‘You okay?’ I put the box down.
I had noticed his flushed cheeks when I picked him up at home, but he’d toted the heavy bag out into the garden all by himself, so I’d put his sweaty hands and damp curls down to physical exertion.
‘Have you still got that cold?’ I asked anxiously.
‘I’m fine now, Dad.’ He fended off my hand when I tried to feel his forehead. Then he coughed some more, but it really didn’t sound too bad.
‘Did Mum take you to the doctor?’
This is a hospital. Maybe we ought to have you checked over while we’re here.
Julian shook his head.
‘No, just...’ He broke off, and I felt a surge of anger.
‘Just what?’
He turned away, looking sheepish, then took hold of the bag handles again.
‘One moment,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me the two of you paid another visit to that guru?’
He nodded hesitantly, as if confessing to some misdemeanour, even though it wasn’t his fault. It was his mother who was straying down ever more esoteric paths. She would sooner have taken our son to a Indian spiritual teacher than an ENT consultant.
A long time ago, when I was falling in love with Nicci, her eccentricities had amused me. I even found it entertaining when she tried to infer my future from the lines in my palm or disclosed that she’d been a Greek slave girl in a previous existence. As the years went by, however, her harmless fads developed into the idées fixes that had undoubtedly contributed to my separation from her, mentally at first, then physically. At least that’s what I like to tell myself; it absolves me of sole responsibility for the failure of our marriage.
‘What did that charla— I mean, what did the guru say?’ I asked, catching him up. It was an effort not to sound aggressive. Julian would have thought I was angry with him, and it really wasn’t his fault that his mother didn’t believe in traditional medicine or the theory of evolution.
‘He said my chakras aren’t properly charged with energy.’
‘Your chakras?’ The blood rose in my cheeks.
‘Of course,’ I harangued Nicci in my head, ‘his chakras – why didn’t I think of that myself? That’s probably also the reason why our son broke his wrist two years ago while skateboarding.’ That time, she had asked the surgeon, in all seriousness, if hypnosis couldn’t be substituted for the anaesthetic.
‘You should drink something,’ I said to change the subject, indicating the soft-drinks machine. ‘What would you like?’
‘A Coca-Cola,’ he said promptly.
Okay, a Coca-Cola.
Nicci would tear a strip off me, that was for sure. My ‘still-wife’ (not yet ex-wife) shopped at eco-stores and organic supermarkets exclusively and on principle; her shopping list would never have featured a fizzy drink laced with caffeine and chemicals.
Yes, but there isn’t any fennel tea here, I thought, patting my jacket in search of my wallet and its little pocket for coins.
I gave a sudden start at the unexpected sound of a young but world-weary voice behind me.
‘Well, if it isn’t the Zorbachs. What a nice surprise!’
I vaguely remembered the blonde nurse from our visit the year before. She had appeared from nowhere and was now standing in the hospital corridor with a brightly painted tea trolley.
‘Hello, Monika,’ said Julian, who had evidently recognized her too. She gave him a practised ‘young patients are my buddies’ smile. Then she caught sight of our burdens.
‘Wow, what a lot of toys you’ve brought this year.’
I nodded – absently, because I still hadn’t found my wallet.
Please, no! All my IDs and credit cards. Even the key card without which I can’t get into the newsroom.
I remembered having it yesterday at the newsroom drinks dispenser. I could have sworn I’d put it back in my breast pocket, but now it was gone.
‘Yes, more and more every year,’ I muttered, annoyed with myself for sounding guilty. Although it may at first sight have seemed typical behaviour by the father in a broken marriage, the fact was, I’d always enjoyed buying Julian presents. A hand-crafted wooden tractor would, of course, have been more educationally worthwhile than the fluorescent water pistol the nurse was extracting from the Ikea bag. But ‘educational’ was an argument inflicted on me by my own parents, who had refused to see why I needed a Walkman or a BMX just because all my friends listened to the former and rode around on the latter. Call me shallow, but having experienced it, I wanted to spare my son an outsider’s fate. That didn’t mean I bought him any old rubbish just so he could ‘belong’. But I wasn’t going to send him empty-handed into the Darwinian fight for survival that raged daily in every school playground.
