Melanie Raabe - The Trap

I stand in front of the mirror and contemplate my reflection. The woman looking back at me is a stranger. I frown, and examine the wrinkle that divides my forehead down the middle like a crack, and I realize that it’s not my face but a mask. I raise my eyebrows and more cracks appear, branching out, further and further. I press my hands to my head in an attempt to stop the pieces from falling and shattering, but it’s too late; I’ve started a process that I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.

I let go. My face falls to the floor with a clatter, and behind it is emptiness.

Am I mad?

No, I’m not mad.

How can you tell you’re not mad?

You just can.

How can you tell if you are mad?

You just can.

But if you really are mad — how can you know? How can you know anything with absolute certainty?

I listen to the voices arguing in my head, and I no longer know which of them is the rational one.

I’m back in bed. I’m lying quite still, but my thoughts are racing. I’m scared. I’m still cold.

Then a peculiar noise penetrates my consciousness: a buzz. No, a drone. It swells, subsides, starts up again. It’s throbbing, alive and menacing, and it’s getting louder. I hold my ears and almost fall out of bed. When I take my hands away, I realize that what I’m hearing is silence. That is all that remains, after this day that should have decided everything. Silence.

I sit up and listen until it dies away. Now there’s nothing — only the cool of the night. Everything is muted. My heart is beating dully, as if it no longer believes that this Sisyphean work is worth it. My breathing is quite shallow, my blood is flowing wearily, and my thoughts have almost come to a standstill. I think of nothing except a beautiful pair of different-colored eyes.

All of a sudden I’m sitting up with the phone in my hand, although I can’t remember having made a decision, and I’m dialing a number.

My heart is now beating like mad and my breathing is galloping and my blood has started flowing again and my thoughts are coming thick and fast, because I’m finally making the call I’ve put off for eleven years. I know the number by heart; I’ve dialed it often enough only to cut off the connection immediately, every time.

The first ringing tone is nearly more than I can bear; I almost hang up again from pure reflex — but I push on. The second ring sounds, the third, the fourth, and with a kind of relief I’m beginning to think he’s not there. Then he picks up.

25

JONAS

Jonas Weber’s mobile was vibrating for the third time in half an hour. He took it out of his trouser pocket, looked at the display, saw that it was Sophie and cursed himself for having given her his number. After a brief internal struggle, he answered.

“Jonas Weber.”

“It’s Sophie Peters. I have to talk to you.”

“Listen, Sophie, this isn’t a good time,” he said, sensing Antonia Bug and Volker Zimmer turn to look at him as he spoke her name. “Can I ring you back?”

“It won’t take a second and it’s really, really important,” said Sophie.

Something in her voice alarmed Jonas. She sounded odd — manic.

“Okay. Hang on.”

With an apologetic glance at his colleagues, he left the scene of the crime they’d been called to, extremely glad, in fact, to step outside for a bit.

“Okay, I’ve got away for a moment,” he said.

“Are you in a meeting or something?”

“Something.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I was in the museum a moment ago. I was looking at van Gogh’s sunflowers. And…you know that I told you it must have been a stranger? That no one who knew Britta would have hurt her in any way? You said I made her sound like an angel? That’s what she was, you see. A kind of angel.”

“Sophie,” said Jonas, “slow down a bit. I can’t keep up!”

He could hear her nervous breathing at the other end of the line.

“I knew straightaway that I’d seen something in Britta’s flat that didn’t belong there. I told you, do you remember? That the culprit had left something behind, like a serial killer in a film. Something was out of place — I just didn’t know what. But now I do!”

“Keep calm, Sophie,” said Jonas as patiently as he could.

“Take a deep breath. That’s the way. Now, carry on.”

“Okay, so I said it must be a serial killer — a lunatic — and you said that there aren’t serial killers in real life; that most crimes are committed by the victim’s partner. All that stuff.”

“Sophie, I remember very well. Where are you going with this?”

“You said it couldn’t be a serial killer because, for one thing, there wasn’t a series because there’s no comparable case. But what if Britta’s the beginning? The first in a series? What if he keeps going?”

Jonas was silent.

“Are you still there? Jonas?”

“I’m still here.”

Her story was a muddle, but he realized that he was going to have to let her talk.

“Good. Well, in any case…I told you I was in the museum, in front of van Gogh’s sunflowers. Do you remember how I told you that something wasn’t right in Britta’s flat? Now I know what it was. No idea why I didn’t think of it before — it’s as if my brain had been blocked. Probably because it was far too obvious and somehow, for whatever reason, I was looking for something subtle, something obscure. But I knew it, damn it, I knew it!”

“It was the flowers,” said Jonas.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“You knew?” Sophie asked.

“Not until just now,” said Jonas, trying to sound calm. “But listen, Sophie, I really should be getting back.”

“Do you know what that means, Jonas?” Sophie asked in excitement, ignoring his last words. “The murderer left flowers in Britta’s flat! What normal murderer, acting in the heat of the moment or out of base motives, would leave flowers next to his victim?”

“Let’s talk this over in peace some time, Sophie,” said Jonas.

“But…“

“I’ll ring you as soon as the meeting’s over, I promise.”

“The murderer left them there, do you see? They weren’t Britta’s flowers! Britta didn’t like cut flowers! Everyone knew that! The flowers are probably a kind of trademark of his! If that’s the case, he’ll do it again! That’s the direction your investigations must take. Maybe it’s not too late to stop him!”

“Sophie, we’ll talk later, I promise.”

“But there’s something else I must te—”

“Later.”

He hung up, put his mobile back in his pocket and returned to the airless flat.

The scene of the crime, which his colleagues were going over with a fine-tooth comb, was similar to the scene in Britta Peters’s flat. On the living-room floor lay a blonde woman. She was wearing a white dress that was now almost saturated with her blood. As far as appearances went, she could have been a sister of Britta Peters. Like her, she, too, lived alone; like her, she, too, had a ground-floor flat. When the police officers had arrived, the door had still been open.

Sophie’s words went through Jonas’s head: “The flowers are probably a kind of trademark of his.”

Jonas looked about the flat as he went back to join his colleagues. There was one big difference between the crime scenes: here the flowers he’d brought with him weren’t strewn about.

Again, Jonas heard Sophie’s voice: “He’ll do it again! But maybe it’s not too late to stop him!”

He looked at the corpse of the blonde woman. She was holding a small, neat bunch of white roses, which stood in lurid contrast to the dark dried blood in which she was lying.