sorry, had to go.
take care!
A tiny Post-it note with little space, which was why Salim had written his farewell note in small letters.
With clammy fingers Emma removed the yellow sticker from the wooden frame of her front door and screwed up her eyes. It had started snowing again. At the other end of the street, just before the junction, children were playing ‘It’ between the parked cars, but there was no sign of the delivery man or his yellow van.
How long was I out of it?
Emma checked her watch: 11.13.
So she’d been unconscious for almost a quarter of an hour.
During which the front door had been open.
Not wide open, just a few centimetres, but still.
She shuddered.
What now? What should I do?
Samson was rubbing up against her legs like a cat. It was probably his way of saying it was bloody cold, so she finally went to shut the door.
Emma had to brace herself against it, for all of a sudden a violent gust of wind blew straight at the house, howling and hurling a few snowflakes into the hallway before the lock clicked and the room fell silent.
She looked to her left, where the mirror that had been left in the wall unit would have shown her red cheeks had it not been covered in packing paper.
It would have probably been fogged up by her breath too.
With writing on it?
Emma was briefly tempted to rip the paper from the mirror to check for hidden messages. But she’d done this so often and never found any writing on the glass. No ‘I’m back’ or ‘Your end is nigh’. And Philipp had never complained about having to repaper the mirror.
‘I’m sorry,’ Emma told herself, unsure what she was referring to. The conversations she had with herself, which ran into the dozens per day, were making less and less sense.
Was she sorry that she’d abandoned Salim without giving him a tip? That she was causing Philipp all this trouble? Ignoring his suggestions, avoiding being intimate with him and having refused him her body for months now? Or was she sorry that she was letting herself go? As a psychiatrist she knew, of course, that paranoia wasn’t an illness but a weakness, for which you needed therapy. If you’ve got the strength for it. And that the overreactions were a symptom of this suffering, which wouldn’t go away of its own accord, just because she ‘got a grip on herself’. Those who weren’t afflicted were often suspicious of the mentally ill. They would wonder, for example, how a world-famous actor or artist who ‘had it all’ could possibly commit suicide, in spite of their fame, wealth and endless ‘friends’. But these people knew nothing of the demons that would embed themselves, particularly into sensitive souls, then at the moment of that person’s greatest happiness whisper into their ear and reel off their shortcomings. Psychologically healthy people would tell depressives to stop being so miserable all the time, and urge paranoid individuals like her to stop making such a fuss and checking the front door every time the beams creaked. But that was a bit like asking a man with a broken shin bone to run the marathon.
What now?
Unsure, she looked at the post by her feet, which Salim had delivered. The narrow, white packet of contact lenses could stay in the hallway for the time being, as could her medicines and the slightly larger box with the gloves. The food had to be put into the fridge, but at the moment Emma felt too weak to drag the crate into the kitchen.
I can’t be afraid and carry stuff at the same time.
At her ankles, Samson shook himself and Emma wished she could do the same, simply shake her entire body and cast off everything that was currently bearing down on her.
‘You would have barked, wouldn’t you?’ she asked him. Samson pricked up his ears and put his head to one side.
Of course he would have.
Samson was so attached to his mistress that he growled whenever a stranger approached the house. Never in his life would he allow an intruder to enter.
Or would he?
Although she was paralysed by the thought that she couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure she was alone in the house, she could hardly call Philipp and ask him to come back for no reason at all.
Or was there a reason?
She had an idea.
‘Don’t move!’ she ordered Samson, and opened the fitted cupboard by the front door, which housed the small white box that controlled the alarm system. The digits on the control panel lit up as soon as her hand moved close.
1 – 3 – 0 – 1
The date they met. At Sylvia’s birthday party.
The alarm was programmed to call Emma’s mobile at the sign of a break-in. If she wasn’t available or didn’t give the correct code word (Rosenhan), a police patrol would be dispatched immediately.
Emma pressed a pictogram showing an empty house, thereby activating all motion detectors. With a second button (G) she switched the ground-floor sensors back off.
