She was expecting to hear it go to voicemail when there was a click on the line and she heard a cough.
‘Yes? Hello?’
Emma moved away from the fridge, but the vibrations in her back remained. They got stronger when she realised who had answered her husband’s mobile.
‘Jorgo?’
‘Everything alright?’ the policeman whispered.
‘Yes. Where’s Philipp?’
‘He’s… hold on a sec.’ She heard a rustling, then footsteps and finally something like a door closing. Jorgo spoke louder now; his voice sounded strangely distorted, as if he were standing in an empty room.
‘He can’t talk right now.’
‘I see.’
‘He’s just giving his lecture. I’ve had his mobile all this time.’
Was that an excuse?
Emma pressed the receiver closer to her ear, but couldn’t detect any background noises that might either confirm or refute Jorgo’s claims.
‘And you don’t want to listen to your best friend talk?’
‘I left the room especially because of you. Is there a problem?’
Yes. My life.
‘How much longer will it go on?’ she asked.
‘A while yet. Listen, if it’s about his visit to Le Zen again…’
An icebox opened in Emma’s stomach.
‘How do you know about that?’ she gasped.
The explanation was as simple as it was embarrassing. ‘Philipp had his phone on speaker in the car when he listened to his messages earlier.’
She blinked nervously.
Shit.
She’d completely forgotten her first call. And Jorgo had heard everything.
‘Four weeks ago Philipp was at the hotel in a professional capacity. I know, because I accompanied him. We got them to show us all the rooms on the nineteenth floor again. What else could he have said when he suddenly found himself face to face with that vet? Hello, I’m waiting for the hotel manager? We want to find the room where my wife was raped.’
Emma gave an involuntary nod.
The icebox in her stomach closed again.
‘Haven’t you listened to your voicemail?’ Jorgo asked after a slight pause.
‘Sorry?’
‘Philipp called you back a number of times. But you didn’t answer your mobile or landline.’
Because I broke into Palandt’s house, where I lost my phone, Emma almost said.
What a fuck-up.
As soon as her neighbour found it in his hallway it was just a matter of time until he discovered who’d made their way into his house.
He also saw me in his bedroom!
Emma froze at the memory of those wide, unblinking eyes.
‘Could you please tell Philipp that I’m contactable again. He should call me on the landline. And thanks for your note.’
It grew louder in the background, as if Jorgo had put the phone on speaker.
‘Which note?’ he asked.
‘You know, the one you put in my hand earlier. Thanks for believing me.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘What?’
Emma felt woozy, as if she’d been running too quickly. She sat at the desk and stared out into the garden, looking for a fixed point that at least her eyes could latch onto, even if her mind had become derailed.
She saw the splintered birch again.
The crow had gone.
‘But you… you gave…’
The note!
Emma hastily felt in her trouser pockets, but couldn’t find it. She tried to concentrate, but couldn’t remember where she’d put Jorgo’s note. Far too much had happened in the meantime; maybe she’d lost it at the vet’s, on the way to Palandt’s or even in his house with her mobile.
‘I didn’t give you any note,’ she heard Jorgo say, his voice suddenly sounding strangely irritable.
‘YOU’RE LYING!’ she was about to yell, but then noticed an object on the desk, so large that it would have been impossible to miss. Like the proverbial wood you fail to see for the trees. Emma shuddered.
‘Is there anything else?’ she heard Jorgo ask as if from a great distance.
Emma couldn’t prevent her shudder from intensifying into a shake.
‘No,’ she croaked and hung up, even though what she really wanted to scream was, ‘YES. THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING DREADFUL!’
She was shaking so badly now that she dropped the cordless phone. This extreme reaction had nothing to do with Palandt’s eyes or her escape from his house.
But with the package.
The item that Salim had given her this morning for her mysterious neighbour.
It was there again.
On the desk.
In the very place she’d put it earlier.
As if it had never been anywhere else.
28
Just as an alcoholic knows what they’re doing when they lift the glass for their first sip, so Emma knew what she was doing when she untied the string around the package. She was embarking on the most dangerous leg of her self-destructive journey, deep into the slums of her pointless existence.
One of the first things she had learned in her psychiatry lectures was the meaning of the word ‘paranoia’, which comes from the Greek and is best translated as ‘contrary to all reason’. Which was exactly how she was behaving at the moment: contrary to all reason. She was even committing a crime, although violating the law on the privacy of correspondence was the least of her worries. She was far more afraid of herself. What if everyone else was right? The police psychologist who’d claimed Emma had invented the rape to get attention. Jorgo who’d sworn he’d never given her a note.
But the package had turned up again.
Emma was sure that it contained the key to solving all the puzzling events of the last few hours, if not weeks.
But how many people had she met with a completely distorted sense of reality? How many patients had she treated, lost souls who did nothing all day long apart from mentally twisting their observations and experiences until eventually they could serve as proof for the most malicious conspiracy and persecution theories? Had she changed sides? Was she now doing the same?
