Splinter

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, all will be made clear.’

  Don’t worry? I’m losing my mind!

  ‘One more thing: if you’re still down in the cellar, leave now. Get out of there at once.’

  He felt a cold draught on the back of his neck. The candle almost went out, it was so strong, but the wick flared up again just in time.

  ‘You forgot something, you see.’

  ‘What?’ he asked the machine.

  ‘Robert von Anselm.’

  A dark figure loomed up behind him.

  ‘You didn’t check his handcuffs.’

  Marc swung round, dropping the phone and shielding his head with his hands, but it was too late. A fierce stab of pain, and he went plummeting down into a dark void. The candle went out before it even hit the floor.

  51

  The first time they drove there he couldn’t believe it was a proper road at all. The route that ran through the forest between Potsdam and Berlin, via Sakrow, was little wider than the average pavement. If you wanted to avoid oncoming traffic, you risked scratching your car’s paintwork on the fir trees alongside.

  At the moment, however, they had the road to Spandau to themselves and Marc could put his foot down.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t found out.’ Sandra was gazing out of the window. ‘Not so soon, at least.’

  They often argued in the car. As usual, she avoided looking him in the eye.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken me with you, then.’

  She nodded. A moment later, still watching the trees flit past, she reached for his hand. ‘Still, you do see we don’t have any choice, don’t you?’

  His laugh was rather forced. Then, when she squeezed his hand so hard that it hurt, he said: ‘You can’t be serious, surely?’

  He briefly contemplated pulling up, getting out and shaking some sense into her. His wife had clearly lost her mind.

  ‘The end justifies the means,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what you always say?’

  He speeded up. A yellow star lit up on the dashboard, indicating that the outside temperature had dropped below four degrees.

  ‘Well, isn’t that your motto in life?’

  ‘You’re crazy, Sandra. Killing is never justified.’

  ‘But you can’t prevent it.’

  She let out a sob. As a rule, Marc always gave in when she started crying, but today it only made him angrier.

  ‘Oh yes I will, believe me.’

  The speedo needle crept past 70 kph and the fir trees beside the road dissolved into a grey-green blur.

  He glanced sideways. The glow from the dashboard made the tears on her cheek look like blood trickling from a wound.

  ‘You mustn’t,’ she protested. ‘I won’t let you.’

  ‘Really? I already did it once. How do you propose to stop me this time?’

  Now it was his turn to stare obdurately ahead. For a while they didn’t speak, then they rounded a bend and the road became more undulating. Constantin’s house had long since disappeared from the rear-view mirror.

  She was sobbing louder now. He longed to put out a soothing hand and stroke the medicine ball of a pregnant tummy that bulged below her seatbelt. But then she did something unexpected. She unbuckled the seatbelt and turned round. He had the sudden feeling that someone was sitting in the back, a stranger who had been listening to their altercation the whole time. But Sandra turned back, with a photograph in her hand. Coarse-grained and greyish-black, like an ultrasound print.

  ‘Look at it!’ she shouted.

  But before he could look back at the road there was an ear-splitting crash. The steering wheel bucked in his grasp, and although he strove with all his might to correct it he failed. His last sight was of Sandra’s hands dropping the print and fumbling desperately for her seatbelt. Then lightning struck and everything went glaringly white. The next thing he saw was the worried face of an elderly man bending over him and patting his cheek.

  ‘He’s coming round,’ said the face.

  And that was when Marc really did open his eyes.

  52

  For a moment he thought he was still dreaming, except that he wasn’t in Sandra’s car any more. He was in an antique shop, and the grey-haired owner had bedded him down on a sofa redolent of tobacco and wood smoke, its cushions so plump and yielding they threatened to smother him. He tried to raise his head, which was supported by a neck roll, but this quickly proved to be an impossible undertaking – unless he wanted to throw up over one of the numerous carpets covering the floor.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked, remembering the attorney whose request for water he’d refused.

  And who knocked me out.

  He felt his head, which was still ringing, and noticed that his right sleeve had been rolled up. The plaster in the crook of his arm suggested that someone had taken a blood sample.

  He blinked in surprise, and even that hurt. His eyelids were gummed together by a milky secretion.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re among friends,’ he heard the antique dealer say. Now, having wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes, he was able to get a better view of his new surroundings. The sofa’s companion piece was a wing chair positioned so that anyone sitting in it could look out of the window and see the sofa and the fireplace at the same time. But that was the only set-up that made any sense. All the other furniture – bookcases, chests of drawers, upright chairs, a desk, even a tea trolley – was randomly arranged and mismatched in colour and style. The room reminded him of his own untidy flat, except that the removal firm’s boxes were missing and every available surface was covered with medical textbooks, reports and articles.

  ‘Friends?’ Marc looked over at the fireplace.

  Standing beside it, shoulder to shoulder with the elderly stranger, were Emma and his brother. Benny looked just as he had the last time they met – a weary, unshaven figure in cargo pants and bomber jacket – whereas Emma was looking somewhat better and had a white bandage over her left ear. Someone must have seen to it, and if Marc’s inference from the medical diplomas on the mantelpiece was correct, he had a pretty good idea who it was.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked the old man, whom he no longer took to be an antique dealer.

