Therapy

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘Vans?’

  ‘Right. They were parked bumper-to-bumper. Everyone seemed to be heading . . .’

  . . . towards my house . . .

  ‘. . . in the same direction as us. The road was really narrow and we had to push our way through. A big crowd had gathered on the pavement at the end of the drive. No one noticed our arrival. In fact, they were all too busy staring at the house. Some were using binoculars, others had telephoto lenses. Barely a second went by without a mobile phone or a camera flash going off. A couple of men had climbed a tree to get a better view, but they couldn't compete with the helicopter circling overhead.’

  Viktor knew the exact location of the house. What was more, he could practically pinpoint the date of their visit. In the days following Josy's disappearance, the media had laid siege to his villa in Schwanenwerder, placing an intolerable strain on Isabell and himself.

  ‘Suddenly a cry went up from the crowd. The front door opened and someone stepped outside.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I couldn't tell. We were standing at the top of the drive, seven or eight hundred metres from the house. I tried asking Charlotte who lived there, but she avoided the question. “It's my house,” she told me. “I grew up here.” Then I asked why she had brought me there, and she said, “Don't you get it? I live in this place – and the illness lives here too.”’

  ‘The illness?’

  ‘That's what she said. From what I could gather, something in the house was making her ill. That's why she left home – firstly, to establish the cause of her illness, and secondly, to break free.’

  So Josy's illness was caused by something in Schwanenwerder.

  ‘I was still deciding what to make of it all when she tugged on my sleeve and begged me to go. I ignored her at first because I wanted to get a proper look at the person on the drive. I still didn't know if it was a man or a woman, but whoever it was looked vaguely familiar and I wanted to stay. But then Charlotte said something that changed my mind.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She said: “We need to go. Remember the thing in the cabin? It followed us – and it's here.”’

  20

  ‘May I use your bathroom?’

  Anna had clearly decided to take a break from her story. She stood up briskly.

  He nodded. ‘Of course.’ Not for the first time it struck him that Anna was unusually well spoken. It was almost as if she were compensating for the awfulness of her narrative by carefully enunciating each word.

  He wanted to rise to his feet, but a dead weight was pushing on his shoulders, keeping him down.

  ‘The bathroom is—’

  ‘Upstairs and second on the left – I know.’

  He gaped at her in disbelief, but she was already in the doorway and didn't turn round.

  She knew where the bathroom was? How?

  His plan of sitting and waiting was abandoned. Summoning his strength, he hauled himself upright, walked to the door, and stopped. A pool of water had formed on the floor where Anna's cashmere coat, dripping wet from her walk in the rain, was draped over a chair by the couch. He picked it up to move it to the hall and was surprised by its weight. The waterlogged cashmere couldn't account for the heaviness. He checked the silk lining: bone dry. There had to be another explanation.

  Viktor heard a door close upstairs and a bolt shoot home. Anna was safely in the bathroom.

  He gave the coat a little shake and traced the clunking noise to the right-hand pocket. Without really thinking, he thrust his hand inside. The pocket seemed virtually bottomless and Viktor was on the point of giving up when his fingers met with a handkerchief and, a few centimetres later, a large wallet. He whipped it out and weighed it in his hand: an Aigner wallet from the men's collection. He thought of Anna and her beautifully coordinated, ladylike style. What would she want with a man's wallet?

  Who is this woman?

  Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Since the bathroom was almost directly above the sitting room, Viktor could hear the clacking of high-heeled shoes on the marble floor, from which he deduced that Anna was standing at the basin. As if on cue, he heard a squeaking of taps and a tumbling of water through the ancient copper pipes.

  Time was running out. He flipped open the wallet and checked the plastic pocket at the front. No ID; no driving licence. His heart slowed to a crawl as he realized that his discovery, far from solving the enigma of Anna's identity, only added to the mystery. She wasn't carrying a single bank card or even any cash – at least not in notes.

