‘You faked Sandra’s death?’
‘It wasn’t easy for us, believe me. We wanted to discontinue the process more than once. My daughter most of all.’
Marc recalled the photo of the yellow Volvo that Emma had taken outside the police station and shown to him.
They were arguing, the two of them, that’s the only reason I took the picture.
‘What about the Bleibtreu Clinic? Does it even exist?’
‘Oh yes. Patrick is a good friend of mine – he often treats my in-patients. He examined you after you regained consciousness here. Your amnesia would probably not be of long duration, he told us, but he didn’t want to include you in his programme, not officially. I can well understand that. After all, he really does carry out serious research, whereas what we were doing was highly unethical. Still, he did at least place one floor of his clinic at our disposal.’
Then Emma really is just a patient!
Marc didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His closest confidante, the person who had helped him most, was a paranoid refugee from a hospital. Perhaps she really had overheard a conversation between Constantin and the genuine Professor Bleibtreu and jumped to certain conclusions. She’d escaped from the clinic to warn him and worked herself up into a paranoid psychosis at the same time.
‘I still don’t understand,’ Marc said with a catch in his voice. He pressed both hands to his burning cheeks. ‘Why go to such incredible lengths?’
‘Because it’s a matter of life and death, Marc. We never wanted to hurt you, believe me. Your grief was simply meant to delay the process of recollection, and it worked really well for the first few weeks. However, then you began to dream of the moments immediately preceding the accident, and we knew it would be only a matter of time before you caught on and put two and two together. So we placed the magazine containing that bogus advertisement in my waiting room.’
Learn to forget.
‘In the end we needed only one more day. Just another twenty-four hours in which you couldn’t be allowed to remember. We couldn’t set up the operation before, and it would have been too risky to deliver the baby earlier.’
Marc hesitated one last moment. Then he couldn’t restrain himself any longer: he vaulted over the desk that separated him from his father-in-law.
‘What was I meant to forget?!’ he yelled, and punched him in the face. Constantin staggered backwards with Marc’s hands around his throat.
‘Tell me!’ he cried, squeezing hard.
‘Marc,’ Benny called in the background. ‘Let go of him.’
Constantin’s eyes bulged, and his cheeks turned puce, but he made no attempt to defend himself.
‘You’ll never find out that way.’ Benny sounded calm, almost detached, and it might have been his oddly dispassionate tone of voice that brought Marc to his senses. He gave one final squeeze, then let go.
Constantin fought for breath, clasping his blotchy throat, and started to retch.
‘Hurry up and give me some answers or I swear I’ll kill you!’
His father-in-law stood there with his head bowed, coughing. Then he straightened up, took a folder from the desk and went over to a metal-framed light box on the wall. He turned on the halogen light behind the frosted-glass screen, removed a photograph from the folder and clipped it to the screen.
‘This is a greatly enlarged ultrasound picture.’
All Marc could see were black and white splotches. He didn’t know whether they were benign or malignant, yet he recognized the photograph.
The last time he’d seen it was a few seconds before the crash – in Sandra’s hand.
That was why she undid her seatbelt, to get this ultrasound picture from the back of the car! But why?
‘We’re looking at your unborn son’s abdominal region. And this…’ Coughing, Constantin cautiously tapped a shadowy area on the photograph ‘…is his liver. The problem is quite apparent.’
He gazed at Marc with a sorrowful expression. ‘The baby’s bile ducts are missing.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He suffers from the illness that killed your father, Marc, only far more severely. The bile cannot drain away. The baby will be born without a functioning liver.’
‘What… what can be done?’
‘Nothing. A human being without a liver isn’t viable.’
Marc felt he was rotating on the spot, not that he’d budged a millimetre. ‘You’re saying my son is bound to die?’
Constantin nodded.
But why all this? Why deliver him by Caesarian section ten days earlier than planned?
An actor had gone through the motions of examining him at the Bleibtreu Clinic. The hours of tests, the blood samples, the pointless psychological questionnaires he’d had to complete – these were just a way of gaining time while they set up the ensuing charade, which involved wiping his mobile phone and changing the lock and name card on the door of his flat. But why? So that other amateur actors could pass themselves off as the manager of his office, a handcuffed attorney, and even himself? The bogus film script, the answerphone recording of Sandra’s voice, the forged bank statement, the video at Constantin’s house that looked like a news magazine’s report but was really a fabrication – all these things had been intended to nudge his memory in the wrong direction and, at the same time, get him to this hospital at this particular juncture. Why?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Constantin said in an attempt to get through to Marc, who was staring at the illuminated photograph like a man in a stupor. ‘How could we have done this to you? How could I have lied to you? How could I have treated you for an imaginary splinter so you had to take pills that reinforced the suppressive process? It was a matter of life and death, my boy, don’t you see? You think I enjoyed swapping your SIM card or turning on that confounded dolphin lamp just to bemuse you, then hiding behind your lavatory door and shutting myself up in the bathroom while you combed the rest of the flat for me? I didn’t concoct all this myself, believe me. I employed a company that specializes in role play – it usually arranges murder mystery weekends. They didn’t know what was actually at stake, so they probably went too far. The film script you found at Eichkamp, the attorney in your cellar, my wrecked study and, last but not least, the furniture in your house – that was wrong beyond a doubt, but in the last analysis we had no choice. You do understand, don’t you? Good God, he’s your son! My grandson!’
Marc had only taken in snatches of Constantin’s outburst. His thoughts had drowned out one word in three.
No, it still doesn’t make sense. Why should they have wanted me to forget about my son’s terminal condition if he’s doomed in any case?
Unless… The truth hit him like a blow in the face. ‘You need a donor!’
Constantin stared at him blankly. ‘Yes, of course. I thought…’ He turned to Benny. ‘Didn’t you explain it to him?’
Benny shook his head. There was a look of infinite sadness in his eyes. ‘I leave the talking to you. I just do the dirty work.’
‘You intend to carry out a transplant?’ Marc broke in.
‘Yes, though an infant’s chances of surviving a liver transplant aren’t a hundred per cent, as you know.’
‘So you need someone with the same DNA as my son?’
Constantin nodded warily. ‘A donor with a compatible blood group is sufficient.’
‘Someone whose liver can be surgically tailored to fit into the body of a newborn baby?’
‘Yes.’
Click! The first truth was like the bead of an abacus sliding into place. ‘How soon after the birth do you need the organ?’
‘Immediately.’
‘And how long after the death of the donor can you transplant it?’
Constantin glanced nervously at his watch. ‘Only a few hours.’