  ‘I’m Professor Niclas Haberland.’ The words were accompanied by a smile. ‘But my friends call me Caspar.’

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘You can thank your brother for that. He brought you to me.’

  Marc looked at Benny. He noticed only now that some of his symptoms had disappeared. Although he still felt sick and his head was buzzing like a swarm of bees, he wasn’t feeling as bad as he had over the last few hours. He wondered what the Professor had given him.

  ‘I followed the two of you,’ Benny volunteered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why.’

  Marc nodded. The movement made his neck twinge. He hoped his fall in the cellar hadn’t jolted the splinter nearer his spinal cord, and that it was only a trapped nerve.

  Yes, I know why. That’s the reason I came to see you.

  ‘You asked for my help, you ass, and you know perfectly well how I react to that.’

  ‘You did a runner.’

  ‘Yes, I had some urgent business to attend to. But then, as I was sitting in my car, my conscience pricked me. You’re still my brother, after all, no matter what’s happened between us.’

  Emma had gone over to the window. ‘What a coincidence!’ she said scathingly. ‘First he tries to kill us, then he turns up like a fairy godmother.’

  Marc ignored this. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

  ‘You think I’ve lost my powers of intuition?’

  Marc almost shook his head but remembered the trapped nerve just in time.

  ‘You wanted to see Sandra again. The only likely place to start looking was your former home.’

  Summoning up all his strength, Marc struggled into a sitting position. The room seemed to rotate for a moment, first one way, then the
other. To his surprise he very soon felt much better than he had when he first sat up. His sense of balance gradually returned and his nausea, too, subsided.

  ‘Anyway,’ Benny went on, ‘I drove out to Eichkamp and spotted this nutcase outside the house, asleep in her Beetle.’ He indicated Emma with a derisive jerk of his head. ‘Then I waited a while. When you didn’t come out after twenty minutes I went inside and found you down in the cellar.’

  Marc looked first at Benny, then at Emma, and finally out of the window at the far end of the room, which evidently doubled as the professor’s living room and study. The house they were in could not have been much bigger than the ‘villa’. Judging by the clumsily split logs stacked beside the fireplace and the unbroken expanse of trees outside the window, it was quite possibly just a cabin in the forest.

  ‘What about that attorney?’ asked Marc, feeling the back of his head. There was a lump about five centimetres above the plaster over his splinter wound.

  ‘What lawyer? You were alone down there.’

  Marc’s stomach muscles tensed. ‘And the film script? It was lying on the desk.’

  ‘Hey, I didn’t waste any time looking around when I found you lying senseless on the floor. I simply humped you outside and drove you to the prof. That makes us quits.’

  Benny folded his arms. Emma gave a contemptuous snort, almost as if she were about to spit on the floor.

  ‘I don’t believe a word you say,’ she said.

  ‘But I do,’ said Haberland, who had been following this exchange from the wing chair. He glanced enquiringly at Benny.

  ‘Go ahead, Professor, I release you from your oath of patient confidentiality,’ Benny said with a smile, zipping up his bomber jacket. ‘Deliver your lecture. I’m going outside for a smoke.’

  53

  Marc felt the room temperature take a sudden dive as his brother opened the door behind him and fresh air came streaming in. The icy blast suggested that they were well outside Berlin. It was just after eleven according to the digital clock on the desk, but the temperature could not have been above zero.

  Haberland waited until Benny had gone out on the veranda and shut the door. Then he motioned Emma into a chair beside him. He did not begin to speak until she’d sat down, with an air of reluctance.

  ‘Benjamin is a patient of mine,’ he said, looking at Marc. ‘That’s probably why he brought you to me instead of taking you to a hospital. In the short time I was able to examine him at the clinic as an outside consultant, I became something of a friend of his. I don’t set much store by publicity, which is why I live out here in the forest, away from the rest of the world.’ He smiled, massaging his wrists.

  ‘I remember reading your report,’ said Marc. ‘You were against discharging him, weren’t you?’

  Haberland raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture, causing the sleeve of his jacket to ride up. Marc wasn’t sure, but before the professor tweaked it back over his wrist, he thought he spotted some raised scar tissue.

  ‘It wasn’t my job to decide whether or not your brother should be discharged. I merely diagnosed a disorder that had always been previously overlooked – one that renders it almost impossible for him to lead a normal life. It makes certain over-reactions, for instance suicidal tendencies, appear more understandable.’

  Haberland turned to Emma. ‘Likewise, the question of why he followed you. Benjamin suffers from what is commonly termed the “helper syndrome”. He’s an HSP.’

  Emma raised her eyebrows enquiringly.

  ‘A highly sensitive person. If you went outside now and gave him your hand, he could sense your state of mind. Worse still, he would experience your mental state himself. Benny lives other people’s lives. That’s why he has to help them whether he wants to or not.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Marc said firmly. Haberland’s few words had struck home. The professor was describing him as well as Benny. Marc had known exactly what was going on inside his younger brother when the band split up. That was why, after the first flush of his affair with Sandra, he had tried to re-establish contact with him. By then, however, Benny was refusing to come home. He not only ignored all Marc’s calls but dropped out of school rather than stay in touch with him.

