“The companion’s name is Gary Lawton. He is English. This is why he was chosen for Kerry. I do not know what he told Hayley He may have told her nothing. He may tell you nothing.”

“Hayley hasn’t been back here, though, has she?” Harding asked.

“She has not.”

“So, it looks like she got something out of him.”

Ulbricht pursed his lips. “I… cannot say.”

“Don’t worry, Heinz.” Tozer grinned at him. “We’ll ask the man who can say. And we’ll make sure we get an answer.”

Gary Lawton lived with his German wife, Helga, and their three children in a brand-new little semidetached house of glaring white render, pale brick and orangey terracotta roof tiles deep in newly colonized residential land on the eastern fringe of the city. Harding and Tozer’s arrival at their door excited the children-and the dog-but elicited from Gary and Helga only brittle smiles.

“The Horstelmann Clinic sent you, did they?” Gary asked glumly.

“Yeah,” Tozer replied. “Any chance we could have a word about Hayley Foxton?”

“I suppose. Who did you say you were?”

“Barney Tozer. Tim Harding.”

“Tozer? Don’t I remember that name… in connection with Kerry’s accident?”

“I was the other diver.”

“Ah. You were, were you?”

Helga said something to Gary in German that sounded anxious and reproachful. He smiled grimly and nodded.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, gents.”

“I’m a friend of Hayley’s, Mr. Lawton,” said Harding. “You should know she broke into Barney’s home last Wednesday night and threatened his wife with a knife.”

Gary grimaced. “Oh hell.”

Helga contributed another four pfennigs’ worth. Gary’s response sounded soothing but uncertain. It caused Helga to throw up her hands and stalk away, shooing the children and the dog ahead of her.

“You’d better come in,” said Gary with a frown of resignation.

He led them through to a square, bare-walled lounge dominated by an enormous flat-screen television. The furniture was of the unstructured bean-baggish variety. Patio doors looked out onto a small, immature garden. There were several toys and a large rubber bone lying on the pocket-handkerchief lawn.

“Want a drink?” Lawton asked, taking a swig from a bottle of Löwenbräu standing on the coffee-table. He was lean and round-shouldered, thirty-five or so, with spiky hair and a pasty, small-featured face. There were lots of smile lines round his eyes and mouth and he looked, in his low-slung jeans and sweatshirt, every inch the suburban family man. But his expression was downcast, his glance wary. He was not merely suspicious of his visitors, but anxious about what their journey to his home signified.

Harding and Tozer both declined the offered drink. A fragile silence formed in the room. The cries of the children seeped through from elsewhere in the house. Lawton puffed out his cheeks and took another swig from the bottle.

“When did she come here?” Harding asked.

“She didn’t. She phoned. I went into the city centre to meet her. In a beer-hall.”

“When was that?”

“Early Friday evening.”

“After she’d been to the Horstelmann Clinic?”

“Yeah. Hanckel put her onto me.”

“Because you were Kerry’s… companion.”

“Sounds like you know it all.”

“We don’t know what you told her.”

“No. Well, maybe that’s between me and her.”

“If she pulls any more stunts like last Wednesday and you turn out to have helped her cover her tracks,” growled Tozer, “it won’t look too clever for you.”

“Worried she might have a go at you, are you?”

“Should I be?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re trying to help her, Gary” said Harding. “And she does need help. I’m sure you realize that.”

“I don’t know where she is. She didn’t say where she was staying. She may have left Munich by now for all I know.”

“Just let us in on your chat in the pub,” said Tozer. “We’ll settle for that.”

“We talked about Kerry. That’s it.”

“Come on, Gary” said Harding. “We need to know.”

Lawton cast a sidelong glance behind him into the garden, then sat down in one of the shapeless chairs. Harding and Tozer took up cramped occupation of the sagging sofa opposite him. There was another silence. Gary appeared to be locked in some fierce debate with himself, the darting of his eyes signalling the trading of points. Then, quite suddenly, it was over. He heaved a sigh. “It really was all about Kerry.”

“What about her?” Harding prompted.

Lawton carefully replaced the bottle on the table and rubbed his forehead. “The Begleiter Programm sounds like a cushy number when you sign up for it. Good money, which I needed at the time. Helga and I had just got together and I didn’t have a regular job. The two oldest kids aren’t mine, you see. Anyway, it seemed an easy way to earn some dosh. The clinic’s an OK place to be if you don’t mind the… hermetic atmosphere. And working as a companion? Well, it’s a doddle. So you think when you start, anyway. Sit by the bedsides of these wordless, motionless people and read to them or talk to them or hold their hand or just… just sit. The undead. That’s what they are. The gone but not quite departed. Oh, a few of them come back. Part of the way, but never the whole way, if you know what I mean. Must be like being shut up in prison for a couple of decades. The world you return to isn’t exactly the one you left. Everything’s slightly but crucially… off.”

“The job got to you, did it?” asked Tozer, with the hint of a sneer.

“Yeah.” Lawton glared at him. “Big time. You spend long enough with someone like Kerry young, beautiful, talented, full of… spirit… and, yeah, it gets to you all right. You read up on her background. You speak to her family and friends. Well, those who show up, I mean. You read her favourite books and listen to her favourite music. You talk to her. About this and that, something and nothing, her, you. You sit with her. A few hours, every few days. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t so much as open her eyes. She doesn’t respond in any way at all. But still, little by little, you get to know her. Or you imagine you do. You wonder what it would be like, what she’d be like, really like, if one day… she sat up in that bed and said, ‘Hello, Gary’”

“But she never did,” put in Harding.

“No. That’s right. She never did. They switched her off. I stood there when they did it. I watched her die. I went to her funeral too. Which is more than any of those many friends I’m sure she had bothered to do.”

“Maybe they didn’t know about it.”

“Maybe. But Barney here knew. Didn’t you?” Lawton’s look defied Tozer to deny it. “According to Hayley you paid for Kerry’s treatment. And then you stopped paying.”

“I did it… for her parents’ sake.” Tozer shifted uneasily on the sofa. “When they were killed, there was no point going on. I checked with Dr. Hanckel. There wasn’t a hope in hell she’d ever recover.”

“No. But then there never was, was there? Luckily for you.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Well, you must’ve wondered what she’d say-about you-if she ever woke up. I mean, as I understand it, we only have your word for what happened to Kerry during that dive.”

“Now just a-”

Tozer was halfway out of the sofa when Harding grabbed his elbow. “Sit down, Barney,” he urged. “We’re just talking, OK?”

“I’ve had seven years of people who know absolutely bloody nothing insinuating that I murdered Kerry.”

“I know.”

Tozer stared across at Lawton as he slowly sat back down. “I was careless. But so was Kerry. Which no one ever mentions. It was an accident. They happen. But she’s always the victim. And I’m always the villain.”

“What was Hayley’s… state of mind… when you met her, Gary?” Harding asked, endeavouring to steer the conversation into smoother waters.