Breidenbach Father Renter Killer

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64268-271-7
Verlag: novum publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 420 Seiten

Tom's marriage is on a knife-edge. He lives with his wife Sandra and their three daughters in a high-rise building in a problem district. It's exhausting, the quality of life is poor and Sandra's mood is getting worse by the day. The saving grace: her own four walls. But they are not so easy to come by ... 'Father Tenant Murderer' is a story about family, intrigue, betrayal and deception, but also about devotion, loyalty and perseverance. It is a story about generational conflict and justice, about second chances and how much you can be wrong about a person. But also about love, which sometimes finds its way to you via wrong paths.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Breidenbach, Thomas

Leseproben

1. The Revelation Tom took a deep breath. "Imagine we're coming home. To our beautiful new house. The children are with your sister. The entrance area is spacious. I will help you out of your coat. A bottle of sparkling wine is waiting in the fridge. There are fresh grapes on the large kitchen island, which stands freely in the room. Everything is bright, the windows are huge, the floor is pleasant oak parquet, the furniture is white. The sun is low and shines far into the rooms. It feels a bit like a beach house. I sit down on one of the bar stools. You come to me, put your arm around my waist and put a grape in my mouth," Tom shared a daydream with his wife. Sandra took a deep breath and held her breath. They were lying in their marital bed and the three children were asleep. It was Sunday evening, around 9 pm. "There's a sweet smell in the house. It smells like you and like home. A beautiful oak staircase leads to the upper floor in the middle of the house. I grab your hand and slowly pull you behind me, up the stairs. When we reach the top, we go into the bathroom. The bathroom is huge. The most beautiful in the whole city! At least! There are candles everywhere, the lights are dimmed, soft pink shines against the white walls. I'll unbutton your pants ..." Tom interrupted abruptly because the beautiful castle in the air was torn down by the banging baby monitor. Johanna sounded the low-flying alarm. The baby was demanding to see its mommy. "Oh, children are simply the most effective contraceptive ..." Sandra sighed and struggled out of bed. "It's all covered by the child benefit, darling!" "You and your stupid remarks," Sandra sighed and quietly left the bedroom. Tom was left alone. Somehow, he had the impression that Sandra was downright relieved about it. It felt like they had not slept together for ages. Tom was crawling on his gums, but Sandra did not seem to miss it. He got a little carried away with this suspicion and became increasingly restless. He waited forever, but the baby's mumbling came from the baby monitor for hours. "Be fruitful and multiply, they said, those sadists..." he whispered quietly to himself. At some point, he simply fell asleep over it. The next day, it was a Monday, Tom had a bank appointment in the afternoon. It was about getting a loan to buy a house. The bank advisor was a man in his mid-fifties with a good figure. He reeked of cheap aftershave, nicotine and alcohol fumes. He had practically no hair left on his head and was sweating miserably. After Tom had presented the family's finances and interesting properties, the bank advisor began frantically trying to persuade Tom to buy something cheaper - a ruin, so to speak. "You can renovate them while you're already living inside," he suggested. "Refurbish," Tom corrected. "You have to renovate houses like this. No, thank you. That's out of the question for us. We have three small children. Living in a ruin for years is not an option," he continued. Besides, they were already living in a ruin and his craftsmanship could not keep up with his wife's standards anyway. With three small children, there was no room for such frills outside of the parental leave he was currently on. This went back and forth for quite a while until Tom finally stood up, thanked her and said goodbye. He had heard enough. What a humiliation! The bank advisor had clearly had to pull himself together not to laugh aloud at him. Tom had performed a financial striptease and instead of thunderous applause, he had only received a shrug of the shoulders. All he wanted was a loan for a house in a suburb of his hometown in the Rhineland. Nothing spectacular, without turrets or a pool - just his own bourgeois four walls that all young families dreamed of. How was he supposed to explain this to Sandra? She had already made plans: Herb garden, hobby room, the whole nine yards. And he had been telling her off the ledge for months, even years. Instead, it was time to get back to the Slab. Tom, his wife Sandra and their daughters Marie, Elena and Johanna lived in a four-room, kitchen and bathroom apartment on the tenth floor of a 1960s social housing block. A dream in exposed aggregate concrete - with night-time noise, mountains of garbage, drug addicts, weekly police patrols and everything that went with it. But there was no shading at all on the windows of the upper floors. Tom's apartment was located directly under the