Emma knew that you could see things differently. That although she’d discovered a number of ‘discrepancies’ in the past few hours, she hadn’t found an ounce of proof to suggest that this package was connected with what had been done to her. Even so, she cut her thumb on the edge of the paper as she tore it open.
She yanked the flaps apart, virtually breaking the package open, and with her right hand burrowed amongst the polystyrene balls that protected the contents during transit. Emma excavated boxes about the size of tablet packets with foreign writing on the top:
MOPФEЙ N60 TAБЛ.
There were at least ten packets, white cardboard with a sky-blue stripe, and Emma opened one of them.
Medicines after all.
Tear-sized, ochre pills in a transparent strip.
But what sort?
Emma had learned English and Latin at school, but no Russian. She picked up the open box again.
МОРФИЙ N60 TAБЛ.
Some of the writing was a reference to the dosage of the pills, she could work that out, but not the brand name or what it contained.
Emma found an instruction leaflet, squashed rather unprofessionally into the box. She unfolded it and the Cyrillic characters reminded her of the medicines on Palandt’s bedside table. She rummaged further in the polystyrene balls and came across something that curiously didn’t cause her to scream, even though she found herself holding a deadly weapon.
A plastic-handled scalpel.
Emma only gasped when she undid the already torn cellophane wrapping to expose a coloured blade.
Is that blood?
Struck by the surreal feeling that someone behind Emma was stretching out their hand towards her, she turned around, but nobody was there. Not even Samson, who s
he wished was here right now.
She pushed the knife aside in disgust and kept searching through the package.
Emma found a brown bottle, its label without a logo or anything printed on it, just some handwriting:
ГАММА-ГИДРОКСИМАСЛАЯНЯ КИСЛОТА
Emma rubbed her eyes and had to force herself not to close them for more than a moment. She felt like a car driver trying to avoid a microsleep.
I ought to pull over and take a break. Good idea.
She longed for her sofa (oh yes, just a little lie down, wouldn’t that be lovely?), but that was out of the question. What if Palandt comes to pick up his package?
Emma picked up the scalpel with the smeared blade and put it in her dressing gown pocket.
Despite the weapon she felt totally defenceless, for quite apart from the fact that she was hardly in a fit state to handle a blade should it come to that, the scalpel would be useless against the most terrifying of all enemies.
The demons corroding my mind.
What if she had a rest and the package had disappeared again once she’d slept off the diazepam?
Emma toyed with the idea of taking photographic proof of the medicine packets scattered across her table, but with what?
Her mobile was at A. Palandt’s house, where the brutal foreign visitors sounded as if they’d be able to read these hieroglyphics that Emma couldn’t decipher… Hang on…
She looked at her laptop.
… the computer can!
She opened her notebook, went to the country settings and put a tick next to ‘Russia’.
That was quick.
It took her considerably longer to find the right characters on her keyboard. She could only proceed using trial and error, so it was some time before she’d managed to type МОРФИЙ N60 TAБЛ and ГАММА-ГИДРОКСИМАСЛАЯНЯ КИСЛОТА into Google Translate.
When she saw the results in the right-hand box she wished she’d never done it:
Morphine & gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.
Every child knew the first of these, every doctor the second.
GHB. A liquid anaesthetic that in higher doses made patients not only limp and defenceless, but also impaired their memory. Sadly the drug had gained notoriety in the press as the ‘date-rape drug’ after numerous rapists had secretly mixed it into their victims’ drinks.
Emma panted, gasping for air.
The package contained the drug that the Hairdresser had used on all his victims.
There was a shimmer before her eyes, as if she were staring at the hot tarmac of a road in high summer.
She’d reached the point where this solo effort at research had to stop. Strictly speaking, she’d crossed that point some time ago. Terribly lonely, utterly shattered and with an almost painful feebleness, Emma stood up from the desk, dragged herself over to the sofa and sank exhausted into the cushions.
She thought about the package and its contents, which she’d hoped would dispel her morbid suspicions, only to achieve the opposite.
She thought about A. Palandt who, threatened by thugs, wept silently in the darkness of his bedroom, and about Philipp, who’d left her on her own with her inner emptiness and who she couldn’t get in touch with now.
Not because her mobile phone was lying next to Palandt’s wig stand in the hallway, because she had her landline. Nor because she was afraid of his anger when he found out that she’d already committed three crimes today: trespass, violation of correspondence privacy and wilful damage to a package.
No, there was a very simple reason why Emma couldn’t phone her husband – her eyes were closing.
The last thing she saw of her surroundings was a shadow moving a few metres to her right at the door to the living room. A shadow that seemed to be in the form of a dark, male figure. Although Emma was deeply troubled by the apparition, it couldn’t keep her awake. With every step he came closer, Emma slid further from consciousness. Even the shuffling sound of his boots couldn’t stop her from drifting into a dreamless sleep.
