‘Can he hear me?’ asked Dr André Klopstock. Then louder: ‘Hello, Mats? My dear colleague.’
Mats blinked.
‘Good, that’s good. Very good. Oh, man. I’m sorry, so sorry.’
To Mats’ amazement, Klopstock didn’t sound ingratiating but rather truly shaken. His voice carried no hint of that pomposity Mats had known from him and that people more or less expected from a psychiatrist who liked to see himself in the society gossip columns.
‘I’m just heartbroken, and I wish there was some way to make up for this. Even though I myself wasn’t directly involved. Which is why I’m speaking with… uh… to you. But I’m not just here to prove my own innocence. I’m fully willing to cooperate with Dr Roth and the authorities, in order to… what was that? Ah, right, fine. I’m sorry.’ Mats figured the last part was Dr Roth intervening. The head physician was evidently gesturing at him to hurry it up.
‘But there’s something you should know before we begin our questioning.’
Questioning?
‘I’ve developed tests for the early detection of certain psychopathological behaviours. I’m steadfastly convinced of their necessity. What’s the good of inspecting fluids in carry-ons and not the mental state of passengers and pilots? But we’ll leave that for now. This is about Amelie, my ex-wife.
‘She was obsessed with the idea of speeding up the approval procedure. You should know that Amelie ran my practice. She had access to all research results, investment plans, and of course patient records. She was actually a photographer and had no training as a doctor’s assistant at all. But I hired her because of her knack for organisation. It was only much later, after we were married, that it became clear to me she was pathologically obsessed with details. And was just as brilliant as she was dangerous in the way she manipulated others. For example, I never wanted to have children but suddenly she got pregnant, despite taking the pill.’
Klopstock cleared his throat with embarrassment.
‘Amelie always knew just what she had to do, or in this case had to refrain from, in order to get her way. She had a hold over me. For too long I repressed the fact that her compulsion for control stretched back to childhood. She first opened my eyes to it when she presented me with a “business plan” one day.’
Mats heard the quote marks in the way Klopstock stressed the phrase.
‘She knew I had a pro bono case, one Franz Uhlandt, an originally harmless but increasingly emotionally disturbed vegan who had the sick fantasy of exposing to humanity how cruel the industrial production of milk was to animals. And Amelie knew that I was treating your pregnant daughter Nele.’
Nele flashed through Mats’ mind. He’d needed to process so many feelings, so much information after waking inside his missing hole that he hadn’t thought about Nele until now.
‘Where is she?’ he screamed inside. ‘Is she all right?’
‘I thought it was a joke when she asked me if we shouldn’t give my patents a little boost. “All we need is one incident,” she’d said, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. I thought it was her hormones talking, she being pregnant after all, and the birth of our baby would surely bring her back to her senses, you know? Yet her mad fantasies wouldn’t quit even after Suza’s birth, and I finally separated from Amelie. That was probably my biggest misstep, because then she saw implementing her plan as the way to win me back.’
Klopstock cleared his throat again, yet his voice still sounded hoarse.
‘To maintain control, she wanted to be on board the plane herself. Good God, she even took Suza along. Of course Amelie only did that to divert suspicion. To manipulate her environment. Who would suspect anything evil of a breastfeeding mom? And now she’s paid for her ludicrous plan with her life. Fortunately just her. Suza’s doing well.’
‘Doctor…’ Mats again heard the head physician’s cautioning voice in the background.
‘I know, I know, Dr Roth. I’m getting to the point. But it’s essential that Dr Krüger knows the context. How else is he supposed to separate the relevant details from the unimportant ones?’
Klopstock’s voice was growing louder.
‘For you to understand things, which is what you’ll need to do for us to prevent even worse from happening…’
EVEN worse?
‘My wife went to school with Kaja and had kept in loose contact with her over the years. In her manipulative way, Amelie managed to convince Kaja that she was being mistreated by you, Mats. That she was at least entitled to compensation. Money. A lot of money. She made it clear to Kaja that her life was messed up, but also that people like us made a mint off the psychological suffering of their patients.
‘She used this argument to win Kaja over. To do her crime. And she had an easy time of it with Uhlandt, who’d long dreamed of showing people, using a real living object, what it meant for a pregnant mother to have her baby taken from her. She provided him with money and a camera.’
Mats suddenly had the horrible feeling of needing to scratch himself inside. Klopstock’s words were like itching powder inside his mind.
‘These aren’t all the facts – much of it I’m only guessing at or piecing together from the information that I do have. Frau Claussen unfortunately can’t be questioned. She died shortly after landing from the effects of nicotine poisoning. And, there is one other thing I have to get off my chest, that you need to know, before—’
Before what???
‘I’m innocent from a legal point of view, but not morally. None of this would’ve happened without my involvement. Because when I treated Nele, I was the one who’d convinced her to get back in touch with you, Mats. To restore the family bonds.
‘My wife must’ve read about it in my session notes. I even wrote down your flight number when your daughter told me about it. Amelie must have then given it to Kaja Claussen.’
Mats’ itch was getting worse. If he could only scream at Klopstock to get to the point.
‘As bad as it is, I cannot help but admit some respect for my dead wife in her madness. She never had to resort to any physical violence herself. It was all about proper timing and manipulating people. Her speciality. You could even say she came up with a brilliant psychological plan that was, at its core, distinctly feminine. She influenced Kaja and you only with words, Mats. And in Franz Uhlandt she had a stranger to get his hands dirty, one with a completely different motive than hers. Which was why any connection between the two crimes wouldn’t have been easy to prove, especially since you, Mats, were supposed to end up paying with your life…’
Before Mats could tell whether he’d heard Klopstock crying he detected the voice of Dr Roth again, who said in a far more straightforward yet urgent way: ‘Good, now that you know the background, this brings us to the crucial question, Dr Krüger: where is your daughter?’
No!
Mats knew this question was coming and yet was praying he wouldn’t have to hear it. Now it was out there, and the darkness all around him opened its hideous maw, threatening to devour him once again.
Oh, God, so you never found her?
Mats’ mind spun, that missing hole inside him becoming a vortex. Then he thought: Good Lord, the baby!
It must have been born after this long.
Or… it had died.
This one word droned so loudly in Mats’ thoughts that Dr Roth was hardly able to reach him with his next question: ‘Did you learn of anything at all on board that aeroplane, heard, seen or otherwise found out, that might tell us Nele’s current whereabouts?’