The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Eight

It was two hundred and fifty kilometres from Hamburg to the Pomeranian coast and the Stresalund Crossing that connected the small city of Stralsund on the mainland to Rügen Island. The little car kept up a good pace on the autobahn as the wipers slapped back and forth all the way. They stopped once for fuel and to grab a couple of sandwiches at a Tank & Rast motorway services. Raul said he wanted to stretch his legs. Ben bought another cup of scalding coffee from a machine, and as he sat in the car alone drinking it, he dialled up Google Maps on his phone and spent a few minutes checking the rest of their route and examining the lie of the island. Then he took another look at the pages that Raul had shown him before leaving Spain, taken from the copy of the police report obtained from Leonhard Klein, the private detective. Raul had made vague noises about showing Ben the rest of the report, but hadn’t mentioned it again since. Ben wondered why, then decided not to press the issue. There was enough here to be getting on with.

Just after two in the afternoon, as the rainclouds finally drew aside to make way for a half-hearted sun in a pale and washed-out sky, they crossed the Rügen Bridge and followed the single road onto the island. The closer they got to their destination, the quieter Raul became, and seemed to draw into himself with a grim expression that became more and more set as Ben drove. Ben guessed that if he were heading towards the scene of his own sister’s apparent suicide, he’d be looking pretty grim himself.

The police report detailed the exact spot on the far side of the island where Catalina Fuentes’ Porsche Cayenne had gone off the cliff. Ben turned off the main road and followed a rough track that led to a small car park. Beyond, the track continued for quarter of a mile, running steeply upwards parallel to the coast and steadily narrowing between clumps of bushes that shivered in the sea wind. Raul was hunched up in the passenger seat, looking pallid and about a hundred years old. Ben left him alone and said nothing.

The final stretch of coastal track led to a grassy incline that the police report said Catalina had climbed in her Porsche. The Kia was no four-wheel-drive, but the ground was firm and Ben gunned the little car up the slope at an angle, for better traction, and slowed to a halt on the approach to the cliff edge. Ahead, the coarse windswept grass sloped gently downwards for about twenty metres before it dropped away into nothing. A triangular yellow warning sign showed an outline image of a little matchstick man toppling off the crumbling drop, for those who couldn’t read German.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay in the car,’ Raul said in a tight voice.

Ben nodded and stepped out. The wind was coming sharply off the Baltic, carrying a penetrating cold from the Scandinavian lands across the water to the north. This was a lonely spot. It wasn’t surprising that no witness to what had happened that day in July had ever come forward.

Ben walked down the slope towards the edge, scanning the ground. The police forensic team had identified four contact patches of flattened grass a little way from the edge that corresponded to the long, wide wheelbase of a Porsche Cayenne, suggesting that she had parked for a few minutes before letting the car roll off the cliff. Ben crouched down, then dropped lower on his palms and toes as if he were about to launch into a set of press-ups. He examined the grass from different angles, but time had erased the impressions of the car wheels. A little further down the slope, he found a ghost of a tyre tread in the sandy, chalky dirt, what remained of it smoothed by wind and rain, the rest obliterated by dozens of fading shoe prints that could have been made by the forensic examiners, or perhaps by hordes of broken-hearted fans on a pilgrimage to the spot where Catalina had met her death.

Ben walked slowly to the edge, following the natural line of the tyre tracks through the tufty yellowed grass of the slope. The gradient was steep enough to let a car freewheel down unpowered. The Porsche had suffered such damage in the fall that the investigators had been unable to tell whether the engine had been running when the car went over. Either way, simply slipping it into neutral and disengaging the handbrake would have been enough to get it moving. As it had picked up speed, the tyres had dislodged a few stones and flattened a couple of shallow ruts. Where the slope suddenly dropped away to nothing, the chalky edge had been freshly crumbled as the wheels had passed over it and lurched heavily downwards into empty space.

Ben toed the brink of the drop and looked down. It was one hell of a long way to fall. Most people would have flinched away from the edge, but Ben was as unbothered by the height as he would have been standing on a chair to replace a light bulb. He could see the foam of the surf lashing and boiling white over the rocks hundreds of feet below. He imagined the impact of the falling vehicle, visualised the devastating explosion of crumpling metal and shattering glass as it hit. That was what he’d come here to see, and now that he’d seen it, it was very hard for him to imagine how anyone inside that car could possibly have survived. The fact that the car’s interior hadn’t been painted with blood when it had been fished out of the sea didn’t mean a thing. The salt tide would have washed it clean.