29
Three weeks later
When Emma opened her eyes she had difficulty getting her bearings. She knew where she was (in Konrad’s office), who she was (a paranoid patient in the dock) and why she was here (to make an important statement – much was at stake). But she didn’t have a clue where the last few minutes had disappeared. The hand of the clock on the shelf had advanced a quarter of an hour and the Assam tea in her cup, which Konrad had just poured, was no longer steaming in spite of the fact that she’d only blinked.
‘What happened?’ she asked Konrad with a yawn.
‘You fell asleep,’ he said. His legs were no longer crossed, but that was the only change in his otherwise flawless poise. He sat as straight as a die in his seat, without looking the least bit tense. Emma knew that he’d been a passionate advocate of autogenic training for years and he’d perfected the mindset for keeping calm.
‘I fell asleep? During our conversation?’ she asked in disbelief, massaging her tensed neck.
‘In the middle of a sentence,’ he asserted. ‘The medication is making you tired and it’s also very hot here. I’ve turned down the fire.’
What a pity.
Emma looked at the glass panel in the wall, behind which the gas flames were lapping with less vigour, and couldn’t help yawning again.
Raising his eyebrows, Konrad asked gently, ‘Maybe we should stop there today, Emma.’
‘Do I have to go back?’
She swallowed. The very thought of her ‘cell’ produced a lump in her throat.
‘I’m afraid so, but I guarantee that they won’t sedate you tonight.’
Wow, what progress!
‘I think I’d like to stay for bit longer.’
‘Okay, but…’
‘No, it’s fine. Tiredness isn’t an illness, is it? I’ve still got some strength left, so we should make use of the time. It does me good to tell you everything.’
‘Everything?’ Konrad pressed her.
‘What are you getting at?’
He took a deep breath and paused. ‘Well, I note that there are some things you merely touched upon before quickly changing the subject.’
‘Like what?’
‘The money, for example.’
‘What money?’
Konrad gave a mischievous smile, as if this question were the proof of his assertion.
‘Didn’t you say that the vet was complaining your credit card was blocked?’
‘Oh, that.’ Emma folded her hands in her lap.
‘What was that all about? Was it a bank error?’
‘No,’ she admitted softly.
‘So it really was blocked?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a nod.
‘And the email you casually mentioned before. The one referring to the blocking of your account, which you thought was spam…’
‘It was real, yes.’
Konrad narrowed his eyes. ‘Did you and Philipp have financial problems?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
Emma cleared her throat in embarrassment, then pulled herself together. ‘You asked if we had financial problems. I said no, because it was just me in trouble.’
It was barely conceivable that Philipp would ever get into financial difficulties. His parents had left him a fortune they’d accumulated from building motorway service stations, before the two of them were swept away by cancer.
‘I’d ordered too much, all manner of rubbish teleshopping and on the internet, from expensive cosmetics to microwavable slippers. Useless stuff I was buying to try and take my mind off things. Meanwhile my practice wasn’t earning a cent.’
‘But surely Philipp didn’t leave you in the lurch?’ Konrad asked.
‘No, you know how generous he is. We didn’t sign a pre-nuptial agreement, even though he brought all the money into our marriage. But he was already paying the loan on my practice. I used my own account for my shopping
addiction.’
‘And when it was empty you were too ashamed to tell him?’
Emma lowered her gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay,’ Konrad said as if ticking off an item from the list, and indeed he did change the subject.
‘Let’s discuss what you told me about Sylvia. What got you more worked up? When she alleged you swapped the pills, or when she talked of the “supposed” rape?’
Emma swallowed. ‘I don’t know. I think they’re one and the same. She called me a mad liar who was out to hurt her.’
‘Did she?’ Konrad put his head to one side. ‘Didn’t she in fact doubt your sense of perception?’
Emma frowned. ‘I don’t see the difference.’
‘Oh, it’s huge. You know very well how three witnesses to a car crash can sometimes come up with four different accounts of the accident. None of them is lying, but in stressful situations the brain often plays tricks.’
‘Maybe, but I’d definitely know if I’d deliberately swapped her pills and whether or not I was raped.’
Konrad nodded and something uncanny occurred. He changed, and so rapidly, as if a switch had been pressed. His paternal smile vanished as quickly as the laughter lines around his eyes. His expression became tight, almost rigid, as sharp as the drawing pins on his desk. His jawbones stuck out and his breathing grew very calm.
That’s what a fox looks like just before it pounces on the rabbit, Emma thought, and indeed her kind mentor had become the notorious star lawyer whose cross-examinations were feared by witnesses and public prosecutors throughout Germany.
‘So you’re sure?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Beneath the cashmere blanket Emma clenched her fists.
‘As sure as you were that you were forcibly treated during the Rosenhan Experiment?’
‘Konrad, I…’
‘At least that’s what you told the audience at your lecture. You showed them a video. Although the woman had different-coloured hair, you explained that it was you being given electric shocks.’
‘Yes, but…’
And with that the cat was out of the bag. The ‘but’ that changed everything. Emma rubbed her eyes in the vain attempt to hold back the tears.
The Package Page 12