When Philip wasn’t there, he was a really nice guy. But he admired his brother more than was good for him.” She shook her head. “I was never allowed to voice the tiniest criticism of my brother-in-law; Lukas would immediately flip out. Philip was his
hero, the white knight in shining armor.” She tried to laugh mockingly, but didn’t manage it. “Yesterday . . . yesterday he accused me of having spoken ill of Philip in front of the police by telling lies about him. He was so upset that he didn’t even listen to what I said. At one point he began to hit me. The kids were already in bed, but the noise woke them 241
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up, and they came to the living room.” She closed her eyes again. “I saw how horrified they were when they saw Lukas hitting me,” she said quietly. “That was almost worse than the blows.” Tears were streaming down her face. She wiped them away with her left hand.
“Frau Birkner,” Lina said gently after a while, “is there anything
you can tell us about what happened in the past?” The woman nodded
but was silent. With a little more emphasis, Lina continued, “So, the clique of Julia Munz and Philip Birkner bullied other students, among them Daniel Vogler. Do you know what they specifically did to him?”
Sonja Birkner shook her head. “I just know the usual stuff,” she
said in a low voice. “Stupid remarks, maybe some shoving in the school-yard. Things like that.” She looked at Lina. “But something really bad must have happened one day. Daniel was absent from school for a few
days, and afterward he was completely withdrawn. You know, he was
always a geek. He’d correct everyone, even the teachers, and everyone in our school knew that. But now, he suddenly just sat there and said nothing.”
“When was that?”
Sonja Birkner was about to frown, but the huge bruise around her
eye made her stop. “That was the summer before we started eleventh
grade and Daniel skipped to the twelfth.” She nodded. “After that I lost sight of Daniel since he was one year above me.”
“And the clique of Julia Munz and your brother-in-law?”
Sonja Birkner looked at Lina. “It was somehow falling apart.
I mean, Julia was still with Philip, and they were still arrogant and snooty, but as far as I could see, they stopped bullying other students.
And with Daniel, they actually avoided him—and I wasn’t the only
one who noticed it. But by then we were all already older, at least
sixteen, and maybe things quiet down by themselves at that age.” She shrugged and grimaced in pain. “I don’t know, but I myself never heard anything really bad after that.”
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Lina looked at the woman. If her husband battered her like that
because of something that happened more than fifteen years ago, it
must have been really bad. “And your husband?” she asked. “Was he
involved when the bad thing happened?”
Frau Birkner turned her head to the window. “I don’t know,” she
said quietly. “We’ve never talked about it; certainly not about that particular event.” She looked at Lina again. “You know, we only hooked up after Julia’s death, a few months before the exit exam. Nobody wanted to say anything bad about her then. A few years later when we were in a nostalgic mood one time, I started to talk about it, how Julia and Philip had been quite nasty at times . . . Lukas completely snapped.” She stopped talking. “I think that was the first time he hit me. Just a slap in the face. It didn’t even hurt, and he apologized immediately.” She paused again. “But that started a pattern. I wasn’t allowed to say anything against Philip. If I followed that rule, everything was fine. But I better not dare criticize him . . . I eventually got it and kept my mouth shut. Philip could get away with everything, and Lukas wouldn’t allow anyone to push him off the pedestal he had placed him on.”
Lina and Max looked at each other. “What kind of things did your
brother-in-law get away with?” Max asked. Frau Birkner gave him a
surprised look as if she hadn’t noticed his presence until then.
“His showing off, for instance. He constantly rubbed Lukas’s nose
in the fact that he’d found a winner with his Katja, and what they’d just bought: the expensive designer sofa, the new stereo system, the new
kitchen, and the fat BMW.”
Max frowned. “I thought Philip wasn’t that interested in money.
Wasn’t it mostly his partner who insisted on all