‘Was that a blink?’
Roth nodded at Klopstock. Of course it was, unmistakably. The electrodes on Dr Mats Krüger’s eyelashes had recorded it. The jump on the monitor above the bed showed it.
Roth stood next to the bed in the intensive care unit holding a silvery-grey pencil microphone and watched as the patient’s eyeballs moved under his closed eyelids like disorientated beetles.
Krüger’s face was completely bandaged except for his eyes and mouth. He looked like some mummified alien with the black earphones, breathing tube in his mouth and little plates wired to his skull. Drainage was maintaining a sufficient avoidance of pressure at the locations where Kaja’s bullet had entered and exited, but the swelling could not be arrested for long and the patient would eventually lose consciousness. Fortunately, he wasn’t feeling any pain.
Hopefully.
The research on patients with locked-in syndrome was still in its infancy. They knew far too little about serious brain damage. Still, it had been recognised that those affected were quite fully aware and could be put into a trance by means of acoustic indicators. To his knowledge, though, Dr Krüger was the first patient on whom they’d used hypnotic regression to restore memory.
Whether it was successful or not would soon be clear.
Roth grabbed his mobile phone, pressed the speed dial for his office and asked them why the police weren’t here yet. It had already been twenty minutes since he’d informed Detective Hirsch that Krüger had ‘woken’ from his trance.
The same detective who, when Krüger was admitted yesterday, had made a fool of himself by insisting on interrogating the ‘suspect’.
‘The detective’s coming from across town,’ Roth’s assistant told him. ‘Might take a little longer.’
Roth thanked her, hung up and decided not to wait. He’d continue questioning his patient on his own.
‘I can imagine what you’re thinking, Dr Krüger. Too much time has passed, and with kidnapping cases the chances of finding a victim alive decreases by the hour.’
Roth was deliberately not mincing words. It was crucial that his patient ignore his own terrible fate and focus only on his daughter.
‘On your phone we found the torture photo the kidnapper made of your daughter. The official search for Nele hasn’t produced any leads so far.
‘Until a while ago, we didn’t know the connection between events on board the plane and a possible kidnapping. We only became aware of this from statements made by Professor Klopstock, who volunteered his help after his wife was identified. He told us everything he knows. Now you’re our only witness. We’re not sparing any effort or expense in questioning you because we want to save your daughter. Do you understand?’
Roth was pleased to see a blink.
‘Good. I’m now going to try using yes/no questions to feel my way towards what you experienced and anything that might help us searching for your daughter. Okay?’
Mats signalled agreement with another blink, and Roth squeezed his patient’s hand even though the man couldn’t feel it anymore. Such an emotional form of contact had become an unconscious habit for the head physician of the Park Clinic. He viewed himself as not only a man of words and pills but also one of humane sympathy.
Roth began with the most direct and important question: ‘Do you know where your daughter is?’
Mats blinked. To Roth’s amazement, he didn’t only do it once or twice – he did it six times in a row.
‘What’s he doing?’ Klopstock asked.
Roth had no idea and first waited to see whether Krüger resumed blinking after a longer pause.
When nothing happened, he asked his patient as loudly and clearly as possible: ‘Did you just blink six times on purpose?’
Mats blinked once.
So, yes.
Then he blinked five times and paused again before twitching his eyelids twelve times.
‘Wait, give us a little time, please,’ Roth requested and reached for a clipboard at the end of the bed.
‘Morse code?’ Klopstock asked.
‘No, the blinking doesn’t have the cadence for that.’
Roth made some hurried notes, verified his suspicions by counting with his fingers, and finally felt he’d solved the mystery.
‘Are they letters?’
He stared at Krüger’s eyes.
‘The alphabet. Are you going through the alphabet?’
A weak, but visible twitch.
‘Yes!’ Klopstock said in excitement behind him.
Roth, no less thrilled, asked Mats to start from the beginning.
He blinked six times again.
F
Then one less.
