Fatal Choices

by Anne Morgellyn

  Fatal Choices

  Anne Morgellyn

  © Anne Morgellyn 2013

  Anne Morgellyn has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Cara

  Man is my darling, my love and my pain,

  My pleasure, my excitement, and my love again,

  My wisdom, my courage, my power, my all,

  Oh Man, do not come to me until I call.

  Stevie Smith

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Coda

  Prologue

  “DEATH TOURISM INVADES THE HOME OF THE RED CROSS”

  A professor of neuroscience with Huntingdon’s disease, a nineteen-year-old athlete with a damaged spine, a depressed lone parent, struggling to cope with a disabled child – just a random sample of the eighty seven foreign nationals who ended their lives at The Charon Clinic, Zurich in the six months before its closure last week, pending a federal enquiry.

  The clinic operated from a number of venues, including a rented chalet on the shores of Lake Zug, an apartment in Fluelen, and even a stolen car. Under federal law, assisted suicide is only permissible in Switzerland if those doing the assisting can prove themselves to be free of any beneficial or financial interest resulting from the outcome. The clinic’s director, Maitre Jean-Marie Moulenc, told the enquiry yesterday: ‘There has been absolutely no profit from the clinic’s services. The charge of seven thousand euros – 8,765 Swiss francs – is solely to cover expenses: medical consultations, provision of drugs, disposal of the body, etc.’

  However, the very large sums bequeathed by grateful patients to Moulenc personally over the past five years have still to be accounted for. Where did the money go? Not, it emerged today, to the Red Cross, nor to any of the other charities mentioned at the hearing by the clinic’s director.

  As long as assisted suicide remains legal in Switzerland, clinics like Charon seem set to attract an ever increasing international cohort of patients, all having one thing in common: the wish to end their lives under the supervision of a qualified physician who prescribes the fatal dose. These ‘death tourists’ have added a dark dimension to the Swiss reputation for first class hospitality. Is death tourism the new unique selling point for the home of the Palais des Nations?

  ‘The Swiss don’t like it,’ says Sonia Wengli, a campaigner for the Greens. ‘The cremation urns are dumped in the lakes, causing pollution and a threat to the ecology. Allowing foreigners to come and die here is giving Switzerland a bad name. We should stick with the attractions we do best – chocolate, watches, Smurfs and cuckoo clocks.’

  Louise Moon, Geneva

  1

  My boy and I were making fairy cakes and were both covered in flour by the time Androssoff flapped in through the insect screen. I called him Androssoff then because we were having problems, and I needed to create some emotional distance.

  ‘Louise, I need to bring the Swiss trip forward. I’ll have to go tonight.’

  ‘Isn’t Buz out there already, setting it up?’

  ‘He’s left us in the lurch.’

  Nicky, our five year old son, was pulling at his father’s hand: ‘Are you going away again, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, Nick, but I’ll soon be coming back.’

  ‘Where’s Uncle Buz?’

  ‘Don’t pester me now. Go and feed your guinea pigs.’

  ‘Give them one of their treats,’ I suggested, trying to make up for Androssoff’s cursory manner, not that Nicky wasn’t used to it by now.

  ‘Can you not be so off-hand with him?’ I said, after the screen had swung closed. ‘He sees little enough of you as it is.’

  Without replying, Androssoff turned his back on me and went to the sink. He filled a glass with water and gulped it down. It had rained earlier, and through the window, the garden was heavy with foreboding.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, messy with cake mixture and sugar: ‘What’s happened to Buz?’

  ‘He’s dead. His executor called me an hour ago.’

  ‘No! Was it an accident?’

  ‘Suicide – some death clinic near Zurich. He could at least have waited till after the conference.’ All of this he said with his back to me. He reached into his biker jacket for his mobile and started pressing keys. ‘I have to find a flight.’

  ‘Can’t it wait a minute, Chas? You can spare me a minute. Was he ill? Was that why he did it? I didn’t know he was ill.’

  ‘I don’t know why he did it. Nobody knows.’ The number connected: ‘I need a flight to Geneva today,’ he said, walking into the hall. ‘Yes, yes, I know I’ll have to change. I’ll hang on.’

  Bitterness welled up in me, but there was someone more important to think about now. Buz Vrubin had been with us only five days ago, playing hide-the-brontosaurus in the garden. I had watched Nicky search through the variegated foliage, the luscious greens picked out by fingers of sunlight. He worshipped his Uncle Buz. For me Buz was a dear friend. He was only sixty five – I had baked an iced fruit cake, big enough to hold all his candles. It was unthinkable that he could have ended his life.

  I followed Androssoff into the bedroom. His hold-all was still half-unpacked from his previous trip.

  ‘Was Buz ill? He never mentioned anything.’

  ‘Christ only knows. I have to get to the airport.’

  ‘You can wait two minutes. I want to know what happened.’

  ‘You know as much as I do. I’ve really got to go.’

  ‘Without saying goodbye to Nicky?’

  ‘Tell him I’ll be back soon,’ he said, pushing past me.

  ‘You can’t treat us like this,’ I shouted. ‘Here one minute, gone the next. You’re never here.’

