From here she had a view of everything: the shed, its door secured by Salim’s belt; the small window beneath the cheap door lamp, where she expected Palandt’s face to appear at any second. But Salim had reassured Emma that her neighbour wouldn’t be getting up again in a hurry.
‘I knocked that bastard’s lights out!’
She couldn’t see Salim for the moment. He was wandering around the shed for the second time, his boots crunching loudly in the snow.
‘There’s no other way out,’ he said in satisfaction when he came back around the corner. ‘That lunatic is not going to escape.’
Unless he digs himself a tunnel, Emma thought, but the base of the shed was as hard as concrete and the ground beneath it must be frozen solid. All the same, she didn’t feel safe. And this wasn’t just because of the acute pain that she now felt from the cut.
To check the bleeding she was pressing to her forehead the blue microfibre cloth which Salim probably used to clean the inside of his windscreen, because it smelled of glass cleaner, but right now an infection was the least of her worries.
‘Why?’ she asked Salim. In the distance she could hear the rattling of the S-Bahn, which at this time of day would mostly be carrying pleasure-seekers. Young people on their way to Mitte, starting with a few drinks in a bar or going straight to a party.
‘I’ve no idea what got into him. I saw you enter his house with him, Frau Stein, and it looked a bit odd somehow. When you tripped it didn’t look as if you were following him willingly.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Emma said, shaking her head and wondering how long it would take for the police to arrive. Salim had called them on his mobile.
‘Why did you come back? Your shift was over ages ago.’
Your very last shift.
‘What? Oh yes.’ Salim assumed a guilty expression.
‘Because of Samson,’ he said contritely, and it struck her that the vet hadn’t yet got back to her with the laboratory results.
Or had he?
Perhaps there was a message from Dr Plank on her mobile, which was still in Palandt’s hallway, having dropped from her hands a second time during their struggle.
‘I’m not sure, but I think I made a terrible mistake,’ Salim said, breathing out large clouds of condensation.
‘You poisoned Samson!’
To Emma’s astonishment he didn’t object, but asked with concern, ‘So he’s in a bad way?’
Salim scratched his beard and pulled a face suggesting he wanted to slap himself. ‘Listen, Frau Stein, I’m terribly sorry. I think I accidentally gave the poor thing the chocolate bar from my right-hand pocket and not the dog biscuit I always keep on the left.’
Chocolate.
Of course!
Cocoa powder could be fatal for dogs, even in the minutest quantities.
Now that she knew, Emma recognised the typical symptoms of theobromine poisoning: cramps, vomiting, apathy, diarrhoea.
Samson clearly reacted particularly badly to chocolate.
‘I only realised when I was getting changed back home.’
Salim pointed to himself. In place of his postal uniform he was wearing a tight-fitting motorbike outfit – the obligatory Harley jacket, leather trousers and matching steel-capped boots.
‘I didn’t have your phone number and you aren’t in the phone book, so I thought it best to come back in person.’
He pointed to the shed with his tattooed hand.
‘I wasn’t expecting to find something like that.’
Salim essayed a sad smile. ‘I suppose that’s what people mean when they say a blessing in disguise, isn’t it?’ he asked, returning to the shed to check his belt was still securing the door.
At that moment blue lights flickered in the evening sky and danced on the snow in the garden like disco lights.
The police were arriving.
In large numbers but with no sirens.
Three patrol cars and a police van, out of which four officers poured in black combat uniform. They ran up the drive into the garden, towards her, led by an unarmed policeman in civilian clothes, who wasn’t dressed warmly enough – a suit, leather shoes and no trench coat over his jacket.
‘What happened here?’ he asked when he’d got to Emma, and for a moment she couldn’t believe that it was him.
‘Thank you,’ she said, bursting into tears as she got up from the bench and threw her arms around Philipp.
38
In Emma’s mind the men in black skiing masks positioned themselves one behind the other in front of the door to the shed.
Four men, all with their weapons drawn.
The shortest, a compact body-builder type (so far as one could make out beneath his uniform), probably stood at the front and had already cut through the belt with his combat knife. His hand was on the doorknob, ready to open it for the three others.
Philipp must be standing somewhere away from the shed, out of her angle of vision through the window. What luck that he’d come back to Berlin early. He’d been worried when Jorgo had told him that she’d simply hung up during her last call. After that she hadn’t been reachable again. When Philipp called her on the mobile that was in Palandt’s hands, he was going to tell her that he’d be back in ten minutes.
Now he was here for when the officer in charge gave the order to storm the shed.
As she knew from films, the men behind would enter shouting loudly and their guns cocked. And the torches screwed to the barrels would light up every corner of the shed.
‘Good God,’ Emma heard Philipp exclaim in her head as he saw the tipped-over container with the corpse. Or Palandt lying in a pool of blood because Salim might have smashed his head in. All this, however, was nothing but conjecture.
Emma saw, heard and felt it in her mind only. She sat forty metres away from the action on an ambulance stretcher that had parked outside Palandt’s carport.
