There was only one photo of her with Philipp that Emma didn’t hate, and that had been taken by a two-year-old thief.
Around five years ago, on the way to an exhibition of a photographer friend of theirs, they’d taken refuge from a downpour in a tourist trap on Hackescher Markt – a ‘potato restaurant’ with long benches lined up along a sort of trestle table, which they had to share with a good dozen other fugitives from the weather.
Obliged by the waiting staff to order more than just drinks, they opted for potato cakes with apple sauce. It is unlikely that this unspectacular late-April afternoon would have branded itself on her memory if Emma hadn’t found these strange photos on her mobile the next day.
The first four were completely dark. The fifth showed the edge of a table, as did the six that followed, plus the individual responsible for these blurred pictures, starting with just the thumb and ending with the entire person: a blonde girl with sticking-up hair, a semolina-smeared mouth and the sort of diabolic smile that only small children are capable of. She must have stolen the phone without them noticing.
Seven photographs taken without a flash showed bits of Philipp and Emma. On one of them they were even smiling, but the nicest picture was the one in which time seemed to have fled into another room: Emma and Philipp standing side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes while both their forks had spiked the same piece of potato cake. It was as if the image were from a film in which the sound – restaurant guests yelling over one another, children bawling and the noisy clatter of cutlery – breaks off abruptly and the freeze frame is accompanied by a romantic piano melody.
Emma had no idea that she and her husband still exchanged such loving glances, and the fact that this photo had been taken unawares, free from any suspicion that it might have been staged, made it all the more prized in her eyes. For Philipp too, who loved the picture, he thought there was something ‘James Dean’ about his gangly poise, whatever he meant by that.
Earlier, in the time before, Emma looked at the photograph every day at five o’clock, when Philipp called her to say if he’d be back for dinner or not, because she’d selected the image as the contact photo for his number. She kept a copy of the picture in the inner pocket of her favourite handbag, and for a while it had even been the screensaver on her notebook, until a system update inexplicably wiped it from the computer.
Just like my self-confidence, my zest for life. My life.
Sometimes Emma wondered whether the Hairdresser had also given her a system reboot that night in the hotel and restored her emotional hard drive to its factory settings. And clearly she was a dud: defective goods that unfortunately couldn’t be exchanged.
Emma clicked the Outlook icon on the taskbar, the standard screensaver vanished and now she could focus on her unpleasant, but necessary daily task.
Her daily ‘work’ consisted of trawling the internet for the latest reports about the Hairdresser. Philipp had expressly forbidden her to do this after the papers had got hold of the criminal profile he’d drawn up thanks to an indiscretion by the public prosecution department. They’d slugged it out for days. Philipp was worried that the sensational tabloid reports would unsettle Emma even more, and so she had to proceed with caution.
Secretly, like an adulteress.
She surfed in private mode via a search engine that didn’t save browser history. And the folder where she chronologically stored all the reports and information about the case was labelled ‘Diet’ and password protected.
Currently the internet was awash with another flood of speculation because the Hairdresser had struck again the previous week. Again in a five-star Berlin hotel, this time on Potsdamer Platz, and once more a prostitute had been poisoned with an overdose of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Residues of it had been identified in Emma’s blood test too, but the investigating officers didn’t see this as conclusive proof. She was a psychiatrist, which meant that it was easy for her to get hold of this product, which in small doses was a stimulant and often used as a party drug. Even easier than shaving her hair off.
The tabloid articles gave more details about the sexual preferences of Natascha W. (22) than the person who’d lost her life in agonising pain. A study of readers’ comments in internet forums gave the impression that the majority pinned at least some of the blame on the women, for who offered themselves to total strangers for money?
It didn’t occur to most of the commentators that the victims were sentient beings. The Russian woman who’d knocked at Emma’s hotel door that night had more empathy than all of them put together.
It was just bad luck that the investigation team hadn’t been able to find her. But hardly a surprise. What female escort would give their real name to reception or say which room they were booked in? In luxury hotels such ‘girls’ were unavoidable but invisible guests.
Crack.
A log fell from its burning pile in the fireplace, and whereas Samson’s nose didn’t even twitch, Emma jumped in fright.
