The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2)

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  Lissoni had been head of the casualty department for six months. From day one he had made it plain that colleagues whose daily activities did not involve drills, bone saws or transfusion pumps would not be taken seriously. Horn had been his enemy for five months and two weeks. It had nothing to do with the Porsche. Lissoni had decreed from on high that he would not dream of sending anyone from his department to the child protection group – if a child suspected of being abused arrived in casualty, the fact would be reported and that would be that. The matter was not up for discussion, irrespective of how things had worked in the past. Lissoni was blond and had a sunbed tan; he wore white Ralph Lauren polo shirts and a chunky signet ring. You could rely on him to serve up the clichés.

  The area outside their house was empty. Horn put the car into reverse by pressing down on the clutch several times. For a while now this had been the only way of engaging the reverse gear. As the garage had told him tersely: Twelve years up and down mountain roads, what do you expect? But he still liked the Volvo, and after he had given Irene the compact off-road Suzuki for her forty-fifth birthday she had stopped harping on about it, too. He manoeuvred the trailer close to the edge of their front garden, got out, and removed the tarpaulin. The resinous smell coming off the heap of bark mulch filled his nostrils. He breathed in deeply. It’s spring, he thought, the air is fresh and I’ve defeated an opponent.

  He fetched a rake, shovel and wheelbarrow from the shed, removed a couple of broken twigs from the lawn, and began to unload the mulch. He spread some under the currant bush, under the rhododendrons, and in amongst the honeysuckles, roses and hydrangeas. The two wisterias, which Irene adored and he did not, got some as well. I’m shovelling bark mulch into a wheelbarrow and enjoying it. If someone had told me that fifteen years ago, I’d have said they were mad. He thought about real country people, Lisbeth Schalk, for example, and the bunches of wild flowers she regularly brought onto the ward, some pink, some yellow, some a mixture of bright colours. Raimund called her an elfin princess, and to be honest there were worse ways of describing a psychologist. “But I haven’t got pointy ears,” she said. “Yes you have,” Raimund replied, and she felt her ears to check. Lisbeth Schalk looked as though she had walked straight out of one of those sentimental “Heimat” films. Her psychological test results were not as dazzling as her bunches of flowers, but that was another story.

  Horn trod down the bark chippings around the walnut tree he had planted in the autumn. Finished. He was hot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves. About a third of the mulch was left. He uncoupled the trailer and pushed it across the lawn to the rear wall of the shed. He tipped out most of the mulch and used the shovel for the rest. He shaped it into a neat cone. But even this would not be good enough for Irene. A garden with a heap of bark mulch was not a perfect garden.

  “You’ll get blisters on your hands.” Tobias was leaning against the corner of the barn, wearing a smug grin. “Not something you’ve ever been in danger of in the last few years,” Horn replied. “Where have you come from, anyway?”

  “I go to school, remember? Seventh year.”

  Horn threw the shovel onto the trailer. “Give me a hand,” he said. Together they manoeuvred the trailer into the garage. Tobias groaned several times as if in pain. Fathers of adolescent sons ought to be granted the right to make occasional use of corporal punishment, Horn thought – the odd stroke with a willow stick, now that wouldn’t be bad. He closed the garage door. A large butterfly flitted towards them and landed for a second on Tobias’s chest. “A pearl-bordered fritillary,” Horn said. Tobias shrugged. There’s something I’ve overlooked, Horn thought as they crossed the gravel to the house. He could not work out what it was.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Tobias shook his head.

  “Are you unwell?”

  “What? Because I’m not hungry? There’s a point at which you stop being hungry all the time, like everything in life.”

  Horn rummaged through the bread drawer. Two hard rolls and a pack of bread for toasting which was now cultivating small bluish-green spots of mould at one end. “Actually, it’s a good thing you’re not hungry,” he said. “I knew it,” Tobias said.

  “What did you know?”

  “That I wouldn’t get fed properly in this house.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Now I’m being booted out, too.”

  “Out!”

