‘How long has it been since you stopped my meds?’
The psychiatrist paused his examination of the electrolyte drip hanging from a three-pronged metal stand at the head of Viktor's bed. ‘Three weeks, Dr Larenz.’
It was, Viktor felt, to Roth's credit that he continued to address him by his title. Over the last few days they had conducted a number of conversations and Roth always treated him with absolute respect.
‘How long have I been lucid?’
‘Nine days exactly.’
‘Right.’ Viktor paused for a moment. ‘So when will I be released?’
The quip brought a smile to Dr Roth's face. They both knew that he would never be discharged. If he ever left the clinic, it would be for another psychiatric facility of similar security.
Viktor gazed down at his hands and shook the straps lightly. The clinic had obviously learned from experience. He had been stripped of his belt and shoelaces as soon as he was admitted. There was no mirror in the bathroom, and during his twice-daily supervised trips to the toilet he had no means of seeing whether he looked as wretched as he felt. At one stage in life he had been complimented on his appearance, attracting attention because of his broad shoulders, thick hair and well-toned body, perfect for a man of his age. These days his declining physique left little to be admired.
‘Tell me truthfully, Dr Roth: how does it feel to see me lying here like this?’
The psychiatrist, mindful to avoid eye contact, stooped to pick up the clipboard at the foot of the bed. He seemed to be debating what to say. Pity? Concern?
He decided on the truth: ‘Alarming.’
‘Because the same thing might happen to you?’
‘I suppose that strikes you as selfish.’
‘No, just honest. I appreciate your frankness. Besides, I'm not surprised that you feel that way. We have a good deal in common, after all.’
Roth merely nodded.
Present circumstances notwithstanding, the two men's lives were alike in many ways. They had both enjoyed privileged childhoods in the sheltered environment of Berlin's elegant boroughs: Viktor, descended from a long line of corporate lawyers, in Wannsee, and Roth, the child of two hand surgeons, in Westend. After studying medicine at Berlin's Free University, they had gone on to specialize in disorders of the mind. As the sole beneficiaries of their parents’ wills, they had come into possession of the family estate and a sizeable fortune – but instead of retiring for the rest of their days, they had ended up in the clinic as patient and doctor, brought together by coincidence or fate.
‘You can't deny there's a certain similarity between us,’ said Viktor. ‘So what would you have done if you were me?’
‘You mean, if it were my daughter and I found out who put her through such pain . . .’ Roth finished his notes, replaced the clipboard and allowed himself to meet Viktor's gaze. ‘To be honest, I don't think I'd survive what you had to cope with.’
Viktor laughed uncertainly. ‘I didn't. It killed me. Death can be unimaginably cruel.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me about it.’ Roth perched on the edge of Viktor's bed.
‘About what?’ He needn't have asked. Viktor knew exactly what the psychiatrist was suggesting. They had discussed the matter several times before.
‘All of it. I want you to tell me the whole story: what happened to Josephine, what was making her ill . . . Why don't you tell me what happened and start from the beginning?’
‘You've heard most of it already.’
‘I'd like to hear the details. I want to know step by step what happened and why it ended that way.’
The final catastrophe.
Viktor allowed the air to escape from his lungs and stared at the patchy ceiling. ‘The awful thing is, during all those years after Josy disappeared, I thought nothing could be worse than not knowing. Four whole years without a reported sighting, with no reason to believe she was alive. Sometimes I longed for the phone to ring and a voice to tell me that her corpse had been found. I thought nothing could be more agonizing than being in limbo, never knowing, just suspecting. But I was wrong. There is something worse.’
Roth waited for him to continue.
‘The truth is worse.’ His voice was almost a whisper. ‘The truth. I almost glimpsed it at the start. It came to me while I was standing in Dr Grohlke's clinic on the day that Josy disappeared. It was so dreadful, so unbearable that I had to shut it out. Much later it caught up with me again and this time I couldn't ignore it. It came after me and confronted me; quite literally confronted me. It stared me in the face.’
‘What happened?’
‘I found myself face to face with the person responsible and it was too much to bear. Well, you know better than most what happened on the island and what became of me after that.’
‘The island,’ said Roth musingly. ‘Parkum, wasn't it? What took you there?’
‘You're the psychiatrist; you tell me.’ Viktor smiled. ‘Very well, I'll give you my version of the answer. A news magazine requested an exclusive interview. I'd been approached by the press more times than I can remember and I'd always turned them down. Isabell didn't like the idea of talking to the media. Then Bunte emailed me some questions and I started to wonder: perhaps doing the interview would straighten out my thoughts. I wanted closure.’
‘And you thought Parkum would be the place to work on your response?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did anyone go with you?’
‘My wife was against the idea. She had an important business appointment in New York and didn't want to come. Frankly, I was glad of the solitude. I hoped Parkum would give me the space I needed.’
‘The space to say goodbye to your daughter.’
It was a statement, not a question, but Viktor nodded all the same. ‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that. In any case, I loaded the car, put the dog in the back, and drove to the coast. We caught the car ferry to Sylt, then a passenger boat to Parkum. If only I'd known what was in store for me, I wouldn't have gone.’
