Three weeks later
It was strange she wasn’t crying.
In the lonely hours in the psychiatric unit the mere thought of Philipp had been enough to bring tears to her eyes, but now that she’d confessed her dreadful deeds to Konrad, recounting for the first time everything in all its detail, it seemed her reservoir of tears had dried up. Although she could feel the dull, headache-inducing pressure behind her eyes, her cheeks remained dry.
‘I’m finished,’ she said, and both of them knew that she wasn’t referring to her testimony.
Two men, both killed by her own hand on the same day.
Just because of a package for the neighbour.
If she hadn’t accepted it, she wouldn’t have lost her mobile in Palandt’s house. And if she hadn’t opened the package she wouldn’t have had a scalpel.
‘Didn’t you notice?’
Konrad was looking at her, standing by the bookshelf with the works of Schopenhauer. He was holding a thin cardboard folder and Emma couldn’t have said how it got there. She hadn’t even been aware that Konrad had stood up and wandered across the room. Two minutes must have passed since she’d uttered her last word, two minutes during which she’d stared fixedly at the tea stain on the round carpet, comparing its contours with the map of New Zealand.
Her hand tingled, her tongue felt numb – typical symptoms of withdrawal. She’d have to take her tablets again soon, but didn’t dare ask Konrad for another glass of water, also because the pressure on her bladder was now almost intolerable.
‘What didn’t I notice?’ she asked after some delay. She was tired and she was reacting with the speed of a drunk.
‘That it was your own husband who raped you, Emma. Do you really believe you wouldn’t have noticed?’
Apart from the fact that he was using her first name, there was no longer any intimacy in his words. In just a single phrase he’d managed once more to change her whereabouts. She wasn’t on the sofa any more, but in the dock.
Where I belong, after all.
‘I had paralysing drugs in my body that distorted my senses,’ Emma said, trying to answer the question she’d asked herself over and over again. Konrad wasn’t satisfied.
‘Your own husband materialises in your hotel room from out of nowhere like David Copperfield, just to do what he could have got from you far more easily a day later within the own four walls of his house? Voluntarily too!’
‘You know full well that for a rapist it’s about power rather than sex.’
‘Are you telling me that you’ve caressed and felt him thousands of times, yet on this occasion you didn’t even get a whiff of suspicion?’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Konrad. You said it straight to my face earlier. Once a liar, always a liar, am I right?’
Konrad gave her a sad look, but didn’t disagree.
‘But you’re wrong,’ Emma said. ‘Yes, I did lie when I foolishly claimed to have been the woman in the Rosenhan video. But in this case things are very different.’
‘How?’
‘Well, they found hair belonging to all the victims in Philipp’s laboratory. All of them!’
‘Apart from yours.’
Konrad opened the folder and took from it four large black-and-white photographs.
‘What do you know about these photos?’ He spread them out on the glass table.
Emma averted her eyes from the women. She didn’t need to see their large eyes, high cheekbones and certainly not their thick hair to recognise them. In the pictures they were laughing, pursing their lips for a kiss or looking brazenly and wickedly into the camera. They had no opportunity to do this in life any more.
‘The victims,’ Emma said.
‘Correct, these are the escort girls that the Hairdresser murdered.’ Konrad fixed her with an inscrutable look. ‘These women have a lot in common with you, Emma. Dreadful things were done to them. They’ve got wonderful hair, they even vaguely look like you. But assuming you’ve told me the truth about the important things, then there’s one key difference between you and these sorry creatures, and by that I don’t mean that all of them are dead.’
… assuming you’ve told me the truth about the important things…
Emma felt even more exhausted than when she’d taken the diazepam earlier on.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘These women had their heads shaved and they were killed, but…’ Konrad tapped each photograph in turn and put an exclamation mark behind each of his words: ‘But! These! Women! Were! Not! Raped!’
Silence. Not completely, for the office was filled with the constant roaring of the gas fire, but all the same the stillness that followed Konrad’s outburst was oppressive.
Emma wanted to say something. She felt that deep inside her, words were buried, which now had to come together into a meaningful, logical sentence, but she could manage nothing other than: ‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m lying?’ Konrad said. ‘There was no forensic evidence of forced penetration. With none of the victims.’
‘But in the news…’
‘Forget the news,’ Konrad interrupted her. ‘The first newspaper that printed the false information, in twenty-centimetre-high letters on a double-page spread lied to increase its circulation. And all the other hastily put-together news tickers, tweets, posts and internet reports, which more people believed and nobody bothered to verify, these spread the lie. Later, the serious magazines, weeklies and television features followed. They lied too, but this time at the request of the investigating officers.’
‘But… but why?’
‘Why was information withheld from the public?’ He answered his own question: ‘I hardly need to tell you about the problems police have with psychologically deranged nutcases who crow about having committed other people’s spectacular crimes.’
Pathological liars.
‘Which is why detailed knowledge about killers isn’t disseminated in the media. So that confessions can be checked for truth.’
Konrad paused to lend his words more weight. ‘Normally this is a way of filtering out people just trying to jump on the bandwagon. It’s not as often used for victims, though.’
He got up and strode across his office as if through a courtroom, his hands crossed behind his back.
‘Do you have any idea how many women rang the police hotline having cut their own hair off? Women who said they’d been raped but were able to escape?’
‘I’m not one of those,’ Emma said, making the error of running her hand through her hair as she’d done all her life whenever she was nervous.
‘I’ve spoken to the public prosecutor. Do you know what he thinks? That you were trying to make Philipp stick with you because of your financial worries. He wanted to leave you so you pretended to be pregnant. But because this isn’t a lie you can keep up forever, you invented a rape to explain the miscarriage. At the same time you were aiming for sympathy with your psychological trauma. But when you realised that none of this was enough to keep Philipp, you killed him, making you his sole heiress.’
‘Konrad… how… how… can you even entertain the… I know what happened. I mean, I’m not mad.’
‘No?’
No?
Did he really just ask that?
Konrad took a few steps towards her and now stood so close again that she’d only have to raise her hand to stroke his well-trimmed beard.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said when she sensed he was going to touch her. ‘Go away!’ she protested, but more for the sake of it rather than with any force. Nor did she shake his hand off when he put it on hers.
‘You were mentally abused,’ he whispered softly. ‘But not physically!’
‘Yes, I was. I was…’ She closed her eyes. ‘I was raped and now I want you to stop your advocatus diaboli routine, or…’
‘EMMA!’
Konrad shouted so loudly that she trembled.
‘Open your eyes and listen to me. This is not a negotiating tactic. I’m not speaking to you as a lawyer, but as a friend.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Your husband abused you. But only psychologically. He didn’t abuse your body. Nor those of the other victims.’
No, no that’s impossible.
‘Philipp wasn’t the Hairdresser?’
‘No.’
All she could see in Konrad’s eyes was a sad certainty. Emma turned away. She couldn’t stand the gaze which seemed to be telling her that in Palandt and her husband she’d killed two innocent men in one day.