‘Now we can move around,’ she said. ‘But we’re staying downstairs, do you hear me?’ If anyone entered unauthorised, she’d hear as soon as they moved upstairs or in the basement.
It was highly unlikely that anyone was hiding on the ground floor. There were no curtains in the living room, no large cupboards, chests or other hiding places. The sofa was right up against the wall, which itself had no nooks and crannies.
But better to be safe than sorry.
Emma took her mobile from the pocket of her dressing gown, opened her list of favourites and pressed her thumb on Philipp’s name, so she could contact him in an emergency. She was about to go back into the living room with Samson, but had to turn around again because she was no longer certain if she’d turned the key twice.
Once she’d had another check and again resisted the impulse to look in the mirror, she followed Samson who’d already pattered noisily back to his sleeping blanket beside the fire.
I really ought to get his claws cut, she thought, but not out of concern for the parquet, which was tatty anyway and urgently needed a good polish as soon as she could cope with people in the house again.
In another life, perhaps.
She was ashamed that he got so little exercise. This morning a mere quarter of an hour, when Philipp had taken him once around the block before leaving for the conference. Emma herself always let him out on his own in the garden, where he did his business like a good dog at the rhododendron beside the tool shed, while she waited behind the locked door for him to come back.
The fact that the dog was behaving so peacefully was a sure sign that they were alone, at least here downstairs. A mere fly would get Samson worked up and he’d start wagging his tail excitedly. He was so fixated on Emma that even in Philipp’s presence he never relaxed completely. She was never far from Samson, which meant that her husband automatically assumed the role of a guest who was watched affectionately, but without a break.
Emma sat at the desk, its drawer still open. She managed to stuff back in the flyer that had triggered her memory, without looking at the razor advertisement again. Then she decided to break from her usual routine and take a closer look at the package before embarking on her ‘work’.
Taking it in both hands she turned it around. It couldn’t weigh more than three bars of chocolate, perhaps less, which probably made it a parcel, although Emma wasn’t an expert in these matters. As far as she was concerned, anything in a solid container and larger than a shoebox was a package.
She shook it beside her head as a barman might a cocktail mixer, but she couldn’t hear anything. No ticking, no humming, nothing that suggested an electrical item or (God forbid) a creature. All she could feel was that something light was moving inside. Sliding back and forth. It didn’t seem particularly fragile, although she couldn’t say this with any certainty.
Emma even gave the package a sniff, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. No pungent, acrid smell of some caustic chemical or maybe a poison. Nothing that pointed to anything dangerous inside.
Apart from the fact that Emma found its mere existence threatening, it appeared to be a perfectly normal package, of the sort that is delivered in Germany every day by the tens of thousands.
You could get that packing paper in any stationer’s or at the post office, if you could still find one open. In the time before, Emma remembered, they were closing at an alarming rate.
The string tied around the package looked exactly like the stuff she used to make things out of as a child: grey, coarse strands.
Emma studied the sticker on the front, which gave A. Palandt as the addressee, but oddly the box for the sender’s details was empty. No company or private address.
It must have been dispatched via an automated Packstation, the only way of sending packages anonymously, something Emma had discovered this last Christmas when wanting to send her mother a package without her immediately realising who it was from. All the same Emma had entered an invented name (Father Christmas, 24 Santa Street, North Pole). On this package, however, the address box was completely empty, which nearly unnerved her more than the fact that she didn’t know of a neighbour by the name of Palandt.
She put the package aside again, almost in disgust, pushing it well away from her to the far end of the desk.
‘Do you really not want to keep me company?’ Emma said, turning back to Samson. In all her hours of loneliness she’d become used to talking to him as if he were a small child carefully watching whatever she did during the day. Today, however, he seemed peculiarly sleepy, having snuggled up so peacefully next to the fire rather than at her feet beneath the desk.
‘Oh well,’ Emma sighed when he continued to make no reaction. ‘The main thing is you don’t snitch on me. You know I promised Philipp I wouldn’t.’
But today of all days she couldn’t help herself. No matter how angry he’d get if he found out.
She simply had to do it.
Feeling as if she were betraying her husband, she flipped open her laptop and began her ‘work’.