‘Hardly likely,’ Konrad agreed. ‘More like Philipp.’
Jorgo nodded. ‘But nor did I think my partner capable of physical violence against women.’
‘Psychological violence, on the other hand…’ Konrad said and Jorgo hesitated briefly, checking again that he could continue to talk. Either he interpreted Roth’s look correctly, or as a policeman he was trained to tell the truth to people who were just about to commit an act of violence.
‘Philipp started behaving suspiciously, telling me again and again how he doubted his wife’s mental state. And when we searched Le Zen together, it seemed as if he was looking for proof of her paranoia rather than the opposite. And he was adamant that Emma shouldn’t find out about the connecting door, even though that would have been a balm for her tortured soul. Nor did he tell her that we found residues of glue on the wall, presumably from the picture you’d covered the door with.’
Jorgo shrugged. ‘From there the logical step was to investigate Emma’s private life. And see: the profile matches, as if Philipp had been looking right at you when he drew it up.’
Konrad grasped his neck. Once again he aimed his eyes and the barrel of his gun at Roth.
‘What about you? You’re the mastermind behind all of this, aren’t you?’
‘Well, I’d prefer to say that I was helped on my way by chance. I also attended the conference where Frau Stein talked about the Rosenhan Experiment. I don’t suppose you remember, but we happened to bump into each other in the cloakroom. Later, when the police brought me on board I recalled our meeting. I assume you weren’t there out of any medical interest, but to change the key cards in Emma’s documents?’
Konrad nodded and said, ‘That wasn’t my question. I wanted to know if the strategy with this trap here was your idea?’
Roth hesitated. Although Konrad would be bound to notice if he lied to him, the senior doctor could hardly be honest without insulting the lawyer.
After he’d been asked by the police for help as a renowned expert, he’d spent the last few weeks looking into the defence lawyer’s psyche. He’d studied all of Konrad’s seminar videos and films of his public appearances on the internet. Analysed his almost pedantic outward appearance, his deportment which was minutely managed and geared towards maximum success. Soon he guessed that Konrad’s biggest weakness would also represent the investigators’ best opportunity: his narcissism.
‘To nail you we had to put you in a position where you felt powerful,’ he said. ‘You had to believe that you were pulling all the strings and were the lead actor in a performance, just like in court. I was convinced that you’d agree to my idea of replicating your office, seeing how you’d gone to all that effort with the hotel room so that the police wouldn’t take Frau Stein seriously.’
‘So none of this was ever about Emma?’ Konrad blinked. His eyes were damp, but it didn’t look as if he was feeling sorry for himself. Even in this extreme situation he actually seemed to be far more concerned for Emma’s welfare.
‘Yes, of course I was interested in Frau Dr Stein too,’ Roth explained. ‘By building your office in here we could kill the proverbial two birds with one stone. After those terrible events Emma was refusing all communication. The fake setting finally made her open up. And condemned you as a murderer.’
Konrad’s expression turned hard. For a moment he looked like a lawyer again, cross-examining the other side’s witness. ‘How did you know? How did you know that I’d take the rug with me?’
Roth gently shook his head. ‘I didn’t. To be honest, until the moment you tried to stop Emma from cleaning the stain it didn’t even occur to me that this might be a piece of evidence. But then on the close-up I saw your pupils dilate. A second later you’d already leaped up, almost on instinct. You didn’t want Emma to touch the rug under any circumstances. Herr Kapsalos and I asked ourselves why? We took a closer look and discovered the hair that Emma must have pulled out when she cleaned it.’
Konrad rapped his knuckles on the table in admiration, as students do to applaud a professor.
Jorgo slid his hand down to his holster, which didn’t escape Konrad’s notice.
‘That’s not a good idea,’ he said laconically, and his knuckles turned white as his grip tightened further on the pistol, which was now pointing at the policeman’s heart.
