Flashback

Chapter Two

Berlin, earlier that morning

There was nothing, thought Jem, like the first flush of trespass. Her stomach bubbled with it. Her body could not decide if the sensation energised or paralysed. She made fists, opened her hands, made fists. She was a gunslinger about to draw. An artist poised to brush the first stroke.

Part of her wanted to return to bed, the better to be discovered by Saskia when she returned from the market with the promised breakfast. Instead she remained on the threshold of the room Saskia had asked her never to enter, and blinked at the muted sunshine that passed through the window. She listened to the lifebloods of the building: water moving through pipes; the tick of warming radiators; the muffled scrape of a faraway chair. And, now, in this room, the unmistakable hum of a computer.

Somewhere in this room was the answer to Saskia Brandt.

‘Arctic, Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Cool as.’

It was larger than the master bedroom where Saskia and Jem slept. She could make out a sofa, sagging in the middle, and an Ikea bookcase, same as the one from the family house in Exeter. Saskia had packed hers with large volumes. Elsewhere, there was a weights bench, a yoga mat, and the desktop computer. The practicality of the room mirrored Saskia. The impression of Saskia’s most private space was that of a nest. Jem recalled Saskia’s expression when she believed nobody was looking: hawkish, alert. Thinking on a distant threat.

She began with the bookcase. It was stacked with texts on neuroanatomy that meant nothing to her and classic computing volumes and journals that Jem half-understood from the computer science degree she had abandoned, ignominiously, two years earlier. She did not touch the books. She had an idea that Saskia would notice their disturbance. She moved to the Tryten Computer Locker. She touched the keyhole, thinking. Power tools would be needed to cut through the steel box that protected this computer. The desk was a long, fine bureau with a glass top. There was a passport (Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer, born 1974 in Berlin; visa stamps for Turkey and Brazil), a digital camera, one ticket for a West End show in London (The Handmaid’s Tale), and an exercise book entitled Krimskrams with notes in German and occasional English snippets: ‘Forsyth method?’ and ‘Spain—do it!’ and ‘How can I ask David?’.

Jem opened the leftmost drawer.

Game fucking over.

It contained a gun.

The barrel was smaller than Jem would have expected. There was a cylinder attached to one end. A silencer.

Something touched her bare calf. She gasped, imagining Saskia’s premature return, and her sudden anger, but it was only the cat.

‘Shit, Ego.’

The honey-coloured animal corkscrewed into her ankle. His eyes gorged on the room and Jem realised that he had never been allowed in either.

‘You’re curious, too, aren’t you, sunshine?’

Curiosity killed the cat.

She looked again at the gun.

Satisfaction brought him back, baby.

Jem tried to smile at Ego as he strolled towards the weights bench and nosed the stack of discs over and over. Turning back to the desk, her eyes caught the doorway and a chill travelled her spine as she saw Saskia Brandt standing there, silhouetted against the brighter hall and black as the gun. She held bags of shopping in each hand. Her mouth was open.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’ Her voice was hard.

‘It’s OK, really,’ Jem replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. She walked over to Saskia, leaving a metre between them. ‘Just having a look around.’

‘How dare you? I locked the room.’

‘Listen, I’m just wandering about, no harm…’

Jem talked. She had filibustered people before, and with this confidence she dealt word after word. Though Saskia’s expression did not change—only the direction of her gaze as she looked around the room, checking—Jem maintained her verbiage. Covering fire, she told herself, shooting from the hip, but that only returned her thoughts to the weapon. The idea that Saskia kept a firearm in her apartment could not be positively spun. For Jem, the most worrying element was the addition of the silencer. Was Saskia a policewoman? A contract killer? How did that fit with the extraordinary events of the previous evening?

Jem’s spiel dried up.

As though that were her cue, Saskia dropped her shopping and entered the room, shouldering Jem aside. Her footsteps were silent. Jem remembered trying to walk silently across the floor minutes before. She had not been able to. Saskia could. She knew, Jem realised, which floorboards would creak.

Saskia touched the glass top of the desk. Her eyes moved from the contents—passports, tickets, camera—to Jem, then back again. Jem tried to judge her mood. Saskia seemed to be as preoccupied as a person working through a crossword. Her skin was ghostly, like a figure in stained glass, yet she was beautiful in an undeniable, cold way. Beholder’s eye be damned.

Saskia took the gun.

Jem said, ‘Wait.’

She did not know what to do. There was a chance that Saskia could rule against her in some way, and though the consequences of that were dim, shapeless in her mind—eviction? death?—Jem knew that she had to interrupt the process. She walked to her. In the glass of the desk, she saw an upside-down Jem meet an upside-down Saskia. Jem wondered, as she had many times, whether the reflected world could be the more real. The true world might play out in polished door handles, around bathroom taps, in the waltz of ice-cubes spun by a lazy hand.

They stood hip to hip. Both were looking at the gun. Saskia held it backwards, like a club, puzzling over it.

‘Sweetheart,’ said Jem, pushing away a strand of Saskia’s fringe.

‘How did you get in?’ Saskia asked. Her voice was sad. ‘I locked the door.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just saw you, that’s all. It was this morning. You were standing at the window of the bedroom. It was after we… it was afterwards. I was about to call your name when you turned away and left the room.’

‘You followed me?’

‘Only to the living room. I saw you pull out that book halfway. I knew it had to be a lock of some sort.’

‘Clever girl.’

Jem smiled, eager to make a human connection between them. Something beyond this exchange of information. But nothing in Saskia’s countenance altered. She looked at Jem, who searched her eyes for meaning, as well as her posture and the memory of her words. Emptiness. Jem took Saskia’s head in both hands and kissed her, hard. Saskia’s lips were dry and unresponsive. ‘You are not going to do this. Are you listening, baby?’

‘Do?’ Saskia asked coldly. ‘Do what? Baby.’

Jem revved herself, raked the throttle on her resolve, and thought, Game over. Saskia did not resist as Jem took the gun. Jem went to the kitchen with an idea to break the gun apart but she leaned over the sink and instead vomit erupted once, twice, onto the stainless steel. It was mostly spit. She looked at the gun. Now what?

Saskia embraced her from behind. Softness at last.

‘Alles wird gut, Schlümpfchen,’ she whispered, reaching around Jem’s waist. Everything will be fine. ‘Here.’ Jem watched the disembodied hands work. Saskia released the magazine with a twist and it dropped into her palm. She thumbed the bullets from the top. Each fell into the sink, dit, dit, dah.

When she had recovered enough to speak, Jem asked, ‘What does Schlümpfchen mean?’

‘Cute little smurf.’

‘Because of my blue hair?’

‘Because of your blue hair.’

Jem felt that Saskia had closed her eyes, but Jem’s were open still, staring.

So that was death, right there, passing me by.