Three

He felt Sbodin push him hard into the room and before he realised what was happening he heard a key turn in the lock. He turned round and banged his hands on the wood. On the other side of the door Sbodin was laughing quietly.

‘You’ve got no right to lock me in here,’ Berg said. ‘Unless you specifically charge me with a crime, you can’t keep me prisoner like this. I know my rights.’

Sbodin continued to laugh and when he at last stopped there was a long silence. Inside the room Berg could hear him walk up and down on the landing, his heavy boots hammering on the wood.

‘Open the door. I insist that you open the door.’

Sbodin said nothing. After a time there was the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Berg battered the door with his fists.

‘Open the door. Open the damned door,’ he shouted.

When the sound of the footsteps faded Berg went to the window and looked out. Below, he saw Sbodin leaving the house and turning into the street. He threw open the window and called after him.

‘Come back. You can’t leave me here like this!’

Sbodin did not even look round. He turned his collar up against the rain and pulled his hat down and continued to walk. When he was finally out of sight Berg closed the window and sat down on the bed. There was a pain at the back of his throat. He looked round the room, suddenly conscious now of the empty house. What was Sbodin’s idea? Was he supposed to remain here until sheer hunger and fatigue forced him to confess? He rose from the bed and went to the door. Uselessly he struck at the wood until the edges of his hands were sore. Then he raised his feet and kicked at the bottom panel of the door until the paint had been scraped from the wood. Tired, he went back to the bed and lay down. He saw from his clock that it was eleven thirty. Outside, although the sky was marginally brighter, there was an incongruous edge of darkness to the day.

He closed his eyes and slept for a time. When he woke it was just after one. He felt unbearably hungry—but it was a futile longing since there was nothing in the room to eat. He looked around. What if Sbodin did not return until tomorrow? Or the day after that? What if he failed to return again? For a second Berg had the harrowing feeling that he was the butt of some insane practical joke, that everything had been staged and contrived simply to make him look a fool—Monika’s rape, Sbodin’s investigation, Lazlow’s appearance. That was a nonsensical thought; it was much too elaborate to be a practical joke. Besides, what would be the point of it?

He went over to the window and looked into the street. He supposed he could get out through the window and slither down the side of the sharply sloping roof to the street, but it seemed risky. For one thing, the slates did not look strong and secure enough to carry his weight; for another he had never had a head for heights. Even the twenty or so feet to the ground made him nervous. He turned away from the window and walked to the door. He was about to hammer on the wood when he remembered that his hands still ached from the last attempt. Instead, he put his ear to the door and listened. Perhaps while he had been asleep someone had entered the house. Sbodin, possibly. Even Mrs Jacobitz, who would presumably return sometime.

He heard nothing. There was complete and utter silence. He could not remember when he had last felt so isolated. Once, possibly, when his mother had locked him in a cupboard for some trivial misdemeanour. Then it had been entirely dark save for a single pinpoint of light coming under the door. Now, perhaps because of the light and the occasional sounds from the street, this isolation was all the more terrible. He thought again of going out through the window, and then it occurred to him that perhaps Sbodin wanted him to do this. Perhaps the whole thing was a trap. Perhaps he would discover, when he dropped to the ground, that Sbodin was waiting for him below. He might even find himself arrested for trying to run away.

He was terribly hungry. Kneeling on the floor, he kept his ear to the keyhole in the forlorn hope that he would catch some sound. If only he could get to the kitchen where he knew there was food. Even a cigarette would be a consolation now. He went back to the bed and lay down. He drummed his fingers on the side of the mattress. After some time he fell asleep again. He dreamed vaguely of being pursued by his mother although he knew in the dream that the person following him looked nothing like his mother. Why then did he imagine it was his mother pursuing him? The question bothered him, just as the dream did, but when he woke he remembered very little of it.

Sbodin was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette.

‘Enjoy your sleep?’

Berg rubbed his eyes and sat up. The daylight seemed suddenly very harsh and for a moment he could not focus on the other man.

‘Why did you lock me in this room?’ he asked. ‘It’s illegal to keep someone a prisoner unless you charge them with something, and I haven’t been charged with anything. I’m perfectly within my rights to complain——’

‘Complain about what?’ Sbodin asked. He looked puzzled.

