The Redbreast (49 page)

‘If I can remember? We talked about that murder for years! The blood on the glass door matched his blood type. And the police found the same fingerprints in Brockhard’s bedroom as on Uriah’s bedside table and bed in the hospital. Furthermore, he had the motive . . .’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, they loved each other, Gudbrand and Helena. But she was to be Christopher’s.’

‘They were engaged?’

‘No, no. But Christopher was crazy about Helena. Everyone knew that. Helena was from a rich family that had been ruined after her father had ended up in prison, and a marriage into the Brockhard family was her and her mother’s way of getting back on their feet. And you know how it is – a young woman has certain obligations to her family. At least, she did, at that time.’

‘Do you know where Helena Lang is today?’

‘But you haven’t touched the strudel, my dear,’ the widow exclaimed.

Harry took a big bite, chewed and nodded in approval to Frau Mayer.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That I don’t know. When it became known that she had been with Johansen on the night of the murder, she was investigated, but they didn’t find anything. She stopped working at the Rudolf II Hospital and moved to Vienna. She started up her own sewing business. Yes, she was a strong, enterprising woman. I occasionally saw her walking in the streets here. But in the mid-fifties she sold up and after that I didn’t hear any more. Someone said she had gone abroad. But I know who you can ask – if she’s alive, mind you. Beatrice Hoffmann, she worked as the house help for the Lang family. After the murder the family could no longer afford her and she worked for a time at the Rudolf II.’

Fritz was already on the telephone again.

A fly buzzed desperately around the window. It was following its own microscopic logic and kept banging into the glass without understanding quite why. Harry stood up.

‘Strudel . . . ?’

‘Next time, Frau Mayer. Right now we don’t have the time.’

‘Why’s that?’ she asked. ‘This happened more than half a century ago. It isn’t going anywhere.’

‘Well . . .’ Harry said, watching the black fly under the lace curtains in the sun.

Fritz received a call on his mobile on the way to the police station and did a highly improper U-turn which made the motorists behind them jump on their horns.

‘Beatrice Hoffmann is alive,’ he said accelerating through the lights. ‘She’s at an old people’s home in Mauerbachstraße. That’s up in the Vienna Woods.’

The BMW turbo squealed with glee. The blocks of flats gave way to half-timbered houses, vineyards and finally the green deciduous forest, with the afternoon sun playing on the leaves and creating a magical atmosphere as they sped along avenues lined with beech and chestnut trees.

A nurse led them out into the large garden.

Beatrice was sitting on a bench in the shade of an enormous, gnarled oak tree. A straw hat dominated the tiny, wrinkled face. Fritz spoke with her in German and explained why they had come. The old woman inclined her head with a smile.

‘I’m ninety years old,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘And tears still come to my eyes when I think about Fräulein Helena.’

‘Is she still alive?’ Harry asked in his schoolboy German. ‘Do you know where she is?’

‘What’s that he says?’ she asked with her hand behind her ear. Fritz explained.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know where Helena is.

She’s sitting up there.’ She pointed up into the treetops.

There you go
, Harry thought.
Senile
. But the old lady hadn’t finished speaking.

‘With St Peter. Good Catholics, the Langs, but Helena was the angel in the family. As I said, it always brings tears to my eyes thinking about it.’

‘Do you remember Gudbrand Johansen?’ Harry asked.

‘Uriah,’ Beatrice said. ‘I only met him once. A handsome, charming young man, but sick unfortunately. Who would have believed that such a nice, polite boy would have been able to kill? Their emotions ran away with them, yes, with Helena too. She never got over him, the poor thing. The police never found him and although Helena was never accused of anything, André Brockhard saw to it that she was thrown out of the hospital. She moved into town and did voluntary work for the Archbishop until the family was in such dire financial straits that she was forced to find paid work. So she started a sewing business. Within two years she had fourteen women sewing for her full-time. Her father was released but couldn’t find work after the Jewish banker scandal. Frau Lang took the family’s fall from grace worst. She died after a long illness in 1953 and Herr Lang the same autumn in a car accident. Helena sold the business in 1955 and left the country without any explanation to anyone. I can remember the day. It was 15 May, Austria’s liberation day.’