Meanwhile, Monika had unearthed a Spiderman doll. ‘I think it’s really admirable of you,’ she said, smiling at my son, ‘agreeing to part with all these lovely things.’
‘No problem.’ Julian grinned back at her. ‘I like doing it.’
He was telling the truth. Although it had been my idea to clear out his room once a year before his birthday, when reinforcements would arrive, he’d adopted it at once.
‘We’ll make room and do some good!’ he said, repeating my own words, and promptly set to work.
That was how our ‘Sunshine Day’, as we called it, came into being. The day on which father and son set off for the children’s hospice, laden with discarded toys, and doled them out to its little patients.
‘Tim’ll like that, I’m sure,’ the nurse said with a smile as she replaced the Spiderman doll with the other toys. Then she said goodbye and walked on. Looking after her, I was dismayed to find that I’d only just managed to restrain my tears.
Julian looked at me. ‘Everything okay?’ he asked. He was used to his father becoming a crybaby as soon as he entered Sunshine Ward on the second floor. Julian had never cried there, probably because death seemed so remote and unimaginable to him. To me, on the other hand, a ward devoted to gravely ill children was an almost unbearable environment. One might have assumed that a man who had shot someone would be rather hard-boiled, especially as I’d had to earn a living as a crime reporter since my retirement from the force. I had now been working for the city’s biggest and most bloodthirsty paper for four years, following a period of recovery and retraining. In fact I’d made something of a journalistic name for myself by reporting on some of the most gruesome and violent crimes ever committed in Germany. But the more I wrote about some of the western world’s worst murders, the less prepared I was to accept death. Least of all when it was the death of innocent children suffering from leukaemia or heart disease. Or Undine’s Curse.
‘The little boy whose life you saved was called Tim, wasn’t he?’
I nodded and gave up looking for my wallet. With luck it would be lying on the passenger seat of my Volvo, but I’d probably lost it somewhere.
‘Absolutely, but the one in here isn’t him. He’s got the same name, that’s all.’
The Tim whose kidnapper I’d shot used to send me a Christmas card every year. The kind of card parents compel you to write: inscribed in squiggly handwriting with words no child would ever use. The kind you stick to the door of the fridge and ignore until it falls off of its own accord. Nevertheless, Tim’s cards were a sign of life that proved he was leading a semi-normal existence at home with his parents in spite of his serious illness, not spending his final hours vegetating in a children’s hospice.
Julian gave me a wide-eyed look. ‘Mum says you’ve not been the same since that time on the bridge.’
That time on the bridge.
Words can sometimes define a whole universe. ‘I love you’ or ’We’re a family’, for example – a combination of innocuous letters that lend your life meaning. ‘That time on the bridge’ definitely came into this category. If it hadn’t been so sad, one could have laughed at the fact that we behaved like the characters in a Harry Potter novel and spoke of ‘You-Know-Who’ instead of calling a
spade a spade. Angélique, the mentally deranged woman whose life I’d taken, was my personal Lord Voldemort.
‘Julian, you go on ahead to the recreation room. That’s where the children will be waiting for us.’ I knelt down so we were at eye level. ‘I’m just going to nip out and see if I left my wallet in the car, okay?’
He nodded silently.
I watched him until he disappeared round the corner and all I could hear was the squeak of his trainers on the lino and the slithery sound of the heavy carrier bag being towed along.
Then I turned and made my way out of the hospital. I never went back.
82
The Volvo was parked beneath a huge horse-chestnut tree in the gloom of the winter morning, so I inserted the ignition key and turned on the reading light over the passenger seat. I looked everywhere: in the footwell, on the rear seats, under a stack of old newspapers. There were few things I hated more than driving with bulging pockets. As a rule, therefore, I tossed my keys, mobile phone and wallet on to the passenger seat before getting in behind the wheel. A ritual I seemed to have neglected this time, because I could find nothing there apart from a ballpoint pen and half a packet of chewing gum. No sign of my wallet.
