Five (8 page)

The shiny silver ballpoint pen which Florin was rotating between his fingers cast elongated reflections on the wall. ‘Well, I still think it’s possible that one of these threads is designed as a distraction for us, so we confirm the Owner’s belief that the police are incompetent.’

Without saying anything in response, Beatrice began to sort out the files strewn all over her desk. The photo of the hand with its macerated skin, enclosed in plastic shrink-wrap. She placed it to the right of the photo of the stone chasm where they had found the box, and diagonally opposite the photo of the handwritten puzzle. She paused to take it all in. Then she changed the order around, waiting for the pictures to tell her a story. But they kept their silence.

‘I’ll tell Stefan to go with you to the agency,’ she heard Florin say.

‘Perfect.’ She glanced at the clock and wished she could pick the kids up from school and drop them off at Achim’s right away. Then she would have crossed one thing off today’s to-do list. ‘By the way,’ she added, more loudly this time, ‘the new owl was a hit. The children love it.’

‘Good, then at least one of my missions has been successful.’ He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Keep your fingers crossed for my next one; I have to go and discuss our plan of action with Hoffmann. See you later.’

Konrad Papenberg arrived shortly before ten that morning, looking as though he had lost ten pounds in the last two days. Beatrice led him into one of the consultation rooms. She apologised for the stuffy air and opened the window.

‘Yesterday I went to … identify Nora.’ After every word he spoke, Papenberg seemed to need to summon up new strength. ‘It was her … and yet it wasn’t. Not properly, do you know what I mean? She wasn’t a person. Just – a thing.’ A jolt passed through his body; he turned aside, took a tissue from his pocket and wiped his eyes.

Beatrice paused to give him a moment. ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ It wasn’t a lie. She had never subscribed to the belief that dead people just looked as if they were sleeping. They looked like a foreign species. Shockingly different, even if they had died peacefully.

Papenberg forced a smile. ‘Thank you. I realise this is nothing new for you.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ Beatrice searched for words. ‘It’s not something you ever get used to, that’s the thing. It’s always hard, every single time.’ She fell silent. Was she bothering him with her own sensitivities? ‘I’m really very sorry for what you’re going through, that was what I wanted to say.’

He nodded jerkily, abruptly, without looking at Beatrice. ‘The handwriting sample,’ he mumbled, lifting his bag onto the desk.

A notepad, full of scribbled writing. Nora Papenberg had filled a good forty pages with brainstormed ideas, trying out and discarding advertising slogans alongside comments like ‘too lame’, ‘stale’, ‘dull’ – or ‘not bad’, ‘has potential’, ‘promising’.

Beatrice would have been willing to bet two months’ wages that the handwriting here was the same as that in the message in the cache box, but it would be unprofessional to jump to conclusions. Before she had the graphology report in her hands, nothing could be regarded as a sure thing.

‘Thank you.’ She laid both hands on the notepad. ‘I’ll make sure you get it back once we no longer need it.’

The man standing opposite her was gazing into space. ‘A colleague of yours questioned me yesterday. He wanted an alibi from me, for the night when …’ He was kneading the fingers of his left hand. ‘I don’t have one.’ Now he looked Beatrice straight in the eyes. ‘Are there many people who have alibis for crimes committed between two and four in the morning?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t …’

‘We have to ask. It’s part of the routine investigation process.’ Beatrice tried to add some warmth into her smile. ‘There’s something else I’d like to ask if possible – don’t worry, it’s not connected to you.’ She stroked her fingers across the notebook, feeling the swirling imprints left behind by the pressure of Nora Papenberg’s pen. ‘Your wife liked spending time in the great outdoors, is that right? Is it possible that geocaching was one of her hobbies?’

Konrad Papenberg’s expression was one of confusion. ‘Geo – what?’

Perhaps not, then. ‘Geocaching,’ repeated Beatrice, disheartened. ‘It’s a kind of treasure hunt. You use a GPS device, work with coordinates …’ She kept her gaze trained on his face, but the last word didn’t provoke any reaction from him.

‘Oh, right, yes, I’ve heard about that somewhere,’ said Papenberg flatly. ‘And it … it sounds like something Nora would have enjoyed.’ He swallowed and looked up at the ceiling to blink back the tears that were building up. ‘But it’s not something we ever did. There’s … so much we never did.’

