Ursula Archer - Five

He started to write again, but then stopped short and looked up, visibly perplexed.

‘What is it?’ whispered Beatrice, but Florin just shook his head.

‘And there’s no chance you could be mistaken? No? Okay. Yes. Thanks, I’ll try to make some sense of it. Send us the full report as soon as it’s ready. Yes, you have a good day too.’ He hung up.

‘What is it?’ pressed Beatrice. ‘What did they find out from the autopsy?’

Deep in thought, Florin stared at his notes. ‘We were right about the tattoos being recent,’ he said, speaking slowly. ‘They were done while she was still alive, about eight to nine hours before she died.’

Beatrice’s toes curled up involuntarily inside her shoes. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘Yes. That’s one thing. The other is that traces of blood were found on her clothes, and it wasn’t hers.’ He smoothed his notes out flat, as if that would somehow help the words make more sense. ‘But…’ he continued hesitantly, ‘it did match the samples from the amputated hand.’

‘What?’

He nodded, almost apologetically. ‘The blood was found on her jacket, blouse and trousers, and there were some small traces on her hands too.’

The image that Beatrice had created of Nora Papenberg’s last hours in her mind suddenly started to crack. Lonely, frightened, tied up somewhere in the dark – perhaps it hadn’t been like that after all. She had someone else’s blood on her, the blood of a dead man. ‘Were there any scratches, any skin cells under her fingernails?’

Florin shook his head. ‘Nothing of the sort. She had some grazes, of course, but they probably came from the fall off the rock face.’ He rubbed both hands over his face. ‘You’re thinking there might have been a struggle, right? The man attacks Nora Papenberg, she defends herself, making him bleed in the process – but what then? She kills him and saws him up into pieces? Hides his hand away in a plastic box? And then commits suicide? It all sounds pretty unlikely to me.’

But the message they had found with the dismembered hand had been written by a woman, Beatrice was sure of it. ‘Well, we should ask the husband for a sample of Nora Papenberg’s handwriting anyway,’ she murmured, looking at her copy of the note. The script was very rounded. Quite girly, even. No man wrote like that. At certain points in the text, you could see that the writer’s hand must have been trembling.

Beatrice traced the letters with her finger: it may be five years or even six .

Why were the clues so vague? Did the Owner want to make it extra hard for them so more time elapsed before they found the next coordinates?

The Owner, a man. Or maybe it was a woman. Maybe it was a woman who was already dead, who had left behind a strikingly unusual legacy.

Beatrice leant over the photo and propped her forehead in both hands. It was time to come up with some scenarios.

Let’s assume that the man whose hand they had found really had been killed by Nora Papenberg. That she had mutilated him, written the note, hidden the cache. Had the victim given her the tattoo first? If so, then there might be traces of her blood on the sawn-off hand. Beatrice made a note.

New scenario .

Let’s assume that the dead man hadn’t been the one who tattooed her – could Nora have done it herself? Beatrice’s common sense cried out in protest. Why would someone tattoo themselves on such a sensitive place as the soles of the feet?

Self-punishment was one possibility. A form of penance, perhaps for killing and dismembering the man. And then… Papenberg had fastened her hands behind her back with cable tie and jumped off the cliff face.

Absolute nonsense .

‘Florin, is it theoretically possible to tie your own hands up with cable tie?’

Florin looked up from his notes. ‘Of course. You’d just need to use your teeth to do it at the front. But behind the back – I imagine that’d be pretty difficult. Impossible, in fact. Unless you’re flexible enough to climb through your own tied-up hands, if you see what I mean. Or… if you had a vice to clamp the ends of the cable tie together, then you could tighten the noose while your hands are in it.’ He frowned. ‘But then you wouldn’t be able to get the clamped end out.’ He pushed his notes aside. ‘Are you wondering whether Nora Papenberg staged the whole thing herself, including her own death?’

‘I just want to be certain we can rule it out, that’s all. The way things stand, she seems a plausible perpetrator in some ways: the blood of a murder victim on her clothes and possibly even her handwriting on the note in the cache box.’

‘Which we still need to check out.’ He rotated his pencil between his fingers, lost in thought. ‘So far, Papenberg’s record seems completely clean, not so much as a parking ticket. If she did kill the man, then it was probably in the heat of the moment. Or self-defence.’

‘Let’s look at the facts. The unidentified man whose hand we found died before Nora, do we agree on that? Good. So logic would suggest that there’s a third person involved.’ With the tip of her finger, she fished a few specks of wood from her mouth which had ended up there as a result of all the pencil-chewing. ‘After all, Nora did get a phone call from someone during her work dinner. Maybe it was a lover? So she fakes a headache and rushes off to meet the guy. But they get caught in the act, the wife tattoos the coordinates onto Nora, kills her husband, saws him up into pieces and hides one of his hands in the forest. Then she pushes Nora off the rock face to her death.’

Even before she had finished the last sentence, Beatrice was already shaking her head. ‘No, women don’t act like that. A dismembered body suggests a male killer.’

‘There are exceptions.’

‘True. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility, but still…’ Beatrice reached for her notepad. ‘The ad agency. We need to question every single person who was there that evening. We’ll pester the pathologist’s office to give us the report on the sawn-off hand as soon as possible. And we’ll follow the Owner’s clues.’ She looked at Florin, hoping for his agreement, but he was gazing beyond her into the distance.

‘Those five days,’ he said. ‘So much time between her disappearance and her death. If we only knew what happened in that time span…’

Without breaking eye contact, Beatrice pinned the enlarged printed photo of the letter on the board above their desk. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘In five days, a person can change completely if you push them hard enough. We should keep that in mind with everything we find out about her.’

The thought stayed with her for the next few hours. Five days . She completed the list of choral Christophs and unearthed contact details for former choirmasters, but those five days kept circling relentlessly in her mind.

‘Good afternoon, this is Beatrice Kaspary from Salzburg Landeskriminalamt. Am I speaking to Gustav Richter?’

‘Erm, yes. What’s—’

‘Don’t worry, nothing’s happened. I just need some information from you. You lead the Arcadia chamber choir, if I’ve been correctly informed?’

A relieved sigh. ‘Yes.’

‘I have two rather unusual questions. Do you have a choir member called Christoph? Or a former member? The time period in question would be the last five to six years.’

‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘It’s connected to a current investigation. Unfortunately I can’t be any more specific than that.’

‘Aha. Yes, we do have a Christoph. Two, for that matter – Christoph Harrer and Christoph Leonhart – and they both still sing with us.’ A brief pause. ‘Are they in some kind of trouble?’