The Trap (7 page)

9

I fight my impulse to flee. It is difficult for me. I feel my pulse racing and notice that my breathing is frantic. I try to apply what I have learnt—to work with my physical reactions instead of ignoring them. I concentrate on my pulse and count my breaths—twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. I focus my attention on my revulsion instead of making a pointless effort to suppress it. My revulsion is in my chest, beneath my fear. It is thick and sticky like mucus. I examine it carefully; it swells and subsides, like toothache. I want to dodge it; I want to get away. It's a normal desire—that's something else I have learnt.

The instinct to flee is normal. But there's no point in evasion, in trying to avoid pain and fear. I grope for the mantra I've formulated with the therapist and cling to it:
The way out of fear leads through fear. The way out of fear leads through fear. The way out of fear leads through fear.

The man looks at me enquiringly. With a mute nod, I signal to him that I am ready, although the exact opposite is the case. But I have been looking at the bird-eating spider for ages now. It is sitting in its jar, quite still most of the time, only stirring now and then, making my hair stand on end. Everything about it looks wrong: its peculiar movements, its body, its black and tan leg joints.

The therapist is patient. We've come a long way today. At first I couldn't even be in the same room as that creature.

It was Charlotte who opened the door to the man with the bird-eating spider and cajoled me into greeting him. Charlotte thinks I'm researching for a book; she thinks the goings-on today are research for a novel, just like all the other crazy things that I've got up to here in the house these past weeks.

It's a good thing she thinks that; it means that she doesn't bat an eyelid when I shut myself away with a retired policeman to study interrogation techniques, or have ex-army trainers explain to me how elite soldiers are made mentally fit enough to withstand torture without disclosing information. These experts, who come to my house day after day, are received by Charlotte discreetly, and she passes no comment on the arrival of the therapist specialising in treating people with phobias using ‘confrontational therapy'. Charlotte has no idea that I'm trying to find out how much fear I am capable of withstanding before I collapse.

I am soft and I know it. The life I've led over the past years has been free of discomfort. I've been mollycoddled so much that it's an incredible act of willpower for me to have a single cold shower instead of a warm one. I have to learn to be tough on myself if I want to take on my sister's murderer.

Hence the bird-eating spider. Can't get more discomforting than that. As long as I can remember, there's been nothing I loathe more than spiders.

The therapist takes the lid off the jar where he'd temporarily stowed the spider while I got used to the sight of it.

‘Wait,' I say. ‘Wait.'

He pauses. ‘Don't think about it too much,' he says. ‘It doesn't get any easier, no matter how long you wait.'

He looks at me, waiting for a sign. He won't do a thing until I've given him the go-ahead. That's the deal.

I recall our conversation at the beginning of the session. ‘What are you frightened of, Frau Conrads?' he'd asked.

‘The spider, of course,' I replied, annoyed at the question. ‘I'm frightened of the spider.'

‘The bird-eating spider that's in a container in my bag?'

‘Yes!'

‘Are you frightened right now?'

‘Of course I'm frightened.'

‘What if there was no container in my bag with a bird-eating spider inside?'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Let's assume, for a moment, that there's no spider because I forgot to pack the container. What would you be frightened of then? You couldn't be scared of the spider, if there wasn't an actual spider.'

‘But I thought there was.'

‘Exactly. You thought. That's where fear begins. In your head. In your thoughts. The spider has absolutely nothing to do with it.'

I pull myself together.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘We'll do it now.'

Once again, the therapist removes the lid and places the jar on its side. The spider begins to move at a speed that terrifies me. I force myself to keep looking at it, even when the therapist lets it crawl onto his hand. I suppress the urge to jump up and run away, and I feel a drop or two of cold sweat running down my spine. I force myself to remain seated and watch. The spider comes to rest on the man's hand—a nightmare of legs and fuzz and repulsiveness.

