Ursula Archer - Five

Maly cleared her throat. ‘You’re punishing yourself for something that isn’t your responsibility. I can understand that you make a connection between your absence and the death of your family, but it wasn’t in your power to predict such a fateful event—’

He interrupted her with a wave of his hand. ‘Let’s leave it. There was something unusual that happened last week, as it happens. It might be of interest to you.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘The police paid me a visit.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘It was about some woman who was murdered. It was really strange actually – the police wanted to know if I knew her. But I didn’t.’

‘So then why is the event significant to you?’

Good question. ‘I don’t know. Maybe because it was the first time in a long while that I’ve spoken to the police. A woman and a man, they were both very considerate.’ He stopped, trying to formulate a thought, and wondered how Maly would interpret it. ‘It was almost a good feeling, somehow, speaking about a murder case that didn’t affect me.’

His quota is over 2,000. He never concedes defeat – or so he claims – he has a loud voice and he refuses to tolerate any contradiction.

Beatrice read through the description of the ‘key figure’ for what must have been the tenth time in a row. The word she kept lingering over was ‘quota’. What kind of quota could be over 2,000? A hit ratio? Was the man connected with weapons in some way?

She rubbed her forehead. Weren’t quotas usually given in percentages? But 2,000 per cent was mathematical nonsense. What was plausible, though, was 2,000 geocaches. In this context, it could be a highly active cacher, a real professional. Someone like that should be easy enough to track down online.

His eyes may be green or blue, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself. He makes a living by selling things which, as he himself says, no one needs. He’s good at it, too.

So he works in sales of some kind. Perhaps the quota was in reference to that? Wasn’t there something like in-house sales statistics in a lot of companies?

It was infuriating: nothing, nothing at all in this clue could be used. Especially not the last sentence of the description.

He has two sons, one of whom is called Felix .

Felix could just as easily be three as twenty-three, and the number of boys named Felix in the surrounding area was probably in the thousands. Exasperated, Beatrice struggled to think clearly. ‘The other two clues were child’s play compared to this—’

At that moment, her phone vibrated.

Beatrice jumped up and grabbed for her phone, feeling her heart pound throughout her entire body.

It wasn’t a message from the Owner, but Achim, who must have somehow found out that the children were at Mooserhof.

You should have custody taken away from you. You’re always offloading the kids, and have been for years. You’re not fit to be a mother.

Feeling raw inside, Beatrice erased the message. Her gaze met Florin’s. He was clearly waiting for her to say something.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s just another message from my ex.’

She put her mobile away again, aware of him watching her. ‘You were expecting something else, right?’ he asked.

All she could manage was a shrug. ‘Well, it could have been the Owner.’ For a few moments, Beatrice was tempted to tell Florin about the lone hand she had played. If you could call it that, but the description seemed to hit the nail on the head. Hoffmann would go mad if he found out she had taken it upon herself to respond to the killer without consulting the others first.

Well, then he would finally have something worth going mad about.

She changed the subject. ‘If we’re not making any progress on the next stage, then how about with Herbert Liebscher? Has anyone questioned his colleagues at the school yet?’

‘Stefan went there with two of our guys. But nothing useful came of it. Three of Liebscher’s colleagues knew that he was a geocacher, so Stefan spoke to them for a good while, but unfortunately he didn’t find out anything we don’t already know.’

Beatrice drew circles on her notepad, lost in thought. ‘Liebscher went geocaching, we can take that as a given. But Papenberg didn’t, unless her husband was lying to us, which would pose the question of why. And we didn’t question Beil about it.’ Beatrice didn’t say it out loud, but she doubted they would ever get the opportunity to remedy that.

Beil’s wife phoned their office for what must have been the fifth time that day – she had been out of her mind with worry ever since hearing that her husband’s car had been found. Luckily for Beatrice, Florin took the call, repeating with seemingly limitless patience the same thing he had already said the last few times. That they were doing everything they could to find Christoph Beil. That they would be in touch as soon as they had any news. Then he paused. ‘Actually, it’s possible you might be able to help us with something. Do you happen to know whether your husband ever went geocaching?’ He turned the phone onto loudspeaker so Beatrice could listen in.

‘That’s… the thing with the navigation devices, right?’ The woman’s tear-choked voice resounded out from the speaker. ‘To be honest, I don’t know. He had so many hobbies. If he did do it, then he never told me about it.’

‘Don’t you spend your free time together?’

A hiccoughing sob. ‘Not always. He’s much more sporty than I am, and I don’t mind when he does things with friends without me. He always says a little distance keeps things fresh.’

‘So that means you don’t know exactly what he’s doing when he’s not at home?’

‘Well, most of the time he tells me. But it’s the same the other way around. I have my hobbies too.’

Beatrice, who had just brought up the geocaching website on her screen, was struck by an idea. ‘Ask her if her husband had a nickname,’ she whispered. ‘Perhaps one that his friends gave him at school, or one that she used for him. Something along those lines.’

Florin nodded, but his question was initially met with incomprehension.

‘Why do you want to know that?’ asked the woman. ‘What does that have to do with the blood in his car, and the fact that he’s missing?’

Beatrice pointed to her screen, and Florin caught on. ‘It’s possible that your husband registered on Internet forums with a nickname of some kind. If you can help us a little we can narrow down our search and possibly find some clues. Does your husband have a PC at home?’

The sound of her breathing came through the loudspeaker. ‘He has a laptop. And I always call him my Grizzly Bear.’

There was a ‘GrizzlyBear’ on Geocaching.com, as well as a ‘GrizzleBear’, but neither of them were Christoph Beil. The first had only registered one found cache, which was back in 2009, in Berlin. The second had registered only five months ago, already logging over 500 finds. ‘But all of them in Baden-Württemberg,’ Beatrice declared.

Two hours later they had Beil’s laptop in their possession – his wife had handed it over without hesitation. Stefan took charge of searching for clues, opening the Web browser and looking through the bookmarks. Geocaching.com wasn’t there, not even in the history, which covered the last three months.

‘I’ll check the emails now,’ he declared. ‘He has an inbox stretching back four years. If he was sent messages via his geocaching account during that time, then we might find them here, which would give us his username too.’

But not even rummaging through his email folders brought anything to light. The disappointment was written all over Stefan’s face, even though he tried to hide it. ‘It looks like Beil wasn’t a geocacher then. With your agreement, I’d like to go through all the emails from the last few weeks with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe I’ll find something useful. Then I’ll send the laptop to the IT lab so they can bring any deleted data back from the dead on the hard drive.’