What now?
Unsure, she looked at the post by her feet, which Salim had delivered. The narrow, white packet of contact lenses could stay in the hallway for the time being, as could her medicines and the slightly larger box with the gloves. The food had to be put into the fridge, but at the moment Emma felt too weak to drag the crate into the kitchen.
I can’t be afraid and carry stuff at the same time.
At her ankles, Samson shook himself and Emma wished she could do the same, simply shake her entire body and cast off everything that was currently bearing down on her.
‘You would have barked, wouldn’t you?’ she asked him. Samson pricked up his ears and put his head to one side.
Of course he would have.
Samson was so attached to his mistress that he growled whenever a stranger approached the house. Never in his life would he allow an intruder to enter.
Or would he?
Although she was paralysed by the thought that she couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure she was alone in the house, she could hardly call Philipp and ask him to come back for no reason at all.
Or was there a reason?
She had an idea.
‘Don’t move!’ she ordered Samson, and opened the fitted cupboard by the front door, which housed the small white box that controlled the alarm system. The digits on the control panel lit up as soon as her hand moved close.
1 – 3 – 0 – 1
The date they met. At Sylvia’s birthday party.
The alarm was programmed to call Emma’s mobile at the sign of a break-in. If she wasn’t available or didn’t give the correct code word (Rosenhan), a police patrol would be dispatched immediately.
Emma pressed a pictogram showing an empty house, thereby activating all motion detectors. With a second button (G) she switched the ground-floor sensors back off.
‘Now we can move around,’ she said. ‘But we’re staying downstairs, do you hear me?’ If anyone entered unauthorised, she’d hear as soon as they moved upstairs or in the basement.
It was highly unlikely that anyone was hiding on the ground floor. There were no curtains in the living room, no large cupboards, chests or other hiding places. The sofa was right up against the wall, which itself had no nooks and crannies.
But better to be safe than sorry.
Emma took her mobile from the pocket of her dressing gown, opened her list of favourites and pressed her thumb on Philipp’s name, so she could contact him in an emergency. She was about to go back into the living room with Samson, but had to turn around again because she was no longer certain if she’d turned the key twice.
Once she’d had another check and again resisted the impulse to look in the mirror, she followed Samson who’d already pattered noisily back to his sleeping blanket beside the fire.
I really ought to get his claws cut, she thought, but not out of concern for the parquet, which was tatty anyway and urgently needed a good polish as soon as she could cope with people in the house again.
In another life, perhaps.
She was ashamed that he got so little exercise. This morning a mere quarter of an hour, when Philipp had taken him once around the block before leaving for the conference. Emma herself always let him out on his own in the garden, where he did his business like a good dog at the rhododendron beside the tool shed, while she waited behind the locked door for him to come back.
The fact that the dog was behaving so peacefully was a sure sign that they were alone, at least here downstairs. A mere fly would get Samson worked up and he’d start wagging his tail excitedly. He was so fixated on Emma that even in Philipp’s presence he never relaxed completely. She was never far from Samson, which meant that her husband automatically assumed the role of a guest who was watched affectionately, but without a break.
Emma sat at the desk, its drawer still open. She managed to stuff back in the flyer that had triggered her memory, without looking at the razor advertisement again. Then she decided to break from her usual routine and take a closer look at the package before embarking on her ‘work’.
Taking it in both hands she turned it around. It couldn’t weigh more than three bars of chocolate, perhaps less, which probably made it a parcel, although Emma wasn’t an expert in these matters. As far as she was concerned, anything in a solid container and larger than a shoebox was a package.
She shook it beside her head as a barman might a cocktail mixer, but she couldn’t hear anything. No ticking, no humming, nothing that suggested an electrical item or (God forbid) a creature. All she could feel was that something light was moving inside. Sliding back and forth. It didn’t seem particularly fragile, although she couldn’t say this with any certainty.
Emma even gave the package a sniff, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. No pungent, acrid smell of some caustic chemical or maybe a poison. Nothing that pointed to anything dangerous inside.
Apart from the fact that Emma found its mere existence threatening, it appeared to be a perfectly normal package, of the sort that is delivered in Germany every day by the tens of thousands.
You could get that packing paper in any stationer’s or at the post office, if you could still find one open. In the time before, Emma remembered, they were closing at an alarming rate.
The string tied around the package looked exactly like the stuff she used to make things out of as a child: grey, coarse strands.
Emma studied the sticker on the front, which gave A. Palandt as the addressee, but oddly the box for the sender’s details was empty. No company or private address.
It must have been dispatched via an automated Packstation, the only way of sending packages anonymously, something Emma had discovered this last Christmas when wanting to send her mother a package without her immediately realising who it was from. All the same Emma had entered an invented name (Father Christmas, 24 Santa Street, North Pole). On this package, however, the address box was completely empty, which nearly unnerved her more than the fact that she didn’t know of a neighbour by the name of Palandt.
