Robert Harris: The Fear Index

Celik shrugged. ‘That is your right. But first you must sign a form.’

After he had signed the little chit – ‘I declare that I am leaving the University Hospital contrary to medical advice, despite being informed of the risks, and that I assume full responsibility’ – Hoffmann picked up his bag of clothes and followed Celik to a small shower cubicle. Celik switched on the light. As he turned away the Turk muttered, barely audibly, ‘Asshole’ – or at any rate that was what Hoffmann thought he said, but the door closed before he could respond.

It was the first time he had been alone since he recovered consciousness, and for a moment he revelled in his solitude. He took off his dressing gown and pyjamas. There was a mirror on the opposite wall and he paused to examine his naked reflection under the merciless neon strip: his skin sallow, his stomach slack, his breasts slightly more visible than they used to be, like a pubescent girl’s. Some of his chest hair was grey. A long black bruise extended across his left hip. He twisted sideways to examine himself, ran his fingers along the grazed and darkened skin, then briefly cupped his penis. There was no reaction, and he wondered: could a blow on the head render one impotent? Glancing down, his feet seemed to him unnaturally splayed and veined on the cold tile floor. This is old age, he thought with a shock, this is the future: I look like that portrait by Lucian Freud Gabrielle wanted me to buy. He bent to pick up the bag and for a moment the room went fuzzy and he swayed slightly. He sat down on the white plastic chair with his head between his knees.

After he had recovered, he dressed slowly and deliberately – boxer shorts, T-shirt, socks, jeans, a plain white long-sleeved shirt, a sports jacket – and with each item he felt a little stronger, a degree less vulnerable. Gabrielle had put his wallet inside his jacket pocket. He checked the contents. He had three thousand Swiss francs in new notes. He sat down and pulled on a pair of desert boots, and when he stood and looked at himself in the mirror again, he felt satisfactorily camouflaged. His clothes said nothing at all about him, which was the way he liked it. A hedge fund manager with ten billion dollars in assets under management could these days pass for the guy who delivered his parcels. In this respect if no other, money – big money, confident money, money that had no need to show off – had become democratic.

There was a knock on the door, and he heard the radiologist, Dr Dufort, calling his name. ‘Monsieur Hoffmann? Monsieur Hoffmann, are you all right?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ he called back, ‘much better.’

‘I am going off duty now. I have something for you.’ He opened the door. She had put on a raincoat and rubber boots and was carrying an umbrella. ‘Here. These are your CAT scan results.’ She thrust a CD in a clear plastic case into his hands. ‘If you want my advice, you should take them to your own doctor as soon as possible.’

‘I will, of course, thank you.’

‘Will you?’ She gave him a sceptical look. ‘You know, you should. If there is something wrong, it won’t go away. Better to face one’s fears at once rather than let them fester.’

‘So you think there is something wrong?’ He detested the sound of his own voice – tremulous, pathetic.

‘I don’t know, monsieur. You need an MRI scan to determine that.’

‘What might it be, do you think?’ Hoffmann hesitated. ‘A tumour?’

‘No, I don’t think that.’

‘What, then?’

He searched her eyes for a clue but saw there only boredom; she must have to deliver bad news a lot, he realised.

She said, ‘It probably isn’t anything at all. But I suppose other explanations might include – I am only speculating, you understand? – MS perhaps, or possibly dementia. Best to be prepared.’ She patted his hand. ‘See your doctor, monsieur. Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.’

Some in the secretive inner counsels of the super-rich occasionally wondered aloud why Hoffmann had made Quarry an equal shareholder in Hoffmann Investment Technologies: it was, after all, the physicist’s algorithms that generated the profits; it was his name above the shop. But it suited Hoffmann’s temperament to have someone else, more outgoing, to hide behind. Besides, he knew there would have been no company without his partner. It was not just that Quarry had the experience and interest in banking that he lacked; he also had something else that Hoffmann could never possess no matter how hard he tried: a talent for dealing with people.

This was partly charm, of course. But it was more than that. It was a capacity for bending human beings to a larger purpose. If there had been another war, Quarry would have made a perfect ADC to a field marshal – a position that had, in fact, been held in the British Army by both his great- and great-great-grandfathers – ensuring that orders were carried out, soothing hurt feelings, firing subordinates with such tact they came away believing it was their idea to leave, requisitioning the best local chateaux for temporary staff headquarters and, at the end of a sixteen-hour day, bringing together jealous rivals over a dinner for which he himself would have selected the most appropriate wines. He had a first in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, an ex-wife and three children safely stowed in a gloomy Lutyens mansion in a drizzled fold of Surrey, and a ski chalet in Chamonix where he went in winter with whoever happened to be his girlfriend that weekend: an interchangeable sequence of clever, beautiful, undernourished females who were always discarded before there was any sign of gynaecologists or lawyers. Gabrielle couldn’t stand him.

Nevertheless, the crisis made them temporary allies. While Hoffmann was having his wound stitched up, Quarry fetched a cup of sweet milky coffee for her from the machine along the corridor. He sat with her in the tiny waiting room, with its hard wooden chairs and its galaxy of plastic stars gleaming from the ceiling. He held her hand and squeezed it at appropriate moments. He listened to her account of what had happened. When she recited Hoffmann’s subsequent oddities of behaviour, he reassured her that all would be well: ‘Let’s face it, Gabs, he’s never been exactly normal, has he, even at the best of times? We’ll get this sorted out, don’t worry. Just give me ten minutes.’

He called his assistant and told her he would need a chauffeured car at the hospital immediately. He woke the company’s security consultant, Maurice Genoud, and brusquely ordered him to attend an emergency meeting at the office within the hour, and to send someone over to the Hoffmanns’ house. Finally he managed to get himself put through to Inspector Leclerc and persuaded him to agree that Dr Hoffmann would not be required to attend police headquarters to make a statement immediately he left hospital: Leclerc accepted that he had already taken sufficiently detailed notes to form a continuous narrative, which Hoffmann could amend where necessary and sign later in the day.

Throughout all this, Gabrielle watched Quarry with reluctant admiration. He was so much the opposite of Alex – good-looking and he knew it. His affected southern English manners also got on her Presbyterian northern nerves. Sometimes she wondered if he might be gay, and all his thoroughbred girls more for show than action.