Blood Relative Page 9

  ‘Now, when a patient goes into therapy, one of the things the therapist will try to do is expose the original shame, to let the light in on it …’

  Wray drew lines breaking through the square like shafts of sunlight: ‘You see, once the shame is exposed and admitted to and even shared with other people – a sort of coming-out – then its potency swiftly diminishes. Patients discover, more likely than not, that things aren’t as bad as they feared and people don’t think any the less of them.’

  ‘I sense a great, big “but” coming on,’ I said.

  Wray smiled, ‘Ha! Indeed you do. Let’s go back to the very beginning of the process, to the creation of the shame. Sometimes this occurs as the result of a genuinely terrible event that goes far beyond the day-to-day failings of an ordinary, fallible parent.’

  ‘Some kind of abuse, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, or it could be the loss of a parent or family member, particularly in violent circumstances; even witnessing some terrible event. There are lots of ways any of us can become profoundly traumatized at any age, after all. Some theorists even suggest that unresolved traumas can be passed on like, ah … unexploded bombs through the generations, so that we may have to suffer for wrongs committed before we were ever born. In any case, this extreme trauma is buried, just as before. The patient builds a wall, just as before. But this psychic wound is much more dangerous. It may be completely forgotten by the child’s conscious mind, but it sits imprinted in the unconscious like a ticking bomb, just waiting for something to set it off: a trigger, if you will.’

  I asked: ‘About this “bomb”: you’re speaking purely in general terms, I assume?’

  ‘Of course,’ Wray replied. But he would not be telling me any of this if it did not contain the key to understanding someone like Mariana. And now I realized something else. Though he could not possibly say so, he was as keen to learn from me as I was from him. After all, he was going to need information to work with, too.

  ‘And this trigger, what might it be?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, er … anything really that creates an immediate connection: an association of ideas that suddenly brings the hidden trauma from the subconscious back into the conscious mind. Suppose a child has been harmed in a room in which there is a large grandfather clock, ticking away. The sound of a ticking clock might, at a later date, trigger off an explosion of that mental bomb … I mean, I’m being fanciful here. I’m just trying to give you a rough idea.’

  ‘And that reaction could be violent?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And it’s uncontrollable, right? I mean, the bomb just goes off inside someone’s head and they flip. It’s not something they planned or anything. They’re not even aware of what they’re doing?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Wray nodded.

  I felt a sudden surge of hope. If I could find out what had set Mariana off, and establish a connection to her early life, then I might be able to explain why she’d lashed out at Andy and provide the evidence needed to mitigate her sentence.

  ‘You said it can take years to get to the bottom of this kind of thing and find out what made someone act a certain way, and why.’

  ‘Well, a psychiatrist isn’t like a police detective,’ Wray replied. ‘We don’t have any clues to work with apart from the ones in a person’s head. And they can take a while to dig out.’

  ‘But if you could actually go and investigate someone, like a detective does, that would save a lot of time, wouldn’t it?’

  Wray laughed. ‘I really don’t know! I suppose so.’

  There was a chance, then. In which case, there was one more thing I needed Wray to tell me: ‘These triggers you were talking about: would they include something somebody said? I mean, suppose you had been abused and I asked you, straight out, “Were you abused as a child?” would that do it?’

  Wray shook his head thoughtfully: ‘No … oddly enough, I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible, I suppose. But a direct question such as that would be dealt with by the conscious mind. And the conscious mind has blanked out the truth. Chances are the person would just reply. “No, of course not”, and honestly believe they were telling the truth. So it’s more likely to come from something that bypasses our rational minds: a non-verbal sense experience; sight, sound, smell, taste …’

  ‘And that sort of thing could unlock memories that might have a violent reaction?’

  ‘Quite so,’ Wray replied. Then he snapped into a different mood, looked at his watch and said, ‘Well, I have another appointment! It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr Crookham. I hope I’ve been of some help. And if you do find out anything useful …’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  The two goons showed me back to the main entrance. Every time we turned a corner I prayed that somehow I’d see Mariana coming the other way. Just to catch a glimpse of her in the distance would be something. But she never appeared. My journey had, on that level, been in vain. I was as frustrated as ever about that. But on the other hand, I did now have a purpose.

  The only way Mariana was going to receive a light sentence was if someone found out why she had killed Andy. As far as the police were concerned, their job was done. Dr Wray himself had said it could take years for him to find an answer. The lawyers were just going to work their way through the whole case in their usual, routine way.

  So that just left me.

  EAST BERLIN: 1984

  Hans-Peter Tretow lifted his four-year-old daughter and threw her, shrieking with a blissful mixture of fear and excitement, up into the air. He caught her again, planted a big kiss on her forehead and put her back down on the path outside the family’s apartment building.

  ‘Me! Me!’ squealed his son, a chubby-cheeked little lad of two, holding out his arms to be picked up just like his sister. Tretow obliged, laughing along with his children. His wife watched the whole scene with an indulgent, maternal smile wreathing a face as bright and pink-flushed as an apple. With her cornflower-blue eyes and golden hair – a gift she’d passed on to her daughter – she had the well-fed, docile, obedient look of the perfect German hausfrau.

