absolutely
understand you,” she said. “Meinhart Steinhagen hardly ever does anything without an ulterior motive.”
“You don’t like him?”
“No.”
Lina smiled. With this answer, the woman had gained some
likability. To her surprise, Katja Ansmann smiled back.
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“Since when did you actually know he was my father?” Lina asked.
Only now, as she gradually relaxed, did she realize how stressed she had been.
“Since you mentioned my father’s threatened bankruptcy,” Katja
Ansmann replied. “I did notice the resemblance with Johanna before,
but would never have suspected that you’re her sister.”
Lina took a sip of her now-lukewarm latte. “The question remains
why he told me about it,” she said. “He pretended that it was to show he trusted me, but I didn’t buy that for a moment.”
“I’d assume he hoped it would become known through you that
the Ansmann Bank is facing difficulties,” Katja said. Lina gave her a surprised look.
Max had voiced the same suspicion, but Lina remained skeptical.
“Doesn’t he have his contacts in the press to do that? I mean, a man in his position . . .”
Katja Ansmann nodded. “Of course he knows the right people in
the right places. But he can’t use them in this case since it would be immediately obvious that he leaked the information. As I told you,
only a very small circle knows about it.”
Lina mulled it over. “However, if I had included the information
in my official reports for this case and it had been published by our public relations office . . . then nobody would have known that the
information came from him.”
Katja Ansmann nodded. “The bank’s precarious situation would
have become public knowledge, investors and clients would have
become nervous, and they’d have withdrawn their money.” She closed
her eyes as if she were trying to imagine such horror. “The work of five generations . . . gone.”
“But he didn’t count on my not saying anything, or at least not officially mentioning it.” She had to laugh again. “Me, of all people, helping to save a bank.”
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Maria C. Poets
Katja Ansmann was smiling. The corners of her mouth began to
tremble and then she laughed, as well.
Max had called Frau Meyer in the morning and asked her to keep
Niels Hinrichsen in her apartment until he got there. She had pre-
pared a substantial breakfast for her neighbor, but by the time Max
finally arrived, shortly before ten, the poor woman was desperate, as was Niels, who couldn’t understand why he couldn’t be on his way to
the forest yet.
Now, the two men were walking from the apartment to the
Niendorfer Gehege, since Niels couldn’t be persuaded to get into Max’s car. He was almost running, so strong was the pull of his beloved forest, and Max always stayed a step behind him. He looked at the patch of
fallow land on one side and the development of single-family houses
on the other side of the road, which didn’t even have a proper sidewalk.
Just as if it were out in the countryside, Max thought, and not in the middle of Hamburg. He heard the unmelodic screeching of a pheasant.
Then some chickens were clucking. But then a jet thundered very low
above their heads, destroying the image of a bucolic idyll.
They came to a railroad underpass. The Kollau flowed right next
to it. Niels was laughing like a child as he ran across the bridge toward a community garden. He pointed out a lot abutting the woods. The
lawn was cropped, the hedge met the height requirement of less than
four feet, and the flower beds were neatly bordered with stones. “That’s where my gramps used to live,” he explained. “He was tall and strong and he took care of the forest.” Hinrichsen had forgotten his impatience and stopped to look at the lot with yearning. “But the house
didn’t belong to Gramps. Other people built that.”
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Dead Woods
And the building on the lot actually bore no resemblance to a
modest garden hut, but looked like a weekend cottage, or a diminutive house. It even came with a nameplate at the gate and a mailbox.
They left the area of the community garden soon afterward, turned
left, then left again, and a little later stood at the spot where Philip Birkner’s body had been found. A remnant of the red-and-white crime-scene tape was still hanging from a branch, but nothing else indicated that eleven days ago this had been the site of a murder.
Niels Hinrichsen didn’t seem to care that a human being had died
here not long ago. He ran around like a child, stopping at a tree or bending over a little plant, without paying attention to the many walkers who crowded the