The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

floor, licking at the hairs and the weave of the carpet, he was completely oblivious to Jack’s words. It was the brutal blow to his ribs that brought him halfway to his senses.

“He takes the dog’s nose to heart.”

It was Baschi’s voice.

“And this is what we do with dogs,” Baschi added, as he aimed another boot into Frank’s side. “We don’t let dogs into this house, do we Jack?”

Frank could not hear Jack’s reply. Or even tell if he said anything at all. He only felt Baschi grab the collar of his shirt and jacket, then let himself be dragged across the floor. He heard the door open and felt the pain of Baschi’s boot again in his side.

“Out!” Baschi screamed, pushing Frank out onto the landing and giving him one final kick down the stairs before he shut the door behind him.

Frank lay at the bottom of the stairs and listened for some time to the faint sound of raised voices mingled with fits of laughter from the room above. Picking himself up, he rearranged his shirt and jacket, opened the door to the cobbled street and staggered out into the night air.

Out into the familiar street with its familiar worn-out look. He knew instantly where it would lead him. Knew that it was only a short walk from here over the cobbles that he had trodden so often in the past. The place where it all began. In the Hotel Storchen.

Chapter 3

It was just after lunchtime on Sunday when Ellen got the call. She was sitting on the sofa in their Fulham bedsit with the Sunday paper, playing with the tresses of her strawberry-blonde hair and smiling to herself as she thought of Frank stealing a lock of it before he left.

The phone was shared with the other tenants. It hung on the wall outside the bedsit. She ran out onto the landing as soon as it started to ring – certain that it must be Frank. And when she picked up the receiver, she fully expected to hear his voice at the other end. But what startled her was not the strange, high-pitched woman’s voice in place of Frank’s. It was the words.

“Your husband’s had an accident,” the woman said. She was calling from the Fleet Street office that had sent Frank to Switzerland. Ellen’s heart missed a beat. She felt quite faint and sat back in the stool beside the phone.

“An accident? What happened? What sort of accident?” Ellen asked. By now her heart was racing and she began to gasp for breath.

The woman on the other end did not know the exact details. She had been given to understand that it was nothing life-threatening and that Frank was in good hands, but they wanted to keep him in for observation. The newspaper, she added, would be prepared to fly Ellen out to see her husband.

It was twenty-four hours later – around lunchtime on Monday – that Ellen touched down on Swiss soil. Everything had moved so quickly since the phone call the day before that she felt almost in a daze as she pushed her passport under the glass screen to the immigration officer on the other side of the desk. She was engulfed by a brief sense of panic at the thought that her dazed demeanour must make her look so suspicious that she expected to be called to one side. Ellen reached into her bag for a handkerchief – as if the hint of a cold might explain any oddness of behaviour.

It was not necessary. Once through immigration and customs, Ellen was met by an elegant, middle-aged lady in a black trench coat – she carried a board in front of her that read: Mrs Ellen Goss. At the sight of her name, Ellen instantly felt her entire body relax. It seemed in her fragile state of mind to be a sign she was among people she could trust.

“Good afternoon, Mrs Goss. I hope you had a good journey,” said the lady in the trench coat, as she lowered the board and offered Ellen her hand. “Frey. Maria Frey,” she added. “I’m Professor Abegg’s secretary.”

Ellen shook her hand.

“Thank you,” she said, before mumbling – almost as an afterthought – “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Ellen’s new acquaintance gave her a slightly inquisitive look.

“If you follow me, I’ll take you to the clinic.”

Ellen followed her companion out of the building and across the road to a row of cars. She was slightly taken aback when the elegant Maria Frey in the black trench coat opened the back of a red Austin Healey, took Ellen’s suitcase and placed it inside, before opening the door on the passenger’s side.

“Please,” she said.

Ellen duly ducked down and manoeuvred herself into the bucket seat of the Austin Healey. She was still trying to reconcile the picture of this rather serious, yet elegant middle-aged woman with her flashy choice of car, when they turned off the airport road just a few minutes later and directly into the grounds of what she assumed to be the clinic. A complex of pavilion-style buildings interspersed with trees in a park that lent the scene a slightly desolate feel in their denuded winter state. But as she climbed out of the car, Ellen could well imagine the tranquillity of the setting in a couple of months’ time when the trees in the park sprang back into life.

The car had stopped outside the tallest of the buildings in the park – a large grey two-storey edifice from the nineteenth century that put Ellen more in mind of a railway station with its huge arched windows towering above the main entrance. As Maria Frey led her up the stairs to the entrance and in through the door, it was the words on the plaque beside the door that jumped out at Ellen: Psychiatrische Klinik.

“I was told my husband had an accident,” she said as she tried to keep up with her escort, who led her up to