At that moment there was a creaking behind Roth. Like Jorgo, he turned around towards the door of the ‘office’, which here only led to the changing rooms rather than the corridor in the law firm. It opened.
Very slowly, as if the person pushing from the other side was having to battle a powerful wind blowing in the other direction.
Or as if they had no strength.
‘Emma!’ Konrad screamed so loudly, like a warning, but it was too late.
She was already in the doorway with her short hair, in white slippers, the clinic nightshirt tied at the back.
‘What… are you doing here?’ he was presumably going to ask, but this was lost in the tumult that ensued once the shot had been fired.
Konrad looked, baffled, at the gun in his hand, then wondered what had happened. He let his arm drop and at that moment was knocked to the ground by Jorgo. The policeman had dived across the table with his pistol drawn.
Roth wasn’t watching the unequal struggle in which the lawyer, offering no resistance, allowed himself to be pushed to the floor and have his arms twisted behind his back.
All he saw was Emma.
Teetering towards him.
Blood dropped onto the freshly laid parquet floor. A whole torrent, pouring onto the floor like a sticky, red waterfall. Over the leather armchair to where the coffee table must have been and where now just the enso rug lay, onto which she finally collapsed.
55
Four weeks later
‘Number three,’ said the hollow-cheeked woman with the man’s haircut, who was responsible for welcoming visitors at the security checkpoint. She was tall, plump, with nicotine-stained teeth, and hands that she could have grasped a basketball with. But she was friendly, something verging on a miracle when you had to work in the high-security wing of a psychiatric prison.
‘You’ve got five minutes.’ The prison officer pointed to the seat with the specified number above the glass separating the free world from the inmates.
Konrad was already sitting there.
Chalky white, gaunt. They’d shaved off his beard, but this made him look even older. Seeing him, many people would have thought of death and how it already scarred some people in life.
The visitors room was awash with the faint smell of decay, but this was just in the mind of course, an olfactory error, because Konrad’s chest was rising and falling, and his nostrils were quivering almost as badly as the age-spotted hand holding the receiver. But nowhere near as firmly as the pistol back in the clinic. It was no surprise that the inmates here were sometimes called zombies by the care workers.
The living dead. Pacified by medication, locked away forever.
Even here in the visitors’ area, where relatives sat opposite the particularly severe cases separated by a glass wall, any normal person would feel an unease similar to that when imagining a tarantula crawling across their tongue.
Emma picked up the receiver and sat down.
‘Thank you,’ said the man who’d shaven four women, killed three of them and given her the most horrific night of her life. ‘Your coming to visit means a lot to me.’
‘This is an exception,’ Emma said impassively. ‘I’m coming just this once then never again.’
Konrad nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. ‘Let me guess, Dr Roth sent you. He thinks that closure would help your therapy, doesn’t he?’
Emma couldn’t help feeling admiration for her once-closest friend. In a short period of time incarceration had eroded his health, his commanding presence and his youthful charm, but not his intelligence.
‘He’s waiting outside,’ she said truthfully. With Samson, who was following her every step
again. And Jorgo, who somehow she’d probably never be rid of.
Emma changed the receiver to the other ear and rubbed her left elbow. The bandage had been taken off recently; the edges of the wound from the operation scars were still visible.
Because the single rooms in the security wing of the Park Clinic were only locked at night she’d been able to leave her room that day. But in her state it had taken more than ten minutes to labour the few metres to get to the gym.
Because of the bullet that had been fired accidentally from Konrad’s pistol when Emma appeared so unexpectedly in the fake office, she’d be reminded of him all her life whenever she bent her arm. But even if he hadn’t shattered her wrist, it was unlikely she’d ever be able to forget him.
‘I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you,’ he said in the voice she’d last heard while half asleep. In the Park Clinic. The memory his tone evoked was so powerful that Emma had that same taste of gastric acid and vomit in her mouth as back in her hospital room when she’d thrown up. Dr Roth said the medication had given her an upset stomach, but she knew better. It was Konrad’s voice that had stopped her from losing consciousness altogether. And it was his confession that had turned her stomach upside down and eventually made her wide awake again.