Fritz saw Harry’s curious expression and explained.

‘Austria is a little unusual. Here we don’t celebrate the day Hitler capitulated, but the day the Allies left the country.’

Beatrice spoke about how she had received news of Helena’s death.

‘We hadn’t heard from her for more than twenty years when one day I received a letter postmarked Paris. She was there on holiday with her husband and daughter, she wrote. It was a kind of final journey, I realised. She didn’t say where she had settled down, whom she had married or what illness she had. Only that she hadn’t long to live and she wanted me to light a candle for her in Stephansdom. She was an unusual person, Helena was. She was seven years old when she came to me in the kitchen and turned these grave eyes on me. “Humans were created by God to love,” she said.’

A tear ran down the old lady’s lined cheek.

‘I’ll never forget it. Seven years old. I think she decided then and there how she was going to live her life. And even though it definitely wasn’t as she had imagined and her trials were many and sore, I’m convinced she believed it to the bottom of her heart all her life – that humans were created by God to love. That’s how she was.’

‘Do you still have the letter?’ Harry asked.

She wiped away her tears and nodded.

‘I have it in my room. Let me sit here and reminisce a little. We can go there afterwards. By the way, this will be the first hot night of the year.’

They sat in silence, listening to the rustle of the branches and the small birds singing as the sun went down behind Sophienalpe, as each of them thought of those gone before. Insects jumped and danced in the pillars of light under the trees. Harry thought about Ellen. He spotted a bird he could have sworn was the flycatcher he had seen pictures of in the bird book.

‘Let’s go,’ said Beatrice.

Her room was small and plain, but light and snug. A bed stood against the back wall, which was covered with pictures of all sizes. Beatrice rummaged through some papers in a large dressing-table drawer.

‘I have a system, so I’ll find it,’ she said.
Naturally
, Harry thought.

At that moment his eyes fell on a photograph in a silver frame.

‘Here’s the letter,’ Beatrice said.

Harry didn’t answer. He stared at the photograph and didn’t react until he heard her voice right behind him.

‘That photograph was taken while Helena was working at the hospital. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes, she was,’ Harry said. ‘There’s something oddly familiar about her.’

‘Nothing odd about her,’ Beatrice said. ‘They’ve been painting her on icons for almost two thousand years.’

It
was
a hot night. Hot and sultry. Harry tossed and turned in the four-poster, threw the blanket on the floor and pulled the sheet off the bed as he tried to shut out all his thoughts and sleep. For a moment he had considered the minibar, but then he remembered he had taken the minibar key off the ring and handed it in to reception. He heard voices in the corridor outside. Someone grabbed the handle of his door and he shot up in bed, but no one came in. Then the voices were inside, their breath hot against his skin, the ripping sound of clothes being shredded, but when he opened his eyes he saw flashes of light and he knew it was lightning.

A rumble of thunder, sounding like distant explosions, came first from one part of town, then another. He went to sleep again and kissed her, took off her white nightdress. Her skin was white and cold and uneven from sweating, from the terror; he held her for a long, long time until she was warm, until she came back to life in his arms, like a flower filmed over a whole spring and then played back at breakneck speed.

He continued to kiss her, on the neck, on the inside of her arms, on the stomach, not with insistence, not even teasingly, but half to comfort her, half comatose, as if he could vanish at any moment. And when she followed, waveringly, because she thought it was safe where they were going, he continued to lead her until they arrived in a landscape not even he recognised, and when he turned it was too late and she threw herself into his embrace, cursing him, begging him and tearing at him with her strong hands until his skin bled.

He was awoken by his own panting and had to turn over in bed to make sure he was still alone. Afterwards, everything merged in a maelstrom of thunder, sleep and dreams. He awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of beating rain; he went over to the window and stared down at the street where water was streaming over the edges of the pavement and an ownerless hat drifted along with it.

When Harry was awoken by his early-morning alarm call it was light outside and the streets were dry.