‘That’s going to need stitching up,’ said a young paramedic or doctor (Emma hadn’t been listening when he introduced himself), who resembled a younger Boris Becker: tall, well built and with a mop of strawberry-blonde hair. He’d wiped the blood from her face and treated the wound with a disinfectant spray and a flesh-coloured head bandage. When he was finished she heard an aggressive struggle coming from the garden. No words, only screams.
‘What’s going on?’ Emma asked loudly enough that Salim, who’d been waiting by the ambulance steps could hear her.
‘It’s happening,’ he told her, although surely that could only be a guess.
A uniformed officer ensured that no unauthorised persons could gain entry to the property. But as far as Emma could make out from the open doors of the ambulance no onlookers had dared come outside anyway, perhaps because neighbours were intimidated by the host of flashing police vehicles blocking Teufelssee-Allee. Also, perhaps, because it was snowing more heavily than before and you could barely see a thing.
Emma sat alone with Salim in the ambulance because the Becker paramedic had gone into the driver’s cab to write his report, then Philipp turned up.
‘Nothing!’ he said, his head poking through the door.
‘Nothing?’ She got up from the stretcher.
‘Body parts, yes. But no neighbour.’
‘What are you saying?’
That was impossible.
Turning to Salim, Philipp said, ‘So you knocked Herr Palandt to the floor and tied him up?’
The delivery man shook his head. ‘I didn’t tie him up. But he was unconscious.’
‘Herr Stein?’
A policewoman appeared behind Philipp and said that the officer in charge urgently needed a word with him.
‘Stay where you are,’ he said, but of course Emma wasn’t going to sit in the ambulance any more.
She followed him for a few steps of the way before the policewoman blocked her path and Emma shouted, ‘Please let me through!’
I’ve got to see it. The empty shed.
Only the fact that
Salim had seen him too prevented her from thinking that she’d lost her mind altogether.
‘I want to go to my husband. I’m a witness!’
Philipp turned back to her. He was about to call out ‘Emma’ in that tone with which parents reprimand their naughty children, but then just shrugged and in response to an invisible signal the policewoman let Emma through.
‘Maybe you really can help us,’ he said, although half his words were swallowed by the strong wind that was making the snow fly around in places.
Philipp stepped into the open shed, where someone had found the light switch.
Besides him there was only one other officer in there, presumably the commander of the operation. His ski mask was over his nose and he waited for the newcomers with an expression that appeared to say, ‘Look here, you wimps. I’m standing with my boots in the middle of this corpse liquid, but I can cope with the stink.’
‘You should take a look at this,’ he told Philipp.
‘There are more body parts here.’
Philipp turned around to Emma. ‘You’d better stay outside,’ he advised.
As if she hadn’t already left enough traces in the shed, but what the hell? I’ll stand in the doorway.
Outside the stench of putrefaction was easier to bear.
From the door Emma watched her husband step over the severed lower leg, trying his best to avoid stepping in the rotting puddle beside the overturned organic waste bin, where the rest of the naked female corpse lay.
Squashed like offal.
Despite her disgust, Emma couldn’t help studying the body of the woman who’d gone through what she’d been spared.
That could have been me lying there instead of you, she thought, mourning this unknown creature whose name would doubtlessly be on the front page of every newspaper very soon. Together with her own, which the press would no doubt be interested in too.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Philipp cursed in the back right-hand corner of the shed.
He’d taken a glance inside the cushion box, its lid positioned in such a way that Emma was unable to glimpse its contents. If her husband’s face was turning green, what he was looking at must be even more repulsive than the female corpse on the floor.
‘Are there any more crates here?’ Philipp said breathily to the officer in charge. ‘Storage for more corpses?’
The officer shook his head. ‘And no place where the lunatic could hide either. We’ve searched everything.’ Emma’s legs were shaking. The sense of déjà vu was unavoidable.
A room with a secret.
‘There’s nobody here.’
That’s impossible.
‘He was with the circus,’ Emma heard herself say. In a monotone, almost a whisper.
‘What was that?’
The two men turned to her.
‘His speciality was the suitcase routine.’
Philipp looked at her as if she’d started speaking a foreign language.
‘What are you trying to say?’
That he can make himself so small that he can fit in hand luggage.
‘Is it dressed?’ she asked uneasily, but Emma already knew the answer. Of course. There was no other explanation.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The corpse, for God’s sake. In the cushion box.’ She was almost screaming now. ‘IS IT DRESSED?’
Because that was the only thing which made sense.
They haven’t found any new body parts.
But Daddy Longlegs.
Palandt, who’s made himself small and will leap out of the box at any moment…
‘No, it’s not,’ Philipp said very calmly, his words like a needle pricking the bubble of her worst fears.
‘There are severed body parts. A torso. A head, a whole leg. Naked. Full of maggots!’
And then he said something that changed everything. ‘But there are clothes here, beside the crate.’
The commanding officer bent down and lifted a coat with the barrel of his rifle.
A black raincoat with yellow buttons.
So Palandt had got undressed! Why?
At that moment Emma hadn’t yet solved the puzzle.
