5

Six months later

Emma opened her eyes and wondered how long the person opposite had been watching her sleep.

Professor Konrad Luft sat in his usual chair, his hands folded in front of his stomach, and his thoughtful gaze lay on her face with a melancholic heaviness.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked. To begin with she didn’t know what her best friend was getting at, but then she noticed the side table by her bed. On it were the pills she’d been given in the psychiatric clinic, where the judge had committed her to the secure unit.

Just in case.

In case she felt pain as soon as she woke up.

She stretched her limbs beneath the covers and with her elbows tried to shift herself up in the hospital bed. Too weak, she sank back down onto the pillow and rubbed her eyes.

She’d slept throughout the journey there, which was no surprise considering all the pills she’d been given. The side effects alone would knock out the strongest elephant, and on top of that she’d been administered a sedative.

After waking up it took her a while to recognise her surroundings. The room where she’d spent so many hours in the past felt unfamiliar, albeit not as unfamiliar as the secure unit she hadn’t left over the past few weeks.

Maybe the strange feeling was down to the fact that Konrad had recently renovated his office, but Emma doubted it.

It wasn’t the room that had changed so fundamentally, but her.

The smell of paint and freshly oiled walnut parquet still hung in the air, some pieces of furniture had been moved around during the redecoration, but basically everything was as it had been on her first visit almost ten years ago. Then she’d slouched on the sofa in trainers and jeans. Today she was in a nightie on a height-adjustable hospital bed, almost in the middle of the room. At a slight angle, with a view of Konrad’s desk and the window behind.

‘I bet I’m the first client of yours to have been wheeled in here on a hospital bed,’ she said.

Konrad smiled softly. ‘I’ve had some who couldn’t be moved so I went to see them. But in the clinic you refused all contact, Emma. You wouldn’t even speak to the doctors. So I obtained exceptional judicial authorisation.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, although there was no longer anything she could be grateful for in life. Not even the fact that she’d been allowed to leave her cell.

She’d refused to receive Konrad in the institution. Nobody was going to see her like that. So ill and broken. Locked up like an animal. The humiliation would have been too much to bear.

‘You’ve lost nothing of your pride, my dear Emma.’ Konrad shook his head, but there was no disapproval in his eyes. ‘You’d rather go freely to prison than allow me to pay you a visit. And yet now you need my help more than ever.’

Emma nodded.

‘Everything depends on how the conversation with your lawyer goes,’ they’d told her. The psychiatrists and the police officers, who would surely be waiting outside to take her back.

Did Konrad really have the power to alter her fate? Her old confidant, although ‘old’ had to be the wrong description for a sporty, almost athletic man of fifty-eight. Emma had met him in the first semester of her medical studies; his name had sounded strangely familiar. Only later did she recall why. Her father and Konrad Luft were colleagues and had joined forces to work together on cases that Emma had read about in the newspaper.

The case that brought her and Konrad together didn’t make it into the papers, however.

Emma’s ex-boyfriend, Benedict Tannhaus, had drunk one too many and harassed her in a bar near the university. Konrad, who regularly took his evening meal there, saw the guy groping her and actively intervened. Afterwards he’d given Emma his card in case she needed legal assistance, which was indeed the case as her ex turned out to be a persistent stalker.

Emma could have asked her father for help too, of course, but that would have meant swapping one abusive man for another. Although Emma’s father had never got physical with her like Benedict, his temper and uncontrolled fits of rage had become worse over the years and she was glad to have avoided contact with him since having moved into her student house. It was a complete mystery to her how her mother managed to stick it out living with her father.

They became friends during the lengthy process by which Konrad obtained a court order against Benedict. To begin with Emma thought that Konrad’s interest in her was motivated by other things, and in truth she felt considerably attracted by his paternal charm, despite the big difference in age. As he had in the past, Konrad still kept his prominent chin hidden beneath a meticulously trimmed beard and wore a dark-blue, bespoke double-breasted suit with hand-stitched Budapest shoes. His curly hair was a little shorter now, but still hung over his high forehead, and Emma understood perfectly well why this defence lawyer was contacted so often by well-to-do elderly ladies. They could not suspect that although he loved women, they had no place in his erotic fantasies. Konrad’s homosexuality was a secret he’d shared with Emma ever since they became friends.

She hadn’t even told Philipp about Konrad’s sexual preferences, albeit for selfish reasons, as she had to secretly admit. Because of his appearance and his charms Philipp was frequently the subject of female advances that he wasn’t even aware of any more, such as when a sweet waitress would offer him the best table in a restaurant or when he got the friendliest smile in the queue at the supermarket.

