Grace listened, feeling numb. “Why did you ask about drugs, Marcel?”
“We circulated her three identities and photographs to all police forces and agencies in Germany that might be able to help us. One responded which is in Frankfurt. They have, how do you call it, a drugs consumption room there. It is a place where drug users can go and inject themselves under supervision. They said they knew this woman who came regularly for two years. I think you should come over here, Roy, and make sure this woman is not Sandy. It would be helpful to us if you were able at least to eliminate her.”
“What other details do you have?”
“Well, Roy, with one identity, the one her son gave us, Alessandra Lohmann is the one she seems to be using now. But it is the variation of her first name that she gave to the drugs clinic that might be interesting to you.”
“Which is?”
“Sandy.”
107
Friday 2 January
Roy Grace stared out of the airplane window at the vast expanse of flat land beneath him, as they began their descent into Frankfurt. Was he on a wild goose chase after a ghost?
God, he hoped so.
And yet he could not dismiss that JPEG on his phone. It could be Sandy.
Three faked identities?
She was a multimillionaire?
She had a son.
The son’s age would have put her just pregnant at the time she vanished. She might not even have known she was pregnant then.
A son who had been twice with his mother to Brighton, last year. Once to a wedding in Brighton on the day he and Cleo had got married?
A son who had said the wedding had upset his mother.
Roy thought again about the nightmare he’d had before the wedding, in which he had dreamed he had seen Sandy in the church. And then, during the wedding itself, when he had turned to watch Cleo walk down the aisle and had seen the strange woman in black with a small boy at the back of the church.
Was it possible? Could Marcel be right?
Was she still alive and had come back to Brighton after all these years? And if so, why? Out of curiosity?
And if it really was her, how the hell would he—could he—deal with that?
His leg had healed to the point where he felt ready to start walking again, although the physio had told him to wait several weeks more before he attempted to start running. He had almost four more weeks at home before returning to work. And while he was going to miss work, to some extent, he was looking forward to the time he would spend with Cleo and Noah—and to getting stuck into stripping paint and paper and redecorating.
After the plane touched down he switched on his phone, then waited for a signal. As soon as he had one he texted Cleo to say he had landed. Feeling guilty that for the first time in their relationship, he had lied to her, telling her he had to make this one brief trip because of a witness’s vital testimony on a cold case he had been working on.
* * *
Immersed in his thoughts in the back of the taxi, he barely noticed the journey into the city. The cab driver, who spoke little English, had given him a dubious look when he had shown him the address. Forty minutes later, at midday, German time, the taxi turned into a seedy, rundown-looking Frankfurt street, with graffiti on the walls, and he could now understand the driver’s strange expression.
He saw the street name, Elbestrasse. Amid the strip clubs and sex shops, they passed several construction sites. To his left he saw a row of breeze blocks on the pavement behind a steel cage, and a blue tube running from the top of the building, down past the scaffolding and into a skip. Next to it was a garish-looking club, with the billboard announcing, CABARET. PIK-DAME. On his right they passed the shabby exterior of Hotel Elbe, then Eva’s Bistro and Hotel Garni. Then the taxi pulled over to the right and stopped beside several small, beat-up cars partially parked on the pavement, pointed at a drab, four-story building, outside which several down-and-outs were gathered, some sitting, some standing, and said something to him in German that he did not understand. But he got the message.
They were here.
He paid the driver, went up the steps, lugging his overnight bag, and rang the bell. Moments later he heard a sharp buzz, pushed open the heavy glass door and entered a small, tiled reception area. A young woman sat behind a high counter at the rear, smiling pleasantly.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Ja, a little.”
“My name is Roy Grace—I’ve come to see Wolfgang Barth—he is expecting me.”
She directed him up the steps past her and along a short corridor toward a door. “You will find him on the second floor.”
There was a plate-glass window to his left. Through it he could see down into an adjoining room. The drugs consumption room. There were functional plastic chairs against a narrow metal table that ran around three sides of the room. Three of the chairs were occupied, two by young men, one in a baseball cap, and the other by a wizened, bearded man, with long straggly hair, in his late fifties, Grace estimated. All of them were hunched over their part of the table, studiously preparing their drugs. The room was presided over by a young woman, who had a row of metal spoons and hypodermic syringes on paper towels laid out in front of her.
He stopped and stared, driven by curiosity, then moved on through the door. Is this where Sandy had been? Taking drugs?
He climbed the stairs and as he reached the second floor a door opened and a friendly looking man, in his mid-forties, emerged. He was dressed in a blue checked shirt and jeans, and his shoulder-length brown hair and craggy good looks gave him the appearance of a rock musician.
“Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?” he asked in perfect English, with a cultured German accent. “I am Wolfgang Barth.”
They shook hands and Grace followed him into a bright, airy, cream-painted office, furnished with two desks, an aerial map of the city and several posters on the walls, one prominently worded, CANNABIS.
They sat down at a small conference table and Barth got him a coffee. There was a bowl of assorted chocolate biscuits on the table, which the German pushed toward him. “Help yourself if you are hungry.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“So,” Barth said, sitting opposite him, “you are a detective with Sussex Police. Do you know Graham Barrington?”