‘Tell me about Parkum. What happened on the island? When did you start to notice the connections?’
Josephine's mystery illness. Her disappearance. The magazine article.
Viktor lowered his chin to his chest and rotated his head. There was a cracking sound as the vertebrae in his neck clicked into place. Any other form of movement was impossible with his limbs tied to the bed. He inhaled slowly and closed his eyes. It never took more than a few seconds for his thoughts to lead him back to Parkum; back to the thatched cottage on the beach where he had hoped, four years after the tragedy, to get his life back on track. He had searched for a new beginning and tried to find closure, but the process had cost him everything he had.
2
Five days before the truth, Parkum
Bunte: What was it like in the aftermath of your daughter's disappearance?
Larenz: Like death. Of course, I was still eating, drinking and breathing and I sometimes managed to sleep for a couple of hours at a stretch, but I wasn't living anymore. My life was over the day that Josy went missing.
The cursor lingered at the end of the line, blinking steadily at Viktor. He had been on the island for a week, getting up early and working into the night at his antique mahogany desk, trying to find an answer to the magazine's first question. That morning he had finally succeeded in typing three sentences in a row.
Like death. There was no other way of describing how he had felt in the days and weeks following Josy's disappearance.
He closed his eyes.
Viktor couldn't recall what had happened after the scene in Dr Grohlke's clinic. He had no memory of where he had gone, whom he had spoken to or how things had unfolded in the chaos that pulled his family apart. His wife had shouldered most of the burden. Isabell was the one who had searched through Josy's wardrobe and worked out what she had been wearing. She had imparted the news to family and friends and found a suitable photo, sliding it out of the cellophane of the family
album to give to the police. Meanwhile, her psychiatrist husband had wandered aimlessly through the streets. Dr Viktor Larenz had faced only one truly serious crisis in his life and it had brought him to his knees. Isabell had coped much better from the start. After four months she had returned to work as a full-time management consultant, while he had sold his private practice and retired.
A high-pitched beep sounded from the laptop, signalling that the power was running low. That first morning at the house, Viktor had moved the desk away from the fireplace and positioned it in front of the window. It gave him a panoramic view of the sea, but there was nowhere to plug in a charger. If he wanted to look out over the breathtakingly beautiful wintry North Sea he had to transfer the computer every six hours to a coffee table by the hearth where the battery could recharge. He saved the Word file hurriedly before the data was lost forever.
Lost like Josy.
His eyes swept the surface of the sea and he turned abruptly from the window, afraid that the seething water was a mirror of his soul. A gale was blowing up, whistling over the thatched roof and whipping the waves to towering heights. There was no mistaking its meaning. November was almost over and winter, abetted by its accomplices snow and frost, was there to stake its claim.
Death, thought Victor as he stood up and carried the laptop to the coffee table where the charger was waiting.
The house, a small two-storeyed affair, was a 1920s construction that had survived without the attentions of a handyman since Viktor's parents died. Halberstaedt, the island's mayor, had kept the generator and electrics working, for which Viktor was especially grateful in weather like this. It was a long time since anyone in the family had stayed in the wooden cottage and it was falling into disrepair. The walls needed painting, both inside and out, and the parquet floor was long overdue for a polish, except in the hallway where the blocks were crying out to be replaced. Sun and rain had warped the frames of the double-glazed windows, making the rooms unnecessarily draughty and damp. Back in the 1980s, the decor had seemed luxurious and the family's wealth was manifest in the choice of furnishings, but the Tiffany lamps, soft leather armchairs and teak shelves had acquired a permanent coating of dust. No one had cleaned them for years.
Four years, one month and two days, to be precise.
Viktor did not need to check the tear-off calendar in the kitchen to know the date of his last visit. Just over four years had elapsed since he last set foot on Parkum. Even then, the ceiling had needed painting and the mantelpiece above the fireplace had been coated with soot for some time. In those days, though, there was a sense of overriding order.
His life had been intact.
By late October that year, the illness had sapped Josy of most of her strength, but she had still been well enough to accompany him to the cottage.
Viktor sat down on the leather couch, plugged in his laptop and tried not to think about the weekend preceding their fateful visit to the clinic. The memories flooded back.
Four years.
It was forty-eight months since Josy went missing. Despite various police campaigns, appeals by the national media and a two-part TV special, she had vanished without trace, yet Isabell maintained that their daughter was still alive. That was why she had tried to dissuade him from the interview.
‘You don't need closure,’ she told him as he prepared to drive away.
They were on the gravel drive outside the house and Viktor had already stowed his luggage into their black Volvo estate: three suitcases, one containing clothes and the other two for documents regarding Josy's disappearance – newspaper cuttings, transcripts, and the reports submitted by Kai Strathmann, the private investigator he had hired.
‘There's nothing to come to terms with. You don't need to say goodbye,’ she insisted. ‘Our daughter is alive.’ She had nothing more to say on the matter, so she let Viktor go to Parkum while she took off for New York on another of her business trips. She was probably in some skyscraper on Park Avenue right now. Work was her way of distracting herself.
