‘Yes?’
‘Sorry for disturb. Everything okay?’
The tall, slim Russian woman in the doorway appeared genuinely concerned. And yet the woman who spoke broken German didn’t look to Emma like the sort of person who worried unnecessarily about her fellow human beings. More like a model aware of how beautiful she was and who regarded herself as the centre of the universe. Dressed in a close-fitting designer suit, drenched in Chanel and perched on sinfully expensive-looking high heels that would have allowed even Emma to gaze down at others.
‘Who are you?’ Emma said, annoyed that she’d opened the door. Now she was standing face to face with a Slav beauty, bare-footed, with soaking wet hair and dressed only in a hastily thrown-on hotel kimono. The material was so fine that every curve of her naked body, which was far less perfect than the Russian woman’s, must be showing beneath it.
‘Sorry. Very thin walls.’
The woman swept one of her blonde extensions from her forehead. ‘Hear scream. Come to look.’
‘You heard a scream?’ Emma said impassively.
In truth, all that she could recall was having felt faint, partly a result of the eerie message on the mirror, but doubtlessly also because the shower had been too hot.
Both these things had well and truly pulled the rug from under her feet.
To begin with, Emma had managed to hold onto the edge of the basin, but then she’d collapsed onto the tiled floor, from where she’d stared at the writing:
GET OUT.
BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
‘Hear crying too,’ the Russian woman said.
‘You must have been mistaken,’ Emma replied, even though it was perfectly possible that her fall had been accompanied by tears. Her eyes were still burning. The message on the mirror had awoken the darkest memories from her childhood.
The cupboard.
The creaking doors, behind which a man lurked in a motorbike helmet.
Arthur.
The ghost who had spent countless nights with her. Again and again. As a monster at first, then as a friend. Until at the age of ten she was finally ‘cured’, even though this concept didn’t actually exist in psychotherapy. After many sessions the child psychiatrist that Emma visited had succeeded in banishing the demon. From both her cupboard and her head. And he’d made her aware who was really responsible for this phantasm.
Papa!
Ever since that course of therapy, which had first stimulated an interest in her current profession, Emma had known that no ghost had ever existed. And no Arthur. Only her father, who she’d spurned and feared throughout her life, but who she’d have dearly loved as a close ally. For her alone. Always there. To call on at any time, even at night in the cupboard.
But Emma’s father had never been a friend. Not in her childhood, not during her studies and certainly not now that she was a married psychiatrist. His work had always been more important. His files, witnesses and cases. Leaving the house too early in the morning, and back too late for supper in the evening. Or not at all.
Although he’d retired a while ago, he only just about managed to send her a card for her birthday. And even that – she would bet – had been dictated by Mama, with whom he now lived in Mallorca. Phrases such as ‘I’m missing you’ or ‘I hope we’ll get to spend more time together this year’ were simply absent from the lexicon of someone as irascible as him. He’d be more likely to write:
‘Get out, right now, or I’ll hurt you.’
And now a similar threat was scrawled across the mirror in her hotel bathroom.
Could this be a coincidence?
Of course!
Before the knock at her door Emma had already found a logical explanation for the incident.
A trick!
The guest who’d occupied the room before her must have scribbled with their greasy fingers on the dry mirror to give the next person a fright. And they’d succeeded.
So well that she’d practically screamed the hotel down. The joker would no doubt have been shocked by the violence of Emma’s reaction, but they couldn’t have imagined that the words on the mirror would have awakened an old trauma.
Back then it wasn’t what her father said that had unnerved her most, but the fact that Arthur had come out of the cupboard for the first time that night. The motorcycle helmet, the needle, his voice… everything had seemed so real.
And sometimes it still did in her memory.
‘You okay?’ the woman asked her, continuing to stare at Emma with a mixture of concern and patience. Then she said something that sounded as kind as it did ghastly, and Emma didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘Client make trouble?’
Oh God.
Of course.
She’s a prostitute.
Which explained why she was dressed up to the nines. Half of the conference were staying at Le Zen; the hotel was full of men on their own in single rooms. How many of them had booked an escort for tonight? Scumbags like Stauder-Mertens, for sure, who would definitely use every opportunity they got when away from their wives and families.
‘Need help? I can…’
‘No, no. It’s very kind of you, but…’
Emma shook her head.
… but I’m not a prostitute. Just a jumpy psychiatrist.
How sweet that the woman wanted to help her. How awful that she seemed to have experience of violent punters. And of beaten-up whores who howl on the floor of hotel bathrooms.
Emma smiled, but she didn’t think it looked sincere. In the woman’s dark eyes she could see that her doubts had not been dispelled, which is why Emma decided to tell her the truth.
‘Don’t worry. I’m alone in my room. But I thought somebody had crept in here and secretly watched me take a shower.’
‘Peeper?’
‘Yes, but it was just a stupid joke by the previous guest.’
‘Okay.’
Although the escort girl still didn’t look convinced, she shrugged and glanced at the Rolex on her wrist. Then she left with her first grammatically correct sentence: ‘Take care nothing happens to you.’ She must have heard this often from colleagues.
Emma thanked her and closed the door. Through the spyhole she saw the woman make her way down the corridor to the right.
The lifts were in the opposite direction, which meant her ‘appointment’ must be almost at hand.
Her heart pounding, Emma secured the door with all the available locks and levers. Only then did she realise how exhausted she was. First the lecture, then the mirror and now the conversation with the Russian prostitute. She longed to relax. To be able to sleep.
Especially in Philipp’s arms.
Why couldn’t he be here with her now, so they could joke together about this absurd situation?
Emma briefly toyed with the idea of calling her best friends – Sylvie or Konrad – as a bit of distraction, but she knew that both of them were on a date. Not with each other, of course, as Konrad was gay.
And even if she could get through to either of them, what would she say? ‘Sorry, but I’m slightly anxious because my mirror’s steamed up’?
Was steamed up, she discovered when she went back into the bathroom to clean her teeth.
The steam had vanished, likewise the joke message.
As if it had never existed.