Beatrice handed him a tissue and waited.

‘How long were you married?’

‘Almost two years. We met three years ago. Next week is – would have been – our anniversary.’

‘I really am very sorry.’ She stood up and pushed the chair back. ‘We’ll do everything we can to find her killer.’ She really meant it, but her words still sounded hollow. ‘If something else comes to mind which you think might be helpful to us, do please get in touch, okay?’

Konrad Papenberg nodded absent-mindedly. He let Beatrice walk him to the door and went to shake her hand, only then noticing that he was still holding the crumpled-up tissue in his. As if this discovery made everything even worse, he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes. ‘I just really need to know what happened,’ he whispered. ‘Do you understand?’

‘I do, very much so,’ answered Beatrice. ‘We won’t give up, I promise.’

She watched him as he went back outside to his car, a green Mazda that he had parked with one wheel up on the kerb. His posture didn’t change, whereas the opposite was often the case when people left the police station and felt that they were no longer being watched.

Beatrice turned and went back to her office, the notepad clamped tightly under her arm. Florin must still be talking to Hoffmann. His mobile was on his desk, seemingly forgotten. The display lit up, indicating an incoming call or message.

No, she wouldn’t look to see what it was.

What would even make her contemplate such a thing? It must be the lack of sleep.

She opened up her contact list on the computer and dialled the graphologist’s phone number.

‘Juliane Heilig.’

‘Beatrice Kaspary here, Salzburg Landeskriminalamt. I need a graphology report, a handwriting comparison. Can I email the documents through to you?’

‘Of course. What exactly would you like to know?’

‘Whether the two pieces were composed by the same person.’

‘No problem. How urgent is it?’

‘The beginning of next week would be great. But if you could give me your first impressions today – off the record, of course – then that would be a great help.’

A brief pause. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Beatrice stared at each of them in turn, the cheerful scribbles on the notepad and the copy of the handwritten cache letter. ‘It’s very probable that one of the samples was written under stress. In extreme circumstances.’

‘That’s useful to know, thank you.’ Heilig gave her the email address, and Beatrice sent the documents through to her. She had barely sat back down at her desk before Stefan rushed in.

‘I’ve got almost all the rehearsal times for the choirs now – it was quite a mission!’ He looked at Beatrice expectantly, prompting her to nod in approval.

‘Excellent work.’

‘Thanks. Three choirs are singing on Sunday – two at Mass, one at a wedding. If we split them up between us we could check them all out.’ He handed her a note detailing the names of the choirs in question, along with the times, churches and addresses.

‘Good work, Stefan. I mean it, you’re being a great help.’

He beamed. ‘I’ll go and make some more calls – it makes sense to get through the list today.’

On his way out, he almost crashed into Florin, who was storming in with a dark expression on his face.

‘Bad news?’ asked Beatrice.

‘No. Just Hoffmann’s usual persecution complex. The press are on his back, so he wants to give the journalists more information than we’d like.’ Florin sank down into his revolving chair and darted a glance at the clock on the wall. ‘He doesn’t like the fact that we didn’t inform him right away and give him the chance to check out the crime scene himself.’

That was nothing new. ‘But we tried to.’

‘Yes, I know, but he says we didn’t try hard enough. Anyway, he’s sulking and lashing out. He wants us to put pressure on the husband. Let’s hope he cheers up over the weekend, otherwise he’s going to be constantly sticking his oar in.’

Half-past ten. For the third time, Beatrice tried to reach Dr Vogt at the Institute for Forensic Medicine, but still without success. Then she tried his mobile. To her surprise, she got through.

‘I’m busy,’ said Vogt, without wasting time on a greeting.

‘I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m still going to need some preliminary information if I can’t get the report before the weekend.’

‘The Papenberg report?’

‘No, the one on the severed hand. In order to find out who it belonged to, I at least need some clues.’

The pathologist sighed. ‘There’s not much I can tell you. The hand belonged to a man, but with the best will in the world I can’t tell you when he died. The decaying process was delayed by the plastic shrink-wrapping, so there was no maggot infestation or anything of the sort.’

