And who knocked me out.
He felt his head, which was still ringing, and noticed that his right sleeve had been rolled up. The plaster in the crook of his arm suggested that someone had taken a blood sample.
He blinked in surprise, and even that hurt. His eyelids were gummed together by a milky secretion.
‘Don’t worry, you’re among friends,’ he heard the antique dealer say. Now, having wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes, he was able to get a better view of his new surroundings. The sofa’s companion piece was a wing chair positioned so that anyone sitting in it could look out of the window and see the sofa and the fireplace at the same time. But that was the only set-up that made any sense. All the other furniture – bookcases, chests of drawers, upright chairs, a desk, even a tea trolley – was randomly arranged and mismatched in colour and style. The room reminded him of his own untidy flat, except that the removal firm’s boxes were missing and every available surface was covered with medical textbooks, reports and articles.
‘Friends?’ Marc looked over at the fireplace.
Standing beside it, shoulder to shoulder with the elderly stranger, were Emma and his brother. Benny looked just as he had the last time they met – a weary, unshaven figure in cargo pants and bomber jacket – whereas Emma was looking somewhat better and had a white bandage over her left ear. Someone must have seen to it, and if Marc’s inference from the medical diplomas on the mantelpiece was correct, he had a pretty good idea who it was.
‘Who are you?’ he asked the old man, whom he no longer took to be an antique dealer.
‘I’m Professor Niclas Haberland.’ The words were accompanied by a smile. ‘But my friends call me Caspar.’
‘How did I get here?’
‘You can thank your brother for that. He brought you to me.’
Marc looked at Benny. He noticed only now that some of his symptoms had disappeared. Although he still felt sick and his head was buzzing like a swarm of bees, he wasn’t feeling as bad as he had over the last few hours. He wondered what the Professor had given him.
‘I followed the two of you,’ Benny volunteered.
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
Marc nodded. The movement made his neck twinge. He hoped his fall in the cellar hadn’t jolted the splinter nearer his spinal cord, and that it was only a trapped nerve.
Yes, I know why. That’s the reason I came to see you.
‘You asked for my help, you ass, and you know perfectly well how I react to that.’
‘You did a runner.’
‘Yes, I had some urgent business to attend to. But then, as I was sitting in my car, my conscience pricked me. You’re still my brother, after all, no matter what’s happened between us.’
Emma had gone over to the window. ‘What a coincidence!’ she said scathingly. ‘First he tries to kill us, then he turns up like a fairy godmother.’
Marc ignored this. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
‘You think I’ve lost my powers of intuition?’
Marc almost shook his head but remembered the trapped nerve just in time.
‘You wanted to see Sandra again. The only likely place to start looking was your former home.’
Summoning up all his strength, Marc struggled into a sitting position. The room seemed to rotate for a moment, first one way, then the other. To his surprise he very soon felt much better than he had when he first sat up. His sense of balance gradually returned and his nausea, too, subsided.
‘Anyway,’ Benny went on, ‘I drove out to Eichkamp and spotted this nutcase outside the house, asleep in her Beetle.’ He indicated Emma with a derisive jerk of his head. ‘Then I waited a while. When you didn’t come out after twenty minutes I went inside and found you down in the cellar.’
Marc looked first at Benny, then at Emma, and finally out of the window at the far end of the room, which evidently doubled as the professor’s living room and study. The house they were in could not have been much bigger than the ‘villa’. Judging by the clumsily split logs stacked beside the fireplace and the unbroken expanse of trees outside the window, it was quite possibly just a cabin in the forest.
‘What about that attorney?’ asked Marc, feeling the back of his head. There was a lump about five centimetres above the plaster over his splinter wound.
‘What lawyer? You were alone down there.’
Marc’s stomach muscles tensed. ‘And the film script? It was lying on the desk.’
‘Hey, I didn’t waste any time looking around when I found you lying senseless on the floor. I simply humped you outside and drove you to the prof. That makes us quits.’
Benny folded his arms. Emma gave a contemptuous snort, almost as if she were about to spit on the floor.
‘I don’t believe a word you say,’ she said.
‘But I do,’ said Haberland, who had been following this exchange from the wing chair. He glanced enquiringly at Benny.
‘Go ahead, Professor, I release you from your oath of patient confidentiality,’ Benny said with a smile, zipping up his bomber jacket. ‘Deliver your lecture. I’m going outside for a smoke.’
53
Marc felt the room temperature take a sudden dive as his brother opened the door behind him and fresh air came streaming in. The icy blast suggested that they were well outside Berlin. It was just after eleven according to the digital clock on the desk, but the temperature could not have been above zero.
Haberland waited until Benny had gone out on the veranda and shut the door. Then he motioned Emma into a chair beside him. He did not begin to speak until she’d sat down, with an air of reluctance.
‘Benjamin is a patient of mine,’ he said, looking at Marc. ‘That’s probably why he brought you to me instead of taking you to a hospital. In the short time I was able to examine him at the clinic as an outside consultant, I became something of a friend of his. I don’t set much store by publicity, which is why I live out here in the forest, away from the rest of the world.’ He smiled, massaging his wrists.
‘I remember reading your report,’ said Marc. ‘You were against discharging him, weren’t you?’
Haberland raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture, causing the sleeve of his jacket to ride up. Marc wasn’t sure, but before the professor tweaked it back over his wrist, he thought he spotted some raised scar tissue.
‘It wasn’t my job to decide whether or not your brother should be discharged. I merely diagnosed a disorder that had always been previously overlooked – one that renders it almost impossible for him to lead a normal life. It makes certain over-reactions, for instance suicidal tendencies, appear more understandable.’
Haberland turned to Emma. ‘Likewise, the question of why he followed you. Benjamin suffers from what is commonly termed the “helper syndrome”. He’s an HSP.’
Emma raised her eyebrows enquiringly.
‘A highly sensitive person. If you went outside now and gave him your hand, he could sense your state of mind. Worse still, he would experience your mental state himself. Benny lives other people’s lives. That’s why he has to help them whether he wants to or not.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Marc said firmly. Haberland’s few words had struck home. The professor was describing him as well as Benny. Marc had known exactly what was going on inside his younger brother when the band split up. That was why, after the first flush of his affair with Sandra, he had tried to re-establish contact with him. By then, however, Benny was refusing to come home. He not only ignored all Marc’s calls but dropped out of school rather than stay in touch with him.
Haberland continued to address his remarks to Emma, trying to explain the complex medical problems as simply as possible. ‘It sounds a little hard to believe, I know, but I’m sure that you yourself have covered your eyes because you didn’t want to watch some overly horrific scene in a film, for instance.’