She recognised it straight away, even though Emma had never heard this voice sound so unfamiliar before.
Muffled, choking with gurgling in the background.
‘Sylvia?’ she said, and her friend started to sob by way of an answer. ‘What’s wrong?’ Emma asked. ‘Are you hurt? How can I help you?’
And why are you calling from Jorgo’s phone?
‘I… I’m dying,’ Sylvia slurred. The panic and terror were still in her voice, but the force of her initial scream had dissipated.
‘No, you’re not. Do you hear me? You’re not dying. I’ll fetch help and everything will be alright.’
‘No. Never… alright… again!’
Emma could virtually hear Sylvia drifting away. The more tightly she pressed the phone against her ear, the quieter it sounded.
In her mind she saw her friend with a utility knife in her neck, sitting in a pool of blood she’d coughed up in a torrent. Sylvia was no longer speaking now, just coughing and gasping, no matter how loudly Emma implored her to say what on earth had happened.
‘Where are you?’
Now Emma screamed, because this question could apply to both Sylvia and Philipp, whose help she desperately needed.
Emma hurried through the living room, the mobile still at her ear. She saw Philipp’s keys on the chest of drawers, his jacket hanging on the rack, so he couldn’t be out. Anyway he’d never leave the house without his mobile, but he had left it in the living room, which he only does when…
‘Sylvia, are you still there?’ Emma said into the phone, and a cold silence washed back.
… he goes down to his laboratory…
Emma looked at the old cellar door. The light from the cellar stairs seeped into the hallway through a large gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.
… where his mobile doesn’t get any reception!
‘Sylvia, stay on the line. I can’t take you down into the cellar, do you understand? The connection will go, but I’ll be right back. Don’t hang up!’
No reaction.
Emma briefly wondered whether it would be smarter to cut Sylvia off and call the police, but what if her friend wasn’t at home? The telephone connection might be the only way of pinpointing her location.
She put the mobile on the chest of drawers, yanked open the cellar door and yelled as she went down the concrete steps, ‘Philipp? Quick. You’ve got to help me. Philipp?’
The ceiling in the cellar was so low that the seller had agreed to knock some money off the price when he saw that even Emma had to duck as they looked around.
After moving in they cladded the ceiling on the stairs with wood, which meant there was even less room now. Stooped, Emma hurried downstairs, taking the sharp turn to the right and then straight on to the ‘laboratory’.
They’d originally earmarked the area as storage for the vacuum cleaner, broom and mop, but then Philipp replaced the old linen curtain with a folding door and made himself a little office behind it. Inside were a tiny desk with a laptop connected to the internet, two metal shelves on the wall, completely cluttered with specialist literature and all manner of stackable hard plastic boxes containing magnifying glasses, tweezers, microscopes and other utensils. These he used for examining photographs and analysing signatures or other evidence essential to his work as a profiler.
Down here in his ‘cave’, cut off from the rest of the world, Philipp was best able to concentrate. While he worked he usually listened through headphones to music that calmed him, but would have given Emma hearing loss in a few seconds: Rammstein, Oomph and Eisbrecher.
It was no surprise, therefore, that he hadn’t responded to her calling. Nor that he got the fright of his life when Emma opened the folding door and pulled off the headphones.
‘What the hell…’
‘Philipp… I—’
Emma stared at his hands, which were wearing mouse-grey latex gloves.
Dull bass drumbeats pounded out from the headphones into the tiny room, providing an accompaniment to her fitful breathing.
Emma was gasping for air, which wasn’t a result of the few steps and quick dash down here, nor of her concern for Sylvia. The reason was that she couldn’t find an innocent explanation for what lay in front of Philipp.
The utility knife.
The gloves.
THE PACKAGE!
She’d wondered where her slippers had got to. The shoebox-sized package with her internet order that you could put in the microwave. Philipp had put away the food delivery in the fridge and her contact lenses were in the bathroom.
But the light package wrapped in normal brown paper? It was down here. Right beneath Philipp’s reading lamp, beside his laptop on the mini desk.
The paper cut open.
The flaps opened.
Some of its contents spread beneath the desk magnifier, the rest still inside the box padded with cotton wool.
Not microwavable slippers.
Emma had obviously been mistaken and she’d neglected to check who the package was addressed to.
For the long, thick, lifelike tufts of brunette hair that had been sent in this box were not for her.
But for Philipp.