  When Nicky came in from the garden and saw that his daddy had left, disappointment flushed his little face. I pulled him towards the table and sat him on my knee.

  ‘I think the cakes are ready to come out. Shall we look?’

  ‘Where’s Uncle Buz?’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it in a minute.’

  I pushed him off me gently and opened the oven door. ‘These look good,’ I said, although the fairy cakes were slightly overdone. ‘When they cool down, we can make some chocolate icing.’

  ‘Where’s Uncle Buz?’

  Lifting him back on my knee, I said: ‘Remember what happened to Wanda?’ This was the guinea pig matriarch who had died a couple of months ago. Buz had helped us bury her in a planter out on the deck.

  Nicky looked bewildered at first, but then he seemed to make a connection. He started to wail: ‘I want Uncle Buz.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Uncle Buz has had an accident. Your daddy has gone to Geneva to sort things out with his work. He has to take the place of Uncle Buz.’

  ‘He can’t take Uncle Buz’s place. I hate him. I want Uncle Buz.’

  I held him tightly against my chest so that he wouldn’t see my tear
s.

  We would both miss Buz Vrubin. He had been like a rock to me and Nicky, who saw more of him than of his father. Vrubin, not a family man himself, nor a social animal, had been a real support to me after Nicky was born. Like him, I had not put down roots in New Zealand although Androssoff and I had gone out there to make a fresh start in a new, clean country. Androssoff felt it was a privilege – a coup, even, to be working with the Great Professor Vrubin, who had been nominated for a Nobel prize. But his pleasure in his work, like the pleasure in our marriage, soon turned sour. His work required him to spend an awful lot of time away on international conferences where he reported to the pharmaceutical companies who funded the project, although I could see why Buz delegated this job to Androssoff, who didn’t suffer fools gladly and was used to handling the suits. Although he was the senior professor and research lead, Buz was shy and introverted: I privately called him The Badger because of his bristly, grey-streaked hair and the comfort he found in going to earth. He had a tiny bungalow, not far from our spacious one, hidden away behind trees and flowering bushes. He buried himself there, working away on his papers while Androssoff set out to tame the drugs companies. Androssoff went away so often, I sometimes had no idea where he was, or what he was doing on all these trips: he made so many complicated connections and detours, here today and gone tomorrow. Unsurprisingly, all this travel made him irritable. He had always been impatient with his colleagues and he liked to paddle his own canoe – or in his case, his Harley-Davidson, which had followed us out from England. In the rare weeks he was in New Zealand, he went out on the bike for recreational rides, leaving me to change the nappies and prepare the feeds. I could see that he was disenchanted with the project and, increasingly, with Buz, which must have been difficult because Androssoff had always looked up to him and they were friends as well as colleagues. I tried to placate him at first; but gradually, as I spent my days in solitude with a baby who became a demanding toddler, and now a little boy who needed a father in his life, I came to resent my husband more and more. I had foolishly become dependent on him during these past five years and now I was trapped and hopeless in a failing marriage. I had just about had enough.

  I put Nicky to bed and stroked his head as he went to sleep. He had thick, dark hair like his father, I was dark too, but not as dark as them. Nicky had my mild green eyes – Androssoff’s were a piercing blue – but not, I hoped, my short-sightedness. I had worn contact lenses since I was twenty one. I braced myself for the sleepless night that was sure to come. I had no one to share the shock of Buz’s suicide, apart from my boy, who was too young to understand. Androssoff hadn’t seemed all that bothered by the startling feature of a death clinic. He had the pathologist’s take on death: he had seen so much of it. Death, for him, was a biological process.

  2

  Buz’s lawyer, who introduced himself as Jake Tarrant, called me the following morning to invite me to collect some of Buz’s personal items that were discounted for probate. They had been packed up in the secluded bungalow and were now at the premises of the legal firm. The letting agency wanted to go through the inventory of furniture and fittings before working out any excess charges to Buz’s estate. This seemed indecently premature to me, like crows flocking to carrion, although I knew that Buz had scant regard for possessions. Most of what he had owned would be in those boxes.

  We also needed to go through Buz’s will because I was named in it. I said I had no one to stay with my son, so Tarrant offered to bring everything over to our place during his lunch break. I liked the informality of this, remembering the palaver I had gone through with lawyers in London when I worked for the coroner. Seated at the kitchen table, from where I could keep an eye on Nicky in his dinosaur corner, Tarrant, a pleasant young man in his thirties who addressed me as Louise and told me to call him Jake, took off his jacket and read Buz’s will. I was astonished to learn that Buz had set up a trust fund for Nicky, nominating Androssoff and me as trustees and expressing the wish that we should use the substantial fund for Nicky’s education, ideally at an international school in Switzerland. Buz had also left money to the research institute, but there were no other bequests. I said I thought he had a half brother in an institution for the disabled in his home state, Maine. Jake made a note of that and said he would check it out. I asked him about the funeral arrangements and he told me the clinic had already dealt with it. The Zurich coroner was satisfied, and Buz had been cremated, according to his wishes. Copies of the death certificate and other papers were faxed through to his executors. His passport had been sent to the US embassy.