‘What is it really?’ she heard Konrad ask. Emma frowned.
‘Pardon?’
‘What has really brought you here? You’re a wilful girl, Emma, that’s something I’ve always admired about you. Your strength, even as a child. You wouldn’t allow him to order you here unless you had something on your mind.’
Emma took a deep breath and felt respect for Konrad once more. He hadn’t lost his talent for reading her like an open book.
‘After everything that’s happened, it’s really quite unimportant. But the question… it haunts me.’
Konrad raised his eyebrows. ‘What question?’
‘Philipp. Why did you let him live?’
She picked nervously at her thumb. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed and painted with transparent polish again. Emma had sprayed on some perfume and shaved her legs. External signs of psychological healing. Inside, however, a heavy cold seemed to be looming. She felt as if her facial muscles were contracting and her ears aching, perhaps because she didn’t want to hear Konrad’s answer.
‘I mean, you killed all those women, but not the guy you hated most. He was the adulterer after all. Wouldn’t it have just been simpler to get him out of the way?’
Konrad shook his head sadly. ‘Darling, don’t you understand? I wanted to protect you from any pain, never inflict it on you. Emma, you must believe me when I say I always loved you. And whatever I did, it was never done out of selfishness. Even when I made sure that you remained an only child.’
Now Konrad’s head was in a motorbike helmet and rather than a phone in his hand there was a syringe with a long needle, glistening silver in the moonlight.
‘Come on Emma, go to bed now and settle down,’ she heard Arthur say. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Emma blinked and the vision from her memory dissipated.
‘What was in the syringe?’ she asked Konrad behind the glass.
‘Something to induce an abortion,’ he admitted candidly. ‘I injected it into the water glass your mother had put beside her bed. Please don’t hate me for it. I mean, how could I allow her to bring another child into the world which might go on to suffer the same psychological abuse your father inflicted upon you? A man who wants to hurt his daughter just because she’s afraid?’
‘You’re sick,’ Emma said, then it struck her: ‘It was you! You swapped Sylvia’s pills too!’
‘To stop Philipp from hurting you again by giving her a child.’
Emma’s fingers tensed around the receiver. ‘You told her about Arthur to further undermine my credibility. And later you told her it was Philipp to make her kill herself.’
‘I just wanted Sylvia to keep away from him. I really couldn’t anticipate her suicide.’
‘But you’ve got her on your conscience just the same. You’re completely insane, do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Konrad said. ‘But I was never selfish, do you hear? The only thing important to me was that you were alright. Even if that meant your having to be with Philipp, that worthless pleb.’
For a second it looked as if he were going to spit on the glass separating them.
‘The bastard left you alone when you were in distress. I had to slip into your house and watch out for you. I even took the package from your desk and hid it in the garden shed for a few hours so that Philipp would see what a state you were in. That he couldn’t leave you on your own all weekend! Not in your condition! But the bastard went anyway. Cold-hearted, no scruples.’
‘You hid?’
How often did you secretly watch me all these years?
Emma knew that this was another creepy thought, just like her hair being woven into Konrad’s enso carpet. A thought which, if she was lucky, might fade over the years, but would never totally lose its horror.
‘In the shed. In the cellar. When the two of you were in conversation I was in the kitchen, separated from you by just a thin door.’
‘Like behind the connecting door in Le Zen,’ Emma snorted.
Konrad’s eyes turned watery. ‘Oh, sweetie, you must really despise me now.’ His lower lip was trembling and he started to dribble, but made no attempt to wipe the spit away.
‘I wanted him to stop hurting you. I only sent him the hair so he knew what the consequences were of his cheating on you. But instead the bastard just used it to torture you even more. I’m so sorry.’
