Five

Chapter 1

N47º 46.605 E013º 21.718

The early morning mist enveloped her like a damp shroud. The dead woman was on her stomach, the grass beneath her soaked with dew and blood. The cows were taking care not to graze there, which was easy enough; the meadow was large, and the thing lying there in the shadow of the rock face unsettled them. A brown cow had ventured over shortly after sunrise, lowering her heavy head and licking the flaxen strands of hair with her rough tongue. But finding her discovery to be unpalatable, she had soon returned to the rest of the herd.

They kept their distance. Most of them just lay there, chewing the cud and staring out at the river. But even the ones that were still grazing avoided straying too close. The scent of death made them uneasy. They much preferred to stay where the first beams of sunlight were pushing through the mist, etching bright patterns onto the meadow.

The brown cow trotted across to drink from the trough. With every step, the clapper in her bell struck against the metal, producing a tinny sound. The rest of the herd didn’t even swivel their ears. They just stared stoically at the water, their lower jaws grinding constantly, their tails swishing to swat away the first flies of the day.

A gentle gust of wind swept over the meadow, brushing the woman’s hair aside and exposing her face. Her small, upturned nose. The birthmark next to the right-hand corner of her mouth. Her lips, now far too pale. Only her forehead remained covered, where her hair and skin were matted with blood.

The morning mist slowly frayed out to form isolated veils. These eventually wafted away, clearing the view of the meadow, the cattle, and the unwanted gift which had been left there for them. The brown cow’s muffled lowing greeted the new day.

As always, Beatrice took the stairs two at a time. She skidded along the corridor, racing past the second door on the left. Just seven steps to go. Six. Reaching her office, she saw that no one was there but Florin. Thank God for that.

‘Has he been in yet?’ she asked, slinging her rucksack onto the revolving chair and her folder onto the desk.

‘Good morning to you too!’

How did Florin always manage to stay so upbeat? She hurled her jacket towards the coat rack, missed and swore loudly.

‘Sit yourself down and catch your breath. I’ll get that.’ Florin stood, picked her jacket up from the floor and hung it carefully on one of the hooks.

‘Thank you.’ She turned her computer on and hurriedly emptied the contents of the folder onto her desk. ‘I would have been on time, but Jakob’s teacher caught me.’

Florin went over to the espresso machine and started pressing buttons. She saw him nod. ‘What was it this time?’

‘He had a temper tantrum, and the class mascot caught the brunt of it.’

‘Oh. Was it a living thing, dare I ask?’

‘No. A cuddly toy owl called Elvira. But you wouldn’t believe what a huge drama it caused – at least ten children in the class were in floods of tears. I offered to send a crisis intervention team across, but the teacher wasn’t amused. Anyway, now I need to arrange a substitute Elvira before Friday.’

‘That sounds like quite a challenge.’

He frothed the milk, pressed the button for double espresso and then crowned his work with a little dusting of cocoa. Florin’s calm demeanour was gradually starting to work its magic on Beatrice. As he put the steaming cup down in front of her, she realised she was smiling.

He sat down at the opposite side of their desk and surveyed her thoughtfully. ‘You look as though you didn’t get much sleep.’

You can say that again. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she mumbled, staring intently at her coffee in the hope that Florin would be content with her brief response.

‘No nocturnal calls?’

There certainly had been. One at half-past eleven, and another at three in the morning. The second had woken Mina, who hadn’t gone back to sleep again for an hour afterwards.

Beatrice shrugged. ‘He’ll give up eventually.’

‘You have to change your number, Bea, it’s been going on long enough. Don’t keep giving him the opportunity to wear you down. You are the police, for heaven’s sake! There are steps you can take.’

The coffee was sublime. In the two years they had been working together, Florin had gradually perfected the ideal blend of coffee beans, milk and sugar. Beatrice leant back and closed her eyes for a few seconds, longing for just one moment of relaxation. However brief it might be.

‘If I change the number, he’ll be on my doorstep before I can count to ten. And he is their father, after all; he has a right to contact his children.’

She heard Florin sigh. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Hoffmann’s already been in.’

Shit. ‘Really? So why isn’t my monitor covered in Post-its?’

‘I appeased him by saying you’d phoned and were on an outside call. He pulled a sour face, but didn’t say a word. The good news is that we’ll have some peace from him today because he’s in meetings.’

That was more than good news, it was fantastic. Beatrice put her cup down, tried to relax her tensed shoulder muscles, and started to sort through the files on her desk. She would finally get a chance to work on her report about the stabbing; Hoffmann had been nagging her to do it for ages. She glanced over at Florin, who was staring intently at his monitor with an expression of utter confusion. A strand of his dark hair fell forwards, almost into his eyes. Clickclickclick. Beatrice’s gaze was drawn to his hand as it clasped the mouse. Strong, masculine hands: her old weakness.

‘Problem?’ she asked.

‘Unsolvable.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

A thoughtful crease formed between his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know. The selection of antipasti is a serious matter.’

She laughed. ‘Ah, I see. So when does Anneke arrive?’

‘In three days’ time. I think I’ll make vitello tonnato. Or maybe bruschetta? Damn it, I wish I knew whether she’s eating carbs at the moment.’

Discussing menu planning wasn’t a good idea; Beatrice’s stomach immediately made itself heard. Quickly thinking back over what she had eaten so far today – an inventory which amounted to two biscuits – she decided she was perfectly entitled to feel hungry.

‘I’d vote for vitello tonnato,’ she said, ‘and a quick trip downstairs to the café.’

‘Already?’ He caught her gaze and smiled. ‘Okay then. I’ll just print this out and then—’

The telephone rang, interrupting him. Once he answered the call, it was only a few seconds before his dark expression told Beatrice to forget about the tuna baguette she had been dreaming of.

‘We’ll be there right away.’ He hung up the phone and looked at her. ‘We’ve got a body, female, near Abtenau. It seems she fell from the rock face.’

‘Oh, shit. Sounds like a climbing accident.’

Florin’s eyebrows knitted together, forming a dark beam over his eyes. ‘Hardly. Not unless she was climbing with her hands tied.’

The corpse was a bright stain against the green, flanked by two uniformed policemen. A tall man, bare-chested under his dungarees, looked at them curiously. He was standing in the adjacent field, holding a small herd of cows in check. He raised his hand, as if wanting to wave at Beatrice and Florin, but then lowered it again.

A rocky crag with an almost vertical twenty-metre drop towered over the meadow, jutting out in stark contrast to the idyllic landscape.

The forensic investigators, Drasche and Ebner, had clearly arrived just a few minutes before them. They were already clad in their protective suits, busying themselves with their instruments, and only nodded briefly in greeting.

A man was kneeling down right next to the pasture fence, filling out a form. He was using his doctor’s case as a makeshift desk. ‘Good morning,’ he said, without even looking up. ‘You’re from the Landeskriminalamt, I take it?’

‘Yes. I’m Florin Wenninger, and this is my colleague Beatrice Kaspary. Is there anything you can already tell us about the deceased?’

The doctor pushed the top back onto his pen with a sigh. ‘Not much. Female, around thirty-five to forty years old. My guess would be that someone pushed her off the rock face last night. Cause of death probably head trauma or aortic rupture – the neck wasn’t broken in any case. You’ll need to ask the forensic pathologist for more detailed information.’

‘Time of death?’

The doctor blew out his cheeks. ‘Between two and four in the morning, I’d say. But don’t hold me to that. All I’m supposed to do here is certify the death.’

Drasche trudged over, carrying his forensics kit. ‘Did anyone here touch the body?’

One of the policemen spoke up hesitantly. ‘The doctor. And me. But just to feel for a pulse. I looked for ID or a wallet too, but couldn’t find anything. We didn’t alter her position.’

‘Okay.’ Drasche beckoned to Ebner, who was poised with his camera at the ready. While the forensics team took photographs and collected samples, sealing them in small containers, Beatrice’s gaze rested on the dead woman. She tried to fade out everything else around her: her colleagues, the traffic noise from the main road, the chiming of the cowbells. Only the woman mattered.

She was lying on her stomach, her head turned to the side. Her legs were bent out to the right, as though she had been paralysed mid-sprint. Her hands were behind her back, her wrists lashed together tightly with cable tie.

Eyes closed, mouth half open, as if death had caught up with her while she was still speaking.

Beatrice’s mind instinctively filled with images. The woman being dragged along through the darkness. The precipice. She struggles, digs her heels into the ground, pleads for her life, but her murderer grips her tightly, pushes her towards the edge, waits until she can feel the depths of the abyss beneath her. Then, just a light push in the back.

‘Everything okay?’ Florin’s hand touched her arm for a second.

‘Sure.’

‘I’m just going to talk to the others. I’m guessing you want to immerse yourself for a bit, right?’

That’s what he called it. Immersing oneself. Beatrice nodded.

‘Don’t go too deep.’

He walked over to the two officers and engaged them in conversation. She took a deep breath. It didn’t smell of death here, just cow dung and meadow flowers. She watched Drasche as he pulled a plastic bag around the woman’s hands. Ideally, she would have liked to climb over the fence to have a closer look at the body, but forensics wouldn’t take too kindly to that; Drasche in particular could get very touchy. Without taking her eyes off the dead woman, she walked in a small arc along the pasture fence, trying to find another vantage point. She focused her attention on the woman’s clothing: a bright-red silk jacket over a floral-patterned blouse. Expensive jeans. No shoes; the soles of her feet were dirty and speckled with blood, as if she had walked a long way barefoot. Amidst the dirt, there were dark flecks on each foot. Small, black marks. Or perhaps something else…

Beatrice knelt down, squinting, but she couldn’t see clearly from this distance. ‘Hey, Gerd!’

Drasche didn’t stop what he was doing for even the blink of an eye. ‘What?’

‘Could you take a look at the victim’s feet for me?’

‘Just a second.’ He fastened the transparent bag with adhesive tape before moving down to look at the lower end of the corpse.

‘What the hell?’

‘There’s something there, isn’t there? Characters of some kind, am I right?’

Drasche gestured to Ebner, who snapped a series of close-ups of the feet.

‘Tell me!’ She lifted the barbed-wire fence and ducked underneath. ‘What is it?’

‘Looks like numbers. There’s a series of numbers on each foot. Could you please stay where you are?’

Beatrice struggled against the temptation to go further forward. ‘Can I see the photos?’

Drasche and Ebner exchanged a glance which betrayed both irritation and resignation.

‘Show her,’ said Drasche, clearly disgruntled. ‘It’s the only way she’ll leave us in peace.’

Ebner put his camera onto viewing mode and held it out for Beatrice to see.

Numbers. But not exclusively – the first character on the left foot looked like an N. Written in an unsteady hand, the oblique line tailed off in the middle before starting again. It reminded her of Mina’s handwriting back in kindergarten, the strokes leaning precariously against one another like the walls of a ramshackle old hut. The N was followed by a four, a seven and something that looked like either a zero or a lower-case o. Then another four, a six, another six, a zero and a five. Black, irregular strokes.

She zoomed in. ‘Are they painted on? With a waterproof pen maybe?’

She looked at the other foot. Again a letter first, then a series of numbers. An E with crooked horizontal lines, followed by a zero, a one, a three. Then another of the little circles. A brief gap, then five more numbers. Two, one, seven, one, eight.

‘No, they’re not painted on.’ Drasche’s voice sounded hoarse. ‘I’d say they were tattooed.’

‘What?’ She looked closer. Now that he’d said it, it suddenly seemed like the only plausible explanation. They were tattoos. But on such a sensitive part of the body, surely it was quite rare to have such a thing. So now the question was: did she already have them, or had they been inflicted on her by the killer?

She wrote the number combinations down in her notebook.

The pattern seemed familiar, but where from? It wasn’t anything connected to computing, nor were they telephone numbers. ‘I feel like I should know this,’ she murmured, more to herself than her colleagues.

‘You should indeed,’ said Drasche through his face mask. ‘And if you promise to leave me in peace, I’ll enlighten you.’

‘It’s a deal.’

‘Those aren’t o’s, they’re degree symbols. Try putting the number combinations into your GPS. They’re coordinates.’

She wanted to tell Florin the latest developments right away, but could see he was in the process of questioning the farmer.

‘I came out at half-six to bring the cows in for milking, and that’s when I saw her. I could tell right away that she had to be dead.’

‘Were the cows in the meadow overnight?’

‘Yes. I bring them out after the evening milking and back in again in the morning. My farm’s only a few hundred metres away, so it’s an easy job.’

So the animals had been stomping around in the meadow all night long. That meant forensics were unlikely to get any usable footprints from the perpetrator. If there had ever been any, that is. She positioned herself next to Florin and held her hand out to the farmer.

‘Kaspary.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Raininger.’ He gripped her hand tightly, not letting it go. ‘Are you with the police too?’

‘Yes. Why?’

He gave a wry smile. ‘Because you’re much too pretty for nasty work like this. Don’t you think?’

The last sentence was directed at Florin.

‘I can assure you, Frau Kommissarin Kaspary is not only very pretty, but above all exceptionally intelligent. Which happens to be the deciding factor for our “nasty” work.’ His tone had become just a fraction cooler, but Raininger didn’t seem to notice. He carried on beaming at Beatrice, even after she had forcefully freed her hand from his grip.

‘I’d like to continue, if you don’t mind.’ Florin’s voice was like bourbon on ice: cold, crisp and as smooth as velvet. ‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary yesterday evening?’

‘No. Everything was just the same as always.’

‘I see. And did you happen to hear anything during the night? Any voices, screams?’

‘No, nothing. So did the woman fall down from the crag? Or did someone attack her? There was an awful lot of blood on her head.’ He sounded eager to know more. No wonder really; next time he met the other farmers for a beer they would be desperate to hear his story, so he had to know the details.

‘We don’t know yet. So is the crag accessible by road then?’

The farmer thought for a moment. ‘Yes. It’s easy to get to from the other side. There’s a dirt track that goes almost right to the top.’

Beatrice saw Florin write in his notebook: Tyre tracks. All she had written in hers so far were the coordinates. Underneath, she scribbled in shorthand the information Raininger had given them.

‘Does the woman look familiar to you?’ she asked. ‘Have you see her here before at all?’

The farmer shook his head vehemently. ‘Never. And I’ve got a good memory for faces. I’m sure I would have remembered hers. Especially with that beautiful blonde hair. Is it natural?’ He grinned broadly, revealing a toothless gap in the top left-hand side of his mouth.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Beatrice in a gentle but firm tone, ‘we’re the ones asking the questions.’

But the farmer didn’t have any useful information left to offer. He set off reluctantly back to the farm, his cows in tow, glancing back over his shoulder after every few steps. Beatrice waited until he was out of earshot.

‘The victim’s feet,’ she said.

‘What about them?’

‘They were tattooed. On the soles.’

He caught on right away. ‘So you think the murderer left her some kind of memento?’

‘Possibly. But I think it might be a message.’ She showed him the two sets of numbers.

‘These were tattooed on her feet?’

‘Yes. The northern coordinate on the left foot, and eastern on the right.’

Florin immediately strode off across the meadow back towards the crime scene, completely disregarding the potential damage an encounter with a cowpat could inflict on his bespoke shoes. He stopped at the pasture fence and stared over towards the body, his head cocked to the side.

Beatrice had almost caught up with him when her phone started to vibrate in her jacket pocket.

‘Kaspary.’

‘I’m not going to let you mess me around any more.’ Every last word was dripping with contempt.

‘Achim. Now’s not the time.’

‘Of course not. It’s never a convenient time for you, is it?’ He was on the brink of shouting. ‘Even when it’s about the children, or—’

‘The children are fine, and I’m hanging up now.’

‘Don’t you dare, you—’

She ended the call and put her mobile back in her bag.

Take a deep breath, she told herself. Focus on the job at hand. But her hands were shaking, she couldn’t think clearly like this. Shit! Crossing her arms and tucking her hands out of sight, she walked over to join Florin.

‘I’d like to know where her shoes are,’ he pondered. ‘If she lost them in the fall then they should be around here somewhere.’ He paused and looked at Beatrice. ‘Are you going to tell me why you look so agitated?’

She didn’t answer, and Florin lowered his head knowingly. ‘Achim, right?’

She pulled her shoulders back and straightened up. ‘You were saying something about her shoes?’ She tried to pick up on his train of thought, keen to deflect the attention from herself. ‘I’m sure forensics will cover the crag too. If she really did fall, then we might find the shoes up there.’

But he was still staring at her intently. ‘I’m such an idiot!’ he exclaimed.

‘Why? We can’t be sure about the shoes. Who knows whether we’re going to find—’

‘Not about that. You still haven’t eaten anything, have you? You must be on the verge of fainting.’

‘Oh.’ Tuning into her body for a moment, she registered a searing sensation in her stomach – which might have been hunger – but not the slightest hint of an appetite. ‘No, there’s no rush. Crime scene work always turns my stomach anyway.’

She left it at that, not wanting to get drawn into a discussion. A light wind picked up, making the thin plastic bag around the dead woman’s hands rustle as if she was kneading it from the inside.