  Sometimes she was so dumbly, infuriatingly obliging that Tretow felt compelled to give her face a good smack, just to shake her up a little. On these occasions Frau Tretow cried, promised to do better in future, but never complained or threatened to leave her husband. This was one of the many clues that had convinced Tretow that she was a Stasi agent, planted on him to make sure he did not stray too far from an acceptable way of life. Added evidence for his theory came from her remarkable resemblance, in both appearance and character, to Judith, the wife he’d left behind in Frankfurt. It was surely too much of a coincidence that such a doppelgänger could possibly be employed at the carpet factory where, thanks to Stasi influence, he had worked as a sales executive since his arrival from the West; too good to be true that she should then be so available and so willing to satisfy him in ways that totally belied her air of homely decency.

  He wondered sometimes whether he would meet his Stasi spouse one day in an interrogation room, her mask torn away to reveal the hard, flinty stare of a secret policewoman, her docility replaced by cold-blooded professional savagery as she tortured a confession from him. She must surely have been longing to avenge the slaps, the betrayals and the routine, petty humiliations he had inflicted upon her. Recently he had almost been daring her to break out of her assigned character and show her true feelings towards him: he wanted to see, close up, all the hatred and anger she must feel.

  And yet their lives continued in the same old settled routine. So maybe he was mistaken, and had merely imagined the whole thing. He pondered this as he wandered from the apartment block, one of the prefabricated plattenbau projects that had sprung up all over Berlin. Tretow and his family were housed in a top-of-the-range model, brand new and built to a Swedish design. It was located barely two hundred metres from the Wall, so close that he could see into West Berlin from his fourth-floor balcony: a constant reminder
of what he had left behind. Rumour had it that the block had been erected directly above the site of Hitler’s bunker, where he’d spent the final weeks of his life as the Third Reich disintegrated around him. It saddened Tretow that he could not invite his father to come and stay. He’d have loved to have seen the old bastard’s face when he told him that this was the spot where his beloved Führer met his end.

  A Trabant, painted in an excremental shade of brown, awaited Tretow at the kerb. The days when he drove fast, rock-solid, eternally reliable Mercedes were long gone. Now he had to stagger down the road in a wheezing, fume-belching joke of a car, whose body was built of a mix of fibreglass and an edible resin: left in a busy farmyard, it was said, a Trabant could be consumed by passing cattle in a matter of days. Such were the joys of life in the German Democratic Republic.

  When he got to his office Tretow would attempt to hawk as many metres as he could of his company’s vile carpets. Their colours seemed calculated to depress or disgust: drab grey, lifeless green, virulent mustard-yellow, a brownish oxblood-red and perhaps the greatest achievement of all, a green-tinged sea shade that managed to make even blue look nauseating. It was Tretow’s daily task to offload them to customers throughout the Soviet bloc, who presumably knew no better, and to bottom-of-the-market furniture stores in the West, whose customers were too cash-strapped to afford anything else. Still, it beat being dead, which would have been the alternative had he stayed in Frankfurt.

  When he reached his office, Tretow strode jauntily through the entrance hall, giving a characteristically flirtatious greeting to the receptionist, a peculiarly plain and scrawny woman in late middle age. ‘Good morning, Fräulein Schinckel, you look particularly lovely today, if I may say so,’ he declared.

  Fräulein Schinckel did not simper coyly, or feign outrage – her two standard responses to Tretow’s phoney advances. Instead she turned her head, avoiding his eye, saying nothing at all. This was not a good sign.

  Tretow’s stomach was already beginning to tighten as he walked down the corridor – fake wooden panelling on one side, the glazed walls of rabbit-hutch offices on the other – towards his place of work. He paused before he turned the door handle and walked in, only to have his worst fears immediately confirmed.

  Two men were waiting for him. They wore normal civilian clothes, rather than uniforms, but they were unmistakably Stasi officers nonetheless: Tretow knew the type well enough by now.

  ‘You will accompany us,’ one of the Stasi said. It was neither an order, nor a polite request, but a simple statement of fact. Tretow did not debate it. Over the previous six years he had regularly been summoned to meetings or interviews with Stasi officers as they mined him for information that was useful to them and damaging to their enemies in the West. This, however, felt different. It smacked of discipline and punishment. He was sweating with fear and nausea as he proceeded back down the corridor, sandwiched between the two men.

  Bad things were about to happen to Hans-Peter Tretow, he was certain of it. As he got into the Stasi men’s car – another Trabant, naturally – he wondered whether his wife would be waiting to meet him when they got to the interview room.

  18

  FRIDAY

  Nick had said that I knew nothing whatever about being a detective and of course he was right. But I did know about project management. I knew about starting with a vacant site and an empty sheet of paper and ending up with a finished house. I knew about planning the work; assembling information and materials; proceeding logically towards an end point; calling in the right professionals to help. So why not apply those problem-solving skills to the questions I faced here?

