Five (2 page)

‘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.

N47º 46 605

E013º 21 718

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.’