A burning log flared up, crackling as it disintegrated in the hearth. Viktor gave a nervous start, and Sindbad, who had been dozing under the desk, leapt to his feet and yawned reproachfully at the flames. The golden retriever was a stray, found by Isabell two years ago in the car park at Wannsee baths.
‘What the hell were you thinking? You can't replace our daughter with a dog!’ he had thundered at her when she came home with Sindbad. The housekeeper had scurried into the first-floor laundry in alarm.
‘What are you going to call it? Joey?’
Even then Isabell had refused to be provoked. Not for nothing was she descended from one of Germany's most venerable banking dynasties and her unshakeable poise was worthy of her Hanseatic birth. Only her clear blue eyes betrayed what she was really thinking: if Viktor had taken better care of Josy, she would still be with them, jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of owning a dog. He knew that she blamed him, even though she never said a word.
In the end, Sindbad stayed, and by an irony of fate Viktor was the one to whom he became attached.
It was time for another cup of tea. Viktor stood up and walked to the kitchen, the retriever following lazily at his heels in the hope of an afternoon snack.
‘No chance, old boy!’ Viktor stooped to give the dog a friendly pat and noticed that his ears were flat against his head.
‘What's wrong, Sindbad?’ He crouched beside it and heard something too. It was a metallic noise, a kind of scratching or grating that brought back ancient memories. What was it? The sound was buried in the past.
Viktor crept towards the door.
There it was again, like a coin being dragged across the floor. There was silence for a moment, and then it came back.
Viktor paused, holding his breath, as the memory took shape. It was a noise he had often heard as a child; the rasping of a metal key as it scraped against fired clay; a noise his father had made when he came home from sailing and fetched the spare key from beneath the ceramic flowerpot by the door.
It couldn't be his father.
Viktor froze. Someone knew where his parents had kept their key, and that someone was intent on coming in. Were they looking for him?
Heart thumping, he strode into the hall and peered through the spyhole in the heavy oak door. No one in sight. He was about to lift the yellowing blinds and look through the window to the right of the veranda when he changed his mind and pressed his face to the door. Horrified, he leapt backwards. His pulse was racing. Surely he must have imagined . . .
Blood was thundering in his ears, and the hairs on his forearms were standing on end. He knew; he knew beyond a doubt what he had seen. For a fraction of a second a human eye had stared back at him, peering through the spyhole into the house. The eye seemed familiar to him, although he had no idea who it was.
He had to pull himself together.
Taking a deep breath, he yanked open the door.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ Viktor intended to frighten the unknown intruder by challenging him at the top of his voice, but he tailed off mid-sentence, surprised to find himself alone. The porch was empty and there was no one on the garden path leading to the gate, six metres from the door. The gravel road to the village was deserted. Viktor stepped outside, descended the five steps into the garden and peered beneath the veranda, where he had waited during childhood games for the neighbours’ kids to find him. Now, even in the fading sunlight, it was obvious that nothing sinister was lurking in the gloom, only a few dead leaves, swept there by the wind.
Shivering slightly, Viktor rubbed his hands together as he hurried up the steps. The wind had almost succeeded in closing the oak door and it took a concerted effort to pull it open against the gusts. He was about to walk in when he stopped in his tracks.
There it was again. This time it sounded less metallic, a little higher in pitch, and it was coming from a different direction. The noise was no longer outside the house: it was sounding fr
om the sitting room.
The intruder was announcing his presence. Someone was inside.
3
Viktor inched towards the sitting room, scanning the hall for possible weapons in case the intruder was armed.
It was no use relying on Sindbad to defend him. The retriever loved people and would sooner play with strangers than chase them from the premises. Besides, the dog had already slunk away to resume his afternoon nap, leaving his master to take care of the disturbance.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
Viktor knew for a fact that Parkum's last recorded break-in dated back to 1964. According to the police report, the incident was part of a drunken quarrel and no punitive measures had been taken. None of this did much to reassure him.
‘Is someone there?’
He held his breath, creeping along the corridor as softly as possible. Despite his best efforts to be quiet, the ageing parquet groaned beneath his shifting weight. The leather soles of his brogues betrayed his presence with every step.
Viktor wondered why he was bothering to skulk around when seconds earlier he had shouted at full volume. He reached for the handle and was about to enter the sitting room, when the door swung open from inside. The shock was so great that he forgot to cry out.
The sight of the stranger inspired both rage and relief. On the one hand, he was relieved to see a small, attractive woman and not a hulking thug; on the other he was furious at her brazen attempt to break into his house in broad daylight.
‘How did you get in?’ he asked sharply. The woman stood her ground, showing neither embarrassment nor fear.
‘I knocked and the back door was open. I'm sorry to disturb you.’
‘Disturb me?’
Viktor's fear had vanished, replaced by an urgent need to let off steam. He rounded on the woman. ‘To hell with the disturbance. The shock nearly killed me!’