On the way to the scene, Beatrice thought about Beil’s wife. She would now have to identify the man she had affectionately named Grizzly Bear. The description given by the police officers at the scene seemed to fit his profile.
The third victim. She looked across at Florin, who was driving. ‘We should arrange some police protection for Bernd Sigart.’
Beil’s body had been laid out on the shore of the lake, and it was a horrific sight. Naked down to his underpants, his body was covered with wounds, some of them deep, narrow and jagged, as if a small animal had been trying to burrow something out from beneath his skin. Blue strangulation marks ran around his neck, and the face above it was already bloated. But there was no doubt that it was him.
‘Do you know what instrument the cuts might have been inflicted with?’ asked Beatrice, but she didn’t receive any answer from Drasche, who was busy taking Beil’s fingerprints. Typical. She spotted the medical officer standing just outside the cordoning tape, making notes whilst he leant over the bonnet of his car.
‘Good morning, Doctor. I know I’m impatient, but I need all the information you can give me.’
He nodded, without breaking the contact between his pen and the paper. ‘The man has been dead for roughly three days, but he was brought here a good while later. He has grazes and deep scratches all over his body, and a stab wound on the left side of his ribcage. That could be the cause of death, but the victim was definitely strangled as well. He was found lying on his stomach, but the livor mortis is on his back, which means the corpse must have been in another position for a good two days.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s all I can tell you right now.’
‘The scratches and cuts – what do you think they were inflicted by?’
The doctor sighed loudly. ‘I don’t know. Presumably it was a jagged instrument, something like a blunt saw that both scrapes and cuts the surface.’
‘While he was still alive?’
‘Yes, that’s very likely.’
Beatrice glanced over her shoulder back at the dead body. Beil had been tortured, and she would bet anything that someone had been trying to force information out of him. Presumably the same information he hadn’t wanted to tell her.
Florin spoke to the uniformed policeman who had been the first one on the scene, while Beatrice went over to the three fishermen who were waiting, palely and silently, by the squad car.
‘The guy over there had a go at us about moving the body,’ said one of them. ‘But we wanted to see if he was still alive, whether there was anything we could do.’
‘Of course. Don’t worry,’ Beatrice reassured them. ‘My colleague is a little quick-tempered – it’s nothing personal. Did you notice anything else that might be significant? Did you encounter anyone on your way down to the lake, for example?’
The three men looked at each other, then shook their heads in consensus. ‘It was half-five in the morning, and there’s hardly ever anyone here at that time,’ said the oldest man, whose grey-flecked hair came down almost to his shoulders. ‘But there was something I noticed – well, nothing really compared to the dead body, but still –’
‘Yes?’
‘Twigs.’ He looked at Beatrice almost apologetically. ‘A few metres away from where we found the man, there were these short twigs on the ground, and they formed a word—’
‘Not a word,’ interrupted one of the two younger men. ‘Just meaningless letters. TFTL, I think.’
‘No, it was TFTH,’ said the third man.
‘Are they still there?’
‘No, we dragged the body across them when we pulled it out.’
‘I see.’ How incredibly helpful. ‘Nonetheless, if you could please show me where the twigs are.’
The spot was just inside the cordon, directly on the river bank where the ground was soft. Beatrice waved Ebner over, who collected the twigs up one by one and stowed them away carefully.
‘The Owner left us his usual message,’ she said to Florin, after pulling him a few steps away from the uniformed policemen. ‘Thanking us for the hunt. We’ll have to…’ She closed her eyes, trying to bring some order to her thoughts. ‘We’ll have to speak to Konrad Papenberg again. Tell me if you disagree, but I believe Beil was killed because of something he knew. The Owner tortured him to find out exactly what, then killed him. Whatever it was – this information he had – must be connected to Nora Papenberg.’
‘The accomplice the Owner disposed of.’ Florin was gazing off over the lake into the distance. ‘That seems the most likely explanation to me. Maybe Beil even knew why they murdered Herbert Liebscher.’
Twenty minutes later, Hoffmann’s car drove up while Beatrice was asking the fishermen some further questions. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Hoffmann look at the body, pace around the scene, then speak briefly with Drasche before heading over in her direction. ‘You knew the victim, is that correct?’
‘Yes. Christoph Beil. We questioned him last Sunday, and two days later his wife reported him missing.’
Hoffmann nodded gloomily. ‘The third murder in such a short period of time – this is ruining our safety stats for the entire year. I expect this case to speed up, Kaspary. For heaven’s sake, the murderer is giving you clues, communicating with you – there must be a way to work with that! Why aren’t you following Kossar’s suggestions?’
Beatrice was silent. Letting herself get drawn into an argument would be just as futile as pointing out Kossar’s overly relaxed approach. Any attempt at self-defence had a tendency to spur Hoffmann on to self-opinionated tirades. More often than not, they started with the words: If I were in your position, I would have…
‘You’ll attend the autopsy today and report back to me afterwards.’ Before she had a chance to respond, he marched over to Florin, who was kneeling down at the edge of the cordoned area talking to Drasche, the body firmly fixed in his sights. She watched Hoffmann go, allowing herself to daydream for a moment that it was his autopsy she was attending instead.
‘Male corpse, 184 centimetres tall and weighing 93 kilos, in a healthy state of nourishment with a strong build.’ Dr Vogt’s scrawny figure moved around the autopsy table with measured steps as he talked into his Dictaphone. ‘The subject’s back – with the exception of the area which was in contact with the ground – reveals fixed, reddish violet livor mortis that doesn’t fade when finger pressure is applied.’
As Vogt continued with the external examination of Beil’s corpse, Beatrice reached for her mobile, which she had tucked into the pocket of the white coat lent to her by the forensics unit. Archived had been the Owner’s last message. He still hadn’t responded to her reply. Did he not care that she knew who he had been dismembering and hiding away? Did it please him, unsettle him?
‘Rigor mortis has set in, the eyelids are closed. There are dotted traces of bleeding around the upper and lower lids. Moving on now to the skin injuries –’ Vogt stopped next to Beil’s shoulder. ‘There are abrasions around the inside of the upper arm, four centimetres wide and six centimetres long, which have penetrated the upper layers of the dermis. The wounds are uneven in depth, which suggests they were inflicted by a serrated object. Lesions of the same sort are also located to the left of the navel, in both armpits and on the inner left thigh, five centimetres above the knee.’
As Vogt detailed one injury after the other, Beatrice closed her eyes, trying to picture a tool that would create wounds like that. Maybe a blunt saw blade? It was possible, but the cuts seemed too small in surface area for that.