The Deadly Space Between (22 page)

The strange chill of warning rushed into my fingertips. The car was gone, but she was never home before six or seven, even if she drove straight back from college. I watched the winter dark rushing up the frost-covered lawns. Then I turned back to the hall and pressed the answerphone,
PLAY MESSAGES
.

Hello? This is a message for Isobel Hawk. Would you please ring the painting studio at the College of Art as soon as you can. Thank you.

Click. Next message. Same voice.

This is an urgent message for Isobel Hawk. Please contact the college. If you are ill we need to know as soon as possible.

I stood in the half-dark of the cold house. Horrified. I picked up the phone to ring Luce. When had Iso last contacted her? But as I picked up the receiver I noticed my mother’s writing on the pad next to the phone. A name. Meersburg. Half an address. Bismarckplatz. A number. 0 75 32 43 11 12. While I had been living in the house I had checked the pad several times a day and written down all the numbers I didn’t recognize, then rung directory enquiries after she had gone to work. Unhesitatingly, I tore the paper off the pad and put it in my pocket. Then the implications of the message from her college seeped through into my incompetent calculations.
If you are ill we need to know as soon as possible
. I bounded up the stairs two at a time and burst into her room.

Only the illuminated plastic banana actually worked and it was by now quite dark. I was left standing in the eerie shaft of light from the stairs landing, like an assassin caught in the act.

Someone was lying in her bed.

I took two steps backwards. My heel caught on the skirting board. I stood still for a moment, listening. The figure in the bed looked like one of the giant toppled statues of Communism abandoned in the parks after the Change, a stone Lenin, no longer feared, no longer loved.

‘Roehm?’ My voice sounded fragile in the stale cold air. The inert still figure was on its side, gigantic and helpless as a beached whale. I didn’t need to go any closer. ‘Are you OK? Wake up.’

The thing did not move. I did not dare approach. Was he breathing? Was he dead?

‘Roehm?’ My voice was pitched too high. He neither stirred nor groaned.

I peered at the body in the bed. Through the dim shadows I saw that he was covered by her duvet, but that beneath he was fully clothed in a black shirt and a black jacket. His face was pressed into the pillow. I shifted out of the light. The eyes were slightly, just slightly open. I turned and ran back down the stairs, leaving the bedroom door ajar. I picked up the phone. Then I had no idea whom to ring. 999? The police? Ambulance? The emergency services? Which ones? Luce? The Art College?

I wanted my mother. Where are you, Isobel?

I plucked the torn wisp of Post It out of my pocket and rang Meersburg. A German voice answered at once.

‘
Grüss Gott. Zum wilden Jäger. Rezeption?
’

I plunged in.

‘
Darf Ich mit Frau Isobel Hawk sprechen, bitte?
’

‘
Moment mal, bitte
.’

There was a rustle of paper. Then the voice returned.

‘
Sie kommt erst morgen Abend an
.’ The woman must have registered my accent for she switched to English.

‘Can I help you? Would you like to leave a message?’

‘
Nein, danke. Aber geben Sie mir bitte Ihre Adresse in Meersburg
.’

A laborious five minutes of spelling out the place and postcode followed. Iso was heading for the Bodensee in south Germany.

My necessary course of action opened out before me. I thudded back upstairs, no longer afraid of the beached shark in the bed. I collected my Post Office savings account book and my passport. I packed a small bag of warm clothes. I dropped my satchel by my desk. I packed my French and German set texts. Then I left everything ready in the darkened hallway.

I did not plan. It came to me, as if I was performing a part in a play. But it was quite deliberate.
I meant to do it
. I rushed back upstairs clutching a wrench. Then I heaved a pile of towels out of the airing cupboard in the bathroom and soaked them in the bath. Fearless and rapid, I strode back into her bedroom, barely glancing at the hulked shape, and wedged the wet towels round all the windows, shutting out the icy draughts. Then I disconnected the heater from its roots with two mighty tugs and turned on the gas.