E
‘Twelve,’ Klopstock counted out loud and Roth wrote:
L
Krüger’s blinking finally ended with a nine count.
I
‘Who is Feli?’ Dr Roth asked Klopstock.
‘Felicitas Heilmann. A colleague.’
Roth turned off the microphone. ‘A friend of Dr Krüger, you mean?’
Klopstock nodded. ‘Yesterday she visited me at my practice and told me that Nele was in trouble. And that Mats was on an aeroplane flying from Buenos Aires to Berlin. That was the moment I first put two and two together. I knew that Amelie was on that plane with Suza, supposedly coming back from vacation. So when Feli came to me at the clinic on Ku’damm, I got this bad feeling that Amelie actually might’ve put her plan in motion.’
Roth lowered the clipboard, astounded. ‘And you didn’t say anything?’ He bristled. ‘Why didn’t you go to the police immediately with this information instead of reporting it only after this tragedy already occurred on board?’
Roth’s verbal onslaught had riled Klopstock somewhat and he launched a counterattack: ‘So what was I supposed to tell the police? “Hey, listen, one of my patients might have been kidnapped? Her father might be causing a disaster? My wife might be pulling the strings on board?”’
He shook his head.
‘All I had was conjecture. And the fact that Dr Krüger was preferring to act on his own initiative instead of informing the authorities told me that I shouldn’t attempt anything that might endanger Nele’s life, no, not on mere suspicion.’
Roth made a disparaging wave of his hand, unable to suppress his anger. ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Dr Klopstock. You wanted that incident,’ he stated frankly.
‘No.’
‘Or you at the least wanted to save your skin. Not to be connected at all if possible. If your wife hadn’t died, you probably never would’ve reported this and offered your help. You’re only doing this now to clear your name.’
Klopstock bristled, angry now too. ‘That’s not true. I even gave Felicitas Heilmann a tip when she came to see me. I had my assistant give her Uhlandt’s contact info, who no one’s been able to locate as you know.’
‘I still don’t understand why you never told me about Dr Heilmann.’
‘Why should I have? Fine, she was looking for Nele, but that’s something we’re all doing if I’m not mistaken.’
Roth had stopped listening to his excuses. He stepped over to the intensive care window facing the park, with his phone to his ear.
It was a sunny fall day, the visitors and patients strolling along the leaf-lined avenue or chatting on one of the park benches. No one out there seemed to have even the slightest idea of the suffering and misery residing just a few metres away inside these clinic walls.
Roth could now hear the police detective he’d just called, road noise in the background. ‘Hirsch? It’s Dr Roth, Park Clinic.’
‘I’ll be there any second.’
‘Good. One question first: has the name Felicitas Heilmann come up in your investigation?’
‘No, should it?’
‘The patient just gave us a lead.’
‘Okay. Hold on…’
Roth heard the line go silent, and after a short while the detective came back on. He was either asking around or was checking case files using his phone.
‘Felicitas Heilmann, forty-two years old, registered psychiatrist from Prenzlauer Berg?’ Hirsch asked.
‘Has to be her.’
‘That’s odd.’
Roth switched the phone from one ear to the other. ‘What is?’
‘We hadn’t seen any connection until now. But her partner has reported her missing.’
‘Come again?’
The head physician exchanged a glance with Klopstock, who made no secret of the fact that he was trying to listen in.
‘They were supposed to get married yesterday, but she left him standing at the altar.’
‘That cannot be coincidence.’
Hirsch sounded like he was biting into something and now spoke with his mouth full: ‘Way I see it too. I mean, left at the altar, that’s not exactly a priority for us. But along with this here… shit.’
‘What?’
‘Heilmann’s fiancé had given us his wife’s last mobile phone location. You won’t believe it.’
Hirsch sounded like he was speeding up, the road noise louder.
‘Where?’ Roth asked. And felt a chill like he was freezing on the inside as soon as the detective told him Feli’s last location:
‘That former East German meat processing plant. Right near the old dairy.’