  Horn filled the water container of the espresso machine and inserted a pod. He heard Tobias shuffling out of the room. He’s getting on my nerves, he thought, and I’ve no interest in what he’s doing, whether it’s French or Latin or Physics. I’m deliberately not asking him and I know that’s bad. He pressed the button, the espresso machine hummed and, when it was finished, spat furiously. He stirred a spoonful of sugar into his coffee and thought for a while. Then he went out of the front door, sat on the bench and looked down at the town. No newspaper, no book, nothing but a cup of coffee, he thought – like an old man; all I’m missing is the cat. He looked around. No sign of her. Up in one of the spruces at the edge of the forest a hawk sat motionless.

  He thought about the argument he’d had that morning with Kren, the businesslike director of the hospital. It had been about staff numbers, specifically about the possibility of a third specialist for his department. In the end Kren had said he was sorry, but one had to bear in mind that, purely from a P.R. angle, psychiatric patients were not an asset to the hospital. At this, Horn had stood up. “The problem is that human beings in general are not assets, not even you, Herr Direktor,” he had said, slamming the door behind him. Alongside his job, Kren was deputy regional secretary of the Business Party, went hunting twice a year with the mayor, and had a tendency towards obsessive–compulsive disorder. Let him throw me out, Horn thought. He imagined trying to explain it to Irene: “Listen, please don’t be shocked, but they fired me today.” She would narrow her eyes at him and ask, “How am I going to satisfy my need for luxuries now?”

  The sky above the town was gloomy and edgy. The towers of the abbey church seemed to sway, as did the steel chimneys of the woodworking factory, and several times he had the impression that water from the lake was sloshing over the promenade. Perhaps it’s just my eyes, he thought, maybe I’ve had a cataract for years without knowing. Christina, his ward sister, advised him at least once a month to go to an eye specialist. He could not bear being mothered like that and hardly ever replied.

  Irene picked up the phone when he rang a second time. “Could you get some bread on your way home, please?” he said. “Tobias is starving.”

  “That’s technically impossible.”

  “Nonsense! It’s easy; you just have to try to imagine it.”

  “I mean the shopping, not Tobias starving. I’ve got two more pupils and then orchestra practice afterwards. Had you forgotten?”

  She had told him, now he remembered perfectly. They had been having breakfast and she had told him: Easter Saturday, evening concert, Mozart’s “Requiem”, and Bruckner’s “Te Deum”, and he had said, “What a depressing programme!” Her retort was that the psychiatrist obviously had no clue about the emotional charge of music.

  “What do you mean forgotten?” he said. “You didn’t mention any rehearsal.”

  “We were having breakfast. You made a totally ignorant remark about Anton Bruckner’s naivety and I lost my temper. Memory still failing you?”

  Horn said she was making it up; he had to chair the relatives’ group that evening. He explained how he’d just been contemplating two rock-hard rolls and some mouldy sliced bread, and she replied that, like it or not, he would have to go to the Prinz bakery himself on his way to the hospital. “That means I’ve got to leave ten minutes earlier,” he said.

  “Oh, you poor thing!”

  “When are you back?”

  “That depends on the tenor.”

  “The tenor, I see.” So that was her way, he said, of thanking him for doing his utmost to protect her gar
den from being overrun by pernicious weeds. He, too, would find a tenor and use him as an excuse for coming home late in the evenings. Why don’t you do that? Irene Horn said. Seeing as you’re such a bisexual. Anyway, she added, it was common knowledge that nobody could handle a sexual relationship with a female cellist, least of all a tenor, and so the whole thing was pretty daft full stop.

  The cat was sitting outside on the windowsill, meowing resentfully. “She’s right, Mimi,” he said. “Forget the tenor; I’ll get myself a soprano with sticky-out ears.” He opened the window. The cat rubbed itself along his forearm, purring loudly. When he tweaked her neck she spun around hissing and sank her claws into the back of his hand.

