‘There are two possibilities,’ Beatrice pondered out loud. ‘First, I’m mistaken, and Beil never met Papenberg. Maybe he’s even the wrong choir singer and his birthday will just be leading us off track. For one thing, he doesn’t even have the birthmark any more.’
‘And the other possibility?’ asked Florin.
‘My instinct is right, and he did know her. Then there has to be a reason why he’s lying to us. If we find something at Stage Two, then we’ll speak to him again.’
Back at the office, the three of them sat down on Florin’s side of the desk. Florin picked up the copy of the cache note. ‘“The last two numbers of his birth date are A,”’ he read out loud.
‘So, sixty-four. Then square that…’ Beatrice tapped on the calculator and made a note of the resulting sum. ‘Four thousand and ninety-six.’
‘Okay. Then add thirty-seven.’
‘That gives four thousand, one hundred and thirty-three. That should be the northern coordinate, right?’
‘Correct. For the eastern coordinates, we need the sum of A’s digits – four plus six equals ten. That times ten gives a hundred. Multiply by A and we get six thousand, four hundred.’
Beatrice wrote the number down and looked up. ‘Why didn’t he just say straight away that we needed to times A by a hundred?’
‘To make it less obvious?’ Florin suggested. ‘To increase the possibility of us making a mistake? Okay, let’s keep going. Take away two hundred and twenty-nine and subtract the resulting sum from the eastern coordinates.’
Beatrice calculated, noting the results as she went and then circling them. ‘This is it. Shall we drive out there today?’ Even as she said it, she realised she wouldn’t have enough time before she had to get home.
‘Of course!’ Stefan had already jumped up, but Florin stopped him.
‘I want Drasche to be with us. We’ll go first thing tomorrow. Having said that, I’d still like to see where this place is.’ He entered the new coordinates into Google Maps. The map appeared on the monitor in just a fraction of a second, prompting Florin to let out a brief and – or so it seemed to Beatrice – pained laugh. ‘We’ve dropped the ball here somehow.’
They zoomed in closer. ‘The results are never completely accurate,’ said Stefan. ‘It’ll be a few metres to the right or left of that.’
They would just have to hope he was right. Because the arrow indicating the location of the coordinates they had just entered was pointing directly at the autobahn.
Beatrice arrived home just in time to air the apartment and prepare all the ingredients for ham-and-cheese omelettes. Achim brought the children back on the dot of the arranged time. They were practically bursting with stories about their weekend. The cat was now called Cinderella. She was grey and white and a little bit black. They had gone for ice cream in the afternoon, two scoops each. Papa had been really funny and lost twelve times to Jakob at arm wrestling.
Beatrice smiled, laughed, nodded and suppressed something that, on closer inspection, she identified as melancholy. Did she wish she had been there too?
She shook her head in disbelief, cleared the table and sent the children off to the bathroom. She would read The Hobbit to them and have a relaxing evening for once.
‘The fires in the middle of the hall were built with fresh logs and the torches were put out, and still they sat in the light of the dancing flames,’ read Beatrice. Jakob, who in her opinion was still too young for the book, and for whom she improvised harmless passages in place of the more violent scenes, was staring at the Buzz Lightyear poster on the wall, his eyes glistening. Mina’s gaze, on the other hand, was fixed on Beatrice; she was smiling and seemed to be at peace with herself and the world for the first time in weeks.
‘…with the pillars of the house standing tall behind them, and dark at the top like trees of the forest–’
Her phone vibrated, and she heard the first few bars of ‘Message in a Bottle’.
Beatrice only realised she had stopped reading and let the book sink when Jakob shook her arm. ‘Mama! Keep reading!’
She found her place, started again, tripped over her words.
Stay calm. The message would still be there in a minute, and perhaps it was… from Florin. Or from Achim, wanting to relieve himself of some more bitter words. She would find out soon enough, but right now it was the children’s time.
‘Whether it was magic or not, it seemed to Bilbo that he heard a sound like wind in the branches stirring in the rafters, and the hoot of owls. Soon he began to nod with sleep and the voices seemed to grow far away—’
‘Mama! You’re not reading properly any more!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Pulling herself together, she tried to concentrate on the story. Eventually, she even let herself get carried away by it, only looking up again once the children were fast asleep.
To be disabled.
Just those three words, sent from the same number of course. Beatrice stared at her phone until the energy-saving function made the display go dark.
Disabled meant turned off, deactivated. And ‘to be’ meant it would happen soon. Or perhaps it could also be read in the sense of something or someone being handicapped.
Was the message referring to the mutilated victim? Was the Owner announcing that he was about to start sawing limbs off again?
She sat down on the couch and felt her pulse beating in her neck and all the way up to her temples. It would be hard to fall asleep now. For the third time that evening, she checked that the door was locked, then fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and turned on the computer. She had left her files in the office, including all the research Stefan had done for her, but she would easily be able to find the list she was thinking of online. She typed Geocache disabled into Google, and a list of links appeared. Reading the first two, she discovered that a cache could be ‘temporarily disabled’. The term, as she found out two clicks later, meant that the owner had removed the box in order to update it or exchange the logbook for a new one.
No, thought Beatrice, not that, please.
In the worst-case scenario, that would mean the coordinates they had gone to such lengths to work out were now worthless. Had the Owner just informed them he was planning to get rid of whatever was hidden at the site in question? Had he already done so? Without hesitating for long, she dialled Florin’s number. He picked up on the third ring.
‘Listen, I got another message—’ She stopped. There was piano music in the background. Erik Satie. Or something similar.
‘Is your brother there?’
‘No, it’s a CD. I was just trying to… oh, never mind. What happened?’
She was willing to bet she had interrupted him while he was painting; Florin was a keen artist and said it helped him to wind down. ‘He sent me another text message. I don’t think it’s anything threatening, but perhaps a hint that he’s planning to get rid of what he hid for us.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The message says “disabled”. That’s caching terminology and means the cache will be temporarily removed. Or updated. Maybe he put something new in.’ Something bloody, coagulating.
For a few seconds, Florin was silent, which made it sound as though he had turned the piano music up. ‘Do you think,’ he asked eventually, ‘that we made a mistake? That we should have gone to the new coordinates right away?’
‘I wondered that too.’
‘I’ll send a few people over there now. We’ll keep the area covered for the unlikely event that the Owner really does turn up. Even though—’