You Are Dead

40

Saturday 13 December

Jacob Van Dam had a sleepless night in the spare bedroom across the corridor from his wife’s room, where he had spent most nights for the past decade, with a mask over his face delivering compressed air. He’d suffered sleep apnoea for years, snoring heavily and turning restlessly, constantly waking his wife, until she couldn’t take it any longer.

He’d actually been sleeping pretty well recently, he thought. But the emotional turmoil in his mind since the strange Dr Harrison Hunter — if indeed he was any kind of medical doctor — had entered his life — and his head — was now keeping him awake.

The man was worrying him like hell.

Who are you, Dr Hunter?

What sick game are you trying to play with me?

He was trying to think clearly through his tiredness.

U R DEAD

What was that about? He’d had plenty of experience, in his career, of people with sick fantasies. They would read of a crime in the media and immediately phone the police and confess to it. Fortunately most clever Senior Investigating Officers kept back certain bits of information that would be known only to the offender and to no one else — which helped them to eliminate time-wasters.

Yet there was something about Dr Hunter that prevented him from dismissing him completely. His confidence, his body language, his whole behaviour, erratic though it was, made him feel deeply uncomfortable.

Would he be helping to find his niece by calling the police and telling them what he knew? Or would he be condemning Logan to death? He felt, and he had been dwelling on this all through the day and night, that Hunter did know something of value. The man had paid his secretary the five-hundred-pound consultancy fee in cash, before the appointment. Would someone who was just a fantasist really have done that?

He looked at the luminous digital figures of his clock radio. 6:05 a.m. Logan was beautiful, smart and kind. She had always had a child-like innocence about her. She was not the kind of person to suddenly disappear.

What did Harrison Hunter know?

Where did his idea that she had a tattoo come from?

He drifted into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke a short while later, to Rachel standing over him with a cup of tea in her hand, wishing him a good morning and reminding him they had to go to the christening of their granddaughter, Hannah, today down in Chichester, his mind was no clearer as to what he ought to do.