After taking another look under the seats I opened the glove compartment, although I felt sure I’d never kept anything in there except the scanner I used to monitor police radio traffic. In my early days as a crime reporter it gave me a pang whenever I heard the voices of my former colleagues. Now I was used to not belonging any more. Besides, my boss, Thea Bergdorf, had only given me the job because of my inside knowledge. It had been made clear to me that that eavesdropping on the police, whenever I was on the move, was an unwritten clause of my contract. Especially on days like today, when we were expecting the worst. I had fixed the scanner so it came on automatically as soon as I turned the ignition key, which was why the thing was hissing away in the glove compartment and flashing like a Christmas tree.
I was just about to abandon my search and rejoin Julian when I heard a voice that banished all thought of my missing wallet.
‘...Westen, Kühler Weg, corner of Alte Allee...’
I stared at the glove compartment, then turned up the volume.
‘I repeat. One-zero-seven in Kühler Weg. Mobile units at the scene.’
My eyes strayed to the dashboard clock.
Damn it. Not again.
One-zero-seven. Official radio code for the discovery of a dead body.
81
(44 HOURS 38 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
TOBY TRAUNSTEIN (AGE 9)
Dark. Black. No, not black. That’s the wrong word.
It wasn’t like the paintwork on Dad’s new car. Nor like the blotchy darkness you see in front of your eyes when you shut them suddenly. Nor was it like the greyish gloom he remembered from the night-time nature ramble they’d gone on with Frau Quandt. This was different. Denser, somehow. Creepier. As if he were submerged in a barrel of oil.
Toby opened his eyes again.
Nothing.
The darkness around him was impenetrable. Nothing like the forest that surrounded the summer camp their class had gone to last summer. There was no moonlight or torchlight like there had been when they were combing the forest path for clues on that paperchase through the Grunewald. No smell of soil, vegetation or wild boar dung, and no Lea clutching his hand like a crybaby and starting at every rustle and crackle. There were no noises in here that would have scared his twin sister. In here – wherever ‘here’ was – there was... nothing.
Nothing apart from his boundless fear of being paralysed. For although he realized that darkness was insubstantial (just as he knew from Herr Hartmann, his art teacher, that black was merely an absence of light, not a colour), it seemed to be holding him in a vice-like grip.
He still didn’t know whether he was standing up or lying down. He might even be upside down. That would explain the pressure inside his head and why he was feeling so dizzy. Or possibly frazzled, as his father used to say when he came home after work and told Mum to run him a bath.
He had never ventured to ask the precise meaning of frazzled. Dad didn’t like his kids asking too many questions. Toby had learnt that lesson while on holiday in Italy two years ago, when he’d dared to wonder aloud over supper whether Dad’s translation of caldo as ‘cold’ was really correct. Although Daddy had told him to stop his everlasting questions and the look on Mummy’s face should have warned him not to cast doubt on his father’s knowledge of Italian, he hadn’t been able to resist pointing out that every tap in the hotel must be defective because only hot water came out of the ones marked caldo. Daddy’s hand had shot out. He’d stopped asking too many questions after that slap in the restaurant. Now he didn’t know exactly what frazzled meant, he had no idea why he couldn’t move and he was feeling so sick. His feet and his head seemed to be imprisoned in a vice and he couldn’t feel his arms any more. No, wrong. He could feel them as far as his shoulders. Maybe even a little lower down, where he’d suddenly developed the awful tingling sensation he got when his best friend Kevin gave him a Chinese burn. Kevin the big-head, who had really been christened Kornelius, but who threatened to thump anyone who addressed him by that ‘poncey name’.
Kevin, Kornelius, Cacky Pants...
Everything below the elbow, or what normally lay or dangled to his left and his right – in other words, his forearms, wrists and hands (Shit, where are my hands?) – all these had disappeared.