Once again, I try to apply what I have learnt over the past weeks. I focus my attention on my body and realise what an unnatural posture I have adopted. My torso is inclined as far to the left as it can go, and I'm cowering in the far corner of the sofa. I ask myself whether this is the way I want to be: like a rabbit in front of a snake. Whether I can afford to act like this, either now or in future.

I sit up straight, throw back my shoulders, lift up my chin. I reach out my hand and give the man with the spider a nod. My fingers are trembling, but I do not withdraw them.

‘Are you okay?' the therapist asks.

I nod, letting all my energy flow into my hand, which I hold still.

‘All right then,' says the therapist and brings his hand nearer to mine. For a moment, the creature squats there, motionless. I watch it, with its thick, hairy legs and its round body—that, too, is hairy but with a small bald spot. The legs are striped: black and tan, black and tan—each with an orange dot in the middle. I only notice that now. The spider sits there, quite still on the man's hand, and I tell myself I can do it.

Then it starts to move. Everything about it looks wrong. My stomach rebels. Specks of light dance before my eyes, but I keep still, and the creature crawls onto my hand. The first tentative movement of its legs on my palm throws me into panic, but I remain motionless. The bird-eating spider crawls onto my hand. I feel its weight, the touch of its legs, its body brushing my skin. For a terrible moment I think it's going to crawl up my arm and across my shoulder to my neck and face, but it stops on my hand. It squats there, shifting its legs. I stare at it. This isn't a nightmare, I think; this is real life, it's happening right now and you can take it. This is your fear; this is what your fear feels like, and you can take it. I feel dizzy; I'd like to faint, but I don't. Instead I sit there with a bird-eating spider on my hand. It has stopped moving. My fear is a dark well that I have fallen into. I'm suspended vertically in the water. I try to touch the bottom with my toes, but I can't.

‘Shall I take it off you?' the therapist asks, startling me out of my trance.

I can only nod again. Carefully, he picks up the creature in the hollow of his hand and stows it back in the container that he carries in a kind of sports bag.

I stare at my hand. I feel the throb of my pulse, the furry feeling on my tongue, my tense muscles. My T-shirt is clinging to me, drenched in sweat. My face contracts as if I were about to cry, but as so often in the past years, no tears come and I cry in dry, painful sobs.

I've made it.

10

I'm sitting in my favourite armchair, looking out into the darkness and waiting for the sun to rise. The edge of the woods lies before me. I would love to see an animal in the cool light of the stars, but nothing stirs. Only an indefatigable owl gives a hoot every now and then.

A clear sky arches over the treetops. Who knows how many stars are really up there. Stars only have one means of telling us that they no longer exist: they stop shining. But if a star is a thousand light years away and stopped shining yesterday, then it would, in theory, be a thousand years before we found out on Earth.

Nothing is certain.

I curl up in my armchair and try to nap. An interesting day lies behind me, and a hardworking night. Tomorrow I have an important talk with an expert and want to be prepared.

It's soon clear to me that I'm not going to sleep. I try to relax in my armchair, to build up a bit of energy even without sleeping. My gaze rests on the meadow behind the house, and the glistening shore of the lake. I sit there like that for a long time. At first I think I'm imagining things when the stars seem to shine paler and the sky begins to change colour. But then I hear the birds twittering through the window; they start up as if an invisible conductor had signalled to them with raised baton. Then I know the sun is rising. To begin with, it is a mere gleaming streak behind the trees, but soon it starts to climb, vast and blazing.

It is a miracle. I remind myself that I am on a tiny planet that is moving at an insane speed through a boundless universe, never tiring of its flight around the sun, and I think to myself: it's crazy. That we exist at all, that the Earth exists and the sun and the stars, and that I can sit here and see and feel all this. It's incredible; it's a miracle. If this is possible, anything's possible.

The moment passes. A clear morning lies before me. I glance at the time. It will be another few hours before the man arrives to teach me about interrogation techniques.

I get up, make myself tea, fetch my laptop and sit down at the kitchen table. I have another quick look at the article I'd studied the night before. When Bukowski comes lumbering up to me, I let him out and watch him go to meet the day.

