‘What’s that?’ Emma asked.
Her mind was seeking a logical, but most of all an innocent, explanation.
‘Were you sent those by the Hairdresser?’
Definitely. The killer has contacted him. He’s just doing his work here and examining the trophies.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Philipp, who’d stood up from his chair.
‘You know, the hair,’ Emma said. An icy ring closed around her heart when she watched Philipp open a desk drawer and shut the bunch of dark hair inside.
‘What hair?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, darling.’
Then he turned his notebook so that she could see the screen.
‘What… how… where…?’ she heard herself stammer. Her monosyllabic questions changed in time to the pictures that appeared on the screen as a sort of slideshow.
Photos of women.
Of beautiful women.
Escort girls. Secretly photographed outside various doors. Hotel-room doors, opened by a man who was always the same, while the prostitutes changed.
‘You?’ Emma said, still desperately trying to deny the obvious.
‘You met these girls?’
The escort girls. The victims?
‘So you killed them?’
‘Emma, are you feeling okay?’ Philipp asked with an expression that made her think he was feigning surprise as he pressed the spacebar on his keyboard. And called up a different picture that showed another victim.
Emma screamed when she recognised herself.
With a wheelie suitcase in one hand, right by a dark door she was just opening. Like all the other clips, this was badly lit, but the room number on the walnut veneer was easy to make out: 1904.
‘It was you!’ Emma screamed into Philipp’s face. ‘You’re the Hairdresser!’
How could have I been so mistaken?
So deceived?
Perturbed by the package for her unknown neighbour, Emma hadn’t paid any attention to the second one.
And thus nor to the enemy in her own house.
Having become lost in the labyrinth of her own paranoid thoughts, Emma had destroyed innocent lives.
‘You bastard!’
Her husband smiled and spoke with a tone of great concern, which didn’t go with his diabolical grin. ‘Emma, calm down, please. You’re out of your mind,’ he said, at the same time pressing his keyboard again, which turned the screen black.
‘What are you going to do?’ Emma cried, with no idea what she should do. She felt paralysed by bewilderment and horror. ‘Are you trying to drive me mad?’
‘What do you mean? I’m worried you’re seeing things again that aren’t there, darling.’
Yes. That’s it. I don’t know why, but he’s feeding my paranoia.
Emma looked around, searching instinctively for an object to defend herself with if Philipp attacked her. Then she saw a small camera on the ceiling, which was fixed so that Emma was in the picture the whole time, whereas her husband would not be visible on the film.
‘You’re filming me?’ she said, devastated.
‘But darling, you asked me to make the cellar secure,’ he replied piously. ‘For fear of burglars.’
‘I never said anything about cameras,’ she yelled at him. And whereas she was still far from clear as to what Philipp’s motives could be, she was struck by another, horrendous realisation:
Sylvia.
She didn’t call from Jorgo’s phone.
But from her own.
On this point, at least, she was sure about the game Philipp had been playing with her the whole time.
It’s just like he did with his ex.
He’d saved Sylvia’s number under a different name.
What sort of a man would do that?
One who had something to hide.
An affair.
So it wouldn’t attract any attention if his lover called several times a day, sent texts or missed calls.
Emma’s stomach tightened.
Of course, how clever.
Jorgo was Philipp’s partner, so it was only natural that he’d make lots of calls. At least there was an explanation when the naïve wifey at home saw the display and asked.
How clever and deceitful.
For him Sylvia was Jorgo, while Sylvia called him Peter.
And she’s got such wonderful long hair. Just like me.
Just like all the Hairdresser’s other victims.
‘But why did you have to kill them all?’ Emma croaked. The revelations seemed to have blocked her airways. ‘The whores, your affairs. Even Sylvia? Why did she have to die?’
As if the name of the woman she’d once regarded as her best friend was the cue, the devilish smile vanished from Philipp’s face and for the first time he looked seriously worried. ‘What’s wrong with Sylvie?’ he asked, as if really unaware that she’d just tried to call him in the throes of death.
Maybe it was the brief moment of weakness she thought she could detect in his eyes, or the fact that he’d called his latest affair by her nickname that unleashed an aggressive, unrestrained fury in Emma.
But possibly it was just the courage of despair that tore her from her paralysis.