The Package Read online

  ‘Why?’ a faceless individual from somewhere in the left middle of the hall asked. The man practically had to shout for her to understand him in the theatre-like space. The German Association of Psychiatry had hired for its annual conference the main hall of the International Congress Centre in Berlin. From the outside, the ICC resembled a silver space station, which from the infinite expanses of the universe had spun to a halt directly beneath the television tower. And yet when you entered this seventies building – which was possibly contaminated with asbestos (experts disagreed about this) – you were reminded less of science fiction and more of a retro film. Chrome, glass and black leather dominated the interior.

  Emma allowed her gaze to roam across the packed rows of chairs but, unable to locate the questioner, talked in the vague direction she imagined him to be.

  ‘Here’s a question of my own: What does the Rosenhan Experiment mean to you?’

  An older colleague, sitting in a wheelchair at the edge of the front row, nodded knowingly.

  ‘It was first performed at the end of the sixties, with the aim of testing the reliability of psychiatric prognoses.’ As ever when she was nervous, Emma twisted a strand of her thick, teak-brown hair around her left index finger. She hadn’t eaten anything before her lecture, for fear of feeling tired or needing to burp. Now her stomach was rumbling so loudly that she was worried the microphone might pick up the noise, lending further succour to the jokes she was convinced were going around about her fat bum. In her eyes, the fact that she was otherwise quite slim only highlighted this bodily imperfection.

  Broom up top, wrecking ball below, she’d thought again only this morning when examining herself in the bathroom mirror.

  A second later Philipp had hugged her from behind and insisted she had the most beautiful body he’d ever laid his hands on. And when they kissed goodbye at the front door he’d pulled her towards him and whispered into her ear that as soon as she was back he urgently needed relationship therapy with the sexiest psychiatrist in Charlottenburg. She sensed he was being serious, but she also knew that her husband was well versed in dishing out compliments. Quite simply, flirting was hardwired into Philipp’s DNA – something Emma had been forced to get used to – and he seldom wasted an opportunity to practise it.

  ‘For the Rosenhan Experiment, named after the American psychologist David Rosenhan, eight subjects had themselves admitted to psychiatric clinics on false pretences. Students, housewives, artists, psychologists and doctors. All of them told the same story on admission: they’d been hearing voices, weird, uncanny voices saying words like “empty”, “hollow” or “thud”.

  ‘It will not surprise you to hear that all of the fake patients were admitted, most of them diagnosed with schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis.

  ‘Although the subjects were demonstrably healthy and behaved perfectly normally after admission, they were treated in the institutions for weeks on end, supposedly taking a total of more than two thousand pills.’

  Emma moistened her lips with a sip of water from the glass provided. She’d put on some lipstick, even though Philipp preferred the ‘natural look’. She did in fact have unusually smooth skin, although she thought it far too pale, especially given the intense colour of her hair. She couldn’t see the ‘adorable contrast’ that Philipp kept going on about.

  ‘If you think the 1970s were a long time ago, that this took place in a different century, i.e. in the Middle Ages of psychiatric science, then let this video shatter your illusions. It was filmed last year. This young woman was a test subject too; we repeated the Rosenhan Experiment.’

  A murmur rippled through the hall. Those present were less worried about the scandalous findings than they were about perhaps having been subjects of an experiment themselves.

  ‘We sent fake patients to psychiatric institutions and once again investigated what happens when totally sane people are admitted into a closed establishment. With shocking results.’

  Emma took another sip of water, then continued. ‘The woman in the video was diagnosed with schizoid paranoia on the basis of a single sentence when she arrived at the clinic. After that she was treated for more than a month. Not just with medicine and conversational therapy, but with brute force too. As you’ve seen and heard for yourselves, she was unequivocal about not wanting electroconvulsive therapy. And no wonder, because she is perfectly sound of mind. But she was forcibly treated nonetheless.

  ‘Even though she manifestly rejected it. Even though after admission no one noticed anything else unusual about her and she assured the doctors several times that her condition had returned to normal. But they refused to listen to her, the nurses or fellow patients. For unlike the doctors who passed by only sporadically, the people she spent all her time with at the clinic were convinced that this locked-up woman had no business being there.’

  Emma noticed someone in the front third of the hall stand up. She gave the technician the agreed sign to turn up the lights slightly. Her eyes made out a tall, slim man with thinning hair, and she waited until a long-legged conference assistant had battled his way through the rows to the man and passed him a microphone.

  The man blew into the microphone before saying, ‘Stauder-Mertens, University Hospital, Cologne. With all due respect, Dr Stein, you show us a blurry horror video, the origin and supplier of which we’d rather not know, and then make wild assertions that, were they ever to become public knowledge, would cause great damage to our profession.’

  ‘Do you have a question as well?’ Emma said.

  The doctor with the double-barrelled name nodded. ‘Do you have more evidence than this fake patient’s statement?’

  ‘I selected her personally for the experiment.’

  ‘That’s all well and good, but can you vouch for her unquestioningly? I mean, how do you know that this person really is sound of mind?’

  Even from a distance Emma could see the same haughty smile that had annoyed her on the technician’s face.