‘About being kept prisoner here——’

‘I didn’t keep you prisoner here, Berg. There must be some misunderstanding. When we came up to the room you lay down on the bed and fell fast asleep. I don’t really see what you’ve got to complain about——’

‘Look, you locked the door. You pushed me into the room and you locked the door. I shouted after you. You stood out there laughing and then you went away——’

Sbodin smiled. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nobody has kept you a prisoner, Berg. Anyway, if I had charged you with a crime, you would have been taken to the local jail. That’s where I keep my prisoners. I don’t allow them to remain in their own homes——’

Berg got up from the bed and went to the door. He looked at the surface of the wood from which he had scraped the paint.

‘How do you explain that? How do you explain those scrapes? I made them myself when I kicked the door after you’d gone——’

He looked once more at the marks on the door and then walked to the table. He stared at the investigator, but something in the other man’s expression—some inherent power in the eyes—made him look away.

Sbodin said, ‘Let’s drop this. We’ve got more important things to discuss.’

Berg said nothing. Of course: it was all perfectly obvious. It was another of Sbodin’s techniques—confuse the accused, confuse him to the extent where he can no longer tell the difference between the reality and the fantasy. Well, he would not be taken. If Sbodin wanted to confuse him he would have to try much harder than that. Did he think he was dealing with an idiot?

‘What do we have to talk about now?’

Sbodin drew a sheet of paper from his pocket and spread it on the table. ‘While you were asleep, one of my colleagues brought me this. I think it will prove to be a significant piece of evidence. Do you recognise it?’

Sbodin held the paper up. Berg recognised his own black handwriting, the cramped, elegant letters, the exaggerated slant. For a moment he could not place the piece of paper and then all at once he remembered: it was the official complaints form that he had started to complete not so long ago. But how did it come to be in Sbodin’s possession? He recalled that when he had decided against making the complaint he had thrown the half-completed form into the waste-basket. Someone obviously had rescued it from there—but who? He could only think of Miss Selz. She might have waited until he had gone from the room and then retrieved the form. After that, she would almost certainly have taken it to Lazlow. Perhaps while they were lying on his desk she had produced it and then they had discussed it together.

‘Yes, I recognise it,’ he said to Sbodin.

‘Do you remember what you wrote?’

‘Not exactly. I was angry when I wrote it.’

‘Don’t you remember the things you do when you’re angry?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it?’

Berg had a painfully empty feeling in his stomach. ‘I’d like to have something to eat.’

‘After we’ve discussed this you can go down to the kitchen and make yourself something.’

‘Can’t I do it now?’

Sbodin passed the form to Berg and then, sitting back in his chair, asked him to read it aloud. Berg looked at the sheet. It was his own handwriting, there was no doubt of that.

‘Read it,’ Sbodin said. ‘Begin with the code number and read the whole thing.’

Berg stared at the sheet. The words seemed to shed all meaning in front of his eyes; the letters were suddenly alive, moving across the page, black letters crowding other black letters as if someone had spilled ink over the paper. He closed his eyes.

‘I can’t.’

‘Read it,’ Sbodin said and raised his voice. He rose impatiently from the table and began to walk up and down the room. ‘Hurry up. I’m waiting.’

‘No, I can’t,’ Berg said.

Sbodin snatched the sheet from him and held it a moment.

‘What’s wrong with you? Are you ashamed to read what you’ve written? Is that it?’

Berg kept his eyes closed. Locked in darkness he did not have to look at Sbodin. Why did the man unnerve him so much anyway? An ordinary investigator in a backward district? A man whose idea of subtlety was to lock a suspect in a room and then deny later that he had done so? Berg opened his eyes slightly and saw that Sbodin was staring at him. The stare caught and held him; it was as if he were imprisoned in the expression, shuttered behind the cold glare of the man’s eyes.

‘You are ashamed, Berg. You’re ashamed of what it says here—in your own handwriting. Do you want me to read it?’

Berg nodded his head. Even that small movement seemed to weaken him. He watched Sbodin return to the table and put the sheet down. And then he began to read:

‘Code number 4 OC. I want to tell this whole organisation how frustrated I am. I want everyone to know how much I desire Monika Jahn.’

Sbodin was then silent for a bit. Berg, his eyes fixed to the window, heard the faint rustle of paper, the scape of the man’s breath as he sighed, the creak of his boots as he moved his feet. Had he heard properly? He could not recall ever having written anything like that. It simply wasn’t true!

‘Let me see that paper,’ he said.

Sbodin held it out. ‘What’s wrong, Berg? Do you want to make sure it’s in your own handwriting?’

