“Good lad. Tony said you wouldn’t let me down.”
“Tony knows we’re here, does he?”
“Couldn’t leave him out of the loop, Tim. Matter of fact, he’s… prepared the ground for us.”
“How d’you mean?”
“I’ll explain as we go.”
***
They could have taken a train into the city centre, but Tozer preferred a taxi. The driver’s severely limited command of English ensured the degree of privacy he evidently required.
“It was actually Tony who handled the arrangements with the Horstelmann Clinic on my behalf,” he revealed as the taxi sped along the autobahn towards Munich through the pewter-grey Bavarian morning. “Using Nathan Gashry as cover was his idea too.”
“Has he had another idea?”
“Sort of. We kept the clinic sweet-and discreet-by fixing up a couple of freebies for the chief administrator. He got to meet some celebs at the Cannes Film Festival-that kind of thing. We run a stable of potentially influential people who owe us favours. Ulbricht, the administrator, is one of them, thanks to accepting our generosity. Tony spoke to him yesterday and reminded him of that. Result: the bloke’s interrupting his weekend to meet us this afternoon.”
“Does he know anything about Hayley?”
“He didn’t yesterday. But hopefully he’ll have found out if she’s contacted anyone at the clinic by the time we see him. My bet is she has. That must be the help she told Ann Gashry she was getting.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Yeah.” Tozer rubbed his jaw reflectively. “I never thought I’d find myself going back to the Horstelmann Clinic, that’s a fact.”
“When were you last there?”
“Three years ago. Shortly after Kerry’s parents were killed. I spoke to her doctor. Just to confirm there was… no chance of a recovery. I did my best for her. I even asked if her sister had been in touch. When I was told she hadn’t, I… assumed she’d washed her hands of her family. Well, as it stood then, with the Foxtons dead, there seemed no point carrying on. It wasn’t actually my decision. But when I stopped paying for Kerry’s treatment…”
“They stopped treating her.”
“She was already dead, Tim. She was never going to come out of that coma.”
“Why did you pay for her to go to the Horstelmann Clinic in the first place, then?”
“I felt responsible for what had happened to her. I wanted to do something-anything-that might… ease my conscience, I suppose. I didn’t expect any miracles. But the Foxtons did, of course. And I’d have been happy to pay for them to go on expecting them indefinitely.”
“But you wouldn’t have been happy for them to know you were paying.”
“They wouldn’t have understood. They’d have taken it as proof that I murdered their daughter. So would a good few others. Ray Trathen for one. So, I kept it quiet. I told no one except Tony.”
“Not even Carol?”
“No.” Tozer grimaced. “I didn’t want any… bad memories… getting between us.”
“Does she know now?”
Tozer nodded. “I told her straight after you called.”
“How did she react?”
“She wasn’t best pleased, to put it mildly. She finished up saying I’d got us into this mess… and had better get us out.” Tozer gave Harding a ruefully crumpled sidelong grin. “Well, she’s right, isn’t she?”
They booked into a city centre hotel selected for them by Whybrow The Cortiina was his sort of place-smart, reserved and efficient. After a snatched lunch in the hotel bar, they ordered a taxi and headed for the Horstelmann Clinic.
It was too soon for Harding to have any grasp of the geography of Munich. They were bound for Schwabing, according to Tozer. It looked a nice part of town through the taxi window-quiet and prosperous, an ideal location for the kind of establishment the Horstelmann was.
The clinic was, in the event, hard to distinguish at a glance from the elegant apartment blocks lining the side-street it was situated in. Its double-doored entrance was wider, but not by much. The brass plaque bearing its name was modestly proportioned. And Harding did not notice that the door handles were fashioned in the likeness of medical caducei until he was about to push at one of them-only for the doors to swing open automatically at the last moment.
The reception area had the hushed and wood-panelled air of an exclusive spa, with a statuesque blonde on duty to complete the effect. They were, of course, expected. She directed them to the lift with an orthodontically idealized smile. And they reached Herr Ulbricht’s office without glimpsing a single nurse, far less a patient.