  ‘What are you getting at, Herr Stauder-Martens?’

  ‘That somebody who volunteers to be admitted to a secure unit for several weeks on false pretences – now, how can I put it carefully? – must be equipped with an extraordinary psychological make-up. Who can tell you that this remarkable lady didn’t actually suffer from the symptoms for which she was ultimately treated, and which perhaps she didn’t exhibit until her stay at the institution?’

  ‘Me,’ Emma said.

  ‘Oh, so you were with her the whole time, were you?’ the man asked rather smugly.

  ‘I was.’

  His self-assured grin vanished. ‘You?’

  When Emma nodded, the mood in the hall became palpably tenser.

  ‘Correct,’ Emma said. Her voice was quivering with excitement, but also with fury at the outrage that had greeted her revelations. ‘Dear colleagues, on the video you only saw the test subject from behind and with dyed hair, but the woman who first was sedated and then forcibly treated with electric shocks against her expressed will, that woman was… me.’

  2

  Two hours later

  Taking hold of her wheelie case, Emma hesitated before entering room 1904, for the simple reason that she could barely see a thing. The little illumination that did penetrate the darkness came from the countless lights of the city, nineteen floors beneath her. The Le Zen on Tauentzienstrasse was Berlin’s newest five-star chrome-and-glass palace, with over three hundred rooms. Taller and more luxurious than any other hotel in the capital. And – in Emma’s eyes, at least – decorated with relatively little taste.

  That, at any rate, was her first impression once she’d found the main switch by the door and the overhead light clicked on.

  The interior design looked as if a trainee had been instructed to exploit every possible Far Eastern cliché when selecting the furnishings.

  In the hallway, which was separated from the neighbouring bedroom by a thin, sliding door covered in tissue paper, stood a Chinese wedd
ing chest. A bamboo rug extended from the door to a low futon bed. The lamps beside the floor sofa looked like the colourful lanterns that the toddlers carried on St Martin’s Day in the parade organised by the Heerstrasse Estate kindergarten. Surprisingly stylish, on the other hand, was a huge black-and-white photograph of Ai Weiwei that stretched from floor to ceiling between the sofa and fitted wardrobe. Emma had recently visited an exhibition by this exceptional Chinese artist.

  She looked away from the man with the tousled beard, hung her coat in the wardrobe and took her phone from her handbag.

  Voicemail.

  She’d already tried calling him once, but Philipp hadn’t answered. He never did when on duty.

  With a sigh she moved over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, slipped off her peep toes, without which she shrunk to the average height of a fourteen-year-old, and gazed down at the Kurfürstendamm. She stroked her belly, which still showed nothing, although it was a bit too early for that yet. But she was comforted by the idea that something was growing inside her, which was far more important than any seminar or professional recognition.

  It had taken a while before the second line on the pregnancy test finally showed up, five weeks ago. And this was also the reason why Emma wasn’t sleeping in her own bed tonight, but for the first time in her life staying the night at a hotel in her home city. Her little house in Teufelssee-Allee was currently like a building site because they’d started extending the loft to make a children’s room. Even though Philipp thought it might be a little overzealous to begin nest-building before the end of the first trimester of her pregnancy.

  As he was working in another town again, Emma had accepted the overnight package that the German Association of Psychiatry offered all the guest speakers at the two-day conference – even those who lived in Berlin – as it allowed them to have a few drinks at the evening function in the hotel’s ballroom (which Emma was bunking off).

  ‘The lecture ended just as you predicted,’ she said in the message she left for Philipp. ‘They didn’t stone me, but that was only because they didn’t have any stones to hand.’

  She smiled.

  ‘They didn’t take my hotel room away, though. The key card I got with my conference documents still worked.’

  Emma concluded her message with a kiss, then hung up. She missed him terribly.

  Better to be alone here in the hotel than alone at home amongst paint pots and torn-down walls, she thought, trying to put the best possible gloss on the situation.

  Emma went into the bathroom and, as she took of her suit, looked for the volume control for the speaker in the false ceiling, which transmitted the TV sound.

  Without success.

  Which meant she had to go back into the living room and switch off the television. Here too it took a while for her to find the remote control in a bedside table drawer, which was why she was now fully up to speed about a plane crash in Ghana and a volcano explosion in Chile.

  Emma heard the nasal voice of the newsreader begin a new item – ‘… the police have issued a warning about a serial killer, who…’ – and cut him off at the press of a button.

  Back in the bathroom it was some time before she found the temperature setting.

  As someone who felt the cold Emma loved hot water, even now in high summer, and it had been an unusually fresh and particularly windy June day at below twenty degrees. So she set the water to forty degrees – her pain threshold – and waited for the tingling sensation she always felt when the hot jet hit her skin.

  Emma normally felt alive the moment she was enveloped by steam and the hot water massaged her body. Today the effect was weaker, partly because the dirt that had been hurled at her after the lecture couldn’t be washed away with water and hotel soap.

  There had been furious reactions to her revelation that, even in the twenty-first century, people risked becoming the playthings of demigods in white abusing their power just because of sloppy misdiagnoses. The validity of her research findings had been questioned more than once. The publisher of the renowned specialist journal had even announced he would undertake meticulous review before he ‘might consider’ publishing an article about her work.

