Emma’s head started spinning.
Konrad doesn’t think I’m the killer? He wasn’t talking about me? But… but who then?
She mulled over the questions her old friend had just asked her.
Who was close to Philipp? Who was intelligent enough to forge a female’s plan of revenge? And who would suffer most from his sleeping with the escort girls if not his wife?
‘His mistress!’ Emma blurted out, putting her head in her hands at the moment of realisation.
‘Correct,’ said Konrad, who’d regained his confidence. ‘Not a whore, but the woman who was important to him. Who was close to him because he saw her regularly.’
All the hairs on Emma’s forearms stood up.
‘Sylvia?’ she whispered.
Konrad nodded.
Emma laughed hysterically, tapped the side of her head, then put her head in her hands again.
‘Noooo,’ she screamed. ‘That’s absurd. Impossible. She died while…’
‘… while you were in the cellar with Philipp. That’s correct. She loved him, Emma. She loved him so much that she wouldn’t forgive his flings and dalliances. You found it out yourself: there was no Peter. The man she wanted children with was called Philipp.’
A sound entrenched itself in her ear, preparing to drown out all others, especially Konrad’s voice.
‘She loved Philipp and she hated the women he consorted with. Unworthy whores who deserved to die.’
‘But what about me? She let me live.’
That made no sense.
‘She didn’t have to murder you, darling. He could separate from you. In all likelihood he’d promised Sylvia to leave you for her. To have children with her. Since that night you hadn’t even touched Philipp, had you? I’m sorry to have to say it, but in her eyes you were no longer any competition. Unlike the prostitutes. Sylvia wanted to prevent all sexual contact between Philipp and other women. Which was one of the reasons for sending him her trophies. To show him: I know who you’re fooling around with. Every one of those whores you sleep with will die.’
Without sinking to the floor, Emma felt as if she were falling.
That’s why Philipp reacted so strangely when she mentioned Sylvia’s name in the cellar. Emma had asked him why he’d had to kill her, but he’d had no idea that Sylvia was dying.
Konrad gave her cheek a soft caress. ‘A moralist would say that your husband had all these women on his conscience. But he didn’t murder them. Nor did he lay a finger on Sylvia. When she tried to call Philipp on his mobile and you answered she’d already taken an overdose of sleeping pills.’
‘The call was a cry for help?’ Emma asked.
She withdrew the hand that Konrad had tried to hold and gazed at the fire. The gas flames were shimmering violet and blue, reminding her of bruises from wounds that would never heal.
‘But why did she come to visit me that day? Why did she scream that I’d slipped her the morning-after pills to stop her from getting pregnant?’
Konrad sighed. ‘She was mad, Emma. You can’t measure the behaviour of a serial murderer by normal standards. But your question contains the answer you’re looking for.’
Bang.
It struck her with the momentum of a guillotine.
‘Because he didn’t want her getting pregnant,’ Emma whispered in horror.
‘And Sylvia must have realised that at some point after having visited you, darling. Now she knew that Philipp didn’t want to have children with her. She feared that he’d go back on his promise and never leave you, and her suspicion can only have been reinforced when he abandoned his conference because of you.’
The world before Emma’s eyes blurred behind a wall of tears.
‘All of that may be true,’ she sobbed. ‘But your story has one massive flaw. I may well be paranoid and have overreacted to Philipp. But the reason for that goes back to what the Hairdresser did to me in my hotel room. And that wasn’t Sylvia.’
‘How come?’
Now it was her turn to yell each word with an exclamation mark.
‘BECAUSE! I! WAS! RAPED!’ She was quaking. ‘I felt it. A woman does feel something like that.’
Konrad looked again as if he were rooted to the floor of his office. Very calmly, without making a face, he asked, ‘Are you quite sure, Emma?’
‘Yes, one hundred per cent sure.’ She turned to the window and gave a fake laugh. ‘I know I have a fertile imagination. And sometimes I tell stories, yes. But on this point I’m absolutely sure! It was a man. Inside me. That’s why I lost my baby. I can still feel…’
She couldn’t breathe. Images flickered before her eyes and veils drifted past her field of vision as if she’d spent too long looking at the sun, rather than the Zehlendorf winter landscape behind Konrad’s desk.
‘What’s wrong?’ Konrad asked, sounding more intrigued than concerned.
‘The light,’ Emma said, pointing out at the Wannsee.
Ought it not to be much darker?
‘How long have I been here in your… in your…’ Once more she was unable to complete a sentence, and this time it was because of the man on the promenade. And the large mastiff on its lead. Which opened its mouth as if intent on catching snowflakes on its tongue. ‘… in your practice?’ Emma mumbled, seized by a surreal, completely irrational feeling of having got caught up in a time loop.
She wasn’t just looking at a similar backdrop, but exactly the same one she’d seen at the start of her session. She stood up. It took some effort, but this time she found the strength to stay on her feet.
‘What’s going on here?’ she asked, wandering over to the window.
Behind her Konrad started talking to someone, even though he was alone in the room.
‘That’s enough now,’ he said sternly. ‘I repeat, that’s enough.’
She heard footsteps approaching from the corridor outside. At the same time her nose again picked up a smell of fresh paint and other renovation work as she got closer to the window. Just as the doors were opened behind her and she was about to touch the glass with her fingertips, the lake vanished before her very eyes, and with it the walker, the snow, the mastiff, the promenade, everything. Even the window wasn’t there any more.
Just a black hole in the wall.
‘Frau Dr Stein?’ she heard a man’s voice say. It wasn’t Konrad’s and she ignored it.
‘But I know who I am,’ she insisted, starting to cry as she heard the electrostatic clicking of the high-resolution television her head was leaning against.
‘Please don’t be afraid, Frau Stein,’ the man said, but when she turned to him and saw her psychiatrist in a white coat with two nurses standing beside Konrad, that’s exactly what she felt: a fear that took hold of every cell inside her body and seemed to have settled there for good.
Emma felt faint and, when her knees gave way and she was losing consciousness, she tried to hold onto something for support, but failed.