He looked at his watch on the bedside table. His flight to Oslo left in two hours.

88
Thereses Gate. 15 May 2000.

S
TÅLE
A
UNE
’
S OFFICE WAS YELLOW AND THE WALLS WERE
covered with shelves crammed with specialist books and drawings of Kjell Aukrust’s cartoon characters.

‘Take a seat, Harry,’ Doctor Aune said. ‘Chair or divan?’

That was his standard opener, and Harry responded by raising the left-hand corner of his mouth in his standard that’s-funny-but-we’ve-heard-it-before smile. When Harry had rung from Gardemoen Airport, Aune had said Harry could come, but that he didn’t have a lot of time as he had to go to a seminar in Hamar at which he was to give the opening speech.

‘It’s entitled “Problems Related to the Diagnosis of Alcoholism”,’ Aune said. ‘You won’t be mentioned by name.’

‘Is that why you’re all dressed up?’ Harry asked.

‘Clothes are one of the strongest signals we transmit,’ Aune said, running a hand along a lapel. ‘Tweed signals masculinity and confidence.’

‘And the bow-tie?’ Harry asked, taking out his notebook and pen.

‘Intellectual frivolity and arrogance. Gravity with a touch of self-irony, if you like. More than enough to impress second-rate colleagues, it seems.’

Aune leaned back, pleased with himself, his hands folded over his bulging stomach.

‘Tell me about split personalities,’ Harry said. ‘Or schizophrenia.’

‘In five minutes?’ Aune groaned.

‘Give me a summary then.’

‘First of all, you mention split personalities and schizophrenia in the same breath, and that is one of these misunderstandings that for some reason has caught the public’s imagination. Schizophrenia is a term for a whole group of widely differing mental disorders and has nothing at all to do with split personalities. It’s true
schizo
is Greek for split, but what Doctor Eugen Bleuler meant was that psychological functions in a schizophrenic’s brain are split. And if . . .’

Harry pointed to his watch.

‘Right,’ Aune said. ‘The personality split you talked about is called an MPD, a multiple personality disorder, defined as the existence of two or more personalities in an individual which take turns in being the dominant partner. As with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’

‘So, it exists?’

‘Oh, yes. But it’s rare, a lot rarer than some Hollywood films would have us believe. In my twenty-five years as a psychologist I’ve never been lucky enough to observe a single instance of an MPD. But I do know something about it all the same.’

‘For example?’

‘For example, it is almost always connected with a loss of memory. In other words, an MPD sufferer could wake up with a hangover without realising that it is because their other personality is a drinker. Well, in fact, one personality can be an alcoholic and the other a teetotaller.’

‘Not literally, I take it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘But alcoholism is a physical ailment too.’

‘Yes, and that’s what makes MPDs so fascinating. I have a report of an MPD case where one of the personalities was a big smoker while the other never touched cigarettes. And when you measured the blood pressure of the smoker it was 20 per cent higher. Women with an MPD have reported that they menstruate several times a month because every personality has its own cycle.’

‘So these people can change their own physical nature?’

‘To a certain degree, yes. The story about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is in fact not so far from the truth as one might think. In one well-known case described by Dr Osherson, one of the personalities was heterosexual while the other was homosexual.’

‘Can the personalities have different voices?’

‘Yes. Actually the voice is one of the easiest ways to observe the shift between personalities.’

‘So different that even someone who knows this person extremely well would not recognise one of these other voices. On the phone, for example?’

‘If the individual concerned knew nothing about the other personality, yes. With people who have only a superficial knowledge of the MPD patient, the change in gestures and body language can be enough for them to sit in the same room and not recognise the person.’

‘Could someone with an MPD keep it hidden from those closest to them?’

‘It’s feasible, yes. How frequently the other personalities appear is an individual matter and patients can to some degree control the changes themselves, too.’

‘But then the personalities would have to know about each other?’

‘Yes, indeed, but that’s not unusual either. And, just as in the novel about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there can be bitter clashes between the personalities because they have different goals, perceptions of morality, sympathies and antipathies with respect to the people around them and so on.’