Splinter

12

‘Leana Schmidt?’ He repeated the name she’d given him once before. That day, a few hours earlier, immediately after Julia’s attempted suicide at the open-air baths in Neukölln. Her hair still looked as if it had been ironed flat at the back and he thought he glimpsed a plain, pale-grey trouser suit beneath her trenchcoat, which was buttoned up at the neck. The only thing that slightly dented the somewhat stern impression she made was a supermarket plastic bag overflowing with ‘women’s purchases’ – the sort of goods which men ignore on principle, like bunches of radishes or sticks of celery. Sandra and he used to laugh at their disparate shopping habits. She would fill her supermarket trolley with fresh fruit, low-fat cottage cheese, fabric conditioner and parsley, whereas he lingered in front of promotion racks stacked with blank CDs and cordless drills, or bags of crisps.

‘How on earth did you find me?’

The slim creature put her shopping down and kneaded her fingers where the handle of the bag had cut into them.

‘I went to your office. They gave me your address.’

She spoke briskly, almost as if she expected him to apologize for keeping her waiting so long.

‘Well, what do you want?’

‘I’m… I was the nurse on your brother’s ward.’

‘Well?’

He took out his front-door key, not that he had to use it. Although one of the list of house rules he’d been handed when moving in exhorted tenants to lock the door to the street after eight at night, they observed it as seldom as they did the ban on dumping glass bottles in the communal refuse bin.

‘I’m worried about Benny,’ she said firmly, and Marc gained a pretty good idea of how this resolute woman treated her patients. Her tone was professional without being intimidating – a combination to prevent them from feeling patronized but authoritative enough to deter them from questioning her instructions. Leana Schmidt was probably not an ordinary nurse but the sister in charge of a ward, or at least on the way to becoming so.

The automatic light in the lobby came on as Marc went inside. She picked up her shopping bag and followed him in.

‘He told me you saved his life once.’

‘Really?’ Marc said curtly.

Eighteen months ago he had found Benny in the bath with his wrists cut. They normally met only once a year – at Christmas beside their parents’ grave – but that morning his mobile had registered three unanswered calls and his mailbox had recorded a message – almost unintelligible it was so broken up and overlaid with static – in what sounded like his brother’s voice. When Benny didn’t respond to his calls, Marc had obeyed a spontaneous impulse and driven to his place. There he received a drastic demonstration that the message on his mobile had been intended as a last farewell.

‘I don’t think you should have retracted your statement.’ Leana blinked. ‘To the judges and doctors, I mean.’

Marc still couldn’t fathom where this odd conversation was leading. When he’d saved Benny’s life by calling the emergency services, he’d employed an old trick that always led to an attempted suicide being placed under immediate psychiatric supervision: he stated that Benny had previously threatened to kill him as well. This automatically branded his brother a danger to the public. It also constituted a criminal offence. Since Benny had already attempted suicide several times, an overall view of the circumstances warranted his temporary committal to a secure institution. Marc’s lie had been a means to an end: getting his brother off the streets and out of an environment that was quite clearly dragging him ever deeper into the mire. Besides, Benny wouldn’t find it as easy to get hold of a belt or a razor blade in a psychiatric ward. He would also be out of Eddy Valka’s orbit at last.

‘Look,’ said Marc, ‘I’ve had enough would-be suicides for one day…’ He tried to open his letterbox, but some vandal seemed to have messed up the lock with a screwdriver.

Not that on top of everything else!

The key wouldn’t fit, so the only post he could get at was a furniture brochure stuck in the slit.

‘…so, if you’ve no objection, I’d like to call it a night and-’

‘Your brother changed so suddenly,’ she broke in. ‘From one day to the next.’

She caught hold of his sleeve. He was tugging at it in an attempt to free himself when the light went off. The timer had run out, and since the antiquated switch in the hallway wasn’t equipped with an LED in the usual way, he took a while to grope his way over to it. By the time the light came on again he was feeling utterly exhausted and incapable of putting an end to his conversation with this mysterious nurse.

‘Of course Benny changed,’ he said. ‘He was in a loony bin.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t mean that. He’d let himself go for months on end. Wouldn’t shave, wouldn’t eat, lay awake all night. He often refused to leave his room – became genuinely violent when asked to do so.’

Marc nodded resignedly. This was no news to him. It was why the doctors’ prognosis had been so poor and Benny’s temporary admission had turned into long-term confinement.

‘But from one day to the next,’ said Leana, narrowing her eyes in a way that rendered her gaze still more intense, ‘about a month before his reassessment, he underwent a sudden change. He asked for fruit juice and vitamin pills, went jogging in the grounds under supervision – even took to reading the Bible.’

‘The Bible?’

That really did sound unlike his kid brother.

‘I’m not sure if it means anything,’ she went on, ‘but Benny’s behaviour changed the day after he had an MRI scan.’

An MRI scan? Was Benny’s mental disorder physical in origin?

‘And here’s another strange thing. We normally scan the brain for anomalies, but they only scanned the lower part of his body although he’d never complained that anything was wrong. I got hold of the pictures.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. He’s perfectly fit.’

‘You aren’t a doctor, Leana.’

‘But I’ve got a pair of eyes in my head. Several times after that scan I caught him trying to spit out his medication. When I spoke to him about it he said he didn’t want his body absorbing any more poison.’

Marc turned and took a step towards her. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘I think he put on an act for the board of examiners.’

‘Why would he do that? He knew I was withdrawing my statement.’

Marc had ceased to care about anything after his life was rent apart by tragedy and the accident robbed him of what he loved most. Constantin had found it easy enough to persuade him to withdraw the false allegation that had consigned his brother to a mental institution, even though he himself would now be facing a charge of perjury.

‘Get your brother out of there,’ his father-in-law had urged him. ‘You need him. He’s the only family you’ve got left.’

Although he had thought and worried about his unstable brother every day until Sandra’s death, nothing had mattered to him afterwards. He no longer wondered whether Benny was better off in a secure unit than on the street; his own mental state had robbed him of the ability to distinguish between right decisions and wrong. Especially tonight, after a day on which he’d had to dissuade a girl from committing suicide and undergone a marathon of a medical examination shortly afterwards.

Marc experienced a surge of anger. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you surely didn’t ambush me just because Benny has suddenly discovered he’s got a health-conscious streak?’

‘No.’

‘So why?’

‘I’m very worried, as I said. You really ought to keep an eye on him. I don’t think he’s capable of surviving out here on his own.’

No need to tell me that. After all, I found him in the bath that time.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘This.’

Putting her bag down, she reached into the inside pocket of her coat and took out a bulging envelope.

‘I found it in his room when I was changing the sheets an hour after he was discharged.’

She opened the envelope. Marc was at a loss for words.

‘Fifteen thousand euros. The notes are genuine,’ she said, sounding rather hesitant and helpless for the first time. ‘I don’t know what they mean, and I’ve no idea how your brother came by them in a secure unit.’