The Fear Index

scrawny windpipe, choking off the sound. He was leaning in to him now; he was able to put the whole weight of his body behind that grip, and his fear and his anger, pinning Karp to the side of the bed. He smelled the animal leather of the German’s coat and the cloying rank odour of his sweat; he could feel the unshaved stubble on the neck. All sense of time was gone, swept away in the rush of adrenalin, but it seemed to Hoffmann only a few seconds later that the fingers gradually ceased scrabbling at his hand and the knife clattered to the carpet. The body went slack beneath him, and when he withdrew his hands it toppled sideways.
    He became aware of someone pounding on the wall and of a male voice calling out in thickly-accented French, demanding to know what the hell was going on. He heaved himself up and closed the door and as an extra protection dragged the wooden chair over and wedged it at an angle under the handle. The movement set off an immediate clamour of pain in various battered outposts of his body – his head, his knuckles, his fingers, the base of his ribcage especially, even his toes where he had kicked the man’s head. He dabbed his fingers to his scalp and they came away sticky with blood. At some point in the struggle his wound must have partially opened up. His hands were a mass of tiny scratches, as though he had fought his way out of an undergrowth of thorns. He sucked his grazed knuckles, registering the salty, metallic taste of blood. The hammering on the wall had stopped.
    He was trembling now; he felt sick again. He went into the bathroom and retched into the toilet bowl. The basin was hanging away from the wall but the taps still worked. He splashed his cheeks with cold water and went back into the bedroom.
    The German lay on the floor. He had not moved. His open eyes gazed past Hoffmann’s shoulder, with an oddly hopeful expression, seemingly searching for a guest at a party who would never arrive. Hoffmann knelt and checked his wrist for a pulse. He slapped his face. He shook him as if that might reanimate him. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t need this.’ The head lolled like a bird’s on the stem of a broken neck.
    There was a brisk knock on the door. A man called out, ‘ Ça va? Qu’est-ce qui se passe? ’ It was the same heavily accented voice that had shouted through the wall from next door. The handle was tried several times and then the knocking resumed. The demand this time was louder and more urgent: ‘ Allez! Laissez-moi rentrer! ’
    Hoffmann levered himself painfully up on to his feet. The handle rattled again and whoever was outside began shoving against the door. The chair moved fractionally but held. The pushing stopped. Hoffmann waited for a renewed assault, but nothing happened. He crept quietly to the spyhole and looked out. The corridor was empty.
    And now the animal fear was inside him again, calm and cunning, controlling his impulses and limbs, making him do things that even an hour later he would look back on in disbelief. He grabbed the dead man’s boots and quickly unthreaded the laces, yanking them out and knotting them into a single length a metre long. He seized hold of the wall light but the fixing was too flimsy. The shower curtain rail came away in his hand in a spurt of pink plaster. In the end he settled on the handle of the bathroom door. He dragged the German’s body over and propped him up against it. He made a noose out of the end of the laces, slipped the ligature around Karp’s neck, looped the line over the handle and yanked. It took some effort, hauling on the cord with one hand and hoisting the corpse under its armpit with the other, but finally he managed to raise it sufficiently to make the scene look at least half-plausible. He looped the line around the handle again and knotted it.
    Once he had stuffed the German’s possessions back into the rucksack and straightened the bed, the bedroom looked oddly untouched by what had happened. He slipped Karp’s mobile into his pocket, closed the laptop and carried it over to the window. He parted the net curtain. The window opened easily, obviously often used. On the fire escape, amid the encrusted swirls of pigeon shit, were a hundred sodden cigarette butts, a score of beer cans. He clambered out on to the ironwork, reached around the window frame and pressed the switch. The shutter descended behind him.
    It was a long way down, six floors, and with every clanging step of his