  Viktor suddenly lost his nerve and his hands began to shake. The tremor was only slight, but he couldn't control it. In the past, it had always been a physiological response to a dip in blood alcohol, but this time it wasn't the drink that was making him jittery. The silence was to blame. Anna had turned off the taps.

  He closed the wallet quickly and picked up Anna's coat. Just then the telephone rang, and he stumbled back guiltily, dropping the wallet that he should never have touched. It hit the floor with a thud, landing in the expectant pause between two rings. And Viktor, watching in frozen horror, learned the secret of its heaviness: coins were spilling in all directions, rolling across the parquet floor as if propelled by an invisible hand.

  Damn.

  Upstairs, the bathroom door opened. Viktor knew it was only a matter of seconds before Anna got back to the sitting room and found the contents of her wallet on the floor.

  Dropping to his knees, he scrabbled after the spinning coins, snatching at them with trembling hands. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing in the background, and his fingernails were too short, his hands too unsteady and the floor too slippery to get any leverage on the coins.

  And so he knelt there, sweaty, flushed and panicking, and suddenly remembered a distant afternoon when he and his father had sat on the sitting-room floor and practised picking up change with a horseshoe magnet. If only he had a magnet now. Anything to spare him the humiliation that almost certainly lay ahead.

  ‘Feel free to answer it, Dr Larenz,’ shouted Anna.

  The infernal ringing made it difficult to locate her voice, but Viktor guessed she was on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he called back, unable to think of a more appropriate response. He could still see at least ten coins scattered over the floor and under the couch. One had made it as far as the fireplace, collided with the fender, and stopped.

  ‘I don't mind if you answer it. I'm happy to wait.’

  This time she sounded much closer. Viktor wondered what was keeping her. He glanced at the coins in his hand and froze. He had been chasing a stash of scrap metal. The contents of Anna's wallet consisted exclusively of Deutschmarks, which had been taken out of commission when the euro was introduced. Some people, Isabell included, liked to use the one-mark coins in supermarket trolleys, but Anna's collection numbered four dozen or more.

  What was she doing with a wallet of obsolete coins? Surely everyone these days carried credit cards and ID?

  Who is she? How does she know about Josy? What's taking her so long?

  Viktor did the first thing that came into his head. Hastily, he shoved the half-empty wallet into Anna's pocket and bent down to sweep the remaining coins beneath the leather couch. There was no reason to think she would look there, and with any luck she wouldn't notice the missing marks.

  He scanned the floor hurriedly and spotted a small slip of paper floating on the puddle of rainwater where Anna had hung her coat. It must have fallen out of the wallet with the coins. Viktor stooped down and pocketed it without thinking.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  Straightening up, he came face to face with Anna. She must have crept into the room without him noticing. The odd thing was, he hadn't heard the door, even though the hinges creaked dreadfully.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I was, um, I mean to say . . .’

  In a dreadful moment of insight he realized how things would look from Anna's perspective. She had left the room for a few min
utes and now here he was, sweaty and agitated, crawling around on the floor. There was nothing he could say.

  ‘I hope it wasn't bad news?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  And then it dawned on him why Anna had taken so long to come in.

  He had been too busy worrying about the coins to realize that the phone had stopped ringing. Anna must have thought he had answered it and waited patiently in the hall.

  ‘Oh, you mean the phone call,’ he said, feeling stupid.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wrong number.’ He stood up shakily, only to jump a mile when the telephone rang again.

  ‘That's persistence for you,’ smiled Anna, taking a seat on the couch. ‘Aren't you going to answer it?’

  ‘Answer it? Err, yes . . . Yes, of course,’ stuttered Viktor, pulling himself together. ‘I'll take the call in the kitchen. Excuse me one moment.’

  Anna smiled serenely, and Viktor left the room.

  As soon as he picked up the phone he realized that he had left something in the sitting room that would give him away. If Anna found it, she would know what he had done.