She glanced out of the window, staring at the fir she decorated as a Christmas tree every year. Its branches were weighed down by the snow.
The sight of nature was one of the few things that calmed her. Emma loved her garden. To be able to get back outside and tend to it was a major impetus to ridding herself of this ridiculous nuisance in her head. At some point she was certain she’d find the strength to go into therapy and let an expert check her self-medication.
At some point, just not today.
In her inbox Emma found what was obviously a spam email threatening to block her bank cards, as well as several news alerts for the keyword ‘hairdresser’, including an article in Bild and one in the Berliner Zeitung, which she opened first. When she established that it didn’t say anything new, she copied it as a PDF in the ‘Hairdresser_THREE_Investigations_NATASCHA’ folder.
In truth she’d taken the place the Hairdresser had earmarked for Emma. Natascha was already number four.
I’m just the woman who doesn’t count.
For each victim Emma had subfolders for ‘Private life’, ‘Professional life’ and ‘Own theories’, but those dedicated to the official investigations were obviously the most important.
Here there was also the Spiegel article about Philipp’s initial profile, which characterised the killer as a psychopathic narcissist. Affluent, cultured and with a high level of education. So in love with himself that he was incapable of forming a firm relationship. Because he believed himself to be perfect, he blamed women for his loneliness. Women who gave men the come-on, but who only wanted one thing from them: money. It was their fault that such a handsome chap like himself couldn’t control his urges. He regarded the act of shaving as a service he was performing for the world of men by making the women ugly.
It was possible that there were other victims, like Emma, who’d ‘only’ had their hair shorn off after the rape. Maybe he didn’t necessarily want to kill his victims, only if he still found them attractive when they were bald.
This idea had led Philipp to the suggestion that the Hairdresser might have worn a night-vision device during his attacks to assess the end results. A supposition that Emma had put in the ‘Theories’ folder, along with the one that the attacker could be repulsed by the sight of blood. But he’d cut Emma while shaving her head. In hospital they’d treated the wound on her forehead and washed away the encrusted blood. This had possibly been the reason for her survival, for the wound and the blood might have disfigured her in such a way that the Hairdresser considered his deed complete.
Philipp was not officially on the case because of his personal involvement, although ‘involvement’ was a polite euphemism for ‘crazed wife with madcap violent fantasies’.
Unofficially, of course, Philipp was tapping all his sources to keep abreast of the investigations. Emma was convinced he wasn’t telling her everything he knew, otherwise she wouldn’t have gasped when she opened the Bild home page.
Jesus Christ!
Emma slapped a hand over her mouth and blinked.
The headline above the photograph consisted of only three words, but these filled two thirds of her monitor:
IS THIS HIM?
The green-tinged colour photo had been taken by a camera in the ceiling of a lift.
From the back right-hand corner a man in a grey hoodie was visible. His face was three quarters covered and the rest could have belonged to pretty much any white adult male wearing jeans and sneakers.
What unnerved Emma wasn’t the sight of the slim, average-height man about to step into the lobby of the hotel where victim number two had lost her life.
But what the man was holding as he left the lift.
‘Here you can see a man who wasn’t registered as a guest leaving the hotel on the night that Lariana F. died,’ the article said. As it was not certain that this man was the killer, they had refrained earlier from publishing the photograph for reasons of data protection. Now, however, they were doing it given the lack of alternatives.
The usual telephone numbers were listed for information relevant to the case, as well as a direct link to the police.
God almighty! Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or is that…?
Emma looked on the desk for a paper bag she could breathe into. When she couldn’t find a bag she considered going into the kitchen to fetch one, but then decided to enlarge the photo first.
Zoom into the hands that were still wearing latex gloves.
Into the fingers.
Into the object they were gripping.
‘The authorities are working on the assumption that this is the Hairdresser making off with his trophies,’ the lurid text continued.
Her hair? In a package.
Emma looked up. Her eyes wandered across the desk, then back to the picture.
A small package wrapped in plain brown paper.
Roughly like the one in front of her. The anonymous package that Salim had given Emma for her neighbour.
A. Palandt.
Whose name she’d never heard before.
Emma felt a small bead of sweat drip from the back of her neck and trickle down her spine, then she heard Samson growl before the alarm sounded in the attic.