Little Hands Clapping (7 page)

The young baker saw the girl’s boyfriend approaching. ‘Here,’ he said, offering her the paper bag. ‘Take the rest of them. Share them with your friend.’ He wished he could have made his way through life without knowing the name of the boy who had captured the heart of the only girl he could ever love, but in a town this small it was impossible, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. ‘Share them with Mauro.’

Madalena took them without a word, and the young baker stood up and walked away.

Mauro arrived, and sat beside her. ‘What was that all about?’

Madalena cast her eyes down. ‘Oh, nothing really.’

But he knew. He had not been oblivious to the emotions that lay behind the sound of the young baker’s euphonium, and he too felt sorry for him. They watched him until he was lost from view.

Madalena offered a doughnut to Mauro. He took a bite, and raised his eyes to the sky. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said. He took another bite, and shook his head. ‘How can anything taste so good?’

They sat under the tree, and for a long time neither said a word.

His working day over, the old man sat alone at his kitchen table. He cut a thin slice from the cake, put it on a plate and stared at it for a while before eating it much as a heron eats a fish: from a state of near stasis erupted a single lightning motion, and it was gone. He cut another slice and ate it in the same manner, then did the same again. He knew that before long the whole cake would be inside him, that he would spend some time staring at the empty tin. But for now it was there in front of him, and it might as well have been the only thing in the world. He was struck by everything about it: by the way it looked, by its aroma, and by its texture both on his fingers and in his mouth. But what he liked most of all about Pavarotti’s wife’s cake was its delicious taste.

A time will come when the doctor’s house is a rogue landmark, attracting traffic from all over the city and beyond. Some drivers will slow to a crawl, trying to appear as if they are looking for a house number and have no idea that there is anything exceptional about the street, while others will come to a shameless halt and get out to take photographs. When the place is no longer considered a crime scene and the police have gone away, people will arrive after dark to climb over the fence and explore the garden. By then it will be an earthy wasteland, every inch having been excavated to a depth of at least three metres, and the visitors will leave with their pockets stuffed with souvenir pebbles and splinters of wood. There will be no formal objections when the house, already denuded by the investigation, is pulled down and the ground rolled flat.

For now though, it looks like any of the houses in this part of the city, its paintwork just as shiny, its roof as free of moss and its driveway as well-swept, but for the doctor’s neighbours it stands apart. To them it is not so much a home as a monument to his quiet bravery.

The doctor had chosen the house without thinking a great deal about why he had done so, and it was only when he moved in and saw how little room his packing crates took up that he realised the absurdity of living alone in such a large place. He knew at once that he should have bought a cottage or an apartment, but he did nothing to correct his mistake, and he soon stopped paying attention to the doors that led to empty rooms.

Every so often he would encounter an attractive fellow doctor at a conference, or a charming divorcee at a social function, and would begin to wonder whether he was ready to let somebody into his life, somebody with whom he could fill the space that surrounded him. He would sigh, but before this sigh was over he would see an image of Ute glaring at him, challenging him to love the other woman more than he loved her, and every time her victory was immediate and absolute.

At least he has Hans to keep him company
, his neighbours said to themselves, as they passed by.
It would be terrible to think of him alone in there with all his memories
.

Doctor Fröhlicher was on his second Hans. He had bought the first one to surprise his bride shortly after they had returned from their honeymoon, hoping that a puppy would help make their apartment feel like a home. On seeing the tiny black Labrador looking up from its basket, Ute had narrowed her eyes and said, ‘You’re not expecting
me
to look after that thing?’ This was not the reaction he had been wishing for, and quietly he told her that he would be the one to feed and exercise the animal. Thinking it might bring his wife and the dog closer together, he had asked her what she would like him to be called, and without a moment’s hesitation she gave her reply. He hadn’t dared ask her why she had chosen that name, and as the possibilities assaulted him he berated himself for allowing the terror to take hold.

‘Hans,’ he said. ‘A fine name.’

In time Ute found it would sometimes suit her to pay attention to Hans, flamboyantly petting him while her husband looked on, and taking him for walks, returning hours later. When the doctor asked where they had been she would only say, ‘Out.’

When this first dog had arrived in the city he had a greying muzzle and a touch of stiffness to his legs, and although he had carried on for a few years, it was no great surprise when one morning the doctor had gone downstairs to find his companion’s heart had stopped beating in the night. As news of the dog’s passing spread through the streets the doctor’s patients said,
If only he was a vet – maybe then he could have saved poor Hans
. A few months later he bought a second black Labrador puppy, which he also called Hans, and it was with relief that people agreed that black Labradors are all more or less the same, and one can quite efficiently be replaced with another.
If only
, they thought,
the same could be said of wives
.

As usual the doctor had risen early. He stood in the kitchen, waiting for his Fair Trade coffee to cool and scratching Hans behind the ears. ‘It’s just as delicious as ordinary coffee,’ he said to the dog, ‘and what better way to start the day than with a good deed?’ He was about to start preparing breakfast when the telephone rang. He had not heard from the old man for some weeks, but he knew it would be him. He answered.

‘Oh dear,’ he sighed, smiling. Hans looked up at him as the conversation continued, its template familiar. The doctor put down the phone, and told the dog he would be returning before long. He put his stethoscope around his neck, picked up his portmanteau and walked through to the car.

Summer had begun, and it was starting to get light as the garage door opened, and then the gates, and he drove towards the museum.

The old man had heard nothing, but in the middle of the night he was woken by the familiar sensation of a light, spindly leg on his cold skin. He knew from experience what this meant; that something had happened in the rooms below, something that would need to be dealt with. He felt the spider cross his cheek, then pause for just a moment before darting into the hollow of his mouth. As it thrashed around, frantic as it struggled to find a way out, he trapped it with his tongue, and with his back teeth he ground it to a paste. He swallowed, then extended a thin arm and set his alarm for five o’clock. Moments later the quiet of the room was broken by the rumble of his breath.

