Splinter

52

For a moment he thought he was still dreaming, except that he wasn’t in Sandra’s car any more. He was in an antique shop, and the grey-haired owner had bedded him down on a sofa redolent of tobacco and wood smoke, its cushions so plump and yielding they threatened to smother him. He tried to raise his head, which was supported by a neck roll, but this quickly proved to be an impossible undertaking – unless he wanted to throw up over one of the numerous carpets covering the floor.

‘Where am I?’ he asked, remembering the attorney whose request for water he’d refused.

And who knocked me out.

He felt his head, which was still ringing, and noticed that his right sleeve had been rolled up. The plaster in the crook of his arm suggested that someone had taken a blood sample.

He blinked in surprise, and even that hurt. His eyelids were gummed together by a milky secretion.

‘Don’t worry, you’re among friends,’ he heard the antique dealer say. Now, having wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes, he was able to get a better view of his new surroundings. The sofa’s companion piece was a wing chair positioned so that anyone sitting in it could look out of the window and see the sofa and the fireplace at the same time. But that was the only set-up that made any sense. All the other furniture – bookcases, chests of drawers, upright chairs, a desk, even a tea trolley – was randomly arranged and mismatched in colour and style. The room reminded him of his own untidy flat, except that the removal firm’s boxes were missing and every available surface was covered with medical textbooks, reports and articles.

‘Friends?’ Marc looked over at the fireplace.

Standing beside it, shoulder to shoulder with the elderly stranger, were Emma and his brother. Benny looked just as he had the last time they met – a weary, unshaven figure in cargo pants and bomber jacket – whereas Emma was looking somewhat better and had a white bandage over her left ear. Someone must have seen to it, and if Marc’s inference from the medical diplomas on the mantelpiece was correct, he had a pretty good idea who it was.

‘Who are you?’ he asked the old man, whom he no longer took to be an antique dealer.

‘I’m Professor Niclas Haberland.’ The words were accompanied by a smile. ‘But my friends call me Caspar.’

‘How did I get here?’

‘You can thank your brother for that. He brought you to me.’

Marc looked at Benny. He noticed only now that some of his symptoms had disappeared. Although he still felt sick and his head was buzzing like a swarm of bees, he wasn’t feeling as bad as he had over the last few hours. He wondered what the Professor had given him.

‘I followed the two of you,’ Benny volunteered.

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

Marc nodded. The movement made his neck twinge. He hoped his fall in the cellar hadn’t jolted the splinter nearer his spinal cord, and that it was only a trapped nerve.

Yes, I know why. That’s the reason I came to see you.

‘You asked for my help, you ass, and you know perfectly well how I react to that.’

‘You did a runner.’

‘Yes, I had some urgent business to attend to. But then, as I was sitting in my car, my conscience pricked me. You’re still my brother, after all, no matter what’s happened between us.’

Emma had gone over to the window. ‘What a coincidence!’ she said scathingly. ‘First he tries to kill us, then he turns up like a fairy godmother.’

Marc ignored this. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

‘You think I’ve lost my powers of intuition?’

Marc almost shook his head but remembered the trapped nerve just in time.

‘You wanted to see Sandra again. The only likely place to start looking was your former home.’

Summoning up all his strength, Marc struggled into a sitting position. The room seemed to rotate for a moment, first one way, then the other. To his surprise he very soon felt much better than he had when he first sat up. His sense of balance gradually returned and his nausea, too, subsided.

‘Anyway,’ Benny went on, ‘I drove out to Eichkamp and spotted this nutcase outside the house, asleep in her Beetle.’ He indicated Emma with a derisive jerk of his head. ‘Then I waited a while. When you didn’t come out after twenty minutes I went inside and found you down in the cellar.’

Marc looked first at Benny, then at Emma, and finally out of the window at the far end of the room, which evidently doubled as the professor’s living room and study. The house they were in could not have been much bigger than the ‘villa’. Judging by the clumsily split logs stacked beside the fireplace and the unbroken expanse of trees outside the window, it was quite possibly just a cabin in the forest.

‘What about that attorney?’ asked Marc, feeling the back of his head. There was a lump about five centimetres above the plaster over his splinter wound.

‘What lawyer? You were alone down there.’

Marc’s stomach muscles tensed. ‘And the film script? It was lying on the desk.’

‘Hey, I didn’t waste any time looking around when I found you lying senseless on the floor. I simply humped you outside and drove you to the prof. That makes us quits.’

Benny folded his arms. Emma gave a contemptuous snort, almost as if she were about to spit on the floor.

‘I don’t believe a word you say,’ she said.

‘But I do,’ said Haberland, who had been following this exchange from the wing chair. He glanced enquiringly at Benny.

‘Go ahead, Professor, I release you from your oath of patient confidentiality,’ Benny said with a smile, zipping up his bomber jacket. ‘Deliver your lecture. I’m going outside for a smoke.’