Their colleague – what was his name again? Becker? – raised his eyebrows in disbelief. ‘You don’t say. We’re not idiots you know.’ With that, he turned on his heel and left.
Beatrice watched him go, completely baffled. ‘What was all that about? Was I – I wasn’t rude, was I?’ Seeing that Florin was struggling to contain a grin, she couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Come on, tell me, what’s so funny?’
‘You treated Bechner like he was still at the police academy.’ He stood up and gathered the files for their meeting, putting them under his arm. ‘He’ll go off to tell the others and confirm your reputation as a control freak.’
‘Control freak?’
‘Come on. You don’t exactly like letting other people handle things, do you?’
‘Well, when it comes to colleagues I don’t work with very often, I can’t know for certain how competent they are.’ But at least she knew the man’s name now. Bechner. She repeated it to herself a few times, glancing at the clock as she did so. Three minutes past three, they were late – wonderful. She hastily grabbed her notes and joined Florin, who was waiting for her by the door.
‘It would do you good to have a little more faith in others,’ he said softly. Looking at the picture of the shrink-wrapped hand on the top of his pile of documents, Beatrice wondered if he could really mean that seriously.
Their meeting with Hoffmann went like all their meetings with Hoffmann. He demonstrated his discontent with the results they had produced so far by puckering the corners of his mouth and sighing loudly. Florin was the only one he ever found favour in, so he took over reporting the investigations that they had undertaken so far. And he said she didn’t ever let anyone else take control! When Florin got to the part about the text messages the Owner had sent, Hoffmann’s attentiveness increased perceptibly. He trained his pale eyes on Beatrice.
‘Did you try to call him?’
‘Of course. But he had already turned the mobile off again. I’m sure he knows they can be used to locate people. The network he was connected to the second time was about fifteen kilometres away from the one the provider said he used the first time. He’s not dumb enough to use the same location twice.’
Hoffmann wrung out a thin smile. ‘I see. But nonetheless, you’re clearly the one he wanted to make contact with. So I expect you to exhaust all the possibilities that arise from that. Lure him into a trap, provoke him, force him to expose a weakness.’ He turned to Florin again. ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, right? And you’ll soon have a forensic psychologist helping you too, and then it’ll be child’s play. The killer has given us the fishing rod – now we just have to put the right bait on the hook.’
Drasche was up next, presenting his findings: the fingerprints on the second handwritten document belonged, yet again, to Nora Papenberg. But Beatrice was only half-listening as he explained the details. Hoffmann’s last sentence was echoing in her mind. She doubted that a few well-chosen words would be enough to lure the killer out of his hiding place. She would have to give him something he really wanted.
The vehicle registration office had responded swiftly. By the time they got back to their desk from the meeting, Florin’s inbox yielded a list of cars, including their owners, for which the last three digits of the number plate and model type matched the clues from the cache. It wasn’t a long list: two VW Golfs, one of which was blue – a 2005 model, registered to Dr Bernd Sigart.
‘If this is him, then it was pretty easy this time,’ said Beatrice. She typed the name into Google, scanned through the first few entries and felt her pulse quicken. One more link and she found what she was looking for. There was no question they had found the right guy: someone who had lost everything. With scars inside and out.
‘We’ve cracked Stage Three,’ she said.
‘So why do you sound so depressed?’ Florin had just stood up to turn on the espresso machine, which came back to life with a gurgle.
‘Because when we read the note earlier, I had a different conception of what he meant by a loser.’ She cleared her throat and began to read the newspaper article she had found online.
‘“Three children and a woman lost their lives last night in a fire near Scharten im Pongau. The blaze, which may have been caused by work in the surrounding forest, broke out around 10 p.m. The now-deceased family were staying in a wooden cabin they had rented as a holiday home, and may have been killed in their sleep by the fire. The husband and father Dr Bernd S., a vet, had been called out on an emergency visit and returned only after the forest and cabin were already engulfed by the blaze. His attempt to push his way through into the burning building left him with smoke intoxication and burns of an unknown degree. He is currently in the emergency unit of Salzburg hospital and, according to the doctors, is out of danger. The firemen were on site until the early hours of the morning.”’
She remembered the story. The case had kept the investigators busy for months; it hadn’t been possible to unequivocally determine the cause of the fire, but they had managed to rule out arson.
‘What a tragedy,’ she heard Florin say softly behind her. ‘How long ago was that?’
‘Almost five years.’
He sat back down at his computer. ‘And here we have the next piece of the puzzle,’ he announced. ‘Sigart’s registered address: Theodebertstrasse thirty-three. The street contains a name, just like Nora Papenberg’s note said it would.’
They headed over to the address half an hour later, the story about the fire lying heavy as a stone in Beatrice’s stomach. She resolved to approach their conversation with Sigart with a great deal of sensitivity. The street name alone was enough to find the cache, so they didn’t need to visit him especially for that. But if he had known Nora Papenberg, they urgently needed to hear what he had to say.
Number thirty-three was a multi-storey building with small balconies, just a few degrees away from looking run-down. It seemed a very modest home for a vet. Beatrice rang the bell, and moments later a deep but soft voice came through the intercom.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s the police. We’re from the Salzburg Landeskriminalamt and need to speak to you briefly.’
No answer, nor the buzz of the door release.
‘Hello?’ she persevered.
‘What do you want from me?’
‘It’s about a current case – we have a few questions. It won’t last long.’
‘Okay. First floor.’
The stairwell smelt of rubber and fried garlic; a baby was screaming behind one of the doors on the ground floor. Sigart was waiting for them at the door of his flat, a haggard man whose jogging bottoms were hanging off him loosely. According to his file, he must have been in his mid-forties, but the deep lines in his face made him look a good ten years older. His arms were crossed in front of his chest, and it was only when he uncrossed them to stretch out a hand in greeting that Beatrice saw the burn scars. Raised, reddish tissue covering his left forearm from the elbow to the fingers, as well as on his neck, stretching up to just under his chin. She took Sigart’s hand and returned his firm pressure. ‘Beatrice Kaspary, Landeskriminalamt. This is my colleague, Florin Wenninger. We’re investigating a murder case and have a few questions we hope you might be able to answer for us.’
The flat was tiny. One room with a kitchenette and a small bathroom. Not a single picture on the walls, no mirror. In the corner, an old portable TV was perched on a stool. Next to it was a wobbly-looking table with just one chair, which Sigart now pointed to. ‘Have a seat,’ he said to Beatrice.