Five

by Ursula P Archer

  ‘… with the pillars of the house standing tall behind them, and dark at the top like trees of the forest–’

  Her phone vibrated, and she heard the first few bars of ‘Message in a Bottle’.

  Beatrice only realised she had stopped reading and let the book sink when Jakob shook her arm. ‘Mama! Keep reading!’

  She found her place, started again, tripped over her words.

  Stay calm. The message would still be there in a minute, and perhaps it was … from Florin. Or from Achim, wanting to relieve himself of some more bitter words. She would find out soon enough, but right now it was the children’s time.

  ‘Whether it was magic or not, it seemed to Bilbo that he heard a sound like wind in the branches stirring in the rafters, and the hoot of owls. Soon he began to nod with sleep and the voices seemed to grow far away—’

  ‘Mama! You’re not reading properly any more!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Pulling herself together, she tried to concentrate on the story. Eventually, she even let herself get carried away by it, only looking up again once the children were fast asleep.

  To be disabled.

  Just those three words, sent from the same number of course. Beatrice stared at her phone until the energy-saving function made the display go dark.

  Disabled meant turned off, deactivated. And ‘to be’ meant it would happen soon. Or perhaps it could also be read in the sense of something or someone being handicapped.

  Was the message referring to the mutilated victim? Was the Owner announcing that he was about to start sawing limbs off again?

  She sat down on the couch and felt her pulse beating in her neck and all the way up to her temples. It would be hard to fall asleep now. For the third time that evening, she checked that the door was locked, then fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and turned on the computer. She had left her files in the office, including all the research Stefan had done for her, but she would easily be able to find the list she was thinking of online. She typed Geocache disabled into Google, and a list of links appeared. Reading the first two, she discovered that a cache could be ‘temporarily disabled’. The term, as she found out two clicks later, meant that the owner had removed the box in order to update it or exchange the logbook for a new one.

  No, thought Beatrice, not that, please.

  In the worst-case scenario, that would mean the coordinates they had gone to such lengths to work out were now worthless. Had the Owner just informed them he was planning to get rid of whatever was hidden at the site in question? Had he already done so? Without hesitating for long, she dialled Florin’s number. He picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Listen, I got another message—’ She stopped. There was piano music in the background. Erik Satie. Or something similar.

  ‘Is your brother there?’

  ‘No, it’s a CD. I was just trying to … oh, never mind. What happened?’

  She was willing to bet she had interrupted him while he was painting; Florin was a keen artist and said it helped him to wind down. ‘He sent me another text message. I don’t think it’s anything threatening, but perhaps a hint that he’s planning to get rid of what he hid for us.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘The message says “disabled”. That’s caching terminology and means the cache will be temporarily removed. Or updated. Maybe he put something new in.’ Something bloody, coagulating.

  For a few seconds, Florin was silent, which made it sound as though he had turned the piano music up. ‘Do you think,’ he asked eventually, ‘that we made a mistake? That we should have gone to the new coordinates right away?’

  ‘I wondered that too.’

  ‘I’ll send a few people over there now. We’ll keep the area covered for the unlikely event that the Owner really does turn up. Even though—’

  Even though he doesn’t really believe that will happen. Just as Beatrice herself didn’t.

  She heard him sigh. ‘And if we don’t find anything there tomorrow morning, I’ll take the fall for it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she objected. ‘If we don’t find anything, then it could just as easily mean we have the wrong Christoph. Remember the map, the autobahn.’ But she wasn’t too keen on that theory. Maybe the others were right; maybe the flicker of recognition in Beil’s eyes had just been a figment of her imagination.

  N47º 50.738 E013º 15.547

  The sundial on the facade of the Thalgau rectory was indicating exactly eight in the morning. They parked the car a few metres away by the side of an unsurfaced road, directly next to the unmarked police car from which their colleagues had kept watch overnight. But apart from two dog-walkers, no one had put in an appearance.

