The Fear Index

2





A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die …




CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)




HOFFMANN HAD NO memory of anything after that – no thoughts or dreams disturbed his normally restless mind – until at last, from out of the fog, like a low spit of land emerging at the end of a long voyage, he became aware of a gradual reawakening of sensations – freezing water trickling down the side of his neck and across his back, a cold pressure on his scalp, a sharp pain in his head, a mechanical jabbering in his ears, the familiar sickly-sharp floral smell of his wife’s perfume – and he realised that he was lying on his side, with something soft against his cheek. There was a pressure on his hand.

He opened his eyes and saw a white plastic bowl, inches from his face, into which he immediately vomited, the taste of last night’s fish pie sour in his mouth. He gagged and spewed again. The bowl was removed. A bright light was shone into each of his eyes in turn. His nose and mouth were wiped. A glass of water was pressed against his lips. Babyishly, he pushed it away at first, then took it and gulped it down. When he had finished, he opened his eyes again and squinted around his new world.

He was on the floor of the hall, laid out in the recovery position, his back resting against the wall. A blue police light flashed at the window like a continuous electrical storm; unintelligible chatter leaked from a radio. Gabrielle was kneeling next to him, holding his hand. She smiled and squeezed his fingers. ‘Thank God,’ she said. She was dressed in jeans and a jersey. He pushed himself up and looked around, bewildered. Without his spectacles, everything was slightly blurred: two paramedics, bent over a case of gleaming equipment; two uniformed gendarmes, one by the door with the noisy radio on his belt and another just coming down the stairs; and a third man, tired-looking, in his fifties, wearing a dark blue windcheater and a white shirt with a dark tie, who was studying Hoffmann with detached sympathy. Everyone was dressed except Hoffmann, and it suddenly seemed terribly important to him to put on some clothes as well. But when he tried to rise further, he found he had insufficient strength in his arms. A flash of pain arced across his skull.

The man in the dark tie said, ‘Here, let me help,’ and stepped forward with his hand outstretched. ‘Jean-Philippe Leclerc, inspector of the Geneva Police Department.’

One of the paramedics took Hoffmann’s other arm and together he and the inspector raised him carefully to his feet. On the creamy paintwork of the wall where his head had rested was a feathery patch of blood. More blood was on the floor – smeared into streaks, as if someone had skidded in it. Hoffmann’s knees sagged. ‘I have you,’ Leclerc reassured him. ‘Breathe deeply. Take a moment.’

Gabrielle said anxiously, ‘He needs to go to a hospital.’

‘The ambulance will be here in ten minutes,’ said the paramedic. ‘They’ve been delayed.’

‘Why don’t we wait in here?’ suggested Leclerc. He opened the door on to the chilly drawing room.

Once Hoffmann had been lowered into a sitting position on the sofa – he refused to lie flat – the paramedic squatted in front of him.

‘Can you tell me the number of fingers I’m holding up?’

Hoffmann said, ‘Can I have my …’ What was the word? He raised his hand to his eyes.

‘He needs his glasses,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Here you are, darling.’ She slipped them over his nose and kissed his forehead. ‘Take it easy, all right?’

The medic said, ‘Can you see my fingers now?’

Hoffmann counted carefully. He ran his tongue over his lips before replying. ‘Three.’

‘And now?’

‘Four.’

‘We need to take your blood pressure, monsieur.’

Hoffmann sat placidly as the sleeve of his pyjama jacket was rolled up and the plastic cuff was fastened around his bicep and inflated. The end of the stethoscope was cold on his skin. His mind seemed to be switching itself back on now, section by section. Methodically he noted the contents of the room: the pale yellow walls, the easy chairs and chaise longues covered in white silk, the Bechstein baby grand, the Louis Quinze clock ticking quietly on the mantelpiece, the charcoal tones of the Auerbach landscape above it. On the coffee table in front of him was one of Gabrielle’s early self-portraits: a half-metre cube, made up of a hundred sheets of Mirogard glass, on to which she had traced in black ink the sections of an MRI scan of her own body. The effect was of some strange, vulnerable alien creature floating in mid-air. Hoffmann looked at it as if for the first time. There was something here he ought to remember. What was it? This was a new experience for him, not to be able to retrieve a piece of information he wanted immediately. When the paramedic had finished, Hoffmann said to Gabrielle, ‘Aren’t you doing something special today?’ His forehead creased in concentration as he searched through the chaos of his memory. ‘I know,’ he said at last with relief, ‘it’s your show.’