The pathologist’s vehicle bumped along the country lane towards them. After it had come to a standstill, a stretcher and body bag were lifted out. Drasche nodded, giving the green light for the woman to be taken away. They lifted her up and the wind caught her hair one last time. Beatrice turned away.

Before the vehicle set off on its way to the pathologist, Florin leant over to the passenger-side window. ‘Tell Dr Vogt I’d like the preliminary results today if at all possible.’

Beatrice’s mobile began to vibrate in her jacket pocket. It was sure to be Achim again. This time though, she wouldn’t pick up. But she took the phone from her pocket just to check, then sighed loudly. The call was from the school.

‘He emptied the entire contents of his milk carton into the pot plants! It’s just not acceptable, do you understand? The plants belong to the whole class, and if they die you’ll have to replace them.’

‘Of course. Just let me know if that turns out to be necessary.’

‘He’s not an easy child, you know.’ The teacher at the other end of the line sighed. ‘Please speak to him again. It’s high time he learnt that rules apply to everyone, including him!’

‘Of course. Out of interest, did he say why he did it?’

The teacher snorted. ‘Yes, he said that water is too thin and he wanted the flowers to have a proper drink.’

Oh, Jakob, my sweet little Jakob.

‘I see. Well, then at least he didn’t mean any harm.’

‘I guess. But he’s seven, for heaven’s sake. At some point he simply has to learn to do what he’s told.’

Beatrice suppressed the desire to shout down the phone at the woman.

‘I understand. I’ll speak to him.’

‘Thank you. Let’s hope it does some good.’ The teacher hung up. Feeling overwhelmed with hopelessness, Beatrice tucked her phone back in her bag.

At Florin’s insistence, they stopped off at Ginzkey’s instead of driving straight back to the office. ‘Vegetable curry helps to restore inner balance,’ he informed her, ordering two portions. By now, Beatrice was starting to feel as if her stomach had been sewn shut. It was only once the aromatic plate of food was put down in front of her, and she had shovelled in the first mouthful, that her appetite finally kicked back in. She devoured the entire curry, then ordered some cake and hot chocolate.

‘Sugar therapy,’ she explained. ‘It generates temporary feelings of happiness. By the time I feel sick I’ll have forgotten about everything else.’ She was relieved to see Florin grinning.

‘Will it spoil your appetite if we talk about the case?’ he asked.

‘Not in the slightest. Once we get back to the office we can go through the missing persons reports. Our investigations are just a stab in the dark until we know who the woman was.’

‘Well, that’s not strictly true. Thanks to your discovery.’

‘Do you really think the coordinates are connected to her death? The tattoos could be old. We should wait for the pathologist’s report first.’

‘Definitely.’ He drank his espresso down in one gulp. ‘But I’m still going to put the numbers into my GPS all the same. You never know, we might find something useful.’

Outside, the skies were clouding over. They hurried back to the office, where they were greeted by a message from Hoffmann asking to be updated on the new case. While Florin went off to look for their boss, Beatrice turned her computer on and loaded the page with the missing persons announcements.

A fifty-five-year-old woman with short grey hair who had gone missing from the local psychiatric unit. No. An unemployed twenty-two-year-old who had made suicide threats. Another no.

The third entry unleashed that subtle but familiar tug inside her, like a divining rod quivering and latching onto its target.

Thirty-nine-year-old female, blonde, green eyes, 170 centimetres, slim. A dark brown birthmark above the right-hand corner of her mouth. Special features: none. So no tattoos then.

The woman had been reported missing four days ago by her husband. Beatrice only turned her attention to the photograph after reading the statement through in full. It was a snapshot, and not really suitable as a missing persons photo, because the Nora Papenberg in the picture had been captured whilst laughing gleefully. Her eyes were half shut, and she was holding a champagne glass in her right hand.

Mouth open, eyes shut. Exactly the same as in the meadow, and yet so completely different.

Beatrice made a mental note of the corresponding features: the rounded chin, the snub nose and the birthmark at the corner of the mouth. Their corpse had a name.

She told Florin as soon as he came back from talking to Hoffmann. ‘Nora Papenberg. I’ve already googled her. She was a copywriter in a small ad agency. There are some photos of her online, so we can be pretty certain it’s her.’ She passed a pile of printouts over to Florin’s side of the desk.

‘Right, let’s get cracking then.’ The vigour in his voice sounded false, and Beatrice knew why. Now came the hardest part of the job: informing the next of kin. Disbelief, tears, devastation. That’s not possible, it’s not my husband, my wife, my child. There must be some mistake. There has to be.

They got stuck in traffic even before they reached the Karolinen bridge. Stealing a glance at her watch, Beatrice realised she would never make it on time now. She pulled her phone from her bag and quickly dialled a number.

‘Mama?’

‘Bea! It’s so lovely to hear from you. Are you already done for the day?’

‘No, unfortunately that’s why I’m calling. We’ve got a new murder case, and…’

Her mother’s sigh echoed down the line. ‘And you want me to pick the children up from the childminder?’

‘Yes. Please. I’ll be as quick as I can, and you won’t need to cook anything, I’ll see to it when I get back.’

‘Frozen pizza, I know.’

Beatrice closed her eyes. As if her guilty conscience needed any more ammunition.

‘No. In actual fact I was planning to make a broccoli bake. That’s quick too.’

If broccoli bake didn’t win her mother around then nothing would.

‘Fine then. I’ll pick them up, but it would be nice if you could give me more notice next time. I do have other things to do, you know.’

‘Yes. I know. Thank you.’

They turned off into Aigner Strasse, where the traffic finally eased up. ‘You don’t have to tell him.’ Florin stared fixedly at the Audi in front of them. ‘I’ll handle that, okay? You just make notes. Unless I overlook something important, then speak up.’

She could have hugged him. He was voluntarily drawing the losing card. The way she sometimes did with the children, just for the pleasure of seeing them hop around giggling, overjoyed to have beaten her.

Did Nora Papenberg have children? As Florin parked the car opposite the house, Beatrice scanned the garden for telltale signs. No sandpit, no children’s bikes, no trampoline. Just one of those Japanese Zen gardens with patterns raked in the sand.

‘We’re too early. He won’t even be home yet,’ said Florin as he turned the engine off.

They got out and rang the bell anyway. Almost immediately, the door was opened by a man wearing jeans and a checked jacket over a dark green polo shirt.

‘Are you Konrad Papenberg?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re from the police.’

Beatrice saw the man flinch, saw how he searched their faces in vain for the trace of a smile, for a sign of the all-clear. Then she saw the realisation dawn.

‘My wife?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid we have bad news, Herr Papenberg.’

‘Come in, please.’ He held the door open for them, turning his ashen face to the side. Most people looked away at that moment, when nothing of finality had yet been said. It was about maintaining that state for as long as possible, drawing out these last seconds of merciful ignorance. He gestured for them to sit down on the sofa, then jumped up again and brought them water from the kitchen, unbidden. The glasses shook so violently in his hands that he spilt half of their contents.

Florin waited until he had sat down and was looking at them. ‘We have every reason to believe that we’ve found your wife. She was discovered this morning in a field near Abtenau.’

‘What do you mean, every reason to believe?’ His voice was surprisingly steady.

‘It means that we’ve identified her based on the missing persons photo. She didn’t have any ID with her.’

‘But she always has it on her… in her handbag.’ The man swallowed, kneading the fingers of his left hand.

Beatrice made a note: Bag missing.

‘You will of course have the opportunity to identify her personally if you feel able to,’ Florin continued gently. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Papenberg didn’t reply. He fixed his gaze on a spot on the coffee table, moving his lips wordlessly, shaking his head in brief, abrupt motions.

In ninety per cent of cases, the husbands are the murderers. That was Hoffmann’s rule – and it was fairly accurate. But this man’s reaction was so faint. He didn’t yet believe it.

‘What – I mean, how… how did she…’

‘At the moment we have to assume that she was murdered.’

He breathed in shakily. ‘No.’ Tears filled the man’s eyes and he covered his face with his hands. They paused to give him time. Beatrice handed him a tissue, which he noticed only after a few seconds and took hesitantly.

‘You last saw your wife on Friday, is that right?’ asked Florin.

Papenberg nodded. ‘She went to a work dinner in the evening, by car. She arrived without any problems, but left early, at half-ten. I spoke to her colleagues; they said she told them she was coming home, that she had a headache.’

He glanced at Beatrice, looking strangely hopeful, as if she could create some equation from her notes, something that would give everything some sense. ‘Her colleague Rosa said that she received a call shortly before she left.’

That was important. ‘We’ll certainly be speaking to your wife’s colleagues,’ said Beatrice. ‘We didn’t find a mobile on her though. Do you know which model she had?’

‘A Nokia N8. I gave it to her… for her birthday.’ His voice broke. His upper body doubled over, shaking with suppressed sobs.

They waited patiently for him to gather his composure.

‘Could you please give me your wife’s mobile number? We’ll check to see who she spoke to.’

Konrad Papenberg nodded weakly and pulled his phone from his trouser pocket. He opened his contacts and let Beatrice write the number down. ‘I phoned her at least thirty times that night.’ His words were hard to make out, his voice bloated with grief. ‘But she must have turned it off, it just kept going straight to answerphone.’

‘When you reported your wife missing, you said she had her car with her. Is that correct?’

He nodded without looking up, scrunching the tissue in his hand.

‘A red Honda Civic?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s one more thing we need to know, Herr Papenberg.’

‘Yes?’

‘Did – does your wife have any distinguishing features?’

He looked up. ‘Like what?’

‘Scars, any obvious birthmarks, tattoos?’

His trembling hand moved up to his face and pointed to the right-hand side, just above his mouth. ‘She has a birthmark here. It’s her beauty mark.’

‘Okay.’ Florin cleared his throat. ‘Nothing else? No tattoos?’

‘No. She always thought they were tasteless.’ A spark of hope smouldered in his eyes. ‘Maybe it isn’t Nora after all?’

Beatrice and Florin exchanged a glance.

‘I’m afraid there isn’t any doubt,’ said Beatrice softly. ‘And not just because of the birthmark.’

That was enough for now. ‘We won’t disturb you any further. Can we call anyone for you so you’re not alone? If you like we can arrange for someone from the counselling team to come and see you.’

‘My brother.’ Papenberg’s voice sounded strangled. ‘I’ll ring my brother.’

While he went to make the call, they left the room and waited in the hallway. There were some framed photos on a dresser: Nora Papenberg immortalised in all manner of situations. In a summer dress on the beach, looking tanned. In hiking gear in front of a summit cross on a mountain. Building a snowman with a group of friends while clad in a quilted jacket and bobble hat. In every single one, she was laughing and full of life, but unmistakably the same woman whose corpse they had seen that very morning.

‘There were five days between her disappearance and the presumed time of death,’ Beatrice pondered out loud. ‘That’s a long time.’

‘It certainly is. Which suggests she was held captive before her death. What are your thoughts on the husband? My hunch is that he’s being genuine.’

‘I agree.’

‘But we’ll still have to look into it.’

‘Of course.’

The door to the living room opened. Papenberg came out, his eyes red and swollen. ‘My brother will be here in twenty minutes. If you don’t have any more questions…’

‘Of course. We’ll leave you alone now.’ They were already by the door before Beatrice realised that she was still holding the snowman photo in her hand. She felt her cheeks go red, and was just about to put it back on the dresser when Papenberg took it from her hand.

‘That was such a great day. Ice cold and clear. Nora said the snow was like icing sugar,’ he whispered. ‘She loves the snow so much, and nature, everything about it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Beatrice, simultaneously loathing herself for uttering the worn-out phrase. But the man wasn’t even aware of their presence any more. He nodded absentmindedly. His steadfast gaze was fixed on his wife’s face as she stood there amidst the blinding white, laughing for all eternity.

‘That’s a bunny rabbit, see? And this is an angel, it just drilled a hole in the cloud and that’s why it’s raining.’ Jakob held the drawing so close to the pan of broccoli that the paper started to buckle from the steam. Beatrice gently herded him over towards the fridge, where she pinned the picture up with two magnets. ‘It’s wonderful. Did you draw it at school?’

‘Yes. Frau Sieber gave me a star for it,’ he beamed. Beatrice squatted down to hug him. At least one of them had ended up having a good day. ‘And Mama, look.’ He wriggled out of her arms and poked two fingers into his mouth. A wobbly tooth.

‘Great!’ she marvelled, before hearing a hissing sound behind her. Boiling water was sloshing over onto the hob and from there down to the floor. Beatrice cursed inwardly, pulling the pan aside and turning down the heat.

‘Go and play with Mina for a little while longer, okay? I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.’

‘But Mina doesn’t want to play with me,’ moaned Jakob. ‘She always says I’m a baby and that I don’t know anything about anything.’ Nonetheless, he trudged obediently back to the children’s room, making loud engine noises as he went.

Beatrice wiped up the mess on the hob and floor, then diced the ham, peeled the potatoes and – once the bake was finally in the oven – sank down, exhausted, onto a kitchen chair. In front of her on the table lay a letter from Schubert and Kirchner, Achim’s lawyers. She threw the letter unopened onto her hated ‘To do’ pile and pulled out her notebook.

She flicked back through her notes to the ones she had made right after leaving the crime scene.

She read through the farmer’s statement again – he hadn’t heard anything, hadn’t seen anything, the same as always. Above it, she had scribbled the coordinates. Beatrice closed her eyes and summoned the image again – the victim’s feet lying sideways as if mid-stride, the digits lined up on the soles. The tattoos hadn’t been done by a professional, that much was clear. They had been done by an amateur. By the killer. Or the victim? Hearing the timer start to peep, she opened her eyes again. Time for dinner.

‘Are we going to Papa’s again this weekend?’ asked Mina, dissecting a broccoli floret into microscopic pieces.

‘Yes, that’s the plan. Why? Don’t you want to go?’

‘No, I do.’ A tiny green fragment had clearly found favour, and was being transported into her mouth on the fork. ‘He said he might be getting me a cat. If it lives with Papa, can I stay there more often?’

Beatrice almost choked. ‘We’ll discuss that when the time comes.’ A cat!

‘Me too, Mama, me too!’ mumbled Jakob, his mouth full.

‘Forget it, doofus, it’s my cat.’

‘Silly moo!’

Mina ignored him. ‘If Papa calls again tonight, can I speak to him?’

‘Me too!’ yelped Jakob excitedly.

‘No. We don’t make phone calls at night-time. Papa will soon realise that.’

She got the children ready for bed and let the CD player read them the bedtime story she had no energy left for today. Then she sat down on the balcony with a glass of red wine and read back through her notes. Again and again, she kept coming back to the coordinates.

Letting the wine swill around in her mouth, she tried to taste the notes of blackcurrant and tobacco touted by the label on the bottle, but didn’t succeed. So she drank the glass down in one long gulp instead. Tiredness pulled at her with its heavy hands.

She turned her mobile off and unplugged the landline from the wall. Achim would have to find another way of amusing himself tonight.

Three yellow Post-its, full of Hoffmann’s indecipherable scrawl, were waiting for her the next morning on her computer monitor. A reminder about the reports. She rolled her eyes.

‘We’ll give Stefan the files, he needs practice anyway. Report writing is character building. Oh, and he’s already checked out the list of Nora Papenberg’s phone calls – and guess what!’ Florin was standing at the espresso machine in a get-up that was very unusual for him – cargo pants, T-shirt and hiking shoes – and was just finishing off his cocoa-powder-dusted masterpiece for Beatrice. ‘The call that we suspect lured her away from the party came from a telephone box on Maxglaner Hauptstrasse. I’ve sent forensics there, although I’m pretty sure they won’t find anything.’ He looked up. ‘Speaking of telephone calls – how was last night? Did you manage to get any peace?’

‘I did actually, but only because I unplugged or turned off anything that could possibly have rung. So I had seven outraged messages from him on the answerphone this morning, telling me he was out of his mind with worry about the kids because he couldn’t get through.’ She took a sip of coffee. It tasted wonderful.

‘Well, the important thing is that you were able to get some sleep. Listen, the pathologist’s report isn’t in yet, so I suggest we concentrate on another aspect of the case first.’

‘The coordinates?’

‘Exactly.’ He waved his mobile in the air. ‘I’ve just installed some new navigation software. It looks like we’re heading off into the sticks.’ He spread out a map and pointed his finger at a section of forest near the Wolfgangsee lake.

‘There? Are you sure?’ Beatrice wasn’t sure what she had been expecting from the location indicated by the coordinates. But certainly something more interesting than trees.

They took Florin’s car. Beatrice lowered the passenger-side window. May had only just begun, but it was acting like a much balmier month. Argentine tango played on the stereo. For a moment, she daydreamed that they were setting off on an adventure, with a picnic basket on the back seat and all the time in the world stretching out ahead of them.

A thought occurred to her. ‘What if the place we’re driving to only has some private significance? Like the scene of an argument? Or quite the opposite – a first kiss, a promise, a sexual act, something that happened between people but left behind no visible trace? Then the location may well be the key to the case, but we’ll never find the lock.’

