The Zurich Conspiracy

the motor. All of that can’t just be coincidence, Helene, do you understand? I simply can’t get over it. And that’s not all.”
    Josefa cleared her throat, then carried on bravely.
    “Feller-Stähli loses his life in a hunting accident somewhere in the bush around Prince George. And who’s a guide in Prince George? Your boyfriend Greg. There’s something not quite right here.” Josefa took a deep breath. Now it had to come out. Whatever the consequences, it had to come out. Her heart was pounding right up to her throat.
    “Helene, did you have anything to do with the deaths of Thüring, Salzinger, Feller-Stähli, and Westek?”
    Josefa couldn’t bring herself to look her best friend in the face. Instead she stared past her at the deer’s half-open mouth, its tongue hanging out as if somebody had tried to pull it out.
    It was deathly quiet for a while. Then Helene turned her back to her. The scraping and poking of the knife was audible once again, as were the soft squeak of the rubber gloves and the shuffling of her hunting boots. Josefa’s throat grew tight. So that was it. Helene was turning away from her because of the monstrous suspicion Josefa harbored.
    “Helene, please…” she implored in a low voice.
    It seemed an eternity until Helene spoke. Her voice sounded constricted, as if it took all her energy to hold back a powerful stream of emotions.
    “I knew you’d ask me these questions one day, Josefa, that’s obvious. You’re anything but stupid. But now…now that I hear you, it’s…hard to take it calmly.” She turned toward her, but Josefa still couldn’t see her face.
    “That’s a big bombshell you’ve thrown. And because I know how concerned you are for me—at least that’s what I’d like to think, and, yes, I think you’re still loyal in spite of everything—only for this reason am I going to tell you the whole story. But I’ve got to keep going here, or I won’t be finished in time. Do you want to hear it now or later?”
    “Now,” Josefa said wearily. A deep sadness overcame her, as if something had been irretrievably destroyed.
    “Whenever something bad happens in the family, you’ve got two choices, maybe three. You can blame others and be bitter. Or you can blame yourself and get desperate. That almost happened to me. I was filled with feelings of guilt over my father; it was for me that he sold the company. At least, so I thought. He lost everything that was important to him on my account. All we had left was our house because that belonged to my mother.”
    Helene’s words were broken up with little pauses as she concentrated on her knife strokes. Josefa followed every motion of her hand as if she could understand all the more easily what Helene was saying.
    “I would certainly have gone into a deep depression if two things hadn’t saved me: the injured birds I nursed back to health at the Mythenquai bird station—you should have seen the will to live in those little bodies; it was incredible—and my mother. She had me go into therapy. She had just lost her husband and did not want to lose her daughter as well.”
    Josefa had the feeling her body was slowly turning to ice. She’d finished her coffee and was now completely abandoned to the cold. She pulled her down jacket tightly around her. She didn’t want to interrupt Helene for anything. Her friend might never want to talk to her again.
    Helene gulped down her coffee and moved over to the deer’s other side.
    “I fought against therapy at first, as you can imagine. But my therapist was a wonderful woman with much life experience and good common sense. She was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I learned to take responsibility for the things I could have some control over and to delegate the responsibility for everything else wherever it belonged. That gave me the strength to act, several years later.”
    She carefully wiped the blade on a rag and leaned over the carcass again.
    “I worked with Freya to contact the sons and daughters of shareholders and employees who had lost all their money—and in some cases their relatives—because of the Swixan swindle. We wanted to make every effort to ensure that something like that wouldn’t happen again, you understand? We wanted to prevent those bastards in Swixan’s top management from causing people so much grief ever again. And we didn’t want to see them enjoying their millions guilt-free after they were let off.”
    Helene put her