In Emma’s mind the men in black skiing masks positioned themselves one behind the other in front of the door to the shed.
Four men, all with their weapons drawn.
The shortest, a compact body-builder type (so far as one could make out beneath his uniform), probably stood at the front and had already cut through the belt with his combat knife. His hand was on the doorknob, ready to open it for the three others.
Philipp must be standing somewhere away from the shed, out of her angle of vision through the window. What luck that he’d come back to Berlin early. He’d been worried when Jorgo had told him that she’d simply hung up during her last call. After that she hadn’t been reachable again. When Philipp called her on the mobile that was in Palandt’s hands, he was going to tell her that he’d be back in ten minutes.
Now he was here for when the officer in charge gave the order to storm the shed.
As she knew from films, the men behind would enter shouting loudly and their guns cocked. And the torches screwed to the barrels would light up every corner of the shed.
‘Good God,’ Emma heard Philipp exclaim in her head as he saw the tipped-over container with the corpse. Or Palandt lying in a pool of blood because Salim might have smashed his head in. All this, however, was nothing but conjecture.
Emma saw, heard and felt it in her mind only. She sat forty metres away from the action on an ambulance stretcher that had parked outside Palandt’s carport.
‘That’s going to need stitching up,’ said a young paramedic or doctor (Emma hadn’t been listening when he introduced himself), who resembled a younger Boris Becker: tall, well built and with a mop of strawberry-blonde hair. He’d wiped the blood from her face and treated the wound with a disinfectant spray and a flesh-coloured head bandage. When he was finished she heard an aggressive struggle coming from the garden. No words, only screams.
‘What’s going on?’ Emma asked loudly enough that Salim, who’d been waiting by the ambulance steps could hear her.
‘It’s happening,’ he told her, although surely that could only be a guess.
A uniformed officer ensured that no unauthorised persons could gain entry to the property. But as far as Emma could make out from the open doors of the ambulance no onlookers had dared come outside anyway, perhaps because neighbours were intimidated by the host of flashing police vehicles blocking Teufelssee-Allee. Also, perhaps, because it was snowing more heavily than before and you could barely see a thing.
Emma sat alone with Salim in the ambulance because the Becker paramedic had gone into the driver’s cab to write his report, then Philipp turned up.
‘Nothing!’ he said, his head poking through the door.
‘Nothing?’ She got up from the stretcher.
‘Body parts, yes. But no neighbour.’
‘What are you saying?’
That was impossible.
Turning to Salim, Philipp said, ‘So you knocked Herr Palandt to the floor and tied him up?’
The delivery man shook his head. ‘I didn’t tie him up. But he was unconscious.’
‘Herr Stein?’
A policewoman appeared behind Philipp and said that the officer in charge urgently needed a word with him.
‘Stay where you are,’ he said, but of course Emma wasn’t going to sit in the ambulance any more.
She followed him for a few steps of the way before the policewoman blocked her path and Emma shouted, ‘Please let me through!’
I’ve got to see it. The empty shed.
Only the fact that Salim had seen him too prevented her from thinking that she’d lost her mind altogether.
‘I want to go to my husband. I’m a witness!’
Philipp turned back to her. He was about to call out ‘Emma’ in that tone with which parents reprimand their naughty children, but then just shrugged and in response to an invisible signal the policewoman let Emma through.
‘Maybe you really can help us,’ he said, although half his words were swallowed by the strong wind that was making the snow fly around in places.
Philipp stepped into the open shed, where someone had found the light switch.
Besides him there was only one other officer in there, presumably the commander of the operation. His ski mask was over his nose and he waited for the newcomers with an expression that appeared to say, ‘Look here, you wimps. I’m standing with my boots in the middle of this corpse liquid, but I can cope with the stink.’
‘You should take a look at this,’ he told Philipp.
‘There are more body parts here.’
Philipp turned around to Emma. ‘You’d better stay outside,’ he advised.
As if she hadn’t already left enough traces in the shed, but what the hell? I’ll stand in the doorway.
Outside the stench of putrefaction was easier to bear.
From the door Emma watched her husband step over the severed lower leg, trying his best to avoid stepping in the rotting puddle beside the overturned organic waste bin, where the rest of the naked female corpse lay.
Squashed like offal.
Despite her disgust, Emma couldn’t help studying the body of the woman who’d gone through what she’d been spared.
That could have been me lying there instead of you, she thought, mourning this unknown creature whose name would doubtlessly be on the front page of every newspaper very soon. Together with her own, which the press would no doubt be interested in too.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Philipp cursed in the back right-hand corner of the shed.
He’d taken a glance inside the cushion box, its lid positioned in such a way that Emma was unable to glimpse its contents. If her husband’s face was turning green, what he was looking at must be even more repulsive than the female corpse on the floor.
‘Are there any more crates here?’ Philipp said breathily to the officer in charge. ‘Storage for more corpses?’
The officer shook his head. ‘And no place where the lunatic could hide either. We’ve searched everything.’ Emma’s legs were shaking. The sense of déjà vu was unavoidable.
A room with a secret.
‘There’s nobody here.’
That’s impossible.
‘He was with the circus,’ Emma heard herself say. In a monotone, almost a whisper.
‘What was that?’
The two men turned to her.
‘His speciality was the suitcase routine.’
Philipp looked at her as if she’d started speaking a foreign language.
‘What are you trying to say?’
That he can make himself so small that he can fit in hand luggage.
‘Is it dressed?’ she asked uneasily, but Emma already knew the answer. Of course. There was no other explanation.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The corpse, for God’s sake. In the cushion box.’ She was almost screaming now. ‘IS IT DRESSED?’
Because that was the only thing which made sense.
They haven’t found any new body parts.
But Daddy Longlegs.
Palandt, who’s made himself small and will leap out of the box at any moment…
‘No, it’s not,’ Philipp said very calmly, his words like a needle pricking the bubble of her worst fears.
‘There are severed body parts. A torso. A head, a whole leg. Naked. Full of maggots!’
And then he said something that changed everything. ‘But there are clothes here, beside the crate.’
The commanding officer bent down and lifted a coat with the barrel of his rifle.
A black raincoat with yellow buttons.
So Palandt had got undressed! Why?
At that moment Emma hadn’t yet solved the puzzle.
Not even when her gaze fell for at least the tenth time on the waste bin with the sticker, the carrot that served as the ‘I’ in ORGANIC.
Only when she kneeled by the overturned container and blocked out the stench did the cogs of realisation all click into place, because Emma did the only logical thing and focused solely on the breathing.
Not her own.
But the corpse’s.
First its chest moved. Then the entire naked body.
As quickly as only a man could who’d once been known as Daddy Longlegs and who now, despite his illness, shot from his hiding place in the waste bin like a bullet.
‘He’s alive!’ Emma was just able to say before all hell was let loose.