Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus Read Free Book Online

straight across the street to the Richters’ grocery store.
    The assembled gossip mafia had seen him coming through the big plate-glass windows. When the bell on the door jingled they were all standing there as if in some tableau: Margot Richter standing like a queen behind the cash register, wiry and malevolent, with her spine ramrod straight, as always. Her burly husband had planted himself behind her, taking cover rather than exuding any sort of menace. With one glance Tobias took the measure of each of the other people present. He knew them all, the mothers of his childhood friends. In front stood Inge Dombrowski, the hairdresser and uncrowned queen of slanderous innuendo. Behind her Gerda Pietsch with her bulldog face, twice as fat as she used to be, and probably with a tongue twice as spiteful. Next to her Nadia’s mother Agnes Unger, careworn and now gray-haired. Unbelievable that she could have produced such a beautiful daughter.
    “Good morning,” he said. An icy silence confronted him. But they didn’t try to stop him from approaching the shelves. The refrigerator motors were humming loudly in the tense silence. Tobias loaded everything into his basket that his father had jotted down on his shopping list. When he neared the checkout counter, everyone was still standing as if frozen in place. Showing no sign of emotion, Tobias set all the goods on the conveyor belt, but Margot Richter had her arms crossed over her chest and made no move to begin the checkout process. The bell on the door jingled again, and a delivery driver who had no idea what was going on came in. He noticed the tense mood and stopped in his tracks. Tobias didn’t budge an inch. It was a test of will, not only between him and Margot Richter, but between him and all of Altenhain.
    “Let him pay.” Lutz Richter relented after a couple of minutes. Her teeth clenched, his wife obeyed and mutely punched Tobias’s purchases into the cash register.
    “Forty-two seventy.”
    Tobias gave her a fifty-euro bill, and she reluctantly handed him his change without uttering a word. The look she gave him could have frozen the Mediterranean, but it didn’t bother Tobias. In the joint he had fought other power struggles and had come through the victor often enough.
    “I’ve served my time and now I’m back.” He looked around him at the embarrassed faces and downcast eyes. “Whether you like it or not.”
    *   *   *
     
    Around eleven thirty Pia arrived at the police station in Hofheim, after giving her testimony in the trial of Vera Kaltensee in the Frankfurt district court. For the past few weeks no one had felt the desire to depart this life in a dubious manner, so there was relatively little to do at K-11, the police crime division. The skeleton from the underground tank at the airfield in Eschborn was the only current case. The results from the medical examiner were still not in, so Detective Inspector Kai Ostermann was going through the missing persons cases from the past year with no particular urgency. He was on his own. On Monday his colleague Frank Behnke had called in sick and would be out all week. When he fell off his bicycle he had reportedly suffered numerous facial injuries and bruises. The fact that DI Andreas Hasse was also sick surprised nobody. For years he had taken sick leave for weeks and months at a time. In K-11 they had gotten used to getting along without him, and nobody missed him. Pia ran into her youngest colleague, Kathrin Fachinger, at the coffee vending machine in the lobby, where she was having a chat with the secretary of Commissioner Nicola Engel. The days when Kathrin used to run around wearing frilly blouses and plaid pants were long gone. She had replaced her round owl glasses with a modern rectangular-style frame, and lately she’d taken to wearing skintight jeans, high-heeled boots, and a tight-fitting pullover that perfectly accentuated her enviably slim figure. Pia didn’t know the reason for this