‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked quietly, once he had put his utensils back in the bag. ‘Are you planning to kill me too?’
He didn’t say no, but instead tilted his head thoughtfully. Regretfully, almost. Beatrice’s blood ran cold. ‘You’re going to kill me?’
‘Calm down. You have a chance of getting away alive. Not a particularly big one, admittedly, but it exists. Are your colleagues on the ball? Are they bright? Then you don’t need to worry.’ He smiled. ‘First and foremost, you’re here so I can thank you. Thanks for the hunt, Beatrice. Thank you very much indeed.’
‘You’re the first person to ever thank us for hunting them.’
That seemed to amuse Sigart. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ He leant over, as if he wanted to confide something in her that no one else was supposed to hear. ‘You didn’t hunt me.’ He looked at her, his gaze full of expectation.
Was this a new game? ‘We were hunting the man who killed Nora Papenberg, Herbert Liebscher, Christoph Beil and Rudolf Estermann,’ she said. ‘Presumably, Melanie Dalamasso was supposed to be his last victim. And it certainly seems like you are this man. The Owner.’
‘That’s what you call me? How sweet. And yet so ironic, for I own hardly anything now.’ He propped his elbows on the table, about to put his fingertips together into a steeple when he suddenly seemed to realise it was no longer possible. ‘I thought you would call me Shinigami. I was very particular about my selection of nickname, but then you can’t control everything.’ He sighed, yet this time it had a contented tone to it. ‘You weren’t hunting me. Think about it, Beatrice – you know everything you need to figure it out. So, I found the cache and was on the brink of finding out who was guilty for the death of my children, right? I found out the most important details.’
‘Yes. The names.’
‘Correct.’ He smiled at her, like a teacher who knew his best pupil could do better. He was eagerly awaiting what she was about to say.
And all of a sudden, Beatrice realised what had happened, what Sigart had been thanking them for all this time. The realisation lay in front of her like a steep precipice she was slipping helplessly towards.
The cable tie cut deeply into the skin of her wrists, but she still wrenched against it. It refused to give by even a millimetre.
‘Please don’t.’ Sigart lifted his claw-like left hand. It was probably intended to be a calming gesture. But only when the pain became really bad, the unrelenting material chafing away at her skin, only then did Beatrice give up her futile attempt at freeing herself.
Sigart responded with a contented nod. ‘I knew you wouldn’t take it very well.’
‘We played right into your hands,’ whispered Beatrice. ‘You had the names, but not the real ones. Only pseudonyms, and you couldn’t do anything with those.’
He didn’t say a word, but his eyes demanded that she keep talking.
‘We solved the puzzles for you, from the few little details you knew about the five. We found out their true identities so you could kill them. You… you used the results of our investigations for your own revenge. You followed us, didn’t you? And that’s how you knew who we were questioning.’
His face spoke volumes. She had hit the bull’s eye. But what else could we have done? Not work on the case? Not look for the people in the puzzles?
She thought for a moment, her mind still foggy, then remembered her previous discovery. ‘But you found one of the cachers without any help – Herbert Liebscher. He was stupid enough not to leave the caching scene and you contacted him.’
‘Yes, by email, via his geocaching account. Descartes, what a joke. I told him I was a new member and that I wanted to do my first outing with an old hand. I said we were both from Salzburg and that his nickname suggested he was an intelligent guy. He took the bait right away.’
And you took your time, lulled him into a false sense of security… for the duration of seven whole caches.
‘Did you knock him out to bring him here? Or drug him with something?’
‘The latter, like I did with you. I wanted his head to be unharmed, I wanted all of his memories from the twelfth of July, all the names.’
The kaleidoscope had come to a halt; the picture was now clear. ‘But there was a problem with that. He didn’t know the others.’ Beatrice groped around for ideas. ‘He only knew – Nora Papenberg.’
Sigart’s eyes reflected genuine admiration. ‘Bravo. That’s exactly how it was. The two of them had arranged at some caching meet-up to go on this trip together. It was quite a trek, and they didn’t even find the cache. They were already halfway back when the other three turned up, GPS device in hand. So they all returned together. There wasn’t much time to chat, and people hardly ever remember names the first time they hear them.’
But Liebscher had known Papenberg, at least by her maiden name, and maybe he also knew the name of the ad agency where she worked. He had told Sigart, filled with fear, probably screaming in pain… and then Sigart had gone to fetch Nora. Used some ruse to call the agency, find out her current surname and maybe even her mobile number. None of that was too difficult; if he had trodden carefully it would probably have taken just twenty minutes.
The photos from the agency meal were still clear in her memory. Nora’s shocked face as the past came back to haunt her.
‘What did you say to her, that night on the phone?’
‘That Herbert Liebscher had told me what had happened on the twelfth of July five years ago. That I knew what role she had played in the whole thing. That I would keep quiet if she gave me ten thousand euros, a very modest sum for being able to keep everything hidden. If not, I said I would have no qualms about sending the evidence to her husband and boss – and to the police too, of course.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She tried to placate me. She said she didn’t have ten thousand euros, that she didn’t believe there was any evidence because she hadn’t done anything. We arranged a place to meet, and she came.’ He shrugged. ‘She was terrified of losing everything she had worked so hard for. I told her I could understand that, and that the loss would be a hundred times worse than she could ever imagine. Once she was unconscious, I took her car and brought her here.’
Just like that. Beatrice inhaled deeply and felt a stabbing pain in the muscles of her right shoulder.
‘Was this a prison for your victims?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, when you were in your flat or with your therapist?’
‘I couldn’t have found a better one. The stone walls swallow up every scream, every cry for help. And even if they didn’t – hardly anyone ever comes out here. There used to be two farms, just a few hundred metres away.’
‘Which also burnt down that night.’ Beatrice remembered having read it in the report. No victims, but immense damage to the properties.
‘Nora,’ she continued. ‘The puzzles we found were written in her handwriting.’
Sigart shrugged. ‘She was an ad woman. I liked the way she phrased things. You could almost feel the mystery behind the words. She also knew the most about the other three – women pay much more attention to these things than men do. For two days, the three of us had an intense brainstorming session. Liebscher wasn’t much use, except as a means of exerting pressure on Nora.’
She swallowed. ‘Is that why you cut his ear off?’
‘It certainly sped things up. After that, she suddenly remembered the birthmark and the Schubert Mass. It turns out people do share the odd detail about their lives when they spend an hour hiking together.’