The Fear Index (23 page)

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.

The man frowned at him as if he were a slightly baffling child and replied in English: ‘Because you invited me.’

Hoffmann stared at him, aghast. ‘I didn’t
invite
you to do this.’

The knife was flourished again. ‘Continue, please.’

‘Listen, this is not right …’

Hoffmann finished unbuttoning his shirt and let it fall on top of his jacket. He was thinking hard now, evaluating risks and chances. He grasped the bottom of his T-shirt and pulled it up over his head, and when his face emerged and he saw his attacker’s hungry eyes he felt his flesh crawl. But here was weakness, he recognised: here was opportunity. Somehow he forced himself to make a ball of the white cotton and to offer it to him. ‘Here,’ he said, and when the man reached out to take it he slightly adjusted his feet against the back of the bathtub so as to brace himself. He leaned forward encouragingly – ‘Here you are’ – and then launched himself at him.

He landed on his assailant with sufficient force to knock him backwards, the knife went flying, and together they sank down so entwined it was impossible for either man to land a blow. In any case all Hoffmann wanted was to escape the horrible claustrophobia of that squalid bathroom. He tried to haul himself up on to his feet, grabbing at the sink with one hand and the light cord with the other, but both seemed to come away at once. The room went dark and he felt something round his ankle dragging him down again. He hacked at it with his other heel and stamped on it and the man howled with pain. He fumbled in the darkness for the door handle, at the same time lashing out with his feet. He was connecting with bone now – that ponytailed skull, he hoped. Kick a man when he’s down, he thought savagely, then kick him and kick him and kick him. His target whimpered and shrank into a foetal ball. When he no longer seemed a threat, Hoffmann pulled open the bathroom door and staggered into the bedroom.

He sat down heavily on the wooden chair. He put his head between his knees and was immediately sick. Despite the heat of the room, he was shivering with cold. He needed to get his clothes. He returned cautiously to the bathroom and pushed at the door. He heard a scuffling noise inside. The man had crawled towards the lavatory bowl. He was blocking the door. Hoffmann gave it a shove and the man groaned and dragged his body out of the way. Hoffmann stepped over him and retrieved his clothes and also the knife. He went back into the bedroom and quickly dressed.
You invited me
, he thought furiously – what did he mean, he had invited him? He checked his mobile phone but there was still no signal.

In the bathroom the man had his head over the lavatory. He looked up as Hoffmann came in. Hoffmann, pointing the knife, gazed down at him without pity.

‘What is your name?’ he said.

The man turned his face away and spat blood. Hoffmann warily came closer, squatted on his haunches and scrutinised him from a distance of half a metre. He was about sixty, although it was hard to tell with all the blood on his face; he had a cut above his eye. Overcoming his revulsion, Hoffmann transferred the knife into his left hand, leaned forward and opened the man’s leather coat. The man lifted his arms and allowed him to search around until he found an inside pocket, from which he withdrew first a wallet and then a dark red European Union passport. It was German. He flicked it open. The photograph was not a good likeness. The text identified him as Johannes Karp, born 14.4.52 in Offenbach am Main.

Hoffmann said, ‘And you’re seriously telling me you came here from Germany because I invited you?’

‘
Ja
.’

Hoffmann recoiled. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘No, fucker, you are crazy,’ said the German with a flicker of spirit. ‘You gave me your house codes.’ Blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth. He spat a tooth into his hand and inspected it. ‘
Ein verrückter Mann!
’

‘Where is this invitation?’

He gestured weakly with his head towards the other room. ‘Computer.’

Hoffmann stood. He pointed the knife at Karp. ‘Don’t move, okay?’

In the other room he sat on the chair and opened the laptop. It came awake immediately and at once the screen was filled with an image of Hoffmann’s own face. The quality of the photograph was poor – an enlarged picture-grab from a surveillance tape, by the look of it. He had been captured gazing up into the camera, his expression blank, unguarded. It was so tightly cropped it was impossible to tell where it had been taken.

