Trixie Trulla Kills Big Dörte · Chapter 2
There are moments when a respectable residential neighbourhood ceases to be a collection of properly financed owner-occupied homes and turns into a stage. This does not usually happen at street parties. These are organised expressly for that purpose, but regularly fail because everyone is simultaneously eating sausages and assuring one another how wonderfully informal the occasion has become.
A true change of scene requires stronger means.
A corpse, for example.
No sooner had Dörte’s body been discovered in the dew-wet grass than the broad roadside verge acquired a status it had never enjoyed even in the eyes of the Parks Department. It was now a crime scene. A crime scene differs from an ordinary place chiefly in that nobody may suddenly touch anything that nobody had wanted to touch for years.
The reluctant early riser already mentioned called the police. He later claimed that his voice had been calm and composed. This was one of those statements that are not directly untrue, provided one understands calm to mean the spasmodic inhalations of a defective bellows and composure to mean dropping one’s telephone three times.
Bodo Beutlin used the interval to sniff a bush. He was a small brown dog of uncertain ancestry but assured self-confidence. Napoleon, Dörte’s enormous black companion, stood two metres from his mistress. He did not whimper. He did not bark. He merely looked at the early riser.
That look was to matter later.
First came a patrol car, then an ambulance, then another patrol car and finally a bakery van whose driver had stopped because of the blue lights and, within seven minutes, knew more than the officers did. This is not a criticism of the police. The bakery driver merely possessed a more tightly woven information network.
The first neighbours appeared in dressing gowns. Some held cups, others mobile phones, and still others both. Behind windows, curtains moved with that unnatural regularity which betrays a firm belief that curtains may be curious of their own accord.
Then Trixie appeared.
She wore a green woollen coat over floral pyjamas, red rubber boots and carried an umbrella, although it was not raining. Her face was pale. Whether from cold, shock or the knowledge that she had issued a frivolous death threat three weeks earlier could not yet be determined.
“What happened?” she asked.
Nobody answered immediately.
It was the moment in which a neighbourhood hitherto composed only of individual curious people thought collectively for the first time. Its thoughts were not especially intelligent, but remarkably uniform.
She did it.
Frau Knobloch, a retired senior teacher of German and history, stared at Trixie. Herr Pahlke, a semi-retired tax adviser, looked first at Trixie and then at her house, as though the purchase price might materialise outside on the drainpipe. Young Herr Yilmaz from number 18 unobtrusively raised his phone. Frau Söntgen whispered something to her husband that he already knew because he had told her himself the previous evening.
A police officer approached Trixie.
“Did you know the deceased?”
Trixie looked at Dörte, then at Napoleon and finally at the silent rank of neighbours.
“A little,” she said.
By late morning, “a little” had become “very well”; by noon, “intimately”; and by evening, “they had been quarrelling for weeks”.
And so the case began.
No comments:
Post a Comment