  Sure, some colleagues had ventured their support after the event, but in the eyes of these few she’d still been able to read the unspoken reproach: ‘Why on earth did you put yourself in danger with this stupid experiment? And why are you risking your career and picking a fight with the bigwigs who run the clinics?’

  Something Philipp would never ask. He understood why Emma had for years been fighting to improve the legal status of patients undergoing psychiatric treatment. Because of their mental illness they were usually viewed with more suspicion than patients who, for example, complained of faulty dental care.

  And Philipp understood why she also took unusual, sometimes dangerous routes to get there. No doubt because they were so similar in this respect.

  In his work, too, Philipp overstepped boundaries that no normal person would cross freely. In truth, the psychopaths and serial killers he hunted as chief investigator in the offender profiling department often left him with no other choice.

  Some couples share a sense of humour, others have similar hobbies or the same political outlook. Emma and Philipp, on the other hand, laughed at completely different jokes, she couldn’t stand football and he didn’t share her love of musicals, and whereas in her youth she had demonstrated against nuclear power and the fur industry, he had been a member of the conservative youth association. What formed the bedrock of their relationship was empathy.

  Intuition and experience allowed them to put themselves in other people’s souls and bring the secrets of their psyches to the light of day. While Emma did this to liberate the patients who visited her private practice on Savignyplatz from their psychological problems, Philipp used his extraordinary abilities to draw up behaviour and personality profiles. Thanks to his analyses, some of the most dangerous criminals Germany had ever known had been put behind bars.

  Recently, however, Emma had been wishing that both of them would take a step backwards. She was continually nagged by the feeling that in their time off, which was fairly meagre anyway, Philipp was also finding it increasingly difficult to achieve the necessary distance from his work. And she was worried that they were well on the way to proving Nietzsche’s dictum about the abyss: if you gazed into it deeply and for long enough, it would start gazing into you.

  Some time out, or a holiday at least. That would be enough.

  The last trip they’d taken together was so long ago that the memories of it had already faded.

  Emma lathered her hair with the hotel’s shampoo and could only hope that she wouldn’t look like a poodle the following morning. Her brown hair might be strong, but it reacted sensitively to the wrong products. It had taken numerous experiments and tears till she found out what made her hair shine and what turned her head into a ripped sofa cushion.

  Emma rinsed her hair, pushed the shower curtain aside and was just wondering why such an expensive hotel hadn’t installed glass sliding doors when she was suddenly incapable of another lucid thought.

  What she felt was fear.

  The first thing that came into her mind when she saw the letters was run!

  The letters on the bathroom mirror.

  In neatly written letters, across the steam-covered glass, it read:

  GET OUT.

  BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

  3

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry for disturb. Everything okay?’

  The tall, slim Russian woman in the doorway appeared genuinely concerned. And yet the woman who spoke broken German didn’t look to Emma like the sort of person who worried unnecessarily about her fellow human beings. More like a model aware of how beautiful she was and who regarded herself as the centre of the universe. Dressed in a close-fitting designer suit, drenched in Chanel and perched on sinfully expensive-looking high heels that would have allowed even Emma to gaze dow
n at others.

  ‘Who are you?’ Emma said, annoyed that she’d opened the door. Now she was standing face to face with a Slav beauty, bare-footed, with soaking wet hair and dressed only in a hastily thrown-on hotel kimono. The material was so fine that every curve of her naked body, which was far less perfect than the Russian woman’s, must be showing beneath it.

  ‘Sorry. Very thin walls.’

  The woman swept one of her blonde extensions from her forehead. ‘Hear scream. Come to look.’

  ‘You heard a scream?’ Emma said impassively.

  In truth, all that she could recall was having felt faint, partly a result of the eerie message on the mirror, but doubtlessly also because the shower had been too hot.

  Both these things had well and truly pulled the rug from under her feet.

  To begin with, Emma had managed to hold onto the edge of the basin, but then she’d collapsed onto the tiled floor, from where she’d stared at the writing:

  GET OUT.

  BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

  ‘Hear crying too,’ the Russian woman said.

  ‘You must have been mistaken,’ Emma replied, even though it was perfectly possible that her fall had been accompanied by tears. Her eyes were still burning. The message on the mirror had awoken the darkest memories from her childhood.

  The cupboard.

  The creaking doors, behind which a man lurked in a motorbike helmet.

  Arthur.

  The ghost who had spent countless nights with her. Again and again. As a monster at first, then as a friend. Until at the age of ten she was finally ‘cured’, even though this concept didn’t actually exist in psychotherapy. After many sessions the child psychiatrist that Emma visited had succeeded in banishing the demon. From both her cupboard and her head. And he’d made her aware who was really responsible for this phantasm.

  Papa!

  Ever since that course of therapy, which had first stimulated an interest in her current profession, Emma had known that no ghost had ever existed. And no Arthur. Only her father, who she’d spurned and feared throughout her life, but who she’d have dearly loved as a close ally. For her alone. Always there. To call on at any time, even at night in the cupboard.