Florin just smiled. ‘That’s very possible. But I don’t think we should ignore the tattoos either, do you? I can’t imagine that they’ll be of no use to us whatsoever.’

He was right, of course. And, worst-case scenario, they’d be spending a sunny May morning in the countryside, far away from Hoffmann and his Post-its. Just that alone made it all worth it.

‘What do you think we’re going to find?’ she asked, as the car wound its way along the serpentine road up the Heuberg mountain.

He shrugged. ‘Let’s see what jumps out at us. If I get something fixed in my mind I’m more likely to overlook the thing that really matters, just because it looks different to what I expected. By the way, you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve finally made a decision.’ Florin raised his eyebrows. That meant: Ask me.

‘About what?’

‘Carpaccio di Manzo.’

‘Come again?’

‘The antipasti problem, remember? Carpaccio’s the ideal solution; the perfect start to a wonderful meal. Anneke will love it.’

The air rushing past carried the scent of fresh earth and lilacs into the car.

‘I’m sure she will.’

They parked the car opposite a restaurant. The path in front of them led across a meadow, which was flanked by grand estates and a magnificently renovated old farmhouse on the right-hand side. Florin held his mobile out in front of him like a compass. ‘Four hundred and thirty metres as the crow flies if we head north-west. But I suggest we follow the path at first rather than fighting our way through the undergrowth the whole way.’

Apart from an elderly couple kitted out in Nordic walking gear, there was no one else to be seen in the woods that morning. The path crossed an astonishingly clear stream and branched off to the right at a yellow trail sign marked ‘Steinklüfte’, which showed the way to the stone chasm.

‘Not much further.’ Florin showed Beatrice his mobile, where the black-and-white destination flag had already come into view on the display. The path was becoming steeper now, winding upwards through high rocky crags, past fallen trees with toadstools growing out of their stumps. One tree trunk stretched out across the path, forming an archway.

‘All we’re going to find here is pretty scenery,’ murmured Beatrice. ‘How much further is it?’

‘A hundred and twenty metres.’

She started to keep a lookout for something unusual, but it was difficult when she didn’t have the slightest idea what this ‘something’ might be. There were rocks, numerous rocks of differing sizes. And another stream.

‘Forty metres,’ announced Florin.

All around them, huge stones propped one another up. Trees were even growing out of some of the steep, moss-covered formations.

‘Fifteen metres.’ Florin stopped in his tracks. ‘We should be able to see something from here.’ He set off again, but walking more slowly now, his eyes fixed on his mobile. Beatrice tried to ignore the tug of disappointment in the pit of her stomach. Okay, so there was nothing here, but that was only at first glance. It didn’t necessarily mean the coordinates were useless. They would have to take their time, be thorough. Assume that there was more behind the tattoos than a murderer with an unusual fetish for feet and numbers.

‘Here.’ Florin stopped again. ‘Somewhere within a three-metre radius of this spot; unfortunately the mobile won’t be any more precise than that.’

Dry leaves crackled under their feet as they slowly paced around. This spot didn’t look any different from all the others in the surrounding area: trees, rock formations, dead wood.

Beatrice pulled her camera out of her rucksack and started to take photos. She tried to capture everything; it was entirely possible that the pictures would reveal more to them later than they were taking in right now.

‘Over there is something called the “Devil’s Ravine”,’ commented Florin. ‘The name sounds appropriate, but they’re the wrong coordinates.’

‘Let’s take a look at it anyway.’ Beatrice sat down on one of the knee-high rocks and looked around. ‘So this is roughly the right spot?’

‘Yes, pretty much. It’s supposed to be eight metres to the east of where you’re sitting now – whatever it may be.’

She took a deep breath of exquisite sun-warmed air. It was filled with aromas. Resin, leaves, earth.

Eight metres.

She looked more closely at the terrain around her. No, there was nothing unusual. Just rocks.

But maybe they had to look further up? At the trees perhaps?

Shielding her eyes with her hand, Beatrice squinted in the sunlight, gazing up at the treetops and upper branches. But all she could see was forest.

No clues, no sign of any kind.

Florin’s expression betrayed the same dissatisfaction she herself was feeling, but his voice still sounded upbeat. ‘It seems you were right again, Bea. Who knows what significance this place has for our tattoo artist? What he may have experienced, seen or heard here, perhaps even years ago.’

‘Indeed.’ She took the water bottle he handed to her and drank three long gulps. But something felt wrong.

There is something, but we’re not seeing it. We’re doing something wrong.

We’re not seeing it. The thought stuck in her mind. We’re not seeing it because we’re not supposed to see it? Or because we need to try harder?

Her gaze settled on one of the taller rocks, which had a stone leaning against it. Colour-wise the stone hardly stood out, being just slightly paler, but unlike the rock behind it, it wasn’t covered in moss.

‘Or because it’s hidden,’ she said decidedly.

‘Sorry?’

Beatrice stood up and paced the short distance over towards the rock. She had to climb a little in order to get to the spot that had caught her attention. Holding onto a tree that had wound its roots around a lower piece of the rock, she pushed against the moss-free stone with her other hand. As she had suspected, it was just propped up against the rock. Behind it was a cavity, a small dark hollow. She took a close-up photograph, struggling to keep her balance in the process. For a split second, the flash from her camera illuminated something pale inside the hollow.

‘Look.’

Florin was clambering over to her, tugging a torch out of his rucksack. Its beam illuminated some earth and a few brown leaves, from beneath which a spider hurriedly scuttled away in search of new shelter. The light stretched back through the hole and picked up something white. Plastic.

Silently, they both took out their gloves and pulled them on. Florin reached his arm into the space and pulled out a box with a white-and-blue lid. An airtight food container. ‘It looks new,’ commented Beatrice.

‘It feels heavy. Full. Have you taken all the photos you need?’

She nodded.

‘Good, then let’s climb back down.’

They knelt next to one another on the soft forest floor. Florin unfastened the container on all four sides, then lifted the lid off carefully.

Something large, wrapped in kitchen towel. On top of it was a neatly folded note, not handwritten, but word-processed. Florin unfolded it, and Beatrice moved closer to him to be able to see properly.

‘It sounds like it was hidden here especially for us,’ said Florin slowly. He folded the note up and slipped it into a plastic evidence bag. They both stared at the container and the thing that was awaiting them inside it, wrapped up in the kitchen towel. Then, although some irrational part of Beatrice was still hoping he wouldn’t, Florin reached for it. The paper towel slipped to the side.

Her first thought was that it had to be a fake. A Halloween prop, still in its original packaging. But her stomach responded more quickly than her mind, delivering a wave of nausea before she had even registered all the details.

‘Shit,’ whispered Florin.

‘Is it real?’

He took a deep breath and swallowed. ‘Yes. Do you see the frayed edges? I’m no expert, but… to me those look like the marks of a saw.’

Employing a painstakingly trained reflex, Beatrice suppressed the images hurtling into her mind and forced herself to look at it without emotion.

A hand. A male hand. Severed just below the wrist. Shrink-wrapped in a thick layer of plastic film, like vacuum-packed meat. The skin of the hand was white, with blueish discolouration on the tips of the fingers and around the nails.

She looked more closely at the amputation wound. She could see bone, and an artery that was protruding a little.

‘So this means we have a second body.’ Florin’s subdued voice sounded as if it was coming from far away.

‘Either that or a victim with only one hand.’

He nodded. ‘Or maybe someone just helped themselves to hospital waste. I’ll call Drasche.’

Beatrice hastily put the camera between herself and their find, taking a number of shots. Then she inhaled sharply and put the camera aside. ‘Florin! There’s something else in the box. Under the hand.’ She gingerly pulled out another piece of paper and unfolded it carefully. Florin put his mobile back in his pocket and came over to her side to read.

Unlike the first message, the words on this note were handwritten in ink, with broad arcs and loops.

For a long moment, the birdsong around them was the only sound to be heard. Beatrice read the text a second and a third time. A man called Christoph? Schubert’s Mass in A flat?

No, don’t think just yet. Just register first impressions. A woman’s handwriting. She herself wrote very similarly – more evenly and a little less elaborately, but with a comparable flourish. She turned around to face Florin.

‘Do you understand any of this?’

‘Not even a little.’ He shook his head without taking his eyes off the note for a second. ‘The box was at the spot corresponding to the coordinates on the corpse.’ He squinted, as though any beam of light would distract him from making sense of it all. ‘We find a clue, with which we can then draw up some new coordinates. And we also find an amputated hand. But why? What’s the point of this? Why is he so brazenly shoving his victims right under our noses instead of hiding them?’

‘Because he thinks we’re stupid. That’s what he wrote, after all. Or she.’

‘But why? Does he want to get caught? Or does he think he’s so superior that there’s no chance of that?’

Beatrice placed the lens cap carefully back onto her camera. ‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to send us off on the wrong track.’

‘With body parts?’

She looked at the dead hand. It was a left hand. There was an indentation on the ring finger, about three millimetres wide.

‘Well, by using body parts,’ she said slowly, ‘he can be sure that we really will follow the trail.’

Drasche appeared within the hour, wearing the same sour expression he always had when someone else had been the first to get their hands on a piece of evidence.

‘We were careful,’ Beatrice assured him. ‘Is there any news on Nora Papenberg?’

‘There was no sign of rape, nor any foreign tissue under her fingernails. We found some tyre tracks near the scene and on the way to the crag, but the results aren’t back yet. No footprints that could belong to the perpetrator, unfortunately. We’ll keep you posted. Where exactly did you find the container?’

Beatrice showed him the hollow in the rock. ‘We took photos while we were there.’

‘That’s better than nothing, I suppose,’ grumbled Drasche, pulling his gloves on. ‘At least he did me the favour of vacuum-packing the amputated body part. Conserved evidence – you don’t get that very often.’

Back at the office, Beatrice connected the camera to her computer. A few moments later, the pictures appeared on the screen, one after the other. The severed hand in its airtight container. While Beatrice clicked through the photos, Florin called Stefan Gerlach.

‘Even Hoffmann will have to realise that you don’t have time to type up reports right now,’ he explained, rolling his chair over to her side of the desk.

‘The box is a well-known brand, and mass produced.’ Beatrice pointed her pen at the website she had just called up. ‘This one here must be the same model as the one we found. The lid with the blue edge, you see? And the double lock on the longer sides. One hundred per cent air- and watertight, it says in the description. “Can easily transport liquids and store intense-smelling foods like fish or cheese without any unwelcome smells.”’

‘Perfect for body parts then. But our perpetrator took it one step further and vacuum-packed the hand just to be on the safe side.’

Beatrice looked back at the photos of the opened plastic container. ‘He didn’t want anyone to find it by accident,’ she pondered. ‘Not even a dog. And given that he doesn’t seem to rate the intelligence of the police very highly, he assumed it would take us a while.’

There was a knock at the door. Stefan poked his head in. ‘I hear there’s some boring typing work for me? Bring it on!’

‘You’re a star.’ Beatrice gathered the files up into a more or less orderly pile to hand over to her younger colleague, but his attention was now entirely absorbed by the photos on the screen.

‘Oh. That looks nasty. What is it?’

‘That’s what we’d like to know.’

‘A hand? Was it just lying around like that, packed up like it came from the freezer cabinet? Bizarre.’

Bizarre pretty much hit the nail on the head. ‘No, it was in a plastic container. There on the right in the photo, you see?’ Beatrice gave him a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘And now scoot, my dear. This isn’t your problem. Be thankful for that.’

But Stefan couldn’t tear his gaze away from the screen. ‘That seems incredibly strange. Doesn’t it remind you of something?’

‘No. Should it?’

Stefan leant over and pointed his finger at the rock hollow in which they had found the box. ‘Was it in there?’

‘Correct.’

He took a sharp intake of breath. ‘Then that’s the most perverse trade I’ve ever seen.’

‘The most perverse what?’

‘A trade. You take something out of the box and put something else back in. That’s how it works.’

Beatrice saw from Florin’s confused expression that he had understood just as little of Stefan’s observation as she had.

‘Oh. Sorry. You’ve never been geocaching, I guess?’

‘What’s that?’

Stefan looked from her to Florin and pulled up a chair. ‘It’s a kind of treasure hunt. Someone hides something, and others try to find it. The thing that’s hidden is called a cache, and this plastic container in the photo looks like a typical cache container. May I?’

Beatrice surrendered the mouse to him and shifted to the side so he could position his chair between her and Florin.

‘What did you call it again – a cash?’

‘Yes, that’s right. C-a-c-h-e, pronounced cash. People put all kinds of things in them.’

‘A treasure hunt,’ she declared. ‘Sounds promising. Do people use GPS for it?’

‘Oh, so you already know what I’m talking about then!’ said Stefan, disappointed.

‘No, not in the least. It was just a good guess. Carry on.’

‘Okay. So, first you sign up to the internet site, it’s called Geocaching.com. All the caches all over the world are recorded on it.’

‘Well I never,’ said Florin. ‘And lots of people do this?’

‘Absolutely,’ explained Stefan enthusiastically. ‘Millions of people, particularly in the US, but it’s getting more and more popular here in Austria. So, you register, under a nickname – mine is “Undercover Cookie”, for example.’

Beatrice couldn’t help grinning. ‘Lovely. I’m afraid that name might stick from now on.’

But Stefan wouldn’t be distracted. ‘Then you select a cache in the area you want to go to, save the coordinates in a specially designed GPS device and set off. Usually the destination will reveal a tin or a box, something watertight, and in it will be a logbook so you can make an entry. The bigger caches often contain objects that you can take with you if you replace them with something else. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a “trade”.’

Coordinates and watertight containers. It all seemed to fit. Beatrice clicked on the photo of the first message and zoomed in so they could read the text. ‘Are messages like this the norm too?’

‘Yes. That’s a cache note.’ He beamed first at Beatrice, then Florin, clearly proud of himself. ‘You find an explanation like this in practically every cache. It’s intended for people who haven’t yet heard of geocaching and stumble on a hiding place by chance. See, the owner mentions that here.’

‘Stop – use layman’s terms. The owner is the person who hides it?’

‘Exactly.’ Stefan gave Beatrice an apologetic look. ‘Abbreviations and specialist terminology are used quite frequently in geocaching.’ The mouse icon hovered over the photo of the cache note. ‘So, when he says this about the fingerprints – in one sense at least, you definitely won’t find any – he means the only ones will be those on the hand itself, right?’ he speculated.

‘It seems so.’ Beatrice had reached automatically for her notepad and was starting to jot down Stefan’s explanations. ‘He or she clearly has a sense of humour that takes some getting used to.’

‘You can say that again.’ Stefan pointed a pencil at the four letters the note was signed off with: TFTH.

‘What does that stand for? Are they elaborate initials of some kind?’ asked Florin. ‘Theodor Friedrich Thomas Heinrich? No, wait, I get it, it must be another puzzle.’

‘Not this time, it’s just the usual abbreviation. He’s thanking you. “TFTH” stands for “Thanks for the hunt”. You’re right, he does have an odd sense of humour.’

‘Or she.’ Beatrice clicked on one of the other photos: the note, written in what seemed to be a woman’s handwriting, sending them off on another hunt. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Stage two – what does that mean? The second level?’

‘It’s the next stage of the treasure hunt.’ Stefan reached for the mouse and enlarged the picture. ‘What we have here seems to be a multi-cache. That means there are several stages. You find Stage One, which gives you the clues for Stage Two, which in turn provides the clues for Stage Three, and so on and so forth, until you get to the final destination. Normally you find the container only at the very end.’

‘We can probably say goodbye to any concept of “normal” in this case,’ remarked Florin. ‘Is there anything else we should know?’

‘It’s not just a multi-cache,’ said Stefan, after thinking for a moment. ‘For that you would only need to count something – steps, trees, gravestones – in order to get the next coordinates. But here you have to solve a puzzle too. That makes it a mystery cache.’

Beatrice made a note: Mystery cache. ‘Thank you, Stefan. You’ve helped us a great deal. TFTH. Thanks for the help.’

But Stefan didn’t want to go just yet. ‘Can you tell me more about the case? How did you find the container? Oh, hang on, it’s connected with the woman from yesterday, right? The corpse in the cattle pasture?’ He gave Beatrice and Florin an earnest look. ‘Couldn’t you make use of an extra pair of hands for the investigation?’

‘I’ll speak with Hoffmann. If he agrees to give us more people, you’ll certainly be our first choice.’

Stefan seemed content with that. He set off back to his office, the pile of papers tucked under his arm.

Beatrice snapped the lid off a neon yellow highlighter and began to structure her notes.

‘Stop me if I’m talking nonsense, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to look for someone from the caching scene? It’s quite obvious that our man – or woman – knows their stuff here. Or would it be better to solve the coordinates for Stage Two first? If Stefan is right, it sounds like – after Stage Eight or Thirty-three or Ninety-two – it’ll eventually lead us to what we’re looking for.’

‘The murderer, you mean?’ Florin scratched himself behind the ear. ‘Do you really think he’ll offer himself up as the prize for us so enthusiastically and eagerly solving the puzzle?’