  The steady rushing sound coming from the autobahn would almost have been reminiscent of waves breaking against a shore, had it not been for the loud diesel engines of passing lorries. Stefan’s comment had been pretty accurate – on the map, it looked as though the coordinates pointed directly at the motorway itself, but in actual fact there was a bridge stretching out across a small valley. They would have to look under it, or in the immediate surrounding area. The autobahn bridge sliced through the landscape just a few metres behind the rectory, separating the house from a gently sloping fragment of forest where the birds were boldly attempting to hold their own against the cacophony of traffic.

  ‘Go ahead until the arch of the bridge, then let us go in front!’ bellowed Drasche. He and Ebner were just about to climb into their overalls.

  The GPS device Beatrice had borrowed from Stefan that morning was showing another 143 metres to their destination. She hoped he wasn’t too disappointed at having to hold the fort in the office instead of coming on the hunt with them.

  ‘What a strange place.’ Florin pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and came over to Beatrice to look at the GPS device with her. His proximity filled her with an unfamiliar shyness; the encounter – or rather, the almost-encounter – from Saturday was still playing on her mind. The strange sensation of having intruded into his private sphere.

  Drasche stomped over in his blue-plastic covered shoes. ‘Which direction?’

  ‘Straight ahead, under the arch of the bridge. Keep to the right just a little.’ She pushed the GPS device into Drasche’s hand and pointed at the black-and-white destination flag. ‘Head towards that. The thing will make a peeping noise once you get there.’

  She and Florin walked several paces behind Drasche and Ebner, who were making their way slowly, step by step, towards the indicated location. It was excruciatingly loud beneath the bridge itself, but as soon as they emerged into the daylight again all that remained was the surf-like rushing sound, paired with the babbling of a stream. It was flowing along to their right, dammed up a little further on by a low wall of uneven stones. A miniature waterfall was spluttering out of a hole in the middle of it.

  Pretty, but not likely to be a hiding place. Beatrice watched Drasche as he paced back and forth, turning around in circles, before eventually pressing the GPS device into Ebner’s hands.

  ‘The bloody thing changes its mind about the direction every other second.’

  ‘That means you’re almost there!’ she called out to him. ‘Look within a five-metre radius.’

  Drasche’s cursing was only just swallowed up by the combined efforts of the autobahn and stream. ‘What am I supposed to do, dig a hole in the ground or something?’

  ‘No …’ She went forward a few paces and pointed at the wall. ‘You have to look for hiding places. Geocaches are often stashed in tiny crevices or holes. You’re not supposed to find them at first glance.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s in the water,’ scoffed Drasche as he lifted a large stone at the edge of the bed of the stream, before climbing up to the small wall with Ebner. ‘Just mud, sludge and branches,’ he commented. ‘Now the GPS is saying we’re thirteen metres away.’

  Beatrice exchanged a glance with Florin. Had they messed up? Was the cache already gone?

  S
he thought back to yesterday’s search, to the hole she and Stefan had crawled into.

  ‘He hasn’t given us a terrain rating,’ she murmured.

  Florin turned to look at her. ‘Come again?’

  ‘A terrain rating. Normally each cache has a starring system which shows you how hard it is to find. That way you know whether there’ll be any climbing or crawling involved …’ Her gaze wandered over to the brambles growing around the mouth of the stream. Buttercups, hip-height spiky plants whose name she didn’t know, and—

  ‘Gerd!’

  Drasche whipped around. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Climb down again and come back in my direction. Yes, just a few steps – stop! Is that a tree root there on your left?’

  As he leant over, Beatrice moved forwards to be able to see more clearly. He nodded. ‘Yes. It’s completely overgrown.’

  ‘Reach underneath – there, where the roots are hanging over into the water. From where I’m standing it looks like there might be a little recess.’

