Bright, glowing. Light.
From the ceiling it shone far too brightly and mercilessly onto the bed and everything else.
Including me.
Emma closed her eyes, not in that sort of childish reflex hoping nobody could see her just because she couldn’t see anything herself, but because she’d been mistaken.
The thing next to the window wasn’t a valet stand, but another wig stand. And it wasn’t as bare as the one in the hall downstairs; this polystyrene head wore a long, blonde, lustreless woman’s wig.
What the hell have I done? What sort of place have I entered?
Caught between two attackers and a pervert?
Hearing a pair of boots enter the room she still didn’t dare open her eyes… and then her mobile rang.
Shit.
A loud, piercing ring. Like the alarm.
Shit, shit, shit!
Sweat was oozing from her pores as if the room had been turned up to sauna temperature.
She knew the game was up. That she wouldn’t have time to grab the phone from her pocket, take the call and scream for help. She tried anyway.
Too late.
She held the telephone and stared at a dark display, cursing the caller who’d only let it ring twice to give her away. Then she heard the man with the bull terrier bass give a filthy laugh.
She opened her eyes, in the certainty that she’d be staring at her own death, but nobody was there.
The laughing grew quieter, moved away from the bedroom and down the landing, along with the sounds that the second man’s boots made on the floorboards.
It was only when the two of them were back downstairs that Emma realised it wasn’t her phone that had rung, but the bull terrier’s.
It had the same standard ringtone as her own. The man had been called by someone who’d made him laugh and had evidently said something to make them abandon their search.
‘Get outta there, we’ve found Palandt.’
or
‘Forget the neighbour, there’s something else for you to do.’
or
‘Hi, it’s me, Anton Palandt. They also call me the Hairdresser. I know we’d arranged for you to come here, but could we meet somewhere else? Right at this moment I’ve got problems with a dying tart.’
Whatever the message, Emma felt as if the caller had saved her life.
For now.
She got to her feet, gripped onto the chest of drawers, and wondered whether to grab one of the pillboxes that, as she could see now in the harsh light of the overhead lamp, all had Cyrillic writing on them. But there was no time to translate her decision into action.
Right in front of her the cushions jerked.
The quilt arched, bulging in some places like a pregnant woman’s belly where the unborn baby kicks.
Then an arm emerged from beneath the exposed duvet and a bald, skinny man sat up.
23
His torso was bare and bony; he looked like a prisoner on the verge of starvation.
His eyes were wide open, swimming in a pool of tears. He didn’t blink once.
Not when he turned his head to Emma.
Nor when he fixed his stare on her.
Not even when she let out a high-pitched scream and tore from the room. Along the landing, down the stairs to the front door where initially she thought she’d run slap into the two men. But it was just the wig stand, which she knocked to the ground, falling over herself in the process. She got up again at once and rushed into the street, without a thought for the neighbours or anyone else who might be watching. Emma slipped several times on the icy cobbles, but not so badly as to fall a second time.
Emma ran and ran and ran… Startled by the crunching gravel her feet was spraying up. By the panting of her own lungs.
She pressed her hand to where the stitch hurt most and kept running until she finally came to her house. The only detached building in the area, which Philipp had made as secure as a bank, with electronic locks she needed a transponder to open. This was a round, coin-like chip you had to hold beneath the lock before it beeped twice and now Emma pulled it from her pocket as she went up the steps.
She almost dropped it when she noticed that the LED light on the lock was green. And then Emma saw a dim glow coming through the curtain behind the small pane of glass in the door.
No. That’s impossible, Emma screamed silently.
That has to be impossible!
Someone had switched off the alarm system, opened the door and turned the light on inside.
And it wasn’t Philipp, because his car wasn’t there.
24
‘Where are you going?’
Emma, who’d made a sharp about-turn and was searching in vain for her mobile to call the police, was infinitely relieved to hear her best friend’s voice behind her.
She turned back to the door, which was now open. ‘Christ, Sylvia. You gave me a fright.’
Instead of an apology or at least a normal greeting, Sylvia just left her standing on the step and went back into the house without a word.
Emma followed her, now overcome with sheer exhaustion. Samson, stealing into Palandt’s house, the intruders, the way back when she’d overexerted herself – all this had taken Emma to her limits. She could happily do without another problem, which her friend’s strange behaviour suggested was on the cards.
Emma closed the door.
Her fingers trembling, she hung her coat on the rack, took off her snow-drenched boots and went into the living room. With the sudden change in temperature blood shot to her cheeks.
‘Are you alright?’
Sylvia shook her head angrily. Her dark hair, which was usually pinned up, hung limply on her shoulders.
Normally when she came to visit Sylvia would make herself comfortable with her legs up on the sofa. She’d ask Emma for a macchiato before chatting about the most trivial things that had happened over the past week. Today she was wearing a mouse-grey tracksuit instead of the habitual designer clothes, and she sat as stiff as a statue on the edge of the sofa, her gaze fixed on the glowing embers in the fire.
‘No, I’m not. Nothing’s alright,’ Sylvia said, as if to explain her unusual outfit and strange behaviour.