‘Yes, it is, but we’ll cancel it.’

‘No, we mustn’t do that – not your first show.’

‘Good,’ said Leclerc, who was watching Hoffmann from his armchair. ‘This is very good.’

Hoffmann turned slowly to look at him. The movement shot another spasm of pain through his head. He peered at Leclerc. ‘Good?’

‘It’s good that you can remember things.’ The inspector gave him the thumbs-up sign. ‘For example, what’s the last thing that happened to you tonight that you can remember?’

Gabrielle interrupted. ‘I think Alex ought to see a doctor before he answers any questions. He needs to rest.’

‘What is the last thing I remember?’ Hoffmann considered the question carefully, as if it were a mathematical problem. ‘I guess it was coming in through the front door. He must have been behind it waiting for me.’

‘He? There was only one man?’ Leclerc unzipped his windcheater and with difficulty tugged a notebook from some hidden recess, then shifted in his chair and produced a pen. All the while he looked encouragingly at Hoffmann.

‘Yes, as far as I know. Just one.’ Hoffmann put his hand to the back of his head. His fingers touched a bandage, tightly wound. ‘What did he hit me with?’

‘By the looks of it, a fire extinguisher.’

‘Jesus. And how long was I unconscious?’

‘Twenty-five minutes.’

‘Is that all?’ Hoffmann felt as if he had been out for hours. But when he looked at the windows he saw it was still dark, and the Louis Quinze clock said it was not yet five o’clock. ‘And I was shouting to warn you,’ he said to Gabrielle. ‘I remember that.’

‘That’s right, I heard you. Then I came downstairs and found you lying there. The front door was open. The next thing I knew, the police were here.’

Hoffmann looked back at Leclerc. ‘Did you catch him?’

‘Unfortunately he was gone by the time our patrol arrived.’ Leclerc flicked back through his notebook. ‘It’s strange. He seems simply to have walked in through the gate and walked out again. Yet I gather you need two separate codes to access the gate and the front door. I wonder – was this man known to you in some way, perhaps? I’m assuming you didn’t let him in deliberately.’

‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’

‘Ah.’ Leclerc made a note. ‘So you did get a good look at him?’

‘He was in the kitchen. I watched him through the window.’

‘I don’t understand. You were outside and he was inside?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry – how could that be?’

Haltingly at first, but with growing fluency as his strength and memory returned, Hoffmann relived it all: how he had heard a noise, had gone downstairs, had discovered the alarm turned off, had opened the door, seen the pair of boots, noticed the light shining from a ground-floor window, worked his way round the side of the house, and watched the intruder through the window.

‘Can you describe him?’ Leclerc was writing rapidly, barely finishing one page before turning it over and filling another.

Gabrielle said, ‘Alex …’

‘It’s all right, Gabby,’ said Hoffmann. ‘We need to help them catch this bastard.’ He closed his eyes. He had a clear mental picture of him – almost too clear, staring out wildly across the brightly lit kitchen. ‘He was medium height. Rough-looking. Fifties. Gaunt face. Bald on top. Long, thin grey hair, pulled back in a ponytail. He was wearing a leather coat, or maybe a jacket – I can’t remember which.’ A doubt swam into Hoffmann’s mind. He paused. Leclerc stared at him, waiting for him to continue. ‘I say I’ve never seen him before, but now I come to think of it, I wonder if that’s so. Perhaps I have seen him somewhere – a glimpse in the street, maybe. There was something familiar …’ His voice trailed off.

‘Go on,’ said Leclerc.