“Welcome, Mr. Tozer.”
Ulbricht was a neat, fussy little man in occupation of a neat, fussy but by no means little office. His hair was fair, almost yellow, complementing the strange golden hue of his skin. His small, round eyes sparkled opalescently behind small, round glasses. He seemed slightly breathless, if not nervous, though whether their presence was the cause of this remained unclear.
“And your friend…”
“Tim Harding.”
“Welcome also.” They shook hands. Ulbricht’s palm was clammy, but his grip was tight. “Sit. Please.”
Harding and Tozer took the chairs arranged in front of the desk. Ulbricht sat behind it, separated from them by several feet of pale, polished wood conspicuously bare of paperwork. At the Horstelmann, less was evidently more in all departments.
“Mr. Whybrow explained the… difficulty of your situation,” said Ulbricht, his smile of greeting fading slowly.
“Good,” Tozer responded.
“I have made… enquiries.”
“We’re grateful, Heinz, believe me.” Ulbricht’s first name had not previously been mentioned. Tozer’s use of it now struck Harding as calculated-a declaration of the extent to which the administrator was beholden to him.
“We have rules… of confidentiality.”
“Which we understand. And respect.”
“So, what I say… must be…”
“Between us.” Tozer squeezed his forefinger and thumb together and ran them across his mouth as if zipping it shut. “Absolutely.”
“Very good.” Ulbricht cleared his throat and reassembled his smile. “It appears… Miss Foxton-Miss Hayley Foxton-came into the clinic Thursday. She desired to speak with the doctor who was in charge of her sister’s case. This was a big surprise. We had no records of a sister. But she showed her passport. The date of birth and the place of birth matched our records of Kerry Foxton. Also, one of the nurses… recognized her. Noticed the resemblance, I mean. This was… embarrassing. As next of kin, she should have been informed of the decision to… to…” Ulbricht’s mouth shaped itself round several possible expressions, none of which made it into speech.
“The decision to terminate Kerry,” suggested Harding, drawing a frown from Tozer.
“Ja,” said Ulbricht, with a slight nod of the head. “This is so. Procedure required it. But… we were not told about her.” There was a hint of reproof in his glance at Tozer. “We did not know.”
“Did she get to speak to the doctor?” Tozer prompted.
“Ja. Friday. Dr. Hanckel met with her. There was no problem. She… understood. She gave no complaint. She only wanted to… speak about her sister… and her time here.”
“So, Hanckel filled her in?” asked Tozer.
“He told her… as much as he could.”
“And then?”
“She left.”
“That was it?”
“Not… exactly. Dr. Hanckel gave her some… items belonging to her sister. We had kept them after the… termination. And he suggested she contact her sister’s… companion.”
“Her what?” put in Harding.
“We have a… Begleiter Programm for coma patients. Each patient has a companion who visits them regularly. To talk to them. To read to them. It shows good results. But not always. Natürlich. And not for Kerry Foxton. Still, the companion spent
longer with her than anyone else, so… Dr. Hanckel thought it could help Hayley to speak with him.”
“Can we speak with him?” asked Tozer.
“I will give you his name and contact details. I have not contacted him myself. He no longer works for us. It must be a… private matter between you.”
“Sure.”
“What about those items Hayley took away with her?” asked Harding.
“Minor personal effects. Nothing valuable. Nothing important. But our policy is to store those things for five years if they are not removed by the family.”
“What were they?”
Ulbricht slid open a drawer in his desk and read from a note he had presumably left there with this query in mind. “Some earrings. A necklace. A brooch. Several books and CDs.” He looked up. “Dr. Hanckel would have asked Mr. and Mrs. Foxton to bring some of Kerry’s favourite books for the companion to read from. And her music to play” He looked back down again. “Ja. There was also a… Blockflöte.”
“Sorry?”
“Blockflöte. I have not the English for it. It is… a pipe children play.”
