Murder Mindfully (eBook)

First off, I’m not a violent man. Quite the opposite. For example, I’ve never once in my life gotten into a fight. And I didn’t even kill anyone until I was forty-two. Which, looking around my current professional environment, seems rather late – though, true, the week after that I did bump off almost half a dozen.

That doesn’t sound great, I know, but anything I did, I did with the best of intentions. A logical result of my commitment to becoming more mindful. To harmonise my work and my family life.

My first encounter with mindfulness was actually very stressful. My wife, Katharina, tried to force me to relax. To improve my resilience, my unreliability, my twisted values. To give our marriage one more chance.

She said she wanted that well-balanced man back she’d fallen in love with ten years earlier, that young man full of ideals and aspirations. Had I responded I would also like her to have the body back that I fell for ten years earlier, our marriage would’ve been over and done with. And rightly so. Obviously, time should be allowed to leave its marks on a woman’s body, but apparently not on a man’s soul. And that’s why my wife’s body was spared a plastic surgeon whereas my soul was sent off to mindfulness training.

Back then, I thought mindfulness was just a different cup of the same esoteric tea that’s warmed over and repackaged under a new buzzword every decade or so. Mindfulness was just autogenic training without lying down. Yoga without contorting yourself. Meditation without sitting cross-legged. Or, as the article in Manager magazine my wife once demonstratively placed on the breakfast table put it: ‘Mindfulness means taking in each moment with love and without judgement.’ A definition that made as little sense to me then as those pebbles on the beach pointlessly stacked by people so de-stressed they’ve become entirely detached from reality.

Would I have even participated in this mindfulness racket if it’d only been about the two of us, my wife and me? Not sure. But we have a little girl, Emily, and for her I would hitchhike from Sodom to Gomorrah if it meant our family would have a future.

She’s the real reason why, one Thursday night in January, I had my first appointment with a mindfulness coach. I was already twenty-five minutes late when I rang the bell outside the heavy wooden door of his ‘mindfulness studio’ to discuss, among other matters, my time-management issues.

The coach rented the ground floor of a lavishly renovated old building in a fancier part of town. I’d spotted his flyer in the wellness area of a five-star hotel and seen his fees online. Someone who charges an arm and a leg to teach people to be more relaxed could probably meditate away any annoyance at a paying client’s lack of punctuality – at least, that’s what I thought. But when I rang the bell, nothing happened.

Until this relaxation guru refused to open the door, I’d actually been quite relaxed, because my delay was entirely excusable. I was a lawyer – criminal law – and had managed to squeeze in a remand hearing just before. An employee of my main client, Dragan Sergowicz, had found himself in a jewellery shop that afternoon wishing to pick out an engagement ring. Instead of money, however, he only had a loaded pistol on him. And when he didn’t like the rings that were presented to him, he smacked the jeweller in the temple with his gun. Since the jeweller had already triggered the silent alarm by then, the police arrived to find the jeweller on the ground, and the armed man offered no resistance when faced with the police’s two sub-machine guns. After they took him to the police station, they informed both me and the district judge.

If I’d retained the ideals I had as a law student, I’d have found it completely justified for such an utter lowlife to remain in pretrial detention until the court hearing and then be tossed in the nick for a few years.

With my years of experience as a criminal defence lawyer who specialised in utter lowlifes, however, I managed to free the idiot in under two hours.

So it wasn’t like I was running late to my coaching appointment, I’d basically been running a victory lap. And if this relaxation flake didn’t waste the remainder of our time being petulant, I could tell him why I’d been so victorious.

The man with a penchant for shopping while carrying was twenty-five and still lived with his parents. His criminal record didn’t have any violent offences, only drug-related ones. There was no danger of flight, repeat offence or suppressing evidence. Plus, I’d argued, he shared the common social values of marriage and family – after all, that’s why he’d been in the jewellery shop: by purloining an engagement ring, he was expressing his readiness to form a strong marital bond.

Alright, for the jeweller in hospital and the constables on patrol, it must certainly have been difficult to understand that someone who was undoubtedly a violent offender was released to preen and mock the authorities to his friends that same night. When it came to things like this, even my wife occasionally found my work rather questionable. But explaining our legal system to other people wasn’t my job. My job was to exploit that system using every trick in the book. I made my money doing good for bad people. That’s it. And I’d mastered it perfectly. I was an excellent criminal defence lawyer, employed by one of the most prestigious corporate law firms in the city, ready and available around the clock.

It was stressful, of course it was. And not always compatible with my family responsibilities. That’s why I found myself at the door of this mindfulness guy, who wouldn’t let me in … My neck started to tense up.

But I got a lot in exchange for all that stress: a company car, bespoke suits, expensive watches. I’d never cared much about status symbols before, but once you’re a lawyer representing organised crime, status symbols start to matter. If only because, as a lawyer, you become a status symbol for your client.

So I got a large office, a designer desk, and five figures a month to bring home to my family: my delightful daughter, my wonderful wife and me.

Sure – a high four-digit slice of that salary went to paying off our house. A home for my delightful daughter, whom I never saw because I was always working, and for her loving mother, with whom, when I did see her, I only ever seemed to argue. Me because I was irritated by my work, which I couldn’t tell my wife about because she hated it; and her because she had to take care of our little girl alone all day – and had given up her own serious job as department head at an insurance company to do so. If our love was a delicate plant, we’d obviously been careless when we moved it up into a family-sized pot. In short: we were like so many successful young couples – going to shit.

In order to reconcile work and family, and because I was the only one of us who had both, my wife had decided I was the one of us who needed to work on themselves. She’d sent me to this mindfulness coach, a plonker who wouldn’t open the door. My neck was really tensing up now, quietly crackling with every shake of my head.

I rang the doorbell next to the heavy wooden door for the second time. The lacquer seemed to be fresh, or at least that’s what it smelled like.

It finally opened, revealing a man standing there as though he’d been lurking the whole time, just waiting for that second ring. He was a few years older than me, in his early fifties.

‘Our appointment was for eight o’clock,’ he stated, then he turned and walked down the bare hallway without another word. I followed him into an indirectly lit, sparsely furnished office.

The man looked ascetic, not an ounce of fat on his sinewy body. The type of guy who essentially wouldn’t gain a pound even if you subcutaneously injected him with an entire cream cake. He looked well groomed, wearing stonewashed jeans, a chunky wool cardigan over a plain white cotton shirt, and slippers on his otherwise bare feet. No watch. No bling.

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. I was wearing my dark-blue bespoke suit, white shirt with cufflinks, a silvery-blue tie with diamond-studded tie pin, Breitling watch, wedding ring, black socks, Budapest brogues. Even just my accessories outnumbered the furniture in his practice. Two armchairs, one table. A bookshelf and a side table for drinks.

‘Yes, sorry. Got stuck in traffic.’ After his non-greeting, I’d already half a mind to turn around and leave. My wife could complain about me being late free of charge. But if Katharina found out that not only had I been late to my mindfulness course, but I’d also left in a right huff, the resulting argument would cause enough stress to require two additional relaxation coaches.

‘I had a sudden remand hearing come up. Aggravated robbery, so I couldn’t just …’ Why did I have to be the one talking? He was the host, shouldn’t he at least offer me a seat, or say something else? But the guy was just looking at me – almost...