat on the window seat. It had been snowing again overnight. The snow had settled on the dark model of a crane in front of the orangery, and its beak seemed to be frozen in the ice of the fountain.

  On the following morning they went through the attics and the cellars, they searched every folder, they looked in cupboards and chests, but they found nothing to explain what Collini had done. Then Johanna went to his car with him. Before he drove out of the gate to the grounds, he looked back once more. Seen through the melting frost on his rear-view window, Johanna was a blurred shape leaning on one of the white pillars at the entrance, looking up at the bright winter sky.

  10

  The 12th Criminal Court – one of the eight courts of first instance in the Berlin regional judiciary where serious felonies were tried – authorized the arraignment of Collini for murder. As usual in major trials, no further evidence was to be heard on that first day, but a psychiatric expert was to attend in order to give an opinion on Collini later. Nor was the list of witnesses particularly long for the next few days: guests at the Hotel Adlon and some of its employees, police officers including those who had interrogated Collini. The forensic pathologist and a ballistics expert were to give their professional opinions, the latter on the murder weapon. The presiding judge thought that she saw the course the trial would take lying clear ahead, and set aside only ten days for the main part of the hearing.

  Mattinger appeared on TV news, always saying the same thing: ‘The outcome of the trial will be decided in court.’ He was a wise, friendly presence onscreen, with his white hair, dark three-piece suit and silver tie. And when the cameras had been switched off he explained to the journalists what was at stake. The press printed stories about Mattinger’s trials in the past. One was regarded as legendary: a man’s wife had accused him of raping her. There was all the evidence that might have been expected, haematomas on the inside of her thighs, his sperm in her vagina, consistent statements to the police. The man had two previous convictions for actual bodily harm. The presiding judge questioned the wife; he was thorough about it, he spent two hours going over every detail in her statement. Counsel for the public prosecutor’s office had no questions. But Mattinger didn’t believe the woman. His first question was, ‘Would you care to admit that you’ve been lying?’ She said she would not. He began questioning her at eleven in the morning, and the court adjourned for the day at six in the evening. The presiding judge asked defence counsel to come up to the judges’ bench, and suggested a favourable deal for the defendant: a lenient sentence in return for a confession. Mattinger raised his voice: ‘But don’t you see that the woman is rotten to the core?’ On the next day of the trial Mattinger asked the same opening question. And on the day after that. In the end the wife spent fifty-seven days on the witness stand, obliged to answer his questions. On the morning of the fifty-eighth day she gave way and admitted that, out of jealousy, she had wanted to see her husband behind bars. The last question was the same as the first: ‘Would you care to admit that you’ve been lying?’ This time she nodded. The defendant was acquitted. Either Mattinger couldn’t bear injustice, or there was no way he could lose a case. In any event, he never gave up.

  These days the old lawyer sat at his desk every night, seeing the lights from the Kurfürstendamm. But now, the night before the first day of the main trial, he felt old. He didn’t want to go to bed. His wife had been dead for fifteen years, but all the same he still reached out for her every morning, half asleep, and he almost always woke with a start because she wasn’t there. When she died he had sat beside her on the bed. First it was abdominal cancer, then the tumours spread; in the end the doctors said there was no hope left. She hadn’t smelled like herself for weeks, too many medicinal drugs, too much morphine. He had sat beside the bed holding her hand, even on that last day when the ECG showed only a flat line. The doctors said she hadn’t felt anything. It had been a relief to him when she died, and he was ashamed of that later. He had risen and opened the window. Down in the street outside the hospital, other people were taking their shopping home, walking arm in arm, phoning, quarrelling, talking, laughing. Mattinger had thought he no longer belonged to that world.

  Now he lit a cigar and bent over the files again. When he switched off the light at two in the morning, he knew them almost by heart.

  Caspar Leinen was also awake that night. He stayed in his chambers until three-thirty in the morning. There were piles of paper all over his desk; he had sorted the files into witness statements, the opinions of experts, police reports, forensic evidence. Leinen was looking for something, although he didn’t know what. He had overlooked some small detail. There must be a key somewhere that would explain the murder and put the world back in order. He smoked too much, he felt nervous, and he was afraid. Hans Meyer’s chessboard stood on the side table beside his desk, with the old chessmen divided between the stacks of paper, acting as paperweights. Leinen thought of Johanna; four black-and-white pictures from a photo booth were fixed to the shade of his table lamp with sticky tape. She would be in court tomorrow; she wanted to see her grandfather’s killer. He looked at the pictures and realized how tired he was. Leinen found his briefcase, but he put only the document with the arraignment into it; he wouldn’t need anything else tomorrow. Then he put the white king from the chess set in his trouser pocket, got into his coat, put his robe over his arm and left his office.

