‘Your voice is becoming faint,’ she said. ‘I can hardly hear you. Why is your voice fainter?’
Minks replied, but his voice had now drifted so far away and she couldn’t make out his answer.
‘Why can’t I hear you?’ Now there was a new magnitude to her fear. It burned furnace raw and deep. ‘Why can’t I hear you?’ She screamed into the dark sky with its too-big moon.
Vasyl Vitrenko leaned forward, tilting down to kiss her on the forehead. His lips were dry, cold. ‘Because you’ve got it wrong, Maria.’ His voice was heavy with an Eastern European accent. ‘Dr Minks isn’t there. This isn’t one of your hypnotherapy sessions. This is real.’ He reached beneath his billowing black cloak. ‘This is no dream. And there’s no one here except you and me. Alone.’
Maria wanted to scream but couldn’t. Instead she stared as if hypnotised at the evil moonlight gleam on Vasyl Vitrenko’s long, broad-bladed knife.
9.10 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina had never seen a human scalp before, but she knew with absolute certainty that that was exactly what she was looking at. To start with, it had been the colour of the hair that had prevented her identifying it as something human. Red. Unnaturally red.
But there was now no doubt in her mind that this was human hair. Glistening wet hair. And skin. A large ragged disc of it. It had been nailed to the bathroom door with three panel pins. The top of it had folded over, revealing a little of the puckered bloody underside where the skin had been sliced and pulled away from the skull beneath. A long ‘Y’ shape of glistening red streamed from it and down the wooden bathroom door.
Blood.
Kristina shook her head. No. Not again. She had seen too much blood in her life. No more. Not now. Not when she had just got her life back. This was so unfair.
She leaned forward again and felt her legs shudder, as if they were struggling to support the weight of her body. Yes, there was blood, but there was too much of it to be blood alone. And too vivid a red. The same vivid red as the sodden, matted hair.
Her pulse thudded in her ears, a tempo that increased as a simple but obvious thought hit her. Whose hair?
Kristina reached out with trembling fingers and pressed them against an area of the door’s wooden surface that was not streaked with glistering red.
‘Herr Hauser…?’ Her voice was high and tremulous.
She pushed and the door of the bathroom swung open.
9.12 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
Vitrenko smiled at Maria. He looped his arm around her back and pressed her close to him, as if they were about to dance. She could feel the unyielding solidity of his body tight against hers.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said, and meant it. Her terror subsided. He eased his body from hers but still held her firm. He lifted the knife and ran its keen edge over her shoulders, her breast and let it rest just below her chest, its cold sharp tip pressing lightly into the soft space just below her sternum.
‘Do you want me to do it?’ he asked. ‘Again?’
‘Yes. I want you to do it again.’ She looked into the green eyes that still shone cold and cruel.
There was a crash of thunder. Then another. She felt the knife-point pressure on her abdomen increase, and the keen pain as the tip pierced her skin. There were another two loud claps of thunder and the world around her dissolved into darkness.
Maria opened her eyes and found herself looking across at Dr Minks. He held his hands together before him as if he had been clapping. The thunder that had brought her back. She straightened herself up and looked around his office, as if reassuring herself that she was back in reality.
‘You closed me out, Maria,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want me there.’
‘He took control,’ she said, and coughed when she realised that her voice was shaking.
‘No, he didn’t,’ said Dr Minks. ‘You took control. He doesn’t exist in your dreams. You recreate him. You control his words and actions. It was your will that sought to exclude me.’ He paused and crumpled back into his chair, again examining his notes, but the frown did not fade from his brow. ‘You saw the same landmarks and motifs again?’
‘Yes. The galleon where the harbour-police patrol boat was that night and the castle where the old barn was. What I don’t understand is why it is all so elaborate in the dream. Why is he dressed in armour? And why is everything changed into some kind of historical counterpart?’
‘I don’t know. It could be that you are trying, in your mind, to place what happened that night into the past… A distant past: like a previous life, almost. Do you feel like it’s the same night as you were stabbed?’
‘Yes and no. It’s like the same night, but in another dimension or universe or something. Like you said, as if it were a completely different time, as well.’
‘And, in this scenario, you let your attacker come close to you? You permit him to have close personal contact?’
‘That’s the thing I can never understand,’ said Maria. ‘Why do I allow him to touch me, when I can’t let anyone else touch me?’
‘Because he is the origin of your trauma. The source of your fear. Without this man, you would have no post-traumatic stress, no aphenphosmphobia, no panic attacks.’ Minks took out a thick leather-bound pad and started to scribble on it. He ripped a page out and handed it to Maria. ‘I want you to take these. I feel we have too big a mountain to climb with therapy alone.’
‘Drugs?’ Maria did not reach to take the prescription. ‘What is it?’
‘Propanolol. A beta blocker. The same sort of thing that I’d prescribe if you had high blood pressure. It’s a very mild dose and I only want you to take one eighty-milligram tablet on, well, difficult days. You can make it a hundred and sixty milligrams if it’s really bad. You don’t suffer from asthma or any respiratory problems, do you?’
Maria shook her head. ‘What does it do?’
‘It is a noradrenalin inhibitor. It restricts the chemicals that your body generates when you’re afraid. Or angry.’ Dr Minks thrust the prescription in Maria’s direction and she took it from him.
‘Will it affect my performance at work?’
Minks smiled and shook his head. ‘No, it shouldn’t do. Some people feel tired or lethargic with it, but not in the same way it would if I were to give you Valium. This might slow you down a little, but otherwise you should feel no ill effects. And, as I said, I only want you to take it when you really feel you need to.’
Dr Minks stood up and shook Maria’s hand. She noticed that the psychologist’s palm was cool and fleshy. And rather moist. She pulled her hand away a little too quickly.
After confirming the following week’s appointment with Minks’s secretary, Maria made her way to the elevator. As she did so she paused to take two things from her shoulder bag. The first was a handkerchief with which she wiped vigorously at the hand that Minks had shaken. The second was her police service-issue SIG-Sauer nine-millimetre automatic, sheathed in its clip-on holster, which she attached to the belt of her trousers before pressing the button to summon the lift.
9.12 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina Dreyer stood framed in the bathroom doorway. She opened her mouth to scream, but her fear strangled the sound in her throat. For four years, twice a week, Kristina had cleaned Herr Hauser’s bathroom until it shone scalpel-bright. She had wiped every surface, swept every corner, polished every tap and fitting. It was a space so familiar to her that she could have navigated it with her eyes closed.
But not today. Today it was an unknown hell.
The bathroom was large and bright. A tall curtainless window, its lower half frosted glass, looked out onto the small square courtyard behind the apartment. At this time of morning when the sun was angled right, it flooded the bathroom with light. For some, the decor would have been too clinical. But not for Kristina, for whom nothing could be too clean; too sterile. The entire room was lined with ceramic tiles: large and pale sky-blue on the floor; smaller and bright white on the walls. Herr Hauser’s bathroom had always been a delight to clean because the light sought out each corner and the tiles always responded to Kristina’s abstergent touch with a keen gleam.