‘Your own husband materialises in your hotel room from out of nowhere like David Copperfield, just to do what he could have got from you far more easily a day later within the own four walls of his house? Voluntarily too!’
‘You know full well that for a rapist it’s about power rather than sex.’
‘Are you telling me that you’ve caressed and felt him thousands of times, yet on this occasion you didn’t even get a whiff of suspicion?’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Konrad. You said it straight to my face earlier. Once a liar, always a liar, am I right?’
Konrad gave her a sad look, but didn’t disagree.
‘But you’re wrong,’ Emma said. ‘Yes, I did lie when I foolishly claimed to have been the woman in the Rosenhan video. But in this case things are very different.’
‘How?’
‘Well, they found hair belonging to all the victims in Philipp’s laboratory. All of them!’
‘Apart from yours.’
Konrad opened the folder and took from it four large black-and-white photographs.
‘What do you know about these photos?’ He spread them out on the glass table.
Emma averted her eyes from the women. She didn’t need to see their large eyes, high cheekbones and certainly not their thick hair to recognise them. In the pictures they were laughing, pursing their lips for a kiss or looking brazenly and wickedly into the camera. They had no opportunity to do this in life any more.
‘The victims,’ Emma said.
‘Correct, these are the escort girls that the Hairdresser murdered.’ Konrad fixed her with an inscrutable look. ‘These women have a lot in common with you, Emma. Dreadful things were done to them. They’ve got wonderful hair, they even vaguely look like you. But assuming you’ve told me the truth about the important things, then there’s one key difference between you and these sorry creatures, and by that I don’t mean that all of them are dead.’
… assuming you’ve told me the truth about the important things…
Emma felt even more exhausted than when she’d taken the diazepam earlier on.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘These women had their heads shaved and they were killed, but…’ Konrad tapped each photograph in turn and put an exclamation mark behind each of his words: ‘But! These! Women! Were! Not! Raped!’
Silence. Not completely, for the office was filled with the constant roaring of the gas fire, but all the same the stillness that followed Konrad’s outburst was oppressive.
Emma wanted to say something. She felt that deep inside her, words were buried, which now had to come together into a meaningful, logical sentence, but she could manage nothing other than: ‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m lying?’ Konrad said. ‘There was no forensic evidence of forced penetration. With none of the victims.’
‘But in the news…’
‘Forget the news,’ Konrad interrupted her. ‘The first newspaper that printed the false information, in twenty-centimetre-high letters on a double-page spread lied to increase its circulation. And all the other hastily put-together news tickers, tweets, posts and internet reports, which more people believed and nobody bothered to verify, these spread the lie. Later, the serious magazines, weeklies and television features followed. They lied too, but this time at the request of the investigating officers.’
‘But… but why?’
‘Why was information withheld from the public?’ He answered his own question: ‘I hardly need to tell you about the problems police have with psychologically deranged nutcases who crow about having committed other people’s spectacular crimes.’
Pathological liars.
‘Which is why detailed knowledge about killers isn’t disseminated in the media. So that confessions can be checked for truth.’
Konrad paused to lend his words more weight. ‘Normally this is a way of filtering out people just trying to jump on the bandwagon. It’s not as often used for victims, though.’
He got up and strode across his office as if through a courtroom, his hands crossed behind his back.
‘Do you have any idea how many women rang the police hotline having cut their own hair off? Women who said they’d been raped but were able to escape?’
‘I’m not one of those,’ Emma said, making the error of running her hand through her hair as she’d done all her life whenever she was nervous.
‘I’ve spoken to the public prosecutor. Do you know what he thinks? That you were trying to make Philipp stick with you because of your financial worries. He wanted to leave you so you pretended to be pregnant. But because this isn’t a lie you can keep up forever, you invented a rape to explain the miscarriage. At the same time you were aiming for sympathy with your psychological trauma. But when you realised that none of this was enough to keep Philipp, you killed him, making you his sole heiress.’