  The coin by the fender.

  He held the receiver to his ear and wondered how to regain her trust. As it happened, he didn't have long to worry about it. Just when he thought the situation couldn't possibly get any worse, he heard five words that eclipsed everything that had gone before.

  21

  ‘The blood was definitely female.’

  ‘Female . . . What age?’

  ‘I can't say,’ replied Kai, his voice echoing strangely.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I'm not a geneticist.’

  Viktor squeezed the back of his neck, but no amount of massaging could get rid of his headache.

  ‘Where are you now?’ he asked the PI.

  ‘Westend Hospital. I know a guy who works in one of the labs. I had to sneak out into the corridor to call you because I'm not supposed to use my phone. They reckon it interferes with the equipment.’

  ‘Standard hospital policy. You'd better be quick.’

  ‘Here's the deal. This mate of mine is a biochemist. I talked him into running some tests in his lunch break. I gave him a phial of blood from your bathroom – although I probably could have given him a vat.’

  ‘Just tell me the results.’

  ‘Like I said, it came from a woman, older than nine and younger than fifty – but probably a whole lot younger than fifty.’

  ‘Josy was twelve when she went missing.’

  ‘It wasn't her blood.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It was fresh – a couple of days old; three at the outside. Josy has been missing for over four years.’

  ‘I'm aware of that, thank you,’ snapped Viktor, opening the kitchen door slightly and peering through the crack. The door to the sitting-room was closed, but he couldn't afford to take risks. He lowered his voice.

  ‘Listen, if it's not Josy's blood, where does Anna fit into this? She described my daughter, she described the cabin in Sacrow, and she described our villa. She's not making it up. She was there, Kai. She knew all about Schwanenwerder. She even saw the reporters camped on the drive.’

  ‘Anna? Is that her real name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Surname?’

  Viktor took a deep breath, swallowed accidentally, and ended up coughing instead.

  ‘Her name is . . .’ He coughed again, holding the receiver at arm's length.

  ‘Blasted flu. I'm sorry, Kai. Listen, I think I'd better tell you who she is. Her name is Anna Glass, she writes children's books, and she's pretty successful, especially in Japan. Her father worked for the American Forces Network and died from a botched appendicectomy when she was a kid. She grew up in Steglitz and was admitted to the Park four years ago. It's a private psychiatric clinic in Dahlem.’

  The PI repeated the information and jotted down some notes. ‘Fine, I'll check it out.’

  ‘There's something else I'd like you to do for me.’

  Viktor heard a long sigh on the other end of the line.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you still got the keys to the villa?’

  ‘A digital card, right?’

  ‘You swipe it to get through the gates.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘OK, I want you to go to my study and open the safe. You'll need to type in the code – Josy's date of birth backwards; year, month, then day. Inside you'll find a stack of CDs. You can't miss them.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘When Josy disappeared, the police asked me to save the footage from the security cameras.’

  ‘Sure, they were hoping to spot the kidnapper in the crowd. They monitored the front of the house for a month.’

  ‘I want you to find the disks for the first week and go through them.’

  ‘Viktor, the footage has been examined tons of times. The police drew a blank.’

  ‘They were looking for a man.’

  ‘And you want me to look for a woman?’

  ‘I want you to look for Anna: a small, slim blonde. Focus on the pack of reporters at the end of the drive. You've got her surname and other details. You should be able to find a photo on the web.’

  There was a pause and when Kai finally responded, the line had improved. Viktor deduced that he was back in the lab.

  1 ‘Fine,’ the PI said reluctantly. ‘If it makes you happy, I'll do it. But don't get your hopes up. Anna's stories, fascinating as they may be, are full of holes. True, there was a break-in in Sacrow, and true, there were reporters outside your house; but think of the time frame. It's four years out!’

  ‘I know you think she's lying, but how else do you account for the blood? A little girl was murdered in my bathroom! If it wasn't Josy, who the hell was it?’