6

FLIGHT

The night train, mid-week, was not full. I didn’t want to squander my precious and dwindling hoard of cash on a sleeper, so I stretched out across three seats under my coat. My feet dangled into the aisle. No one bothered me. But I could not sleep. Instead I watched the pounding dark and listened, rigid, for every station to be announced as we rushed towards the East, and towards Germany. I was in flight, but I was not even terribly sure what I had done. Was this what it was like, to be on the run? Surely people who committed great crimes made more sensible plans before moving into action. But, as I reflected on the villainy which filled the
Mail on Sunday
, most of it seemed to be spontaneous, random, as if each of us could be seized, at any time, by a sudden rush of violent desire, which led straight into atrocities on an unimaginable scale. I had deliberately attempted to murder someone. Something had happened to that huge man who had all but destroyed our lives, and without calling the hospital, our GP, or even my relations, I had knowingly finished him off.

Would the gas run out? Would the neighbours smell it outside? I had left no warnings. What would happen? Secretly, I hoped that the house would explode, leaving a mass of domestic wreckage. The body would never be found, we would claim the insurance and begin our lives again. Even the hideous green pictures of the Demon in his forest kingdom would be consumed by flame. I lay scrunched on the narrow blue seats filling out my fantasy with colours, as if I was painting a catastrophe by numbers. If Roehm had left no trace of his origins when he came to us, he would leave no trace of his passing. Did he have a staff in his research institute? Would they be delighted by this sudden liberation? The lifting of the tyrant’s hand? Or would they make phone calls? Ask questions?

A murky dawn shuddered in the winter sky. I heard my own quickened breathing above the rhythmic hiss of the ICE train. I had looked at its slick white lines, mercifully free of graffiti, and been bewildered by the sloping logo. My ticket explained the banal acrostics – ICE, Inter City Express. But for one paranoid moment I had suspected Roehm’s hand even in this. The metaphor was too close to his nature, and his cold breath. He was far ahead of me, somewhere along the lines, waiting in the tunnels, in the mountains, wandering the ice.

A darker sequence of images ensued. If the neighbours smelt gas, called the emergency services and then broke into the house, we would be the prime suspects. Both of us. It was our house and we were gone, leaving a corpse in a bed on the first floor.

I shut down the images. The narrative had become too frightening. Who would come looking for us? It would be the German police. A front man in plain clothes with a bulge under his arm and then the uniformed men in green, clutching lightweight rifles with night sights. It was therefore imperative that we went to them before they came to us. And then I realized, long after the act, that I had had a plan of sorts. Or an intention. I had wanted to stand between my mother and everything that threatened to do her harm. If she had acted against Roehm then it was crucial that I should deliver the coup de grâce and take the blame. It was also urgent that I should find her and confess, first to her and then to the police. It was a normal thing for a teenage boy to murder his mother’s lover. My case would not even make the headlines. I was bristling with easy Oedipal motives that everyone would recognize. After all, the fantasy was even celebrated in our culture. I conjured up Sophocles, Hamlet and Freud. Then I began to imagine the courtroom drama and the plea in mitigation. I saw Luce in black and Liberty sitting beside me before the judge. No jury is necessary if you plead guilty. Just explain all the circumstances and wait for the sentence.

The train slowed a little in the grim grey light. I heard a strange, convulsive hiss. The only other occupant of the compartment was a middle-aged man in a shabby coat who smelt strongly of alcohol. His cheeks were dark with overnight shadow. I sat up and looked out.

The trees were decorated with frost. There were icicles hanging from the eaves. The pines were licked with white and in all the world there was no longer any winter green. We were swaddled in white ice, a crisp aggressive frost which burned your throat and left unsightly drops seeping from your nose. I pulled my coat around me and listened to the clanging bell at the level crossings. All I wanted was to find her.

