Four weeks later
‘Number three,’ said the hollow-cheeked woman with the man’s haircut, who was responsible for welcoming visitors at the security checkpoint. She was tall, plump, with nicotine-stained teeth, and hands that she could have grasped a basketball with. But she was friendly, something verging on a miracle when you had to work in the high-security wing of a psychiatric prison.
‘You’ve got five minutes.’ The prison officer pointed to the seat with the specified number above the glass separating the free world from the inmates.
Konrad was already sitting there.
Chalky white, gaunt. They’d shaved off his beard, but this made him look even older. Seeing him, many people would have thought of death and how it already scarred some people in life.
The visitors room was awash with the faint smell of decay, but this was just in the mind of course, an olfactory error, because Konrad’s chest was rising and falling, and his nostrils were quivering almost as badly as the age-spotted hand holding the receiver. But nowhere near as firmly as the pistol back in the clinic. It was no surprise that the inmates here were sometimes called zombies by the care workers.
The living dead. Pacified by medication, locked away forever.
Even here in the visitors’ area, where relatives sat opposite the particularly severe cases separated by a glass wall, any normal person would feel an unease similar to that when imagining a tarantula crawling across their tongue.
Emma picked up the receiver and sat down.
‘Thank you,’ said the man who’d shaven four women, killed three of them and given her the most horrific night of her life. ‘Your coming to visit means a lot to me.’
‘This is an exception,’ Emma said impassively. ‘I’m coming just this once then never again.’
Konrad nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. ‘Let me guess, Dr Roth sent you. He thinks that closure would help your therapy, doesn’t he?’
Emma couldn’t help feeling admiration for her once-closest friend. In a short period of time incarceration had eroded his health, his commanding presence and his youthful charm, but not his intelligence.
‘He’s waiting outside,’ she said truthfully. With Samson, who was following her every step again. And Jorgo, who somehow she’d probably never be rid of.
Emma changed the receiver to the other ear and rubbed her left elbow. The bandage had been taken off recently; the edges of the wound from the operation scars were still visible.
Because the single rooms in the security wing of the Park Clinic were only locked at night she’d been able to leave her room that day. But in her state it had taken more than ten minutes to labour the few metres to get to the gym.
Because of the bullet that had been fired accidentally from Konrad’s pistol when Emma appeared so unexpectedly in the fake office, she’d be reminded of him all her life whenever she bent her arm. But even if he hadn’t shattered her wrist, it was unlikely she’d ever be able to forget him.
‘I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you,’ he said in the voice she’d last heard while half asleep. In the Park Clinic. The memory his tone evoked was so powerful that Emma had that same taste of gastric acid and vomit in her mouth as back in her hospital room when she’d thrown up. Dr Roth said the medication had given her an upset stomach, but she knew better. It was Konrad’s voice that had stopped her from losing consciousness altogether. And it was his confession that had turned her stomach upside down and eventually made her wide awake again.
‘What is it really?’ she heard Konrad ask. Emma frowned.
‘Pardon?’
‘What has really brought you here? You’re a wilful girl, Emma, that’s something I’ve always admired about you. Your strength, even as a child. You wouldn’t allow him to order you here unless you had something on your mind.’
Emma took a deep breath and felt respect for Konrad once more. He hadn’t lost his talent for reading her like an open book.
‘After everything that’s happened, it’s really quite unimportant. But the question… it haunts me.’
Konrad raised his eyebrows. ‘What question?’
‘Philipp. Why did you let him live?’
She picked nervously at her thumb. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed and painted with transparent polish again. Emma had sprayed on some perfume and shaved her legs. External signs of psychological healing. Inside, however, a heavy cold seemed to be looming. She felt as if her facial muscles were contracting and her ears aching, perhaps because she didn’t want to hear Konrad’s answer.
‘I mean, you killed all those women, but not the guy you hated most. He was the adulterer after all. Wouldn’t it have just been simpler to get him out of the way?’
