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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  EIGHTEEN

  It was way past midnight, and Raffael Horn was longing for an island he had never been to before. He imagined the coastal road, hills of heather, streams that cut into basalt rock and, right by the sea, villages with the whitewashed walls of the distilleries: Port Ellen, Port Askaig, Bowmore.

  He imagined endless herds of sheep, downpours, real fires, and himself standing by the surf in a tweed jacket, looking out at the Atlantic. “Naff male fantasy”, Irene would say, and Tobias would mutter something about “escapism”; recently it had become his favourite word. Horn would pour himself another glass of Laphroaig and just let everything bounce off him.

  Horn sat at his desk going through the report he had written up from the notes of his interviews with the three children. Two boys with a background of family migration, one a dreamy dragon slayer, the other with a hereditary disease and the ability to name all the capital cities in the world. A girl, shy, guinea-pig lover, with a certain talent for drawing. Nothing unusual in the basic make-up of any of them: of normal intelligence, emotionally responsive, adequate degree of human contact, reserved yet interested. All three clearly upset by a similar experience, wary of answering questions relating to the event, obviously frightened by something they called “the same thing”, but refusing to say what this was. No visible pathological disorders, in particular no sign of post-traumatic stress disorder. He closed the document. Post-traumatic disorders sometimes did not show up until months or even years after the event; from that perspective, what he had just written was of very limited value, but only someone who was an expert in the field would know that. He stood up, left his study, and walked out into the open air. It was drizzling slightly. In the morning there would be fog over the Furth Basin. This was when the cat would usually be rubbing itself around his ankles. But she was with Tobias and Tobias was with Michael, still, as was the Volvo. He had been stupid enough to say that he didn’t need the car. Sons tend to exploit things like that.

  The light was on in the stable. Irene was sitting in one of the armchairs, listening to music. Somebody was singing Baroque arias, a voice that became open and raw in the lower registers. “But that’s not a cello,” he said. She closed her eyes and said nothing. He felt stupid.

  “A countertenor?” he asked. “Kowalski? Scholl? One of the English ones?” She shook her head and pointed to the C.D. case on the speaker. A narrow face, short, dark hair, sticking-out ears, the face betraying a hint of scepticism. Marijana Mijanovic, he read. “Never heard of her.” “Right up your street, though,” she said. “The voice?” he asked. “Everything about her,” she said. “Her ears, her critical look, her voice of course.” She’s right, Horn thought, it’s obvious, who else could know what I like? He asked her why she was listening to it, and she said it was because she liked the woman, too, and also because she’d love to play the cello in the way that voice sang, softly and wildly, at times so untamed that you could hear the tongue vibrating.

  She sat up and motioned him over. “I want to ask you something,” she said, “very quietly.” He perched on the arm of her chair and bent over to her. She whispered something to him. “What, now?” he asked. “Here?” She nodded.

  “It’s the only thing which will calm my nerves.”

  “But you’re only playing Bruckner’s ‘Te Deum’,” he said. She shook her head. “Not only. But when I talk about it, it makes me even more nervous.” She shrugged her shoulders apologetically. He stroked the bridge of her nose with his index finger. “My silly little perfectionist,” he said. She pulled him towards her. “Will you go and get some duvets?” she whispered. “It’s chilly.”

  Marijana Mijanovic sang something about vago e bello and fiore and prato, while Irene lay on top of him in that way she called “full length”: everything touching, toes, thighs, tummies, chests, hands, chins, mouths, noses, heads. The tip of his tongue traced over her incisors, he smelt the piquancy of her fragrance and felt her shivering gradually subside. “What do you want to play?” he said. She lay her head on his neck, nibbled at his collarbone and said nothing.

