‘I’m sorry,’ they said at the same time, equally startled.
Mats hadn’t been counting on Kaja returning to see him once she could get free, not after she’d caught him watching the video.
‘Just some boring documentary,’ he had lied to her when she asked what it was. Then he had acted as if he were getting a phone call, whereupon Kaja left again without a word.
‘May I…’ She pointed at the serving trolley behind her.
It took a moment for Mats to get it.
‘Thanks, but I’m afraid I’m not hungry,’ he said, but let her enter.
‘That’s too bad,’ she said without sounding very sorry. Kaja appeared to be exerting herself pushing the food trolley, as if the thick carpet were giving her trouble. She parked it between two chairs facing each other along the right-side windows.
Deploying its clever handles, she transformed the trolley into a dining table that she decked out with a white tablecloth, napkins, silverware, a salt shaker, and a vase of orchids before pulling out a plate of food from the compartment below.
She lifted the stainless-steel dome covering the china. ‘Grilled winter cod with a roasted onion stock atop green beans and shiitake mushrooms. Normally you’d have more to choose from, but it’s also true that people aren’t supposed to eat heavily late at night, so…’
She looked at her watch and imitated a smile. ‘If you’d like, I could get you a menu and the caviar cart sent up instead?’
‘No, no, thank you. Not necessary,’ Mats said and grabbed her by the hand when she unswervingly switched back to serving him.
His headache had balled up like a fist behind his forehead, and he felt awful. He didn’t want to harm anyone, goddamnit. He didn’t want to die! On the other hand, he was now being offered an opportunity, and almost literally on a silver platter.
‘You didn’t come back up here just because of the meal, am I right?’
He gestured for her to take a seat.
Kaja dodged him half-heartedly. ‘I need to get back to business class.’
‘And yet you went to the trouble of providing me with a nice meal. Though not much is supposed to be served at this hour. And even then you could’ve sent someone else, no problem. So, Frau Claussen, what’s going on? What is it you wish to tell me?’
She swallowed hard, smoothing out her skirt.
‘That video you had on,’ she began haltingly.
He sat down and waited for Kaja to do the same.
The senior flight attendant’s voice had turned a shade deeper than before. Typical for people at the onset of depression. The voice was often a better reflection of the soul than the eyes, since negative feelings made the voice box’s capacity increase. He had learned that from Feli, who often only had speech and tone of voice to work from when assessing an emergency on her hotline calls.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I thought I saw myself. Ten years ago. The gym video, I’m talking about. Of course that’s ridiculous. I mean, my little drama could hardly have made it onto in-flight programming.’ She forced out a laugh.
Mats opened his mouth but she raised a hand in her defence and continued: ‘But there’s also a reason why my imagination’s running away with me. Our conversation before. When you told me that you hadn’t believed me back then either—’
‘I didn’t mean it like it sounded,’ fibbed Mats.
Kaja shrugged. ‘Anyhow, when you said that you were happy to, eventually, believe my version of events, it brought me back to my chamber for a moment.’
‘You felt the walls moving?’ he asked, reviving a subject of their old therapy conversations. The ‘chamber’ was a metaphor that helped Kaja describe her feelings of powerlessness and isolation. By her final year of school she had transformed into a kind of trash compactor, with hydraulic walls that kept closing in, inch by inch. Thick and hard walls of reinforced concrete, threatening to crush Kaja inside.
‘It wasn’t as intense as before. But I could feel it. How the walls kept pressing at me again. I was standing in the galley and could feel the cabin getting smaller and smaller all around me…’ Kaja grabbed at her neck and let her words trail off.
‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean for my thoughtless comment to cause that,’ lied Mats, since this was exactly what he had intended. And it now made him feel like a miserable pig.
‘I’m tired and working too much,’ he added. ‘That should not have happened. I have to apologise to you.’
Kaja nodded, but he saw in her eyes that an apology was not enough. Every painful comment struck like a nail in that mask people wore to protect themselves from psychological abuse. With unstable personalities, it was quicker to crumble, and quickest with those whose defences had to be reconstructed in painstaking detail with psychotherapy.
‘I’m going to speak frankly, Frau Claussen. I shouldn’t have told you that I thought your experiences were made up.’
That I thought the horrible rumours about you at the time weren’t completely unfounded.
