‘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.
TFTH.
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.