  Later, they were lying on the carpet, one duvet beneath them, the other a cover, and he told her about Felix, Britta and Sen Wu, their openness, curiosity and the puzzles they presented. He said that justice in the world ended the very moment you compared children’s histories, and she replied that he didn’t have to tell her that. Tobias would ensure that the thing with Michael sorted itself out, he said, and she replied that Tobias hadn’t been at home for several days, had he forgotten? “Talking of Tobias,” he said, “will you come to Scotland with me in the summer?” “Talking of male fantasies,” she replied, “do you know who Handel wrote all that music for that Mijanovic is singing?” He shrugged. “A castrato,” she said. So he hadn’t been totally off the mark with his countertenor guess, he said. A countertenor was not a castrato, thank you very much, she replied, “and by the way,” she added in English, cutting off a boy’s balls was far worse than hitting him. “If you look hard enough there’s always something worse,” he said.

  While Irene’s breathing beside him became ever calmer, he thought of meadows full of flowers, of Lisbeth Schalk and Leonie Wittmann, of the fact that certain of his colleagues referred to female companions at academic conferences simply as “symposium support”, and of his sons, who at that very moment might be sitting together slagging off their parents, Michael with a glass of wine, Tobias with a joint between his fingers. He wondered when it was that the one had taught the other how to drive, and how close the contact between the brothers had been all this time, without him or Irene noticing anything. He looked through one of the roof windows at the sky. No stars were visible. He wondered again whether this was the right house for him, on the edge of a forest, in the commuter belt of a small town, and then he wondered who would think him conventional if they knew that he thought having sex with his wife was the best thing in the world.

  The call came just before six o’clock. There was a white morning light in the stable. Irene had rolled onto her side and was snoring gently. He reached for his mobile which he had left on the bentwood chair. It was Christina. Günther had just called from the hospital, she said. Margot Frühwald had been having spasms for the past half hour. Gerlinde Schäfer, the most ambitious trainee doctor on the planet, thought as usual that she had to sort it out herself, but was not coping. Horn threw back the duvet. “Can you come and collect me?” he asked. “My son’s stolen my car and I don’t know whether Irene needs hers today.” “I wouldn’t mind having a son who stole my car,” Christina said and hung up.

  Horn gathered up his clothes. Immediately above him he heard a rustling in the pitch of the roof. A dormouse or a marten. Irene got along better with these sorts of animals than he did. Leave them alone, they’re not doing us any harm, she would say if he started thinking aloud about traps or poison. They’ll only eat our roof insulation, he would say, and you’ll freeze again. She would just laugh, shrug and stroke Mimi, who seemed not to have any intention of messing with a marten either. “Women pacifists”, or some similar phrase would then cross his mind. “Have a good dress rehearsal, break a leg!” he said softly in Irene’s direction before he left. She grunted.

  “How’s Dolores?” Horn asked as he climbed into Christina’s car. “She can write her first name and she’ll be starting school in September,” she said. Maybe she’ll steal your car one day, too, Horn said. Christina replied that he should cut the crap; she didn’t know anybody with Down’s Syndrome who had a driving licence, and Horn said a lack of a driving licence hadn’t stopped his son. When they came to the curves that led to the fast road he saw that he had been wrong with his fog prediction from the night before. Layers of high cloud were hanging above the basin. The lake was grey. Good Friday, he thought, and he thought of how the hospital would reek of fish at lunchtime. “Where’s your daughter now, in fact?” he asked. Christina gestured behind her with her thumb. He turned. The girl was curled up on the back seat, as
leep.

  “Do you take her to kindergarten in her pyjamas?” Horn asked. “She stays with me in the office till noon,” Christina said. “Then I drive her home. Today’s a half holiday. And I do have some clothes with me, if it makes you feel better.”

  Christina carried her daughter across the car park and past the porter to the lift. The girl woke up and said, “Push”. Like any other child, Horn thought, and Christina said, “What do you expect?”

