“Werner!” She sprang into action. Avoiding the convulsing body, she let the pistol fall from her hands and hurried over to the staircase. She just managed to prevent Werner’s head from making contact with the hard kitchen floor. Grabbing his shirt, she pulled him away from the stairs and knelt down next to him. “Werner?”
He said something she couldn’t understand. His right eye was swollen, and there was blood on his face. The nurse in her knew that facial wounds almost always looked more serious than they were, but she still couldn’t keep the panic out of her voice.
“It’ll be OK,” she whispered.
She turned him on his side and tried to remove the cable tie from his wrists, but tugging only tightened the rigid material. “Don’t move. Stay where you are.” She ran over to the cutlery drawer to grab a vegetable knife, and sliced through the tough plastic in a few quick strokes.
Werner winced as he stretched his arms forward and crossed them on his chest, like a pharaoh in his tomb. He balled his fists. “Jesus, Helen,” he groaned, his back hunched, his eyes squeezed shut.
Behind them, the robber’s movements were growing steadily weaker. His hands clawed again at the air, his mouth wide open in a silent scream. Helen was oblivious.
She anxiously helped Werner to his feet, asking him where it hurt and instructing him to move his limbs. She checked his pulse, shined her cell phone flashlight into his eyes, opened his mouth, and felt his jaw. Strangely, this calmed her. In the midst of a surreal situation, the habitual actions were a source of comfort, though she missed the droning of the monitors, the reassuring bleeps of the equipment, and the intravenous drips that could work miracles on an injured body.
Werner did everything she asked. He was slightly in shock, she established, simultaneously realizing that the same must apply to her. When she stood up to fetch some damp towels, she once again became aware that there was somebody else in the room. It wasn’t his physical presence that alerted her, but his scent—the smell that sometimes emanated from a body when surgeries went wrong.
Hesitantly, she approached the robber.
The rattling had stopped. A bright-red layer of blood clung to his mouth. There were no signs of breathing.
She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, in the childish hope that the man might disappear and all this would turn out to be a figment of her imagination.
But there he was still, lying motionless on his back, his eyes rolled up in their sockets. He suddenly looked so small, so vulnerable and young.
She knelt down and felt his wrist. No pulse. She took the balaclava off his head. A narrow, angular face. Dark hair, sticky with sweat, close-shaven on the sides. His skin was smooth, with a light outbreak of acne on his chin and along his jaw. She guessed he was about twenty years old.
Against her better judgment, she placed her palms on his chest, straightened her arms, and pushed down hard. And again. The pressure forced more blood out of the body, but no breaths came, and his heart remained still. She pushed down once more with all her might.
And what then, Helen? whispered a voice in her head. What will you do if the patient starts breathing, his heart starts pumping again? He’ll just get even more blood in his lungs. He doesn’t have a ghost of a chance.
She lifted his wrist once more. Looked at his fingers. There were black hairs on the backs of them, and his nails had been untidily trimmed. She pursed her lips. It was too late to do anything for him.
Dead and dying people were part of her work. More than once, she had lost patients who had been shot or stabbed. But this time, she was the one who had inflicted the lethal injuries. And instead of saving the patient’s life, as she was trained to do, she’d let him expire in agony without lifting a finger to help.
She had let a patient die.
“How is he?” she heard Werner ask.
I killed him.
“Helen?” Werner stood next to her, dropped to his knees.
She shook her head.
“How is he?” he repeated.
“Dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“He suffocated.” She lifted the hoodie. A quick glance at his torso confirmed what she already knew. “I hit his lungs.”
Werner looked at her, his lips pursed. A whole host of emotions passed over his face. He took her hand but said nothing.
19
Ten minutes had turned into twelve. Ralf kept thinking he could see somebody—a phantom that approached from the side, hurriedly, before dissolving into the shadows of the trees.
Fifteen minutes.
Just a little longer, a little longer . . .
To his surprise, the dead-end street still wasn’t full of emergency vehicles. He’d expected sirens and flashing lights, but it had remained eerily quiet.
He began to doubt his own ears. Had there really been shots? He had been absolutely sure of it before, but now everything seemed uncertain.
Eighteen minutes.
No police.
No Brian.
Nothing.
Maybe Brian had run away from the other side of the house, and there was a good reason why he hadn’t come to the car. Was his friend currently making his way home on foot? Brian had left his cell phone in the car, so Ralf couldn’t call him to check.
Ralf looked at the house again. Thought carefully. Maybe Brian had assumed he would come to help him if it took too long.
He looked at the clock.
Twenty minutes.
20
“How did he get in?” Helen tried to manage her breathing. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Through the back door. He just appeared in the kitchen. I—” He rubbed his face with both hands. Breathed in deeply. His shoulders were shaking. “My God, tell me this isn’t happening . . . Is he really dead?”
Helen looked at him in silence. Yes, the robber was dead. Even if a team of specialists were to come running in now with the most advanced equipment available, they still wouldn’t be able to bring him back.
“Did he want money?” she asked softly.
“Yes. He obviously thought I kept the daily takings at home.”
