Robert Harris - The Fear Index

Hoffmann’s hand shook as he pressed the buzzer. Did he have the strength to go through it all again? The first time he hadn’t known what to expect; now he would be deprived of the vital armour of ignorance.

A young man’s voice said, ‘Good afternoon.’

Hoffmann gave his name. ‘I used to be a patient of Dr Polidori. My secretary was supposed to make an appointment for tomorrow.’

‘I’m afraid Dr Polidori spends every Friday seeing her patients at the hospital.’

‘Tomorrow is too late. I need to see her now.’

‘You can’t see her without an appointment.’

‘Tell her it’s me. Say it’s urgent.’

‘What name was it again?’

‘Hoffmann.’

‘Wait, please.’

The entryphone went dead. Hoffmann glanced up at the camera and instinctively raised his hand to cover his head from view. His wound was no longer tacky with blood but powdery: when he inspected his fingertips, they were covered with what looked like fine particles of rust.

‘Come in, please.’ There was a brief buzz as the door was unlocked – so brief that Hoffmann missed it and had to try a second time. Inside it was more comfortable than it used to be – a sofa and two easy chairs, a rug in soothing pastel, rubber plants, and behind the head of the receptionist a large photograph of a woodland glade with shafts of light falling from between the trees. Next to it was her certificate to practise: Dr Jeanne Polidori, with a master’s degree in psychiatry and psychotherapy from the University of Geneva. Another camera scanned the room. The young man at the desk scrutinised him carefully. ‘Go on up. It’s the door straight ahead.’

‘Yes,’ said Hoffmann. ‘I remember.’

The familiar creak of the stairs was enough to unleash a flood of old sensations. Sometimes he had found it almost impossible to drag himself to the top; on the worst days he had felt like a man without oxygen trying to climb Everest. Depression wasn’t the word for it; burial was more accurate – entombment in a thick, cold concrete chamber, beyond the reach of light or sound. Now he was sure he could not endure it again. He would rather kill himself.

She was in her consulting room, sitting at her computer, and stood as he came in. She was the same age as Hoffmann and must have been good-looking when she was younger, but she had a narrow gully that ran from just below her left ear down her cheek all the way to her throat. The loss of muscle and tissue had given her a lopsided look, as if she had suffered a stroke. Usually she wore a scarf; today not. In his artless way he had asked her about it once: ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ She told him she had been attacked by a patient who had been instructed by God to kill her. The man had now fully recovered. But she had kept a pepper spray in her desk ever since: she had opened the drawer and showed it to Hoffmann – a black can with a nozzle.

She wasted no time on a greeting. ‘Dr Hoffmann, I’m sorry, but I told your assistant on the phone I can’t treat you without a referral from the hospital.’

‘I don’t want you to treat me.’ He opened the laptop. ‘I just want you to look at something. Can you do that at least?’

‘It depends what it is.’ She scrutinised him more closely. ‘What happened to your head?’

‘We had an intruder in our house. He hit me from behind.’

‘Have you been treated?’

Hoffmann bent his head forward and showed her his stitches.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Last night. This morning.’

‘You went to the University Hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they give you a CAT scan?’

He nodded. ‘They found some white spots. They could have come from the hit I took, or it could have been something else – pre-existing.’

‘Dr Hoffmann,’ she said more gently, ‘it sounds to me as though you are asking me to treat you.’

‘No, I’m not.’ He set the laptop down in front of her. ‘I just want your opinion about this.’

She looked at him dubiously then reached for her glasses. She still kept them on a chain around her neck, he noticed. She put them on and peered at the screen. As she scrolled through the document, he watched her expression. The ugliness of the scar somehow emphasised the beauty of the rest of her face – he remembered that as well. The day he recognised it was the day in his own opinion that he started to recover.

‘Well,’ she said with a shrug, ‘this is a conversation between two men, obviously, one who fantasises about killing and the other who dreams of dying and what the experience of death would be like. It’s stilted, awkward: I would guess an internet chat room, a website – something like that. The one who wants to kill isn’t very fluent in English; the would-be victim is.’ She glanced at him over her glasses. ‘I don’t see what I’m telling you that you couldn’t have worked out for yourself.’

‘Is this sort of thing common?’

‘Absolutely, and every day more so. It’s one of the darker aspects of the web we now have to cope with. The internet brings together people who in earlier years thankfully would not have had the opportunity to meet – who might not even have known they had these dangerous predilections – and the results can be catastrophic. I have been consulted by the police about it several times. There are websites that encourage suicide pacts, especially among young people. There are paedophile websites, of course. Cannibal websites…’

Hoffmann sat down and put his head in his hands. He said, ‘The man who fantasises about death – that’s me, isn’t it?’

‘Well, you would know, Dr Hoffmann, better than I. Do you not remember writing this?’

‘No, I don’t. And yet there are thoughts there I recognise as mine – dreams I had when I was ill. I seem to have done other things lately I can’t remember.’ He looked at her. ‘Could I have some problem in my brain that’s causing this, do you think? That makes me do things, out-of-character things, that I have no memory of afterwards?’

‘It’s possible.’ She put the laptop to one side and turned to her own computer screen. She typed something and clicked on a mouse several times. ‘I see you terminated your treatment with me in November 2001 without any explanation. Why was that?’

‘I was cured.’

‘Don’t you think that was for me to decide, rather than you?’

‘No, I don’t actually. I’m not a kid. I know when I’m well. I’ve been fine now for years. I got married. I started a company. Everything has been fine. Until this started.’

‘You might feel fine, but I’m afraid major depressive disorders like the one you had can recur.’ She scrolled down his case notes, shaking her head. ‘I see it’s eight and a half years since your last consultation. You’ll have to remind me what it was that triggered your illness in the first place.’

Hoffmann had kept it quarantined in his mind for so long, it was an effort to recall it. ‘I had some serious difficulties in my research at CERN. There was an internal inquiry, which was very stressful. In the end they closed down the project I was working on.’

‘What was the project?’

‘Machine reasoning – artificial intelligence.’

‘And have you been under a lot of similar stress recently?’

‘Some,’ he admitted.

‘What sort of depressive symptoms have you had?’

‘None. That’s what’s so weird.’

‘Lethargy? Insomnia?’

‘No.’

‘Impotence?’

He thought of Gabrielle. He wondered where she was. He said quietly, ‘No.’

‘What about the suicidal fantasies you used to have? They were very vivid, very detailed – any recurrence there?’

‘No.’

‘This man who attacked you – am I to take it he is the other participant in the conversation on the internet?’