‘Begin your analysis.’
‘Yes, Kommissarin.’
The night was long. Saskia dressed again. She did not want to eat or read. She had nobody to call. Finally, she fell asleep in her chair, lulled by the swish-swish of the data carousels as, pixel by pixel, the computer formed its answer to her question. She dreamed she brushed the streets, swish-swish, until they were as blank as her.
Night terrors for the kommissarin, whose dreams carried her to a campfire on a dark plain. Around it sat three old women. Clotho, she spun the thread of life. Lachesis, she measured a length. Atropos, she cut it.
Spin, measure, snip.
Awake, she witnessed each tick of the dawn. The city restarted. The empty streets gathered their people. Saskia watched them. In the bathroom, she studied her reflection. She brought cold water to her face and massaged her eyebrows and her eyes. She pressed until her vision clouded. It was 7:50 am. If the engineer was punctual, he would arrive in ten minutes.
‘Saskia,’ called the computer, ‘I have completed the image processing job.’
She returned to her desk. ‘Give me a hard copy.’
As the reconstruction of the murderer’s face appeared on her blotting paper, there was a knock at the door. Saskia folded the paper in half.
‘Computer, who is that?’
‘The Hauptkommissar. He has not requested an appointment.’
‘Is he alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let him in.’
Beckmann, today, was as identical in dress and expression as yesterday, but a carnation had replaced the anonymous lemon-yellow flower in his buttonhole.
‘Kommissarin?’
‘Here.’
She unfolded the paper. It showed the reflection of Saskia frowning in disgust over the woman she had murdered.
Chapter Three
‘Well, you have five minutes until the engineer arrives,’ said Beckmann. ‘Do you think this is a frame-up?’
Saskia took the paper and walked around the desk as she spoke.
‘No. The mechanics of the crime are consistent with the notion that the murderer is female. Mary was killed by a single stab wound below the ear. Though that requires skill, it does not require strength. I have recovered video of the murder itself, and this shows the perpetrator struggling to move the body. The murderer also wore a hat—long since destroyed. The effect of the hat was to conceal the face, and therefore the sex, of the wearer, from the cameras in my office.’
Saskia touched her forehead with her thumb. ‘Second, I remember receiving a burn yesterday morning. By afternoon, it was gone. On the assumption that I am not hallucinating at this very moment, then it must be true that I was never burned. My memory of receiving the burn cannot, therefore, be true. And that memory involved Simon, my English boyfriend. He threw a pot of pasta at me when I was recalled from London.’
‘Or did he?’
‘Precisely,’ she said, taking pride in her glacial tone. ‘This suggests a further hypothesis that at least some of my memories are false. The time at which the burn disappeared marks, I believe, the point where my false memories stop and my true memories begin. This point was perhaps my dizziness after discovering the body in the fridge. Some minutes before this, I killed Mary. Then false memories were implanted, or became activated. The key evidence is the computer’s analysis of the knife blade. If it is true—and it must be—then I have been hunting myself.’
Saskia had stopped next to the window. Across the desk, Beckmann smiled, as if at a prize student. ‘Questions remain.’
‘Such as,’ Saskia began, but she was stalled by the sudden understanding that these implanted memories might extend beyond the immediate past. She reached for a childhood, a school, her first love. She found nothing. Unstoppably, other realizations followed: she had remained in the office overnight because she had no home; she had called no friends because she had none. Even Simon (Saskia took his picture, searched his eyes) meant nothing. She was not in the picture because the two had never met. She ripped the photograph from its frame and found a yellowed advert for stationery on the reverse.
She took her revolver and aimed it at Beckmann.
‘What did you do to me?’ she whispered. This might have been the first time she looked at him. His aloofness was better termed coldness. His indifference was the abstraction of his cruelty.
‘Oh, Frau Kommissarin. You are so worried about being caught for your secretary’s murder. You think they’ll wipe your brain and send you out into the community. It’s too late. They already did.’
Saskia let the gun drop to the desk. ‘What? What?’
‘Three weeks ago, you perpetrated a thorough and meticulous murder. I must be vague on the details. You understand. As part of your rehabilitation, you were released into my programme. Do you know the expression,’ he briefly switched to English, ‘“Set a thief to catch a thief”? People like you, Kommissarin, have a talent to know their own kind. I want that. The FIB wants that.’
‘People like me?’ Even as Saskia felt the rise of madness, her intellect pushed on. ‘So this is an interview? A test to see if I could catch myself?’
‘Yes. You passed.’
‘Who was Mary?’
‘One of your kind. She won’t be missed, particularly by her victims’ families.’ Beckmann leaned over the desk. ‘Do you accept my job offer?’
‘What are the alternatives?’
‘You’ll be destroyed and your ashes pinched across the Spree.’
‘So why don’t I just put a bullet in you and leave for Siberia?’
Beckmann looked at the gun. ‘What bullet?’
She checked. There were no shell rims visible in the cylinder. She flicked out the cylinder and found one round in the topmost chamber. She reset the gun and pointed it at Beckmann. ‘This bullet.’
‘May I make one point? During the First World War, senior Russian officers would test the cleanliness of a junior’s revolver in a peculiar manner. Cleanliness was important because a poorly maintained gun was likely to jam. So a gun was loaded with one bullet, the cylinder was spun and the weapon fired at the junior. If the gun was well maintained, the cylinder would come to rest with the bullet at the base. The pin would strike nothing. However, if the gun was poorly maintained, the bullet could stop anywhere. Beneath the firing pin, for example.’
‘Russian roulette.’
‘Kommissarin, do you know the true significance of Russian roulette?’
She gasped. A breath-stopping pain ripped along her gun arm. She felt the joints flare and her muscles tremble with effort. Despite her will, the arm began to bend.
‘Your arm becomes my arm,’ Beckmann said, ‘if I wish it. Think of it as a safeguard.’
She strained until her jaw creaked and her chest bulged with trapped air.
‘Don’t fight,’ said Beckmann. ‘Listen. The purpose of Russian roulette is edification. A lesson that poses the question: Is there a bullet or is there not? Some officers were hanged because they did not have the courage to ask.’
Her eyes, which she could move, beseeched Beckmann, but he did nothing. She—or he—dashed the cylinder across her thigh. It spun. Then she raised the revolver to her temple.
Beckmann’s eyes drank her body from toes to crown. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘do you commit? If so, you will become my property. You will investigate federal crime as a probationary officer within the FIB. You will not be permitted to leave the EU and you will not attempt to rediscover your past. You will tell no one your true circumstances. You will accept anything I care to put in your brain. If you break any of these rules, you will be executed. Do you understand? Answer me now, or you will pull the trigger.’