“Do you know him?”
Werner hesitated for a moment. “I think he used to work for us in the kitchen. One of the temps.”
“This is exactly what you were worried about. You were talking about it just the other day.”
He nodded. Stared at the boy in silence.
Helen followed his gaze. The mingled odor of gunpowder, blood, and urine made her want to vomit. She held a trembling hand over her nose and mouth and walked over to the table.
“What are you doing?” Werner asked sharply.
She pulled her cell phone from her bag. “Calling the police.”
“Don’t!” He leapt to his feet and pushed her hand down.
“Don’t?”
“We aren’t making any phone calls. To anybody.”
Perturbed, she shook her head and tapped the telephone icon with her thumb.
Werner gripped her wrist and wrenched the device from her hand. Slid it into his pocket.
“Hey! What—”
“Listen. Look at me. No police. The media will have a field day.”
“Media? It was a break-in! We could have been killed, both of us.”
“You aren’t thinking clearly, Helen.”
“It’s not our fault, is it?” She pointed at the lifeless body. Her voice cracked. “He was the one who came into our house with a gun!”
“Listen. That gun—” Werner’s breath caught. He ran his fingers through his hair. Paused for a moment. “That gun—belongs to me.” He looked down regretfully at the robber. “You killed that boy with our pistol. He came in here with a BB gun. I managed to get it off him upstairs. It was fake.”
She felt herself go cold. “You have a gun?”
He looked at her guiltily. Said nothing.
“We have a gun in the house, and you didn’t think to tell me? Have you lost your mind?
There are three teenagers living here; this is absurd, you know—”
“Shh . . .” He held her arms and tried to pull her toward him.
She acquiesced briefly, before putting her hands on his chest and pushing away.
He kept hold of her. “I didn’t want an argument,” he whispered. “It was my decision, OK?”
“Somebody just died because of your decision.”
“But we’re still alive! Do you understand what I’m trying to say? We are still alive!”
She pursed her lips and stared at the man she had been married to for nearly eighteen years. Where had he gotten it into his head to buy a gun? More than once over the last few months he had told her that he was afraid of becoming a target. He had even implied he wanted to take countermeasures. But she had no idea it had gone so far.
Her voice sounded a good deal calmer than she felt. “Werner, we need to hand this over to the police.”
“Hand it over? Do you think you’ll be off the hook, then? The police won’t take anything off our hands; they’ll be all over us like a rash. This isn’t just a break-in; this is news. This”—he made a broad gesture—“will be the talk of the whole country before you know it.” He glanced fearfully at the clock hanging over the counter. “We can discuss it later. Emma and Thom will be home in half an hour. We need to get him out of here.”
She looked at him in confusion. This was moving too fast.
“Now, Helen! We can’t let them see this.”
“OK. I’ll meet them outside and take them to your mother’s.” She tried to get through to him, but there was a wild expression in his eyes. She’d never seen him like this before. As calmly as possible, she continued. “If I hadn’t done anything, he would have killed me. You too, probably. It was a life-or-death situation. Life or death. The police will understand; everyone will understand. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“But will they believe that in court? What about my customers, the guys in the kitchen? Your boss? Your colleagues? The neighborhood? The teachers at school?”
“Who cares if they believe it? It’s the truth.”
“There’s no such thing as truth, Helen, only perception. And that’s different for everybody. If we report this—everything will change.”
“Everything already has changed.” Helen looked from Werner to the blood spattered on the counter and the white tiles above it. She had chosen those tiles herself shortly after they had bought the house. “Traditional Dutch white”—now stained with the blood of a stranger.
A dead stranger.
She began to feel nauseated. She’d gunned him down and left him for dead. Literally. She had watched in a trance while he succumbed to his injuries. She, Helen Möhring, recovery nurse, had let someone die before her very eyes. It was her job to do everything she could to keep people alive. Yet she had done nothing.
Would the judge believe her if she explained that she’d been in shock? How seriously would the prosecutor take the postmortem report, which would reveal that the robber had suffered for several agonizing minutes before finally expiring?
Werner’s fingers dug hard into her arms. “Helen, listen to me now. Think of us—think of Emma, Thom, and Sara. We have three wonderful children who we can’t keep locked away in a golden cage.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“How do you know that boy doesn’t have friends who will want to settle the score? Brothers, a father, or an uncle out for revenge? An eye for an eye?”
Helen froze. The fear penetrated her physically, like a sharp, icy hand that reached through her back and seized her heart.
Werner stroked her hair, sought her eyes. “Look at me, Helen. Trust me. I think it’s horrible, I’m scared to death, just like you, but I can see very clearly how we should resolve this.”
“I don’t know if—”
“Have I ever made a bad decision?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “What do you want to do? Bu—bury him? But where?” There was desperation in her voice. “In the yard? In the flower beds by the swimming pool, or farther back, where the swing used to be? I don’t think I can handle that. I can’t—”
“Shh.” He placed a finger on her lips. “Trust me. I know exactly what we need to do. Help me.”
