She hadn’t even driven 500 metres by the time her phone rang.
‘What’s happened?’
She almost laughed out loud with relief. Florin sounded wide awake and completely alert.
‘Did I wake you?’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter. What’s going on?’
‘I’m driving out to the Dalamasso coordinates. We found something there – we just didn’t realise.’
‘What?’ She heard him take a deep breath. ‘But why now? In the middle of the night?’
‘That’s the only time it will make sense. Trust me.’
She picked him up fifteen minutes later. He had insisted on coming, and she hadn’t protested for very long.
‘Morning,’ he said as he opened the passenger-side door. He didn’t seem to have had enough time to brush his hair or button up his polo shirt, but he did have his gun with him.
‘Thanks for calling me back. It feels better if there’s two of us.’
‘No need to thank me. But it would be even better if there were twenty of us, so we’ll phone the base once we’ve made sure you’re right.’
‘Okay.’ She turned the radio on. Phil Collins was singing ‘In the Air Tonight’, the song with the best drum intro of all time. Evelyn used to play along to it with her cutlery and plate at every opportunity she got.
Speed limit: 30 km/h. The reflective circular sticker in the middle of the zero was illuminated by Beatrice’s torch, a tiny full moon in the darkness.
‘A night cache.’ Beatrice pointed the beam of light down the road. ‘It starts here. If I’m right, we need to find another reflector nearby…’
‘And then another and another.’ Florin turned slowly around on his own axis, holding his torch at head height. ‘There!’ He pointed towards a tree at the edge of the road, a good fifty metres away. Behind it, a pathway forked off.
‘We’re not waiting until tomorrow,’ said Beatrice as she saw Florin’s hesitation. ‘It’ll be dark for another four or five hours, so maybe we’ll be able to find Stage Five before sunrise.’
Without giving an answer, Florin went over to the marked tree. He nodded. ‘Call Stefan. If he’s awake, he should come join us. I’ll report back to base and say we’ll check in at hourly intervals.’
Stefan’s mobile went straight to the mailbox. ‘You’re missing something here,’ she said in her message. ‘Stage Five is a night cache. I’ll bet you’ve never done one of those before, have you?’
They parked the car in a clearly visible spot near the fork in the road, then set off. The path was narrow and zigzagged up the hill past cattle pastures and farms. Beatrice discovered the next reflector on the wall of a wooden barn. ‘The owner is marking all the turn-offs,’ she realised. ‘We have to go right here.’
They followed the trail of shining clues into isolation. The beams of light from their torches danced along the path, intermingling against a grey, brown and green background. They heard the muffled sound of a cowbell nearby. Beatrice couldn’t help picturing Nora Papenberg’s corpse again, on her stomach in the meadow, the cows alongside her. Was the tinny clang of a cowbell the last sound she had heard in her life?
The path plunged into the even deeper darkness of the forest. A reflective gleam from the knothole of a tree trunk confirmed that they were on the right path. Something scurried past them, disappearing with a rustling sound into the bushes to their left. Birds protested the disturbance at such an unusual hour.
The path wound its way steeply upwards, and Beatrice began to regret not bringing along anything to drink. The gentle sound of a nearby stream could be heard amidst the nocturnal rustle of the leaves, but to find it they would have to fight their way through the undergrowth.
After an hour, they stopped for a rest, and Florin called back to base to report that everything was under control. ‘I’ve only got two bars,’ he said with a frown after hanging up. ‘How’s your mobile reception?’
‘Not much better. There aren’t very many radio masts out here.’
Nor were there many houses or farms. Beatrice and Florin had passed the last one about twenty minutes before, and since then they hadn’t seen any signs of human dwellings. But at least the path was in good condition, albeit not tarmacked, as it had been at the start of their climb.
Before long, they found themselves searching around another fork in the path, and for a few moments Beatrice felt as though she was deep underwater, too deep to ever get back to the surface. They shone their torches into the forest, but the beams only penetrated the first row of trees; behind it, the world was absorbed by darkness. Above them, rustling sounds and the gentle sway of the treetops in the night-time breeze. Beatrice was freezing beneath her light jacket. Where was the next damned reflector? To the right, she hoped, for the path there seemed fairly even. But of course they soon realised they had to go left, where it looked much steeper. She was the one to spot the small shining disc, impaled on a thorny bush.
They spoke only when necessary now, battling their way further into the solitude. Something around them had changed in the course of the last few minutes: the forest had taken on a new form of darkness. It wasn’t so dense any more. It was bleaker, sparser. Beatrice pointed her torch at the trees. Stunted, dark trunks, interspersed with young spruces and their vibrant green. Then, the blackness again.
It reminded her of something. Some painful research she had undertaken.
He’s mocking his victims. He’s mocking us. He wants us to find Sigart’s severed fingers and some witty message about how strange life can be.
Without realising, she had quickened her pace. Her breath came out in gasps and her heart was racing, but she didn’t stop. Florin caught up with her. She felt his questioning look and shook her head. First they had to get there. First, certainty.
They almost missed the next reflector. They had just emerged from the forest and it was there, right in front of them, fastened to a flat stone at the edge of the path.
Beatrice was convinced the cache must be hidden beneath it, but she was wrong. The only things they found as they lifted it up were a worm and two beetles, who fled in panic from the beam of light. A loud, snapping sound, like the lashing of a branch against wood, announced that they had probably startled even more wildlife.
‘I think the path must go down there.’
‘Here? But there’s nothing.’ The terrain sank down before them, densely overgrown with bushes and hip-high brambles. ‘We’d need a machete to get through there.’
‘Then we’ll have to manage without.’ Florin looked at his watch and pulled his mobile out from his trouser pocket. ‘Hi, Chris.’ He spoke in hushed tones. ‘We’re okay, we’re leaving the path now and heading off into the thicket. In an hour… Hello? Can you hear me? Okay, yes, I’ll call again in an hour.’
Florin took a tentative step forward into the undergrowth. ‘Come on, Bea, we can go through here.’ He stepped down a little and took her hand. ‘There must have been a path here once.’
A step. Another. A third. They made their way slowly, unbearably slowly, down an overgrown slope, until Beatrice got her foot caught in a tree root. She dropped the torch and grasped around for something to hold onto, feeling a searing pain shoot from her right palm to her elbow as she finally found her grip.
At first she thought it was barbed wire, but it was only stinging nettles. Florin pulled her up, and that was when she saw it.
A shining number five. She pointed towards it in silence, then groped around on the ground for her torch. The number was fixed to a small wooden shed, and seemed to be swinging back and forth.