Beatrice looked at the photo of the hand again. ‘It’s probably just wishful thinking,’ she said. ‘But the way he’s been acting so far, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched an idea.’

The forensic test results from their find came back the next morning, even before Nora Papenberg’s autopsy report.

‘Say goodbye to any hopes about the amputation having been done in a hospital,’ said Florin, his expression grim as he scanned through the report. ‘The hand was cut off with a wood saw, post-mortem thankfully, and must have been shrink-wrapped straight afterwards. Traces of wood shavings were found in the wound.’ He put the report down and rubbed his eyes. ‘This is pretty messed up, don’t you think? Particularly considering no mutilated corpse has turned up anywhere.’

Not yet. But it soon would, and then they’d have not one murder case to contend with, but two. Unless the perpetrator had hacked up someone who had met their end through natural causes.

The perpetrator. The Owner.

‘Let’s start the search for the next stage then,’ she said.

Two copies of the photographed handwritten note were just gliding out of the printer when Hoffmann came storming into the office – without knocking, as usual.

‘Kaspary, what an unfamiliar sight. You’re actually at your desk during office hours!’

‘Good morning,’ said Beatrice. ‘I missed you too, sir.’

‘So what’s happening with those reports? I’ve been told you offloaded them onto young Gerlach without discussing it with me.’

‘I did indeed. You weren’t around to consult, unfortunately. Stefan very helpfully offered to take on the typing for me.’

The corners of Hoffmann’s mouth, which were droopy even at the best of times, sank even further down his face. ‘Well, you always were good at delegating unwanted tasks, weren’t you, Kaspary?’

Beatrice decided not to dignify that with an answer. Instead, she stood up and fetched the pages from the printer. The photo quality wasn’t great on normal printer paper, but it would have to do for now.

‘The press are breathing down my neck about the murder, as I’m sure you can imagine. So I hope you’re going to have some results for me soon. I’m relying on you, Florian!’ He ran his hand through his thinning, dirty-yellow hair and trudged out of the room.

‘Just wait, soon you’ll be on first-name terms,’ said Beatrice with a smirk. ‘He seems to have a real soft spot for you.’

‘I can’t believe he called me Florian!’

‘Well, the boss is too busy for minor details like that. It’s only an extra “a”. Don’t be such a girl, Wenninger!’

Don’t be such a girl was one of Hoffmann’s favourite catchphrases. Beatrice secretly suspected that his aversion to her was based on precisely that: that she was a girl, and what’s more – making it even worse – one who spoke her mind.

She handed Florin one of the printouts. On her copy, she underlined Christoph, birthmark, Salzburg choir and Mass in A flat with her yellow marker.

‘That’s all we have to go on, right?’

‘Well, it’s something at least. Although practically every choir sings Schubert’s Mass in A flat.’ A few clicks of the mouse, and he was on YouTube. Operatic tones resounded out from the computer’s tinny-sounding loudspeakers.

‘Good grief. Yep, that’s clearly a hit,’ sighed Beatrice.

Half an hour later, Florin slumped back in his chair and sighed. ‘From the looks of it, pretty much every Salzburg resident is in a choir,’ he said. ‘There are more choirs than there are churches. I reckon we’ll easily find fifteen Christophs, and for every one of those we’ll need to inspect the back of his left hand and check his year of birth.’ He pressed a tablet out of the blister pack that lay next to his desk lamp, swallowing it down with a gulp of orange juice. ‘These are the kind of things that make being a policeman so much fun.’

‘Headache?’

‘A little. It must have been Hoffmann’s voice – I can’t cope with the frequency.’

‘Either that or you’ve been hunched over your desk again.’ She stood up, went over to him and started to massage his neck muscles. She felt his surprise as he tensed up for a few seconds, but then he relaxed.

‘We’ll have to speak to the choirmasters, one after the other,’ she murmured. ‘By phone.’

‘The Owner wrote that this Christoph guy was in the choir more than five years ago. I would take that to mean he isn’t there any more. A bit to the left, please – yes, right there, that’s perfect. Thanks.’ He sighed.

Smiling, Beatrice pressed the balls of her thumbs into the knots between his neck and shoulders. ‘So we’ll ask them about former Christophs, too. And about a Schubert Mass that was rehearsed over five years ago.’

It was taking for ever. After two hours on the phone, Beatrice had got through just half of her part of the list, and had already found six Christophs – four active choir members, two inactive. Florin had five, including one where the choirmaster couldn’t really remember whether he might in fact have been a Christian instead.

He was just noting down the details from his last call when the telephone rang.

‘Yes? Oh, hi. Is there any news?’

Beatrice saw him raise his eyebrows. As he listened, he silently mouthed the word ‘pathologist’.

‘Yes, I’d definitely like to know the details. Can you tell me anything about the tattoo yet?’ He nodded, jotted something down, then took a deep breath. ‘Okay. And the other thing?’

He started to write again, but then stopped short and looked up, visibly perplexed.

‘What is it?’ whispered Beatrice, but Florin just shook his head.

‘And there’s no chance you could be mistaken? No? Okay. Yes. Thanks, I’ll try to make some sense of it. Send us the full report as soon as it’s ready. Yes, you have a good day too.’ He hung up.

‘What is it?’ pressed Beatrice. ‘What did they find out from the autopsy?’

Deep in thought, Florin stared at his notes. ‘We were right about the tattoos being recent,’ he said, speaking slowly. ‘They were done while she was still alive, about eight to nine hours before she died.’

Beatrice’s toes curled up involuntarily inside her shoes. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘Yes. That’s one thing. The other is that traces of blood were found on her clothes, and it wasn’t hers.’ He smoothed his notes out flat, as if that would somehow help the words make more sense. ‘But…’ he continued hesitantly, ‘it did match the samples from the amputated hand.’

‘What?’

He nodded, almost apologetically. ‘The blood was found on her jacket, blouse and trousers, and there were some small traces on her hands too.’

The image that Beatrice had created of Nora Papenberg’s last hours in her mind suddenly started to crack. Lonely, frightened, tied up somewhere in the dark – perhaps it hadn’t been like that after all. She had someone else’s blood on her, the blood of a dead man. ‘Were there any scratches, any skin cells under her fingernails?’

Florin shook his head. ‘Nothing of the sort. She had some grazes, of course, but they probably came from the fall off the rock face.’ He rubbed both hands over his face. ‘You’re thinking there might have been a struggle, right? The man attacks Nora Papenberg, she defends herself, making him bleed in the process – but what then? She kills him and saws him up into pieces? Hides his hand away in a plastic box? And then commits suicide? It all sounds pretty unlikely to me.’

But the message they had found with the dismembered hand had been written by a woman, Beatrice was sure of it. ‘Well, we should ask the husband for a sample of Nora Papenberg’s handwriting anyway,’ she murmured, looking at her copy of the note. The script was very rounded. Quite girly, even. No man wrote like that. At certain points in the text, you could see that the writer’s hand must have been trembling.

Beatrice traced the letters with her finger: it may be five years or even six.

Why were the clues so vague? Did the Owner want to make it extra hard for them so more time elapsed before they found the next coordinates?

The Owner, a man. Or maybe it was a woman. Maybe it was a woman who was already dead, who had left behind a strikingly unusual legacy.

Beatrice leant over the photo and propped her forehead in both hands. It was time to come up with some scenarios.

Let’s assume that the man whose hand they had found really had been killed by Nora Papenberg. That she had mutilated him, written the note, hidden the cache. Had the victim given her the tattoo first? If so, then there might be traces of her blood on the sawn-off hand. Beatrice made a note.

New scenario.

Let’s assume that the dead man hadn’t been the one who tattooed her – could Nora have done it herself? Beatrice’s common sense cried out in protest. Why would someone tattoo themselves on such a sensitive place as the soles of the feet?

Self-punishment was one possibility. A form of penance, perhaps for killing and dismembering the man. And then… Papenberg had fastened her hands behind her back with cable tie and jumped off the cliff face.

Absolute nonsense.

‘Florin, is it theoretically possible to tie your own hands up with cable tie?’

Florin looked up from his notes. ‘Of course. You’d just need to use your teeth to do it at the front. But behind the back – I imagine that’d be pretty difficult. Impossible, in fact. Unless you’re flexible enough to climb through your own tied-up hands, if you see what I mean. Or… if you had a vice to clamp the ends of the cable tie together, then you could tighten the noose while your hands are in it.’ He frowned. ‘But then you wouldn’t be able to get the clamped end out.’ He pushed his notes aside. ‘Are you wondering whether Nora Papenberg staged the whole thing herself, including her own death?’

‘I just want to be certain we can rule it out, that’s all. The way things stand, she seems a plausible perpetrator in some ways: the blood of a murder victim on her clothes and possibly even her handwriting on the note in the cache box.’

‘Which we still need to check out.’ He rotated his pencil between his fingers, lost in thought. ‘So far, Papenberg’s record seems completely clean, not so much as a parking ticket. If she did kill the man, then it was probably in the heat of the moment. Or self-defence.’

‘Let’s look at the facts. The unidentified man whose hand we found died before Nora, do we agree on that? Good. So logic would suggest that there’s a third person involved.’ With the tip of her finger, she fished a few specks of wood from her mouth which had ended up there as a result of all the pencil-chewing. ‘After all, Nora did get a phone call from someone during her work dinner. Maybe it was a lover? So she fakes a headache and rushes off to meet the guy. But they get caught in the act, the wife tattoos the coordinates onto Nora, kills her husband, saws him up into pieces and hides one of his hands in the forest. Then she pushes Nora off the rock face to her death.’

Even before she had finished the last sentence, Beatrice was already shaking her head. ‘No, women don’t act like that. A dismembered body suggests a male killer.’

‘There are exceptions.’

‘True. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility, but still…’ Beatrice reached for her notepad. ‘The ad agency. We need to question every single person who was there that evening. We’ll pester the pathologist’s office to give us the report on the sawn-off hand as soon as possible. And we’ll follow the Owner’s clues.’ She looked at Florin, hoping for his agreement, but he was gazing beyond her into the distance.

‘Those five days,’ he said. ‘So much time between her disappearance and her death. If we only knew what happened in that time span…’

Without breaking eye contact, Beatrice pinned the enlarged printed photo of the letter on the board above their desk. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘In five days, a person can change completely if you push them hard enough. We should keep that in mind with everything we find out about her.’

The thought stayed with her for the next few hours. Five days. She completed the list of choral Christophs and unearthed contact details for former choirmasters, but those five days kept circling relentlessly in her mind.

‘Good afternoon, this is Beatrice Kaspary from Salzburg Landeskriminalamt. Am I speaking to Gustav Richter?’

‘Erm, yes. What’s—’

‘Don’t worry, nothing’s happened. I just need some information from you. You lead the Arcadia chamber choir, if I’ve been correctly informed?’

A relieved sigh. ‘Yes.’

‘I have two rather unusual questions. Do you have a choir member called Christoph? Or a former member? The time period in question would be the last five to six years.’

‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘It’s connected to a current investigation. Unfortunately I can’t be any more specific than that.’

‘Aha. Yes, we do have a Christoph. Two, for that matter – Christoph Harrer and Christoph Leonhart – and they both still sing with us.’ A brief pause. ‘Are they in some kind of trouble?’

‘No, absolutely not. Did your choir perform Schubert’s Mass in A flat around six years ago?’

This time, his answer came more quickly. ‘Yes, that sounds about right. Let me think for a moment – yes. It must be almost six years ago now.’

Beatrice highlighted the two names.

‘You’ve been a great help, thank you.’ Her hand continued to hover over the notepad; one final question was burning on her tongue.

She took a deep breath.

‘Is that all, Frau Kommissarin?’

‘Yes. No, sorry, just a moment – there’s one more thing, and it might sound strange, but I’ll ask anyway. Do either of the two men have a birthmark on their hand? Something big, quite noticeable?’

‘What? Why do you ask?’

Beatrice sighed inwardly; it was an understandable reaction. ‘It could be an important detail in the case.’

‘A birthmark?’ He sounded slightly irritated, as if she was trying to make a fool of him. ‘I’ve no idea why that might be of interest to you, but I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I tend to concentrate more on my singers’ voices, as it happens.’

Three further telephone enquiries revealed yet another Christoph. After that, the only choirs left on the list were the very small ones, and the ones whose choirmasters she had been unable to reach. ‘That’s already fourteen we have to check out in person.’ Beatrice flung her pencil down on the desk in exasperation. ‘With my luck the last one will end up being the one we’re looking for. None of the choirmasters so far knew anything about a birthmark.’

‘Same here.’ Florin’s outstretched arm fished for Beatrice’s notes. ‘I’ll just type everything up, then get Stefan to hunt out the addresses.’

‘Okay. I really need to grab a bite to eat. Can I bring you anything?’

Florin shook his head silently, already populating the table on his screen with names. The glum twist of his mouth reflected her own mood: yet another weekend without any time off.

One steak sandwich later, Beatrice ran into Stefan on her way back to her office. He was eagerly waving a sheet of paper at her.

‘I’ve got a few addresses for you, and also the rehearsal times for four of the choirs. Interested?’

‘You bet. Thanks!’ She quickly scanned through the information. One of the choirs was rehearsing tonight at seven in the Mozarteum. She could just make it if she picked the kids up first, cooked them dinner and then asked Katrin to watch them for an hour. The neighbour’s daughter’s piggy bank must be almost bursting by now.

‘Perfect.’ Florin nodded as she explained her plan to him. ‘I’ll pick you up at a quarter to seven.’

By seven, after laminating schoolbooks, putting a load of washing on, cooking carbonara and taking a quick shower, Beatrice was sitting in the passenger seat next to Florin, hoping she didn’t still smell of garlic.

‘Christoph Gorbach and Christoph Meyer. Blue eyes and a birthmark. It shouldn’t take long.’

‘No,’ replied Florin gruffly.

Beatrice resisted the impulse to give him a friendly nudge – after all, he was concentrating on the road. ‘You’re annoyed because of this weekend, right? Have you already told Anneke about the new case?’

Florin shrugged. ‘I’m wondering whether I should cancel. I mean, there’s no point her coming all this way if I have to work.’ He turned off into Paris-Lodron-Strasse.

‘Why cancel just yet? We’ll bring Stefan onto the team – he’s really fired up by the case and practically working on it already anyway.’ She looked at Florin’s profile. ‘He and I will make sure that we find the right Christoph, then…’

Florin braked abruptly and manoeuvred into a space that had just become free at the side of the road. ‘Have you considered the possibility,’ he said, his gaze fixed on the rear-view mirror, ‘that this whole puzzle nonsense could just be a red herring? The sick little mind games of a killer who wants to throw us off his scent by sending us on this ridiculous birthmark hunt?’

The idea had indeed occurred to Beatrice, earlier that evening when she was in the shower. They certainly couldn’t rule out the possibility that they were allowing themselves to be led down the garden path, giving the killer enough time to erase his or her tracks.

‘We’ll see. If it turns out there’s no man who meets the Owner’s description, then all we’ll have lost is a little time.’

‘Yes, but we’ll have lost it to him,’ Florin objected.

The plastic container pushed its way back into Beatrice’s mind. The dead hand.

‘We don’t have any other choice but to play the game, Florin. I don’t like it any more than you do.’

They parked up and got out. Florin took her arm as they crossed the road, making their way towards the steel-and-glass cube that housed the Salzburg Mozarteum. ‘The thing that makes me most angry,’ he said, ‘is the feeling that he’s really enjoying all of this.’

Male voices singing in unison. A slow descent into inconsolable grief.

Beatrice paused in front of the door to the rehearsal room and lifted her hand to turn the door handle. But she couldn’t bring herself to push it down. From all the songs they could have been rehearsing, it would have to be this piece.

The female voices had tuned in now, soaring and full of hope.

Beatrice hadn’t heard it since that day, but every note was familiar to her, every detail burnt into her memory. The smell of incense and flowers and grief, but above all the bitter metallic taste on her tongue that had stayed with her for months on end. Guilt was something that had to be suffered slowly.

‘Beautiful,’ whispered Florin at her side. ‘I don’t know what it is though… Puccini?’

‘No. Joseph Rheinberger, the Stabat Mater.’ She could feel that something inside her, something that had to remain hard at all costs, was starting to be softened by the music.

‘I’m impressed. Where do you know it from?’

‘It’s often sung at funerals.’ She pressed the door handle down brusquely. ‘Right then, it’s time to play. Our move.’

While Florin asked the two Christophs to step out of the rehearsal room so they could speak with each of them in turn, Beatrice pushed the unwelcome memory back into the hidden recesses of her mind, the place where it usually stayed, and tried to concentrate on the matter at hand.

It soon became apparent that they hadn’t hit the bull’s eye first time. Christoph Gorbach had only been in the choir for just under two years. The backs of his hands were very hairy, making it hard to tell at first, but on closer inspection there was no birthmark. Christoph Meyer, in turn, was a little hesitant to show his hands to Beatrice initially, but that was more down to his chewed fingernails than any conspicuous changes in skin pigmentation.

