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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  “What’s she doing up there in her near-death state?”

  “You’re not taking me seriously.”

  “I mean, did she climb the tree in slow motion, too?”

  Tobias went red in the face and rapped his knuckles on the table. “You’re such an arsehole!” he shouted. He explained how the cat had soon started behaving normally again, doing her normal thing of chasing after a blue tit, and the blue tit its normal thing of being faster.

  “Cats do tip over,” Horn said, “just like that. It’s common knowledge and it’s got nothing to do with being ill.” There was a glint in Tobias’s eye. “Do you know what? I really pity your patients.”

  “You mind what you say!”

  “Raffael!” Horn noticed too late that he had raised his arm. “What? Are you going to hit me?” Tobias asked. “It seems to be all the rage at the moment.” Horn took a deep breath. “I’ve never hit you,” he said, “you know that.” Tobias grinned, then acted very cold. There were three occasions he could remember, he said, and surely a psychiatrist didn’t need telling about the times he couldn’t remember. “Once only,” Horn said, “if ever.”

  “Three times,” Tobias said, bending over the table. “Do you want to know what it felt like?” Horn leaned back and eyed his son. In his mind he saw Tobias lying asleep on the bed, a dribble of saliva by his mouth, and he recalled the word his son had used to describe the cat’s condition. Then it just came out, without his being able to stop himself. “Are you stoned again?” he asked.

  Irene sat there, rigid, her hands flat on her lap. The blanket had slipped from her shoulders. A wasp was hovering at her plate, carving tiny pieces from the remains of a slice of ham. A look of confusion spread across Tobias’s face, then he seemed to withdraw inside himself completely. His gaze was fixed half a metre away when he stretched out his arm, lifted Horn’s egg from the eggcup, closed his hand around it and squeezed. A yellow sludge seeped through his fingers. He took a napkin from the table, wiped his hand thoroughly, scrunched it up and placed it in front of Horn. Then he turned around and went into the house.

  Like a painting, Horn thought as his gaze drifted over the table: the jug with the orange juice, the white loaf that had been cut open, the scrunched-up napkin with an Easter bunny on it, and the wasp flying off with a morsel of ham between its front legs. In the background the field with hazelnut bushes, and beyond that the woods. In the air, the perfume of meadowsweet which grew to the right of the corner of the house, the chirruping of a male redstart, and the rattling of a motor mower. Behind him he could hear Irene’s footsteps heading back towards the house. At that moment it occurred to him that wasps were incredibly rare at this time of year.

  After the fourth year of primary school Tobias had been ten and full of energy. He drew Ferraris, saved baby hedgehogs and scored his first goals for the under-12 football team. It had seemed a perfectly logical idea to send him to holiday camp in the Waldviertel with his best friends, Jakob and Benny. They had bought him a sleeping bag, a food container and a headlamp, and in the end they had decided to leave Mike the teddy bear at home after all. He had lain down to sleep next to his packed rucksack, and nobody had entertained even the slightest idea that anything might go wrong. Horn got up from the table.

  She was sitting with her head lowered on her stark bentwood chair, playing a wild melody he did not recognise, alternating rapidly between bowed and pizzicato passages. He liked it. He stood by the wall next to the door and listened.

  “He’s not taking drugs,” she said suddenly, letting her arm fall, “I’m absolutely sure he’s not taking drugs.” Play on, Horn thought, don’t talk, just play on. She leaned back and looked at him. What did he think he was doing, accusing Tobias like that, she asked, she wasn’t born yesterday and she’d never noticed anything, no funny smells or anything like that. Horn thought of the parents of anorexic girls who didn’t notice a thing right up to their daughters’ deaths. He did not answer. She played a low note. “And what was all that hitting stuff he was talking about?” she asked. “Children are being beaten,” he said.

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “No, this is different. More systematic. And it’s happening here.”

  “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all, actually,” he said. She took hold of her bow again. Opus five, number one came into his head, but what he had just been listening to definitely wasn’t Beethoven.

  “What’s your tenor up to, by the way?” he asked as he was about to leave the room. She gave him a baffled look. “He’s protecting his voice,” she said at last.