Kaja leaned her head a little towards the window, like she used to do in her sessions, when she couldn’t fall back on her memories, only her fantasies.
Mats followed her eyes into the darkness and thought he could sense her doubt.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked, not sure which answer was better.
A ‘no’, which would cease all this talk and save the hundreds of lives on this plane, him included.
Or a ‘yes’, which would put him in the position of becoming possibly the worst psychological mass murderer of all time.
Even if he wasn’t sure how Kaja was technically supposed to pull off making a plane crash, he was nevertheless certain that he could fulfil his mission and revert her to a mental state where she would want to do just that.
‘What am I supposed to tell you?’ she asked.
Mats just wished he could break off this discussion right here and now. So he forced himself to think of his daughter instead, of that image of Nele being held by her kidnapper. Then he got to work chiselling away, adding another breaking point to Kaja’s psychological armour with the following question:
‘How many of your fellow students did you want to shoot?’
She shook her head, but said quietly, ‘All of them.’
Mats gave her a moment’s pause, then continued: ‘But who especially?’
She avoided his gaze. ‘I’m not sure, I—’
‘You know. Who was first to die on your wish list?’
Silence. Then, after a while, she said with noticeable reluctance, ‘Johannes.’
‘Johannes Faber,’ Mats expounded. ‘Eighteen years old, just like you were then. What had he done to you?’
She stood up abruptly and nearly stumbled on the wheels of the service trolley.
‘I think this conversation is a mistake, Dr Krüger, I, I don’t see how it could make me feel any better.’
Mats stood too and tried to put on a trusting expression, which his headache made extremely difficult.
‘Frau Claussen, please give me a chance. I hurt you with that thoughtless comment of mine. I have to make it up to you.’
Gentle beeping sounded above their heads. The seatbelt sign lit up.
‘But right now our conversation is only making me feel worse,’ Kaja protested feebly. ‘I haven’t felt this bad in years.’
That’s something we have in common.
Mats tried giving his voice as much of a calming and ingratiating tone as possible. ‘Tell me, how were you feeling that very first time we had a therapy session?’
She had come voluntarily yet was sent by her parents, who at the time were just glad that the worst had been prevented. This was mostly because of Feli, who’d taken Kaja’s desperate call to the mental health hotline and connected the potential school shooter to Mats.
‘Similar to now,’ admitted Kaja. ‘Awful. Tired. Not feeling very hopeful.’
Mats nodded. ‘You do know that a therapy session is like a fever, Frau Claussen. At the beginning you feel terrible, but the truth is that you’re sweating out the illness.’
Kaja shrugged and gave him an exhausted ‘if you say so’ look, and Mats continued his inquisition.
‘All right. Then let me formulate it another way: ten years ago, you entered your school with a gun. You stole the pistol from your father, a member of a shooting club.’
‘I didn’t steal it. He gave it to me so I could defend myself in case such a thing ever happened to me again at school.’
Such a thing.
Kaja still didn’t possess the courage to express concretely and openly what had been done to her, exactly one year before she locked herself inside the school restroom while armed. Despondent, with the firm intention of killing.
‘I replaced the gas cartridges with real bullets. My father had only loaded the gun with tear gas.’
‘Which, however, was not sufficient for your purposes.’ She blinked, and Mats continued: ‘Because you wanted to kill Johannes Faber.’
She nodded.
‘He had done something to you.’
‘Yes.’
Mats pointed at the monitor on the wall. ‘He made that video that you believed you saw just now.’
‘Yes, yes, yes. You know all that. Why are you trying to torment me, Dr Krüger?’
‘I’m not tormenting you. I’m getting the sense that you still haven’t fully worked through what happened. I want to help you, you see.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that, though.’
‘That’s the fever,’ Mats repeated. ‘It needs to get out. Just like the truth.’
‘But all I’ve ever told you was the truth.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘About the video, too?’
‘Of course I did.’
He gave her a second to collect herself, then he said: ‘Fine, Frau Claussen. Then please describe it all once again for me.’ He forced out a smile. And while the aeroplane gently shook as a result of slight turbulence, he asked: ‘What did Johannes Faber record on that video back then that was so bad it made you want to kill him a whole year later?’
Him and everyone who’d watched it.