‘We couldn’t find any defensive wounds.’
‘I was drugged. I expect the blood test will reveal what with. I felt a pricking.’
‘Did the attacker shave your head before or after penetration?’
‘Do you mean before he rammed his dick into my cunt?’
‘Look, I understand how upset you must feel.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Okay, but I’m afraid I have to ask you these questions all the same. Did the attacker use a condom?’
‘Probably, if you say you didn’t find any sperm.’
‘Nor any major vaginal injuries. Do you frequently change sexual partners?’
‘I’m pregnant! Can we please change the subject?’
‘Fine. How did you get to the bus stop?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The bus stop at Wittenbergplatz. Where you were found.’
‘No idea. I must have lost consciousness at some point.’
‘So you don’t know for sure that you were raped?’
‘The madman shaved off my hair. My vagina’s burning as if it had been poked with a cattle prod. WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED TO ME?’
The question of all questions.
Emma recalled how Philipp had brought her home by taxi and laid her on the sofa.
‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ he’d said.
She’d nodded and asked him to fetch a tampon. A large one for heavy flow, right at the back of the bathroom cabinet. Emma had started bleeding in the taxi.
It was the first time they’d cried together.
And the last time they’d spoken about children.
The following day Emma lit a candle for the unborn child. It had long burned out.
Emma coughed into her cupped hand and tried to distract herself from these gloomy memories by letting her gaze wander across Konrad’s office.
The floor-to-ceiling shelves, which housed not only the leather-bound rulings of the Federal Supreme Court, but also Konrad’s favourite works of Schopenhauer, looked slightly lower, probably due to the new coats of paint which made the room appear smaller. And of course the massive desk was in the same place, in front of the almost square windows through which on a clear day you had a view across the Wannsee all the way to Spandau. Today she could see only as far as the promenade on the shore of the lake, along which a handful of pedestrians were struggling through the ankle-deep December snow.
All of a sudden Konrad was beside her bed and Emma felt him gently caress her arm.
‘Let me make you a little more comfortable,’ he said, stroking her head.
She smelled his spicy aftershave and closed her eyes. Even the idea of being touched by a man had triggered a feeling of revulsion in these last few months. But she allowed Konrad to put his arms around her body and carry her to from the bed to the sofa by the fireplace.
‘That’s better,’ he said, as she sank into the soft cushions, half sitting, half lying, and he covered her carefully with a cream cashmere blanket.
And he was right. It was better. She felt secure; everything here was familiar. The seating area opposite with the wingback chair to which Konrad returned. The glass coffee table between them. And of course the circular rug at her feet. Fluffy white threads in a black border that looked like a brushstroke thinning out in a clockwise direction. Seen from above the rug appeared to be a hurriedly drawn ‘O’. How Emma had loved lying on top of this ‘O’ in the past and staring into the gas fire as she daydreamed. How happy she’d felt when they ate sushi together. How safe and secure when they discussed relationship troubles, failures and self-doubt and he gave her the advice she wished all her life she’d had from her father.
Over the years the black threads of the rug had faded slightly and assumed a brownish hue.
Time destroys everything, Emma thought, feeling the warmth of the fire on her face, although the cosy feeling she’d always got when visiting Konrad remained absent.
No wonder – this wasn’t a visit, after all.
More of a meeting essential to her survival.
‘How’s Samson?’
‘Very well,’ Konrad said, and Emma believed him. He’d always had a way with animals. The dog was in the very best hands with him – while she was locked up.
Philipp had given her the snow-white husky with its black-grey mop of frizzy hair soon after that night in the hotel.
‘A sledge dog?’ she’d said in astonishment when he handed her the lead for the first time.
‘He’ll get you out of there,’ Philipp insisted, by which he meant the ‘miserable place’ she was stuck in.
Well, he’d been wrong, and as things looked Samson would have to do without his mistress for quite a while longer.
Maybe for ever.
‘Shall we begin?’ Emma asked, hoping that Konrad would say no, stand up and leave her alone.
Which of course he didn’t.
‘Yes, let’s,’ said the best listener in the world, as a reporter had once described the star lawyer in a newspaper portrait. It was, perhaps, his greatest strength.
There were people who could read between the lines. Konrad could hear between the sentences.
This ability had made him one of the few people Emma could open up to. He knew her past, her secrets and all about her exuberant imagination. She’d told him about Arthur and her psychotherapy, which she believed had liberated her from imaginary friends and other visions. Now she was anything but sure of this.
‘I don’t think I can, Konrad.’
‘You have to.’
Out of a decades-old habit, Emma felt for a strand of hair to twist around her fingers – but her hair was far too short for that.
It had been almost six months ago, but she still couldn’t get used to the idea that her long hair, once so splendid, had disappeared. Even though it had already grown back six centimetres.
Konrad gave her such a penetrating look that she had to avert her eyes.
‘I can’t help you otherwise, Emma. Not after everything that’s happened.’
Not after all the deaths. I know.
Emma sighed and closed her eyes. ‘Where should I begin?’