‘Konrad… how… how… can you even entertain the… I know what happened. I mean, I’m not mad.’
‘No?’
No?
Did he really just ask that?
Konrad took a few steps towards her and now stood so close again that she’d only have to raise her hand to stroke his well-trimmed beard.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said when she sensed he was going to touch her. ‘Go away!’ she protested, but more for the sake of it rather than with any force. Nor did she shake his hand off when he put it on hers.
‘You were mentally abused,’ he whispered softly. ‘But not physically!’
‘Yes, I was. I was…’ She closed her eyes. ‘I was raped and now I want you to stop your advocatus diaboli routine, or…’
‘EMMA!’
Konrad shouted so loudly that she trembled.
‘Open your eyes and listen to me. This is not a negotiating tactic. I’m not speaking to you as a lawyer, but as a friend.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Your husband abused you. But only psychologically. He didn’t abuse your body. Nor those of the other victims.’
No, no that’s impossible.
‘Philipp wasn’t the Hairdresser?’
‘No.’
All she could see in Konrad’s eyes was a sad certainty. Emma turned away. She couldn’t stand the gaze which seemed to be telling her that in Palandt and her husband she’d killed two innocent men in one day.
46
‘So who was it then?’
Emma’s entire body was itching. She was desperate to scratch her arms, legs and tummy. Or even better, cast off this skin she no longer wanted to be in.
‘Who murdered those women if it wasn’t Philipp?’ she repeated her question.
‘Think about it, Emma,’ Konrad said, getting to his feet and picking up the photos of the dead women from the coffee table. He held them in his hands like a fan. ‘All these victims – look closely and then you’ll see the connection between them.’
Reluctantly her eyes wandered to the photos.
Yes, they look like me. They’ve got hair like I used to have.
‘They’re all Philipp’s type.’
‘Precisely, Emma,’ Konrad agreed. ‘But unlike you they’re prostitutes. High-end escorts. Your husband cheated on you. With every one of them.’
He shook the fan of photos in his hand.
‘And this infidelity is the motive. It points the way to the murderer.’
Emma couldn’t breathe until a tortured cough freed her passages.
‘What did you just say?’
‘Think about it, Emma. Who was so close to Philipp that he could discover his amorous escapades? Who was so hurt yet intelligent enough to forge a plan to remove from those women the very thing that had triggered Philipp’s desire?’
Their hair.
‘You’re crazy,’ Emma protested. ‘You must have totally lost your mind. Do you seriously believe that all these women…’
‘… your rivals in love!’
… were murdered by me? She wasn’t able to say this out loud.
‘Put yourself in his po
sition, Emma. Philipp knows that the Hairdresser is after women who he’s had sex with. The killer taunts him by sending packages to your home with his trophies, as if trying to say, ‘Look what I’ve done to those women you sleep with.’ If your husband discloses this information and passes the evidence to the investigation team, it gets out that he’s been cheating on you. Which is the last thing he wants. So he has to take the matter in hand himself. In his laboratory he examines the pieces of evidence and undertakes research without knowing that the Hairdresser is someone close to him. Even though Philipp knows the women haven’t been raped he makes the mistake of looking for a man. And yet any child knows who uses poison, the weapon that that killed the escorts.’
The weaker sex. Women.
Emma crossed her arms behind her head. The scar for which she had Palandt to thank was throbbing and itching, but she resisted the urge to scratch her forehead.
‘So why did he show me the photos in the cellar? And behave as if there weren’t any hair? Was he trying to drive me mad?’
Konrad nodded. ‘I have to say that this is what most bothered me in preparation for our conversation. And it won’t be easy to convince the court that Philipp exploited your vulnerable mental state for his own purposes.’
‘Which purposes?’
‘I think he wanted to obtain a reservation of consent.’
‘Have me declared incapacitated?’
‘That’s another way of putting it.’
‘But that makes no sense,’ Emma protested. ‘Philipp was the one with the money, not me.’