  There was something funny going on. A load of bark mulch left over, bread rotting in the drawer, fantasies about resigning, forgetting Irene’s appointments, and church spires swaying in the distance. His son was being patronising and distant, and now even his pet was attacking him. Irene would probably say he was attaching far too much meaning to all of this, and he would reply that attaching meaning to things was his job.

  Horn washed out his coffee cup. The cat toyed with the jet of water, behaving as if she had never been cross with him. “Devious little bitch!” he said quietly. She purred and looked right through him. She’s got a squint, he thought. He had never noticed it before. He wondered whether he should take the car or his bike again, but in the end he decided to walk. The front tyre of his cross bike was losing air unpredictably – sometimes almost all of it in one go, and at other times nothing for kilometres – and he did not want to get straight back into the Volvo.

  He crossed the back garden and knocked on the door to Tobias’s bedroom. There was no response so he opened it. Tobias was lying sideways across the bed, snoring. A blob of saliva had collected at the corner of his mouth. Horn watched him for a while. He’s got my build, he thought, he’s got Irene’s freckles, he’s truculent and he stinks. I’m trying but failing to drum up some affection for my son. The cat leapt onto the bed and curled up behind his knees. None of that bothers you, Horn thought.

  *

  In spring, the path which cut across the winding road and led in a straight line into town, was habitually overgrown with weeds and bushes. It was only when people started to make a fuss that Martin Schwarz, the farmer who lived a little further up the hill, would come down with his strimmer and clear the path. As he got caught several times on young bramble stems, Horn cursed, and then became aware that a tune had filled his head, a short passage from Bruckner’s “Te Deum”. Sanguine, sanguine – these were the only words he could remember, but he was able to hum a few bars more. He imagined some nuns gazing heavenwards in ecstasy, then Padre Pio with his hands swathed in bandages, and finally he saw in his mind Sabrina, the red-headed sixteen-year-old who had been admitted to his ward, and who each day for the past week had sliced open another part of her body, needing each time to be stitched up. There’s nothing lovelier, she had said, than the moment just after you’ve made the cut, when the body pauses briefly, as if it were thinking, you can see the gash, pure and white, and the blood doesn’t start flowing for a second or so. This was why she had no time for burns, even though she was a smoker. “You reek of burning and there’s not a drop of blood,” she had said. When she was offered alternative ways of reducing the tension she just laughed or tapped her forehead. Everyone else could bite into chilli peppers or smash their fists into bags of sand; she wasn’t that nutty. “But who’s going to want you later on, if you’re covered from head to toe in scars?” Sonia, the young social worker, had said, and Sabrina had answered, “Who’s wanted me up till now?”

  Irene hated stories like this. “My existence is an idyll,” she said. “You’re the one in charge of fear and horror.” That’s how it was: Sanguine, sanguine. He dealt with girls disturbed in early childhood who harmed themselves, while she sat in stuccoed halls, playing her melancholic solos with eyes closed and the tip of her tongue between her teeth. “I don’t know anybody more consistently in denial than you,” he would sometimes say, and she would reply that if he saw music as a form of denial then she wouldn’t argue with him. “Do you think Michael sees it like that?” he said, and tears welled up in her eyes. There was something irreparable between those two; Michael’s moving out had not changed the situation one bit. They hardly ever spoke, and whenever they met it always went the same way: within minutes Irene would start nagging him, and Michael would go red in the face and clam up.

  He had plenty of time so he left the main road and took the path to the wildlife observation centre. Behind the dark-brown wooden building he turned left and walked eastwards along the lake outlet and the first section of river. Coots and great-crested grebes were making their way through the reeds. There was a yellow dinghy in a side channel. In it sat a man with a baseball cap, performing bizarre contortions and taking photographs. Horn felt the urge to creep up on him and push him into the water, but at that moment two joggers trotted by, both wearing pink – one was more salmon, the other more shocking pink – and the feeling had passed. There’s still hope, Horn thought, my wickedness is dispelled by young women jogging in springtime.