This is why it was sometimes good for Emma have her husband react jealously, when Konrad rang yet again to invite her out for brunch. Let Philipp believe that she had admirers too.

Konrad kept his secret to avoid damaging his reputation as a hardcore macho lawyer. He would regularly appear at official functions with pretty law students. ‘Better the eternal bachelor unable to commit than the faggot in the courtroom,’ he’d said to Emma as an explanation for his secrecy.

And thus the adventurous, well-coiffed widows showed their disappointment when Konrad told them that he only took on criminal cases rather than divorces, and within his area of expertise only selected the most spectacular, often hopeless-looking cases.

Like hers.

‘Thanks for helping me out,’ Emma said. A cliché, but she was doing her duty and breaking the silence.

‘Again.’

She was now his client for a second time, following the stalking case. Ever since that night in the hotel, when she became the victim of a madman. A serial killer, who’d lain in wait for three women in hotel rooms, then shaven their heads with an electric razor.

… after having brutally raped them…

The hours Emma spent afterwards in hospital were scarcely better than the rape itself. Barely had she regained full consciousness than her orifices were again being manipulated by a stranger. Once again she felt latex fingers in her vagina and objects for taking swabs as evidence. Worst of all, however, were the questions put to her by a grey-haired policewoman with a poker face.

‘Where were you raped?’

‘In Le Zen. Room 1904.’

‘There is no room with that number at the hotel, Frau Stein.’

‘They told me that there, too, but it’s impossible.’

‘Who checked you in?’

‘Nobody. I was given the key card along with my conference documents.’

‘Did anybody see you in the hotel? Any witnesses?’

‘No, I mean yes. A Russian woman.’

‘Do you know her name?’

‘No.’

‘What’s her room number?’

‘No, she’s a…’

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Okay. Could you describe your attacker?’

‘No, it was dark.’

‘We couldn’t find any defensive wounds.’

‘I was drugged. I expect the blood test will reveal what with. I felt a pricking.’

‘Did the attacker shave your head before or after penetration?’

‘Do you mean before he rammed his dick into my cunt?’

‘Look, I understand how upset you must feel.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Okay, but I’m afraid I have to ask you these questions all the same. Did the attacker use a condom?’

‘Probably, if you say you didn’t find any sperm.’

‘Nor any major vaginal injuries. Do you frequently change sexual partners?’

‘I’m pregnant! Can we please change the subject?’

‘Fine. How did you get to the bus stop?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The bus stop at Wittenbergplatz. Where you were found.’

‘No idea. I must have lost consciousness at some point.’

‘So you don’t know for sure that you were raped?’

‘The madman shaved off my hair. My vagina’s burning as if it had been poked with a cattle prod. WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED TO ME?’

The question of all questions.

Emma recalled how Philipp had brought her home by taxi and laid her on the sofa.

‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ he’d said.

She’d nodded and asked him to fetch a tampon. A large one for heavy flow, right at the back of the bathroom cabinet. Emma had started bleeding in the taxi.

It was the first time they’d cried together.

And the last time they’d spoken about children.

The following day Emma lit a candle for the unborn child. It had long burned out.

Emma coughed into her cupped hand and tried to distract herself from these gloomy memories by letting her gaze wander across Konrad’s office.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves, which housed not only the leather-bound rulings of the Federal Supreme Court, but also Konrad’s favourite works of Schopenhauer, looked slightly lower, probably due to the new coats of paint which made the room appear smaller. And of course the massive desk was in the same place, in front of the almost square windows through which on a clear day you had a view across the Wannsee all the way to Spandau. Today she could see only as far as the promenade on the shore of the lake, along which a handful of pedestrians were struggling through the ankle-deep December snow.

All of a sudden Konrad was beside her bed and Emma felt him gently caress her arm.

‘Let me make you a little more comfortable,’ he said, stroking her head.

She smelled his spicy aftershave and closed her eyes. Even the idea of being touched by a man had triggered a feeling of revulsion in these last few months. But she allowed Konrad to put his arms around her body and carry her to from the bed to the sofa by the fireplace.

‘That’s better,’ he said, as she sank into the soft cushions, half sitting, half lying, and he covered her carefully with a cream cashmere blanket.

