The driver nods deliberately and glances at me.
‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ I say. ‘That’s not my husband.’
The driver looks at me for a moment. Then he averts his eyes. The window goes up and the man puts the car into first gear.
‘That’s not my husband,’ I shout again.
Then the driver of the sedan puts his foot on the accelerator and drives off. For a second I watch him go, then I turn back to face the stranger. Again I feel the impulse to run away. He notices. Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.
‘Look at you,’ he says after a while. ‘Look at the state you’re in. Where were you thinking of going?’
He hesitates, then turns and heads back to the house. When he notices that I’m not following him, he stops again.
‘Come on,’ he says.
I stand and stare at him.
Run away, I think. Away from here.
‘I’m warning you,’ the stranger says, as if he’s read my mind.
The words he spoke earlier flash through my head.
You’ll lose everything. Your son. Your whole beautiful life.
I swallow.
‘I don’t know what you think you know about me,’ I say. ‘But you’re wrong! I’m only a mother! A teacher! I wouldn’t hurt a fly!’
The stranger laughs. Mirthlessly.
He takes a few more steps towards the house, and again he stops when he notices that I’m not following him.
‘Come on!’ he says.
It’s as if I’m rooted to the spot. I don’t know what to do.
‘If I wanted to hurt you, I’ve already had ample opportunity tonight,’ he says. Then he says it again—‘Come on!’—but more gently this time, as if he were trying to coax a timid cat.
There’s a storm raging in my head, but then, slowly, gradually, one thought detaches itself from all the others and crystallises, growing louder and louder until it fills my head: There’s no point running away.
And then: If I leave now, I am ceding the house to him. If I run away, he has won.
I breathe deeply, in and out. Then I get a grip on myself and follow the stranger back into my house.
The stranger
Estoy cansado. I am tired. Not only because I haven’t slept for three days. No, more than anything because of the constant stress.
No organ consumes as much energy as the brain. It is a strain having to stay a hundred per cent focused and alert. Not being allowed to make the slightest mistake saps your strength.
The situation is proving more difficult than I had expected.
She is more difficult.
I hadn’t imagined her like this.
I open my holdall, take the phone out of the little compartment inside and switch it on. Grimm hasn’t got back to me yet. I try to check my impatience. Nothing that happens is good or bad. Events as such have no meaning. It is we who give them meaning. I lie down on the bed and stretch out.
As so often in the last few days, my thoughts stray to the past. And as always, I force them back to the present as soon as I realise.
I can’t let myself be distracted.
I close my eyes for a second.
I am ready.
I go to the window and wait for dawn.
Sarah
It is growing light—dawn is near. I’m sitting in my reading chair in the living room—I didn’t have the strength to drag myself up to my bedroom. My lungs are on fire, I have a bloody graze on my calf where I scraped it on the fence last night, and my feet, now in trainers, are still sore. A tune pops into my head, goodness only knows where it’s come from. ‘Karma Police’, Radiohead. And of course the tune makes me think of Philip, of how it all began. I let my thoughts drift.
‘The night Sarah and I met, lightning struck—and that’s not a figure of speech.’