  Next to the reed bed was an area of raised bog, from which peat had once been cut. Now it was in flower with cotton grass, willowherb and irises. Signs put up by the Furth Nature Conservation Authority requested visitors to watch out for grass snakes and ground-nesting birds, and to stick to the marked paths. I would like to see a bittern, just once, Horn thought, a wild boar in its natural habitat and a bittern. Where did the goals in our lives come from? In many cases it was impossible to determine.

  The hospital stood on a rocky hill directly across the river. When building the extension two years previously they had put in some glass-covered steps down to the promenade, which had no doubt cost a fortune and were quite clearly too steep for invalids.

  The first view of the lake was from a platform half-way up the steps. The air was still hazy; it was hard to make out the houses in Moosheim to the west. Horn took off his jacket. It was muggy, like in summer. He bumped into Jakob Fuhrmann, a squat, bald-headed operating theatre assistant. “Someone on your ward’s yelling their head off,” he said. “Thanks,” Horn said, and was immediately irritated. Fuhrmann was a union representative and saw himself as a kind of policeman for the hospital. The man made his way down carefully, step by step. I’ll give him a shove, Horn thought, my fist between his shoulder blades. He pictured arms flailing to either side, Fuhrmann swaying wildly and his massive body tilting ever further forward, finally falling and hitting the ground with a hideous thud. There’s nothing better for one’s mental health than a good old aggressive fantasy, his former supervisor Aichhorn had once said. Then he had been devoured by cancer.

  As he pressed the button for the lift, Horn wondered whether he should go straight up to the ward or not. It was probably Schwind who had been doing the yelling, the schizophrenic forklift-truck driver who, in his worst phases, was tormented by the conviction that at any moment someone would come to take him to his execution. It may also have been Fehring, the junkie, who for several days had been in a complicated withdrawal from a number of substances. Both could make a lot of noise when they were in a bad way. So what? The relatives’ session never started on time anyway.

  The door to P2 was locked. That was not good news. Horn fished out his key and listened. To begin with he could not hear any shouting. In the day room a few patients were sitting down to their evening meal. Daniel Fehring had pushed his plate away and was staring at the silent television. “Didn’t you like it?” Horn asked. “I’m not hungry,” Fehring said. “You know that food helps with withdrawal,” Horn said.

  “Junkies don’t eat much.” Fehring yawned.

  “Are you tired? That’s a good sign.”

  Fehring looked awful, with a grey, shrunken face. He also had swollen eyelids – this was new. Once or twice a year he came for physical drug withdrawal, whenever his girlfriend threatened to le
ave him. Afterwards it would usually only be a few days before he was back on them again.

  Horn walked along the corridor to the office. Karin, the youngest nurse, a skinny girl with very blonde hair, was sitting at the computer and hammering away at the keyboard. She seemed tense. “What’s up?” he asked. “Sabrina,” she said.

  “Sabrina? The usual?”

  “Yes, the usual. And she’s put it on the web.”

  “What do you mean she’s put it on the web?”

  The girl had slashed her forearm with a razor blade while her room-mate took photographs, and had put the whole thing on the Internet using the patient computer. She had also provided a written commentary: This was how much the psychiatry department in Furth cared for its patients, and anyway, doctors couldn’t give a toss about human misery, etc., etc. Her room-mate had been paid to take the snaps and then spilled the beans, which Sabrina had objected to.

  “So then she started screaming,” Horn said.

  “What do you mean? She didn’t scream.”

  Horn explained that outside they’d heard someone yelling. He told her about his conversation with Fuhrmann. All of a sudden Karin smiled. “It was Raimund,” she said. “He was the one shouting.” He’d been pretty angry that the bloodbath had been posted on the Internet, and when he discovered that Sabrina’s commentary mentioned him by name, he slightly lost it.

  “What did she write about him?”

  “That he’s a nerd with a ponytail.”

  Now it was Horn’s turn to smile. Karin raised her head. “Yes it’s true, I know,” she said, “but she wrote something else, too.”

  “What?”

  She stood up, went to the filing cabinet containing the patient histories and pulled out Sabrina’s file. “You’ll find it under ‘Current’,” she said.