‘Excuse me?’
The woman sounded diffident, like a beggar who has been rebuffed too often to hope for even a modest handout. Turning his head, Marc saw at a glance that there was something wrong with the overweight creature. She was licking her upper lip and plucking nervously at her scabby fingers.
‘What is it?’ Marc said brusquely. He was in no mood to help out some vagrant.
She retreated a step, clinging to the wire-mesh fence like him. The dim light made it hard to tell how much of a down-and-out she was. Her dark, shoulder-length hair might have been greasy or simply wet with rain. The same applied to the white quilted jacket that made her corpulent figure look like a Michelin mascot.
‘May I ask you a question?’ she asked softly, as if she dreaded the answer. She stepped forwards into the glare of one of the lights mounted on the fence at two-metre intervals to warn of the abyss beyond it. The sight of her puffy face and scratched hands banished any doubts Marc might have had about her mental state. The woman with the double chin and the cheap glasses with sand-coloured frames was either heavily medicated or suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ Ostentatiously, Marc looked up as though interested in the crane overhead. A light was still on in the deserted cab. If he hadn’t already been feeling dizzy, just gazing up at it would have made him feel queasy.
‘Are you in the programme too?’ asked the timid voice beside him.
What?
He didn’t turn to face her until she repeated the question. She removed her glasses and rather clumsily wiped the misted lenses with her bare fingers.
‘The programme,’ she said again, looking straight at him for the first time. Her dark, beady little eyes lent her face a doll-like appearance. She might have been younger than him, although she looked older. Marc knew only too well what life on the streets could do to a person. He peered around suspiciously. The pavement was deserted. The shops and offices had been closed for hours.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The trial. The experiment.’
Although his early warning system had been defective since the accident – it had failed him several times in the past few hours – what little remained of it was sufficient to put him on his guard. It was disconcerting enough to be accosted by a down-and-out while staring into a deserted construction site on a rainy night, but the subject she had just raised rendered the situation thoroughly unreal.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Emma.’ Her arm shot out like that of a child whose parents have told her to shake hands nicely with a guest. ‘My name is Emma Ludwig, and…’ Her good-natured expression reminded him of his mother. She used to give him the same kindly, rather wistful look in the kitchen at the end of a long, tiring day. He was about to shake hands when the rest of her sentence made him instinctively recoil. ‘…and I’ve been waiting for you for days.’
A car went speeding through a puddle behind her.
‘For me?’
He swallowed hard. A plump raindrop landed on his bare scalp. He brushed it off before it could make its icy way down his neck. He couldn’t remember when he’d last shaved his head, and the feel of the stubble beneath his fingertips made him even sadder. Sandra had liked it when his ‘haircut’ matched his three-day beard.
‘You must be mistaking me for someone else,’ he said at length, letting go of the wire-mesh fence. His jeans had become completely sodden in the short time he’d been standing there.
‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘Why did you come here? To this hole in the ground, I mean?’
Marc retreated a step. His perception of some invisible threat intensified with every word this strange woman uttered.
‘What’s it to you?’
‘I think I can help you.’
‘Why should you think I’m in need of help?’ he said dismissively.
Her reply took his breath away. ‘Because I’m a patient too.’
Too? Why too?
‘I was in the Bleibtreu programme just like you.’
Wrong. I didn’t even sign the application form.
‘But then I got out. Since then I’ve spent every spare minute here.’ She indicated the construction site and put her glasses on again. ‘Here beside this hole, on the lookout for people who can’t understand where No. 211 has got to.’
Marc turned to go. He was itching to get away from her even though he had no idea where he could go in the middle of the night, with no car, no money or medication.
‘People like you.’
He wanted to go to Constantin or his old friend Thomas – even, perhaps, to Roswitha, whom he had never met outside office hours but who at least was a familiar face. In the end, however, he went nowhere. He stayed where he was, but not because the woman who called herself Emma Ludwig had offered to help him, nor because she wanted to show him a file that would, she claimed, be of interest to him.
‘Please come with me, Dr Lucas. It’s too dangerous for us to be seen together here.’
He stayed because this woman, if she really existed, knew his name and shared his belief that there used to be a clinic here. That meant there was an outside chance he hadn’t lost his mind. Then at least he wouldn’t be the only one.
21
The situation was ridiculous. Confronting him was an unknown woman who sounded like a paranoid conspiracy theorist. She imagined she was being dogged by unseen pursuers from whom they had to escape at once, yet he felt he had to talk to this creature because she was the first person in ages who appeared to recognize him.
‘You know who I am?’
‘Yes, come on.’
Emma pulled a snow-white hood over her bedraggled hair and set off. It was only now that Marc noticed that her knee-boots were, surprisingly, far from down-at-heel. She also seemed to be in better physical condition than her obesity suggested. It was an effort to keep up with her, and he soon broke out into a sweat.
‘Do we know each other?’ he asked. Emma strode along with her head down, looking like a boxer on his way to the ring. ‘I mean,’ he added rather breathlessly, ‘have we ever met before?’ He was suffering from the effects of lack of medication and felt even wearier and more wrung out than he usually did at this hour. At least his nausea had subsided a little, but that could be down to the MCP drops he’d taken at the beginning of his last taxi ride.
‘No, we’ve never met.’
Emma’s reply reassured and disturbed him in equal measure. On the one hand, it accorded with his own certainty that he’d never seen this woman before. On the other, it posed the question of how she knew who he was.
He caught hold of her sleeve and brought her to a stop. ‘What do you know about me?’
‘Please can we straighten that out on the way?’
‘On the way to where?’
A car crawled past. Emma swiftly turned to face a shop window displaying women’s shoes that cost more than a laptop – despite the 30 per cent price reduction emblazoned in bold lettering.
‘He’s only looking for a parking place,’ said Marc, and she promptly lost interest in a pair of high-heeled Italian sandals.
‘Quick, quick!’
She hurried across the street, taking a bunch of keys from her jacket pocket. When Marc saw what she was rushing towards, his original assumption about her was finally dispelled. Nobody who drove an old Volkswagen Beetle with a divided rear window could be an urban vagrant.
But he wasn’t interested in going for a drive in this peculiar creature’s car. He wanted some answers.
‘Stop, wait.’
Although he hadn’t raised his voice she must have sensed its latent threat. She turned and saw the mobile in his hand.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to call the police and-’
‘No, don’t!’