  Haberland continued to address his remarks to Emma, trying to explain the complex medical problems as simply as possible. ‘It sounds a little hard to believe, I know, but I’m sure that you yourself have covered your eyes because you didn’t want to watch some overly horrific scene in a film, for instance.’

  He waited for Emma to nod.

  ‘So you can at least empathize with the sufferings of others. Most of us become inured to being confronted by terrible sights day after day. We no longer notice the beggar shivering in the street, we avert our eyes from the woman burbling unintelligibly to herself on the Underground, and we no longer cover our eyes after the umpteenth horror film.’ He paused. ‘Most people become desensitized. But Benny is different.’

  Emma looked out of the window. Benny was endeavouring to light a cigarette. His hair fluttered in the wind as he shielded the flame of his lighter by turning to face the trees in front of the veranda.

  Haberland, too, looked out of the window. ‘Benny can’t suppress his feelings,’ he went on. ‘For him, everything gets worse and worse. If he drives past a hospital he wonders how many people are dying inside. If he shuts his eyes he pictures all the terrible things that are happening at this moment – events of which we’ll read in tomorrow’s papers. He sees the baby shaken into a coma, the soldier whose torturers are crushing his genitals, the horse dying of thirst on its way to a Tunisian slaughterhouse. He can never forget anything he has seen, heard or sensed.’ Haberland gazed at Marc intently. ‘Just like you, am I right?’

  The room was growing darker, the sky more overcast.

  ‘No, it isn’t quite as bad with me. Benny has always been the more sensitive one. Perhaps that’s why I’ve managed to offset my helper syndrome by doing the work I do.’

  Unlike his brother, Marc had succeeded in suppressing even his worst mental images as time went by. The best proof of that was that he’d given up chasing after Benny in the end. He had made many attempts to contact him and rescue him from Valka’s clutches, but in vain. Benny’s self-embargo was so complete that it had been months before Marc learned of his first suicide attempt. After that he’d even gone to court to see if Benny could be taken into care or made to undergo psychiatric treatment, only to be informed that, as long as his brother represented no threat to other people, he could do what he liked with his life. Marc had nonetheless felt guilty afterwards, suspecting that he might have given up too soon for reasons of personal convenience. In those days, life with Sandra was so infinitely less complicated than what would have awaited him with Benny at his side.

  His train of thought was interrupted by a bird call. When he looked at the window his brother had disappeared.

  ‘Okay,’ Emma said belligerently, ‘so how come such an allegedly peace-loving person tried to kill me?’

  Marc shook his head. ‘Benny hasn’t a violent bone in his body.’

  ‘What! He nearly blew my ear off and he forced me to drive out here at gunpoint.’

  ‘That shot was accidental, I’m sure,’ Marc protested. ‘He never meant to hurt you. He’d be incapable of it.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not entirely true,’ Haberland amended, raising his hand again. ‘That’s why he spent so long in a secure unit. Like any unstable personality, Benny suffers from extreme mood swings that threaten to tear him apart. It’s the same with bipolar disorder. The switch can be tripped from one moment to the next, and all that your brother has suffered over the years – all that has been gnawing away at him – bursts forth. One little thing – that’s all it takes to unleash his pent-up capacity for violence, either on himself or on others.’

  ‘What did I tell you!’ Emma said triumphantly. She took out her mobile, which Benny must have re
turned to her. She’d clearly had enough of this conversation and preferred to dictate the latest information to her voicemail.

  Marc ignored his aching head and neck and struggled to his feet. To his surprise he succeeded at the first attempt.

  ‘Okay, Professor,’ he said, rolling his sleeve down. ‘I’ve no idea what kind of injection you gave me – maybe I don’t even want to know. It was very kind of you to minister to us, but now I must go. I’m afraid I don’t have time to discuss our family’s psychological problems.’

  Haberland looked at him searchingly. There was a sudden hint of melancholy in his expression. ‘Perhaps it would be wiser of you to find the time,’ he said softly.

  The lattice window trembled in a gust of wind. Although no one had opened a door this time, Marc felt the temperature drop again. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, your brother brought you to me because he wanted me to look at your head wound. . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I’m not a general practitioner,’ said Haberland. ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’ He looked years older all of a sudden. ‘Perhaps I can help you to discover what’s been happening to you.’

  He went to the tea trolley beside his desk, picked up the quilted woollen jacket draped over it, and put it on.

  ‘Come,’ he said to Marc as if Emma wasn’t there any more. ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’

  54

  The lake formed a horseshoe around the little cabin in the forest. A bird of prey was circling above its choppy surface just as they left the back door and emerged into the open air. Several ducks and a swan were flustered at first by the old dog, which lolloped down to the lakeshore and dabbled its forepaws in the water. They quacked and flapped their wings in a frenzy, then decided that the newcomers presented no threat and calmed down again.

  ‘Easy, Tarzan!’ Haberland called. Pale brown with a white muzzle, the animal had been lying so quietly in its basket that Marc hadn’t noticed it until it jumped up, yawning, and accompanied him and its master on their walk.