Sylvia Bergmann was not only her best friend, but the tallest too. Even amongst her widest circle of acquaintances, there was no woman on a par with her, and not just metaphorically speaking. The fact that she wore size forty-two shoes said a lot, as did the fact that she might have become a professional basketball player if her conservative parents hadn’t insisted on a proper career, although as far as study was concerned they’d been thinking more on the lines of medicine rather than physiotherapy. The patients in Sylvia’s practice on the Weinberg loved her because of her huge, magical hands that, as if equipped with a sonar, first felt for tension and blockages, then made them vanish by pressing energy and reflex points known to her alone. Today, however, Sylvia looked as if she could do with one of her own treatments. Everything about her appeared cramped and tense.
‘Sit down,’ she demanded gruffly, as if this were her house and Emma a summoned guest.
Emma was fighting a wave of tiredness that was causing her to sway now that she was back within her own four walls. The house didn’t feel as safe as it had this morning, partly because Sylvia had opened the door to her.
‘Sylvie, I hate to say it, but you know that I gave you the key only for emergencies?’
‘Sit down!’ Sylvia repeated in a cold voice. ‘This is an emergency.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Emma asked, deciding to stay standing. Despite her wobbly knees she thought it was important to keep her distance. If necessary she could hold onto the mantelpiece above the fire.
‘What’s wrong, you ask?’ Sylvia achieved the impossible and managed to sound even less friendly. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she blurted out.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘This!’
Her friend took a white pillbox with a red cap f
rom the pocket of her tracksuit top.
‘You know what this is?’ she asked.
Emma nodded. ‘Looks like the progesterone I gave you.’
A drug that increases the chances of pregnancy. The medicine stimulates circulation in the uterus. Women who’ve been unable to have children are encouraged to take this before conception and also afterwards to prevent them from miscarrying. Emma had it prescribed by her gynaecologist after the first ultrasound scan and gave the opened packet to her friend.
After the bleeding, after the night in the hotel, she’d had no further use for it.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Sylvia said again, putting the pillbox onto the coffee table.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Do you not want me to have any children?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Do you want me to suffer the same fate as you?’
‘What on earth has got into you?’ Emma raised both hands, opened and closed her fingers and kneaded the air like invisible dough, feeling helpless, with no idea how to respond to this unbelievably hurtful accusation. ‘Why should I think that?’ she asked, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I love you, Sylvia. I wouldn’t wish a night with the Hairdresser on my worst enemy.’
Sylvia looked at her in silence for a while, then nodded scornfully, as if she’d been expecting a lie like that. ‘Over the last few weeks I’ve been suffering permanent sickness, headaches and tiredness,’ she said flatly.
Welcome to the club.
‘I was delighted to begin with, because I thought it had finally worked. But the tests remained negative and I got my period. So I went to the doctor and he asked me if I was taking any medicines. Only Utrogestan, I said, which he approved of. Yes, that can help.’
As Sylvia’s eyes wandered across Emma’s face they felt like acupuncture needles. Her best friend opened her mouth and Emma took an involuntary step backwards, as if Sylvia were a growling dog baring its teeth.
‘That’s assuming that the packet your dear friend gives you is progesterone. And not Levenor-something,’ Sylvia said in a voice that was too quiet for such an outrageous accusation.
‘Levonorgestrel?’ Emma became hot. She started sweating for the first time that day. ‘That’s impossible,’ she spluttered. She wobbled over to the mantelpiece and felt even hotter.
‘What were you thinking?’ Sylvia asked. ‘When the bleeding got heavier, Peter took a look at the pills. His ex-wife had taken them too, you see, and he said hers looked very different.’
Peter!
Sylvia’s boyfriend with no surname. Or at least Emma didn’t know his surname, which might have been because she barely listened to her best friend when she talked about him. Sylvia had only met him in the time afterwards, when Emma didn’t mind listening to anything apart from relationship stories. She hadn’t even wanted to see a photo of him. All she knew about Peter was that he was supposedly ‘the one’, the dream man she wanted to have children with.
‘So I took the pills to a pharmacist and he analysed them.’
Her best friend started to weep. In tears, she grabbed the packet from the table and flung it in Emma’s direction, missing her head by miles and crashing into shelves behind her. As it hit the ground the box opened and the pills rolled across the parquet floor like tiny marbles. ‘You swapped them,’ Sylvia screamed. ‘You gave me the morning-after pill, you crazed bitch!’
25
From a slight distance Emma stared at the packet that looked exactly like the one she’d given Sylvia a good three months ago.
The morning-after pill?
‘There’s got to be a logical explanation,’ Emma said, without having the slightest clue what it might be.
‘Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’re going to try to come up with one of your stories?’
‘Sylvia, you know me.’
‘Do I?’
I don’t know. I don’t even know if I know myself.
Emma scratched her forearm nervously. Suddenly she felt her whole body itching. ‘If what you’re saying is right, then someone else must have swapped the pills.’
‘Oh yes, an ominous somebody. Like the somebody who supposedly raped you.’