Philip always began the story like that. I can’t tell it as well as my husband, but I remember everything. It was the hottest day of the year and Radiohead were giving an open-air concert. I had gone along by myself, not yet knowing anyone who might have gone with me. I’d only just moved to Hamburg to study and was a little lonely, but thought it all right to be a little lonely. The concert was sold out. People as far as the eye could see. Bodies—all around me, sweating bodies. I was in the middle of the crowd and it felt as if I’d fallen into a snake pit. So many people. Body heat, sticky skin, sweat-soaked T-shirts. We were like pilgrims who ignore hunger and thirst and any other physical need because they know they will soon receive something more nourishing than food or drink. For one hot evening, music was our religion. When the band came on stage, they were greeted by a noise that seemed to come from a single, parched throat. A surge went through the crowd. Then the music began and with it the lights—it was like looking in at the gates of heaven, it was so beautiful, so dazzlingly bright. The lights flickered across my retina and the music throbbed. I didn’t just hear it with my ears—I heard it with my stomach, my fingertips, the down on my cheeks. Every cell in my body was vibrating. I closed my eyes to hear better and the people around me vanished and nothing hurt anymore, nothing mattered anymore—I let myself be swallowed up, carried away. I was drunk on rock music and a lack of oxygen—a heady mix. The crowd burst into cheers every time the band started a new song. I looked about me. The pupils of the people around me reflected the stage lights, tears were rolling down their cheeks. It was so loud and so quiet, so unbearably and unfathomably beautiful. The sun went down behind the stage, bathing everything in a light that was not of this world. The music boomed; the speakers bulged towards us. Fifteen songs were played that night, eleven litres of tears were shed, eight hundred and fifty-one people fell in love—so much energy. The grass under our feet would never grow back; a thousand moths singed themselves on the floodlights and died happy. Then came the rain. As if from nowhere, storm clouds appeared. It was so sudden. Within seconds, single drops had given way to a downpour. And with the rain came the wind, and the wind whipped up into a gale. Lightning sliced the sky into left and right, up and down. The dreamy gazes and the teary faces vanished—suddenly the crowd was all elbows and shoulders, pushing and shoving. The lightning flickered, the thunder followed almost immediately, the gale shook the steel structure of the stage, the band stopped playing, the crowd around me poured towards the exit. For a few metres I was dragged along, then I stumbled and almost went down. Struggling to stay on my feet, I was jostled along by the crowd towards the exit until I stumbled again, an elbow in my back—or a knee. I caught my breath and almost fell, but then somebody grabbed my arm and held me up, and I clutched the hand that was stretched out to me and didn’t let it go. I had regained my footing. I glanced up, looking for the face that belonged to the hand, and caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired boy, but there was such a crush and I was still being pushed towards the exit, my face in somebody’s back, bodies everywhere, no room to turn your head even. Then suddenly I was through the bottleneck at the exit and could breathe again. The grass was sodden with rain. I was soaked, water dripping down my face, my dress clinging to me. Everywhere there were people running, everywhere thunder and lightning. I could only stand and watch. Noise. Chaos. Pushing and shoving. Dazzling flashes. I looked at it all as if it were a picture you could step into. I was in the eye of the storm, wrapped in a cocoon that kept the thunder at bay. Where I was, it was calm. And then I felt a hand on my lower arm. Turning, I saw the dark-haired boy, and I pulled him to me, into my cocoon, where it was quiet and still and where we could at last look at each other in peace. The dark-haired boy smiled and I saw that he had dimples. I lowered my eyes, and then the spell broke and the bubble around us burst and the wind lashed rain into our faces and the thunder was deafening and the boy took me by the hand and we ran, while above us the sky flickered and somewhere far, far away, people stopped to look at the summer lightning over the distant concert grounds. Music and thunder, electricity and pounding hearts. That’s how it was with us. That’s the kind of night it was.
I return to the present, Philip’s face still on my retina like a blurred photograph of a ghost. I close my sore eyes and try to retrieve the image, but I can’t. Out of the window I see the night sky slowly fade to morning.
I think of Leo.
And then I think of Philip again who, if Constanze is to be believed, looked just like Leo when he was little. Even now, when she sees Leo, she sometimes says, ‘Just like my Green. The spitting image.’
I often asked my husband why he was called Green when he was a boy, but he never told me, always dismissing the question with a breezy ‘I’ll tell you some other time’. I assumed the story must have been in some way embarrassing to him and didn’t insist. I myself am not a fan of nicknames—Philip’s insistence on only ever calling me ‘Princess’ drove me mad after a while.
My thoughts circle back to Leo, who doesn’t have a funny nickname and who is now asleep somewhere in Miriam’s cosy house. I wonder whether he let Miriam read him a bedtime story. Probably not—stories are probably uncool and he’d rather his best friend didn’t know that he still likes being read to. I think of a conversation we had, one evening in bed, long before we’d heard that Philip had been found. Leo asked me whether his father was dead, and then wanted to know all about death and dying. I reassured him as well as I could, of course. No, his father wasn’t dead—one day he’d come back. And he didn’t need to worry about dying—he was far too young for that. I sat on the edge of his bed and told him a real whopper of a fairy story—the tale of a safe and ordered world where the sun keeps rising and spring never fails to follow winter. I lie to my son because I want him to feel secure, but in fact all kinds of things, even the most atrocious things, can happen at any moment. How am I to know when I go to bed at night that Leo will still be breathing the next time I see him?