flat roof, which was covered with roofing felt. As a result, the temperature often rose to over 30° C in summer. In winter, it was freezing cold when the heating was not constantly on full blast. There was a satellite dish on every balcony, and many had the flags of the residents' countries of origin hanging on them. Bulky waste and other garbage were piled up on the balconies almost everywhere. There was often someone sitting between them, smoking. It was desolation cast in concrete. For years, Tom and Sandra had been putting every cent they had left on the table to scrape together the necessary equity to buy their own home "In the green". In their price range, however, "In the green" was more like "Next to the railway line and the sewage treatment plant" - but all that would have been better than the slab. The search had been going on for almost five years. As soon as she had become pregnant, Sandra's ultimate nest-building instinct had kicked in. Tom rode his bike home from the bank and thought about how he was going to break the disappointment to Sandra. Tom and Sandra were both in their early thirties and had married seven years ago. In order to save money for their own home, they had only celebrated the wedding in a very small circle and without pomp. And they had lived very spartanly. Although Sandra was also an engineer like Tom, she earned considerably less. She simply did not manage to show her achievements in the right light and never asked for more pay in appraisal interviews. And so for years she remained on her starting salary, which was barely above what a secretary earned. At some point, Tom had stopped giving her advice or reproaching her about it. It had only ever put her in a bad mood. He loved her more than anything and wanted to make her as comfortable as possible whenever possible. By the time their first daughter Marie was born, the issue had been resolved anyway. Sandra had originally wanted to wait until they had bought a house before having children, but then changed her mind. Her fear of not being able to have any more children or having to undergo fertility treatment due to her advanced age was too great. But Tom had also been treading water for years as far as his salary was concerned. He was put off again and again: "The department is already far too expensive anyway. You know, all the old contracts of the older colleagues from the good old days," his boss told him like a prayer wheel in every appraisal interview. Tom felt it was terribly unfair that some of his colleagues who were twice his age and only worked half as fast were earning twice as much. He simply felt cheated. But with three children, it hard to reinvent himself professionally, especially as Sandra did not exactly back him up. On the contrary: he was the one who supported her. At a crossroads, Tom turned off his way home to pay a visit to his Uncle Til. Uncle Til lived in a retirement home run by the Workers' Welfare Association at the end of a cul-de-sac called the Brick Road. It was the only old people's home in the whole town with an underground parking garage. For some reason that Tom could not understand, the operators were immensely proud of it and advertised it aggressively. Apart from the retirement home, the Brick Road was lined with detached houses - Tom's objects of desire. Swallowing his envy, he cycled briskly past the children playing. Actually, the children weren't really playing. Instead, the children of the affluent upper middle class on this estate were staring at their smartphones. But because that's what the cappuccino moms wanted, at least they were doing it "in the fresh air". Tom parked his bike in the bike rack in front of the main entrance to the retirement home. The automatic double sliding door opened, and Tom was greeted by the smell of coffee and urine. He routinely intercepted a "fleeing" elderly lady, who marched out of the door with great determination. "But I have to go to class! My pupils are waiting for me!" protested the visibly confused woman. "But Mrs. Specht, you know you're off today. After all, it's the vacations!" Tom replied. Mrs. Specht was a resident on Uncle Til's ward and almost a hundred years old. She had obviously been a teacher in the past. She repeatedly praised Tom, saying that he had been good today and therefore did not have to do any homework. He went in and out of his uncle's old people's home almost every day and had previously worked there as a community service volunteer. Tom thanked her warmly, dropped Mrs. Specht off at the reception of the old people's home and once again swore to shoot himself on the spot at the first sign of dementia. He could still hear them singing loudly down the corridor, "Cologne girls, cologne boys, they are all God's best choice!" "Master of all classes!" Uncle Til greeted him. Tom told him about Mrs. Specht and his plan to prevent Alzheimer's by committing suicide. "But how are you going to do that, boy? You don't even have a gun!" Uncle Til replied. "Although of course you could easily buy one in the Slab. You already know where." Tom hugged the "old bastard", as Uncle Til called himself, and told him about the bank advisor. "That was that Schröder, wasn't it? He's a really lousy left-wing sock, that guy! I'm sure he's going to have one tonight," Uncle Til grumbled like a...