“A recorder?”
“Ja.” Ulbricht smiled. “A recorder. This is the word.”
A picture formed in Harding’s mind of Kerry Foxton lying in a mutedly lit room somewhere in the Horstelmann Clinic, motionless in her bed, wired, drained and tracheotomized, her eyes firmly closed as the plangent notes of her childhood recorder sounded unheard and unremembered in her ears.
“The companion’s name is Gary Lawton. He is English. This is why he was chosen for Kerry. I do not know what he told Hayley He may have told her nothing. He may tell you nothing.”
“Hayley hasn’t been back here, though, has she?” Harding asked.
“She has not.”
“So, it looks like she got something out of him.”
Ulbricht pursed his lips. “I… cannot say.”
“Don’t worry, Heinz.” Tozer grinned at him. “We’ll ask the man who can say. And we’ll make sure we get an answer.”
TWENTY-NINE
Gary Lawton lived with his German wife, Helga, and their three children in a brand-new little semidetached house of glaring white render, pale brick and orangey terracotta roof tiles deep in newly colonized residential land on the eastern fringe of the city. Harding and Tozer’s arrival at their door excited the children-and the dog-but elicited from Gary and Helga only brittle smiles.
“The Horstelmann Clinic sent you, did they?” Gary asked glumly.
“Yeah,” Tozer replied. “Any chance we could have a word about Hayley Foxton?”
“I suppose. Who did you say you were?”
“Barney Tozer. Tim Harding.”
“Tozer? Don’t I remember that name… in connection with Kerry’s accident?”
“I was the other diver.”
“Ah. You were, were you?”
Helga said something to Gary in German that sounded anxious and reproachful. He smiled grimly and nodded.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, gents.”
“I’m a friend of Hayley’s, Mr. Lawton,” said Harding. “You should know she broke into Barney’s home last Wednesday night and threatened his wife with a knife.”
Gary grimaced. “Oh hell.”
Helga contributed another four pfennigs’ worth. Gary’s response sounded soothing but uncertain. It caused Helga to throw up her hands and stalk away, shooing the children and the dog ahead of her.
“You’d better come in,” said Gary with a frown of resignation.
He led them through to a square, bare-walled lounge dominated by an enormous flat-screen television. The furniture was of the unstructured bean-baggish variety. Patio doors looked out onto a small, immature garden. There were several toys and a large rubber bone lying on the pocket-handkerchief lawn.
“Want a drink?” Lawton asked, taking a swig from a bottle of Löwenbräu standing on the coffee-table. He was lean and round-shouldered, thirty-five or so, with spiky hair and a pasty, small-featured face. There were lots of smile lines round his eyes and mouth and he looked, in his low-slung jeans and sweatshirt, every inch the suburban family man. But his expression was downcast, his glance wary. He was not merely suspicious of his visitors, but anxious about what their journey to his home signified.
Harding and Tozer both declined the offered drink. A fragile silence formed in the room. The cries of the children seeped through from elsewhere in the house. Lawton puffed out his cheeks and took another swig from the bottle.
“When did she come here?” Harding asked.
“She didn’t. She phoned. I went into the city centre to meet her. In a beer-hall.”
“When was that?”
“Early Friday evening.”
“After she’d been to the Horstelmann Clinic?”
“Yeah. Hanckel put her onto me.”
“Because you were Kerry’s… companion.”
“Sounds like you know it all.”
“We don’t know what you told her.”
“No. Well, maybe that’s between me and her.”
“If she pulls any more stunts like last Wednesday and you turn out to have helped her cover her tracks,” growled Tozer, “it won’t look too clever for you.”
“Worried she might have a go at you, are you?”
“Should I be?”
“Maybe.”
“We’re trying to help her, Gary” said Harding. “And she does need help. I’m sure you realize that.”
“I don’t know where she is. She didn’t say where she was staying. She may have left Munich by now for all I know.”