A couple of keystrokes took him into the hard-drive registry. The program names were all in German. He called up a list of the most recently viewed files. The last folder to be edited, just after six o’clock the previous evening, was entitled
Der Rotenburg Cannibal
. Inside it were scores of Adobe files containing newspaper articles about the case of Armin Meiwes, a computer technician and internet cannibal who had met a willing victim on a website, drugged him and started eating him, and who was currently serving a life sentence in Germany for murder. Another folder seemed to consist of chapters of a novel,
Der Metzgermeister
–
The Master Butcher
: was that right? – tens of thousands of words of what appeared to be a work of fantasy in an unparagraphed stream of consciousness that Hoffmann could not understand. And then there was a folder called
Das Opfer
, which Hoffmann knew meant
The Victim
. This was in English and looked like transcripts from an internet chat room – a dialogue, he perceived as he read on, between one participant who fantasised about committing murder and another who dreamed about what it would be like to die. There was something distantly familiar about the second voice, phrases he recognised, sequences of dreams that had once festooned his mind like filthy cobwebs until he had cleaned them out, or thought he had cleaned them out.

Now they seemed to coalesce in front of him into a dark reflection, and he was so absorbed by what was on the screen it was a near-miracle that some slight alteration in the light or air caused him to look up as the knife flashed towards him. He jerked his head back and the point just missed his eye – a six-inch blade, a flick-knife; it must have been hidden in the man’s coat pocket. The German lashed out at him with his foot and caught him on the bottom of his ribcage, then lunged forward with the knife and tried to slash at him again. Hoffmann cried out in pain and shock, the chair toppled backwards and suddenly Karp was on top of him. The knife glinted in the pale light. Somehow, by reflex rather than conscious intent, he caught the man’s wrist with his left and weaker hand. Briefly the knife trembled close to his face. ‘
Es ist, was Sie sich wünschen
,’ whispered Karp soothingly.
It is what you desire
. The knife-tip actually pricked Hoffmann’s skin. He grimaced with the effort, holding the knife off, gaining millimetres, until at last his attacker’s arm snapped backwards and with a terrible exultation in his own power Hoffmann flung him back against the metal frame of the bed. It slid briefly on its wheels, banged against the wall and stopped. Hoffmann’s left hand still held on to the other man’s wrist, his right was clamped to Karp’s face, his fingers gouging into the deep sockets of the eyes, the heel of his hand jammed against the throat. Karp roared in pain and tore at Hoffmann’s fingers with his free hand. Hoffmann responded by adjusting his grip so that he had his hand entirely around the scrawny windpipe, choking off the sound. He was leaning in to him now; he was able to put the whole weight of his body behind that grip, and his fear and his anger, pinning Karp to the side of the bed. He smelled the animal leather of the German’s coat and the cloying rank odour of his sweat; he could feel the unshaved stubble on the neck. All sense of time was gone, swept away in the rush of adrenalin, but it seemed to Hoffmann only a few seconds later that the fingers gradually ceased scrabbling at his hand and the knife clattered to the carpet. The body went slack beneath him, and when he withdrew his hands it toppled sideways.

He became aware of someone pounding on the wall and of a male voice calling out in thickly-accented French, demanding to know what the hell was going on. He heaved himself up and closed the door and as an extra protection dragged the wooden chair over and wedged it at an angle under the handle. The movement set off an immediate clamour of pain in various battered outposts of his body – his head, his knuckles, his fingers, the base of his ribcage especially, even his toes where he had kicked the man’s head. He dabbed his fingers to his scalp and they came away sticky with blood. At some point in the struggle his wound must have partially opened up. His hands were a mass of tiny scratches, as though he had fought his way out of an undergrowth of thorns. He sucked his grazed knuckles, registering the salty, metallic taste of blood. The hammering on the wall had stopped.

He was trembling now; he felt sick again. He went into the bathroom and retched into the toilet bowl. The basin was hanging away from the wall but the taps still worked. He splashed his cheeks with cold water and went back into the bedroom.