  *

  Horn sat in his car and mulled it over. The holiday camp business was clear-cut. That morning Tobias was lying on his side in bed, his mouth tightly shut and fists clenched. Both of them had stood there shaking him, struggling with the notion that nothing in the world could have stirred him. When he got up at half-past eight, five minutes after the coach had left, sat down at the kitchen table and asked, “Where’s my breakfast?” Horn blew a fuse. He had grabbed Tobias’s hair with his left hand, twisted the boy’s head around, and slapped him with his right hand, left, right, palm on the left cheek, back of the hand on the right. Once again he could feel the uncontrollable fury from back then, and in his mind he saw his son’s face which had registered barely any surprise or fear, only contempt and triumph. They had not spoken about it afterwards, not a word. The rucksack had remained on the floor of the children’s room, unopened, for eight weeks. Eventually Irene found it too ridiculous and unpacked the thing. Horn had never apologised.

  He started the car, reversed a few metres along the country lane where it had been standing, and manoeuvred the Volvo back onto the road. The first marguerites were flowering by the roadside. The sun lit up the young leaves on the trees, making them appear yellow. The town lay before him, rolled out as if the distances between individual points had become increased. The helicopter landing pad on the hospital roof towered above the river like a diving board. It’s spring, he thought, I’m fighting with my son, and I’m not talking to my wife enough.

  On one occasion she had pulled Tobias’s hair. He was perhaps twelve at the time, and had tipped the beef stroganoff she had cooked, together with the rice and salad, from his plate back into the pan, complaining that he’d asked for ravioli. He did not know whether she had ever hit him. It was different with Michael. Maybe this is a kind of role distribution, too, he thought, one of you hits one child but not the other, and with your partner it’s vice-versa. He recalled an episode when Irene had given full vent to her anger at Michael’s dyslexia. He can’t read, she had said, he can’t write, and if you try to help him he puts on a face like a frog. He doesn’t know a single note, either, she had added quietly, and for the first time he pictured her hitting Michael when he was not there.

  *

  Frühwald was waiting for him in the hospital car park under a sky dotted with fleecy clouds. He was leaning against his minivan, smoking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ring you back,” Horn said. “You’re a busy man,” Frühwald replied, pushing himself off the van. He was as tanned as if it were high summer. “Do you fill up on sun before the swimming season?” Horn asked. “The swimming season has already begun,” Frühwald said, “a good week ago.” As a medical man, Horn said, he found that terribly alarming, the lake couldn’t be more than twelve degrees. “Thirteen point two at one twenty deep. That’s what the biologists say.” A year ago they had installed an electronic monitoring station at the wildlife observation centre, which measured the temperature and oxygen content of the lake as well as the concentration of nitrates in it. The locals had been fairly sceptical at first, but tourists had begun to make pilgrimages to the lake, as if they all had gills. How did he tolerate the cold? Horn asked, seeing that he was definitely not a penguin. “A walrus, perhaps,” Frühwald said. “I’ve always been fascinated by walruses, by elephant seals, too. On the one hand they’re soft giants you’d love to sin
k your fists into, like foam rubber, but then they’ve got jaws they could bite you in two with.” He was a friend of Frank Holderegger, the owner of the water sports shop, he said, and Frank always lent him the right kind of wetsuit. That was the secret, not some sort of hidden layer of fat around the vulnerable organs. From Easter onwards, as long as it didn’t fall in mid-March, a four-millimetre shorty was usually sufficient, and at the beginning of June the lake was eighteen degrees, which meant trunks only. “What about now?” Horn asked.

  “Now? Now, you can forget it.” In theory it should be six-millimetre conditions at the moment, Frühwald said, with arms and legs covered that would be enough to keep him warm for the entire three and a half kilometres. But, as Horn well knew, this was purely theoretical as far as he was concerned. His wife’s current condition meant he couldn’t leave her alone for longer than a few minutes, so swimming was out of the question. “It makes me imbalanced,” he said, “very imbalanced.” He flicked away his cigarette. He was sleeping badly, being unfriendly to those around him and had started smoking again. Horn looked around. “And where’s your wife now?” he asked. “At home,” Frühwald said, looking at his watch. “It’s only twenty minutes. Shall we go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want you to see her.” He opened the passenger door. Horn put up his hand in protest. “You know it’s not that simple for a hospital doctor,” he said. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Frühwald said, grabbing Horn by the arm. Horn reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his mobile. “Are you calling security?” Frühwald asked. Horn shook his head. “I may not swim as much as you, but I shovel cow muck on a daily basis,” he said, “and because I’ve got a bigger reach I reckon I could deal with you on my own.” Frühwald grinned and let him go.

