Therapy (16 page)

What's wrong with me? I'll never find out the truth about Josy
.

You were being poisoned, said a voice inside him.

It was only paracetamol, his conscience replied.

It took a few moments for him to stop shaking and stand up.

The tea was cold by the time he summoned the strength to load the crockery on to a tray. He shuffled to the kitchen, staring at the cups in bewilderment. Distracted by the shocking evidence, he forgot to look where he was going, stumbled and let go of the tray. Everything crashed to the floor. Tea spilt everywhere, robbing him of the proof, but he knew for certain what he had seen.

Both cups were full to the brim
.

He was willing to bet that Anna hadn't taken a single sip of tea.

Before he could fetch a dishcloth from the kitchen, a humming and rattling alerted him to the arrival of a fax on his old-fashioned machine.

Leaving the tray and broken china on the floor, he retraced his steps to the desk. Before he got there, he could tell there was a problem. The machine had disgorged a single piece of paper, which he picked up slowly and held under the lamp. He could turn it this way and that and study it for as long as he liked, but it wasn't going to get him any further. Not even a microscope would have helped. The fax was blank. There was no sign of a picture drawn by Josy, only a thick black line.

33

By the time Halberstaedt arrived with the awful news, Viktor was so worked up that he could barely remember his own telephone number, let alone Kai Strathmann's. The PI had failed to call about the fax. After waiting in vain for twenty minutes, Viktor had decided to ring Kai himself. Unfortunately, he was still so feverish that his memory seemed to be melting. Names and numbers were slopping around in his head like alphabet soup and it felt as if someone had given them a thorough stir. He couldn't remember Kai's number, so he couldn't ring him to tell him that the fax hadn't worked.

But the blank fax was the least of his problems. The thought that he might have been poisoned was driving him insane. His back felt excruciatingly tender, as if the skin had been burnt to a crisp, and his migraine had worked its way from the base of his skull to his forehead. Naturally, with the exception of himself, no one on Parkum knew anything about medicine, and the gusts had reached such a speed that even a military chopper would only leave the mainland in the event of an emergency. And he wasn't even sure that it
was
an emergency. Maybe Anna had been telling the truth and the powder
was only paracetamol. Or maybe he had been poisoned in small doses, day by day.

Like Charlotte? Like Josy?

Had Anna had sufficient opportunity to poison him by degrees? He decided to give it a few more hours. The weather was atrocious and he didn't want the paramedics to risk their lives on his behalf. It would be unforgivable to make them fly through a hurricane if it turned out that he was suffering from the flu. Luckily he had packed some activated charcoal and other absorbent agents, which he took with some high-powered antibiotics, just in case.

Looking back on events, it occurred to Viktor that it was probably a good thing that he had been in a state of near physical exhaustion when Halberstaedt arrived with the shocking news. His brain, numbed by pain and the cocktail of tablets, was too weary and muddled to process the grisly details delivered to him on the porch.

‘I'm sorry, Doctor,’ said the mayor. He was holding a black cloth cap in both hands and spinning it with his fingers.

Viktor almost toppled over as he tried to crouch beside the body of his dog.

‘I found Sindbad by the dustbins at the back of the Anchor.’

Viktor felt as if he were listening to a script from the wrong side of a theatre curtain. He knelt down and stroked the lifeless body of the golden retriever. It was
obvious that the dog had been tortured. His hind legs, jawbone and maybe his spine were broken. ‘You know who's staying there, don't you?’

‘Pardon?’ Viktor wiped the tears from his eyes and looked up at the mayor. Sindbad had been garrotted with a length of fishing twine that was buried in the flesh around his throat.

‘Her, of course. That woman I warned you about. She's staying at the Anchor. You can bet your life she killed him.’

Viktor's instinct was to agree. He thought about asking Halberstaedt to wait while he fetched the gun so they could shoot her. Then he pulled himself together.

‘Listen, Patrick, I don't want to talk about it. And I can't discuss the conduct of my patients.’

Something fishy. Fishing twine
.

‘You think she'll be back, do you? From what I saw, she was pretty het up when she left here. She was crying hysterically.’