  The night sky was cloudless; it was cold. He thought about the fact that tomorrow three legally qualified judges and two lay judges, a public prosecutor, an accessory prosecutor and he himself would be sitting in court to try a man. Eight people leading eight different lives, all with their own wishes, fears and prejudices. They would follow the code of criminal procedure, an old law that determines the course of a trial. Hundreds of books had been written about it; verdicts were quashed if a court failed to observe a single one of its clauses, four hundred of them or more in all. Leinen walked past Mattinger’s chambers and looked up at the windows. The old lawyer had said that every trial should be a battle for what was right; that was how the fathers of the laws had intended it. The rules were clear and strict, and only if they were kept could justice be done.

  The tarts on the Kurfürstendamm stood in front of the illuminated ads. One of them accosted Leinen; he politely declined her offer and went home through the noct
urnal streets of Berlin.

  The police officers on duty in the courthouse began doing the rounds of its courtrooms; they had to hang a notice announcing the day’s programme there on the door of each one. The notices said who was being tried and when. The officers would need about an hour; the building comprised twelve courtyards, seventeen staircases, and there were about three hundred hearings every day. An officer fixed a single sheet of paper up with a drawing pin beside the tall wooden double doors with the number 500 on them, the doors to the largest courtroom in the building:

  ‘12th Criminal Court – trial of Fabrizio Collini for murder – 9.00 a.m.’

  11

  ‘A coffee, please.’ Caspar Leinen hadn’t slept much, but he was full of adrenalin and wide awake. He was sitting in Weilers, a café opposite the courthouse. Everyone came in here for home-made cake and open sandwiches. Some said that Weilers was the real central point of the criminal division of the district court. Defence lawyers sat here every day, along with prosecutors, judges and expert witnesses, discussing trials and doing deals.

  ‘Coffee just coming up. Hey, you’re early today,’ said the waitress, a pretty Turkish girl. Many stories about her were told in Moabit.

  Indeed, Leinen was already in the café by eight, an hour before the opening of the trial. The TV stations had set up their cameras on the pavement near the courthouse; outside-broadcast vehicles were parked there, half on the street; cameramen in thick coats and TV reporters in suits too thin for the weather were standing around in the cold. The teams from the main TV channels had permission to film in the courthouse building itself. Weilers was full of journalists trying to look blasé.

  A group of young public prosecutors came into the café. Leinen knew some of them from their two-year training period of work experience. There were the usual jokes about rich lawyers and impoverished servants of the state. Leinen found that no one in ‘Cap’, the Capital Crimes Department of the public prosecutor’s office, expected any surprises.

  He finished his coffee and got up to leave. One of the public prosecutors clapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck. When he had paid for his coffee at the counter, he crossed the street to the main entrance, showed the officers on duty his pass to the courthouse and was allowed past the long line of visitors and into the central hall of the complex. He still found it overwhelming: the hall was thirty metres high, a veritable cathedral. The stone statues above the stairwell gazed menacingly down, six allegorical figures of Religion, Justice, Belligerence, Tranquillity, Falsehood and Truth. The idea was to make defendants and witnesses feel small, awed by the power of the law. Even the floor tiles all had the letters KCG engraved on them, the insignia of the Königliches Criminal Gericht, the Royal Criminal Court. Leinen took a lift tucked away in the side wing, went up to the first floor and entered Courtroom 500.

  Although it was a perfectly normal working day, about a hundred and thirty people sat crammed close together on the spectators’ benches. The crush of the press was so great that seats for journalists had to be chosen by lot. They would go away disappointed, for usually nothing ever happened on the first day of a trial like this except that the arraignment was read out.

  None the less, all the major newspapers had sent their correspondents; Leinen knew none of their faces. Four camera teams were roaming around the hall, filming anything there was to film: stacks of files, legal books, and of course Fabrizio Collini. He sat in a glass cage behind the defending counsel’s bench, and you could hardly see him. These were TV pictures unaccompanied by any commentary.

  Dr Reimers, the senior public prosecutor, sat on the window side of the hall, looking at his watch. A thin red folder lay in front of him, containing only the arraignment; nothing else was expected to be dealt with today. It would be a short day in the trial. Next to the public prosecutor, and separated from him by a pane of glass, stood Mattinger, representing the accessory prosecution.

  Leinen went to his place, took the document with details of the charge out of his briefcase and placed the white king from Meyer’s chess set on the table in front of him. Johanna was the last to arrive, so that she wouldn’t have to speak to the press. He could hardly bear to see her on the other side from him in this case.

