Ursula Archer - Five

‘Of course!’ Stefan had already jumped up, but Florin stopped him.

‘I want Drasche to be with us. We’ll go first thing tomorrow. Having said that, I’d still like to see where this place is.’ He entered the new coordinates into Google Maps. The map appeared on the monitor in just a fraction of a second, prompting Florin to let out a brief and – or so it seemed to Beatrice – pained laugh. ‘We’ve dropped the ball here somehow.’

They zoomed in closer. ‘The results are never completely accurate,’ said Stefan. ‘It’ll be a few metres to the right or left of that.’

They would just have to hope he was right. Because the arrow indicating the location of the coordinates they had just entered was pointing directly at the autobahn.

Beatrice arrived home just in time to air the apartment and prepare all the ingredients for ham-and-cheese omelettes. Achim brought the children back on the dot of the arranged time. They were practically bursting with stories about their weekend. The cat was now called Cinderella. She was grey and white and a little bit black. They had gone for ice cream in the afternoon, two scoops each. Papa had been really funny and lost twelve times to Jakob at arm wrestling.

Beatrice smiled, laughed, nodded and suppressed something that, on closer inspection, she identified as melancholy. Did she wish she had been there too?

She shook her head in disbelief, cleared the table and sent the children off to the bathroom. She would read The Hobbit to them and have a relaxing evening for once.

‘The fires in the middle of the hall were built with fresh logs and the torches were put out, and still they sat in the light of the dancing flames,’ read Beatrice. Jakob, who in her opinion was still too young for the book, and for whom she improvised harmless passages in place of the more violent scenes, was staring at the Buzz Lightyear poster on the wall, his eyes glistening. Mina’s gaze, on the other hand, was fixed on Beatrice; she was smiling and seemed to be at peace with herself and the world for the first time in weeks.

‘…with the pillars of the house standing tall behind them, and dark at the top like trees of the forest–’

Her phone vibrated, and she heard the first few bars of ‘Message in a Bottle’.

Beatrice only realised she had stopped reading and let the book sink when Jakob shook her arm. ‘Mama! Keep reading!’

She found her place, started again, tripped over her words.

Stay calm. The message would still be there in a minute, and perhaps it was… from Florin. Or from Achim, wanting to relieve himself of some more bitter words. She would find out soon enough, but right now it was the children’s time.

‘Whether it was magic or not, it seemed to Bilbo that he heard a sound like wind in the branches stirring in the rafters, and the hoot of owls. Soon he began to nod with sleep and the voices seemed to grow far away—’

‘Mama! You’re not reading properly any more!’

‘I’m sorry.’ Pulling herself together, she tried to concentrate on the story. Eventually, she even let herself get carried away by it, only looking up again once the children were fast asleep.

To be disabled.

Just those three words, sent from the same number of course. Beatrice stared at her phone until the energy-saving function made the display go dark.

Disabled meant turned off, deactivated. And ‘to be’ meant it would happen soon. Or perhaps it could also be read in the sense of something or someone being handicapped.

Was the message referring to the mutilated victim? Was the Owner announcing that he was about to start sawing limbs off again?

She sat down on the couch and felt her pulse beating in her neck and all the way up to her temples. It would be hard to fall asleep now. For the third time that evening, she checked that the door was locked, then fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and turned on the computer. She had left her files in the office, including all the research Stefan had done for her, but she would easily be able to find the list she was thinking of online. She typed Geocache disabled into Google, and a list of links appeared. Reading the first two, she discovered that a cache could be ‘temporarily disabled’. The term, as she found out two clicks later, meant that the owner had removed the box in order to update it or exchange the logbook for a new one.

No , thought Beatrice, not that, please .

In the worst-case scenario, that would mean the coordinates they had gone to such lengths to work out were now worthless. Had the Owner just informed them he was planning to get rid of whatever was hidden at the site in question? Had he already done so? Without hesitating for long, she dialled Florin’s number. He picked up on the third ring.

‘Listen, I got another message—’ She stopped. There was piano music in the background. Erik Satie. Or something similar.

‘Is your brother there?’

‘No, it’s a CD. I was just trying to… oh, never mind. What happened?’

She was willing to bet she had interrupted him while he was painting; Florin was a keen artist and said it helped him to wind down. ‘He sent me another text message. I don’t think it’s anything threatening, but perhaps a hint that he’s planning to get rid of what he hid for us.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The message says “disabled”. That’s caching terminology and means the cache will be temporarily removed. Or updated. Maybe he put something new in.’ Something bloody, coagulating .

For a few seconds, Florin was silent, which made it sound as though he had turned the piano music up. ‘Do you think,’ he asked eventually, ‘that we made a mistake? That we should have gone to the new coordinates right away?’

‘I wondered that too.’

‘I’ll send a few people over there now. We’ll keep the area covered for the unlikely event that the Owner really does turn up. Even though—’

Even though he doesn’t really believe that will happen . Just as Beatrice herself didn’t.

She heard him sigh. ‘And if we don’t find anything there tomorrow morning, I’ll take the fall for it.’

‘Nonsense,’ she objected. ‘If we don’t find anything, then it could just as easily mean we have the wrong Christoph. Remember the map, the autobahn.’ But she wasn’t too keen on that theory. Maybe the others were right; maybe the flicker of recognition in Beil’s eyes had just been a figment of her imagination.

N47º 50.738 E013º 15.547

The sundial on the facade of the Thalgau rectory was indicating exactly eight in the morning. They parked the car a few metres away by the side of an unsurfaced road, directly next to the unmarked police car from which their colleagues had kept watch overnight. But apart from two dog-walkers, no one had put in an appearance.

The steady rushing sound coming from the autobahn would almost have been reminiscent of waves breaking against a shore, had it not been for the loud diesel engines of passing lorries. Stefan’s comment had been pretty accurate – on the map, it looked as though the coordinates pointed directly at the motorway itself, but in actual fact there was a bridge stretching out across a small valley. They would have to look under it, or in the immediate surrounding area. The autobahn bridge sliced through the landscape just a few metres behind the rectory, separating the house from a gently sloping fragment of forest where the birds were boldly attempting to hold their own against the cacophony of traffic.

‘Go ahead until the arch of the bridge, then let us go in front!’ bellowed Drasche. He and Ebner were just about to climb into their overalls.