“Just let us in on your chat in the pub,” said Tozer. “We’ll settle for that.”
“We talked about Kerry. That’s it.”
“Come on, Gary” said Harding. “We need to know.”
Lawton cast a sidelong glance behind him into the garden, then sat down in one of the shapeless chairs. Harding and Tozer took up cramped occupation of the sagging sofa opposite him. There was another silence. Gary appeared to be locked in some fierce debate with himself, the darting of his eyes signalling the trading of points. Then, quite suddenly, it was over. He heaved a sigh. “It really was all about Kerry.”
“What about her?” Harding prompted.
Lawton carefully replaced the bottle on the table and rubbed his forehead. “The Begleiter Programm sounds like a cushy number when you sign up for it. Good money, which I needed at the time. Helga and I had just got together and I didn’t have a regular job. The two oldest kids aren’t mine, you see. Anyway, it seemed an easy way to earn some dosh. The clinic’s an OK place to be if you don’t mind the… hermetic atmosphere. And working as a companion? Well, it’s a doddle. So you think when you start, anyway. Sit by the bedsides of these wordless, motionless people and read to them or talk to them or hold their hand or just… just sit. The undead. That’s what they are. The gone but not quite departed. Oh, a few of them come back. Part of the way, but never the whole way, if you know what I mean. Must be like being shut up in prison for a couple of decades. The world you return to isn’t exactly the one you left. Everything’s slightly but crucially… off.”
“The job got to you, did it?” asked Tozer, with the hint of a sneer.
“Yeah.” Lawton glared at him. “Big time. You spend long enough with someone like Kerry young, beautiful, talented, full of… spirit… and, yeah, it gets to you all right. You read up on her background. You speak to her family and friends. Well, those who show up, I mean. You read her favourite books and listen to her favourite music. You talk to her. About this and that, something and nothing, her, you. You sit with her. A few hours, every few days. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t so much as open her eyes. She doesn’t respond in any way at all. But still, little by little, you get to know her. Or you imagine you do. You wonder what it would be like, what she’d be like, really like, if one day… she sat up in that bed and said, ‘Hello, Gary’”
“But she never
did,” put in Harding.
“No. That’s right. She never did. They switched her off. I stood there when they did it. I watched her die. I went to her funeral too. Which is more than any of those many friends I’m sure she had bothered to do.”
“Maybe they didn’t know about it.”
“Maybe. But Barney here knew. Didn’t you?” Lawton’s look defied Tozer to deny it. “According to Hayley you paid for Kerry’s treatment. And then you stopped paying.”
“I did it… for her parents’ sake.” Tozer shifted uneasily on the sofa. “When they were killed, there was no point going on. I checked with Dr. Hanckel. There wasn’t a hope in hell she’d ever recover.”
“No. But then there never was, was there? Luckily for you.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“Well, you must’ve wondered what she’d say-about you-if she ever woke up. I mean, as I understand it, we only have your word for what happened to Kerry during that dive.”
“Now just a-”
Tozer was halfway out of the sofa when Harding grabbed his elbow. “Sit down, Barney,” he urged. “We’re just talking, OK?”
“I’ve had seven years of people who know absolutely bloody nothing insinuating that I murdered Kerry.”
“I know.”
Tozer stared across at Lawton as he slowly sat back down. “I was careless. But so was Kerry. Which no one ever mentions. It was an accident. They happen. But she’s always the victim. And I’m always the villain.”
“What was Hayley’s… state of mind… when you met her, Gary?” Harding asked, endeavouring to steer the conversation into smoother waters.
“Calm. Rational. Curious.”
“Curious about what?”
“Kerry’s last days.”
“Which you described to her?”
“Yeah. The switch-off at the clinic. The cremation at Ostfriedhof. I talked her through the whole thing. She seemed… glad to hear about it. Like it was… the next best thing to being there at the time.” Lawton sighed and looked across awkwardly at Tozer. “Maybe I was… out of line… just now. Maybe I… went too far. Sorry.”
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