You Are Dead

33

Friday 12 December

Stationsschwester Anette Lippert was seventy-five minutes into the night shift in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital where she had trained and spent most of her career to date. The Klinikum München Schwabing was, in her view deservedly, reputed to have one of the finest neurological departments in Germany with a nurse to every patient in the ICU.

As the senior staff nurse she normally took the morning shift, because that was when most of the transfers and operations took place, but with an epidemic of flu sweeping the city of Munich they were currently several nurses down and she was having to work around the clock some days to help cover.

The night shift was long and tedious, during which little tended to happen. The unit was kept at a carefully regulated twenty-four degrees Celsius, which sometimes felt stiflingly warm — although the patients who occupied the fifteen beds there never complained. Many of them never spoke. One exception was the comatose, unidentified woman in bed 12, who made occasional confused, sporadic utterings.

Stopping to check on each patient in turn, and getting an update from their charge nurse, accompanied by two doctors, Lippert reached bed 12. The occupant was a woman in her mid to late thirties, with short brown hair, her face heavily bandaged. She had been semi-comatose since being hit by a taxi a month ago whilst crossing Widenmayerstrasse, the busy main road that ran through one of the city of Munich’s smartest districts, separating it from the river Isar.

She had been admitted here as Unbekannte Frau.

An eyewitness to the accident had told the police, with disgust, that as she had lain in the road, some helmeted bastard on a motorcycle had pulled up, snatched her handbag from the road and accelerated off.

For forty-eight hours, no one had any idea who she was. Then a young boy, back from football camp, in tears because his mama had not collected him on his return from his trip, had been brought in here by the police and identified her as his mother, Frau Lohmann. Yet, despite this, she remained something of an enigma.

It seemed, so the police had informed the hospital, that Frau Lohmann had gone to some considerable lengths to erase her past. A search of her apartment, her computer and her mobile phone had revealed no clues as to who she really was. It appeared that she had at least two faked identities, including forged passports and social insurance numbers. Her credit cards were in her assumed names. She had over three million euros on deposit in a Munich bank, under one of these names, and had managed to open that account some nine years earlier by getting through its money-laundering protocols with her false documentation.

Interpol would take several weeks before they had results — if any — of fingerprint and DNA tests. But because of the police interest in her, she was due to be moved into one of the private rooms at the side of the ward as soon as one became vacant.

Lippert stared at her now. Her eyes were closed, as they had been since she had first arrived here. Her breathing was controlled by a ventilator, and she was catheterized. Fluids containing the various nutrients that kept her alive were steadily pumped into her through the dual lumen central line catheter that protruded from her upper chest.

Who are you really? Anette Lippert wondered. Where were you heading to when you were hit by that taxi? Where had you come from? What have you been running away from?

The police were doing all they could. She had various aliases, they had told the hospital. At some point in her life, before her son was born, she had changed her name, at least twice. But they could not give any reason why. Perhaps to escape from a nightmare relationship? A criminal past? A terrorist? The police were continuing with their investigations.

Meanwhile, Frau Lohmann continued to sleep. Kept alive by the tubes cannulated into her body.

And Anette Lippert continued to stare down at her, with a feeling of deep sadness. Someone loved you, once. You have a son. Come back to us. Wake up! Your son needs you.

Occasionally Frau Lohmann would take a sharp intake of breath. But her eyes would remain closed.

Always closed.

There were no relatives — at least, none that her son, Bruno, knew of. He was now staying with one of his friends, whose parents brought him frequently to visit.

What the hell is locked in your mind? Lippert wondered. How do we unlock it?

On the fourth round of her shift, shortly after midnight, when Anette Lippert was once again staring down at her, the woman suddenly, and very briefly, opened her eyes.

‘Tell him I forgive him,’ she said, then closed them again.

‘Tell who?’

But all she got back was the steady puff-hiss-puff-hiss of the ventilator, and the beep-beep-beep-beep from the monitors.

Locked inside her skull, Sandy heard their voices. She understood what they were saying. But she felt like she was swimming underwater at the deep end of a pool. She could not talk back to them.

‘Tell who?’ Lippert pressed.

But she was gone again. Gone into some deep, inaccessible recess of her brain.

Lippert lingered for some while, then moved on to the next bed.