  Herbert picked up the telephone. No, there were no dramas on the ward. In a fit of night-time confusion, Frau Hrstic had clambered over her bed guard, tumbled onto the floor, broken her upper arm and been transferred to casualty for the time being. Her room-mate, Frau Steininger, was annoyed by her absence and kept on looking for her. There had also been a raft of phone calls: several newspapers, Sabrina’s father and the police. No, he didn’t know what the police wanted. The policewoman had said it wasn’t urgent. What else? The usual.

  “Let’s go,” Horn said. Frühwald took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he said.

  They drove along a stretch of the riverbank and took the exit for Furth north at the roundabout by Severin bridge. A milk lorry slowed them down for a while. Frühwald shifted endlessly between third and fourth gear, not saying a word. He only opened his mouth when they turned east into a side street just by the blocks of flats. “Do you know why I admire you?” he said, without turning towards Horn. “I admire you because you’re able to deal with children.” Horn did not ask, and Frühwald explained that he had read about it in the paper.

  The house, hidden away on the crest of a hill behind a horn-beam hedge, was an unspectacular 1960s bungalow: L-shaped layout, pitched tiled roof, adjoining garage. As if built for a wheelchair user, Horn thought. “We don’t need a stairlift,” Frühwald said, “but that’s about the only advantage.” The internal doors, for example, were only seventy-five centimetres wide and so they’d all had to be changed, and then there were the loo and bathroom conversions and the re-laying of the driveway. Frühwald pointed to the concrete path that snaked up the slope in two shallow curves. A few metres from the front door he stopped and said just what a mess it had made widening eleven doorways by fifteen centimetres, quite apart from the cost. At that moment something flashed across his face. “You’re a doctor, right?” he asked. “Yes, I am a doctor,” Horn said. “You know that.”

  “So you’re bound by confidentiality?”

  Of course he was bound by confidentiality, Horn said, why the question? Frühwald turned the key in the lock. She’s dead, Horn thought, he’s strangled her and wants me to certify a natural death, like a protracted epileptic fit or a pulmonary embolism. Frühwald turned his head. Horn put his hand to his mouth. Not again, he thought. “I can’t hear anything,” Frühwald said. “She must be sleeping.”

  Margot Frühwald was lying on her back in bed, her eyes wide open, staring straight at the ceiling. All that was visible was her face, surrounded by dark-blue bedclothes with a silver peacock-feather pattern. What they were witnessing was simply one variant of her behaviour at the moment, her husband said. At other times she would bellow incoherently or whimper to herself for hours on end. And then there were the fits. Oh yes, fits plural. Over the last three days she must have had ten epileptic fits, some only a few seconds long, others three or four minutes, with cramps, going blue in the face and incontinence, just as you imagine it. He had given her diazepam, both in drops and rectal tubes, but nothing had worked. Horn walked up to the bed. “What are you doing?” Frühwald asked, grabbing his arm again. “I’d like to examine her,” Horn said, pulling the covers back.

  The straps were white, about eight centimetres wide and attached to the bed frame on her right and left. They were fixed around her wrists with magnetic catches. “I’m sorry, I had no other choice,” Frühwald said, looking over to the window. Beads of sweat were closely packed on his wife’s forehead. Now Horn understood what Frühwald had meant by confidentiality. “Undo them,” he said.

  Half an hour later, Horn and Frühwald were sitting at the kitchen table drinking schnapps. Margot Frühwald was on her way to hospital in an ambulance. Confused state after cerebral attack, Horn had written on the ambulance form, and had allocated her to his own department. His people knew what to do, and he himself would pop over there shortly.

