Splinter

31

‘There must be,’ Marc said wearily, although he knew his father-in-law was telling the truth. He’d known it the moment his key fitted and the door swung open. Just as it did here in the living room, everything looked exactly the way he’d left it that morning.

Sandra had never been fussy, that was for sure. She was quite as capable as he was of turning a tidy room into a shambles in no time at all. But her love of plants was so great that she would never have carelessly uprooted her favourite bonsai and left it lying beside its own potting compost. And that fact allowed of only one conclusion.

Sandra wasn’t here – never had been.

Marc felt Constantin sit down beside him. ‘I’m losing my mind,’ he whispered with his eyes shut.

‘No, you aren’t.’

‘I am.’ Marc kneaded his temples. The soothing pressure did nothing to relieve the nausea constantly simmering away inside him. ‘I saw her. I could have put out my hand and touched her.’

‘Here, take this.’

He looked up. His father-in-law must have found a plastic mug in the kitchen and was holding it out. He himself had appropriated a cut-glass tumbler with a slightly chipped rim.

‘Drink up, it’s only water. You need plenty of fluid when you’re in shock.’

The white mug’s thin, fluted sides made a crackling sound as Marc grasped it. Its contents gleamed like the surface of a dark lake in the dim light. He raised it to his lips but stopped short.

‘Just water?’

‘What else?’

Constantin deposited his glass on the coffee table. Then he took Marc’s plastic mug and drained it in one. ‘Satisfied?’

He looked down at Marc with a paternal expression.

‘I’m sorry.’

Constantin nodded and picked up his glass again. It left a ring of moisture behind on the coffee table. ‘But I ought to give you something to relax you soon. I’m genuinely worried about you, Marc.’

‘That makes two of us.’

I feel like someone who’s swallowed a magnet that attracts insanity, not metal, and I’m very much afraid its effects are getting stronger by the minute.

‘Come on, it’s getting late. Let’s go to the clinic.’ Constantin put his empty glass down, plumb on the wet ring. He held out his hand, but Marc had shut his eyes again. He had learnt, even as a boy, that he could think better when not all his senses were activated. When he opened them again his father-in-law was standing at the window, tracing the course of a raindrop trickling down the pane like a teardrop.

‘How often do you think of that day in May? How long ago was it exactly?’ Constantin’s voice had gone husky all of a sudden.

That day in May.

They had never referred to it as anything else. In their conversations it had never been ‘the day Sandra was attacked’ or ‘the day they gagged her and tied her to the kitchen stove with a wire noose’. Nor was it ‘the day Sandra should really have accompanied him to a lecture but stayed behind at her father’s house because of morning sickness’.

‘Christian would be three now,’ Marc replied.

‘Exactly. It was three years ago.’

Constantin sighed, as if an eternity had gone by since then. And it had, in a sense. Sandra had been pregnant once before. The burglars came just as she had settled down with a family pack of crème brûlée ice cream on her lap to watch an old King of Queens DVD. It was six hours before Constantin came home. By then the two thugs in ski masks had forced the safe, stripped the walls of valuable originals and gone off with cash, a collection of antique clocks, all the family silver and an old laptop.

Six hours.

The bleeding had started three-quarters of an hour before.

‘Is that why you didn’t want to choose a name for your second baby?’

Marc nodded. ‘Yes. That day destroyed so many things. We thought she could never have another child. When she became pregnant after all, we didn’t want to tempt providence. Pure superstition.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Ironical, isn’t it?’

Constantin turned round. He looked infinitely old all of a sudden. ‘You’re wrong, you know.’

Marc stared at him. ‘What do you mean?

‘You said that day destroyed a lot of things. It’s true, of course. Cruel as it may sound, though, it granted you another three years of happiness together.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sandra was going to leave you, Marc.’

‘What?’

Marc shivered, hunching his shoulders like someone expecting an ice cube to land on the back of his neck at any moment.

‘I’m not sure, but I think that was why she was staying with us out at Sakrow. She wanted a word with me as soon as I came home from the clinic.’ Constantin was breathing heavily now. ‘She called me – said it was about your relationship and another man she’d met recently.’

‘That can’t be so,’ said Marc, although he had every reason to believe his father-in-law. Dismal old memories elbowed their way into the forefront of his mind. He had tried to suppress them back then, attributing Sandra’s behaviour to hormonally governed mood swings during pregnancy. At first she had simply been distrait and silent, but she became steadily more withdrawn until it seemed that her self-absorption had given way to depression. He offered to cancel all his commitments and stay at home with her until the birth, but Sandra wouldn’t have it. She went walking by herself for hours, even in neighbourhoods she normally steered clear of. One day, when he had been visiting the parents of a notorious truant in Neukölln, he caught sight of her emerging from a seedy café and getting into a taxi, lost in thought. When he raised the subject that evening she flew off the handle and ‘refused to testify, Counsellor’.

‘Who was the other man?’ Marc asked. It was the question that had tormented him at the time.

Constantin shrugged. ‘I really have no idea. We never got a chance to clear the air. When she came round after the emergency op she wouldn’t say another word on the subject. All she wanted was to see you.’

Marc felt a touch of cramp in his calf and struggled to his feet. For some strange reason he was involuntarily reminded, at this of all times, of a tired old joke his father had told him: You can always recognize men of fifty or over by the way they groan whenever they sit down or get to their feet. By that measure he himself had aged eighteen years in a single day.

‘Why tell me this now?’ Marc demanded. He picked up the empty plastic mug Constantin had drained and deposited on the coffee table. He had to go to the bathroom, dunk his head in the basin and take some medication at last.

Constantin didn’t reply until he’d already shut the bathroom door behind him. ‘Because you asked me just now why I still regard you as my son. A tragedy can form a tremendous bond between people who love each other.’

‘Fine, then let me know when you can’t stand me any more and I’ll kill someone else…’

Marc propped both forearms on the washbasin, staring at the place on the wall that should really have been occupied by a mirror. He was glad he hadn’t bothered to put one up. It spared him the sight of his own haggard face.

‘Stop hiding behind your sense of humour,’ Constantin called, his voice muffled by the door between them. ‘It’s just self-pity.’

‘That’s the second time in twenty-four hours I’ve been told something of the kind,’ Marc muttered, reaching for the tap. He was about to turn it on and run cold water over the inside of his wrists when his eye lighted on the crack between the plug and the plughole.

What on earth…?

He bent down and extracted the chrome-plated plug. It came away with a faint plop.

It can’t be…

Dangling from the black rubber gasket was a single human hair. It was about fifteen centimetres long and curly at the lower end like a treble clef. Involuntarily, he clutched the back of his head, which he hadn’t shaved for four days.

‘Constantin,’ he called hoarsely. No answer, so he called again, louder this time.

So I was right after all.

He stared as if mesmerized at the blonde hair draped over his forefinger, which certainly wasn’t his. His hand trembled as he put it to his nose. He couldn’t smell anything, of course, but he was quite sure.

Sandra…

The flat had been renovated before he took it over. The washbasin was brand-new and he’d no guests.

This proves it. She was here.

He shut his eyes, clasped one trembling hand with the other and drew a deep breath. Then, clutching the hair in his fist like a child clutching a coin en route for a sweet shop, he hurried out of the bathroom.

‘Constantin? I haven’t gone mad, this proves it!’ he called. On his way back to the living room he barked his shin on the leg of a metal stool protruding from a half-open packing case, but the pain was blotted out by sheer consternation when he came hobbling in. The window was wide open.

The living room in which he’d just been sitting on the sofa with his father-in-law was deserted. Constantin had vanished. So had the tumbler and the ring of moisture on the coffee table.