Three weeks later
‘Seventeen stab wounds.’
Konrad opened the murder squad’s investigation report and put it on his lap. To get a better understanding of her testimony he’d fetched the file from his desk after giving Emma a glass of water.
‘Three in the eye. Most in the neck and larynx, only two on the forehead and one – the last one – in the left ear.’
Emma shrugged. ‘Self-defence.’
‘Hmm.’
Konrad looked at the file as if it were a restaurant menu on which he couldn’t find anything he fancied.
‘Self-defence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Emma, he was incapacitated after the first cut, when you severed his carotid artery.’
‘But still…’
‘But still it escalated into a bloodthirsty attack. With the utility knife…’
Looking up from the documents he frowned. ‘How did you get hold of that again?’
Till now Emma had been staring impassively out of the window to study the dark, low-hanging bank of cloud above the Wannsee, its grey-black seemingly reflective of her emotional state, although at least it wasn’t snowing – for the time being. They had now been talking for three hours, but unlike her Konrad didn’t display the slightest signs of tiredness. And he seemed to have a concrete bladder. She really wanted to go to the loo, but couldn’t summon the energy even for that.
Over the last few weeks she’d learned bitterly how depressives have to suffer when their illness is misconstrued by those who don’t know such intensive sadness. In truth, you were in such a deep psychological hole that you weren’t even able to pull the proverbial blanket over your head. This was a reason for the high suicide rate when depressives took medication for the first time to relieve their symptoms. Rather than a new lease of life, all it gave them was the strength to finally end it.
‘The knife was still on the floor,’ she said in response to Konrad’s question. ‘Not long before, he’d tried to kill me with it, remember?’
‘Yes. But excuse me for pointing out that, as the law sees it, this attack was definitively over. It had occurred a quarter of an hour before. Your wound had already been treated.’
‘And what about when he leaped out of the waste bin smeared in blood. How does “the law see that”?’ Emma said, making quotation marks with her fingers.
‘As an escape.’ Konrad moved the tips of his manicured fingers towards his mouth and tapped his lips with both index fingers.
‘Escape?’
‘He was naked and unarmed. He didn’t pose any danger. That’s how the public prosecutor will see it at any rate, especially as there was an armed policeman close by.’
‘Who didn’t shoot!’
‘Because he couldn’t. You and Palandt were like a ball on the ground. The risk of hitting you was far too great. Anyway the danger at that moment wasn’t from him, but you…’
‘Huh!’ Emma snorted. ‘That’s absurd. A sick man dismembers a woman and stuffs her into a bin, gets undressed, stores the body parts in a cushion box so he can disguise himself as a naked corpse. Finally this guy, who’d kicked, punched and practically scalped me, leaps out from his hiding place – and now I’m the one in the dock?’
Konrad’s answer was laconic and thus doubly painful. ‘Seventeen stab wounds,’ was all he said. ‘You were crazed. Both men together, your husband and the commanding officer, had great difficulty peeling you away from Palandt. You were stabbing with such fury that you even cut them.’
‘Because I was beside myself with fear.’
‘Excessive self-defence. Not particularly rare, but unfortunately no justification. At best an excuse, which’ – now it was Konrad’s turn to make quotation marks with his fingers – ‘“as the law sees it” is unfortunately a weaker argument for the defence than a real emergency.’
The pressure increased behind Emma’s eyes, which felt like the harbinger of a flood of tears.
‘I’m in real trouble, aren’t I?’
Konrad did not oblige her by shaking his head.
‘But how could I have known what it all really meant?’
Her eyes were aching more painfully. Emma wiped invisible tears from her cheeks; she hadn’t started crying yet.
Not yet.
‘You were mistaken. That’s human too, Emma. Many of us in that situation would have drawn the wrong conclusions and regarded Palandt as a criminal.’
Konrad closed the file and leaned forwards. ‘In truth he didn’t mean you any harm. Not to start with at least. And that’s why, I’m afraid, it makes my job of defending you so tricky.’
She couldn’t withstand his penetrating look. Nor could she gaze into the flames of the fire, which were higher again now and felt like they were burning her face. But perhaps it was just the shame of realisation.
‘What happened next?’ Konrad asked calmly. The best listener in the world had put on his poker face again.
‘You mean how did I find out that I’d been wrong about Palandt?’ Sighing, Emma picked up the water glass and moistened her lips. ‘If only that had been my worst mistake that evening.’ She glanced briefly again at the lake, then closed her eyes.
Emma found it easier to talk about her darkest moments if she shut out the light and the world within it.