They’d never taken to Frank. Conrad had wondered if it was because he was American, or because his wife, who’d left Frank a couple of years before Conrad first met him, had been black. But he’d underestimated the good people of Mittenwald. They’d disliked Frank because they knew, as only people in a small town could know, that Frank was a lowlife.
As Conrad drove through the worsening weather toward Miesbach he sensed they were probably right. Maybe that was why he felt nothing for the man he’d killed. After Klemperer, he thought he’d feel something for every killing, particularly someone he’d known so long. But right now he felt as little for Frank as he did for all those victims whose names he could no longer even remember.
The only thing keeping Frank in his thoughts at all was a curiosity about those final words—that he’d lied, about everything. Conrad had already dismissed them once, and they’d probably been no more than a desperate play by a man who knew he was up against it.
But the words kept coming back to trouble him. He was driving to Miesbach, then south to Birkenstein. He’d check in late to his guesthouse, do his recon in the morning, and so on, and so on. He’d rehearsed it all in his head a hundred times in the last few days, but even the possibility of an unknown quantity was disturbing the rhythm of his thoughts.
What if he had been lied to? What if nothing was as it seemed? None of it would have concerned him two weeks ago, but the Klemperer job had changed everything—he understood that now. Perhaps for the first time ever, as much as Conrad tried to suppress it, he feared what he didn’t know about the world, and most of all, he feared what he didn’t know about himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEVIN WIGNALL, thirty-four, was born in Heren-tals, Belglum, where his father was stationed as a soldier. After living in Northern Ireland and Germany, the family settled in a small town in the west of England where he still lives. He graduated with a degree in politics and international relations from Lancaster University. Certain only that he didn’t want a regular job after leaving university, he traveled, campaigned, wrote on the environment, and taught English as a foreign language. Having always written, it was during his brief stint as an English teacher that he began work on his first novel, People Die.