Not even when her gaze fell for at least the tenth time on the waste bin with the sticker, the carrot that served as the ‘I’ in ORGANIC.
Only when she kneeled by the overturned container and blocked out the stench did the cogs of realisation all click into place, because Emma did the only logical thing and focused solely on the breathing.
Not her own.
But the corpse’s.
First its chest moved. Then the entire naked body.
As quickly as only a man could who’d once been known as Daddy Longlegs and who now, despite his illness, shot from his hiding place in the waste bin like a bullet.
‘He’s alive!’ Emma was just able to say before all hell was let loose.
39
Three weeks later
‘Seventeen stab wounds.’
Konrad opened the murder squad’s investigation report and put it on his lap. To get a better understanding of her testimony he’d fetched the file from his desk after giving Emma a glass of water.
‘Three in the eye. Most in the neck and larynx, only two on the forehead and one – the last one – in the left ear.’
Emma shrugged. ‘Self-defence.’
‘Hmm.’
Konrad looked at the file as if it were a restaurant menu on which he couldn’t find anything he fancied.
‘Self-defence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Emma, he was incapacitated after the first cut, when you severed his carotid artery.’
‘But still…’
‘But still it escalated into a bloodthirsty attack. With the utility knife…’
Looking up from the documents he frowned. ‘How did you get hold of that again?’
Till now Emma had been staring impassively out of the window to study the dark, low-hanging bank of cloud above the Wannsee, its grey-black seemingly reflective of her emotional state, although at least it wasn’t snowing – for the time being. They had now been talking for three hours, but unlike her Konrad didn’t display the slightest signs of tiredness. And he seemed to have a concrete bladder. She really wanted to go to the loo, but couldn’t summon the energy even for that.
Over the last few weeks she’d learned bitterly how depressives have to suffer when their illness is misconstrued by those who don’t know such intensive sadness. In truth, you were in such a deep psychological hole that you weren’t even able to pull the proverbial blanket over your head. This was a reason for the high suicide rate when depressives took medication for the first time to relieve their symptoms. Rather than a new lease of life, all it gave them was the strength to finally end it.
‘The knife was still on the floor,’ she said in response to Konrad’s question. ‘Not long before, he’d tried to kill me with it, remember?’
‘Yes. But excuse me for pointing out that, as the law sees it, this attack was definitively over. It had occurred a quarter of an hour before. Your wound had already been treated.’
‘And what about when he leaped out of the waste bin smeared in blood. How does “the law see that”?’ Emma said, making quotation marks with her fingers.
‘As an escape.’ Konrad moved the tips of his manicured fingers towards his mouth and tapped his lips with both index fingers.
‘Escape?’
‘He was naked and unarmed. He didn’t pose any danger. That’s how the public prosecutor will see it at any rate, especially as there was an armed policeman close by.’
‘Who didn’t shoot!’
‘Because he couldn’t. You and Palandt were like a ball on the ground. The risk of hitting you was far too great. Anyway the danger at that moment wasn’t from him, but you…’
‘Huh!’ Emma snorted. ‘That’s absurd. A sick man dismembers a woman and stuffs her into a bin, gets undressed, stores the body parts in a cushion box so he can disguise himself as
a naked corpse. Finally this guy, who’d kicked, punched and practically scalped me, leaps out from his hiding place – and now I’m the one in the dock?’
Konrad’s answer was laconic and thus doubly painful. ‘Seventeen stab wounds,’ was all he said. ‘You were crazed. Both men together, your husband and the commanding officer, had great difficulty peeling you away from Palandt. You were stabbing with such fury that you even cut them.’
‘Because I was beside myself with fear.’
‘Excessive self-defence. Not particularly rare, but unfortunately no justification. At best an excuse, which’ – now it was Konrad’s turn to make quotation marks with his fingers – ‘“as the law sees it” is unfortunately a weaker argument for the defence than a real emergency.’
The pressure increased behind Emma’s eyes, which felt like the harbinger of a flood of tears.
‘I’m in real trouble, aren’t I?’
Konrad did not oblige her by shaking his head.
‘But how could I have known what it all really meant?’
Her eyes were aching more painfully. Emma wiped invisible tears from her cheeks; she hadn’t started crying yet.
Not yet.
‘You were mistaken. That’s human too, Emma. Many of us in that situation would have drawn the wrong conclusions and regarded Palandt as a criminal.’
Konrad closed the file and leaned forwards. ‘In truth he didn’t mean you any harm. Not to start with at least. And that’s why, I’m afraid, it makes my job of defending you so tricky.’
She couldn’t withstand his penetrating look. Nor could she gaze into the flames of the fire, which were higher again now and felt like they were burning her face. But perhaps it was just the shame of realisation.
‘What happened next?’ Konrad asked calmly. The best listener in the world had put on his poker face again.
‘You mean how did I find out that I’d been wrong about Palandt?’ Sighing, Emma picked up the water glass and moistened her lips. ‘If only that had been my worst mistake that evening.’ She glanced briefly again at the lake, then closed her eyes.
Emma found it easier to talk about her darkest moments if she shut out the light and the world within it.
40
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