She put the package aside again, almost in disgust, pushing it well away from her to the far end of the desk.
‘Do you really not want to keep me company?’ Emma said, turning back to Samson. In all her hours of loneliness she’d become used to talking to him as if he were a small child carefully watching whatever she did during the day. Today, however, he seemed peculiarly sleepy, having snuggled up so peacefully next to the fire rather than at her feet beneath the desk.
‘Oh well,’ Emma sighed when he continued to make no reaction. ‘The main thing is you don’t snitch on me. You know I promised Philipp I wouldn’t.’
But today of all days she couldn’t help herself. No matter how angry he’d get if he found out.
She simply had to do it.
Feeling as if she were betraying her husband, she flipped open her laptop and began her ‘work’.
11
There was only one photo of her with Philipp that Emma didn’t hate, and that had been taken by a two-year-old thief.
Around five years ago, on the way to an exhibition of a photographer friend of theirs, they’d taken refuge from a downpour in a tourist trap on Hackescher Markt – a ‘potato restaurant’ with long benches lined up along a sort of trestle table, which they had to share with a good dozen other fugitives from the weather.
Obliged by the waiting staff to order more than just drinks, they opted for potato cakes with apple sauce. It is unlikely that this unspectacular late-April afternoon would have branded itself on her memory if Emma hadn’t found these strange photos on her mobile the next day.
The first four were completely dark. The fifth showed the edge of a table, as did the six that followed, plus the individual responsible for these blurred pictures, starting with just the thumb and ending with the entire person: a blonde girl with sticking-up hair, a semolina-smeared mouth and the sort of diabolic smile that only small children are capable of. She must have stolen the phone w
ithout them noticing.
Seven photographs taken without a flash showed bits of Philipp and Emma. On one of them they were even smiling, but the nicest picture was the one in which time seemed to have fled into another room: Emma and Philipp standing side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes while both their forks had spiked the same piece of potato cake. It was as if the image were from a film in which the sound – restaurant guests yelling over one another, children bawling and the noisy clatter of cutlery – breaks off abruptly and the freeze frame is accompanied by a romantic piano melody.
Emma had no idea that she and her husband still exchanged such loving glances, and the fact that this photo had been taken unawares, free from any suspicion that it might have been staged, made it all the more prized in her eyes. For Philipp too, who loved the picture, he thought there was something ‘James Dean’ about his gangly poise, whatever he meant by that.
Earlier, in the time before, Emma looked at the photograph every day at five o’clock, when Philipp called her to say if he’d be back for dinner or not, because she’d selected the image as the contact photo for his number. She kept a copy of the picture in the inner pocket of her favourite handbag, and for a while it had even been the screensaver on her notebook, until a system update inexplicably wiped it from the computer.
Just like my self-confidence, my zest for life. My life.
Sometimes Emma wondered whether the Hairdresser had also given her a system reboot that night in the hotel and restored her emotional hard drive to its factory settings. And clearly she was a dud: defective goods that unfortunately couldn’t be exchanged.
Emma clicked the Outlook icon on the taskbar, the standard screensaver vanished and now she could focus on her unpleasant, but necessary daily task.
Her daily ‘work’ consisted of trawling the internet for the latest reports about the Hairdresser. Philipp had expressly forbidden her to do this after the papers had got hold of the criminal profile he’d drawn up thanks to an indiscretion by the public prosecution department. They’d slugged it out for days. Philipp was worried that the sensational tabloid reports would unsettle Emma even more, and so she had to proceed with caution.
Secretly, like an adulteress.
She surfed in private mode via a search engine that didn’t save browser history. And the folder where she chronologically stored all the reports and information about the case was labelled ‘Diet’ and password protected.
Currently the internet was awash with another flood of speculation because the Hairdresser had struck again the previous week. Again in a five-star Berlin hotel, this time on Potsdamer Platz, and once more a prostitute had been poisoned with an overdose of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Residues of it had been identified in Emma’s blood test too, but the investigating officers didn’t see this as conclusive proof. She was a psychiatrist, which meant that it was easy for her to get hold of this product, which in small doses was a stimulant and often used as a party drug. Even easier than shaving her hair off.
The tabloid articles gave more details about the sexual preferences of Natascha W. (22) than the person who’d lost her life in agonising pain. A study of readers’ comments in internet forums gave the impression that the majority pinned at least some of the blame on the women, for who offered themselves to total strangers for money?
It didn’t occur to most of the commentators that the victims were sentient beings. The Russian woman who’d knocked at Emma’s hotel door that night had more empathy than all of them put together.
It was just bad luck that the investigation team hadn’t been able to find her. But hardly a surprise. What female escort would give their real name to reception or say which room they were booked in? In luxury hotels such ‘girls’ were unavoidable but invisible guests.