‘I see.’

‘The victim’s age is equally difficult to estimate. I’d say somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. The blood group is O positive.’

‘Have you already taken fingerprints?’

Vogt cleared his throat. ‘Of course. I’ll do my best to get the report to you today. And there’s one more thing – the man must have worn a ring for a long time, because there was an indentation on the fourth finger. I’m guessing it was a wedding ring. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that he had a rendezvous with a lover and took the ring off, or that he was recently divorced.’

Jealousy climbed back up on Beatrice’s list of potential murder motives. ‘Thank you. So the report …’

‘Will be with you as soon as possible. Of course.’

Between thirty-five and fifty years old. Beatrice searched despondently through the information on male missing persons, expanding her search to the whole of Austria. Three of the notices had been filed in the last week, but the individuals in question were either older or significantly younger. So was no one missing the man whose hand they had found?

She scrolled through the remaining reports, one after the other, searching for possible connections to Nora Papenberg, for similar professions. When she next glanced at the clock, over two hours had passed. Damn it! She jumped up, wrenched her bag from the back of the chair and dashed towards the door. She’d be lucky to get there on time, yet again.

The traffic was heavy, as it always was on Fridays, and by the time Beatrice finally pulled up at the school she could see Mina and Jakob sitting on a bench in front of the entrance, waiting for her. Mina was gesticulating in front of Jakob’s face, clearly giving him an important pedagogical speech.

‘You’re late,’ said Mina accusingly as she got into the car.

‘I know, I’m sorry. Did you guys have a good day?’

‘We made an alphabet chain,’ crowed Jakob cheerfully. ‘Do you know what my favourite letter is?’

‘Hmm. J?’

‘No, X. Exxxxx!’ He pronounced it, savouring the sound.

‘And how was your day, Mina?’

‘It was okay. Can we drive a bit quicker?’

Back at home, Mina rushed straight over to her bag, which was half-packed in the children’s room, and stuffed two of her bathing suits in it. Beatrice put some fish fingers in a pan on the stove, checked Jakob’s report book for any messages announcing impending disaster, then added jackets, rain trousers, pullovers and an additional pair of shoes to their bags.

‘Has Papa already bought you toothbrushes?’

‘Yes. Mine is green and has a car on it,’ cried Jakob. ‘Can I watch TV?’

‘No, lunch is nearly ready.’

The frozen fish fingers were sizzling away nicely, but they only had fifteen minutes. She was sure to have forgotten something –
oh, God, their pyjamas
.

‘No one go near the stove,’ she ordered, running over to the cupboard to take out two pairs of pyjamas.

Her mobile vibrated on the worktop, playing the first few bars of ‘Message in a Bottle’, signalling the arrival of a text message.

If there was a guardian angel for single mothers, then it would be a text from Achim saying that he was stuck in traffic and running late. Beatrice stuffed the pyjamas in the bag and reached for the mobile, pulling a fork from the cutlery drawer with her other hand to check the fish fingers.

‘Wash your hands, you two, dinner will be ready soon!’ she called towards the children’s bedroom, turning up the heat before wiping her fingers on a kitchen towel and pressing the menu button on the mobile. She opened the message.

It was from an unknown number, and it consisted of just one word.

Slow.

Her first thought was that it was a wrong number. What was it supposed to mean? Was someone asking her to slow down? She stared at the display, trying to make some sense of the message, then remembered the fish fingers. She pulled the pan off the hob.

‘Come and sit down at the table!’

Slow
. The word crept into her consciousness as if it were trying to illustrate its own meaning. Could it be … that the Owner was making contact with her? Was that possible?

All of a sudden, she felt hot, far hotter than standing over the stove had made her.

In his cache message, he had addressed the police directly. What if he was doing it again? Did he want to make contact personally? But – why with her? And where would he have got her number from?

‘Mama, I want ketchup!’ Jakob’s voice forced its way into her mind as if from afar. She had to be patient for a moment longer. Soon Achim would be here, and then …

‘I’ll get it. Leave Mina’s glass alone.’

‘But she’s got more juice!’

Beatrice decided she would call the number. That would be much better than spending her time guessing. But only once the children had gone.