‘With the worst!’ she heard him say. ‘Take your mind back to where the memories cause the greatest pain.’
A tear fell from her eyes and she opened them again.
She stared out of the window and watched a man taking a mastiff for a walk along the promenade. From a distance it looked as if the large dog was opening its mouth to catch snowflakes on its tongue, but Emma couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she’d rather be out there, with the man holding the mastiff and the snow at their feet, which couldn’t be as cold as the core of her soul.
‘Okay,’ she said, even though there was nothing about what was to follow that would be okay. Nor would it probably ever be, even if she survived the day, which right now she was not counting on.
‘I just don’t know what good it will do. I mean you were there during the interrogation.’
At least during the second session. She’d made her first statement alone, but as the officer’s questions became more sceptical and Emma started to feel more like a suspect than a witness, she’d demanded her lawyer. Unlike Philipp, who’d had to drive through the night to get to her from where he was working in Bavaria, her best friend had been with her at the hospital at half past one.
‘You took me through my statement and you were there when I signed the policewoman’s protocol. You know what the Hairdresser did to me that night.’
The Hairdresser.
How the press had made him sound so harmless. Like calling a man who flayed women a scoundrel.
Konrad shook his head. ‘I’m not talking about the night in the hotel, Emma.’
She blinked nervously. She knew what he would say next and she prayed she was mistaken.
‘You know exactly why you’re here.’
‘No,’ Emma lied.
He wanted to talk about the package,
obviously. What else?
‘No,’ she repeated, less vigorously than before.
‘Emma, please. If I’m going to defend you, you have to tell me everything that happened on that day three weeks ago. At your house. Don’t leave anything out.’
Emma closed her eyes, hoping that the sofa cushions would swallow her up forever, as the leaves of a carnivorous plant devour a fly, but unfortunately it didn’t happen.
And because she probably had no other choice, she started to recount her story in a brittle voice.
The story of the package.
And how, with this package, the horror which had begun that night in the hotel knocked at the door of the little house with its wooden fence at the end of the cul-de-sac and found its way inside.
6
Three weeks earlier
The screw pierced Emma’s eardrum and threaded straight into her brain. She didn’t know who had switched on the acoustic drill that was puncturing her fear centre. Who it was ringing at her door so early in the morning and throwing her into a panic.
Emma had never regarded her house in Teufelssee-Allee as anything special, even if it was the only detached house in the neighbourhood, the rest of the Heerstrasse Estate consisting of charming 1920s semi-detached properties. And until Philipp turned it into a fortress over the past few weeks, for almost an entire century their small house had been unremarkable, save the fact that you could walk around it without setting a foot on somebody else’s land. Very much to the delight of the local children, who on warm summer days used to hold races across their garden. Through the open wooden gate, anticlockwise along the narrow gravel path past the vegetable patch, a sharp left around the veranda, left again beneath the study window and through the overgrown front garden back into the street, where the winner had to tap the old gas lantern and shout, ‘First’.
Used to.
In the time before.
Before the Hairdresser.
Now the wooden fence had been replaced by massive grey-green metal struts anchored into the ground and supposedly secure against wild boar, although wild boar were the last things Emma was afraid of.
Her good friend Sylvia thought she was utterly terrified of the man who’d done those dreadful things to her that night in the hotel. But she was wrong. Sure, Emma was afraid that the guy might come back and pick up where he’d left off.
But she was even more afraid of herself than of him.
As a psychiatrist Emma was well aware of the symptoms of severe paranoia. Ironically she’d done her PhD on this subject and it was one of her specialist areas, besides pseudology: pathological lying. She’d treated many patients who got lost in their delusions. She knew how their story ended.
And even worse: she knew how their story began.
Like mine.
The shrill ringing still in her ears, Emma crept to the front door together with Samson, who’d been wrenched from his sleep by the doorbell. It felt as if she’d never get there.
Emma’s heart was running a marathon. Her legs were virtually marking time.
A visitor? At this hour? Right now, when Philipp has left?
Samson pushed his nose into the back of her knees, as if encouraging her to go on and saying, ‘Come on, it’s not that hard.’
He wasn’t growling or baring his teeth, as he usually did when a stranger was at the door.
Which meant she probably wasn’t in danger.
Or was she?
Emma just wanted to burst into tears right here in the hallway. Crying – her favourite pastime at the moment. For the last 158 days, 12 hours and 14 minutes.
Since my new haircut.
She felt the hair above her forehead. Felt how much the strands had grown back. She’d already done that twenty times today. In the past hour.
Emma stepped up to the heavy oak door and opened the tiny curtain across the palm-sized pane of glass set into the wood at head height.
According to the land registry, Teufelssee-Allee was in the Westend district, but compared to the villas this posh areas was famous for, her little house looked more like a dog kennel with steps.
It was at the apex of the turning circle of a cobbled cul-de-sac, which was difficult for large cars to navigate and practically impossible for small lorries. From a distance the house blended in well with the neighbourhood, with its light, coarse render, the old-fashioned wooden windows, a clay-coloured tiled roof and the obligatory reddish-brown clinker steps leading up to the front door, through which she was spying.