I opened my book. My marker was still on the same page I had been pretending to read, crouched next to a coffee machine, twelve hours earlier, at Waterloo Station:
The Collected Short Stories of Thomas Mann
. ‘
Mario und der Zauberer
’ – Mario and the Magician. It was a peculiar tale of hypnotism and humiliation set in an Italian holiday resort. A sinister hypnotist selected members of the audience and forced them to make fools of themselves. He was cruel and unashamed. He revelled in his power. His victim, the hapless Mario who was a waiter in the Grand Hotel, finally put an irreproachable bullet through the monster’s brains.

No one could describe it as a crime.

An eerie sense of recognition blossomed at the back of my mind as I finished the tale and laid down the book. I had been reading, not a summary of what I had done, but a warning. The tale was an allegory of Fascism. It was also about killing the father. And it had no certain end.

I pasted my face to the window. We were almost in Cologne. It was time to change trains.

I took simple precautions. I kept my woollen ski hat pulled down over my blonde hair. Fair hair is easy to spot at a distance. I stayed where the crowd was thickest. I kept close to trailers that were piled with luggage. I hid behind people carrying skis. I avoided the masses who stood by the barrier, staring at the faces, watching. Above all, I did not hesitate. Even when I was uncertain of my next move, I walked fast, with my shoulders straight and steady. Everyone who hesitates or cowers appears to be guilty. I was learning the techniques of disappearance. I was on the run.

In a peculiar way it was exhilarating. After weeks of depression, separation and inaction, sinking beneath my stifled longing for her, I was at last free again. Bizarre as the situation was, at least it felt like an adventure. If the train connections worked I would reach Offenburg in the dark. I then had to get to Konstanz and cross the Bodensee to Meersburg on the ferry. I changed more money into Deutschmarks at the station and watched uneasily as the woman tapped my passport number into her computer.

It never occurred to me then that our movements were astonishingly simple to trace. All the calls from our phone, and from every other phone in England, were generated by computer. The police had only to summon up the numbers of the last two calls, which I had carefully cancelled on the screen as a precaution, to find the hotel on the Bodensee. Iso had checked in under her real name. We had not vanished into the winter Continent. We had barely drawn a curtain across our intended destinations.

I thought about Roehm, about the man rather than the dead hulk in the bed, for the first time as the ferry cast off across the dark waters of the Bodensee. The boat was full of people sitting in their cars, listening to their radios, and workers going home from the city. Giant spotlights illuminated our path across the icy water. The winds coming off the great lake had the savagery of an ice axe sinking into flesh. Everyone turned their backs to the gust. I felt unclothed and frightened. Roehm came back to me in the ice blast, his cold, white face, his lizard skin, his chilling touch. He was made of cold. He had come to us when the leaves were turning and the days were shortening, as the year sank towards the longest night. He felt suddenly near to me on the vast lake of black lapping cold, in the slap of small waves on the ferry’s hull. It was as if he was beside me, before me, as if I were passing through a shadow yet always, always, moving towards him. The sensation was disturbing, but I was not really afraid. In fact I was strangely comforted, for the dead do not abandon their killers, but become part of them.

Had he been there I would have spoken to him, without jealousy or resentment. And he would have listened, attentive, reflective, engaged by my stories and my views, but not intrusively curious. He possessed the art of listening. Who are you? Why did you come to us? I had the bizarre sensation that Roehm was in fact two people. There was a giant man, powerful, aristocratic, and generous in his manners, a prince travelling incognito without his entourage, and the other, the ambiguous, erotic presence whose seductive lure was a foretaste of perdition. He had revealed aspects of myself to me with the sinister acumen of a psychoanalyst who has heard it all before. But these were the stories that I did not wish to hear, whose consequences left me terribly afraid. The insidious knowledge that stuck in my throat was that he had forced me to choose between my mother and whatever it was that he did in fact represent. I had chosen her, thinking that I was choosing love, the security of her body against mine, continuity with our shared past, a safe world for the two of us. But if I had not chosen her the only option I would ever have had, through all the years to come, would have been Roehm himself. There was no world elsewhere.