Three weeks earlier
She stayed quite calm.
Emma had fallen asleep sitting up, her head had slipped to the side and was now resting on the edge of the sofa cushion, tipping the room about forty-five degrees anticlockwise.
The cup on the coffee table, the photo frame on the mantelpiece, the vase with dried flowers in the window – everything appeared to be defying gravity.
Including the man three paces away from her.
For a moment Emma thought she was trapped in a dream and to begin with she was surprised that she could dream with the sleeping pill. Then she was surprised that she was surprised, because normally she tended not to reflect on her state of consciousness while asleep. Eventually she realised that she’d opened her eyes and everything around her was real: the dust on the coffee table, the burned embers in the fire, the dressing gown that she’d soaked through with sweat in her short, but intense sleep. And the man with the chunky winter boots, dripping melting snow onto the floorboards.
The man!
Emma sat up so quickly that she momentarily felt giddy and the world started to spin.
She reached for the switch on the standing lamp and clicked it on. Warm, soft light flooded the living room, which had been in a dusky gloom.
‘Hello,’ the man said, raising his hand.
‘What do you want?’ Emma said, feeling for the scalpel in her pocket. Strangely she was far less frightened than she ought to feel looking at a man who’d entered her house while she was sleeping.
She was agitated, nervous, felt as she might before an exam she hadn’t revised for, but she was far from becoming paralysed with shock or even screaming. Not because she was resigned to her fate, but because the man looked less scary than the first time she’d seen him.
Not an hour ago.
Weeping in his bedroom.
‘Herr Palandt?’ she said, and the intruder nodded silently.
He’d been bald before, but now he was wearing a short, dark-brown wig that had turned black in the sleet.
He was tall, almost Sylvia’s height, and slim, even gaunt. His black raincoat hung over his sunken shoulders like a tarpaulin. It had yellow buttons, which looked curiously fashionable for someone who otherwise didn’t seem to care about his appearance. His cords, which were also far too thin for this weather, were several sizes too big, as if Palandt was having to wear an elder brother’s clothes. Yet he must be at least sixty.
The most striking thing about him were his glasses. Beige, plastic monstrosities with lenses so thick you could hardly make out his eyes behind them. Could he see anything at all without them?
‘What do you want?’ Emma asked again in the hope that Palandt hadn’t recognised her in his bedroom. ‘How did you get in here?’
Emma pushed herself up from the sofa cushions and felt as if she had to apologise, even though it was her neighbour who had intruded into her house, and trespass is a more serious offence than criminal damage, isn’t it?
‘I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t frightened you, but your front door was open.’
The front door?
Emma recalled lying howling on the floor and hearing Sylvia angrily slam the front door. So hard that she’d felt it in the living room.
Maybe it had jumped out of the latch again.
I didn’t check – stupid cow!
Palandt turned away from her and looked over at the desk.
At the package!
Ripped open as if by an impatient child at Christmas, its contents lay scattered amongst polystyrene balls on the desk.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said guiltily, pointing at the package. ‘I’m… well… I’m not in a good way. It was a stupid idea to look through the post after taking a sleeping tablet. I thought the package was for me. Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ Palandt said. His words sounded friendly and warm, but his voice was weak. ‘As I said, it’s me who should apologise.’
Emma unconsciously shook her head, and so Palandt went on: ‘Yes, yes. I should never have just burst in here to pick up my package.’ He put his hand in the back pocket of his cords and pulled out Salim’s card. ‘I knocked, but couldn’t find a bell…’
‘It’s out by the garden gate.’
‘Oh, yes, right. I didn’t go back to the gate once I’d climbed the steps. I’m a bit unsteady on my legs, you see.’ He looked down as if checking that his scrawny legs were still attached to his emaciated body.
‘Anyway, when nobody answered I was worried that this house had been burgled too.’
‘Too?’ Emma asked, and all of a sudden it was there, the fear. Because of course she knew what Palandt was talking about.
‘Oh, I’ve been robbed several times, including today,’ her neighbour said, scratching the back of his head.
‘Today they even came into my bedroom and watched me.’
Emma turned cold. She opened her mouth, intent on posing the questions that an innocent person would ask immediately: ‘Who are you talking about? What did they want from you? Have you called the police?’ But no sound would issue from her lips.
Not when she saw the wig moving on Palandt’s head while he kept on scratching.
He muttered something that sounded like ‘this damned itching…’ and at the same time his monstrous glasses turned into an aquarium of tears.
Palandt had started to cry.