Therapy (11 page)

‘I didn't stop to think. I just sensed that whatever had been hiding in the cabin was coming after us. I grabbed Charlotte's hand and we ran through the snow to the car. Neither of us dared to look back. We were frightened of what was behind us, and the path was quite slippery so we had to watch our step.’

‘Who was in the cabin? Who was following you?’

‘I can't say for sure. My first priority was to get Charlotte into the car, lock the doors and head back to Berlin. As soon as we were on the road, I tried to get some answers, but Charlotte was talking in riddles.’

‘Can you remember what she said?’

‘Things like: “I'm not here to give you answers. I'll show you the clues, but I can't explain their meaning. You're the one who's writing this story, not me.”’

Viktor was forced to concede that Anna's story was becoming increasingly fanciful, which wasn't entirely surprising in view of her mental health. He only hoped that her imaginings bore some relation, no matter how tenuous, to the truth. At the same time he couldn't help but realize that his attitude towards her delusions was slightly pathological. He decided not to care.

‘Where was she taking you?’

‘To see the next clue. She said, “You've seen where everything started. It's time I showed you something else.”’

‘The first clue was the cabin in the forest?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘Charlotte said something really strange, something I'll never forget.’ Anna pressed her lips together and spoke in the whispered voice of a young girl. ‘ “I want to show you where the illness lives.”’

‘Where it
lives
?’

‘That's what she said.’

Viktor shivered. He hadn't warmed up since coming in from the beach, and Anna's unnaturally childish voice seemed to lower his temperature by a couple of degrees.

‘Where did you go?’ he persisted. ‘Did you find the illness?’

‘We drove back to Berlin via the Glienicke Bridge
with Charlotte giving me directions. I can't remember the rest of the route. For one thing, I'm not familiar with that part of the city – and besides, I couldn't concentrate because Charlotte had taken a turn for the worse.’

Viktor felt a lurching sensation in his stomach. ‘What was the matter with her?’

‘It started with a nosebleed. We were near the lido on Lake Wannsee at the time. I parked outside a beer garden and Charlotte lay down in the back. The nosebleed stopped, but a moment later . . .’

She started shaking
.

‘. . . she started shaking all over. She was shivering so violently that I wanted to rush her to hospital.’ She gave a forced laugh. ‘But then I remembered she didn't exist. A visit to the doctor's was hardly going to help.’

‘So you did nothing?’

‘To be honest, I thought it was best. It seemed foolish to pander to my hallucinations, but Charlotte kept getting worse. She was shivering all over and begging me to take her to the pharmacy.’

She needed penicillin
.

‘She wanted antibiotics, but I knew it was hopeless: we needed a prescription. I tried to explain that to Charlotte, but the tantrums started. I couldn't calm her down.’

‘Did she shout at you?’

‘She was shouting, crying and screaming at the top of her lungs. It was dreadful to listen to her hoarse little voice.’

‘What kind of things was she saying?’

‘She blamed me for creating her. I remember her yelling, “You gave me this illness; you need to make me well!” I knew I was hallucinating and she didn't exist, but it was no good – I couldn't ignore her. In the end, I drove to the pharmacy, bought some paracetamol for her headache and charmed the guy behind the counter into dispensing the penicillin. He handed me the tablets and told me to come back with the prescription as soon as I could. If I'm honest with myself, I was doing it for my own good and not to help Charlotte: I knew I wouldn't get rid of my hallucinations unless I did what she said.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Things improved for me, but not for Charlotte.’

Viktor nodded and waited for her to explain.

‘Charlotte took two tablets, but I don't think they helped. If anything, she got worse, not better. She looked pale and listless, but at least she stopped screaming. I guess I was still in shock, though, because I can't remember how we got to the villa by the lake.’

‘But you remember the villa?’

‘It was stunning, simply stunning. I've never seen such a beautiful house in Berlin. It didn't seem to belong in the city – it was more like a country estate. The grounds must have covered a few thousand square metres at least, and the lawn sloped down to the water's edge. There was a private beach and a jetty, and the house itself was huge. As far as I could tell, the architecture was neoclassical with a few extravagant flourishes – oriels, turrets and the like. No wonder Charlotte called it a “palace”.’

Schwanenwerder
.

Once again Anna's description was uncannily accurate. Viktor had heard enough to know that she was definitely involved.

‘The house and the gardens were impressive enough, but I hadn't reckoned with the commotion outside. The whole place was swarming with people and cars. We had to get out and walk a couple of hundred metres over a little bridge because the road was chock-a-block with vans.’

‘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 minutes 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.’