When the time comes, the sun has long since passed its zenith. I'm sitting in the kitchen with Charlotte, who's brought around the week's shopping.

‘Would you mind taking the dog out again before you knock off?' I ask.

‘Sure, no problem.'

Charlotte knows I like to be left alone with my experts; she knows that's the only reason I'm sending her out again with Bukowski. I look out of the window and watch the gardener cutting the grass. He raises a hand in greeting when he sees me. I wave back and close the window in the room where I plan to receive Dr Christensen.

Less than half an hour later, I'm sitting across from him. The blond German-American has icy blue eyes. His handshake is firm and I can only withstand his gaze because I've put in a substantial amount of practice over the past weeks. Charlotte has been gone a while; dusk is falling. I arranged this private consultation some weeks ago and had to cough up a great deal of money to get Christensen to come to my house. He is an expert in wringing confessions from criminals. His speciality is the notorious Reid technique, a questioning method not officially permitted in Germany, which employs a range of psychological tools and tricks to make the suspect break down.

Maybe it's naïve to hope that Lenzen will confess.

But having got so far, I want to be as well prepared as possible. I must somehow get him to talk to me beyond the framework of the interview—ask him questions, get him to tie himself up in contradictions, provoke him if necessary, and somehow pin him down. If there's anyone who can help me find out how to impose my will on a criminal and talk him into confessing, it's Dr Arthur Christensen.

And in case Lenzen is a tough nut to crack, I always have something else up my sleeve…

When Christensen realised that I wasn't interested in his theoretical explanations (which you can easily mug up on in the specialist literature on the subject) but in quite concrete information on how to break a culprit and force him to confess—that is to say, how it works in practice and what it feels like—he seemed peeved. But the large sum of money I was prepared to spend, combined with his realisation that I am not a criminal mastermind but merely a sick, weak woman novelist, persuaded him to demonstrate his skills to me.

So now we're sitting face-to-face. I've done my homework. Christensen has suggested demonstrating his method of interrogation on me: that seemed the most straightforward way of showing me what it feels like to be put through the Reid technique. He began the consultation by asking me to think of something I was particularly ashamed of—something that I never wanted to reveal. Of course, I came up with something, just as anybody would have done, and now Christensen is trying to wheedle the information out of me.

He's getting closer. Over an hour ago he understood that it's something to do with my family. His questions are getting more penetrating and I am getting thinner-skinned. To begin with, I felt indifference towards Christensen, maybe even sympathy. I have come to detest him: for his questions, for his persistence, for the fact that he won't leave me in peace. He instructs me to sit down again when I want to go to the loo. Reprimands me every time I want to drink anything. I'm not allowed to drink until I've confessed. When he saw me wrap my arms around myself because I was shivering, he opened all the windows in the room.

Christensen has the habit of constantly clearing his throat. I didn't notice at first, but when I did I dismissed it as an endearing mannerism. Now it's driving me crazy, and every time he does it I want to jump up and yell at him to bloody well stop it. Stress brings out the worst in me—my irritability, my quick temper. Everyone has triggers. Mine are mainly acoustic: throat-clearing, sniffing, or that noise when someone chews gum and keeps popping the bubbles. Anna was always doing that, often only because she knew it annoyed me—I could have killed her!

The thought has hardly taken shape in my mind before I'm ashamed of myself. How could I think such a thing? Christensen is tenderising me; I'm starting to yield. I'm tired, I'm cold, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. Following Christensen's instructions, I didn't sleep last night and have hardly eaten all day. If I were in custody under his supervision, says Christensen, he'd have made damn sure that I went hungry and got as little sleep as possible.

‘It's astonishing how quickly we start to crack up when we're deprived of the mainstays of our physical wellbeing,' Christensen had explained to me on the phone.

I am not, it is true, going to be in a position to deprive my sister's murderer of food or sleep, but I am at least learning to cope better in situations of tremendous stress. Who knows whether I'll sleep at all in the nights before the interview with Lenzen—or manage to eat.