21
Ralf shot upright behind the wheel and stared intently at the two bikers weaving toward the house and talking loudly. A rattling bike chain, the constant, quiet jingle of a bell that hadn’t been fitted properly. The boy and the girl were coming home, each with a tennis racquet on their back.
They disappeared from view behind the garage. Shortly afterward, he saw two black shadows move across the deck behind the house and go inside.
His heart throbbed in his throat. He kept watching, expecting at any moment to hear screaming, commotion.
Something.
The seconds ticked by, drawing out into minutes.
Ralf looked at the clock again. Nearly fifty minutes had now passed since he had heard the shots. If Brian had killed those people, their kids would have raised the alarm by now. But nothing happened. Everything was quiet.
Maybe Brian was already home?
Ralf started the engine. With his headlights off, he rolled out of the sheltered bay, turned onto the cart track, and slowly headed toward the road.
22
“It smells funny in here.”
“Yeah, like a dog-rescue center or something.” Thom wrinkled his nose.
“No, more like Maros.”
Maros was a local butcher shop. Helen froze momentarily, then dropped her cleaning cloth in a bucket of cold water and wrung it out. Continued mopping down the white tiles above the counter. “Come on, it’s not that bad, is it?”
“Er, Mom, since when do you clean the kitchen at night?”
Helen did her best to make her voice sound as normal as possible, but was unable to prevent a slight tremor. “Since when are you guys interested in your mother’s cleaning schedule? Do you want to do it for me?”
“No way.”
Thom and Emma remained by the kitchen island and looked around. Emma lifted her nose. “It smells really weird, Mom.”
“Blood,” said Helen.
The children looked at her in alarm.
If the situation hadn’t been so bewildering and horrifying, she could have laughed. Instead, she carried on scrubbing. “Your father slipped and hit his head on the kitchen island.”
Werner came down the stairs. He was wearing clean clothes—a dark shirt and jeans, with a pair of leather flip-flops on his feet. The lump by his eye had begun to turn blue, and his lip was swollen—there was a jagged black cut in it.
Emma gaped at her father. “Jeez, Dad.”
“I know—it looks bad, huh?” He laughed.
“Looks like you were in a fight,” said Thom. There was a note of admiration in his voice.
“If only—that way at least I might have gotten a good story out of it.” Werner looked at Helen. “Do you need any help?”
Helen looked around, wiping her forehead with her sleeve. “I think it’s all clean now.”
Emma walked over to the bulletin board. “Holy crap. There’s blood on the theater tickets.”
“They’ll still let you in even if your ticket has a few stains on it.” Helen hurried over, wrapped the cloth around her index finger, and quickly wiped off the spatters. Then repeated the action for the stains on the wooden frame. Her heart pounded behind her ribs.
Thom looked at his father. “Did all that come from your lip?”
“Yeah—crazy, huh? I can hardly believe it myself.”
“Wounds on the head and face always bleed really badly,” said Helen. She poured the bucket out into the ceramic sink and rinsed the towel. It stank of iron.
“What are you guys up to this evening?” asked Werner.
“Yorick and Stijn are coming over in a while to hang out,” answered Thom.
Emma took off her jacket. “I’m going to stay at So
phie’s tomorrow, so I want to get my studying out of the way for the exam on Monday. Why are you asking?”
Werner’s eyes sought out Helen’s. “Well, your mother and I were planning to go to the movies, but—”
“I think it’d be better if we stayed home tonight. You look shot to pieces.” Her hand flew to her mouth in shock, but she recovered and quickly added, “Want me to make you some coffee?”
23
Brian lived as a property guardian in a former Asian restaurant that stood by a lake in the park. The enormous building resembled a farmhouse and was in a state of complete neglect, with damp walls and a leaky roof. The red-and-gold awning over the entrance had once given an impression of grandeur, but it was now covered in black stains and hung askew. A developer had bought the property with the intention of erecting a chic apartment building on this idyllic spot, surrounded by old chestnut trees and close to town. Until that happened, fifteen or so rooms in the old structure were being rented to people who paid very little on the understanding that they might be evicted at any moment. Ralf thought there was something spooky about the place. Especially at night. It stood a considerable distance from the road and was barely lit. The front door was seldom locked; anybody could come in or out. Ralf and Brian had once come across a vagrant camping out in the former restaurant kitchen with his shopping cart and sleeping bag.
The odor of cigarette smoke and cooking fat penetrated Ralf’s nostrils as he entered the building. A few dim lamps were lit in the hall. Pots of bedraggled artificial plants cast a blur of shadows. He walked through the kitchen, still lined with stainless-steel counters and shelves. A narrow staircase at the end led upstairs. The smell grew stronger now, mingling with mold and damp. The staff had slept up here; their mattresses had still been on the floor and their posters and calendars on the walls when Brian moved in.
Ralf stopped at the third door on the right. He pushed down the handle, but it refused to open. Ralf knocked. “Brian?”
Nothing.
He banged the door with the palm of his hand. “Brian? Hey, dude?”
The next door along swung open. Brian’s neighbor had his arm thrown over the shoulders of a girl who regarded Ralf with curiosity.
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