Martin ended the call without saying goodbye to Diesel. As he hurried behind Elena he tried to reach Bonhoeffer again.

68

Lisa was sweating.

A fresh breeze was blowing in from the open balcony door, but her daughter looked as if she were standing in a spotlight. Her body was reacting to the flame of insanity simmering deep inside her. A fine trickle of sweat ran down her cheek and collected above the collar of her T-shirt.

‘I’ve tried to get Tom back,’ she told her mother. ‘I’ve called him, emailed him, bombarded him via Facebook and WhatsApp. I turned up to one of his consultation hours after he dumped me overnight. I even got him back into bed once.’

Lisa’s wistful smile at the end unsettled Julia as much as what she’d said.

‘Are you talking about the time when I… had a relationship with Tom?’

Her daughter’s smile gave way to a stony face. ‘But it didn’t mean anything to Tom any more. He said the sex was better with me, but he could only imagine having a relationship with you.’

Jesus Christ! Julia closed her eyes for a while.

Lisa’s faked suicide. Her resurrection. The hatred in her voice.

She wasn’t sure how much more she was capable of taking. Julia looked at her daughter’s hand gripping the screwdriver tightly, observed the reflection of the slowly setting sun on the silver metal and asked Lisa softly, ‘What are you going to do now, darling?’

‘Get Tom back.’

Lisa virtually spat these words at her bare feet. If it hadn’t occurred to her earlier, now Julia was having doubts about who she was talking to.

The girl before her, with that haunted look and those quivering lips, was no longer her daughter. In all senses of the word Lisa was disconnected.

Julia had once read that, besides grief, lovesickness could inflict the worst emotional wounds. Evidently including those that didn’t heal on their own.

‘Lisa, if someone’s to blame for your heartache, it’s Tom. He should never…’

‘Blah, blah, blah… Don’t talk crap. So now you want to pin it on him, do you?’

Julia just wanted to shout ‘Yes!’ and – had that fucker been here – grab him by the balls and throw him overboard. But as Tom Schiwy was as far away as a clear thought was from Lisa’s mind, she just shook her head. ‘No, it’s not just his fault,’ she said to placate her.

She was no psychologist, but she knew that something inside her daughter had broken that could not be stuck back together with logic.

‘So you admit that you deserved my plan?’ Lisa asked triumphantly.

‘What plan?’

‘The one I worked out with Querky.’ A dark cloud veiled Lisa’s expression. It looked as if she’d just been visited by a nasty thought.

‘Did you steal the envelope from the safe?’ she asked with menace.