A not entirely serious crime story · Part 1

Trixie Trulla Kills Big Dörte

Note: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to persons living or dead would not merely be coincidental, but probably the work of a particularly talkative neighbourhood.

In a respectable district of a German city, a house had been sold. Neighbours whispered that the purchase price had been exorbitantly high, that the promises had been transparent and impossible to keep, and that, to crown it all, the new owners had subsequently discovered that extensive renovations were required.

Eventually, one of the neighbours, who lived diagonally opposite and therefore happened to encounter the newcomers from time to time, could contain herself no longer. She approached the new neighbour with simulated warmth and asked her bluntly what she had paid for the house.

As far as my now fading memory serves, the new owner was called Trixie, sometimes with the disparaging suffix “Trulla”. She was suspected of merely simulating respectable middle-class behaviour rather than embracing it wholeheartedly, both in spirit and intellect. To this day, I remain uncertain what exactly that was meant to convey. Perhaps the message lay precisely in its vagueness and indeterminacy, allowing—or inviting—everyone to fill the remaining gaps with their own imagination.

The diagonally-opposite neighbour, tormented by curiosity, was known as Dörte. She was a somewhat comprehensive lady who regularly had to accompany her enormous black dog on his customary walks—the dog taking his mistress out.

After Dörte had softened up our defenceless Trixie with every variety of simulated friendliness, Trixie finally let a purchase price slip—let us simply say one million euros. In return for divulging this originally closely guarded key information, Dörte had to swear a vow of silence, accompanied by the surely not entirely serious threat: “Otherwise I’ll kill you!”

Since time immemorial, it has been no secret that nothing travels faster than a “secret” revealed under the cloak of confidentiality. Before long, the entire neighbourhood knew and nodded knowingly to one another whenever they happened to pass the house in question. To avoid becoming responsible for the premature death of Big Dörte, who was highly valued as the neighbourhood’s rumour-distribution centre, everyone nevertheless made a conspicuous effort to remain tight-lipped on the subject.

Then, one grey November morning, a tragic incident occurred. A reluctant early riser, who had likewise been driven into the at that hour still unwelcome fresh air by his dog in order to avert a domestic mishap, was led by that very animal—whom, for simplicity’s sake, we shall call Bodo Beutlin—straight towards Dörte’s monstrous hound. Let us, equally simply, christen him Napoleon.

Napoleon was greatly agitated. The reason was soon found. Not far away, stretched out at full length in the still dew-wet grass of the broad roadside verge, lay Dörte’s body. All life had already left her. She had also plainly sustained several injuries in some event whose nature remained entirely obscure in the dim light of that grey morning.

Thus, a random collection of people privy to the vow of silence became a community of fate united by a shared secret. Suspicion naturally fell at once upon poor Trixie. I would have believed many things of her—but not, of all things, this.

To be continued …