The room filled with a furious beep. With a long, grey finger he slid the switch on the alarm clock to
off
, then he rose to his feet, picked up a plastic torch and walked downstairs. There was a familiar faint metallic quality to the air, and his nose led him to Room Nine, where the smell was thick and unpleasant. As was often the case, there was more than just blood to be dealt with. He opened a window to let in fresh air, then went to a utility cupboard where he picked up a pile of old newspapers that he kept for this reason. He placed them on the floor around the body, and went down to the front desk to make his call to the doctor. Twelve and a half minutes later he was fully dressed and standing by the back door.

The knock came precisely on time, and he stood aside as the doctor entered.

They went up to Room Nine, and the doctor stepped onto the damp, dark newspaper and looked down. ‘Once again,’ he sighed, with a sympathetic smile, ‘it seems we are too late.’ He looked for a while longer, then turned to the old man and said, gravely, ‘My medical opinion is that the unfortunate gentleman is completely dead.’ He walked up and down a few times, crouched, and delivered his post mortem, telling the old man what was already apparent – that the deceased had most likely perished at some time in the early hours of the morning as a result of the loss of blood from a series of self-inflicted wounds to the left wrist. He pointed at the knife, which lay beside a display unit on the other side of the room, a smear marking its course. He continued: ‘Judging by the aroma emanating from the body it would seem the deceased soiled himself in his final moments.’ The people they found had seldom died cleanly. The doctor wondered why this was always left out of films and theatrical productions: surely, he thought, it would be more realistic for Juliet to find Romeo lying in a puddle of his own urine, and for her to vomit all over the Capulet tomb as she sends her body into shock by digging the knife into her heart.

The doctor had come prepared, bringing with him a woollen blanket in which to wrap the body. When that was done they took one end each and carried it down to the back door. After a few hurried words about the importance of breakfast, the doctor checked for passers-by. He gave the
all clear
, and together the men bundled the corpse into the back of the car.

The old man finished cleaning up. The floor was well-sealed, and nothing would seep through to the ceiling below. Wearing a rubber glove, he picked up the stinking newspapers, stuffed them into a bin bag and went back into the cupboard for a mop and bucket. He added cleaning fluid to the water to mask the smell, and when the floor and skirting board were clean of congealing blood he checked the displays, using a handkerchief to wipe off the occasional spot. He looked around to see if anything had been left behind. The knife was still there, but that was all. He picked it up. It looked new, and sharp. He would use it for his cheese. After checking the stairs for his or the doctor’s footprints, mopping a few marks as he went, he put the cleaning apparatus away. The smell was fading, but it remained unpleasant. He left the windows open. If Hulda was to ask him why Room Nine’s floor was damp he would tell her he had dropped a mug of coffee, that it had gone everywhere and he had mopped it up. If she mentioned that she had found any stray dark spots or smears he would say that a visitor had suffered a sudden violent nosebleed. He had prepared these explanations some time before, but had never yet had cause to use them.

Back in his kitchen he sat down for breakfast, and as he lifted the dry cracker to his mouth he noticed something stuck in the gap between two of his back teeth. He levered it out with his tongue, and transferred it to the tip of a long, grey finger. It was the dark brown leg of the spider that had crawled into his mouth in the early hours of the morning, just as the blood had spilled from the body downstairs. He counted. Five of the seven segments were there: the femur, the patella, the tibia, the metatarsus and the tarsus. Only the coxa and the trochanter, the short sections closest to the body, were missing. The skinny leg was coated in brown hairs, and there at the end of the tarsus, so small it was barely visible, was the spider’s claw, perhaps the one that had woken him in the night. He put it back in his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed.

The doctor peeled away the blanket, and looked at the body. Hans had come out to greet him, and he told the dog, as he often did, that one of the benefits of mental or emotional collapse is that often there will only be minimal physical symptoms to accompany the inner turmoil. Sometimes, he continued, the person will be overweight or, as in this case, underweight, but in terms of taste either was preferable to somebody who had died after a long and debilitating illness. He was concerned, though, for himself and Hans not to ingest any second-hand poison. They would be unlikely to die from eating the amount that would make it through to the meat, but it would result in them getting upset stomachs, and he didn’t want that.

Self-poisoning had become somewhat old-fashioned, but they still had to be careful. One man passed on to him from the museum had apparently overdosed, probably on a narcotic or a commercial painkiller, but he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t taken weedkiller or rat poison. The doctor’s garden was often visited by cats, and he had lured one into the garage and fed it morsels of the suspect flesh. The animal had started to exhibit a combination of listlessness and nausea, and the doctor had panicked, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and thrown it into the nearest freezer. With a heavy heart he wrote off the man as inedible, and disposed of all but his liver and a hand, meaning to carry out tests on them. He had kept the cat’s body for the same reason, but he found he never quite had the time to conduct his investigation, and it remained in the freezer, its body contorted, stuck in the position in which it had finally given up its struggle.

One of the doctor’s worries was of dying without having a chance to cover his tracks, and he shivered at the thought of the garage being searched and people concluding that he must have enjoyed having sex with frozen cats. To ensure that this would not happen, he had written
I do not have sex with frozen cats
on a piece of paper, and left it in a drawer in his study. Sometimes he wondered whether this would be enough to combat speculation.

He felt remorseful about what he had done to the cat, even more so when posters went up around the neighbourhood, appealing for its safe return. The doctor knew the family, and one evening he knocked on their door and after a few gentle words of sympathy for their loss he presented them with a kitten. Within hours this act of kindness had entered into legend.