Berg snatched the sheet and stared at it. The message on it was exactly as Sbodin had read it. He went to the window and held it flat against the light and read it again—as if in the light he would be able to detect a forgery. He examined the handwriting closely. It looked like his own, certainly. And if he had been able to remember writing the words on the sheet then he would have claimed it as his own—but he had no such memory. ‘I want everyone to know how much I desire Monika Jahn.’ He had never written anything like that. He was certain of the fact. Turning to Sbodin he said,

‘This is a very clever forgery. One thing I know for sure is that I never wrote it.’

Sbodin laughed. ‘You’re a very stupid man, Berg. Any handwriting expert in the country would testify that this is your own handwriting. I fail to see why you continually deny things. Are you so stupid? First you deny raping the woman. Secondly you concoct some idiotic story about Lazlow and his secretary. Thirdly you claim that I kept you prisoner in this room. And now, faced with this overwhelming evidence, you say that you didn’t write it at all.’ Sbodin opened a packet of cigarettes but didn’t take one out; instead he left the pack open on the table as though to taunt Berg. He laughed again. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to get out of a tight spot. But I don’t understand why you’re so stupid about it.’

Berg lay on the bed. He was trembling. He felt terribly weak. Any moment now he thought he might faint. Briefly he recalled that his mother had once told him he would probably die in the end of a heart attack, since that was how his father had died and the complaint was hereditary. At the time he had dismissed this as yet another aspect of his mother’s morbid hypochondria. Now, listening to the monstrous sound of his heart pumping in his chest, he was not so sure. What could that kind of death be like? A pain in the chest, a creeping numbness—and then nothing.

‘The point I want to make, Berg, is that if you’re going to come out of this whole sordid business with your reputation intact, you’ll have to do much better than you’ve done so far. How can you conceivably deny that this is your own handwriting?’

Berg said, ‘All right, I admit that it looks like my hand. But I don’t remember writing anything like that. I wouldn’t have written anything like that.’

‘How can you tell? You said you were angry when you wrote the form. You said you didn’t remember what you had written. How can you be sure that this isn’t what you wrote?’

‘But why should I write something like that? It’s nonsense. I had a complaint about my job. It was nothing to do with Monika Jahn——’

‘I suggest your frustration at work was simply the result of another sort of frustration. That’s why you wrote this. You desired the woman. You couldn’t have her. So you took out your frustrations——’

‘No,’ Berg said. ‘None of this is true. It’s a forgery. I didn’t write anything like that.’

Suddenly Sbodin moved towards the bed and caught him by the shoulders. Berg’s first reaction was surprise that such a big man could move so quickly.

‘Admit it. Make it easier on yourself.’

Sbodin started to shake him back and forth, his fingers digging into Berg’s shoulder. Berg tried desperately to think: what had he written on the sheet? But the pain from the pressure of Sbodin’s grip was unbearable. He tried to shake himself free. The investigator held on tightly, pushing Berg back and forward, rocking him effortlessly.

‘Why don’t you just sign my document, Berg? That would put the magistrate firmly on your side when you come up for trial. Why don’t you just sign?’

Berg pulled himself free. A trickle of blood from his shoulder appeared through the material of his shirt.

‘Get your clever forger to do it,’ he said.

Sbodin sighed. Perspiration ran along his brow, over his nose.

‘I don’t know any clever forgers,’ he said.

‘My shoulder hurts.’

‘It won’t kill you.’

There was a long silence, broken eventually by the sound of a car in the street. It passed the house, its horn rattling harshly as if in celebration of some misdeed. The noise echoed in Berg’s head and he remembered his hunger.

‘I want something to eat.’

Sbodin got up. They went together to the door. Berg rubbed his shoulder and turned to the investigator, and as he turned an irrational thought went through his head: suppose this man weren’t an investigator at all? Suppose he wasn’t what he claimed to be? Berg hadn’t seen any document to support the man’s identity, he hadn’t been shown any warrant card. Simply, a man turns up in his room, accuses him of a crime, and calls himself an investigator. Where was the proof of this? It was on the tip of his tongue to say something when Sbodin gently raised his hand to Berg’s bleeding shoulder.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I must have been carried away. It happens sometimes in this kind of work. Sometimes you can get carried away without realising it.’ He paused on the landing. From somewhere came the sound of rain hammering on a piece of tin. Berg raised his head. Above, set in the roof, was a glass skylight smeared with streaks of rainwater.

‘Let’s see what there is to eat,’ Sbodin said. ‘And let’s forget all this nonsense about locked doors and forged handwriting. What do you say?’

Berg said nothing. He went downstairs in front of Sbodin. The investigator was whistling quietly to himself in that way he had—more of a tuneless whisper than a whistle.