  *

  Margot Frühwald was pale purple in the face and gasping for breath. “It could kick off again at any moment,” Günther said, who was the first to spot Horn. Horn asked how long she had been like this. Günther said forty minutes, and Karin, who was also standing by the bed, said, “Maybe longer.” Gerlinde Schäfer was putting the oxygen mask over Margot Frühwald’s nose. If you subtracted the spasm-free intervals, the net time she had been in spasm was a maximum of twenty minutes. Horn gave her a searching look. She was pale and quivering. In truth the whole thing had begun just after midnight, Karin said. During monitoring Frau Frühwald had suddenly sat upright in bed, stared into the distance, and started counting in a loud voice: “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one”, different series of numbers. Occasionally she would say, “There’s one’s missing”, or, “Gunde, there’s one missing”. She had also made erratic movements with her arms, sometimes wiping with her hands, sometimes as if she were trying to pluck an apple from the air, or as if she were waving to someone. “What does Gunde mean?” Horn asked. Friedegund Mayrhofer had been the head of the old town kindergarten, now called Kindergarten Furth I, Günther said, she had been known to her colleagues as Gunde. He knew this because she’d taught him at the kindergarten.

  “What have you given her?” Horn asked. Schäfer remained silent. He saw tears welling in her eyes. “Infusomat, clonazepam ampoules, solvent, pulse oximeter,” he said to Karin and Günther. When the two of them had left the room, the stocky young woman sat on a chair by the window and started to cry. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “Yes it is,” she sobbed.

  “Why?”

  She thought that Margot Frühwald was hearing voices and seeing things, so she had given her risperidone, and not just a small dose, either. Horn started to understand. “And you think that sparked off the attack?” Schäfer sniffed up the tears and nodded. He felt the urge to kneel down beside her as if she were a little child and put his hand on her thigh. Frau Frühwald had evidently suffered a temporal lobe seizure, he said, which had gone on for a long time and had ultimately translated into a grand mal seizure. So although, psychiatrically speaking, the stereotypical movements and exclamations had nothing to do with hallucinations, he was certain that she had not set anything off with her antipsychotic drug either.

  “Sometimes medicine is less harmful than it thinks it is,” he said. Schäfer gave him a doubtful look. “So she’s not going to die?” she asked. “Not yet,” he said.

  They put Margot Frühwald on the clonazepam drip and administered her a dehydrating agent for the prophylaxis of cerebral oedema. Then Horn got on the phone and was put through to the neurological monitoring unit. There were two beds free.

  Dolores was sitting on Christina’s lap in the staff room, wolfing down a plaited bun. “Aren’t you too heavy for your mum?” Horn asked. The girl shook her head. “She tortures Christina every time she’s allowed here,” Karin said. “No!” Dolores protested, spluttering a cloud of crumbs and sugar crystals around the room. “Oh, yes you are,” Horn said. She kicked her legs at him. In fifteen years she’ll take her driving test and drive a hundred and sixty on the motorway, he thought. “No,” Dolores said. “She won’t,” Christina said. It’s worse when I’m woken too early, Horn thought, putting his hand over his mouth.

  “Are you going to send her home?” Christina asked. “Fräulein Schäfer? No. She’s got to get over these things. Anyway, ambition and taking it easy don’t go together,” Horn said. He was harsh, she said. No, he wasn’t, he replied, and if he knew his colleague Herr Hrachovec, that man would look after the poor girl when he arrived at eight. “The hero in the white coat,” Christina said.

  “Who saves the feeble woman.”

  It obviously still worked like that, she said – unless the feeble woman had a disabled child, then the number of heroes was quite clear. “One more,” Dolores said, reaching for another plaited bun.

  She has a disabled child and that Richard, Horn thought, no sign of a hero there. Richard Gassner from the I.T. department was definitely no hero. He was short, bearded and paid Christina the occasional visit to sleep with her. Otherwise he left her in peace. Which was the most important thing as far as she was concerned, she said.