  Drasche’s gloved hands fumbled downwards. It would have been much easier to get access if he had climbed into the slimy riverbed, but he was clearly trying to avoid that. His favourite sentence was: Your evidence erases their evidence.

  But he couldn’t get to it kneeling down, so he lay on his stomach and immersed his arm right up to the shoulder in the cavity between the roots and the bed of the stream.

  If I were the Owner, thought Beatrice, this is exactly the place I would have picked. No one would go rooting around in there just for fun.

  Drasche’s triumphant cry made her jump. He pulled his arm back up, bringing out into the daylight a container which was coated in slime and tiny pebbles. An earthworm lost its grip and tumbled down into the grass.

  They had been right after all. Relief streamed through Beatrice’s body, as welcome as oxygen after being immersed underwater. Florin put an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Good work, Bea.’

  They walked over to join the others. Ebner was already taking photos of the box, the stream, the tree roots and the surrounding area, while Drasche busied himself putting the cache into one of his own transport containers. ‘Sorry, but you’re not opening anything out here,’ he said, turning to Beatrice and Florin. ‘For one thing, I’d like to do it in lab conditions, and for another I’m not in the mood to wait for official transportation if it turns out there’s another body part in there.’

  They struggled to contain their impatience. Beatrice was in no hurry to see the gruesome trade she presumed was inside the box, but the note she hoped it contained was another matter. A clue to the next stage, perhaps a clue leading them to the Owner himself. Or a mistake, at long last.

  But they would have to wait while Drasche and Ebner took samples of the mud and searched the surrounding area for any possible traces of evidence. When they finally set off to the lab, the journey seemed to take longer than usual, and even the act of putting on protective clothing in the scrub room was a tortuous exercise in patience. Slow, she thought to herself grimly.

  Under the light of the blindingly bright investigation lamps, Drasche finally opened the box. He took a note out and unfolded it.

  ‘“Congratulations – you’ve found it!”’ he read out loud. ‘“This container is part of a game that you are now familiar with. You didn’t find it by chance, but intentionally looked for it. The contents won’t surprise you as much as last time, but surprises are overrated, believe me. I’m sure you’ll soon agree with me on this. TFTH.”’

  Drasche looked up. ‘What an asshole.’

  No surprises. It was already clear what was in the wrapped-up bundle that almost entirely filled the container. Feeling vaguely grateful that she didn’t have to touch it herself, Beatrice felt her body tense as Drasche carefully pulled it out.

  Three additional days in warm spring temperatures hadn’t been good for the contents of the plastic film. This hand had expunged significantly more fluid than its left counterpart. Despite the vacuum packing, green and blue discolorations on the flesh were clearly visible.

  ‘Luckily the task of opening it falls to the pathologist,’ explained Drasche. Beatrice guessed that his face mask was veiling a sardonic smile. She watched him check the plastic film for fingerprints and shake his head in frustration. Next, he laid the typed note down on the work surface, sprayed it with Ninhydrin and heated it up with the hot-air gun, but this didn’t yield any results either.

  Commenting that ‘all good things come in threes’, Drasche pulled another folded piece of paper from the cache container. He spread it out carefully and laid it beneath the lamp to take photos of it under the light.

  ‘I’d hazard a guess that this is the same handwriting as last time,’ he established. Instead of waiting for him to read aloud, Beatrice moved closer and leant over the note. He was right. The same looping, rounded letters – Beatrice was sure they belonged to Nora Papenberg. The pen had clearly been shaking at times; the lines slanted slightly downwards like the stems of a withering plant.

  Stage Three

  You’re looking for a loser, and you’re the first person besides me to take any interest in him in a long time. Look for scars, inside and out, and an old, dark blue VW Golf. The last three digits of the number plate are 39B. The street he lives in contains a name, which forms your keyword. Transform the letters into numbers (A=1, B=2 …). Take the sum you get from the word, multiply it by 26, add 64 and subtract this from the northern coordinates from Stage Two.

