“May I ask why you want to know that?” Tanja Fischer had raised
one brow and looked at her suspiciously. “Did something happen to
Philip?”
Lina nodded. “Philip Birkner is dead. I got your phone number
from the contact list on his phone.”
Tanja Fischer turned pale. She raised a hand as if she was about
to cover her mouth, just as Katja Ansmann had done, but then put it
down again and turned away instead. She was staring out the window
toward the facade of the office building across the street. One could hear muted traffic noise from below.
“Frau Fischer, how well did you know Herr Birkner?” Lina asked
in a low voice.
She didn’t say anything for awhile, then took a deep breath,
and turned toward Lina. “Quite well,” she said. “We were . . . He was . . . Well, we were close friends.” She swallowed. “We had a date for Thursday, but then I had to go to Frankfurt on short notice for a presentation. I only came back late last night.” She took another deep breath. “How did he . . . I mean, did he have an accident?”
Lina shook her head. “No. He was murdered late Thursday night,
in the Niendorfer Gehege.”
Tanja Fischer grew even paler. Now she did cover her mouth and
Lina was almost afraid she might faint. It was obvious she was affected by Philip Birkner’s death. The way she phrased it, that she and the
dead man had been close friends, most likely was an understatement.
The tears in her eyes were real and the shaking hand with which she
accepted the handkerchief Lina gave her proved how important Birkner had been to her.
119
Maria C. Poets
“Frau Fischer,” Lina said gently after a while, “I assume that Herr
Birkner and you were very close. Did you . . . have an affair?”
Tanja Fischer sniffled and wiped her nose. “Yes . . . No. I mean . . .”
She sniffed again. “Two, three years ago, we had something going,
a relationship. At least I thought we had one, but then Philip met
another woman and it was suddenly over between us.” She wiped away
her tears. “I was working for him at the time—he had his own com-
pany then—as an administrative assistant. I was his right hand.”
“Oh, so you worked at Inoware?”
Tanja Fischer nodded and looked out the window.
“Were you there until the end, when the firm went bankrupt, or
did you quit before?”
The woman didn’t respond for quite some time but finally shook
her head slowly. “I stayed on even though it was really hard after he took up with the other woman, Katja Something-or-other, a management consultant. You probably already met her. At first I thought it wouldn’t last long. The woman’s a cold fish. I only looked for another job when Philip told me she was pregnant—but the bankruptcy came
as fast as the baby.” She looked at Lina with a faint smile. “Do you already know who killed him?”
“No. We are still very early in our investigation.” Lina watched the woman carefully. Her blue eyes were amazing, sparkling, almost glaring, like a summer sky. Or maybe like contact lenses?
“Then you should have a conversation with Frank Jensen,” Tanja
Fischer said.
Lina tilted her head. “Why?”
“Because Philip kicked the man out and gave him a miserable
referral. He was convinced that the bankruptcy was Frank’s fault.” Lina didn’t tell her that she had already talked with Frank Jensen. “Frank has been unemployed since then and holds Philip personally responsible
for that.”
120
Dead Woods
Lina scrutinized the woman across from her. She seemed to be
intelligent and self-assured, not like someone who’s easily hoodwinked.
“But you don’t think that Herr Jensen had anything to do with it?”
Tanja Fischer shook her head. “No way. I mean, I don’t know
enough about the technical part of it, but from what I heard it was
rather simple, almost a careless mistake. Frank simply isn’t the type to plan something like that. I mean, he’s a good, honest guy, stuffy . . .”
She shook her head again.
“Did you ever discuss the matter with Herr Birkner?”
“No. At the time, we avoided each other as best we could. He
had just become a father and three or four weeks later disaster struck.”
She blushed. “To be honest, I felt pleased in the beginning that he
got such a raw deal. I mean . . . he dumped me because of this Katja Ansmann . . . That’s it, that’s her name: Ansmann.” She shrugged.
“Obviously, I was hurt at first, and then came rage. And about the
same time the data leak and data theft became public,