Ursula Archer - Five

‘Help me!’ Sigart was sobbing. ‘He’s trying to—’ The word culminated in a scream, followed by a crash which sounded like a bookcase falling over. Another crash, then the whimpering was muffled; someone must have put their hand over the microphone. It crackled, rustled, then the sound became clear again, and Sigart’s cries cut shrilly through the air in the meeting room. ‘Stop! Please! No!’

‘Where are you?’ shouted Beatrice.

There was no answer, just a dull thud, more pain-racked screams, then the connection was abruptly broken.

‘Shit! Florin, Stefan, we need to drive to Sigart’s flat right now!’ She clapped Bechner on the shoulder. ‘Tell all available squad cars in the area to get over there, Theodebertstrasse thirty-three. Quickly!’

She estimated the driving time in her mind: they would need at least fifteen minutes, twenty more realistically, even if they went through the red lights. Florin jumped behind the wheel, stepping on the accelerator even before all the doors were shut. His lips were pressed into a thin line, all his concentration directed on the road. Meanwhile, from the back seat, Stefan offered his analysis of the call.

‘Sigart said “he”, which means it’s just one guy. So now we at least know that the Owner is a man—’

‘We don’t even know for sure if it was the Owner,’ Beatrice interrupted him. Her throat felt dry with nerves. Sigart does value his life after all, she thought. We all do, as soon as someone wants to take it from us, as soon as things get serious.

Hopefully became her mantra for the next ten minutes. Hopefully we won’t get there too late. Hopefully .

The walls of the building in Theodebertstrasse were reflecting the blue lights of the two squad cars that had arrived before them. The street was narrow, so one single car up at the crossing was enough to block access to traffic.

Four male and one female uniformed officers were standing at the front door, talking into walkie-talkies. Seeing Beatrice and Florin arrive, the policewoman came running over to them.

‘We’ve already been in,’ she called breathlessly. ‘It looks pretty bad in there.’

Florin voiced Beatrice’s thoughts before she managed to. ‘Is Sigart dead?’

The policewoman shrugged. ‘Probably. It’s hard to say.’

‘What does that mean?’ The entrance lay in front of them, and even though dusk was already turning to darkness and the street lamps were only giving off sparse light, the dark smears and flecks in the hallway were unmistakable. Bloodstains ran down the stairs, as if something heavy had been dragged along the floor. They led down to the cellar.

‘It certainly seems like whoever did this got a look at the house beforehand and worked out the best escape route,’ explained the policeman holding the walkie-talkie. ‘The cellar leads to a rear exit, and the suspect must have had a car parked there, because the traces of blood stop abruptly.’

‘But what about Sigart?’ asked Beatrice impatiently.

‘We haven’t found him.’

They ran up the stairs, taking care not to disturb the bloodstains. Beatrice noticed a large shoe print in one of the smears and hoped fervently that the Owner had finally made a mistake. The story told by the bloodstains was a clear one. They had come too late.

‘Was there any sign of a break-in?’

‘No.’

Now she saw for herself: the door was open, but undamaged. He must have let the killer in.

The inside of the flat looked like a slaughterhouse. Most of the blood was on the floor, on the wall next to the couch and by the table, which had been knocked over. The bookcase lay diagonally across the room and had buried a folding chair beneath it; the legs jutted out from under the heavy load like those of a squashed insect.

As expected, there was no sign of Sigart, but they still called out for him, checking the bathroom and finding nothing but blood and more blood. The patterns on the wall suggested an intensely spurting wound. Sigart must have been badly injured, unconscious or even dead before the killer dragged him through the building out to his car.

‘He acted pretty damn fast.’ Florin’s gaze had stopped at the pool of blood next to the table. ‘The patrol team said they arrived seven minutes after the emergency call, and both Sigart and the killer were already gone.’

That at least increased the probability that, in his haste, the Owner had made a mistake. The bloody shoe print on the stairs, for example. Tiptoeing cautiously, Beatrice crossed the small living area and glanced into the kitchen. Compared to the rest of the flat, it was quite clean. ‘But we warned him. Why would Sigart just open the door like that?’

‘The Owner isn’t stupid. Maybe he disguised himself as a policeman, a handyman, or a postman. Or maybe…’

Beatrice nodded, fighting against the sense of helpless frustration rising inside her. ‘Or maybe they knew each other.’

It was a mild evening, and most of the neighbours hadn’t been home at the time the crime was committed. While Drasche and Ebner inspected the flat and stairwell, the others tried to find someone who might have seen the Owner.

An old woman living in one of the ground-floor flats reported that she had heard a dull thud: ‘As though someone had dropped something heavy.’

‘That was it? No screams?’ Florin probed.

‘Yes, but I thought they were coming from the TV.’ The neighbours who lived next to Sigart were only arriving home now, and were clearly horrified. By 10 p.m., the residents from the other flat downstairs still hadn’t come back.

‘It must have been very loud. There was a struggle – we heard part of it on the phone,’ Beatrice explained to the tenants in the flat above Sigart. ‘Did you not hear anything?’

The man lowered his gaze. ‘We did. He was screaming and banging against the walls, but, the thing is – that was nothing new. In the last few years I’ve rung his bell again and again whenever he had those… incidents, but he never opened up, and I knew, you see… I mean, the thing with his family.’ He looked back up. ‘I didn’t want to be a nuisance. He always made it clear that he wasn’t interested in any contact or help.’

We were too slow , thought Beatrice, feeling the hate well up inside her, a feeling that had no place in her work. She balled her hands into fists and burrowed her fingernails into her palms; normally that helped.

‘Wenninger? Kaspary?’ Drasche’s muffled voice echoed out of Sigart’s flat. ‘Come here, but be careful!’

When they got there, he was kneeling next to the upturned table and pool of blood. With his gloved hand, he pointed at something light and oblong amidst the red. ‘The killer left us some body parts again.’

‘What is it?’ They leant forwards towards Drasche.

‘Except this time he didn’t package them up for us. Do you see?’ He turned the oblong shapes around carefully.

Fingers. Beatrice went cold as she thought of Sigart’s screams. Stop it , he had yelled, his voice racked with pain and fear.

‘The little finger and ring finger of the left hand,’ Drasche clarified. ‘They must have been cut off at the same time, possibly hacked off, because the wound is sharp and the bone was severed too, I think.’ He put the fingers into one of his evidence bags and held it out towards Beatrice.

She took it, noticing a detail that turned her suspicion into certainty. ‘They’re Sigart’s fingers, for sure.’

Drasche’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. ‘And you know that how?’

‘I recognise the burn scars.’

They closed off the street, called the inhabitants out of the surrounding houses and questioned them about a stranger who had entered building number 33 between eight and half-past that evening. Maybe a little earlier. But no one had seen anything.