Hoffmann thought for a moment, then fractionally shook his head. ‘No. I can’t remember. Sorry. But to be honest – you know, I’m not trying to make a big deal of it – I have had an odd feeling of being watched just lately.’

Gabrielle said in surprise, ‘You never mentioned anything to me about it.’

‘I didn’t want to upset you. And besides, it was never anything I could put my finger on, exactly.’

‘It could be that he’s been watching the house for a while,’ said Leclerc, ‘or following you. You may have seen him in the street without being aware of him. Don’t worry. It’ll come back to you. What was he doing in the kitchen?’

Hoffmann glanced at Gabrielle. He hesitated. ‘He was – sharpening knives.’

‘My God!’ Gabrielle put her hand to her mouth.

‘Would you be able to identify him if you saw him again?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Hoffmann grimly. ‘You bet.’

Leclerc tapped his pen against his notebook. ‘We must issue this description.’ He stood. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said. He went out into the hall.

Hoffmann suddenly felt too tired to carry on. He closed his eyes again and leaned his head back against the sofa, then remembered his wound. ‘Sorry. I’m ruining your furniture.’

‘To hell with the furniture.’

He stared at her. She looked older without her make-up, more fragile and – an expression he had never seen before – scared. It pierced him. He managed to smile at her. At first she shook her head, but then – briefly, reluctantly – she smiled back, and just for a moment he dared to hope the whole thing wasn’t that serious: that it would turn out to be some old tramp who had found the entry codes on a scrap of waste paper in the street, and that one day they would laugh about it – his knock on the head (a fire extinguisher!), his mock heroics, her anxiety.

Leclerc came back into the drawing room carrying a couple of clear plastic evidence bags.

‘We found these in the kitchen,’ he said, resuming his seat with a sigh. He held them up. One contained a pair of handcuffs, the other what looked to be a black leather collar with a black golf ball attached to it.

‘What’s that?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘A gag,’ replied Leclerc. ‘It’s new. He probably bought it in a sex shop. They’re very popular with the S and M crowd. With luck we may be able to trace it.’

‘Oh my God!’ She looked in horror at Hoffmann. ‘What was he going to do to us?’

Hoffmann felt faint again, his mouth dry. ‘I don’t know. Kidnap us?’

‘That’s certainly a possibility,’ agreed Leclerc, glancing around the room. ‘You’re a rich man, that’s obvious enough. But I must say that kidnapping is unheard of in Geneva. This is a law-abiding city.’ He took out his pen again. ‘May I ask your occupation?’

‘I’m a physicist.’

‘A physicist.’ Leclerc made a note. He nodded to himself, and raised an eyebrow. ‘That I did not expect. English?’

‘American.’

‘Jewish?’

‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’

‘Forgive me. Your family name … I only ask in case there may be a racist motive.’

‘No, not Jewish.’

‘And Madame Hoffmann?’

‘I’m English.’

‘And you’ve lived in Switzerland for how long, Dr Hoffmann?’

‘Fourteen years.’ Weariness once again almost overtook him. ‘I came out here in the nineties to work for CERN, on the Large Hadron Collider. I was there for about six years.’

‘And now?’

‘I run a company.’

‘Called?’

‘Hoffmann Investment Technologies.’

‘And what does it make?’

‘What does it make? It makes money. It’s a hedge fund.’

‘Very good. “It makes money.” How long have you been here?’

‘Like I said – fourteen years.’

‘No, I meant here – here, in this house?’

‘Oh …’ He looked at Gabrielle, defeated.

She said, ‘Only a month.’

‘One month? Did you change the entry codes when you took over?’

‘Of course.’

‘And who apart from the two of you knows the combination for the burglar alarm and so forth?’

Gabrielle said, ‘Our housekeeper. The maid. The gardener.’

‘And none of them lives in?’

‘No.’

‘Does anyone at your office know the codes, Dr Hoffmann?’

‘My assistant.’ Hoffmann frowned. How sluggishly his brain moved: like a computer with a virus. ‘Oh, and our security consultant – he checked everything before we bought the place.’