Konrad shook his head sadly. ‘Darling, don’t you understand? I wanted to protect you from any pain, never inflict it on you. Emma, you must believe me when I say I always loved you. And whatever I did, it was never done out of selfishness. Even when I made sure that you remained an only child.’
Now Konrad’s head was in a motorbike helmet and rather than a phone in his hand there was a syringe with a long needle, glistening silver in the moonlight.
‘Come on Emma, go to bed now and settle down,’ she heard Arthur say. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Emma blinked and the vision from her memory dissipated.
‘What was in the syringe?’ she asked Konrad behind the glass.
‘Something to induce an abortion,’ he admitted candidly. ‘I injected it into the water glass your mother had put beside her bed. Please don’t hate me for it. I mean, how could I allow her to bring another child into the world which might go on to suffer the same psychological abuse your father inflicted upon you? A man who wants to hurt his daughter just because she’s afraid?’
‘You’re sick,’ Emma said, then it struck her: ‘It was you! You swapped Sylvia’s pills too!’
‘To stop Philipp from hurting you again by giving her a child.’
Emma’s fingers tensed around the receiver. ‘You told her about Arthur to further undermine my credibility. And later you told her it was Philipp to make her kill herself.’
‘I just wanted Sylvia to keep away from him. I really couldn’t anticipate her suicide.’
‘But you’ve got her on your conscience just the same. You’re completely insane, do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Konrad said. ‘But I was never selfish, do you hear? The only thing important to me was that you were alright. Even if that meant your having to be with Philipp, that worthless pleb.’
For a second it looked as if he were going to spit on the glass separating them.
‘The bastard left you alone when you were in distress. I had to slip into your house and watch out for you. I even took the package from your desk and hid it in the garden shed for a few hours so that Philipp would see what a state you were in. That he couldn’t leave you on your own all weekend! Not in your condition! But the bastard went anyway. Cold-hearted, no scruples.’
‘You hid?’
How often did you secretly watch me all these years?
Emma knew that this was another creepy thought, just like her hair being woven into Konrad’s enso carpet. A thought which, if she was lucky, might fade over the years, but would never totally lose its horror.
‘In the shed. In the cellar. When the two of you were in conversation I was in the kitchen, separated from you by just a thin door.’
‘Like behind the connecting door in Le Zen,’ Emma snorted.
Konrad’s eyes turned watery. ‘Oh, sweetie, you must really despise me now.’ His lower lip was trembling and he started to dribble, but made no attempt to wipe the spit away.
‘I wanted him to stop hurting you. I only sent him the hair so he knew what the consequences were of his cheating on you. But instead the bastard just used it to torture you even more. I’m so sorry.’
‘What for?’ Emma asked. She’d resolved to be furious with him. On the way here she’d run through the course of the conversation and its conclusion in her head. She’d pictured herself leaping up and slamming the receiver against the glass panel again and again until it shattered and she could slit Konrad’s throat with one of the shards.
But now that he was sitting there like a little boy whose favourite toy has been taken away, she felt nothing but a great emptiness tinged with pity.
‘You’re not sorry for having killed all those women?’ she asked, and watched as a tear rolled down his cheek. ‘Not even for having hounded me all my life?’
He shook his head, weeping.
‘And you’re not sorry for having sedated and raped me, before dragging my body out of the hotel? So turning me into a paranoid wreck who stabbed innocent men to death?’
‘No,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m only sorry that I didn’t confess my love for you earlier. Maybe the two of us would have had a chance.’
Emma closed her eyes, wiped her eyelids with back of her hand and hung the receiver back up.
Of course, she thought. He’s sick. I should understand that better than anyone.
She opened her eyes and gave Konrad one final look.
And although she’d never learned how to lipread, nor even ever tried, she was able to read from Konrad’s lips what he was saying to her from behind the pane of glass:
‘Out of love, Emma. I did it all only out of love.’