Crack.
A log fell from its burning pile in the fireplace, and whereas Samson’s nose didn’t even twitch, Emma jumped in fright.
She glanced out of the window, staring at the fir she decorated as a Christmas tree every year. Its branches were weighed down by the snow.
The sight of nature was one of the few things that calmed her. Emma loved her garden. To be able to get back outside and tend to it was a major impetus to ridding herself of this ridiculous nuisance in her head. At some point she was certain she’d find the strength to go into therapy and let an expert check her self-medication.
At some point, just not today.
In her inbox Emma found what was obviously a spam email threatening to block her bank cards, as well as several news alerts for the keyword ‘hairdresser’, including an article in Bild and one in the Berliner Zeitung, which she opened first. When she established that it didn’t say anything new, she copied it as a PDF in the ‘Hairdresser_THREE_Investigations_NATASCHA’ folder.
In truth she’d taken the place the Hairdresser had earmarked for Emma. Natascha was already number four.
I’m just the woman who doesn’t count.
For each victim Emma had subfolders for ‘Private life’, ‘Professional life’ and ‘Own theories’, but those dedicated to the official investigations were obviously the most important.
Here there was also the Spiegel article about Philipp’s initial profile, which characterised the killer as a psychopathic narcissist. Affluent, cultured and with a high level of education. So in love with himself that he was incapable of forming a firm relationship. Because he believed himself to be perfect, he blamed women for his loneliness. Women who gave men the come-on, but who only wanted one thing from them: money. It was their fault that such a handsome chap like himself couldn’t control his urges. He regarded the act of shaving as a service he was performing for the world of men by making the women ugly.
It was possible that there were other victims, like Emma, who’d ‘only’ had their hair shorn off after the rape. Maybe he didn’t necessarily want to kill his victims, only if he still found them attractive when they were bald.
This idea had led Philipp to the suggestion that the Hairdresser might have worn a night-vision device during his attacks to assess the end results. A supposition that Emma had put in the ‘Theories’ folder, along with the one that the attacker could be repulsed by the sight of blood. But he’d cut Emma while shaving her head. In hospital they’d treated the wound on her forehead and washed away the encrusted blood. This had possibly been the reason for her survival, for the wound and the blood might have disfigured her in such a way that the Hairdresser considered his deed complete.
Philipp was not officially on the case because of his personal involvement, although ‘involvement’ was a polite euphemism for ‘crazed wife with madcap violent fantasies’.
Unofficially, of course, Philipp was tapping all his sources to keep abreast of the investigations. Emma was convinced he wasn’t telling her everything he knew, otherwise she wouldn’t have gasped when she opened the Bild home page.
Jesus Christ!
Emma slapped a hand over her mouth and blinked.
The headline above the photograph consisted of only three words, but these filled two thirds of her monitor:
IS THIS HIM?
The green-tinged colour photo had been taken by a camera in the ceiling of a lift.
From the back right-hand corner a man in a grey hoodie was visible. His face was three quarters covered and the rest could have belonged to pretty much any white adult male wearing jeans and sneakers.
What unnerved Emma wasn’t the sight of the slim, average-height man about to step into the lobby of the hotel where victim number two had lost her life.
But what the man was holding as he left the lift.
‘Here you can see a man who wasn’t registered as a guest leaving the hotel on the night that Lariana F. died,’ the article said. As it was not certain that this man was the killer, they had refrained earlier from publishing the photograph for reasons of data protection. Now, however, they were doing it given the lack of alternatives.
The usual telephone numbers were listed for info
rmation relevant to the case, as well as a direct link to the police.
God almighty! Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or is that…?
Emma looked on the desk for a paper bag she could breathe into. When she couldn’t find a bag she considered going into the kitchen to fetch one, but then decided to enlarge the photo first.
Zoom into the hands that were still wearing latex gloves.
Into the fingers.
Into the object they were gripping.
‘The authorities are working on the assumption that this is the Hairdresser making off with his trophies,’ the lurid text continued.
Her hair? In a package.
Emma looked up. Her eyes wandered across the desk, then back to the picture.
A small package wrapped in plain brown paper.
Roughly like the one in front of her. The anonymous package that Salim had given Emma for her neighbour.
A. Palandt.
Whose name she’d never heard before.
Emma felt a small bead of sweat drip from the back of her neck and trickle down her spine, then she heard Samson growl before the alarm sounded in the attic.
12
What was that?
Once the fear had coursed into her limbs, Emma forced herself not to panic but to find out what was going on.
The noise was too quiet and too distant for the shrill din that the motion detector would have set off. Captured by the infra-red sensors, a single movement would trigger a deafening interval alarm throughout the entire house. Not just on one of the upper floors.
Besides, the sound was too rich, almost melodic.
The Package Page 6