He gazed out across the Baltic for a few moments, watched its implacable heave and listened to the crash of the waves. He could taste the salt in the air, like tears. He loved the sea, but it was a hard and cruel element.

He turned and started back towards the Kia. Raul looked small and shrunken in the passenger seat, watching him with an expression that was half curious, half dreading what Ben might have to tell him.

‘There’s nothing here for us,’ was all Ben said as he slipped into the car. He didn’t want to say too much for now. Although he feared it was simply delaying the inevitable, under the circumstances he felt he had to do as thorough a job as he could for Raul’s sake.

In the meantime, they had a long road trip ahead of them. They would be traversing Germany north — south, the reverse of Catalina’s last journey in her Porsche. Raul said nothing about taking turns at the wheel, and Ben didn’t raise the matter either. He was here now, and he had nothing else to do but sit and drive, smoke and think.

It was evening by the time they reached Munich. Raul had stayed quiet for nearly all of the seven-hour drive, as if the nervous energy that had kept him babbling on the flight was now completely expended, leaving only the sombre reality of what he was doing here so far from home.

Catalina Fuentes’ apartment was on the top floor of an upscale building in the fashionable district of Glockenbach, off Palmstrasse just a few blocks north of the River Isar. The area was Munich’s answer to Greenwich Village, a popular haunt for musicians and artists and writers and other left-leaning individuals of the creative variety who could somehow afford to live there and frequent its bohemian cafés and bars. Raul produced a key as they stepped out of the lift onto a broad landing that smelled of pine air freshener and new carpet, and led Ben to one of only two glossily varnished doors at opposite ends. He paused at the door and looked about to ring the buzzer, then drew back his hand and closed his eyes with a sigh. Then he inserted the key in the lock and pushed open the door as if his own death lay beyond it.

Ben followed Raul inside the apartment, and closed the door behind them. Raul strode along a short hallway with a gleaming parquet floor that opened up into a large modern open-plan space. He took off his jacket and slung it on the back of a white leather armchair, as if he’d done it a hundred times before and was at home in the place. He glanced around the room, and for a second Ben thought he was going to call his sister’s name, in case she might suddenly appear, smiling her perfect smile at this unexpected visit and wanting to be introduced to Raul’s interesting new friend. But Catalina Fuentes didn’t appear, and her brother turned to gaze heavily at Ben.

‘My parents want to sell this place, once all the craziness with the lawyers is settled,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that, so soon? I told them I wouldn’t let that happen, no way. It’s still her home, you know?’ He shivered. ‘It’s cold in here. You’d think the building manager would keep the heat on.’ Going over to a panel on the wall, he flipped open a cover and prodded small buttons. Ben couldn’t see radiators or pipes anywhere. Without them, the lines of the room looked clean and elegant. Electric heating, magically hidden under the gleaming wood floor.

Raul gazed around the big living room with a wistful frown. ‘It all looks just the way I remember it.’

‘When were you last here?’ Ben asked.

‘I know the exact number of days,’ Raul said. ‘Too many. It was last autumn. Our birthday, November third. I stayed here for a week.’ He thought for a few moments then added in an undertone, ‘In fact I hardly saw much of her. She was so busy with her work, some new thing she was working on that she was terribly excited about. I didn’t even ask her what it was.’

Raul’s voice trailed off as he lost himself in memories of the last time he’d seen his sister alive. In one corner, a gleaming classical guitar rested on a stand. He went over to it, gazed at the instrument for a moment and then softly drew his fingers across its six strings. Its sound was deep and sonorous. ‘Catalina’s guitar,’ he murmured.

Feeling he should say something, Ben was about to ask, ‘Did she play well?’ Too much past tense, he decided. Against his instincts, and to avoid hurting Raul, he said instead, ‘Does she play well?’

Raul smiled sadly. ‘I suppose so. She took it up years ago. But I never heard her play. She always kept it to herself.’

Too much past tense. Raul had snagged the emotional tripwire that Ben had managed to avoid. He began to droop as if his limbs and his head weighed nine hundred pounds, and lowered himself into the nearest armchair with his elbows on his knees, forehead cupped in both hands and his eyes screwed tight.