‘It's none of your business,’ said Viktor in a strained, angry voice.

Halberstaedt raised his hands in surrender. ‘Calm down, Doctor, I was only trying to help. You look pretty poorly.’

‘It's hardly surprising, is it?’

‘Even accounting for the fact that your dog has been murdered, you don't look yourself. Is there anything I can do?’

‘No.’ Viktor stared at the ravaged body of his dog. He
suddenly noticed the stab marks in its belly. The knife had penetrated the abdomen.

A long blade, like a carving knife
.

‘Actually, there is something you could do.’ He got to his feet. ‘You could bury Sindbad for me. I'm not up to it.’ He didn't have the mental toughness, let alone the physical strength.

‘No problem.’ Halberstaedt tipped his cap at him. ‘I'd best fetch a shovel.’ He turned towards the toolshed and stopped. ‘There's something else I wanted to show you. I'm hoping you'll take my warnings more seriously after this.’

‘After what?’

Halberstaedt handed Viktor a green sheet of paper smeared with blood. ‘It was in Sindbad's mouth when I found him.’

Viktor smoothed it out.

‘It looks like a . . .’

‘Exactly. It's a bank statement. And unless I'm much mistaken, it belongs to you.’

Viktor wiped away the blood in the top right-hand corner and was able to make out the name of his bank. It was a printout from his savings account where he and Isabell kept the bulk of their money.

‘Read it carefully,’ advised Halberstaedt.

The date and transaction number were printed on the left.

‘That's today!’

‘Apparently so.’

‘But it can't possibly . . .’ He knew there weren't any cash machines on Parkum. But it wasn't the date that concerned him most.

Two days ago the account balance had stood at 450,322 euros.

Yesterday someone had withdrawn the lot.

34

Room 1245, Berlin-Wedding Psychosomatic Clinic

‘And it hadn't occurred to you until then that Isabell might be involved?’

Smoking was strictly forbidden in the clinic, but Dr Roth had fetched a cigarette for Viktor and was holding it next to his mouth.

‘No, and even then I dismissed the idea straight away. It was simply too distressing.’

‘And Isabell was the only one who could access the money?’

‘Yes, the account was in both our names. If someone had withdrawn our savings, she must have authorized the transaction. Either that, or the bank had made a mistake.’

Dr Roth's bleep went off again, but this time he silenced it.

‘Aren't you going to answer it?’

‘It wasn't urgent.’

‘I see. Only the wife,’ chuckled Viktor.

Dr Roth wasn't amused. ‘Let's focus on your spouse, Dr Larenz. Did you think about asking Kai to keep an eye on her?’

‘Remember the hoo-ha about the forged Hitler diaries?’ asked Viktor. ‘Remember how the newspapers fell for the scam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Years ago I met a journalist who worked for
Stern
. He was directly involved with the story.’

‘I'm not sure how this answers my question.’

‘He and I were waiting in the green room at a TV studio where I was booked to appear on a talk show. He wasn't especially forthcoming about the diaries, but we met up later in the studio canteen and after a couple of beers he was ready to talk about it. I'll never forget what he said.’

‘What?’

‘He said: “We staked our reputations on those diaries. We'd risked too much for them not to be real. It was a case of seeing what we wanted to see: we were convinced they were genuine because the alternative was too awful to contemplate. We weren't looking for signs that we'd been conned; we were looking for proof that we were right.”’

‘How does that apply to you and Isabell?’

‘I felt the same about my wife as he felt about the diaries: I wanted to trust her, so I did.’

‘You didn't look into it any further?’

‘Not right away. I had better things to do.’ He took a drag on the cigarette that Dr Roth was holding for him.

‘I had to get back to the mainland alive.’

35

‘Help me, Viktor!’

Three words. And the first thought that crossed his mind was that Anna had dropped the ‘doctor’ from his name.

