The Lie by Petra Hammesfahr Page A

You have to be able to park the thing as well. As a courier you’ll have to squeeze into much narrower spaces. Try reversing in, it’s easier.”
    Some ten minutes later the BMW was parked between two other vehicles. Susanne got out, trembling at the knees.
    â€œYou see,” said Johannes as they went over to the building, “you can do it, no problem. See you at seven. Or let’s say half past, the car park’ll be fairly empty by then and you can practice a bit and drive back.”
    This time next week, she thought, as she thanked him for his offer.
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    It was a terrible week, starting with her mother going on at her because she wasn’t her usual chatty self. “Susanne, there’s something wrong with you. Won’t you tell me what it is?”
    â€œIt’s just my time of the month.”
    Agnes Runge was happy with that and prattled on about the little events in her life. Finally she asked Susanne how work was going and how her friend Jasmin Toppler and that nice Herr Heller were.
    All at once she felt like bursting into tears. All the lies and the two thousand euros missing from her mother’s account. It would have been so simple to say in January, “I’ve lost my job, Mother.” Her mother would have certainly supported her. And now she could have said, “Something funny happened, Mum. I’ve met a woman who looks exactly like me. Or, rather, now I look exactly like her. She was keen to splash out on it and now she’ll pay me five hundred if I…”
    This time next week! She was itching to talk to someone about Nadia Trenkler, but it was an itch she didn’t dare scratch. She could still hear her mother going on about fidelity in marriage. Her father had often said, “Why don’t you go dancing, Susanne. You’ll see there are more men around than your roving reporter. He’s never there for you. And don’t imagine he sticks to his marriage vows the way you do.”
    Every time her mother had jumped on him. “How can you say something like that? What Dieter does is neither here nor there. I don’t think it’s right for him to leave her alone all the time either. But at the altar she vowed…”
    To tell her mother she was acting as stand-in for a woman who was going to cheat on her husband was out of the question.

    At half-past seven she got behind the wheel of the BMW for the second time. Johannes was a mine of useful tips and she spent more than an hour, under his patient guidance, practising in the almost empty car park, going backwards, forwards, sideways into a parking space, doing three-point turns, reversing round corners and all the other driving-school manoeuvres. Then she drove out onto the country road and later - in first gear - along the acceleration lane and onto the autobahn.
    Johannes kept her amused with a stream of advanced driving theory: how to get a car that’s in a skid back under control, finishing off with a handbrake turn; how to travel for a short stretch on two wheels; how much you had to accelerate to jump like a horse over ditches or other obstacles, all tricks he needed for his part-time job as a stuntman. Then he even offered to come round during the week so she could practise on a piece of waste ground where he’d been working recently.
    It would probably have been more sensible to take a couple of ordinary driving lessons, to familiarize herself with city traffic and learn to drive up an autobahn approach road in third gear at least. But Johannes’s course in skid control was free, so she said yes.
    On Monday she spent half the day with the photos: interior and exterior views of Nadia’s house, parties in the neighbourhood, Nadia with Joachim Kogler, Nadia with Lilo Kogler, Nadia with Wolfgang Blasting, Nadia with Ilona Blasting, Nadia with a dozen unknown friends. For the first time it struck her that the blond man did not appear in any of the photos.