Three weeks earlier
Emma knew that she was at home, in her own bed. She also knew that she’d sunk into a feverish sleep, physically and mentally exhausted by the consciousness of having killed a man after the skirmishes in Palandt’s shed.
So she knew she was dreaming, but that didn’t make it any better.
Emma was crouching in the hotel bathroom, looking up from the tiled floor to the message on the mirror.
GET OUT.
OR I’LL HURT YOU.
There was a knock, but it was Emma herself at the door rather than the Russian woman. She looked like a victim of radiation sickness: a bald head, encrusted in places, interspersed with the odd strands and tufts of hair that remained like forgotten weeds, ready to be plucked out.
But worse than what she could see (the dried blood on her forehead and cheek, the blouse buttoned up wrong, the snot in her nostrils) was what she could not see: an expression on her face, life in her eyes.
That life had been switched off in the darkness of the hotel room. All that remained was the buzzing of the electric shaver in her ears and the pressure in her upper arm at the puncture site, now throbbing like a tooth after drilling.
She slammed the door to number 1904. Ran barefoot to the lifts. But when the lift opened she couldn’t get in. The cabin was almost entirely taken up by an organic waste bin. A monstrosity with a brown lid and a sticker on the front that said ‘EMMA’, the second ‘M’ formed by a bunch of carrots.
Emma heard, no, she felt, a noise emanating from the very bottom of the bin, as if it were several hundred metres deep. Something was carving its way from the depths of this well of horror, something which, once released, would never be able to be caught again.
‘You fucking bitch,’ Anton Palandt howled. ‘I had to do it. I had no other choice. I haven’t got any money! Why can’t anybody understand that? Why can’t you all just leave me in peace?’
Emma stepped closer. Looked into the bin, which was actually a shaft that Palandt was squatting inside. Maggots were crawling from his unmoving eyes. Only his lips were moving. ‘I had to do it. I had no other choice. I haven’t got any money! Why can’t anybody understand that? Why can’t you all just leave me in peace?’
‘But I haven’t got any money!’ he yelled from the shaft, and when the naked, blood-smeared corpse, stinking of decay, leaped into Emma’s face she woke up.
Her heart was ready to burst out of her chest. Everything about her was pulsing: her right eyelid, the artery on her neck, the cut on her forehead.
She felt for the bandage, happy to find it there. It covered a large section of her head, including her hair – she’d retch if she touched that now.
Emma had been given some medication for this too.
Ibuprofen for the pain, Vomex for the nausea and pantoprazole to stop the cocktail from making her stomach churn.
They had been able to patch the cut. Now the only thing that urgently needed stitching back together was her life, which was ripped into several parts when she killed the Hairdresser. Maybe it had been shredded earlier.
The Hairdresser. The Hairdresser. The Hairdresser.
It didn’t matter how many times she repeated this name, he remained a person. A person. A person.
I killed a person.
Emma looked at herself and wouldn’t have been surprised to see her hand chained to the bedframe with a metal clamp.
Philipp had managed to arrange things so that she was allowed to go to bed after giving a short preliminary statement in the living room. Tomorrow morning the interrogation wouldn’t finish so quickly.
Nor, in all likelihood, would it turn out to be so friendly when the coroner’s report was ready.
She had no idea how many times she’d stabbed Palandt, but she knew that it had been too many to count. And that it hadn’t merely been a case of self-defence, but a desire to bring it to an end.
Back in the shed it wasn’t only Palandt she would have killed, but anybody trying to stop her from ridding the world of this danger for good.
Revenge.
There was no other response that felt more important when you were done an injustice. And none that left you feeling guiltier once you’d exacted it.
Emma felt for the light switch and knocked a teacup that Philipp had considerately put beside her bed, its contents now cold. It was just after half past ten. She’d slept for more than an hour.
‘I haven’t got any money,’ Emma whispered with a shake of the head as she put a cushion behind her back so she could sit upright in bed.
Why were these the words she’d taken from her dream?
Emma didn’t believe in dream analysis as a means of psychotherapeutic treatment. Not every vision that appeared at night had a meaning in the cold light of day. It was just that, even out of a dream, these words made little sense.
Why had Palandt said them?
Even if in some points Philipp’s profile analysis didn’t match the reality, for example over the question of wealth, there were still universal, almost indisputable, characteristics that defined a sex offender. They were driven less by lust than power, their motor was impulsivity, and money rarely or never played a role with a serial rapist.
And yet Palandt had uttered these words in a state of great distress and agitation. At a point when he could no longer think, only act instinctively like a trapped animal fighting desperately for its life.
And he chooses this moment to articulate his financial problems?
In her own terror, Emma hadn’t spent a second thinking about her blocked credit card and the fact that she urgently needed to ask Philipp to top up her account again.
Then there was something else, something really bizarre: Palandt was terminally ill and being harassed by strangers. Even if he’d shown himself to be surprisingly strong on occasion, the whole thing really didn’t fit. If the Hairdresser was in such bad physical condition that he couldn’t keep blackmailers at bay, how on earth was he able to rape and kill women?
Emma threw back the duvet.
Someone – Philipp, probably – had changed her into silk pyjama bottoms before putting her to bed. She was wearing sports socks, which was useful because she didn’t now have to hunt for her slippers before going downstairs to talk to Philipp about what was unnerving her – she was worried that the danger posed by the Hairdresser still hadn’t disappeared.
She checked again to see if her bandage was in place and, as she breathed into her hand to see if the smell was as bad as the taste in her mouth, Emma saw the red light.
A small diode on the display of her house phone beside the charging unit.
It showed that the device would soon have to be recharged.
‘I don’t have any money. I’m not going to prison. Never!’ she heard Palandt shouting in her mind, and she couldn’t help thinking of the corpse in the bin, another inconsistency.
The Hairdresser’s other victims had been left at the crime scene.
This gave her an idea.
Emma picked up the phone on the bedside table, deactivated the caller ID function and hoped that Philipp hadn’t reassigned the saved numbers recently.