‘Well, it was always unlikely we were going to find him right away,’ said Florin with a faint smile as they left the rehearsal room and walked back out to the car. ‘Anneke’s flight is landing in Munich at half-two tomorrow, and I was hoping to pick her up,’ he added. Feeling his sideways glance, Beatrice nodded.

‘Let’s work flat out in the morning, then you head off whenever you need to. I can carry on with Stefan and come in at the weekend.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Achim will have the kids.’ He said he might be getting me a cat. She turned her head to the side, gazing out of the car window.

They were almost there now. As Florin double-parked in front of her building, she nodded to him, opened the door and got out.

‘Wait, I almost forgot!’ He turned around and reached for something which, in the dark, just looked like a shapeless lump. ‘Make sure you tell Jakob they’re an endangered species.’

Grey-brown fur. Huge yellow plastic eyes. ‘Elvira the Second,’ murmured Beatrice. ‘Thank you. You’ve really helped me out there, I’d forgotten all about the massacred owl.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ His eyes were tired, but he was smiling broadly. ‘Sleep well.’

Her laptop was whirring so loudly that Beatrice worried it would wake the children, who had reluctantly crawled into bed only half an hour before. Jakob had immediately grabbed the new Elvira, stubbornly refusing to give it back. He gave in eventually, but not without a great deal of tears, for which Mina had called him a ‘stupid crybaby’.

No, the laptop wasn’t running very well at all. Beatrice gave it a smack, which instead of muting the noise just made it more noticeable. Presumably something had made its way into the ventilation slot and was now rattling around in the cooling system. Another quick smack and the rattling became a hum, considerably quieter now. Good, that had clearly done the trick.

Beatrice checked her emails, making sure there was nothing that needed an immediate response, then opened her browser.

She typed www.geocaching.com into the address bar. The site appeared on the screen; the colour logo and, a little further down on the right, an icon in the form of a little television with the prompt: WATCH! Geocaching in 2 Minutes. The link led her to an animation which depicted, more or less, exactly the same things Stefan had explained to them the day before. Watching the little white cartoon figures search for orange boxes amidst a colourful animated landscape, Beatrice thought about the Owner. It was very likely that he had watched the film at some point too. Had he intended to fill his caches with such macabre contents back then?

‘He’. Why is the killer always a he in my head? Her fingers drummed on the touchpad, making the mouse icon dart across the screen in abrupt jolts. On the right-hand side there was an option to select caches in your neighbourhood, but the coordinates could only be shown once you had registered and logged on.

A Basic Membership on Geocaching.com is free, the site announced cheerfully. Beatrice clicked on the grey button and was redirected to the registration form.

A username. Reminded of Stefan’s – ‘Undercover Cookie’ – she couldn’t help but grin.

Lost in thought, she stroked her fingertips across the keyboard. Something inconspicuous, innocuous. The cuddly owl caught her attention. Elvira. Excellent – but unfortunately the nickname was already taken. ‘We won’t let that deter us though, will we?’ she murmured, typing Elvira the Second into the text field.

The registration process was uncomplicated enough, and soon the coordinates of the hiding places lay before her; it was even possible to look at each individual one on a geocaching Google map.

The maps were a great deal more helpful than the coordinates. Without hesitating for long, Beatrice searched for Lammertal, the region near Abtenau where Nora Papenberg’s body had been found.

No, there was no cache listed there. There were a few in the surrounding area, clearly marked by little white box icons with green or orange lids. On the other side of the river, a blue question mark denoted a – what had Stefan called it again? – a ‘mystery cache’, that was it. But none of the hiding places were within 500 metres of the crime scene. Without taking her eyes off the map, Beatrice leant back and dragged the mouse down eastwards. She lost her orientation and accidentally expanded the scale so much she could see half of Salzburg. Your search has exceeded 500 caches, the program complained.

‘Okay, calm down, hang on.’ She zoomed back in. The stone chasm had to be somewhere around here. Searching the map, Beatrice noticed that there was a regular cache very close to the place where she and Florin had found the box with the dismembered hand. She read through the profile of the corresponding owner, then the comments of the successful treasure hunters. The container was hidden in a hole under a rock. But the most gruesome object in it was apparently a cross-eyed plastic pig.

Shaking her head, Beatrice leant back in her chair. What had she been expecting? That the killer would leave clues on the Internet for them?

On the off chance, she clicked through the profiles of the users who had commented on the stone chasm cache. Most of them would be easy to track down through the details they had given, and some had even included a photo – often depicting them out in the countryside, smiling, with a muddy plastic container in their hands. The picture of Nora Papenberg building a snowman would have fitted in perfectly here.

Beatrice read the entries and profile descriptions until her eyes were so tired they began to sting. Stefan had already spent the previous evening looking in the forums for leads, for any conspicuous members from the local area. It was a Sisyphean task. But if the perpetrator was from the geocaching community, it wasn’t entirely impossible that he might betray himself through a post. They couldn’t rule it out, at least.

Beatrice altered the map on the screen again and clicked on the second-nearest blue question mark she could find. It revealed a Sudoku, the solution of which was supposed to give the correct coordinates. Was that the standard kind of puzzle? Another blue question mark, however, revealed a load of numbers with no apparent system. It was a complete mystery.

She tried to suppress a yawn. ‘Pretty complicated, huh, Elvira?’ The cuddly owl’s yellow plastic eyes stared unseeingly into nothingness.

Beatrice carried on searching, stumbling upon an online dictionary devoted exclusively to geocaching. One of the first links led her to a list of abbreviations. ‘TFTH’ was there, the one with which the Owner had so sarcastically signed off his message. Perfect. She decided she would read on for a little bit longer, then go to sleep. With the end of her working day finally in sight, Beatrice fetched a glass of wine and shunted her notepaper to the side. No more revelations would be presenting themselves today, no flashes of inspiration which ran the risk of being washed away into the depths of claret red forgetfulness.

She took a sip from her glass. The abbreviation ‘BYOP’ meant ‘Bring Your Own Pen’, and was usually found in caches that were too small to contain writing utensils of their own. ‘HCC’ was ‘Hard Core Caching’ ‘JAFT’ stood for ‘Just Another Fucking Tree’ and denoted a Tree Cache with Rope Technique, whatever that was supposed to mean. Beatrice squinted, trying to ignore the headache that was threatening to take hold. She would have to go deeper into this material to make any sense of it, much deeper.

It was 10.35 p.m. She yawned again and caught herself wishing she could just snuggle up against the furry owl and go to sleep.

The shrill tone of the telephone was like a sudden punch to the chest. Beatrice jumped up from her chair, ran across the lounge and practically ripped the handset from the unit. Had the children woken up? Hopefully not. A telephone call this late could only mean something had happened. Another dead body, or another body part…

She braced herself for anything; anything, that was, except Achim’s nightly onslaughts.

The stupid asshole.

‘How lovely to actually get through for once.’ As always, his voice was dripping with contempt. ‘Make sure they’re ready tomorrow, half-one on the dot. And this time remember to pack a jacket for the kids, and by that I mean one each. Mina almost froze to death last time.’

Don’t let him get to you. ‘Of course. Tomorrow at half-one,’ she said curtly. ‘And stop calling at this time of night – the children don’t just need their jackets, they need their sleep too.’

‘I don’t need parental advice from you—!’

Acting on reflex, Beatrice hung up. Another thing he could use against her. The cosy sleepiness from a few moments ago had vanished; her heart was beating so hard it felt as if she’d just come back from a long run. But at least the children didn’t seem to have stirred. She bookmarked the cache dictionary and shut down the laptop, unplugged the telephone, turned her mobile off and went to brush her teeth. As she brushed, she realised she was humming something, but couldn’t place the sombre melody at first. Then she realised: it was the Stabat Mater.

‘Herr Papenberg? I’m sorry to disturb you, but we need your assistance with something.’ Beatrice strove to inject the right balance of sympathy and efficiency into her voice. ‘Would you be able to provide us with a sample of your wife’s handwriting? A letter, a diary – or something along those lines?’

‘For what?’ He sounded exhausted.

‘We have a note that may possibly have been written by your wife. We need to have the handwriting compared by a graphologist.’

She could hear him struggling to keep his voice steady. ‘A note? Can I see it?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. There’s some information that we can’t even make available to the next of kin. Not yet, in any case.’

‘I understand,’ he said wearily. ‘Okay then. I need to run a few errands and I’ll be in the area anyway, so I’ll drop off a sample of her handwriting for you.’

‘That would be great, thank you very much.’

That morning, Hoffmann had appointed Florin leader of ‘Project Geocache’, a name that had amused Beatrice for several minutes even though she couldn’t have explained why. He now came through the door with Stefan in tow, who was beaming across his unshaven cheeks. ‘I’m officially on board. Give me some work to do!’

‘You’ll live to regret it,’ said Beatrice in mock earnest, pressing the list of choir rehearsals into his hands. ‘We’re still missing the rehearsal times for some of these. It would also be helpful to find out the private addresses of the singers we need to speak with. It’s possible that some of the choirs are performing this Sunday, so I’d like us to check those out together.’

Stefan gave an exaggeratedly snappy salute, already on his way back to his office.

It’s good that he’s motivated, thought Beatrice with a glance at the clock. It was only half-nine, but she felt as if she already had an entire working day behind her. She had slept badly last night, dreaming intermittently of Achim and sawn-off limbs. Then she had just lain awake in the darkness, trying to make some sense of the case.

‘We need to question the people from Nora Papenberg’s work as soon as possible.’ Florin pushed a piece of paper over the desk towards her, a printout of the contact details on the agency’s home page.

‘I know, and preferably today. We can do it as soon as I’ve spoken to Konrad Papenberg. He’s bringing a sample of her handwriting across, and I really need to ask him something.’ She wiped her eyes, too roughly; a few eyelashes were now clinging to the back of her hand.

‘Should we send one of the others? Stefan could do it, or Sibylle, she—’

‘No.’ Hearing the hardness in her voice, she tried to soften it with a smile. ‘I want to speak to them myself, otherwise I’ll lose my sense of the case. It already has too many components as it is. The body, the coordinates. Then the puzzle, dismembered parts of a second body, and blood traces from that body on the clothing of the first. All of these things are connected, but I can’t figure out in what way.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘Not yet, anyway.’ And I don’t want anyone to beat me to it. She didn’t say it out loud, knowing that Florin was a great believer in teamwork and collaborative brainstorming. That was a good thing, of course – for him. But Beatrice found it hard to think clearly as part of a team. She had to do her thinking alone, or with one other person at the most. Any more than that and she just found it disruptive.

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.

When the doorbell rang, Jakob was just shoving the last bite of fish finger into his mouth. ‘Papa!’ He jumped up, knocking his chair over in the process, and ran out into the hallway.

Beatrice ran after him, but Jakob had already managed to reach the intercom system. ‘Papa?’ he mumbled with his mouth full.

She took the receiver from his hand. ‘You know very well that you’re not allowed to buzz anyone in!’

‘But—’

‘No buts. Go and wash your face. You’re covered in ketchup.’

The irritated snort that came through the intercom was sufficient for her to be sure it was Achim at the door. Beatrice pressed to buzz him in, hearing his footsteps on the stairs seconds later. For a moment she wished she could run away and avoid seeing him, but by then his head, with its thinning blond hair, was already visible through the banisters.

‘Hello,’ she said, attempting a smile which was intended to signify a willingness to be civil. ‘The children are almost ready.’

He glanced at her briefly and didn’t even reply.

‘Papa!’ cheered Mina from behind her. ‘Guess what? Today at school I was the only one who knew that Helsinki was the capital of Finland!’

‘That’s excellent, Mouse. You’re the best.’ Achim leant over to Mina and pressed her against him, prompting unexpected tears to well up in Beatrice’s eyes. For heaven’s sake, what was wrong with her? She turned away quickly and fetched the children’s bags. Despite the fact that Achim still refused to look at her, she used all the energy she had to keep her smile going. In five minutes’ time, the encounter would be over. At her side, Jakob was tugging at her trouser leg. ‘Mama?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can’t you come too?’

She knelt down next to him. ‘No, unfortunately I can’t. But you’ll have a great time, and if you want you can call me in the evening. Okay?’

He nodded uncertainly. ‘I packed Fleece,’ he whispered. ‘Do you think Papa will be mad at me?’

Fleece. Also known as the grubbiest toy rabbit in the world.

‘No, Papa understands that you can’t sleep without him.’

Achim had released Mina from their hug. ‘Come on, kids. Let’s get some fresh air, it smells awful in here!’

‘I don’t think so,’ protested Jakob. ‘It’s fish finger air!’

‘Exactly.’ A disdainful shake of the head as he rolled his eyes. ‘And let’s make sure you get a proper dinner tonight too. Come on, we’re off!’

Beatrice hugged her children. Mina was in a hurry, struggling to get loose. ‘Are we buying the cat soon?’ she asked as she ran down the steps. ‘I’ve already thought of a name.’

‘Remember, Sunday at half-six, on the dot,’ said Achim to Beatrice, before taking Jakob by the hand and leaving. Instead of waiting until they were out of sight, Beatrice shut the door right away. Only now did she realise how hard she had been gritting her teeth; they were hurting.

She flung the window open, letting fresh air into the apartment. She could hear Jakob’s cheerful jabbering coming from downstairs, and she felt her stomach clench painfully. Then she remembered the message on her mobile. Slow.

The prefix was, if she wasn’t mistaken, that of a prepaid provider which sold cards and top-up codes in supermarkets. Beatrice opened the message and pressed ‘Call’.

A friendly female voice informed her that the connection was not available right now and that she should try again later.

Slow. It’s an observation. Or an accusation. Directed at us because we haven’t yet decoded the clues to the next stage?

If that was the case, then the Owner had exposed himself in a way that could prove to be his downfall. Slamming the window shut with a bang, Beatrice grabbed her car keys from the counter and set off back to the office.

The Department of Public Prosecutions took less than an hour to approve her request to have the mobile phone located. While Beatrice sat with the phone to her ear, waiting to be put through to the technical department of the mobile provider, her gaze fell on a new neon pink Post-it that Hoffmann had stuck to her monitor. Meeting on Monday, 3 p.m., attendance compulsory. Wonderful. That was sure to be the highlight of her day.

A young male voice spoke up at the other end of the line. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Beatrice Kaspary, Landeskriminalamt. I need some information about the number 0691 243 57 33. I’d like to know whether it’s contracted or a prepaid mobile.’

Silence. Then: ‘You’re from the LKA?’

‘Yes, Beatrice Kaspary, Murder Investigation Department.’

The sound of paper rustling. The clatter of a keyboard. ‘It’s a prepaid card.’

Shit. ‘So I presume you can’t tell me who it belongs to?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. People don’t have to give any ID when—’

‘I understand,’ she interrupted. ‘Okay, then in that case I need the mobile’s identifier. A message was sent from the number at 13.17 to the following recipient.’ Beatrice recited her own number. ‘I’d also like to know which network the device was connected to at the time. How long will it take you to get that information?’

She must have sounded extremely bossy, as when the man at the other end answered, his voice sounded both intimidated and defiant at the same time. ‘I’m not sure. It’s the weekend, so I’ll need to see if there’s someone here who can—’

‘If no one’s there, then you’ll have to get someone there!’ She tried to rein herself in and adopt a more friendly tone, but her insides were vibrating like a plucked guitar string. ‘It’s important. It would be an immense help if you could get the information to me as soon as possible.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Beatrice hung up and propped her face in her hands. Slow? If we are, then it’s certainly not because of me.

She pulled the pathologist’s report towards her and immersed herself in the details relating to the severed hand.

The sawdust which had been found in the wound came from bay and spruce trees – the most common in the local area, so not very helpful. Earth had been found under the fingernails, and there were also traces of soapy water on the skin – presumably the killer had washed the hand before shrink-wrapping it—

‘Beatrice?’

She jumped. She hadn’t heard Stefan come in.

‘Yes?’

‘I spoke to the agency earlier – they’ll all be there if we go now.’ He smiled, shy and excited, as if he had just asked to open a Christmas present two days early and was now waiting expectantly for her permission.

She couldn’t help but smile back. ‘Right. Thanks for taking care of that. I’ll just get my things together. Can you grab the Dictaphone?’

The stale biscuits laid out in a bowl on the circular conference table seemed appropriate for the sombre occasion. Two men and three women were sitting around the table. When Beatrice and Stefan walked in, the taller of the men stood up and stretched out his hand. ‘Max Winstatt. I’m the owner of the agency, and I want to offer whatever assistance I can to help you find out how Nora died.’ His accent indicated that he wasn’t from Salzburg; perhaps the Ruhr valley, thought Beatrice.

‘I’m Kommissarin Beatrice Kaspary, and this is my colleague Stefan Gerlach.’ She put her bag down on a vacant chair. ‘Is there a room where we can talk without any interruptions? I’d like to speak with each of you alone.’