‘For that very reason,’ Konrad said. ‘Your husband had the fortune and because there was no pre-nuptial contract he would have lost half of it if you got divorced. Unless as your guardian he had regained full access to it while you were legally committed to a psychiatric hospital.’
The motive. His cheating had brought it to light.
And yet…
‘Okay, you say that Philipp wasn’t the one who killed the women. He didn’t even rape them, but just slept with them. And someone else, the Hairdresser, shaved their hair and sent the trophies to Philipp to show him that they knew about him cheating on me. And you claim that Philipp then resorted to emotional blackmail to destroy me.’
Konrad nodded. ‘That’s about right.’
‘And you think that the Hairdresser…’
Emma let her words hang in the air and Konrad made a grab for them.
‘I think that only an extremely jealous person is capable of such acts. Someone who wants Philipp for herself and can’t stand the thought of having to share him.’
‘I didn’t know anything about Philipp’s infidelity,’ she told Konrad. ‘I didn’t know those prostitutes. So I didn’t kill them.’
‘You?’ Konrad asked, perplexed. In a gentle, conscience-stricken voice he said, ‘Oh my, Emma, I’m really sorry. You thought I was talking about you the whole time?’
47
Emma’s head started spinning.
Konrad doesn’t think I’m the killer? He wasn’t talking about me? But… but who then?
She mulled over the questions her old friend had just asked her.
Who was close to Philipp? Who was intelligent enough to forge a female’s plan of revenge? And who would suffer most from his sleeping with the escort girls if not his wife?
‘His mistress!’ Emma blurted out, putting her head in her hands at the moment of realisation.
‘Correct,’ said Konrad, who’d regained his confidence. ‘Not a whore, but the woman who was important to him. Who was close to him because he saw her regularly.’
All the hairs on Emma’s forearms stood up.
‘Sylvia?’ she whispered.
Konrad nodded.
Emma laughed hysterically, tapped the side of her head, then put her head in her hands again.
‘Noooo,’ she screamed. ‘That’s absurd. Impossible. She died while…’
‘… while you were in the cellar with Philipp. That’s correct. She loved him, Emma. She loved him so much that she wouldn’t forgive his flings and dalliances. You found it out yourself: there was no Peter. The man she wanted children with was called Philipp.’
A sound entrenched itself in her ear, preparing to drown out all others, especially Konrad’s voice.
‘She loved Philipp and she hated the women he consorted with. Unworthy whores who deserved to die.’
‘But what about me? She let me live.’
That made no sense.
‘She didn’t have to murder you, darling. He could separate from you. In all likelihood he’d promised Sylvia to leave you for her. To have children with her. Since that night you hadn’t even touched Philipp, had you? I’m sorry to have to say it, but in her eyes you were no longer any competition. Unlike the prostitutes. Sylvia wanted to prevent all sexual contact between Philipp and other women. Which was one of the reasons for sending him her trophies. To show him: I know who you’re fooling around with. Every one of those whores you sleep with will die.’
Without sinking to the floor, Emma felt as if she were falling.
That’s why Philipp reacted so strangely when she mentioned Sylvia’s name in the cellar. Emma had asked him why he’d had to kill her, but he’d had no idea that Sylvia was dying.
Konrad gave her cheek a soft caress. ‘A moralist would say that your husband had all these women on his conscience. But he didn’t murder them. Nor did he lay a finger on Sylvia. When she tried to call Philipp on his mobile and you answered she’d already taken an overdose of sleeping pills.’
‘The call was a cry for help?’ Emma asked.
She withdrew the hand that Konrad had tried to hold and gazed at the fire. The gas flames were shimmering violet and blue, reminding her of bruises from wounds that would never heal.
‘But why did she come to visit me that day? Why did she scream that I’d slipped her the morning-after pills to stop her from getting pregnant?’