  Add the number 1,000 to the house number and multiply the sum by 4, then add 565. Subtract the resulting sum from the eastern coordinates from Stage Two. We’ll see each other there.

  ‘A loser,’ mused Beatrice. ‘That could mean anything. We’ll have to go by the description of the car.’

  While Drasche checked the second piece of paper for fingerprints, Florin went off to phone the vehicle registration office.

  Look for scars, inside and out. The first thing that came to Beatrice’s mind was the scar on the back of Beil’s hand – that was definitely an outer scar. Her gaze wandered instinctively over to the vacuum-packed hand. The counterpart to their first find – but there was still no body. Presumably inner organs would follow in the next stages, pieces that could fit in mid-sized plastic containers, pieces of a mutilated body …

  ‘Bingo!’ Drasche leant in closer over the paper he was heating with the hot-air gun. ‘We’ve got plenty of spoils here.’ On the letter, particularly around the edges of the page, violet flecks began to stand out. Oval shaped, partly smeared, but clear in some places, almost sharp. Fingerprints.

  ‘Is that a fleck of blood on the bottom right?’ asked Beatrice.

  ‘Possibly. You’ll get the detailed report when we’re done, okay?’ For Drasche, that was a consciously polite attempt at kicking them out.

  ‘I’d like the photos right away though,’ insisted Beatrice. Ebner promised to email them over in the next ten minutes.

  By the time she left the lab, Florin had just finished off his telephone conversation. ‘They’re sending us a list. All the cars from Salzburg and the surrounding areas which match the last three digits of the number plate.’

  Lists. Letters. Reports. Beatrice peeled off her lab coat, threw the gloves in a disposal bin, pulled the protective cap from her head and ran both hands through her hair. When she was trudging through all the paperwork that the case brought along with it, she didn’t feel as though they were getting even one step closer to the Owner. She only felt his presence in the notes they found in the containers.

  There was another three hours to go before their scheduled meeting with Hoffmann. They hurried back to the office. Beatrice checked her emails immediately in the hope of finding the photos there. Nothing. Instead, a provisional handwriting comparison had arrived from the graphology expert.

  ‘“The two samples correspond in all fundamental characteristics such as size, connectivity, angularity, anticlockwise slant and line spacing,”’
Beatrice read out loud. ‘“This suggests that they originate from the same individual, despite the fact that the second sample shows considerable irregularities which may indicate the subject was under extreme psychological stress.”’

  Florin had stopped what he was doing to listen. He drummed his knuckles thoughtfully on the desk. ‘So Nora Papenberg really did compose the puzzles. And then there’s the fact that the blood of the dismembered victim was found on her clothes – Bea, we have to at least consider the possibility that she might not be the victim here.’

  He was right, of course; they couldn’t rule it out. But it just felt so wrong.

  ‘Two accomplices,’ Florin continued, holding a pen in each hand, ‘who are in it together, until they argue, and one of them kills the other.’ The pen on the right fell onto the desk and rolled towards his keyboard. ‘Then the Owner disposes of the helper.’

  ‘Yes, although – nothing we’ve found out about Nora so far makes her sound like the kind of woman who cuts people up into little pieces.’ Seeing Florin frown, she knew what he was thinking. It was impossible to know, taking someone at face value, what they were capable of. Unfortunately. Luckily. She had tried to do it so often, back then, that she had almost lost her mind.

  ‘Have a good look at the photos from the agency dinner. She was carefree in all the pictures, completely relaxed. Until the phone call – then you can almost feel the weight on her shoulders.’

  She thought about Christoph Beil. He had recognised Nora. Not her name, but her face. She would speak to him again, hound him if she had to, until he told the truth.

  A few minutes before they headed off to their meeting with Hoffmann, word came in that a man had been reported missing. A man who, as the official put it, ‘could fit with the profile you have, age-wise’. The individual in question hadn’t turned up to work for the last week.