Winstatt nodded emphatically and led Beatrice into a neighbouring room, which was dominated by a large glass desk. ‘You can use my office.’ He paused at the door. ‘Rosa, could you bring us some coffee, please?’ he called out. ‘You’ll have a cup, won’t you, Frau Kaspary? With milk and sugar? We’re all so devastated by Nora’s death, it’s hard to believe she was…’

Beatrice waved Stefan over to put the Dictaphone on the desk. She took her notepad and pen out from her bag.

‘We can start with you if that’s okay, Herr Winstatt. Would you please close the door?’

He followed her command at once, then sat down in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk.

‘Could you describe for me the evening of Nora’s disappearance – from your perspective? Everything you can remember about the course of events, and of course everything that relates to Nora herself.’

He paused a moment before starting to speak. Good. Perhaps that meant there was more to his rhetoric than just smooth clichés.

‘We reserved a table at the restaurant for 7 p.m., and Nora was one of the first to arrive. She was in a cheerful mood and seemed completely carefree, if you know what I mean.’

Beatrice nodded. ‘What was she wearing?’

He only had to think for a moment. ‘A red jacket. Trousers. I can’t remember what was under the jacket, something nondescript. But Rosa took some photos that evening. Erich too, on his mobile, if I’m not mistaken.’

Beatrice and Stefan exchanged surprised looks. ‘Excellent. Do you have the photos here?’

‘I’m sure Erich has his phone on him, and Rosa might have her camera too. It’s one of those compact ones, so they’re really easy to carry around with—’

‘Okay,’ Beatrice interrupted. ‘Let’s come back to the photos in a moment. So, Nora was there early and in a good mood. What happened next?’

‘We all had an aperitif, and then I made a short speech. We had just managed to secure a budget which is amazing for a company the size of ours, you see – that’s why we were celebrating. Then we ordered the food.’

‘Was Nora sitting next to you?’

‘No, she was next to Irene. Irene Grabner, she’s a copywriter too. But I know what she ordered – fish soup to start, then sweetbreads in Madeira sauce. I had the same, that’s why I remember…’

What an inappropriate moment to become aware of the emptiness of her own stomach. Beatrice thought with dull longing of the biscuits on the conference-room table.

‘We all had wine too, in case that’s important,’ Winstatt continued.

There was a knock at the door, and one of the female employees came in balancing a tray with three coffee cups.

‘Are you Rosa?’ asked Beatrice.

‘Yes,’ said the woman, looking at her boss hesitantly. ‘Rosa Drabcek.’

‘Do you have your camera with you? The one with the pictures from the work dinner?’

‘I… I think so. I’ll go and see.’

‘Then we’ll speak to you next.’ Beatrice took one of the cups with a grateful smile, then sipped the coffee. Black and strong. Her stomach contracted in protest, but she drank another sip regardless.

‘So, you had wine.’ She picked the topic of conversation back up. ‘Did Nora drink a lot?’

Winstatt hesitated. ‘No, I mean… one glass, or maybe two. Plus the Prosecco we had at the beginning of the evening. She certainly wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. Slightly tipsy at most.’ He stared down at the table, embarrassed. ‘Do you think she would have had a better chance against her murderer if she had been completely sober?’

‘That’s hard to say. Please continue.’

She could see from his face that he was trying to compose himself. ‘We were halfway through the main course when her mobile rang. She took it out from her handbag and made some jokey comment about her husband. Then she said something like, “Oh, it’s not him,” and answered it. We carried on talking, of course, so I don’t know what she was speaking to the caller about, but after a few seconds she got up and went off towards the toilets with her phone.’

‘As if she didn’t want anyone at the table to hear her conversation?’ Beatrice interrupted.

‘Yes. Or perhaps it was just too loud and she wanted to find somewhere quieter to talk. That was the impression I had, at least. But if I’m honest I wasn’t really paying that much attention to Nora at the time.’

The telephone conversation. She glanced questioningly at Stefan. He understood at once and, in a barely perceptible movement, shook his head. That meant the list of Nora’s phone conversations which they had requested from the provider hadn’t arrived yet.

‘She wasn’t on the phone for that long,’ continued Winstatt. ‘Three, maybe four minutes. Then she came back to the table.’

‘Did she carry on eating?’

Winstatt shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘I’m not sure, sorry. Probably. But then she left about twenty minutes later. She said she was heading back home, that she had a headache.’

That corresponded to what Beatrice had found out from Konrad Papenberg.

‘When she left the restaurant – was she alone, or did anyone else leave at the same time?’

This time, Winstatt shook his head decisively. ‘She was definitely alone. It wasn’t much later than half-nine, and we tried to convince her to stay, but she didn’t want to. She looked pretty exhausted too, so I don’t think she was feeling very well.’

‘Okay. Thank you. Right, so I’d like to speak with…’ She glanced at her notes. ‘Rosa Drabcek next. And also see the pictures on her camera if I can.’

Rosa Drabcek wasn’t a secretary but an executive assistant, as she emphasised right at the start of the conversation. Stefan, who had unwittingly stuck his foot in it by mentioning the word ‘secretary’ as they introduced themselves, nodded guiltily. Beatrice, on the other hand, only had eyes for the camera, the small, metallic blue device that was resting in Drabcek’s hands.

‘I haven’t yet downloaded the pictures from the meal,’ she said apologetically, ‘but the display is quite big, so you should be able to see everything well enough.’ She turned the camera on, activated the viewing mode and handed it to Beatrice. ‘I took quite a lot of pictures, but I hope they can be of help in some way.’

Hohensalzburg Castle, illuminated at night, was captured in at least ten images. There was a wonderful view from the restaurant over to the mountain and castle, and it was clear that the executive assistant hadn’t been able to get enough of it.

Next, the table, smartly set and still free of guests, plates and mess. Four photos. Winstatt, standing behind a chair with his head turned to the side. Then the castle again.

‘The camera takes good pictures, don’t you think?’ commented Drabcek.

Sure, if you looked beyond the nondescript subject matter… Beatrice clicked on impatiently to the next photo, and the next – there was nothing she could use here. But they would still copy all the photos to a memory stick to be sure.

Beatrice looked up. ‘Do you mind me asking why you took so many pictures? You must have hardly had time to eat.’

A shy smile. ‘It’s a new camera. I wanted to see what it can do. I really love photography, you know.’

Finally, some pictures of people. A young woman with an updo, wearing a short electric blue dress. A man with glasses and an expensive-looking suit – if Beatrice’s memory served her correctly, he was sitting outside right now, waiting to be questioned.

Then, right at the end, Nora Papenberg. The clothes she was wearing in the picture were without a doubt the same as those she had been found in. The jeans, the red silk jacket, the blouse with the delicate flower pattern. High-heeled red shoes which matched the jacket. The shoes that hadn’t yet turned up.

Nora was beaming into the camera, making a victory sign with the fingers on her right hand.

The next picture. Nora sitting next to the woman in the blue dress. ‘Is that Irene…?’

‘Irene Grabner,’ Drabcek eagerly completed her sentence. ‘Yes. She always dolls herself up like that.’

It suited her though, Beatrice reflected. She clicked further forwards. Nora and Irene with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling. Then a picture of the young man in a suit, one of Winstatt and another woman, and numerous shots of the whole table; the group now seemed to be complete. Drabcek was taking the photographs, of course, although she was in a few of the last ones herself. ‘Nora took those,’ she said softly.

Nora. Beaming happily in every shot. Beatrice continued to scroll through the images. Aperitifs, the group clinking glasses. The meal being served. A few close-ups of sumptuously presented plates. The colleagues, eating. Conversations.

Then, suddenly, Nora’s seat was empty. Beatrice squinted. Was she visible in the background at all? No, not in this photo. The next one had been taken from a wider angle, but the background was blurred. Another picture, a red splodge which looked like the colour of Nora’s jacket.

Five photos later, she was back at her seat. Even on the small display, Beatrice could see that something must have happened, as Nora was no longer smiling. Her eyes were gazing past the lens. Into nothing. Or into herself. In one of the subsequent shots, she had pulled the candle across the table towards her and was staring into the little flame.

Then came a series of photos in which Nora was nowhere to be seen. They were all of her colleagues, laughing, toasting, gesticulating. A half-full and an empty bottle of wine stood on the table.

I can’t let myself think too single-mindedly, Beatrice reminded herself. The call wasn’t necessarily the catalyst. It’s entirely possible that she really had just drunk too much alcohol and given herself a headache.

In the next photo, she was sitting there, both elbows propped on the table in front of her, holding her head. Then there were several of the desserts, followed by a group picture in which Nora’s chair was empty again.

Nora didn’t appear in any of the final photos. Beatrice passed the camera to Stefan. ‘We’ll copy the pictures to a memory stick and take them with us. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Sure, no problem.’

While Stefan pulled a laptop and USB cable from his bag, Beatrice leant over the desk and looked at Rosa Drabcek silently for a few moments. Usually this made people begin to talk hurriedly, blurting out things that they might not otherwise say, but Drabcek clearly wasn’t one of those people. She remained silent.

‘Was there anything about Nora Papenberg’s behaviour that stood out that evening? Even something seemingly minor?’

She shook her head. ‘No. She was just her usual self – until the headache started, anyway, but even that wasn’t out of the ordinary for her. She used to get migraines from time to time. She always had a packet of tablets on her desk.’

‘Did Nora mention who she was speaking to on the phone?’

‘No. But then I didn’t ask.’

‘Okay. I’d like you to tell me about the evening from your perspective.’

Her narrative differed only marginally from what Winstatt had told them. Once they had finished, Beatrice saw Rosa Drabcek to the door of the office and asked her to send Irene Grabner in.

Even without the electric blue dress, Grabner looked – how had Rosa put it? – dolled up, that was it. But she was clearly one of those women who could wrap themselves in a tablecloth and still look fantastic. Stefan was beaming at her, transfixed. Beatrice shot him a quick, chiding glance, upon which he toned down his smile to a more professionally acceptable level.

‘You were sitting next to Nora Papenberg at the work dinner. Please tell me everything you can remember from the moment after Nora’s phone rang.’

Grabner lowered her head and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with her perfectly manicured hand. ‘We were having so much fun at first,’ she said. ‘Nora was in a really good mood. I mean, it was mostly down to her that we had managed to secure the budget. It was really her evening. When her phone rang, she giggled, saying it was sure to be Konrad asking her to smuggle some of the dessert out in her handbag.’ Irene Grabner broke off, looked away. ‘We were really good friends, you know? I’m… I don’t understand… how…’

Stefan nodded. ‘Take your time.’ Noticing that he had lowered his voice by an octave, Beatrice couldn’t help but smile.

‘So, her mobile rang, and Nora looked at the number on the display. “That’s not Konrad,” I remember her saying, but she answered it anyway, saying something a little cheeky like, “Anyone who’s calling me in the middle of a party had better be male, young and gorgeous.”’ Grabner took a deep breath. ‘Then she stopped smiling, stood up and went into a faraway corner of the restaurant. I didn’t hear anything of the conversation – all I could see was her back.’

‘Were there any other people over where she was talking?’ Beatrice interjected. ‘Who might have heard something?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I think she intentionally sought out a quiet spot, so she wouldn’t be disturbed.’

‘And then what?’

‘I asked her who it was, and she just said, ‘Oh, no one you know.’ And that it was nothing important. But from then on, her good mood had vanished. She left soon after, and I wish I’d gone with her. But I didn’t know…’

Grabner’s voice failed her. Beatrice felt the urge to give her a hug, to tell her how well she understood what she was going through. She wanted to tell her to exorcise the word ‘if’ from her mind.

If I had gone with her.

If I had taken her home.

If…

Beatrice dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Her own problems had nothing to do with this case. She smiled at the woman, giving her a moment to calm herself down.

‘When Nora left,’ she probed further, ‘did she say she was going to drive home? Or was she going somewhere else?’

‘Home. I’m sure of it. She had one of her headaches, and wanted to go to bed. I remember Herr Winstatt offering to get her a taxi – the company would have paid for it of course – but she said she was fine. The migraine hadn’t kicked in fully, and she didn’t want to leave her car there overnight. That was typical of her, and it would have been pointless trying to convince her otherwise.’

‘Do you have any idea of how much Nora drank?’

Irene Grabner looked at her hands, which were clasped on the table in front of her. ‘Not exactly. But she wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. She knew she would be driving, after all, so she didn’t overdo it.’

No new information arose in their conversations with the rest of the agency colleagues. At the time, none of them had placed any great significance on Nora’s early departure. They were shocked by her death, as could be expected, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in their testimonies. The photos which Erich, the account manager, had taken on his mobile didn’t show anything that Rosa Drabcek’s pictures hadn’t already captured, but Stefan transferred them to his laptop nonetheless.

Before heading off, they had a look at Nora’s desk.

Organised chaos. It was very similar to how Beatrice’s desk looked when she was immersed in a case: the seemingly random distribution of documents on the desk forming an associative network that stretched out before her, all the component parts communicating, forming links, reaching their invisible tentacles out towards one another.

Maybe that’s how Nora had worked, too, when she was dreaming up an advertising campaign. Another parallel jumped out at Beatrice: the yellow Post-its on the computer screen, except here they weren’t from the boss but from Nora herself. That same handwriting again, now so familiar.

Pick up jacket from drycleaners, said one of the notes. The other two revealed telephone numbers, scribbled alongside the names they belonged to.

‘Do you know who these people are?’ Beatrice asked Max Winstatt, who was waiting behind her.

‘Business contacts. A graphic designer and a client we’re hoping to get a follow-up commission from.’

The desk drawers were much neater than the surface of the desk itself, containing stacks of writing paper, headache tablets, cough sweets and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, 70 per cent cocoa. Seeing it suddenly made Beatrice feel much sadder than any other detail of the case had. It would never have occurred to Nora Papenberg that she wouldn’t be around to finish it.

She turned away hastily. ‘That’s all for today. Thank you for your help.’

Winstatt accompanied her and Stefan to the door. ‘If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me.’

‘Of course.’

The car was parked in the next street. Stefan laid the laptop gently on the back seat before getting behind the steering wheel. ‘Oh, shit. This wasn’t a short-stay parking zone, was it?’

Beatrice, who had only just opened the passenger door, leant over and reached for the piece of paper that was tucked under the windscreen wiper. ‘No, it’s just some advertisement, there’s no—’ She had been about to say, ‘plastic sleeve around it’, but the words stuck in her throat. She stared at the unfolded piece of paper shaking in her hand.

The Owner had sent them another message.

Drasche sniffed disdainfully as he took the little plastic bag Beatrice had put the message into. ‘And I’m assuming you touched it without gloves, right?’

‘Of course. I thought it was just a flyer.’

A grim nod. ‘So you said.’

‘If you had your way,’ said Beatrice, ‘we’d never be allowed to take our gloves off, because the whole world is made up of potential evidence, right?’

A trace of a smile crept across Drasche’s face. ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it.’

Back in her office, Beatrice called the mobile provider to chase up the research on the text message. To her surprise, they were ready with the results.

‘We were just about to call you,’ said the young man at the other end of the phone. She heard him shuffle through his paperwork. ‘The mobile the card is being used with isn’t connected to a network cell right now. It was last connected when the text message was sent, the one you received. At 13.16 at a UMTS cell in Hallein.’

‘What can you tell me about the phone’s owner?’

The owner. She tried to rein herself in. Don’t jump to conclusions.

‘I can give you the IMEI and the IMSI; in other words, the mobile’s device number and user identification. That’s all, I’m afraid. I can also block the number for you if you like.’

‘No, certainly not!’ The words tumbled out. Every sign of life from the Owner – if it was him who had sent the message – was another chance that he might let his guard down.

Each of the two numbers was fifteen digits long. Beatrice got him to read them out twice to eliminate any possibility of making a mistake. ‘Thank you. I just have one more request – I need a complete list of the connections that were made by this mobile, if you could get that ready for me.’ She gave the man her email address, thanked him again, hung up and leant back in her chair. With any luck, she would have a name soon. If the mobile hadn’t made its way to its owner illegally, then he had blown his cover with that text message. But only if he was that stupid. She pushed the thought away and concentrated on the IMEI she had noted down. She remembered something Florin had told her a few weeks ago when he had turned up in the office with a new phone. Just to be sure, she checked the information online too.

The first eight digits of the IMEI formed the TAC, the Type Approval Code, in which the third to eighth numbers were the decisive ones – denoting device brands and types. If you knew how to read them, that was. Which she definitely didn’t; she would need to consult an expert, or at least Stefan…

Following a flash of inspiration, she typed TAC end device analysis into Google and found a link promising to reveal the corresponding mobile model upon the code being entered. Beatrice typed in the first eight digits.

Bingo.

She felt her pulse start to race, but wasn’t yet sure why. The phone was a Nokia, which wasn’t uncommon by any stretch of the imagination. But in this context…

Rummaging through her papers, she found the notes from her first conversation with Konrad Papenberg, the day they had informed him about his wife’s murder.

There it was. Nokia N8.

I gave it to her for her birthday.

