A big challenge

One of this weekends tasks...

 I have a very difficult task ahead of me on Saturday and Sunday. Well, two actually, if you include helping my smallest daughter tidy her room, but the one which is probably more interesting to you as a blog reader is how to portray Franz, Madeleine's husband.
Madeleine is coming along nicely. I'm very proud of her behaviour in Chapter 20 - Death on the Rialto. She dealt admirably with the horrible rapist/murderer Boran and I find myself liking her more and more.
However, I need to make sure that her husband, Franz, doesn't disappear completely. From what you've read in chapters 1, 3 and 20 you could be forgiven for thinking that Franz is a real wuss. He isn't - I promise - otherwise Madeleine would never have married him. But I haven't given him a chance to explain a) why he gave up his job at the university to go and work for the Deutsche Bahn and b) why he won't sleep with Madeleine at the moment.
Without wanting to get too philosophical (and I'm sure somebody else has already said this) a novelist creates a fictional world for the reader where things are out of order, and then he or she tries to restore harmony to it. Madeleine's world has gone wrong at various levels, including her relationship with her husband, and the novel tracks what happens as the characters resolve these problems. But to do that plausibly, you need all the key characters to be convincing and that's what I need to at the weekend with Franz. I hope I'll have something to show by late on Sunday evening.