‘Can you remember his name?’

‘Genoud.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘Maurice Genoud.’

Leclerc looked up. ‘There was a Maurice Genoud on the Geneva police force. I seem to remember he went into the private security business. Well, well.’ A thoughtful expression crossed Leclerc’s hangdog face. He resumed his note-taking. ‘Obviously all the combinations will need to be changed immediately. I suggest that you don’t reveal the new codes to any of your employees until I’ve had a chance to interview them.’

A buzzer sounded in the hall. It made Hoffmann jump.

‘That’s probably the ambulance,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I’ll open the gate.’

While she was out of the room, Hoffmann said, ‘I suppose this is going to get into the press?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘I try to keep my name out of the papers.’

‘We’ll endeavour to be discreet. Do you have any enemies, Dr Hoffmann?’

‘No, not that I know of. Certainly no one who’d do anything like this.’

‘Some rich investor – Russian, perhaps – who’s lost money?’

‘We don’t lose money.’ Still, Hoffmann tried to think if there was anyone on his client list who might possibly be involved. But no: it was inconceivable. ‘Is it safe for us to stay here, do you think, with this maniac on the loose?’

‘We’ll have our people here most of the day, and tonight we can keep an eye on the place – perhaps put a car in the road. But I have to say that generally we find that men in your position prefer to take precautions of their own.’

‘You mean hire bodyguards?’ Hoffmann grimaced. ‘I don’t want to live like that.’

‘Unfortunately, a house like this is always going to attract unwanted attention. And bankers are not especially popular these days, even in Switzerland.’ Leclerc looked around the room. ‘May I ask how much you paid for it?’

Normally Hoffmann would have told him to go to hell, but he didn’t have the strength. ‘Sixty million dollars.’

‘Oh my!’ Leclerc pursed his lips in pain. ‘You know, I can’t afford to live in Geneva any more. My wife and I have moved to a house just over the border in France, where things are cheaper. Of course it means I have to drive in every day, but there it is.’

From outside came the noise of a diesel engine. Gabrielle put her head around the door. ‘The ambulance is here. I’ll go and find you some clothes we can take with us.’

Hoffmann tried to rise. Leclerc came over to help him, but Hoffmann waved him away. The Swiss, he thought sourly: they pretend to welcome foreigners but really they resent us. Why should I care if he lives in France? He had to rock himself forward a couple of times before he had gained sufficient momentum to escape the sofa, but on his third attempt he managed it and stood swaying on the Aubusson carpet. The clamour in his head was making him feel nauseous again.

Leclerc said, ‘I do hope this unpleasant incident hasn’t put you off our beautiful country.’

Hoffmann wondered if he was joking, but the inspector’s face was perfectly straight.

‘Not at all.’

Together they went out into the hall, Hoffmann taking exaggerated care with each step, like a drunk who wishes to be thought sober. The house had become crowded with people from the emergency services. More gendarmes had arrived, along with two ambulance personnel, a man and a woman, wheeling a bed. Confronted by their heavy government-issue clothing, Hoffmann once again felt naked and vulnerable; an invalid. He was relieved to see Gabrielle coming down the stairs with his raincoat. Leclerc took it from her and draped it around Hoffmann’s shoulders.

By the front door, Hoffmann noticed a fire extinguisher, wrapped in a plastic bag. The mere sight of it gave him a twinge of pain. He said, ‘Are you going to put out an artist’s impression of this man?’

‘We might.’

‘Then now I think of it, there’s something you should see.’ It had come to him suddenly, with the force of a revelation. Ignoring the protests of the ambulance people that he should lie down, he turned and walked back along the hall to his study. The Bloomberg terminal on his desk was still switched on. Out of the corner of his eye he registered a red glow. Almost every price was down. The Far Eastern markets must be haemorrhaging. He switched on the light and searched along the shelf until he found The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His hands were trembling with excitement. He flicked through the pages.

‘There,’ he said, turning to show his discovery to Leclerc and Gabrielle. He tapped his finger on the page. ‘That’s the man who attacked me.’