‘What for?’ Emma asked. She’d resolved to be furious with him. On the way here she’d run through the course of the conversation and its conclusion in her head. She’d pictured herself leaping up and slamming the receiver against the glass panel again and again until it shattered and she could slit Konrad’s throat with one of the shards.
But now that he was sitting there like a little boy whose favourite toy has been taken away, she felt nothing but a great emptiness tinged with pity.
‘You’re not sorry for having killed all those women?’ she asked, and watched as a tear rolled down his cheek. ‘Not even for having hounded me all my life?’
He shook his head, weeping.
‘And you’re not sorry for having sedated and raped me, before dragging my body out of the hotel? So turning me into a paranoid wreck who stabbed innocent men to death?’
‘No,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m only sorry that I didn’t confess my love for you earlier. Maybe the two of us would have had a chance.’
Emma closed her eyes, wiped her eyelids with back of her hand and hung the receiver back up.
Of course, she thought. He’s sick. I should understand that better than anyone.
She opened her eyes and gave Konrad one final look.
And although she’d never learned how to lipread, nor even ever tried, she was able to read from Konrad’s lips what he was saying to her from behind the pane of glass:
‘Out of love, Emma. I did it all only out of love.’
Ten Years of Sebastian Fitzek
When I was ten years old I was in class 5b at the Wald primary school and as popular as you can only be if you wear the clothes of your brother who’s seven years older, while your haircut (a Mum special) is about a decade out of fashion.
Picture, if you can, a sullen young boy with a big nose, bowl haircut, leather trousers and an aluminium briefcase, who likes to spend all his breaktime in the library. Yes, precisely: I was that classic book nerd who nobody wanted on their dodgeball team apart from as cannon fodder.
And then Ender came.
Ender, a German of Turkish origin, was the biggest thug in the school and had to repeat a year twice. When he first entered the classroom I thought he’d come to pick up his child early from school. But then the coolest of the cool boys was seated right next to me.
Our class teacher probably thought
that the swot (me) might have a positive influence on the problem child (Ender). But of course the reverse happened. Ender changed my life, first and foremost by liking me, which might have been because I helped him out with homework. Believe me, no coercion was involved, nor did I have to surrender my trainers to Ender. On the contrary, from his dad’s sports shop he brought me my first Adidas customisable sneakers and so liberated me from my ugly clodhoppers.
And because he, Mr Popular, became my friend, this rubbed off on the mob that were my classmates, who till then hadn’t even wanted to ignore me.
Ender taught me lots of useful things essential to the daily life of a primary school pupil, such as how to smoke a cigar (although it was a bad idea to try it behind the gym as the sports teacher was jogging past). Later he smuggled his father’s 18-rated videos out of their apartment (Rollerball, Class of 1984, The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and – of course – Escape from New York with Kurt Russell). This might give you an inkling of where my passion for thrillers comes from. To cut a long story short, I have much to thank Ender for and – mate – it’s great to still be friends with you after all these years. Of course I’ll come to visit you next Sunday in prison (just joking).
This is the second time I’m celebrating a ten-year anniversary. And I can rightly say that the last few years have been some of the most intense but also happiest of my life.
I’m often asked what has changed in my life since I became an author. My standard response is: not much. I still drive a Ferrari and sleep in my twenty-room villa in Grunewald. (Here I ought to add a smiley to make it clear that this is a joke too. Preferably one with tears of joy. I’d love to know the last time I laughed quite so much as this overused tears-of-joy smiley, but I’m digressing.)
In truth my life has changed drastically over the past decade, chiefly because I’ve had the privilege of getting to know so many great people I’d never have met had I not become a writer. And first and foremost this means you, dear readers.
I admit that when I published my email address in my debut novel, Therapy, I was utterly naïve. I reckoned on getting a handful of messages. A dozen emails, perhaps, in which readers would point out typos, voice their criticism, or maybe offer some fleeting praise. But how wrong I was! So far I’ve received over 40,000 emails and have been chuffed about each one.
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