‘What was it about?’
‘You.’
‘Me?’
Emma nodded. ‘Bleibtreu was arguing fiercely. He’d been asked to treat someone named Marc Lucas, but he was dead against it.’
Bleibtreu didn’t want to treat me? Then why did he pick me up in his car?
‘Who was the other man?’ Marc asked.
‘I’ve no idea. They were behind the frosted-glass door that separated the consulting room from my examination room. A nurse had brought me along too early – they didn’t know I was waiting next door.’
‘What else did they discuss?’
‘They talked about the bogus advertisement that had lured you there. So you could undergo further treatment.’
‘Further treatment?’
‘Yes, but this time it was to be done properly.’
What? What was to be done? And why?
Emma gave him no opportunity to pursue this train of thought. ‘Bleibtreu was startled out of his wits when he saw me,’ she went on. ‘He stepped in front of the other man, quick as a flash, so I never got a chance to see his face. After that I knew there was something fishy going on.’
‘And you escaped?’
‘An opportunity arose the very next day. I stole an overall from one of the cleaning staff.’ Emma looked down at herself with a disparaging expression. ‘I look more like a charwoman than an interpreter in any case. It was child’s play.’
‘But first you took your file?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, from the patients’ records. It was a fortunate coincidence our surnames are so close together. Ludwig, Lucas. My folder still contained my car keys and a parking card, but there was nothing in yours except this application form.’
She pointed to the form she’d taken back from him, which was now lying at the foot of the bed beside a textbook on neuropsychology.
Marc felt the back of his neck. ‘But why? I still don’t understand any of this. Who has designs on my memories? Why are they trying to drive me insane?’
Emma’s eyes widened. She gazed at him expectantly, like a teacher waiting for her pupil to come up with the right answer. ‘That’s just what I’m asking you. What deadly secret – one you can’t remember – are you carrying around with you?’
‘Deadly?’
She expelled a deep breath. ‘Yes. Why do you think I’m on the run? We’re in the greatest danger. We’re both in possession of some secret we want to forget. Our enemies are more powerful than us, that’s for sure, but together we may manage it.’
‘Manage what?’
‘To find out what they’re doing or have done to us. Then we document it and put it on the internet. We publicize the awful truth.’
Marc looked at his watch. Not for the first time, he wondered whether the alarm would go off at some point and extricate him from this nightmare. ‘Have you any idea how crazy you sound?’
‘Not half as crazy as the man who was giving Bleibtreu an earful.’
‘What do you mean?’ Marc felt his stomach fill with bile. ‘What else did he say?’
Emma’s hands started to tremble. She put them to her lips as if to lessen the impact of her words. ‘He said: “Marc Lucas mustn’t remember, or there’ll be more deaths”.’
26
The hot-water tap wasn’t working. The other gushed like diesel from a pump for HGVs, but the water was too cold to dissolve the aspirin tablet Marc had dropped into the tooth mug. The hotel bathroom was a windowless cubby hole partitioned off from the bedroom by thin plasterboard walls that provided optical privacy at most, but certainly not acoustic. He could even hear Emma tossing more papers into her holdall.
What deadly secret are you carrying around with you?
He wondered whether to tell her about the last few minutes before the accident. About the moment when Sandra undid her seatbelt in order to get something from the back seat.
That coarse-grained, monochrome photo. The one I couldn’t make out.
But what did that sequence, which seemed to him more like a dream than a genuine memory, have to do with the shock waves whose turbulence now engulfed him? Who was so anxious to brainwash him? He could scarcely recall the last few minutes before the crash in any case. There was no need to expunge his memory of them; it had dissipated of its own accord, thanks to the painkillers they’d given him at the scene of the accident.
He opened the bathroom cabinet in search of a nail file or some other implement with which to break up the aspirin, but the hotel’s complimentaries were limited to a two-pack of condoms older than its use-by date. Shutting the cabinet again, he flinched at his own reflection in the mirror. His face looked as if a seismic shock had sent its individual features into free-fall. His sunken eyes surmounted two pendulous pouches, and even the corners of his mouth seem to be sagging under the effect of gravity. It was a long time since he’d coerced them into a smile.
Dusty though it was, the overhead light shed a glare that accentuated his look of general ill health. The colour of his eyes and skin was reminiscent of someone suffering from jaundice.
He held his wrists under the icy jet. Its chill helped him to sort out his thoughts. If the Bleibtreu Clinic and the amnesia experiment really existed, he hadn’t gone mad but become the victim of a conspiracy.
That was the good news. The bad news: if she wasn’t dead, his wife must be actively involved in that conspiracy.
But why? To what end?
Why would Sandra want to subject him to such unutterable torment? Why would she have faked her death and come to life a short while later, only to traumatize him still further by pretending not to know him? Was she capable of such cruelty?
True, she was an actress. She found it easy to take people in. Marc remembered their first date only too well. She had invited him to a performance at her drama school, introduced him to her fellow students as her brother, and then shocked them by kissing him passionately on the lips two minutes later. After that they had made a game out of putting each other in embarrassing situations. His revenge for the incestuous kiss had been to stand up in the middle of her next public appearance and clap so frenetically that she burst out laughing and forgot her lines. They were both proficient in swapping roles, but never in order to wound each other. Sandra’s acting ability and her sense of fun had formed a bond between them, never a rift. Besides, there was no reason for her to want to destroy what they had built up together.
Unless…
Marc stirred the aspirin with his forefinger. Only a third of it had dissolved.
Unless this really is a matter of life and death.
He took a swallow, although the tablet wasn’t even frothing on the surface. On a scale between white- and red-hot, his headache was entering the incandescent zone.
Or…
The thin disposable cup crumpled in his hand as a possible explanation occurred to him.
What if it’s Sandra who is in the Bleibtreu programme, not me? What if she genuinely can’t remember me any more?
Throwing the broken cup onto the floor, he opened the bathroom door and headed back to the bedroom along the narrow passage flanked by the wardrobe. He must ask Emma what she knew about his wife. Perhaps she’d gathered that Sandra had also been part of the experimental programme. Although that would raise a myriad new questions, it would at least account for her whereabouts during the last few weeks, not to mention her recent behaviour.
The premises were so cramped that the open wardrobe door was barring his route back to the bedroom. He was about to shut it when the sound of his own name abruptly froze him to the spot.