He tried to scream but his mouth and throat were too dry. All he produced was a pathetic croak.
Why aren’t I covered with blood if my hands have been cut off? Amputated, or whatever it’s called.
A stale smell infiltrated Toby’s nostrils. Sweetish like rancid butter but a lot less strong. It was a while before he grasped that the darkness must be enclosed by walls that were reflecting his bad breath back into his face. It was even longer before, to his infinite relief, he rediscovered his hands. They were behind his back.
I’m tied up. No, wrong. I’m wedged in.
His mind started to race.
I’m lying on my arms, that’s for sure.
Feverishly, he tried to recall what he’d been doing just before he came here, wherever ‘here’ was, but his memory seemed to have been sluiced away by a tide of pain. The last thing he remembered was playing that silly game of computer tennis in the living room, the one where you had to jump around in front of the TV set and Lea always won. Then Mum had put them to bed. And now he was here. Here in this nothingness.
Toby swallowed hard, and all at once he felt even more scared than before. So scared that he didn’t even notice the sharp smelling rivulet trickling from between his legs. Fear of being buried alive was now doing what the constraints of his invisible prison had failed to do completely: it was paralysing him.
He swallowed again, reflecting that the darkness was like a living creature which could hold you tight and tasted like metal when you gulped it down.
He felt as queasy as he had after that long car journey, when he’d insisted on reading and Dad got mad because they’d had to stop. He was holding his breath so as not to be sick when suddenly...
What the...?
His roaming tongue had encountered a foreign body.
What on earth is it?
The thing was clinging to the roof of his mouth. Like a potato crisp, but its surface was harder and smoother.
And colder.
He ran his tongue over the object, feeling the saliva accumulate. Instinctively breathing through his nose, he suppressed his urge to swallow until the foreign object detached itself from the roof of his mouth and came away on his tongue.
And then it dawned on him. Even though he couldn’t recall how he had got here, who had kidnapped him and why he was being held captive – even though he hadn’t the least idea what it was, this dark nothingness that hemmed him in – he had at least solved one mystery.
A coin.
Before confining Toby
Traunstein in the darkest place imaginable, someone had inserted a coin in his mouth.
80
(44 HOURS 31 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
‘You insensitive, irresponsible, self-centred shit!’
‘You’ve forgotten stupid and objectionable.’
I sounded calm. Far calmer than I usually did when arguing with my still-wife. At our last meeting we had finally agreed to get divorced. Now Nicci repeated the sentence she had hurled in my face that night: ‘I sometimes wonder how I ever got together with you.’ Good question.
To be frank, I was utterly unable to fathom what women saw in me. Nicci and I had first met in the lecture room of the psychology faculty, a room full of men who were taller, better-looking and certainly more charming than I. Yet she had plumped for me. It couldn’t have been my outward appearance. I hate seeing myself in photos. Out of two hundred snaps there’ll be at most one of which I’m not ashamed. It will be a blurred or ill-exposed picture that doesn’t show up my steadily developing double chin. People used to say I reminded them of Nicolas Cage because of my doleful expression; now, all I have in common with him is thinning hair. I’ve put on a kilo a year since my thirtieth birthday, even though I avoid junk food and go jogging twice a week. Nicci put her finger on it at the start of our relationship when she called me a ‘collector’s item’ of no obvious value. Like an old banger: elderly enough to qualify for a scrappage scheme but too endearing, in spite of its quirks, to trade in for a new model. In that respect, of course, she had since changed her mind.
‘What kind of father abandons his ten-year-old son in a hospice for the dying?’ she demanded angrily.
I didn’t even trouble to explain that Julian had been very understanding when I called him from the car and asked him to distribute the presents on his own because an emergency had arisen. I had to get to a crime scene, and I could hardly take a ten-year-old boy along.
‘And what kind of mother takes her son to see a witch doctor when he’s got bronchitis?’ I retorted.