  Somehow he had been able to accept the paralysis caused by the accident, Frühwald said, “We all have our crosses to bear,” but now that he was no longer able to have a meaningful conversation with her, it had become intolerable. She would talk about railways, her sister Hedwig, with whom she had not been in touch for decades, and a man called Sylvester who he didn’t know. He found it most difficult when she talked about children at the kindergarten as if nothing had happened, about the trips and games, about Who’s sitting next to me? and Ball over the rope and about We’re the animals of the jungle. “She was the love of my life, you understand?” Frühwald said. “She was ruined for me.” He reached for the bottle to pour more. Horn put his hand over his glass. “Do you drink every morning?” he asked. Frühwald raised an eyebrow. “Only when I’ve got a psychiatrist visiting,” he said.

  They talked about the series of examinations she might be expected to undergo, about the likelihood of developing epilepsy even a long time after an epidural haematoma, and about the various drug treatment possibilities. Gradually Frühwald seemed to regain confidence. “O.K.: all her medical notes, a few nighties, a dressing gown, slippers, magazines,” he said finally. Horn thought about asking him where he had got the immobilisation straps, but let it lie.

  Horn decided to return on foot. As he left he noticed that the elder in Frühwald’s garden was starting to blossom, and that the first buds were opening on the juvenile broad-leafed lime growing on the bend of the drive. Normally he would be happy, Frühwald said, when things started growing early in the year, when the wild crocuses pushed through the last of the snow, or when the blue clematis threw out its stems at the end of February, but this time he was totally indifferent. Horn stopped by the garden gate and turned to him. “In your opinion, who would go around systematically hitting children?” he asked. Frühwald thought about it. “Do you mean this black owl thing?” Horn nodded. “Maybe someone like me.” There was the hint of a smile on Frühwald’s face when Horn held out his hand.

  *

  The beds lining the paved path which ran between the blocks of flats had recently been planted up with roses and box. The musty smell of fresh compost hung in the air. Ants scrabbled around for worms between the small plants. Horn thought of Irene, of her enthusiasm for the garden and her inability to deal with pests. She loathed c
hemical pesticides, and if the aphid infestation ever got so bad that she felt it necessary to use nettle spray or diluted vinegar, she was wracked by guilt. When, not long ago, he had gathered up the night-time snails which were devouring her sacred dwarf asters and cosmos, and drowned them in beer, she had called him a murderer. She had offered a half-hearted apology later, and suggested getting a pair of Chinese runner ducks. “They feed on snails,” she had said, and when he replied, “If you do that, I’m going to feed off Chinese runner ducks,” she was deeply offended. She never leaves me cold, Horn thought, she thrills me, she sets me on fire; sometimes she makes me so soft, sometimes she hurts me; but she doesn’t leave me cold. And yet I’ve never called her the love of my life, he thought, never said it to anyone else and not to her either. Maybe because he never wanted to be in the situation where he would have to say it in the past tense, like Frühwald, or maybe as a psychiatrist you lost your faith in such states of emotion. “Love is first and foremost a hormonal imbalance,” Cejpek, head of the department of internal medicine, had said. Christina had replied that she was pleased their senior consultant would never be threatened by this disorder, and Cejpek had said that this was not quite true; the sight of a sixteen-pointer in a forest clearing could upset his internal balance. Cejpek had leased some hunting land on the south-western slope of the Kammwand massif and he spent every free moment there. He was an expert on the local fauna and a good shot when it really mattered. He pursued women in the same way as he did small game, quickly and loudly, a strategy which had not yet brought any lasting success. Irene spoke time and again about love. Sometimes Horn took it seriously, sometimes less so, depending on whether or not a half-Italian tenor was on the horizon.

  He crossed the square in front of the Protestant parish centre and took the route along Ettrichgasse. My wife freezes ostentatiously when she sits at a table with me, he thought, my son crushes my breakfast egg, and my patients are strapped to their beds by their husbands. And the cat’s falling over. There were days when it was better to be invisible. He tried to focus his mind on what awaited him: Frau Hrstic’s daughter, who would scurry up to him at the entrance to the ward in one of her gaudy suits, and irately declare that her mother’s fall could only have been the result of some foul play; Sabrina’s father, who left a trail of slime behind him even on the telephone – will this skin cutting never end? I can’t explain it, please tell me what I can do, Herr Doctor; and that Marcus with a “C” and the electric guitar, who he would probably be able to talk to this time, finally.