  ‘Firstly, we don't know the age of the female in question, and secondly, no one was killed.’

  ‘You said—’

  ‘Listen to me, Viktor: no one was killed. In fact, the female was very definitely alive.’

  ‘Alive?’ he said, practically screaming into the phone. He was so exhausted and agitated that he had given up caring whether Anna was listening or not. ‘She wouldn't have bled all over the bathroom if she were alive!’

  ‘Viktor, you need to pay attention. There was mucus in the blood.’

  ‘What difference does that—’ He broke off and answered his own question. ‘So she was . . .’

  ‘Yes, and it's time you calmed down. The lab results were unambiguous. It was menstrual blood.’

  22

  Room 1245, Berlin-Wedding Psychosomatic Clinic

  It was dark outside. The clinic's automatic lighting had hummed into action and Dr Roth looked more anaemic than ever in the cold glare of the overhead lights. Viktor Larenz noticed for the first time that the consultant psychiatrist was balding at the temples. His stylishly cropped hair usually kept the telltale triangles well hidden, but for the past hour he had been raking his fingers nervously through his hair and ruining the effects of his grooming.

  ‘You seem anxious, Dr Roth.’

  ‘Not anxious, just curious about what happened next.’

  Viktor requested a glass of water. His wrists were still strapped to the bed, so Roth had to hold the glass while he drank through a straw.

  ‘There are a few things I'd like to ask,’ said the psychiatrist as Viktor sipped thirstily.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Why didn't you make more of an effort to find Sindbad? If it was my dog, I'd be hunting high and low.’

  ‘You're absolutely right. To be honest, I was surprised by my own apathy. Looking back, I'd say I was emotionally and physically exhausted from searching for Josy. You know how veteran soldiers barely flinch when they hear a grenade? It was like I'd decided to stay in my trench and weather the next bombardment. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, but why didn't you tell your wife? Surely you must have thought to call her when the dog dis
appeared?’

  ‘I did! I tried calling her almost every day, but I couldn't get through. I can't say I was looking forward to telling her about Anna. We'd already argued about the interview – unnecessarily, as it happens, because I was too distracted to work on it anyway. But if she'd known I was treating a patient . . .’ He stopped and sighed. ‘She would have taken the first plane home. In the end I didn't get the chance to speak to her because the receptionist wouldn't put me through. I had to content myself with leaving messages.’

  ‘And she never called back?’

  ‘She called once.’

  ‘Were you able to clear things up?’

  Rather than answering, Viktor signalled for more water. Dr Roth lifted the straw to his mouth.

  ‘How long have I . . .’ Viktor broke off, took a long sip and started again, ‘Are we doing all right for time?’

  ‘We've probably got another twenty minutes. Your lawyers have arrived. They're in Professor Malzius's office.’

  My lawyers.

  Viktor's last encounter with the legal profession dated back to 1997. The lawyer, a gawky fellow who specialized in traffic infringements, had successfully salvaged his licence; but only a real professional could help Viktor now. This time it wasn't about a ding in someone's car.

  His future was at stake.

  ‘The lawyers, are they any good?’

  ‘Top-notch, I'm told. The best that money can buy.’

  ‘I suppose they'll want to know what happened to Anna?’

  ‘They'll be asking a lot of questions. How else are they supposed to construct a defence? You're being tried for murder, remember.’

  There. He had finally said it: murder.

  Neither of them had mentioned it explicitly, but the facts of the matter were plain: Viktor Larenz was heading for jail unless the conclusion of his story could convince the judge to throw out the case.

  ‘I know what I'm being accused of, but I won't have the strength to go over the story again. Besides, I'm hoping to be out of here in twenty minutes.’

  ‘No chance,’ said Roth, putting down the glass of water. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Can we get on with the story? You were describing how Kai informed you about the blood. Did Anna have anything interesting to tell you when you got off the phone?’