Emma felt the snow coming through the seat of her trousers and her underwear getting soaked, but the air out here was so clear and restorative that wild horses wouldn’t have got her to leave the plastic garden bench Salim had taken her to.
From here she had a view of everything: the shed, its door secured by Salim’s belt; the small window beneath the cheap door lamp, where she expected Palandt’s face to appear at any second. But Salim had reassured Emma that her neighbour wouldn’t be getting up again in a hurry.
‘I knocked that bastard’s lights out!’
She couldn’t see Salim for the moment. He was wandering around the shed for the second time, his boots crunching loudly in the snow.
‘There’s no other way out,’ he said in satisfaction when he came back around the corner. ‘That lunatic is not going to escape.’
Unless he digs himself a tunnel, Emma thought, but the base of the shed was as hard as concrete and the ground beneath it must be frozen solid. All the same, she didn’t feel safe. And this wasn’t just because of the acute pain that she now felt from the cut.
To check the bleeding she was pressing to her forehead the blue microfibre cloth which Salim probably used to clean the inside of his windscreen, because it smelled of glass cleaner, but right now an infection was the least of her worries.
‘Why?’ she asked Salim. In the distance she could hear the rattling of the S-Bahn, which at this time of day would mostly be carrying pleasure-seekers. Young people on their way to Mitte, starting with a few drinks in a bar or going straight to a party.
‘I’ve no idea what got into him. I saw you enter his house with him, Frau Stein, and it looked a bit odd somehow. When you tripped it didn’t look as if you were following him willingly.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Emma said, shaking her head and wondering how long it would take for the police to arrive. Salim had called them on his mobile.
‘Why did you come back? Your shift was over ages ago.’
Your very last shift.
‘What? Oh yes.’ Salim assumed a guilty expression.
‘Because of Samson,’ he said contritely, and it struck her that the vet hadn’t yet got back to her with the laboratory results.
Or had he?
Perhaps there was a message from Dr Plank on her mobile, which was still in Palandt’s hallway, having dropped from her hands a second time during their struggle.
‘I’m not sure, but I think I made a terrible mistake,’ Salim said, breathing out large clouds of condensation.
‘You poisoned Samson!’
To Emma’s astonishment he didn’t object, but asked with concern, ‘So he’s in a bad way?’
Salim scratched his beard and pulled a face suggesting he wanted to slap himself. ‘Listen, Frau Stein, I’m terribly sorry. I think I accidentally gave the poor thing the chocolate bar from my right-hand pocket and not the dog biscuit I always keep on the left.’
Chocolate.
Of course!
Cocoa powder could be fatal for dogs, even in the minutest quantities.
Now that she knew, Emma recognised the typical symptoms of theobromine poisoning: cramps, vomiting, apathy, diarrhoea.
Samson clearly reacted particularly badly to chocolate.
‘I only realised when I was getting changed back home.’
Salim pointed to himself. In place of his postal uniform he was wearing a tight-fitting motorbike outfit – the obligatory Harley jacket, leather trousers and matching steel-capped boots.
‘I didn’t have your phone number and you aren’t in the phone book, so I thought it best to come back in person.’
He pointed to the shed with his tattooed hand.
‘I wasn’t expecting to find something like that.’
Salim essayed a sad smile. ‘I suppose that’s what people mean when they say a blessing in disguise, isn’t it?’ he asked, returning to the shed to check his belt was still securing the door.
At that moment blue lights flickered in the evening sky and danced on the snow in the garden like disco lights.
The police were arriving.
In large numbers but with no sirens.
Three patrol cars and a police van, out of which four officers poured in black combat uniform. They ran up the drive into the garden, towards her, led by an unarmed policeman in civilian clothes, who wasn’t dressed warmly enough – a suit, leather shoes and no trench coat over his jacket.
‘What happened here?’ he asked when he’d got to Emma, and for a moment she couldn’t believe that it was him.
‘Thank you,’ she said, bursting into tears as she got up from the bench and threw her arms around Philipp.