Just as an alcoholic knows what they’re doing when they lift the glass for their first sip, so Emma knew what she was doing when she untied the string around the package. She was embarking on the most dangerous leg of her self-destructive journey, deep into the slums of her pointless existence.
One of the first things she had learned in her psychiatry lectures was the meaning of the word ‘paranoia’, which comes from the Greek and is best translated as ‘contrary to all reason’. Which was exactly how she was behaving at the moment: contrary to all reason. She was even committing a crime, although violating the law on the privacy of correspondence was the least of her worries. She was far more afraid of herself. What if everyone else was right? The police psychologist who’d claimed Emma had invented the rape to get attention. Jorgo who’d sworn he’d never given her a note.
But the package had turned up again.
Emma was sure that it contained the key to solving all the puzzling events of the last few hours, if not weeks.
But how many people had she met with a completely distorted sense of reality? How many patients had she treated, lost souls who did nothing all day long apart from mentally twisting their observations and experiences until eventually they could serve as proof for the most malicious conspiracy and persecution theories? Had she changed sides? Was she now doing the same?
Emma knew that you could see things differently. That although she’d discovered a number of ‘discrepancies’ in the past few hours, she hadn’t found an ounce of proof to suggest that this package was connected with what had been done to her. Even so, she cut her thumb on the edge of the paper as she tore it open.
She yanked the flaps apart, virtually breaking the package open, and with her right hand burrowed amongst the polystyrene balls that protected the contents during transit. Emma excavated boxes about the size of tablet packets with foreign writing on the top:
MOPФEЙ N60 TAБЛ.
There were at least ten packets, white cardboard with a sky-blue stripe, and Emma opened one of them.
Medicines after all.
Tear-sized, ochre pills in a transparent strip.
But what sort?
Emma had learned English and Latin at school, but no Russian. She picked up the open box again.
МОРФИЙ N60 TAБЛ.
Some of the writing was a reference to the dosage of the pills, she could work that out, but not the brand name or what it contained.
Emma found an instruction leaflet, squashed rather unprofessionally into the box. She unfolded it and the Cyrillic characters reminded her of the medicines on Palandt’s bedside table. She rummaged further in the polystyrene balls and came across something that curiously didn’t cause her to scream, even though she found herself holding a deadly weapon.
A plastic-handled scalpel.
Emma only gasped when she undid the already torn cellophane wrapping to expose a coloured blade.
Is that blood?
Struck by the surreal feeling that someone behind Emma was stretching out their hand towards her, she turned around, but nobody was there. Not even Samson, who she wished was here right now.
She pushed the knife aside in disgust and kept searching through the package.
Emma found a brown bottle, its label without a logo or anything printed on it, just some handwriting:
ГАММА-ГИДРОКСИМАСЛАЯНЯ КИСЛОТА
Emma rubbed her eyes and had to force herself not to close them for more than a moment. She felt like a car driver trying to avoid a microsleep.
I ought to pull over and take a break. Good idea.
She longed for her sofa (oh yes, just a little lie down, wouldn’t that be lovely?), but that was out of the question. What if Palandt comes to pick up his package?
Emma picked up the scalpel with the smeared blade and put it in her dressing gown pocket.
Despite the weapon she felt totally defenceless, for quite apart from the fact that she was hardly in a fit state to handle a blade should it come to that, the scalpel would be useless against the most terrifying of all enemies.
The demons corroding my mind.
What if she had a rest and the package had disappeared again once she’d slept off the diazepam?
Emma toyed with the idea of taking photographic proof of the medicine packets scattered across her table, but with what?
Her mobile was at A. Palandt’s house, where the brutal foreign visitors sounded as if they’d be able to read these hieroglyphics that Emma couldn’t decipher… Hang on…
She looked at her laptop.
… the computer can!
She opened her notebook, went to the country settings and put a tick next to ‘Russia’.
That was quick.
It took her considerably longer to find the right characters on her keyboard. She could only proceed using trial and error, so it was some time before she’d managed to type МОРФИЙ N60 TAБЛ and ГАММА-ГИДРОКСИМАСЛАЯНЯ КИСЛОТА into Google Translate.
When she saw the results in the right-hand box she wished she’d never done it:
Morphine & gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.
Every child knew the first of these, every doctor the second.
GHB. A liquid anaesthetic that in higher doses made patients not only limp and defenceless, but also impaired their memory. Sadly the drug had gained notoriety in the press as the ‘date-rape drug’ after numerous rapists had secretly mixed it into their victims’ drinks.
Emma panted, gasping for air.
The package contained the drug that the Hairdresser had used on all his victims.
There was a shimmer before her eyes, as if she were staring at the hot tarmac of a road in high summer.
She’d reached the point where this solo effort at research had to stop. Strictly speaking, she’d crossed that point some time ago. Terribly lonely, utterly shattered and with an almost painful feebleness, Emma stood up from the desk, dragged herself over to the sofa and sank exhausted into the cushions.
She thought about the package and its contents, which she’d hoped would dispel her morbid suspicions, only to achieve the opposite.
She thought about A. Palandt who, threatened by thugs, wept silently in the darkness of his bedroom, and about Philipp, who’d left her on her own with her inner emptiness and who she couldn’t get in touch with now.
Not because her mobile phone was lying next to Palandt’s wig stand in the hallway, because she had her landline. Nor because she was afraid of his anger when he found out that she’d already committed three crimes today: trespass, violation of correspondence privacy and wilful damage to a package.
No, there was a very simple reason why Emma couldn’t phone her husband – her eyes were closing.
The last thing she saw of her surroundings was a shadow moving a few metres to her right at the door to the living room. A shadow that seemed to be in the form of a dark, male figure. Although Emma was deeply troubled by the apparition, it couldn’t keep her awake. With every step he came closer, Emma slid further from consciousness. Even the shuffling sound of his boots couldn’t stop her from drifting into a dreamless sleep.