  *

  At the morning meeting Gerlinde Schäfer was sitting near Hrachovec. She appeared to have regained her composure. Apart from the Margot Frühwald incident there were two things to report from the shift, she said. First, in the middle of the afternoon they had discovered Sabrina stark naked in Marcus’s room. He had evidently found this rather embarrassing and had assured them that nothing had happened. She, on the other hand, had said that she’d been wanting a child for a long time and could not pass up the opportunity. Nobody could say exactly what had taken place, because Sabrina had ingeniously painted over the lens of the surveillance camera with nail polish. “Is she using contraception?” Horn asked. Nobody knew. “Is he using contraception?” Leonie Wittmann asked. He could not imagine that someone who had recently fallen from the ceiling with a noose around his neck would be thinking about contraception, Horn said. Nor a young woman who regularly slices through her skin with razorblades, she said.

  On the topic of nooses, Schäfer said, the second noteworthy item was Marcus’s goodbye letter. It had been brought in by a detective who’d said that she had been here recently with Felix Szigeti and Britta Kern. In fact it was the print-out of an e-mail Marcus had sent to his best friend. She had attached a note of his medical history. The friend was a certain Florian Weghaupt, a young man who’d recently died in a fall from scaffolding. It had even been on the television news. The letter was full of accusations aimed at the world, and clearly written after Weghaupt was already dead. It started with the sentence: “Flo, you were always the more consistent of the two of us.” She couldn’t remember any more of it.

  Horn thought of Tobias and his own brand of consistency, the solidarity between the two brothers, and a new car. Then he thought of the early morning, the white light in the stable, the rustling of the marten in the roof insulation, and how Irene had nibbled at his collarbone. “Do you like Baroque music?” he murmured to Wittmann. “Not especially,” she replied. “Why?” “No particular reason,” he said.

  They were in the middle of a discussion about people who wanted to be cared for, but who only got sex, when Kurt Frühwald suddenly appeared in the doorway. They all went quiet. Frühwald was ashen. His right cheek twitched incessantly. “Where is she?” he asked softly. Horn stood up and walked over to Frühwald. “Come with me,” he said. Frühwald looked straight through him. “Where is she?” he roared. Horn took him firmly by the arm and pulled him out of the room. “In neurological intensive care,” he said. “That’s where they rang you from.”

  “Nobody rang me!”

  “So why did you come?”

  Frühwald stood there, fists clenched, and did not answer. The laughter of Christina’s daughter rang out from her office. Horn pictured Dolores running down the corridor after a toy car, stopping, staring at the two of them, and then all of a sudden Frühwald would hold out his arms. He imagined her opening her mouth in astonishment, so you could see her tongue, forgetting to breathe for a short while and splaying her fingers like a little mermaid. Then he imagined Kurt Frühwald pausing, dropping his arms, and kicking the toy car with his right foot as if he had not seen it.

  Frühwald did not say a word as they made their way to N31, not in the hallway, not on the stairs and not by the sliding door where they then had to wait. Horn
thought of the lime tree outside Frühwald’s house, of Margaret Frühwald’s face with the peacock-feather bedclothes wrapped around it, and how her husband had undone the magnetic clasps on the white straps. The tall, dark-haired nurse who stepped out from behind the pane of frosted glass said she was sorry, but his wife was just having a venous catheter attached to her neck to give them better access in case of an emergency, he should not come back for at least another hour. Frühwald stared at the wall for a while, then turned to go. He pressed the button in the lift. “My wife’s been taken away from me, every single day, for the past eleven years,” he said. When they reached the ground floor he headed for the exit.

  *

  He gave them his word, he had not touched her, Marcus Lagler said, looking to Herbert for help. First she had climbed up on the table and painted the surveillance camera – quite a protracted job with the tiny nail-polish brush – then she had stood in front of him and removed one item of clothing after another, not like a stripper, but more as you do before going to bed. For a short while he had thought that her body was rather beautiful, but he had noticed those scars and cuts – lots of them – all over her body. He knew from magazines and the television that people did that sort of thing to their arms, but on her legs, stomach and breasts – he hadn’t been prepared for that. So as far as he’d been concerned, sex was out of the question, and to be honest he never really was sure what she was after either, because she’d just stood there naked beside him, goose bumps on her thighs, giving him a stare which was provocative and sad at the same time.