When I found out that I was expecting a baby, I was stiff with fear. Philip was delighted, but I wasn’t. Of course, I told everyone I was thrilled, but it was a lie. I was afraid—not afraid that I wouldn’t be able to take care of the child properly—no, it wasn’t that. I was afraid that the child might resent me for bringing him into the world unasked, into a world I couldn’t explain to him, a world so full of wonders and atrocities, so unfathomable and inexplicable. I was afraid because I had no answers to the most elementary questions. It preoccupied me a great deal at the time. The other mothers-to-be I got to know at the antenatal classes fed their unborn babies Mozart and macrobiotic fare. I read philosophy. I’m not the brooding type—more pragmatic. I like order and clarity and purposefulness. But all through my pregnancy I read philosophical texts. It didn’t get me anywhere, of course—the more I thought and the more I read, the clearer it became to me that there are no answers to the big questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Why are some of us healthy when others are sick? Why are some of us rich when others are poor? Why am I the person I am rather than anyone else? What does it all mean? There are no answers to these questions, that much I know now. It is of no significance why things are the way they are. All that matters is what we make of them. That’s what I’ll tell my son when he asks me—and it’s what I tell myself today, at the end of this nightmarish night. It’s up to me.
The stranger is in the spare room. After my humiliating encounter with the driver of the sedan, we returned to the house without a word, then he turned to me and said that he was going to bed and would advise me to get some sleep too. He withdrew to his room and hasn’t emerged since. But he isn’t asleep—I can hear his footsteps making the floorboards creak overhead. To and fro he goes, to and fro. He can’t get to sleep any more than I can.
What on earth does he want of me? How am I to understand the hatred that flashes in his eyes when he looks at me? I run my hand over my face. Am I still thinking straight?
Is the stranger after Philip’s money? I asked that question myself when Barbara Petry was here, without pursuing the thought: Philip was—is—a very wealthy man. Of course that attracts con men.
A recent conversation I had with Johann flashes across my mind. He had wanted to discuss money with me again, and again I had refused. I earn more than enough to make ends meet, and I live in this enormous house with its wonderful garden—a house which is really far too big for Leo and me—with no rent, no mortgage to pay. I have all I need. I can do without Philip’s money. And I wouldn’t dream of having him declared dead or doing anything else to be able to access my husband’s funds.
‘Whether you like it or not,’ Johann had said, ‘it’s your money. You’re not only Philip’s wife, you’re his heir. Whether you’re comfortable with the idea or not, you are a very, very rich woman. We have to protect you and your money, if not for your sake, then at least for Leo’s. Have your husband declared dead.’
Whenever it cropped up, I tried to change the subject, but Johann wouldn’t let it drop.
‘I don’t know why you’re so keen to avoid the issue,’ he said. ‘You could do good things with Philip’s money. You could help people if you wanted.’
‘Philip isn’t dead,’ I replied every time. ‘So I’m not his heir.’
Philip isn’t dead, I tell myself even now. He’s only missing. I try the thought for size like a tailor-made jacket I haven’t had on for a while—see if it still fits. For seven years I’ve been repeating the words like a mantra. Philip isn’t dead. Philip is alive. But now this stranger is going about pretending to be my husband—and once again I don’t know what to think.
I recall something else Johann said, after I’d told him that I wasn’t interested in money—that I’d never been bothered about money and never would be. Johann had smiled his quiet smile and put his head a little to one side.
‘But Sarah, please. You say that because you want for nothing. But believe me, when the going gets tough, it always comes down to money.’
I nod deliberately.
There is only one reason for the stranger to pass himself off as Philip and worm his way into my house.
I don’t know how he came up with the idea. I don’t know how he did it. But I do at least know why now. For the money—my money, Philip’s money.
So let’s begin at the beginning.
Firstly, the stranger’s in it for the money.
Secondly, he will be expecting me to use all available means to unmask him.
Thirdly, he will have taken the necessary precautions.