She stood up and turned the espresso machine on. But on remembering how much coffee she had drunk at the agency and how disgruntled her stomach had been, she turned it off again.

It could be a coincidence, but she doubted it. Gathering up her notes from the conversation with the provider, along with a printout of the online analysis page, she went off to Stefan’s office. ‘Could you find out who this mobile is registered to?’

He glanced at the papers, his finger wandering to the neatly circled IMSI code. ‘Sure, no problem.’

‘Thanks.’

At the door, she realised that her curt request had implied he had all the time in the world, but she left it at that. She was willing to bet anything that the name his research unearthed would be Nora Papenberg.

The evening sun painted stripes across the wooden floor of the balcony. Beatrice shunted the little round wooden table into the pink-tinged light and laid her Friday evening meal out on it: sushi from the Japanese restaurant two streets down. She opened the plastic container, inhaled the aroma of fresh fish and ginger and hoped that her appetite would finally kick in. But no such luck. The only dinner of interest to her was the agency one after which Nora had disappeared, running off into her murderer’s arms. The Owner, the master of the cryptic messages.

The most recent note, meticulously examined by Drasche, hadn’t offered up any new clues. ‘Not one single fingerprint, apart from yours of course,’ were his words. ‘We’re still investigating the ink type, but it seems to be from some bog-standard mass-produced biro.’

Drasche hadn’t been interested in how the very existence of the note told them a great deal about the Owner. That wasn’t his job.

When she had driven home that evening, Beatrice had parked her car a street further up from her apartment, looking around several times to check whether anyone was following her, or even just watching her. She hadn’t noticed anyone, but had double-locked the door behind her just in case.

She sighed, looked at the sushi box on the table and found herself thinking about beef carpaccio and Anneke, even though she’d never met her. Dinner for two by candlelight. She wondered whether she should put a candle on her balcony table.

But she deposited her rattling laptop on it instead and had another look through the photos of the agency dinner, cursing when soya sauce dripped down onto her grey marl jogging bottoms.

She concentrated on the pictures taken around the time of Nora Papenberg’s departure. The last one, which depicted a scene of carefree hilarity, was of Nora and Irene Grabner, their heads close together and tongues stuck out. Like a couple of schoolgirls. After that, Nora’s chair was empty. A few clicks later, Beatrice found a photo in which Nora could be seen in the background, recognisable by her red jacket.

She enlarged the photo. The resolution was very good. The closer Beatrice zoomed in, the clearer the view of Nora Papenberg’s face became – her eyes wide open. She was covering her nose and mouth with her left hand, as if she was shocked or about to throw up. In her other hand, she was holding the mobile to her ear.

The call had come from a telephone box, they knew that now, and it had definitely unleashed a reaction. She clicked through the remaining pictures. There wasn’t even a hint of a smile on Nora’s face, not in any of them.

Had she left to drive to the phone box? To meet the caller? Was he her murderer? Or the man whose blood was found on her clothes?

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ Beatrice asked a distant-looking Nora in the photos that followed. She was pictured with her gaze averted, her thoughts clearly elsewhere, an outsider amidst the laughing group.

According to the records, she hadn’t contacted anyone after the ominous call, at least not from her mobile. Not even a brief message to her husband, letting him know she would be late.

Was it a rendezvous he wasn’t supposed to have known about? Or had she actually left in order to get home as quickly as she could, to reach her safe haven? Had she been intercepted en route?

Beatrice had eaten all of her sushi without having tasted any of it. She went to throw the packaging into the kitchen bin and was just letting the lid drop back down when she heard her mobile. ‘Message in a Bottle’. A text message.

Her pulse quickened. Stay calm. It might just be Florin; he texted from time to time.

She wiped her hands on her jogging bottoms and went back out to the balcony. It could just as easily be her mother.

But a tap of the mobile’s keypad was enough to clarify things. The sender’s number was the same as the one that lunchtime. Feeling as though something was tightening around her neck, Beatrice sank down onto the balcony chair.

Cold, completely cold.

The message consisted only of these three words, without any explanation or further comment.

Beatrice remembered the photo of Nora Papenberg holding her mobile pressed to her ear, hand in front of her mouth. He sent me the text message from this very phone. A Nokia N8, a present from her husband.

Suddenly, Beatrice felt as though she was being watched. She jumped up and went over to the main door of the apartment, checking to see if it was definitely locked properly. Pulled the curtains shut. Ran back to the balcony and peered down into the courtyard, but no one returned her gaze.

Cold, completely cold. The first association that had shot into Beatrice’s mind was the coldness of a corpse’s skin, but the longer she turned the words over in her thoughts, the surer she became that the sender of the message hadn’t meant that.

She thought back to Jakob’s last birthday party, when she had revived all the party games from her own childhood, including a treasure hunt. Cold, completely cold, warmer now, even warmer, colder, good, warmer, warmer, hot!

Was the Owner trying to tell her that they were on the wrong track?

She resisted the temptation to delete the message, and called Achim instead. In a way, she was relieved that the children weren’t with her, but she had to hear their voices and make sure that—

‘You? What do you want?’ Achim’s words perforated her thoughts. There it was again, the utter contempt.

‘Hello. Put Mina or Jakob on the line, please.’

‘They’re busy.’

She wouldn’t beg. ‘Just for a moment.’

He sighed resignedly. ‘Fine, go ahead then. But it would be better if you could look after them properly while they’re with you instead and leave them in peace for the little time I have with them.’

She stared over at the corner of the balcony, at a red plant pot in which a small conifer was leading a miserable existence. Nothing she would have liked to say to Achim right now would make the situation any better.

He sighed once more. ‘Mina, Jakob, do either of you want to speak to your mother?’

‘Later,’ called Mina, but Jakob’s ‘Yes’ echoed loudly down the phone.

The sound of running, crashing. ‘Hi, Mama!’

‘Hello, my darling! Are you having a good time?’

‘Yes! Papa really did get us a cat! Mina wants to call her Miley, but that’s a totally stupid name! Can we call her Lou? Like Tobias’s cat? I think that’s much better, but Mina says it sounds like loo…’

Beatrice listened to him talk, feeling the relief rush through her. Of course the children were fine; what had she expected? Even though the Owner clearly had her mobile number, none of the messages had been personal; no one had threatened her. The messages were a good thing, not a danger. But she still felt safer once she had retreated from the balcony back into the lounge, closing the glass door behind her.

She let Jakob go back to the nameless cat, hung up and looked at the text message again. After staring at the number for a few moments, she pressed the green button. It had barely begun to ring before the recorded voice kicked in. The number you have dialled is not available right now. Please try again later.

He hadn’t activated his voicemail, which meant Beatrice didn’t have the chance to say all the things she wanted to blurt out. That was probably for the best.

She was still holding the phone in her hand when it started to ring, prompting her to nearly drop it in shock. Florin.

‘Is there any news? How was this afternoon?’

‘We went to the agency. And it seems like the Owner has made contact with me. Three times.’

‘What?’

She brought him up to date on the events of the last few hours.

‘I’m coming into the office tomorrow,’ he said.

‘No, enjoy your time with Anneke. Stefan and I have things under control. We’ll check out a couple of the choir singers, and if we don’t have any luck then we’ll see the others on Sunday.’

She heard him sigh. ‘You two are making me feel guilty. And Bea, it worries me that he’s sending you anonymous text messages. Are you alone in the apartment?’

The creeping sense of unease from before returned. ‘Yes, but you can’t seriously think that he’ll pay me a visit. That’s nonsense, Florin.’ Good – she had even managed to convince herself.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it. We don’t yet know what makes him tick. Be careful, okay?’

‘Of course.’ Seeing her nod reflected in the balcony door, she pulled the curtain closed. ‘How was your evening? Was the carpaccio a hit?’

‘Don’t try to change the subject.’ But she could hear from his voice that he was smiling. ‘Are you sure about tomorrow? I could come in for an hour or two, at least.’

‘There’s no need. Really. You always have my back when I need to go and pick up the children, so it’s the least I can do to repay the favour now and again. Give my best to Anneke, even though I’ve never met her, I mean.’

‘I will. Have a nice evening, Bea. And remember—’

She interrupted him. ‘You, too. Both of you, I mean.’

Ending the call, she collapsed onto the sofa and closed her eyes.

Schubert’s Mass in A flat.

A noticeable birthmark on the back of the hand.

Why these particular clues? What was their relevance?

They reminded Beatrice of bad witness statements. Sometimes the strangest things stick in people’s memories while they forget the really important ones.

She clapped her laptop shut and went off to bed, not because she was tired, but because she knew she needed the sleep to be able to function tomorrow. She wouldn’t unplug the phone this time; she wanted to be contactable in case something was wrong with the children. Presumably Achim would leave her in peace tonight.

She only hoped the Owner would too.

‘I have no idea what you want from me, and I have no intention of letting you inspect my hands.’ The chubby, angry man in a dressing gown who had opened the door to them was the third Christoph they had called on today, and by far the least cooperative. ‘Show me your ID again,’ he demanded, looking Beatrice up and down in a leering fashion. The fatty was lucky she was feeling well rested, she reflected. She had slept through the night as if drugged. No calls or messages had startled her awake.

‘We’re investigating a murder case,’ she explained. ‘If you don’t want to get this over with quickly, we can happily take you down to the station.’

The man made a big fuss of examining the ID, then stretched his hands out. ‘If this is some hidden camera thing, you won’t hear the end of this,’ he grumbled.

‘Don’t worry.’ Gripping his hands a little more tightly than necessary and prompting an involuntary yelp, she looked at his palms. Nothing.

And the backs? Still nothing, even though she pushed up the sleeves of his dressing gown to be sure.

‘Thank you, we’re done now. Enjoy the rest of your day.’

Clearly the fat man wasn’t content with that. ‘Aren’t you going to at least tell me what murder case this is in connection with?’

‘Sorry, but no. Goodbye.’

The next man on their list wasn’t at home, and the one after that didn’t have any noticeable birthmarks either. Frustrated, Beatrice and Stefan made their way back to the police station, disappearing into their respective offices without another word. As she walked in, Beatrice was surprised to see Florin sitting at his desk.

‘Just a couple of hours,’ he explained. ‘I discovered yesterday evening that if you enter coordinates on Google Maps it shows you the exact location on the map. Look.’ He angled his screen so she could see. ‘This is the place where we found the hand. More or less exactly. This should make the work easier for us in future, if—’

Stefan rushed into the room, waving a piece of paper over his head. ‘This email arrived an hour ago, and you were right,’ he cried, thrusting the printout into Beatrice’s hand.

The Nokia N8 with the International Mobile Subscriber Identity she had investigated yesterday was registered to Nora Papenberg.

‘I knew it!’ exclaimed Beatrice. ‘He’s got her phone, and he’s sending us messages from it.’

‘Not us, you,’ Florin corrected her. ‘Which I still find very worrying, by the way.’

‘And I still think it’s very unlikely he wants to harm me,’ she answered, with a conviction that she only half felt. ‘He’s just trying to demonstrate his superiority.’ All the same, she knew she would be double-locking the door and closing all the windows tonight.

Florin nodded, but still looked doubtful. ‘It’s high time we brought a forensic psychologist onto the case – perhaps he’ll read more into the messages than we’re seeing. I don’t want to risk making mistakes or overlooking anything.’

Midday gave way to afternoon, and the striped pattern on Beatrice’s desk cast by the sunlight stretching through the blinds wandered from left to right. At half-past two, an email arrived from the network provider with a PDF attachment listing the connections made by the owner’s prepaid card.

The pickings were slim; only one number appeared, and that was Beatrice’s own. He had connected to the network cell for just two minutes at a time to send her the two messages, once in Hallein and the second time right there in Salzburg, in the Aigen district. Apart from that, the mobile had been offline the entire time.

‘He knows what he’s doing,’ Beatrice muttered. ‘So far he hasn’t made a single mistake that could give us anything to go on.’ The familiar digits of her own mobile number aggravated her every time the printout caught her eye. ‘So are we in agreement that the text messages and note came from him? From Nora Papenberg’s murderer?’

Florin stared thoughtfully at the reports in front of him for a few seconds, then nodded. ‘Yes. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.’

Half an hour later, Beatrice tried to shoo him away from the desk. ‘You shouldn’t even be here today. You have a guest.’

She sounded like her grandmother, but Florin’s smile was one of gratitude.

‘Okay, okay. But you should call it a day now, too.’

‘I will soon.’ She started to rearrange the papers on her desk. ‘Just another half-hour.’ Seeing the look on his face, she added, ‘I have a child-free weekend, so let me make use of it, okay?’

Half an hour turned into two, but beyond that she couldn’t make sense of anything; none of her thoughts managed to find a tenable link. Frustrated, she flung her pen across the desk.

She took a deep breath and shut down her computer. After letting Stefan know that she was stopping for the day, and noticing with a guilty conscience that he carried on working regardless, she finally walked out into the sunshine. It hadn’t been this warm for a long time. Beatrice pulled her sunglasses and car keys out of her bag, almost making her mobile fall out in the process.

All of a sudden, the thought of driving home, bunging on a DVD and putting her feet up was far less appealing than it had been five minutes ago.

What about living a bit for a change? she asked herself, looking through the contact list on her mobile. A coffee in town, an hour or two chatting to a girlfriend… Lisa or Kathrin perhaps?

Fat chance. Both of them had families – children and a husband – so there was no room for spontaneous activities on the weekends any more. But perhaps Gina, who didn’t have kids and was recently separated? Without hesitating a moment longer, Beatrice pressed the dial button.

After three rings, Gina picked up. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me. Bea. Do you fancy going for coffee in the Bazaar? In half an hour perhaps?’

‘What? Oh, sorry, I’m in Rome right now. You wouldn’t believe how gorgeous the weather is! Next week, okay? I’ll bring you back a bottle of grappa.’

Beatrice swallowed down her disappointment. It was her own fault; she had let the friendship slip, hadn’t responded to emails or invitations for a while now.

You’re still afraid, aren’t you? Bea, you coward.

Her mobile was returned to her bag. She unlocked her car – no notes under the windscreen wiper this time – and wound down the windows.

There was nothing stopping her going for a coffee by herself, buying a magazine, enjoying the spring sunshine. She drove through the quiet Saturday afternoon traffic towards the old town, crossed the bridge over the Salzach and found a parking space on Rudolfskai.

Walking over to Residenzplatz, Beatrice noticed how the jet of water shooting up from the baroque fountain had been transformed by the sun into a golden fog, completely enveloping the four marble horses which sprang forth from its basin. The tourist season was already in full swing. A living statue in a Mozart costume, painted in glittering silver from head to toe, bowed in front of a Japanese tour group who seemed to have mistaken themselves for paparazzi. Beatrice paused for a moment to take in the scene. Three English students walked past, chattering and laughing, each with a beaker of ice cream in hand.

Ice cream, yes, that was a good plan.

There was a fantastic ice cream parlour a few streets away, with plenty of galleries and boutiques lining the route. Beatrice looked at the fancy clothing in the window displays, but without feeling any urge to shop. There was no point; the opportunity to wear things like that didn’t really come up in her life. Evading another group of tourists, she joined the queue for ice cream.

Hazelnut, caramel and pumpkin brittle in a large beaker, with chocolate sauce. The perfect remedy for her frustration.

Enjoying the explosion of flavours in her mouth, she allowed the first genuine smile of the day to tiptoe across her face.

It didn’t even last five minutes. On her way to the cathedral square, where she was hoping to find a peaceful and sunny bench, she saw Florin. From behind, but there was no doubt it was him. His arm was draped around the waist of a tall, slim woman with blonde shoulder-length hair. As they walked, he leant over and said something that made her burst out laughing. A laugh that was much throatier than Beatrice would have attributed to the Anneke in her imagination.

They were crossing Residenzplatz and veering off into the narrow, cobbled Goldgasse. Amongst the crowds, Beatrice kept seeing Anneke’s fair hair gleam in the sunlight. Without giving any thought to what she was doing, she followed them, taking care not to get too close. She had completely forgotten her ice cream by now, and only remembered it as the sticky mess began to drip onto her fingers.

‘Shit.’ She threw the beaker into the nearest bin and tried to pull a tissue from her bag without making everything dirty in the process. In front of her, Florin and Anneke turned in to a lane on the right. Beatrice watched as Anneke put some coins into a beggar’s bowl, watched as she stopped with Florin in front of a window display full of shoes, as he brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear and—

Had she lost her mind? What was she doing? Was she seriously stalking her colleague?

She abruptly turned on her heel and ran back down the cobbled street in the opposite direction, as quickly as she could, before Florin had a chance to spot her.

Why, Beatrice? What is it? Why does the sight of two loved-up people torment you so much?

She couldn’t answer her own question. It wasn’t jealousy, not really; she didn’t begrudge them one single minute of happiness. Longing, perhaps… that was more to the point. But she couldn’t allow herself to lose her composure like this.

She paced hastily all the way back to her car, then took the fastest route home. Browsing her bookshelves, she found a historical novel she had bought two years ago but never opened since. She took it to the sofa with her – that and a glass of Chardonnay. Sleep stalked her with its silent steps; within an hour, it had laid the book down on her chest and pressed her eyelids shut.