It was the illustration for the emotion of terror – an old man, his eyes wide, his toothless mouth agape. Electric calipers were being applied to his facial muscles by the great French doctor Duchenne, an expert in galvanism, in order to stimulate the required expression.

Hoffmann could sense the others’ scepticism – no, worse: their dismay.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Leclerc, puzzled. ‘You’re telling us that this is the man who was in your house tonight?’

‘Oh, Alex,’ said Gabrielle.

‘Obviously I’m not saying it’s literally him – he’s been dead more than a century – I’m saying it looks like him.’ They were both staring at him intently. They believe I have gone mad, he thought. He took a breath. ‘Okay. Now this book,’ he explained carefully to Leclerc, ‘arrived yesterday without any explanation. I didn’t order it, right? I don’t know who sent it. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But you’ve got to agree it’s odd that a few hours after this arrives, a man – who actually looks as though he’s just stepped out of its pages – turns up to attack us.’ They were silent. ‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘all I’m saying is, if you want to make an artist’s impression of the guy, you should start with this.’

‘Thank you,’ said Leclerc. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

There was a pause.

‘Right,’ said Gabrielle brightly. ‘Let’s get you to the hospital.’





LECLERC SAW THEM off from the front door.

The moon had disappeared behind the clouds. There was barely any light in the sky, even though there was only half an hour until dawn. The American physicist, with his bandaged head and his black raincoat and his thin pink ankles poking out beneath his expensive pyjamas, was helped into the back of the ambulance by one of the attendants. Since his gabbling remarks about the Victorian photograph, he had fallen silent; Leclerc thought he seemed embarrassed. He had taken the book with him. His wife followed, clutching a bag full of his clothes. They looked like a pair of refugees. The doors were banged shut and the ambulance pulled away, a patrol car behind it.

Leclerc watched until the two vehicles reached the curve of the drive leading to the main road. Brake lights briefly gleamed crimson and then they were gone.

He turned back into the house.

‘Big place for two people,’ muttered one of the gendarmes standing just inside the doorway.

Leclerc grunted. ‘Big place for ten people.’

He went on a solitary expedition to try to get a feel of what he was dealing with. Five, six – no, seven bedrooms upstairs, each with an en suite bathroom, none apparently ever used; the master bedroom huge, with a big dressing room next to it lined by mirrored doors and drawers; a plasma TV in the bathroom; his-and-hers basins; a space-age shower with a dozen nozzles. Across the landing, a gym, with an exercise bike, a rowing machine, a cross-trainer, weights, another big TV. No toys. No evidence of children anywhere, in fact, not even in the framed photographs scattered around, which were mostly of the Hoffmanns on expensive holidays – skiing, of course, and crewing a yacht, and holding hands on some veranda that seemed to be built on stilts above a coral lagoon of improbable blueness.

Leclerc went downstairs, imagining how it must have felt to be Hoffmann, an hour and a half earlier, descending to face the unknown. He skirted the bloodstains and passed through into the study. An entire wall was given over to books. He took down one at random and looked at the spine: Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud. He opened it. Published Leipzig and Vienna, 1900. A first edition. He took down another. La psychologie des foules by Gustave le Bon. Paris, 1895. And another: L’homme machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Leiden, 1747. Also a first edition. Leclerc knew little about rare books, but sufficient even so to appreciate that this must be a collection worth millions. No wonder there were so many smoke detectors dotted around the house. The subjects covered were mostly scientific: sociology, psychology, biology, anthropology – nothing anywhere about money.