“Indeed, very well. He was a Chief Superintendent who recently retired.”
Barth frowned. “Retired? Such a young man?”
Grace smiled. “That’s the system we have. Most officers retire after thirty years.”
“He was here two years ago, looking at our work—he was keen to introduce what we are doing here into your city of Brighton.”
“He was very forward-thinking. Unfortunately I don’t think my country’s politicians are as enlightened as yours in dealing with drug problems.”
Barth shrugged. “In 1992 we had one hundred and forty-seven drug deaths in this city. Now, since we introduced the consumption rooms, like this one, we have thirty. And the number is still reducing.” He shrugged again. “So tell me, how can I be of help to you?”
Roy Grace unzipped his bag, and pulled out a stiff brown envelope. From it he removed a photograph of Sandy, taken just before she vanished, and handed it to him. “Do you recognize this woman?”
The German studied it intently.
“About a month ago,” Grace said, “Munich police circulated a photograph of a woman who was involved in an accident, whose identity was uncertain. They discovered she appeared to have three different names—aliases. One of them was Alessandra Lohmann. You responded that you recognized her, and that she had been a regular at this consumption room a couple of years back, using the first name Sandy.”
Wolfgang Barth put the photograph down and nodded, thoughtfully. Then he went over to a tall metal rack of box files, peered at the covers, pulled one out and opened it up.
“Yes,” he said. “Sandy Lohmann. She was a recovering drug user who wanted to help
by providing counseling services to others. She worked here for free every day from March 2009 until December 2011. But then she stopped coming.”
He replaced the file and sat back down again. Grace leaned forward and pointed at the photograph. “Is that her? Do you recognize her?”
Barth stared at it again for some moments, then looked at Grace and shrugged. “You know, this is very difficult. So many faces here. I remember Sandy a little, but she had red hair and wore a lot of, how you call it, makeup. It’s possible. She was very thin.” He ran his fingers down his face as if to illustrate. “Gaunt, you know?”
Grace sat silently for some moments. Then he pulled out the photograph he had been sent by Marcel Kullen, of the woman in the Intensive Care Unit. “How about this one?”
Barth studied it. “This is the same woman?”
“Perhaps. This was taken a month ago.”
Barth stared down at it for a long while, before looking up. “You know, it is possible. But I cannot say yes for sure. She is a person of interest to you?”
“Yes,” he replied. “She’s a person of interest to me.”
108
Saturday 3 January
At 5 p.m. that afternoon, Roy Grace sat in the passenger seat of Marcel Kullen’s immaculate fifteen-year-old BMW, heading from the airport into Munich. Ahead of them, out of the falling darkness, blue road signs with white writing loomed up then shot past them. SALZBURG. MÜNCHEN. NÜRNBERG. ECHING.
His old friend had refused to countenance the idea of his spending a night in a hotel, and insisted he stayed with him and his family, which the German detective assured him would give them a good opportunity to sample some fine local beers, some even finer German wines and some even finer still German schnapps.
* * *
At 9 a.m. the following morning, with one of the worst hangovers Grace could remember, in a long history of bad hangovers, compounded by his guilt at having lied to Cleo, Kullen drove down a wide, quiet street, through falling sleet, in the smart Schwabing district of Munich. Small, grubby patches of snow here and there lay on the pavement. They turned onto a circular driveway, passing a row of parked bicycles, and pulled up in front of an enormous, handsome beige building, with gabled windows in the roof and a sign over the arched entrance porch that said, KLINIKUM SCHWABING. It looked, to him, as if it might once have been a monastery.
“Would you like me to come in, or wait for you?” Kullen asked.
Grace’s mouth was parched, his head was pounding, and the last two paracetamol he had swallowed, an hour ago, had failed to kick in. He felt badly in need of a large glass of water and a multiple espresso. Why the hell had he drunk so much last night?
He knew the answer.
Staring at the facade of the building was scaring the hell out of him.
What?
What if?
What if it was really her, here? How would he feel? How would he react? What on earth would he say?
Part of him was tempted to turn to Marcel Kullen and tell him to drive on, back to the airport, to forget it. But he had come too far now, he knew. He was past the point of no return.
“Whatever you’d prefer, Marcel.”
“I stay. I think this is a journey you are needing to make alone.”
Fighting his reluctance, feeling like he had a dagger sticking into his head, Grace opened the door, and stepped out, limping, into the bitterly cold air. As he did so he heard the thwock-thwock-thwock of an approaching helicopter and looked up. The machine was coming down out of the sky straight toward the building. Moments later it disappeared over the rooftop, and he could hear it descending.
He entered a large foyer and saw a sign, INFORMATION, above two smartly dressed women at a modern reception desk, backlit in orange. He gave his name and was directed to a row of chairs to wait. He looked around, in vain, for a water dispenser or a hot drinks machine, then sat down, his nerves shot to hell and back.
After a few minutes, a plump, middle-aged woman with shoulder-length fair hair and glasses, dressed in a black trouser suit and trainers, greeted him very formally. She gave him her name but he didn’t catch it.