The next morning, shortly before eleven, Beatrice and Stefan’s search led them to Christoph Beil, a brawny man in his mid-forties who sang Beethoven’s Mass in C major with his choir in the Maria Plain basilica. They only noticed the birthmark on his hand after closer inspection – or, to be more precise, the scar from where a birthmark had once been.

‘I did used to have one, yes, a naevus, as the doctors called it. It was really dark and looked horrible, so I’m really glad my wife convinced me to have it removed.’

Only an uneven, violet-coloured fleck remained. ‘How long ago was that?’ Beatrice enquired.

‘About two and a half years,’ the man explained. He answered cautiously, visibly unsettled by their questioning and the fact that he didn’t know what it was about.

Beatrice glanced at Stefan. ‘We’d like to speak with you privately, Herr Beil. Don’t worry, you’re not under suspicion of having committed a crime, but you may be able to help us with a current case.’

Beil hesitated. ‘Could you not at least give me some idea of what it’s about?’

‘Later,’ replied Beatrice. ‘In private.’

Something resembling protest flickered in the man’s eyes, but only briefly. Then he tilted his head to the side and smiled. ‘Of course, when would be good for you?’

‘This afternoon, around four?’ Stefan suggested. ‘Florin could be there then too,’ he said, speaking more softly as he turned to address Beatrice.

‘That’s fine. Do you want to come to my house? My wife has been baking, and we could sit out in the garden.’

‘You call Florin,’ said Beatrice, once they were sitting back in the car.

Stefan raised his eyebrows in surprise, but did what she had asked.

‘Four is fine,’ he said after hanging up. ‘He’s dropping his girlfriend off at the airport now, so he can come round to us at half-three.’ Lost in thought, Stefan played with the car keys. ‘Why didn’t you just come out and ask him right away?’

‘About what?’

‘The year of his birth, of course! I mean, that’s what this is all about. Then we could have started working out the coordinates already and might even find what we’re looking for!’

‘I want to see some form of ID with his birth date on it, preferably his birth certificate, and in general get a better idea of who Christoph Beil is. Or do you think it’s just a coincidence that he’s part of all this?’

Stefan shook his head, still a little reluctant. ‘I know. It’s just that our progress feels so slow.’

Slow. The word was haunting her.

‘I’m as keen to get the coordinates as you are, but I want to do things properly. Cover as many bases as possible. I don’t want to be kicking myself later for stupid mistakes.’ Or have Hoffmann rub her nose in them.

Stefan seemed convinced, albeit a little disappointed. ‘Okay. It’s just that I brought along my GPS device and thought, if we manage to find the guy we’re looking for…’

An idea sparked in Beatrice’s mind. There was still plenty of time before four o’clock, and the opportunity to fill a gap in her knowledge seemed advantageous.

‘You know what? Let’s go and look for a cache. I want to have done it at least once, and you can show me how it works. Okay?’

He looked surprised, but the prospect of taking on the expert role seemed to have cheered him up. ‘Okay, let me fire up my laptop then.’

Christoph Beil stood in the shadow of the basilica, his eyes fixed on the police car. They were leaning over something together, presumably their notes.

With the tips of his fingers, he stroked thoughtfully over the scar where the birthmark had once been. It was the only thing the policewoman with the honey-coloured hair had been interested in. She had searched for it intently, turning his hands over and around like a doctor.

If only he knew what all this was about, but he didn’t dare ask again. He wasn’t used to dealing with the police and didn’t want to take any risks. It might lead them to ideas it would be better for them not to have. He wasn’t under suspicion; the woman had said that very clearly.

Was she the gawky red-haired guy’s boss? It seemed so, for the man had stayed silent the whole time, just listening and staring at him attentively.

‘Have a good afternoon, Christoph! Give Vera my love!’ The hearty slap to his shoulder startled Beil, making his heart skip a beat. Heavens, he would have to be more aware of his surroundings; he didn’t want to end up having a heart attack over something like that. Hopefully he hadn’t yelped out loud. But Kurt, the man responsible for his now-racing pulse, had headed off without noticing the reaction unleashed by his rough farewell.

It was fine. Everything was okay; he hadn’t made a fool of himself. Wiping his hand across his brow, he realised it was wet with sweat and felt annoyed at himself. Where had these sudden nerves come from? After all, he hadn’t done anything wrong; he didn’t need to worry. Not about Vera, either. She wouldn’t leave him – she loved him. And it was very unlikely that the police visit had anything to do with all that. He wasn’t guilty, as he had to keep reminding himself.

And if it really turned out to be necessary, he would just come clean.

The caching game was fun – much more so than Beatrice had expected. Stefan logged into Geocaching.com and searched through the maps for a hiding place that was relatively nearby. ‘Nothing too difficult, nothing too small,’ he murmured. ‘Voilà! Look, this cache is called “The Hole”, and it’s a regular.’

‘A what?’

‘A regular. That means it’s about this big.’ Stefan sketched something the size of a loaf of bread in the air. ‘Like the one you found the hand in. And it’s also a traditional – which means the given coordinates are also where the box is stashed. No stages, no puzzles. The difficulty rating is two stars, so that means we won’t end up searching for hours on end. Although the terrain is three and a half stars, so it’ll be more than a light stroll.’ He gave her Timberlands an appraising glance, then nodded contentedly. ‘Let’s head off then.’ He connected the navigation device with the computer via a USB cable and clicked ‘Send to my GPS’. ‘Done. The good thing is that we can drive almost all the way by car, so it won’t take too long.’

The GPS device worked with astonishing precision. It led them from their parking space by the edge of the path directly to a wooded slope. Stefan switched into compass mode, and now they could see the distance between them and their target reducing with every step they took. In the end, it was Beatrice who found the entrance to the hole – a gap under a steep crag that she could only reach by lying on her stomach and easing herself along by the elbows.

‘If I crawl in there my T-shirt will be in tatters,’ she said.

‘Yep. That’s all part of the fun. Here’s a torch.’

She took a deep breath, struggled to contain a fleeting impulse of claustrophobia, and crawled into the darkness. She only switched the torch on when she literally couldn’t see a thing ahead of her.

After the narrowness of the first few metres, Beatrice was surprised to see a tunnel open out in front of her. She could even stand and walk along it if she ducked. As she moved forwards, she heard someone following her in the darkness. For a split second, she was convinced it must be Nora Papenberg’s killer, that it hadn’t been enough for him to simply thank them for the hunt this time – he had picked up their tracks and wanted to trap his prey in the hole.

But it was just Stefan, of course. ‘Shine the torch into all the nooks and crannies,’ he advised her. ‘The box is a big one, so it’ll stand out, but any owner worth his salt tries to hide his caches in a well-camouflaged spot so they don’t get muggled.’

Hearing the word ‘owner’ made her jump involuntarily. She shook her head at herself. ‘What does “muggled” mean?’

‘It’s a Harry Potter reference. Muggles are people who can’t do magic – so in this context, the non-cachers. They’ve been known to throw cache containers in the bin if they stumble upon them by chance.’

The light of the torch made every protrusion inside the crag throw shadows that could easily be taken for niches, so a good ten minutes passed before Beatrice found the cache, right at the back of the hollow. A plastic container, very similar to the one they had found at the stone chasm.

‘Well done,’ Stefan praised her. ‘Now open the box. That’s the logbook, you see?’

She nodded, shone the light on the pages and started to read:

At least half the pages in the small spiral notepad were scribbled full.

‘Draw a line under the last comment and write something – whatever you like. People normally leave a note of thanks – TFTC means “Thanks for the Cache”. Then sign off with Undercover Cookie. We can log our find on the website – it’s my eight hundred and sixty-seventh.’ Stefan sounded proud.

Beatrice stared at the notepad, wondering whether it was wise to leave handwritten evidence, then shook her head in disbelief. She was thinking like a perpetrator, not a policewoman.

So she did what Stefan had said, drawing a line under the last entry and writing:

‘Is that the right plural for cache?’

‘Absolutely. Right, now you pack the logbook back into the plastic bag and see what treasures are in the box.’

A transparent dice, a sticker that clearly belonged in a collection album from the last football World Cup, a glass marble and a broken Matchbox car.

‘Those are the trades,’ explained Stefan. ‘Normal trades. You can take something with you and then put something else in. Do you want to?’

Even though she couldn’t have explained why, she did want to. In her jacket pocket, alongside a rubber band and a tissue, she found a tiny metal heart that had once been part of a keyring. She exchanged it for the glass marble.

‘Okay. Now pack everything up neatly and put it back exactly where you found it.’

Having made a note of the hiding place behind the crag ledge, she put the box back, then turned her attentions to the arduous task of crawling back out.

‘Right then, I’ll have to go and get changed,’ Beatrice determined. ‘Thank you, Stefan, that was very educational. I think I understand the appeal now.’

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ He beamed. ‘The last stage is on the computer. Come on.’

They logged the cache as ‘Found’, which resulted in a yellow smiley appearing on both the map and the webpage with the cache description.

I really enjoyed it, TFTC, wrote Beatrice as her comment on the site. The abbreviation was flowing from her hand as though it was second nature now.

On the drive home, she contemplated whether she should get one of these GPS devices; perhaps the treasure hunt could be something Mina and Jakob would both enjoy. But thinking back to her very first find made her quickly dismiss the idea. Today, even accompanied by Stefan, she had been overcome by a queasy feeling as she opened the cache box. She wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to look at a plastic container like that again without thinking of the severed hand.

They all met in front of the office shortly before four and got into the car, Stefan taking the wheel and Florin – still exhausted from his round trip to Munich – claiming the back seat.

Christoph Beil’s house was out in the suburbs, and looked in dire need of renovation. The cracked facade suggested damp in the walls, and the wooden terrace looked unsound even from twenty metres away. But the garden was well looked after, complete with gnomes, clay frogs and a replica of the Manneken Pis.

‘We have to be careful – under no circumstances can we give too much away,’ warned Florin. ‘So not a word about coordinates or caches with body parts.’

They rang the bell at the garden gate. Beil opened it so quickly that it seemed likely he had been watching out for their arrival from the window.

‘Would you like some coffee? Tea? Water?’ He waved to his wife, who had been waiting in the doorway and now came out bearing a tray of drinks, only to disappear back into the house again straight afterwards.

They all sat down at a massive wooden table, on which a company of ants were forming a long line. Beil wiped them off with nervous, jerky hand movements. ‘I’ve been racking my brains since lunchtime, trying to work out what you might want from me.’

He looked tense, like someone who had to do an exam without knowing what subject it was in. Beatrice cleared her throat. ‘We’re investigating the murder of Nora Papenberg. Does the name mean anything to you?’ She fixed her gaze on him. But Beil didn’t bat an eyelid; on the contrary, he suddenly seemed to relax. ‘No, I’m sorry. Although – it’s possible that I might have heard about it on the radio. Is this the woman who was found in the cattle pasture?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. Could you tell me what I have to do with all of this?’

Beatrice wiped her forehead, a tiny insect stuck to her hand. ‘We’re pursuing every single lead, and one of them led us to you. May I check your ID, please?’ Seeing him hesitate, she smiled reassuringly.

Beil pulled a battered black wallet out from his trouser pocket and handed Beatrice his driving licence. She immediately focused her attention on his date of birth.

1964. She noted the day and month, along with the date of issue and licence number, then returned the document to Beil. ‘The thing is,’ she began cautiously, ‘the suspect left a clue that could indicate there’s some connection between you and the victim. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific.’

‘Aha.’ He stared at the discoloured spot on the back of his hand. ‘But that’s not the case. Which means I can’t be of any further assistance to you.’

Florin cleared his throat, a signal that he wanted to take over. ‘Have you been singing with the choir for a while?’

‘Yes, nearly ten years now. I’m a dental technician, so I like to have some artistic balance in my free time.’

‘How’s business in the dental trade?’

Beil grinned. ‘I assume you’re referring to the run-down state of the house? It’s being renovated this summer. My great-aunt left it to me.’

Florin nodded to Beatrice, who was pulling two photographs from her bag. ‘We’d like to ask you to look at the woman in the pictures very closely and tell us whether it’s possible that you know her after all.’

Beil took the photos. ‘Is that this Nora Pa…’

‘Papenberg. Yes. Please take your time.’

He laid the picture down on the table, the one of her laughing heartily, and flicked one last confused ant away. It began to scrabble over the edge. ‘No. I really am very sorry.’

The second photo was a portrait in which Nora was looking directly at the camera with a serious expression. The jolt that went through Beil’s body as Beatrice laid the photo in front of him was subtle, so much so that at first she wasn’t certain she had really seen it. But it had definitely been there. No widening of the eyes or sudden intake of breath, but a jolt nonetheless. When Beil handed the pictures back to Beatrice, his hand was completely steady. ‘No, sorry. I really wish I could have helped you.’

She kept staring at him, not looking away for a second. ‘Are you completely certain that this woman doesn’t look familiar to you?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a really good memory for faces, so I would know if I’d ever met her. And the name doesn’t mean anything to me.’ Beil grimaced apologetically. ‘I can imagine that your job is no walk in the park, so I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing. And on a Sunday of all days.’

He smiled warmly and looked her right in the eyes without blinking, but she didn’t believe him. He had recognised Nora Papenberg – not immediately, but when he saw the second photo. So it was very interesting indeed that he was denying it.

With a friendly smile, Beatrice took the pictures, tucked them away in her bag and pulled out a business card. ‘If anything else occurs to you that you think might be relevant to us, then please call me.’

He put the card in his wallet. ‘Of course, but as I said…’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the woman.’

Beatrice was convinced, even though neither Florin nor Stefan had noticed Beil’s reaction to the second photo. If he was lying, then there must be a reason.

‘There are two possibilities,’ Beatrice pondered out loud. ‘First, I’m mistaken, and Beil never met Papenberg. Maybe he’s even the wrong choir singer and his birthday will just be leading us off track. For one thing, he doesn’t even have the birthmark any more.’

‘And the other possibility?’ asked Florin.

‘My instinct is right, and he did know her. Then there has to be a reason why he’s lying to us. If we find something at Stage Two, then we’ll speak to him again.’

Back at the office, the three of them sat down on Florin’s side of the desk. Florin picked up the copy of the cache note. ‘“The last two numbers of his birth date are A,”’ he read out loud.

‘So, sixty-four. Then square that…’ Beatrice tapped on the calculator and made a note of the resulting sum. ‘Four thousand and ninety-six.’

‘Okay. Then add thirty-seven.’

‘That gives four thousand, one hundred and thirty-three. That should be the northern coordinate, right?’

‘Correct. For the eastern coordinates, we need the sum of A’s digits – four plus six equals ten. That times ten gives a hundred. Multiply by A and we get six thousand, four hundred.’

Beatrice wrote the number down and looked up. ‘Why didn’t he just say straight away that we needed to times A by a hundred?’

‘To make it less obvious?’ Florin suggested. ‘To increase the possibility of us making a mistake? Okay, let’s keep going. Take away two hundred and twenty-nine and subtract the resulting sum from the eastern coordinates.’

Beatrice calculated, noting the results as she went and then circling them. ‘This is it. Shall we drive out there today?’ Even as she said it, she realised she wouldn’t have enough time before she had to get home.

‘Of course!’ Stefan had already jumped up, but Florin stopped him.

‘I want Drasche to be with us. We’ll go first thing tomorrow. Having said that, I’d still like to see where this place is.’ He entered the new coordinates into Google Maps. The map appeared on the monitor in just a fraction of a second, prompting Florin to let out a brief and – or so it seemed to Beatrice – pained laugh. ‘We’ve dropped the ball here somehow.’

They zoomed in closer. ‘The results are never completely accurate,’ said Stefan. ‘It’ll be a few metres to the right or left of that.’

They would just have to hope he was right. Because the arrow indicating the location of the coordinates they had just entered was pointing directly at the autobahn.

Beatrice arrived home just in time to air the apartment and prepare all the ingredients for ham-and-cheese omelettes. Achim brought the children back on the dot of the arranged time. They were practically bursting with stories about their weekend. The cat was now called Cinderella. She was grey and white and a little bit black. They had gone for ice cream in the afternoon, two scoops each. Papa had been really funny and lost twelve times to Jakob at arm wrestling.

Beatrice smiled, laughed, nodded and suppressed something that, on closer inspection, she identified as melancholy. Did she wish she had been there too?

She shook her head in disbelief, cleared the table and sent the children off to the bathroom. She would read The Hobbit to them and have a relaxing evening for once.

‘The fires in the middle of the hall were built with fresh logs and the torches were put out, and still they sat in the light of the dancing flames,’ read Beatrice. Jakob, who in her opinion was still too young for the book, and for whom she improvised harmless passages in place of the more violent scenes, was staring at the Buzz Lightyear poster on the wall, his eyes glistening. Mina’s gaze, on the other hand, was fixed on Beatrice; she was smiling and seemed to be at peace with herself and the world for the first time in weeks.

‘…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.

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.