Trixie Trulla Kills Big Dörte · Chapter 3
At first, the neighbourhood mistook this quality for coldness.
Martens had the area cordoned off. A pathologist bent over Dörte. Napoleon had to be led away, a task none of the officers managed. Only when Trixie quietly said, “Napoleon, come,” did the animal rise, walk over and sit at her left side.
An audible intake of breath passed through the ranks.
“He obeys her!” Frau Söntgen whispered.
“Dogs never forget,” Frau Knobloch replied with the certainty she normally reserved for historical dates.
“Or they know their killer,” said Herr Pahlke.
Martens turned round. Three heads vanished behind a hedge.
Dörte had a bleeding wound at the back of her head. There were superficial scratches on her right hand, and her coat was torn at the shoulder. Beside her lay a broken pair of reading glasses, although Dörte had never read while walking. A little farther away, an officer found a small silver spring of the sort that might belong to a mechanical device, and a fragment of red plastic.
Napoleon’s lead was not attached to his collar. It lay in a loose loop around a municipal boundary post, one of those low metal fixtures intended to prevent motorists from damaging the grass and to invite pedestrians to damage themselves.
“Accident?” asked the young constable.
The pathologist lifted one shoulder. “Possible.”
That word did not reach the far side of the hedge.
There, the more important question was already being debated: who would tell the police about Trixie’s threat?
Everyone knew about it. Nobody could explain how.
Frau Knobloch had heard it from Frau Söntgen, who knew it from her husband. Herr Söntgen had supposedly picked it up at the bakery. The baker denied this and referred them to the pharmacist. The pharmacist invoked professional confidentiality, which was interpreted as an admission. Herr Pahlke had received the information “from a reliable source”, by which he generally meant his wife. She, in turn, had heard it from Dörte herself, though expressly under the seal of absolute secrecy.
Thus nobody was responsible.
Responsibility is an object which, in respectable life, becomes strikingly lighter as it is passed around.
At ten o’clock, Inspector Martens began her interviews. At ten thirty-seven, Herr Söntgen lost his nerve.
“She threatened her!” he blurted.
“Who threatened whom?”
“Trixie threatened Dörte. Said she would kill her if she told anyone the purchase price.”
“Were you there?”
“No.”
“Who was there?”
“Dörte and Trixie.”
“Then how do you know?”
Herr Söntgen fell silent. It was not the silence of a man guarding a secret. It was the silence of a man who has just discovered that the logical structure of his statement points back towards himself.
“It’s common knowledge,” he said at last.
“Then it was evidently not a particularly effective threat.”
Martens wrote something down.
Herr Söntgen tried to see the page. “Are you writing down her name?”
“No. Yours.”
Before lunch, the neighbourhood knew that Trixie’s name appeared on a secret police list.
This was even true.
The same list also contained Napoleon, Bodo Beutlin, fourteen neighbours, two delivery drivers, the bakery driver, a cyclist whose identity was not yet known, and the weather.
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