The horizon had closed in and was ominously close to the shore. Dark grey clouds hung heavy over the island, so low he could almost touch them, and the sky seemed intent on smothering the house. The full force of the storm was about to hit Parkum. By the time Viktor got out of bed to find out who was hammering on his door, the shipping forecast was reporting wind speeds of ten to twelve on the Beaufort scale. But Viktor was oblivious to the freakish weather raging around him. Before falling asleep, he had taken a couple of powerful sleeping pills in the hope of dozing for a few hours, free from pain or stress. When he opened the door, the parts of his nervous system that weren't under the numbing influence of the barbiturates were immediately focused on a new conundrum: Anna had turned up unexpectedly and Viktor had never seen such rapid deterioration in a patient's state of health. The woman who ninety minutes earlier had stormed out of his house in a fury was
standing before him, hair matted, face wan and tired, and pupils dilated with fear. Her clothes, filthy and sodden, clung to her body, accentuating her pitiful state.

‘Help me, Viktor.’

Those were her last three words that day. Before Viktor had time to react, she slumped to the ground, clutching helplessly at his blue woollen sweater. At first he thought she was having an epileptic fit. After all, there was a known link between epilepsy and psychosis. But, as he noted dispassionately, she wasn't trembling or flailing around. Nor was she displaying other typical symptoms such as foaming at the mouth or sudden incontinence. And she wasn't actually unconscious, just extremely dazed and unresponsive, as if she were spaced out on drugs.

Viktor made a snap decision to carry her into the house. Scooping her up from the wooden porch, he was surprised by how much she weighed. She seemed ridiculously heavy for someone of her build.

I've really let myself go
, he thought, panting as he carried her to the spare room upstairs.

As he ascended the staircase, the pounding in his head grew deafeningly loud. It felt as if his body were soaking up the barbiturates, absorbing the manufactured tiredness like a sponge. He seemed to be getting more ponderous by the second.

The spare room was across the corridor from Viktor's bedroom. Fortunately he had arranged for all the beds to be made up prior to his arrival, so the room was ready for use.

He laid Anna between the white linen sheets and helped her out of her grimy cashmere coat. Then he loosened her silk scarf and took her pulse.

No problems there
.

Following a sudden impulse, he opened her eyelids and shone a pen torch at her pupils. Anna clearly wasn't well. Both pupils responded sluggishly. That in itself wasn't a concern and could easily be a side effect of her medication, but it proved that she wasn't faking her condition. Anna was either sick or suffering from exhaustion. Like him.

What was wrong with them?

He decided not to think about it for the moment and to get on with removing her sodden clothes. He was a doctor, a doctor acting in the interest of his patient, but he still felt uncomfortable when it came to taking off her trousers, unbuttoning her blouse and slipping off her silk underwear. Her naked body was flawless. He wrapped her hastily in a fluffy white bathrobe from the bathroom and covered her with a light eiderdown quilt. She was so exhausted that she fell asleep before he finished tucking her in.

Viktor stayed for a while, listening carefully as his patient took deep, regular breaths. He was relieved to establish that she had suffered no more than a temporary breakdown and hadn't done herself serious harm.

All the same, the situation made him nervous.

He was ill and exhausted and now there was a
schizophrenic patient in his spare room who quite possibly wanted to kill him. As soon as she woke up, he intended to confront her about what had happened to Josy, Sindbad and his money.

Were it not for the sleeping pills and antibiotics sapping his strength, he would have erred on the side of caution and carried her back to the village without delay.

Viktor considered for a moment, then came to a decision. He went to the telephone to call for help.

Just as he picked up the receiver, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating the length of the beach. Viktor put down the phone and started counting. He only got as far as four when a deafening rumble shook the house. He hurried from room to room, unplugging electrical appliances in case of a power surge. After unplugging the television in the spare room, he waited for a moment, watching as Anna tossed, turned and sighed in her sleep. She seemed to be making a good recovery. In a couple of hours she would be back on her feet.

She'll probably wake up while I'm asleep
.

He knew that he had to take action. The last thing he wanted was for Anna to hold him to ransom in his own house. He went downstairs to the telephone, pausing halfway to sit down for a moment and regain his balance.

When he got to the sitting room and picked up the phone, he was so exhausted that it took him a couple of
seconds to realize that the line was dead. He put the handset back on the cradle and tried again, but the old-fashioned telephone refused to make a noise.