‘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.