Konrad sighed. ‘She was mad, Emma. You can’t measure the behaviour of a serial murderer by normal standards. But your question contains the answer you’re looking for.’
Bang.
It struck her with the momentum of a guillotine.
‘Because he didn’t want her getting pregnant,’ Emma whispered in horror.
‘And Sylvia must have realised that at some point after having visited you, darling. Now she knew that Philipp didn’t want to have children with her. She feared that he’d go back on his promise and never leave you, and her suspicion can only have been reinforced when he abandoned his conference because of you.’
The world before Emma’s eyes blurred behind a wall of tears.
‘All of that may be true,’ she sobbed. ‘But your story has one massive flaw. I may well be paranoid and have overreacted to Philipp. But the reason for that goes back to what the Hairdresser did to me in my hotel room. And that wasn’t Sylvia.’
‘How come?’
Now it was her turn to yell each word with an exclamation mark.
‘BECAUSE! I! WAS! RAPED!’ She was quaking. ‘I felt it. A woman does feel something like that.’
Konrad looked again as if he were rooted to the floor of his office. Very calmly, without making a face, he asked, ‘Are you quite sure, Emma?’
‘Yes, one hundred per cent sure.’ She turned to the window and gave a fake laugh. ‘I know I have a fertile imagination. And sometimes I tell stories, yes. But on this point I’m absolutely sure! It was a man. Inside me. That’s why I lost my baby. I can still feel…’
She couldn’t breathe. Images flickered before her eyes and veils drifted past her field of vision as if she’d spent too long looking at the sun, rather than the Zehlendorf winter landscape behind Konrad’s desk.
‘What’s wrong?’ Konrad asked, sounding more intrigued than concerned.
‘The light,’ Emma said, pointing out at the Wannsee.
Ought it not to be much darker?
‘How long have I been here in your… in your…’ Once
more she was unable to complete a sentence, and this time it was because of the man on the promenade. And the large mastiff on its lead. Which opened its mouth as if intent on catching snowflakes on its tongue. ‘… in your practice?’ Emma mumbled, seized by a surreal, completely irrational feeling of having got caught up in a time loop.
She wasn’t just looking at a similar backdrop, but exactly the same one she’d seen at the start of her session. She stood up. It took some effort, but this time she found the strength to stay on her feet.
‘What’s going on here?’ she asked, wandering over to the window.
Behind her Konrad started talking to someone, even though he was alone in the room.
‘That’s enough now,’ he said sternly. ‘I repeat, that’s enough.’
She heard footsteps approaching from the corridor outside. At the same time her nose again picked up a smell of fresh paint and other renovation work as she got closer to the window. Just as the doors were opened behind her and she was about to touch the glass with her fingertips, the lake vanished before her very eyes, and with it the walker, the snow, the mastiff, the promenade, everything. Even the window wasn’t there any more.
Just a black hole in the wall.
‘Frau Dr Stein?’ she heard a man’s voice say. It wasn’t Konrad’s and she ignored it.
‘But I know who I am,’ she insisted, starting to cry as she heard the electrostatic clicking of the high-resolution television her head was leaning against.
‘Please don’t be afraid, Frau Stein,’ the man said, but when she turned to him and saw her psychiatrist in a white coat with two nurses standing beside Konrad, that’s exactly what she felt: a fear that took hold of every cell inside her body and seemed to have settled there for good.
Emma felt faint and, when her knees gave way and she was losing consciousness, she tried to hold onto something for support, but failed.
48
Behind the scenes, Park Clinic
‘Splendid. That was splendidly done.’
Dr Martin Roth pointed to the screen on the table on front of them, having just turned down the volume. On it they could see the mock-up office where Emma was being attended to by two nurses. After passing out, she’d come around again soon afterwards and now was lying on the sofa with her legs bent. If Konrad hadn’t known better he would have actually believed he was watching his office by the Wannsee on the security camera. It was incredible how perfectly the carpenters and builders had reproduced it.
The Package Page 19