The German lay on the floor. He had not moved. His open eyes gazed past Hoffmann’s shoulder, with an oddly hopeful expression, seemingly searching for a guest at a party who would never arrive. Hoffmann knelt and checked his wrist for a pulse. He slapped his face. He shook him as if that might reanimate him. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t need this.’ The head lolled like a bird’s on the stem of a broken neck.

There was a brisk knock on the door. A man called out, ‘
Ça va? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?
’ It was the same heavily accented voice that had shouted through the wall from next door. The handle was tried several times and then the knocking resumed. The demand this time was louder and more urgent: ‘
Allez! Laissez-moi rentrer!
’

Hoffmann levered himself painfully up on to his feet. The handle rattled again and whoever was outside began shoving against the door. The chair moved fractionally but held. The pushing stopped. Hoffmann waited for a renewed assault, but nothing happened. He crept quietly to the spyhole and looked out. The corridor was empty.

And now the animal fear was inside him again, calm and cunning, controlling his impulses and limbs, making him do things that even an hour later he would look back on in disbelief. He grabbed the dead man’s boots and quickly unthreaded the laces, yanking them out and knotting them into a single length a metre long. He seized hold of the wall light but the fixing was too flimsy. The shower curtain rail came away in his hand in a spurt of pink plaster. In the end he settled on the handle of the bathroom door. He dragged the German’s body over and propped him up against it. He made a noose out of the end of the laces, slipped the ligature around Karp’s neck, looped the line over the handle and yanked. It took some effort, hauling on the cord with one hand and hoisting the corpse under its armpit with the other, but finally he managed to raise it sufficiently to make the scene look at least half-plausible. He looped the line around the handle again and knotted it.

Once he had stuffed the German’s possessions back into the rucksack and straightened the bed, the bedroom looked oddly untouched by what had happened. He slipped Karp’s mobile into his pocket, closed the laptop and carried it over to the window. He parted the net curtain. The window opened easily, obviously often used. On the fire escape, amid the encrusted swirls of pigeon shit, were a hundred sodden cigarette butts, a score of beer cans. He clambered out on to the ironwork, reached around the window frame and pressed the switch. The shutter descended behind him.

It was a long way down, six floors, and with every clanging step of his descent Hoffmann was acutely aware of how conspicuous he must be – directly visible to anyone looking out from the buildings opposite or who happened to be standing in one of the hotel bedrooms. But to his relief most of the windows he passed were shuttered, and at the others no ghostly faces materialised behind their shrouds of muslin. The Hotel Diodati was at rest for the afternoon. He clattered on down, his only thought to put as much distance between himself and the corpse as possible.

From his high vantage point he could see that the fire escape led to a small concrete patio. A feeble attempt had been made to turn this into an outdoor seating area. There was some wooden garden furniture and a couple of faded green umbrellas advertising lager. He calculated that the best way to get out to the street would be through the hotel, but when he reached the ground and saw the sliding glass door that led to the reception area, the fear-animal decided against it: he couldn’t risk running into the man from the next-door room. He dragged one of the wooden garden chairs over to the back wall and climbed up on to it.

He found himself peering at a two-metre drop to the neighbouring yard – a wilderness of sickly urban weeds choking half-hidden pieces of rusting catering equipment and an old bike frame; on the far side were big receptacles for trash. The yard clearly belonged to a restaurant of some kind. He could see the chefs in their white hats moving about in the kitchen, could hear them shouting and the crash of their pans. He balanced the laptop on the wall and hauled himself up to sit astride the brickwork. In the distance a police siren began to wail. He grabbed the computer, swung his leg over and dropped down to the other side, landing heavily in a bed of stinging nettles. He swore. From between the waste bins a youth stepped out to see what was going on. He was carrying an empty slop bucket, smoking a cigarette – Arab-looking, clean-shaven, late teens. He stared at Hoffmann in surprise.

Hoffmann said diffidently, ‘
Où est la rue?
’ He tapped the computer significantly, as if it somehow explained his presence.

The youth looked at him and frowned, then slowly withdrew his cigarette from his mouth and gestured over his shoulder.

‘
Merci
.’ Hoffmann hurried down the narrow alley, through the wooden gate and out into the street.