  Just after nine the clerk who would be acting as court reporter, taking down the proceedings, said into her microphone, ‘All rise, please.’ When all the spectators and those involved in the trial were on their feet, a smaller door behind the judges’ bench opened. Leinen knew that it led into a conference room furnished with a long table, chairs, a telephone and a washbasin.

  The presiding judge was the first to enter the courtroom. Her left hand had a slight tremor. There were five tall chairs at the judges’ bench, and she placed herself in front of the middle one, with a professional judge on each side of her, flanked in turn by the two lay judges. All of them except for the lay judges wore black robes. They stood looking at the camera teams for four or five minutes. ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think that’s enough. Please leave the court now,’ said the presiding judge in a friendly tone. An officer opened the door of the courtroom, two others placed themselves in front of the cameras and spread their arms. ‘You heard what the judge said, please leave the court now.’ Gradually the courtroom calmed down.

  ‘Is the defendant present?’ the presiding judge asked the court reporter, who was over to her right. She too wore a black robe; she was a young woman, and had tied her hair back in a ponytail.

  ‘Yes, your honour,’ she said.

  ‘Right, then we can begin.’ The presiding judge paused for a moment and drew the microphone close to her. ‘I now declare the first session of the 12th Criminal Court in the trial of Herr Fabrizio Collini open. Please sit down.’

  After that she established the presence of the others involved in the trial, read out their names and duties, and asked Collini his age, profession and marital status. Finally she turned to the senior public prosecutor and asked him to read the arraignment. Reimers stood to read out the brief text, which lasted hardly fifteen minutes; a murder is quickly described. The presiding judge stated that the district court had allowed the charge of murder to proceed to the main hearing, and told Collini at length about his right to remain silent. The court reporter tapped into her computer: ‘The defendant is told about his rights.’ Then the presiding judge turned directly to Leinen.

  ‘Counsel for the defence, I’m sure that you have discussed this with your client already. Would the defendant like to say anything?’

  Leinen switched on the microphone in front of him, and a small red light showed.

  ‘No, your honour, Herr Collini doesn’t want to make any statement at this time.’

  ‘ “At this time” – what do you mean? Is the defendant going to make a statement later?’

  ‘We haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Is that what you say yourself, Herr Collini?’ the presiding judge asked the defendant. Collini nodded. ‘Very well,’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Then we have nothing else on today’s agenda. The trial will continue next Wednesday. All of you who are involved are required to attend. This session is now adjourned.’ Placing one hand over the microphone, she added, ‘Dr Reimers, Herr Mattinger, Herr Leinen, please would you wait a moment. I’d like a word with you outside this session of the court.’

  Leinen turned to Collini and was about to say goodbye, but his client had already risen to his feet and gone over to the police officers. It was almost fifteen minutes before the courtroom was empty. When the three lawyers were on their own with her, the presiding judge said, ‘Gentlemen, we all know that this is an unusual trial. The victim was eighty-five, the defendant is sixty-seven. He has no previous convictions and has led a blameless life. In spite of lengthy investigations, no motive has been found.’ She looked sternly at Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers, and you couldn’t miss hearing criticism of the work of the public prosecutor’s office in her voice. ‘I want to tell you that I don’t like surprises. I
f the defence, the prosecution or the accessory prosecution have plans for making a plea or statement of some kind, then this is your opportunity to let the court know.’

  The judge, Reimers and Mattinger were looking at Leinen. It was clear that they needed to know Collini’s motive for the killing, and were waiting for Leinen to put a foot wrong.

  ‘Your honour,’ said Leinen, ‘as you’re aware, all of you have far more experience than I do, and you know that this is my first major brief for the defence. So please forgive me if I ask whether I understand you correctly: are you asking me to tell you at this point how Herr Collini is going to defend himself? As he told you during the session, he prefers to say nothing at this time. Do you want me to tell you more than that now?’

  The presiding judge couldn’t conceal a smile. Leinen smiled back.

  ‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that we needn’t fear the defendant will not be ably represented. Let’s leave it at that for now, then. Have a nice day, and we’ll meet again on Wednesday.’

  Reimers put his files together, Leinen and Mattinger went to the door of the courtroom. Mattinger laid his hand on Leinen’s forearm.

  ‘Well done, Leinen,’ he said. ‘Now for the press.’ He nodded briefly to Leinen and went to the double doors. The photographers’ flashlights dazzled them. Mattinger placed himself in front of the cameras. In spite of his tanned skin, he looked pale just now, and Leinen heard him saying again and again, ‘Wait for the end of the trial, ladies and gentlemen, and then we’ll see. I’m sorry, but I’m not making any comment now. Wait and see.’

  Leinen made his way past the reporters.