  The task, after all, had already been defined for me by Samira Khan and Tony Wray: save Mariana from jail by uncovering the truth about her past. Of course Yeats, the policeman, had also defined the big problem: no one knew anything about that past. And Mariana was in no state to discuss it, even if she’d been prepared to meet with me in the first place. But architects spend all their lives finding ways round financial, technical and bureaucratic limitations. I’d find a way round this one.

  I’d start the same place Yeats had: Andy’s computer. Just as soon as I could get hold of it.

  The facts of the case had been agreed to everyone’s satisfaction, so there was no need for the police to hold Andy’s body and possessions any longer. I’d already arranged undertakers to deal with the body. The possessions, however, were my responsibility.

  There wasn’t much to deal with, just the black nylon case containing Andy’s laptop and an overnight bag. A list that was handed to me with the bag informed me of its contents. The bag itself reeked of some disgusting institutional odour that reminded me of that morning-after smell of fag ends floating in stale beer. I didn’t bother even opening it, just dumped it in a black plastic bin-liner, tied as tight a knot as I could and slung it in the back of the Range Rover.

  It was the computer I was interested in. I took it back to the hotel room where I’d been living for the past couple of nights, plugged in the power cable and asked myself where Andy had put all his research.

  Like a lot of people who appear to be chaotic, Andy was very well organized whenever he wanted to be. Dirty plates piled up in his sink for days, carpets disappeared under dust and rubbish, and his desk was invisible beneath the trash scattered all over it. But the things he really cared about – his books, magazines, CDs and DVDs – were always kept perfectly dated and alphabetized, so that he could find anything he wanted in an instant. His laptop, which was essentially his brain in microchip form, was just the same: everything sorted into logical, clearly defined categories. His journalism, for example, was split into folders for each of the publications he worked for. Inside those folders, each finished story had its own file, within which Andy kept all his drafts, copy he’d cut from the finished piece, notes, and so on.

  But whatever he was planning to do with Mariana’s story, it didn’t sound like he was close to a finished product. That meant he’d still be working on it in Scrivener. This was a program that allowed one to collect written documents, notes, pictures, web pages and any other media relating to a given project in one folder called a ‘binder’. All the research materials contained in a binder, irrespective of their format, were displayed in the form of cards, pinned to a virtual corkboard. That made it easy for anyone working on a project to see precisely what they’d got … and it also made it simple for me to realize what Andy had been up to.

  I looked down the list of Recent Projects in the program’s File menu and there it was: a binder he’d called MC, for Mariana Crookham. I opened it, clicked on the Research icon and up popped a corkboard on which there were a dozen cards and one photograph. It was the biggest single item on the board, pinned at the top left – the start of the page – where one’s eye naturally rested.

  The photo showed the blown-up, slightly blurred, image of a little girl, about six or seven years old. She wore a dress with short, puffed sleeves made of a pale-blue checked fabric, with a little white collar and a blue satin bow. Her golden hair was gathered in two long bunches, held by elastic bands, over which big blue bows, darker than her dress, had been tied. She had clear, tawny eyes, which were looking directly at the camera, and her mouth was caught in a slightly tentative expression, as if deciding whether to smile.

  Even as a child Mariana had been ravishingly pretty.

  19

  Minutes went by as I stared at her face, absorbing every scrap of it, hoping that if I only concentrated hard enough, I would hear what the little girl who’d grown up to be my wife had to say through those half-opened lips. ‘Tell me who you are,’ I whispered at the screen. ‘What happened to you? What did they do to you? Just tell me …’

  I sent the picture as an email to myself, planning to use the hotel system to print it up. I wanted to be able to carry that image of Mariana with me, like an icon, a totem of faith. In order to send the email I simply opened Andy’s Microsoft Entourage application,
created a new message, attached the picture and sent it as if from him to me. But once I’d opened Entourage it automatically got to work downloading new incoming messages. I scrolled with guilty fascination through the posthumous mail that had arrived on his electronic doormat. Almost all of it was spam. There was a cheery message from a friend who was on holiday Down Under, with a picture attached of his latest hot blonde conquest. And then came the final unread message.

  It had been sent at 09.36 on Thursday morning, just as Mariana’s case was being discussed in the magistrates’ court. The subject of the message was, ‘Good advice for Andrew Crookham’, sent by ‘warningvoicexxx@yahoo.com’. I opened the message: ‘You are investigating matters that are none of your concern. These investigations must cease immediately. Do not return to Berlin. Consider your own personal safety and that of those you love. Remain at home in England. Only bad things can happen if you disregard this advice.’

  The message was not signed. I wanted to be able to dismiss it as a sick joke, like one of those round robins that come with instructions to pass them on, or else. But the heavy, nauseous chill that was spreading through my guts said something else. This was a genuine threat. Andy had stumbled onto something in Berlin: something that someone else badly wanted to keep secret. And whatever it was, it surely had to do with Mariana: events in her past, or family connections that could not be exposed to the light. The belief in Mariana that had been snuffed out in court flickered inside me again. This message clearly suggested that there were people out there willing to use violence to stop Andy exposing their activities. Didn’t that provide, at the very least, a reasonable doubt that Mariana was the only person who could possibly have killed him? I picked up my phone and called DCI Yeats.