Splinter

26

The hot-water tap wasn’t working. The other gushed like diesel from a pump for HGVs, but the water was too cold to dissolve the aspirin tablet Marc had dropped into the tooth mug. The hotel bathroom was a windowless cubby hole partitioned off from the bedroom by thin plasterboard walls that provided optical privacy at most, but certainly not acoustic. He could even hear Emma tossing more papers into her holdall.

What deadly secret are you carrying around with you?

He wondered whether to tell her about the last few minutes before the accident. About the moment when Sandra undid her seatbelt in order to get something from the back seat.

That coarse-grained, monochrome photo. The one I couldn’t make out.

But what did that sequence, which seemed to him more like a dream than a genuine memory, have to do with the shock waves whose turbulence now engulfed him? Who was so anxious to brainwash him? He could scarcely recall the last few minutes before the crash in any case. There was no need to expunge his memory of them; it had dissipated of its own accord, thanks to the painkillers they’d given him at the scene of the accident.

He opened the bathroom cabinet in search of a nail file or some other implement with which to break up the aspirin, but the hotel’s complimentaries were limited to a two-pack of condoms older than its use-by date. Shutting the cabinet again, he flinched at his own reflection in the mirror. His face looked as if a seismic shock had sent its individual features into free-fall. His sunken eyes surmounted two pendulous pouches, and even the corners of his mouth seem to be sagging under the effect of gravity. It was a long time since he’d coerced them into a smile.

Dusty though it was, the overhead light shed a glare that accentuated his look of general ill health. The colour of his eyes and skin was reminiscent of someone suffering from jaundice.

He held his wrists under the icy jet. Its chill helped him to sort out his thoughts. If the Bleibtreu Clinic and the amnesia experiment really existed, he hadn’t gone mad but become the victim of a conspiracy.

That was the good news. The bad news: if she wasn’t dead, his wife must be actively involved in that conspiracy.

But why? To what end?

Why would Sandra want to subject him to such unutterable torment? Why would she have faked her death and come to life a short while later, only to traumatize him still further by pretending not to know him? Was she capable of such cruelty?

True, she was an actress. She found it easy to take people in. Marc remembered their first date only too well. She had invited him to a performance at her drama school, introduced him to her fellow students as her brother, and then shocked them by kissing him passionately on the lips two minutes later. After that they had made a game out of putting each other in embarrassing situations. His revenge for the incestuous kiss had been to stand up in the middle of her next public appearance and clap so frenetically that she burst out laughing and forgot her lines. They were both proficient in swapping roles, but never in order to wound each other. Sandra’s acting ability and her sense of fun had formed a bond between them, never a rift. Besides, there was no reason for her to want to destroy what they had built up together.

Unless…

Marc stirred the aspirin with his forefinger. Only a third of it had dissolved.

Unless this really is a matter of life and death.

He took a swallow, although the tablet wasn’t even frothing on the surface. On a scale between white- and red-hot, his headache was entering the incandescent zone.

Or…

The thin disposable cup crumpled in his hand as a possible explanation occurred to him.

What if it’s Sandra who is in the Bleibtreu programme, not me? What if she genuinely can’t remember me any more?

Throwing the broken cup onto the floor, he opened the bathroom door and headed back to the bedroom along the narrow passage flanked by the wardrobe. He must ask Emma what she knew about his wife. Perhaps she’d gathered that Sandra had also been part of the experimental programme. Although that would raise a myriad new questions, it would at least account for her whereabouts during the last few weeks, not to mention her recent behaviour.

The premises were so cramped that the open wardrobe door was barring his route back to the bedroom. He was about to shut it when the sound of his own name abruptly froze him to the spot.

‘Marc Lucas,’ Emma was saying in a low voice. ‘I’ve found him. We’re now at the Tegel Inn Hotel on Bernauer Strasse.’

Holding his breath, Marc peered through the narrow crack between the wardrobe door and the outer wall of the bathroom.

What the hell’s going on?

No doubt about it: Emma was on the phone to someone.

‘It’s now one minute to midnight,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if I can persuade him to come with me.’

He drew back. In an even lower voice, she said: ‘It’ll be hard to gain his trust. He’s very suspicious.’

The last words were like a starting pistol. Heedless of what he might be leaving behind in the room, he quietly opened the main door and stole out into the corridor. The overhead light had gone out. The corridor was in darkness, so he had to find his way by means of the thin slivers of light escaping from under some of the doors.

Who was Emma talking to? What was her role in this crazy affair?

He didn’t dare put on speed till he reached the stairs, which he raced down two at a time. He almost lost his footing when he reached the ground floor and slalomed around the reception desk.

‘Oh, you were in all the time…’ the night porter called after him.

Marc continued on his way to the exit, walking backwards. ‘Was it you who knocked earlier on?’

‘Yes. There’s a problem with the hot water, and…’

He didn’t hear the rest. It was swallowed up by the revolving door that propelled him out of the hotel and into the street.

What now? Where to?

The traffic was noticeably sparser. There was no one in sight but a shift worker walking his cocker spaniel.

Where shall I go? Without money, without a car, without a home… without any memories?

He stood beside the kerb at some temporary traffic lights, looking first left and then right like some well-trained schoolboy. Behind him, the hotel’s neon sign deluded potential guests with three stick-on stars.

His wristwatch vibrated, reminding him of another vital necessity he lacked: the pills for the splinter in his neck.

The man with the cocker spaniel was coming towards him, far too engrossed in his mobile phone to notice that his dog had been wanting to relieve itself for a considerable time.

Marc looked up at the third floor, where light showing through cracks in the blind denoted Emma’s probable location. He wondered if he’d left his mobile up there but found it in his jacket pocket.

He opened the phone and decided to go right, guessing that a busier intersection lay in that direction – possibly an Underground station as well. He seemed to have inadvertently turned off his mobile after that last call in the taxi, because the display was dead. It couldn’t be for lack of juice, because when he turned it on he was asked for his PIN number. The first time it beeped a warning he thought he must have mistyped the number. The second beep reminded him of the strange man who had answered his own number – and called himself Marc Lucas! After the third attempt he felt sure he didn’t know the code for the swapped SIM card. He came to a halt, satisfied himself that no one had been following him, and wiped a raindrop off the display.

Input incorrect.

Utterly exhausted, he read the second line of the automated error message.

Phoned locked.

And suddenly knew what he had to do.