Apart from the fence, the most recent modifications were not visible from outside: the glass-break sensors, the radio-controlled locking system, the motion detectors in the ceilings or the panic button in the wall connected to the emergency services, which Emma had her hand on right now.
Better safe than sorry.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and a miserable day – the grey, impenetrable cloud seemed almost close enough to touch – but it wasn’t raining (it was probably too cold), nor was it snowing as it had done almost uninterruptedly for the past few days, so Emma could clearly make out the man at the gate.
From afar he looked like a Turkish rocker: dark skin, clean-shaven head, ZZ Top beard and silver, coin-sized metal rings that filled the earlobes of his 120-kilo hulk like alloy wheels would a tyre. The man wore blue-and-yellow gloves, but Emma knew that each finger inside them was tattooed with a different letter.
It’s not him! Thank God! she thought, a massive weight falling from her soul. Samson stood beside her, his ears pricked in anticipation. She gave him the sign to make room.
Emma pressed the button to open the gate and waited.
Sandwiched between Teufelsberg in the north, several sports grounds and schools in the west, the AVUS Circuit in the south and the S-Bahn and federal railway tracks in the east, the Heerstrasse Estate was home to around 150 mainly middle-class families. A rural community in the middle of the metropolis, with all the advantages and disadvantages of living in a village, such as the fact that everybody knew everybody else by name and what they were up to.
Even the delivery man.
7
‘Hello, Salim.’
‘Good morning, Frau Doktor.’
Emma had waited for the delivery man to climb the few steps before opening the door a crack, as far as the metal bolt inside would allow.
Sitting beside her, Samson started wagging his tail, as he always did when he heard the delivery man’s voice.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting so long, I was upstairs,’ Emma apologised with a frog in her throat.
She wasn’t used to speaking any more.
‘No problem, no problem.’
Salim Yüzgec put the delivery on the top step under the porch, kicked some snow from his heels and smiled as he fished the obligatory treat from his trouser pocket. As he did every time, he checked that Emma didn’t mind and, as every time, she gave Samson the sign to grab the dog biscuit.
‘How are you today, Frau Doktor?’ he asked.
Fine. I’ve just swallowed ten milligrams of Cipralex and spent from nine o’clock till half past ten breathing into a bag. Thanks for asking.
‘Getting a little better by the day,’ she lied and felt that her attempt to return his smile was a desperate strain.
Salim was a sympathetic chap, who occasionally brought over a pot of vegetable soup his wife had made. ‘So you don’t lose any more weight.’ But his concern for the psychiatrist was based on false assumptions.
To stop the neighbourhood from gossiping wildly about why the Frau Doktor no longer stepped outside the house, spent the whole day in her dressing gown and was neglecting her practice, Philipp had told the woman who owned the kiosk that Emma had suffered severe food poisoning, which had attacked her vital organs and almost killed her.
Frau Kolowski was the biggest gossip on the estate and by the time the message had reached Salim’s ears, the poisoning had escalated into cancer. But it was better for people to think that Emma had l
ost her hair through chemotherapy than for them to chinwag about the truth. About her and the Hairdresser.
Why should strangers believe her if her husband didn’t? Of course, Philipp tried as hard as he could to hide his doubts. But he’d done his own investigation and found practically nothing that supported her version of the events.
In everyday Chinese, Japanese and Korean the number four has a similarity to the word ‘death’, which is why it’s considered unlucky in some circles. In the areas where Cantonese is spoken, the number fourteen even means ‘certain death’, which is why the Le Zen owners, who were from Guangdong, not only did away with the corresponding room numbers, but the fourth and fourteenth floors too.
Not even the suspicion that Emma had mistaken her room number was of much help. From her description of the view the only possibilities were rooms 1903 and 1905. Both had been booked for the entire week by a single mother from Australia with three children, who were having a holiday in Berlin. In neither room was there any sign of forceful entry or a physical assault. And neither room had a portrait of Ai Weiwei, which wasn’t a surprise as there wasn’t a picture of the Chinese artist anywhere in the hotel. This was another reason why the investigating team didn’t accord Emma’s ‘case’ a particularly high priority.
And why she increasingly doubted her sanity.
How could she blame Philipp for being sceptical, given such an unbelievable story? A rape in a hotel room that didn’t officially exist and which she’d searched thoroughly just before the alleged attack had taken place?
Emma also claimed she’d been abused by a serial killer notorious for shaving the heads of his victims. But all of these so far had been prostitutes and none had lived to tell the tale. For that was another of the Hairdresser’s trademarks: he killed female escorts who he’d ambushed in their rooms.
I’m the only one he let live. Why?
It was no surprise that the police were reluctant to attribute her case to the Hairdresser. Amongst Philipp’s colleagues she was seen as a self-mutilating madwoman who invented horror stories. But at least she wasn’t being hassled by the press.
Only by the delivery man.
The Package Page 4