“Please come with me.”
He followed her down a long corridor, passing beneath an illuminated gantry of signs and direction arrows, then on past a glassed-in café, and stopped at an elevator.
“I understand this lady—she might be your missing wife?”
His stomach was so tied up in knots he found it hard to speak. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. She has not spoken?”
“Sometimes she has mumbled, but that is all. Mostly she is silent. In her own world. Like she is locked in.”
They rode up a couple of floors, in silence, then emerged in front of a glass door, with the sign on it reading, ANÄSTHESIOLOGISCHE INTENSIVSTATION 16G.
They went through into an orange-painted corridor, with a row of hard chairs on either side, a snacks vending machine, and several picture frames on the wall with portraits of staff doctors and nurses.
A man hurried past them in blue scrubs, with yellow Crocs on his feet, and went into an alcove where Grace saw there was a drinks vending machine.
The woman suggested he sat while she checked it would be all right for him to go in now. As she went through some double doors he walked over to the alcove, poured himself a cup of water, and managed to get himself a black coffee. Then he sat down to wait, wondering whether he should ask Marcel to take him to meet the boy, but decided to delay for now.
He was too nervous to sit, and stood up again, pacing up and down. Wondering. Wondering. Wondering. He was shaking. Had he made a terrible mistake coming here? Was his whole life about to unravel?
Five minutes later the woman returned and said, “All is fine, it is fine for you to see her now. It is good with comatose patients to touch them. Talk to them. They can recognize smell—perhaps she will recognize your smells, if it is your wife. Also if you have any of her favorite music on your phone, it would be good to play it.”
He followed her in through the doors to the Intensive Care Unit. They passed rows of beds, each with an intubated patient connected to a bank of monitors, and screened off on either side by pale green curtains. A number was fixed to the walls above their heads. They turned a corner and he was ushered into a small room, marked “7,” its door already open.
Inside lay a woman with short brown hair, in a blue and white spotted gown, amid a forest of drip lines, surrounded by more banks of monitors, in a bed with its sides up like the bars of a cage.
The woman who had led him there discreetly disappeared, and he was all alone.
He stepped forward, slowly, until he was beside the bed, looking straight down at her face. It was still swollen and covered in scabs and scars, and partially masked with bandages. One drip line fed into a cannula on her right wrist and another, held in place by a plaster, at the base of her throat. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing rhythmically.
He felt a lump in his throat.
Could this be her?
God.
Was this the woman he had once loved so much?
The truth was he did not know. He really did not. A plaster lay across the bridge of her nose, masking most of it. It was Sandy’s mouth.
“Sandy?” he whispered, tentatively. “Sandy? It’s me, Roy.”
There was no reaction.
He held her puffy, bandaged free hand, squeezing it very gently. “Sandy? My darling? Is this you?”
From what he could remember, her hand felt similar to the way it always had—small, a perfect fit into his. His heart was heaving. One instant he was sure it was her, and the next, he was convinced he was looking at a stranger.
“Sandy?”
She continued her steady breathing.
What the hell was he going to do if she opened her eyes and stared at him in recognition? How could he deal with it? He had been massively devious coming here. How could he begin to explain it to Cleo?
He stared down at her a
gain. Was this the woman he had once loved? Could he ever love her again, if it was her? He felt nothing. Empty of emotion.
She had a son. Was it possible it could be his son? How could he deal with that? This wasn’t his life any more. He was looking at a stranger. Even if it was—her.
He felt numb.
Suddenly, he made his decision. He turned and walked back out of the room. The woman who had brought him in was standing just outside, talking to a nurse in a blue tunic and Crocs. She stepped toward him, quizzically.
“Is she your wife?”
He shook his head. “No.”
109
Sunday 4 January
Three hours later, Roy Grace settled into his seat on the British Airways plane that would take him back to London. His mind was in overdrive. Why the hell had he come here, what had he hoped to achieve? Why hadn’t he had the courage to tell Cleo?
If the purpose of this trip had been to lay a ghost to rest, precisely the opposite had happened. He had re-opened the nightmare of the past.
Apart from his injury, which was now healing well, the last year had ended on a high. He had been lauded by his chiefs for saving Logan Somerville, and despite the tragedy of the lost lives, Operation Haywain had succeeded in halting the reign of terror of the Brighton Brander. He’d had several other successes this past year, too, and even with the arrival of Cassian Pewe he had been feeling more positive about the future. During this past year, he felt, more than ever, he had really proved his abilities as a homicide detective.
They had moved into their beautiful new home, and Cleo, despite her exhaustion with Noah and the move, was feeling so happy and positive about the future. She would shortly be going back to work, and they would have to make a decision on a nanny.
They had always been honest and open with each other. Should he tell her the truth when he got home, and lay her mind to rest once and for all? Even if that would mean admitting he had lied to her about this trip?
The past had been a dark place for far too long. He needed to put it back in its box. It had taken him ten long years to finally move forward and find happiness again. He could not let the past destroy him—them.