Five (7 page)

‘Pia mater, fons amoris

Me sentire vim doloris’

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

‘Fac, ut tecum lugeam
.

Fac, ut ardeat cor meum

In amando Christum Deum,

ut sibi complaceam.’

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.