Ben walked slowly around the room. It was an elegant blend of modern and old that spoke of good taste and a fine eye. He paused at a heavy sideboard, brushed his fingertips along wood that felt like oiled silk, and snicked open one of its doors. His guess had been right: drinks cabinet. Catalina’s good taste extended to single malt scotch, nothing less than a fifteen-year-old Glenfiddich. He grabbed the bottle and two cut-crystal glasses, set them on the top and glugged out two generous measures. One for him, after the long drive. One for Raul, to take the raw edge off what he was feeling. Sooner or later they’d have to think about food, having eaten nothing since their sandwich before Rügen Island. Scotch would substitute fine for the moment.

Ben held out Raul’s drink. Raul opened one eye, then the other, reached out for the glass and downed most of its contents as if he could happily chug through the whole bottle that night. Ben didn’t intend to let him, not after what had happened last time.

‘Mind if I look around?’ he asked.

Raul just waved a hand at him. Ben thought he could trust him alone with the bottle for a few minutes while he had a quick reconnaissance of the apartment, sipping his whisky as he went from room to room. The kitchen was large and modern, spotless and gleaming and equipped with all the right accessories for someone who probably ate out most of the time but liked her kitchen to look the part. Ben checked the fridge and found two bottles of chilled 2011 vintage Chablis nestling on a rack inside. A couple of thin-crust pepperoni and anchovy pizzas were stacked in the freezer compartment above. Dinner was sorted, at least.

From the kitchen, he wandered down another passage to what looked like a home office, although it had to be the neatest and least-used home office in the world, entirely clutter-free and a few neat rows of abstruse-looking astrophysics and cosmology titles arrayed on the shelves. One wall displayed a blown-up framed still of Catalina pictured against the backdrop of an astonishingly resplendent Milky Way. Her face was aglow with enthusiasm, those big brown eyes as incandescent as the heavens. Ben presumed it must be an image from her TV astronomy series. Looking at it, it wasn’t hard to see what her public had loved in her. He gazed at it for a moment, then went on examining the room.

According to the police report, Catalina’s personal computer had been checked for suspicious emails or anything that could provide leads to contradict the suicide motive. Nothing having been found, the computer had been replaced, unplugged from the monitor on the desk. Ben was confident that the contents of drawers, her address book, phone records and general paperwork would have all been routinely examined, too, but he had a riffle through the desk just in case anything jumped out at him. It didn’t, although he wasn’t particularly sure what he was looking for. Sometimes you just had to go by instinct. And so far, his instincts weren’t feeding much back to him.

Of the three bedrooms in the big apartment, the first he looked into was a guest room with a huge empty wardrobe and a timber-framed bed piled high with silk cushions. The second was stripped bare and in the middle of being redecorated, a stepladder against one wall, paint pots, plastic sheeting on the floor. He found that potentially interesting. Suicidal people didn’t tend to care much about the state of their home decor. Then again, it wasn’t much to base a theory on.

The third bedroom was Catalina’s, the largest of the three with Gustav Klimt on the walls and a broad expanse of glass overlooking Glockenbach district. Her bed was an antique Louis XI kind of affair the size of a Cadillac Fleetwood. Old and modern side by side, the same elegant blending of styles. Ben did a five-minute search of her wardrobe and drawers, feeling as if he was prying. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he walked into the ensuite.

Despite his experience of domestic life with his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel, a woman’s bathroom nonetheless remained a world of mystery to someone of Ben’s ingrained spartan ways. Automatic halogen spotlights caught him by surprise as he entered, and he could see about twenty of himself reflected from all angles in the blaze of mirrors covering every vertical surface. A thick sheepskin rug stretched over the floor near the walk-in shower. Fluffy towels draped thickly over a chrome rail. The biggest vanity unit he’d ever seen held a collection of cosmetics and perfumes and creams and lotions and feminine paraphernalia that could have stocked a small pharmacy. Tools of her trade, he guessed. He had no doubt that being the world’s sexiest scientist must be hard graft.

A walk-in wardrobe led off the ensuite, a whole other room in itself. Ben stepped into it, gazing around him for clues the police might have missed, like a pair of bathroom scissors lying in a red pool on the floor, or a cryptic message daubed in blood by the kidnapper.

What he found instead, he stared at for ten long seconds and then hurried back through the apartment with to show Raul.