Fourthly, it seems likely he had help. How else could he know so much about me, details he could never find online? That means I have to be careful whom I speak to. And above all, I can’t act the way he expects me to act.
A hideous thought flashes across my mind. If the authorities believe the stranger is my husband, does that mean he can have me locked up? And if he can do that, what other discretionary power does he have over me? If I were to have an accident and fall into a coma, could he have the life-support machines switched off? And what about Leo? My throat tightens.
I run over my encounters with Barbara Petry and the driver of the sedan. The stranger is clever, and so far he’s been able to rely on me to act like a raving lunatic. Maybe—no, definitely—that was part of his plan.
If it’s part of the stranger’s plan that I act like a madwoman, I’ve so far been playing into his hands. My breakdown at the airport, my manic calls to Mr Bernardy, Wilhelm Hansen and Johann, the talk with Barbara Petry, and most recently—I shudder when I recall the scene from this point of view—my carry-on by the side of the road. There I was, in a kind of frenzy, barefoot, soaked in sweat, shouting at the driver, rattling at his car door. I wonder whether any of the neighbours witnessed the scene.
Maybe it really is as simple as that. Maybe the stranger is trying to drive me mad—or at least make it look as if I were mad. It would get me out of the way and leave him free to help himself to Philip’s money.
I realise how absurd that sounds and have to shake my head. Who would do such a thing? But when I think of all the crazy things people do for money, it do
esn’t seem quite so improbable after all.
I close my sore eyes, relax my muscles and try to get into a more comfortable position. I don’t expect to be able to sleep—not, I think to myself, after all I’ve been through today. But then I feel my body growing light and my consciousness dissolving like a tablet in water.
I’m walking along a passage. Bare walls. All around me it is silent, and I am scared—very scared. I don’t know what I’m so scared of, but the fear is driving me almost out of my mind. Then I hear it and stop in terror. A rumbling. The noise terrifies me, but I walk towards it all the same. There is a door. I stop a short way off and listen out. There it is again! It’s coming from the other side of the door. I walk towards it, steeling myself for whatever is lying in wait for me on the other side. Then I push down the doorhandle and fling open the door. I see what is lying there on the other side. I blink in confusion. The door doesn’t open onto a room.
The door opens onto a dark road.
I start, instantly wide awake. It was a noise that woke me. What was that? A door? I catch my breath.
I heard the stranger in the spare room until late into the night. To and fro, he went, to and fro, his footsteps making the floorboards creak. Did he get to sleep in the end after all? No, there it is again—footsteps. My guts signal danger, my pulse quickens and I realise that it’s not the footsteps themselves setting off alarm bells—it is the cautious, tentative nature of the footsteps. Someone is creeping along the hall upstairs. I prick up my ears. Without making a sound, I sink back into my armchair, close my eyes and breathe more slowly, as if, worn out by the night’s exertions, I have dropped off again. I strain my ears, but hear nothing. Sitting here with my eyes shut, I lose all sense of time and don’t know whether I’ve been waiting for two minutes or twenty. Was I imagining things? No, I can hear something, barely audible. The stranger is coming. He moves terrifyingly quietly, but the fourth stair from the top betrays him with a gentle creak. That wouldn’t have happened to Philip. He grew up in this house, lived in it nearly all his life. I squint cautiously through my eyelashes. It’s hard work breathing calmly and evenly when the man is gliding down the stairs towards me, getting slowly and steadily nearer. The wan light shining in at the living-room window has transformed the room into the set of a black-and-white film, and in the middle of this grey world stands the stranger, only a few metres away. He stands there in the middle of the room and looks across at me. My instinct is to hold my breath, but I force myself to keep breathing, nice and steady, nice and calm, in and out. My eyes are only open a slit—I see his trouser legs, but nothing else. If I were to raise my head and look him in the face, he’d know at once that I’m awake. He stands motionless for a while and it feels like forever. I wonder what he can be thinking. He’s not going to attack me physically—I feel sure of it. What he said last night seems plausible to me: if he wanted to harm me, he’s already had ample opportunity. Then a jolt goes through him and he leaves the living room as quietly as he entered it.
The Stranger Upstairs Page 10
