Three weeks earlier
The screw pierced Emma’s eardrum and threaded straight into her brain. She didn’t know who had switched on the acoustic drill that was puncturing her fear centre. Who it was ringing at her door so early in the morning and throwing her into a panic.
Emma had never regarded her house in Teufelssee-Allee as anything special, even if it was the only detached house in the neighbourhood, the rest of the Heerstrasse Estate consisting of charming 1920s semi-detached properties. And until Philipp turned it into a fortress over the past few weeks, for almost an entire century their small house had been unremarkable, save the fact that you could walk around it without setting a foot on somebody else’s land. Very much to the delight of the local children, who on warm summer days used to hold races across their garden. Through the open wooden gate, anticlockwise along the narrow gravel path past the vegetable patch, a sharp left around the veranda, left again beneath the study window and through the overgrown front garden back into the street, where the winner had to tap the old gas lantern and shout, ‘First’.
Used to.
In the time before.
Before the Hairdresser.
Now the wooden fence had been replaced by massive grey-green metal struts anchored into the ground and supposedly secure against wild boar, although wild boar were the last things Emma was afraid of.
Her good friend Sylvia thought she was utterly terrified of the man who’d done those dreadful things to her that night in the hotel. But she was wrong. Sure, Emma was afraid that the guy might come back and pick up where he’d left off.
But she was even more afraid of herself than of him.
As a psychiatrist Emma was well aware of the symptoms of severe paranoia. Ironically she’d done her PhD on this subject and it was one of her specialist areas, besides pseudology: pathological lying. She’d treated many patients who got lost in their delusions. She knew how their story ended.
And even worse: she knew how their story began.
Like mine.
The shrill ringing still in her ears, Emma crept to the front door together with Samson, who’d been wrenched from his sleep by the doorbell. It felt as if she’d never get there.
Emma’s heart was running a marathon. Her legs were virtually marking time.
A visitor? At this hour? Right now, when Philipp has left?
Samson pushed his nose into the back of her knees, as if encouraging her to go on and saying, ‘Come on, it’s not that hard.’
He wasn’t growling or baring his teeth, as he usually did when a stranger was at the door.
Which meant she probably wasn’t in danger.
Or was she?
Emma just wanted to burst into tears right here in the hallway. Crying – her favourite pastime at the moment. For the last 158 days, 12 hours and 14 minutes.
Since my new haircut.
She felt the hair above her forehead. Felt how much the strands had grown back. She’d already done that twenty times today. In the past hour.
Emma stepped up to the heavy oak door and opened the tiny curtain across the palm-sized pane of glass set into the wood at head height.
According to the land registry, Teufelssee-Allee was in the Westend district, but compared to the villas this posh areas was famous for, her little house looked more like a dog kennel with steps.
It was at the apex of the turning circle of a cobbled cul-de-sac, which was difficult for large cars to navigate and practically impossible for small lorries. From a distance the house blended in well with the neighbourhood, with its light, coarse render, the old-fashioned wooden windows, a clay-coloured tiled roof and the obligatory reddish-brown clinker steps leading up to the front door, through which she was spying.
Apart from the fence, the most recent modifications were not visible from outside: the glass-break sensors, the radio-controlled locking system, the motion detectors in the ceilings or the panic button in the wall connected to the emergency services, which Emma had her hand on right now.
Better safe than sorry.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and a miserable day – the grey, impenetrable cloud seemed almost close enough to touch – but it wasn’t raining (it was probably too cold), nor was it snowing as it had done almost uninterruptedly for the past few days, so Emma could clearly make out the man at the gate.
From afar he looked like a Turkish rocker: dark skin, clean-shaven head, ZZ Top beard and silver, coin-sized metal rings that filled the earlobes of his 120-kilo hulk like alloy wheels would a tyre. The man wore blue-and-yellow gloves, but Emma knew that each finger inside them was tattooed with a different letter.
It’s not him! Thank God! she thought, a massive weight falling from her soul. Samson stood beside her, his ears pricked in anticipation. She gave him the sign to make room.
Emma pressed the button to open the gate and waited.
Sandwiched between Teufelsberg in the north, several sports grounds and schools in the west, the AVUS Circuit in the south and the S-Bahn and federal railway tracks in the east, the Heerstrasse Estate was home to around 150 mainly middle-class families. A rural community in the middle of the metropolis, with all the advantages and disadvantages of living in a village, such as the fact that everybody knew everybody else by name and what they were up to.
Even the delivery man.