  ‘Did he leave a note?’ I asked. ‘Any message for his friends?’

  ‘The only note I’ve seen is with the boxes. It just says, ‘For the attention of Louise Androssoff Moon’. They’re in my car. There’s nothing else I can tell you for now. I’ll send you a copy of the will – I didn’t get around to making one before I came over. We just wait till probate is granted. It might take a few months. It seems as though he was a wealthy man.’

  I sat on at the table till he brought the boxes to the kitchen door. They didn’t look heavy.

  ‘I guess you need some time to digest all this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all happened so quickly. He died, he’s been cremated, all within a week. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Were you close to Professor Vrubin?’

  ‘We were very good friends.’

  ‘I’m sorry – that’s none of my business. If your husband wants to come by when he gets back from Switzerland, I’ll go through it all with him again so you don’t have to be worried with it. You take care now. I’ll be in touch.’

  Such thoughtfulness, from an entirely unexpected quarter, made me tearful. Nicky, ever sensitive to my facial expressions, bounded over.

  ‘Are you crying, Mummy?’

  ‘He brought Uncle Buz’s things,’ I said. ‘Should we go through them?’ I know I shouldn’t have asked Nicky to help me with that, but I couldn’t face the boxes on my own. There were a few clothes: trousers and shirts, a couple of pairs of boxer shorts, a summer jacket – Buz must have taken the winter one to Switzerland. I wondered fleetingly what had happened to that, and to his overcoat which made him look almost louche, like Harry Lime in The Third Man. A few photographs were packed at the bottom of the other box: there was one of Buz on his graduation day at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his weak eyes squinting at the camera, his hair black and bristly, having not yet acquired those shafts of silver-white that gave him his badger look. What terrible thing had driven Buz to take his own life, and in such a desolate, distant way? I cried when I saw that picture. Nicky threw his arms around me.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m OK, sweetheart. Let’s leave this now. It’s time to feed Boo and Poo.’

  After we’d filled the guinea pigs’ bowls, I called the human resources section at the faculty but they refused to release any information about Professor Vrubin’s medical and private history. Androssoff could have a go when he returned. As Buz’s Number Two, I supposed he would now be acting head of research. At least he wouldn’t have to go on so many trips now. He could pass that on to the next in line.

  We spent the next few days in a sort of limbo, Nicky alternating between wanting Buz and wanting his daddy. I didn’t know who I wanted: I was numb. When Androssoff came back from Geneva, he had a very black look on his face. He was haggard after the twenty-six hour journey: his collar-length hair was uncombed and there were crumbs in his beard from the in-flight meals. He presented me with yet another bottle of duty-free scent – they were crowding out the bathroom shelves now, and handed Nicky a bar of chocolate and a model aeroplane, though Nicky had several of these already, bearing the insignia of different airlines. He left the plane on the kitchen table and went back into his bedroom. I heard him slam the door.

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘He likes dinosaurs.’

  ‘I know he likes dinos
aurs. Do you think I’ve had time to go looking for fucking dinosaurs? It was a jungle over there, Planet of the Apes.’

  ‘Did you tell them what happened?’

  ‘You mean Buz’s pre-mediated opt-out? I sat up all night writing his fucking obituary to read to the conference. I couldn’t tell them why he visited that clinic because I didn’t know. Human Resources here don’t know – there was nothing on his medical record. Nobody fucking knows. The clinic told me the Coroner was satisfied but kept Stumm about the why and wherefore. Patient confidentiality and all that crap. Buz is dead, for Christ’s sake, he’s hardly going to sue them. It’s like those fucking secret bank accounts they have in Switzerland – no names, just a number. If they tell you anything, they think it’ll screw up their business. Well, this business certainly screwed me. The delegates pressed me for a project report but I had very little to tell them. I had to stand there making feeble excuses. I could report on the outcomes I’d reached but they are inconclusive and I didn’t have all the data because Buz was supposed to be giving the summary. Christ knows what was in it because he didn’t e-mail a final draft to me – he probably didn’t even finish it. It’s turned out to be a real turkey.’

  ‘I’ll make you some coffee.’

  ‘You know I drink tea in the morning. I’m going to freshen up.’

  After he had showered and was sitting in the kitchen with his laptop – that familiar spirit – open on the table, although I had asked him repeatedly not to bring it into the kitchen because that was our family space, I decided to confront him. He vehemently refuted my accusation that he took only a passing interest in Nicky and me, but he agreed that things weren’t going too well for us in New Zealand. He could see that I was isolated. There were no other families with young children in the near vicinity, the bungalows being mostly occupied by elderly retired people. With Buz out of the picture, Androssoff’s position at the faculty was now ambiguous. Everyone knew that the project was foundering, everyone being the faculty here, the international peer reviewers, and the funders. He was ready to throw in the towel. He had an open invitation to resume his Chair in London, where he could steer his own research project – something to do with sectioning tissue from malignant brain tumours and studying their implications for diseases like Alzheimer’s. It was at this ancient hospital, the Charitable Hospital of St Roche-without-the-walls, that Androssoff and I had first met. He was the senior consultant pathologist then, and I was his technician.