And he was right. It was better. She felt secure; everything here was familiar. The seating area opposite with the wingback chair to which Konrad returned. The glass coffee table between them. And of course the circular rug at her feet. Fluffy white threads in a black border that looked like a brushstroke thinning out in a clockwise direction. Seen from above the rug appeared to be a hurriedly drawn ‘O’. How Emma had loved lying on top of this ‘O’ in the past and staring into the gas fire as she daydreamed. How happy she’d felt when they ate sushi together. How safe and secure when they discussed relationship troubles, failures and self-doubt and he gave her the advice she wished all her life she’d had from her father.

Over the years the black threads of the rug had faded slightly and assumed a brownish hue.

Time destroys everything, Emma thought, feeling the warmth of the fire on her face, although the cosy feeling she’d always got when visiting Konrad remained absent.

No wonder – this wasn’t a visit, after all.

More of a meeting essential to her survival.

‘How’s Samson?’

‘Very well,’ Konrad said, and Emma believed him. He’d always had a way with animals. The dog was in the very best hands with him – while she was locked up.

Philipp had given her the snow-white husky with its black-grey mop of frizzy hair soon after that night in the hotel.

‘A sledge dog?’ she’d said in astonishment when he handed her the lead for the first time.

‘He’ll get you out of there,’ Philipp insisted, by which he meant the ‘miserable place’ she was stuck in.

Well, he’d been wrong, and as things looked Samson would have to do without his mistress for quite a while longer.

Maybe for ever.

‘Shall we begin?’ Emma asked, hoping that Konrad would say no, stand up and leave her alone.

Which of course he didn’t.

‘Yes, let’s,’ said the best listener in the world, as a reporter had once described the star lawyer in a newspaper portrait. It was, perhaps, his greatest strength.

There were people who could read between the lines. Konrad could hear between the sentences.

This ability had made him one of the few people Emma could open up to. He knew her past, her secrets and all about her exuberant imagination. She’d told him about Arthur and her psychotherapy, which she believed had liberated her from imaginary friends and other visions. Now she was anything but sure of this.

‘I don’t think I can, Konrad.’

‘You have to.’

Out of a decades-old habit, Emma felt for a strand of hair to twist around her fingers – but her hair was far too short for that.

It had been almost six months ago, but she still couldn’t get used to the idea that her long hair, once so splendid, had disappeared. Even though it had already grown back six centimetres.

Konrad gave her such a penetrating look that she had to avert her eyes.

‘I can’t help you otherwise, Emma. Not after everything that’s happened.’

Not after all the deaths. I know.

Emma sighed and closed her eyes. ‘Where should I begin?’

‘With the worst!’ she heard him say. ‘Take your mind back to where the memories cause the greatest pain.’

A tear fell from her eyes and she opened them again.

She stared out of the window and watched a man taking a mastiff for a walk along the promenade. From a distance it looked as if the large dog was opening its mouth to catch snowflakes on its tongue, but Emma couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she’d rather be out there, with the man holding the mastiff and the snow at their feet, which couldn’t be as cold as the core of her soul.

‘Okay,’ she said, even though there was nothing about what was to follow that would be okay. Nor would it probably ever be, even if she survived the day, which right now she was not counting on.

‘I just don’t know what good it will do. I mean you were there during the interrogation.’

At least during the second session. She’d made her first statement alone, but as the officer’s questions became more sceptical and Emma started to feel more like a suspect than a witness, she’d demanded her lawyer. Unlike Philipp, who’d had to drive through the night to get to her from where he was working in Bavaria, her best friend had been with her at the hospital at half past one.

‘You took me through my statement and you were there when I signed the policewoman’s protocol. You know what the Hairdresser did to me that night.’

The Hairdresser.

How the press had made him sound so harmless. Like calling a man who flayed women a scoundrel.

Konrad shook his head. ‘I’m not talking about the night in the hotel, Emma.’

She blinked nervously. She knew what he would say next and she prayed she was mistaken.

‘You know exactly why you’re here.’

‘No,’ Emma lied.

He wanted to talk about the package, obviously. What else?

‘No,’ she repeated, less vigorously than before.

‘Emma, please. If I’m going to defend you, you have to tell me everything that happened on that day three weeks ago. At your house. Don’t leave anything out.’

Emma closed her eyes, hoping that the sofa cushions would swallow her up forever, as the leaves of a carnivorous plant devour a fly, but unfortunately it didn’t happen.

And because she probably had no other choice, she started to recount her story in a brittle voice.

The story of the package.

And how, with this package, the horror which had begun that night in the hotel knocked at the door of the little house with its wooden fence at the end of the cul-de-sac and found its way inside.