Ouch!
Now it was out in the open. Supposedly.
A single word. That was all it needed to toss their friendship into the bin and put the lid on.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ Sylvia croaked. She looked as if she’d just awoken from a bad dream. With a different, slightly softer expression, she put her hand to her mouth in regret.
‘But you said it,’ Emma said impassively.
‘I know. But just put yourself in my situation. What am I to think?’
‘The truth.’
‘But what is the truth, Emma?’
The brief pause for breath was over. Sylvia now talked herself into a rage again, and every word brought her closer to the fury of a few moments before.
‘A hotel room that doesn’t exist? A witness who can’t be found? For Christ’s sake, Emma, you don’t even fit the profile. The Hairdresser kills whores. You’re the most faithful wife I know. And you’re alive.’
‘I was shaved and raped. There was a man in my room…’
‘Yeah, like Arthur in your cupboard…’
Ouch again!
The dustbin where their friendship was festering was ready to go to the tip.
‘What are… you… you…?’ Emma felt so hurt she couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes and was in danger of getting lost in a maelstrom of memories.
Letters on a mirror flashed in her mind.
GET OUT.
She heard her father’s voice.
GET OUT RIGHT NOW. OR I’LL HURT YOU.
Heard the vibrating blades.
BZZZZ.
Heard a door slamming. So hard that the whole living room shook.
‘That night I didn’t just lose consciousness and my hair, but my baby too,’ Emma screamed with her eyes closed, striking her stomach in anger. Once, twice. Until the pain was so intense that she sank to her knees.
She retched, gasped and was on the verge of throwing up.
‘Help me,’ she said, the words coming from her lips as if spontaneously. ‘Help me. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’
She opened her eyes, put her arms out and groped for her friend.
But there was nobody there to help her any more.
Sylvia had already gone.
26
Emma dragged herself coughing to the sofa.
Her throat burned from the retching and her stomach felt inflamed as a result of the blows. She thought of Samson, who was in a far worse state, but who was hopefully in good hands and being treated.
With pills.
You swapped them! You crazed bitch…
Sylvia had gone, but her voice lingered in Emma’s head where it continued to level accusations that Emma couldn’t make head nor tail of.
She’d never even taken the morning-after pill, let alone built up a supply she could have passed on. As a doctor she felt she had a duty to life. She’d never intentionally give her best friend the wrong medicine. Not Emma, who’d revived the Rosenhan Experiment as a protest against the abuse of patients.
And yet, although Sylvia’s accusations were terrible and her suspicion had hurt Emma deeply, their argument was nothing compared to what she’d experienced in Palandt’s house.
Emma hauled herself to her feet again.
She had to call Philipp.
He would of course take her to task as soon as he heard about her solo effort. But in the end he’d have to admit she was right: Anton Palandt was a very strange neighbour, who they ought to keep an eye on.
She shuffled to the coat rack.
‘Hello, Philipp? Can you please tell the investigators they should check out the resident of Teufelssee-Allee 16a? A bald man who swallows mountains of pills, lives in a gloomy house, is obviously being threatened by someone and – just listen to th
is – stuffs his house with wig stands. There’s even a woman’s hair in the bedroom – don’t ask how I discovered that.’
This, or something along those lines, was what she wanted to tell him on the phone, but she couldn’t, as she realised to her horror when she felt her coat pocket. Because her mobile had disappeared.
No! No, no, no…
In distress, Emma let her hands fall to her sides.
‘Disappeared’ was the wrong word for what had happened to her mobile.
I’ve lost it, she thought, then cursed out loud when it dawned on her that there was only one likely place where it could have fallen out of her pocket.
At A. Palandt’s house.
When I tripped over the wig stand on my way out.
27
Emma felt as if she were being buffeted by a cold draught, a psychosomatic stress reaction. One part of her brain told her she had to go back to fetch her mobile; the other asked if she was seriously so insane as to want to return to the lion’s den.
She froze and took her thick, sky-blue towelling dressing gown from the cupboard in the hall. It smelled of the perfume that she’d fished out again only yesterday, in the hope that the scent Philipp had bought her on the first day of their honeymoon in Barcelona would remind her of the happiest days of the time before. At that moment, however, all the mixture of cassis, amber and lotus did was to confirm Emma in her belief that she’d irretrievably lost the happiness of the past.
With sluggish steps she dragged herself to the kitchen, where she took the cordless house telephone from its charging station beside the coffee machine.
Her back leaning against the vibrating fridge, she looked out into the garden and keyed in Philipp’s number.
Please pick up. Please pick up…
A crow landed in the middle of the garden on the splintered trunk of a headless birch tree, which had been hit by lightning years before, and which they ought to have removed ages ago. Outside it was already getting dark and the lights of the neighbouring houses were shimmering cosily between the trees like small sulphur lamps.
In the time before, she would have poured herself a cup of tea at this hour, lit a candle and put on some classical music, but now the only soundtrack accompanying her depressive mood was the endlessly ringing telephone.
The Package Page 11