He crossed over to the desk and sat down in Hoffmann’s antique captain’s chair. Occasionally the large screen in front of him rippled slightly as the shimmering expanse of figures changed: -1.06, -78, -4.03%, -$0.95. He could no more decipher it than he could read the Rosetta Stone. If only I could find the key, he thought, maybe I could be as rich as this fellow. His own investments, which he had been persuaded to make a few years back by some pimply ‘financial adviser’ in order to secure a comfortable old age, were now worth only half what he had paid for them. The way things were going, when he retired he would have to take a part-time job: head of security in a department store, maybe. He would work until he dropped – something not even his father and grandfather had had to do. Thirty years with the police and he couldn’t even afford to live in the town where he was born! And who was buying up all the expensive property? Money-launderers, many of them – the wives and daughters of presidents of the so-called ‘new democracies’, politicians from the central Asian republics, Russian oligarchs, Afghan warlords, arms-dealers – the real criminals of the world, in short, while he spent his time chasing teenage Algerian dope-peddlers hanging round the railway station. He made himself stand up and go into another room in order to take his mind off it.

In the kitchen he leaned against the granite island and studied the knives. On his instructions they had been bagged and sealed in the hope that they might yield fingerprints. This part of Hoffmann’s story he did not understand. If the intruder had come prepared to kidnap, surely he would have armed himself properly beforehand? And a kidnapper would have needed at least one accomplice, maybe more: Hoffmann was relatively young and fit – he would have put up a struggle. So was the motive robbery? But a simple burglar would have been in and out as quickly as he could, taking as much as he could carry, and there was plenty portable here to steal. Everything therefore seemed to point to the criminal being mentally disturbed. But how would a violent psychopath have known the entry codes? It was a mystery. Perhaps there was some other way into the house that had been left unlocked.

Leclerc went back out into the corridor and turned left. The rear of the house opened into a large Victorian-style conservatory, which was being used as an artist’s studio, although it was not exactly art as the inspector understood that term. It looked more like a radiographic unit, or possibly a glazier’s workshop. On the original exterior wall of the house was a vast collage of electronic images of the human body – digital, infrared, X-ray – along with anatomical drawings of various organs, limbs and muscles.

Sheets of non-reflecting glass and Perspex, of various sizes and thicknesses, were stored in wooden racks. In a tin trunk were dozens of files, bulging with computer images, carefully labelled: ‘MRI head scans, 1–14 Sagittal, Axial, Coronal’; ‘Man, slices, Virtual Hospital, Sagittal & Coronal’. On a bench were a light box, a small vice and a clutter of inkpots, engraving tools and paint brushes. There was a hand drill in a black rubber stand, with a dark blue tin next to it – ‘Taylor’s of Harrogate, Earl Grey Tea’ – crammed full of drill heads, and a pile of glossy brochures for an exhibition entitled ‘Human Contours’ due to begin that very day at a gallery on the Plaine de Plainpalais. There was a biographical note inside: ‘Gabrielle Hoffmann was born in Yorkshire, England. She took a joint honours degree in art and French from the University of Salford, and received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. For several years she worked for the United Nations in Geneva.’ He rolled the brochure into a cylinder and stuffed it into his pocket.

Next to the bench, mounted on a pair of trestles, was one of her works: a 3D scanned image of a foetus composed of about twenty sections drawn on sheets of very clear glass. Leclerc bent to examine it. Its head was disproportionately large for its body, its spindly legs drawn up and tucked beneath it. Viewed from the side it had depth, but as one shifted one’s perspective to the front it seemed to dwindle, then vanish entirely. He could not make out whether it was finished or not. It had a certain power, he was forced to concede, but he couldn’t have lived with it himself. It looked too much like a fossilised reptile suspended in an aquarium. His wife would have thought it disgusting.

A door from the conservatory led out to the garden. It was locked and bolted; no key nearby that he could find. Beyond the thick glass, the lights of Geneva wavered across the lake. A solitary pair of headlights made its way along the Quai du Mont-Blanc.

Leclerc left the conservatory and returned to the passage. Two more doors led off it. One turned out to be a lavatory containing a big old-fashioned water closet, into which Leclerc took the opportunity to relieve himself, and the other a storage room filled with what appeared to be detritus from the Hoffmanns’ last house: rolls of carpet tied with twine, a bread-making machine, deckchairs, a croquet set, and, at the far end, in pristine condition, a baby’s cot, a changing table, and a clockwork mobile of stars and moons.