Ursula Archer - Five

So the man must have had enemies, and had maybe even been involved in criminal activity of some kind. Even though Beatrice was sure to find the information in his file, she asked all the same. ‘Could you tell me where your husband was born?’

If the question had taken Graciella by surprise, then she didn’t let on. ‘In Schaffhausen. His father was Swiss.’

Back in the office, it was time to decipher the coordinates for Stage Four. The ‘S’ had a value of nineteen, the ‘C’ three, and the ‘H’ eight. With an endearing eagerness, Stefan turned his attention to the task. He was perfectly capable of doing it alone. Beatrice tried not to disturb him, speaking quietly into the phone.

‘I think the Owner’s trying to get close to us. He sent me a message today, and his phone was connected to the network directly in this area. Why is he doing that? Does he want to look up at my window while he types?’

‘It’s very possible,’ replied Kossar after thinking for a moment. ‘On the one hand he feels safe enough to risk it, but on the other he enjoys the thrill that it might go wrong. He’s the stranger who lays his hand on your shoulder in the darkness, then disappears again without being caught.’

An icy shiver passed over Beatrice’s arms and back. ‘That doesn’t sound good to me.’

‘No. The Owner picked you as his contact, Beatrice. I think that before his game comes to an end, he’ll seek out a personal encounter with you.’

‘But why?’ She instinctively turned to look out of the window. Everything looked just as it always did. Nothing stood out or caught her attention. Stefan hadn’t noticed anything on his circuit around the building either.

But the Owner wants to show us that we’re slow , thought Beatrice, he wants to send his FTF victory messages and then thank us for our efforts, full of sarcasm. TFTH .

‘Maybe he’s not turning to me as an individual, but as a representative of a group. The police.’

‘We shouldn’t rule that out. Nor should we discount the idea that he finds you attractive, and perhaps that’s the reason why he wants to play his game with you rather than with Florin or even Hoffmann.’ Kossar cleared his throat. ‘If that’s the case, you need to be careful, Beatrice. I know I told you to lure him in with personal information, but that may not have been one of my best ideas.’

Was Kossar admitting to having made a mistake?

‘Don’t worry, I only gave him a date. Even if he understood what I meant, it won’t enable him to get any closer to me.’

‘Good.’ He seemed genuinely relieved. ‘Let’s leave it at that, okay? Don’t give him anything of a private nature.’

As if that would make any difference. As if he didn’t already know much more than I want him to .

Florin returned from the autopsy looking pale and grim-faced. The same hard look from the night before was in his eyes again, but this time there were no calming cigarettes within reach.

‘Estermann’s gullet was black inside. The tissue was completely dead, the stomach perforated. Vogt thinks he died from sepsis, so it would have taken two to three days of unbelievable pain. The whole of the chest area was inflamed and the gullet had developed festering sores.’

‘And the eye?’

‘Corroded away with forty per cent hydrofluoric acid. The substance Estermann drank was the same kind of solution, just less concentrated. Otherwise the Owner wouldn’t have been able to have his fun with him for as long.’ Florin laid both his hands on the table, spreading out his fingers, and stared at them as he spoke. ‘Hydrofluoric acid was a really good choice. In high concentrations, it can dissolve glass. But even strongly diluted it can eat through everything – skin and flesh. It even corrodes bone. Not very quickly, mind, but over time. Day after day, it eats away at the whole body.’ Taking a deep breath, he balled his hands into fists. ‘Do we have any new information?’

The change of subject made Beatrice lose her train of thought for a moment, but then she recovered herself. ‘The coordinates. Stefan did the research. This is Stage Five.’ She passed a printout of the Google Maps page across the desk to him.

‘Am Wallersee.’

‘Yes. A no-through road by a small wood, surrounded by fields. The nearest house is half a kilometre away.’

They set off forty minutes later. The way Florin was driving began to worry Beatrice just a few blocks down the road. He was driving much too quickly. Much too angrily.

‘Shall I take over?’ she asked, trying to sound casual as her hand gripped the armrest on the passenger door.

‘No.’ He beeped at a taxi driver who had swerved out of the bus lane.

When Florin was in this mood, it was futile trying to reason with him. Beatrice turned around to Stefan, who was slouched back in the rear seat, his arms behind his head and eyes closed. If he managed to get a few minutes’ sleep, even like this, it would do him good.

‘It’s really starting to get to me, Bea.’ She could only just make out what Florin was saying; his voice was almost entirely swallowed up by the cacophony of traffic. ‘When was the last time it took us this long to at least find a suspect?’ He was driving at a normal speed again now, only accelerating once they reached the autobahn.

‘You can’t compare this to other cases. Until now we’ve never had to deal with killers that act anything like this one.’ Even if she couldn’t manage to reassure him with her words, then at least she could reassure herself. ‘The Owner is organised and extremely well prepared. He’s… like a director, staging his own play.’

Florin didn’t respond. She looked across at him, his profile, the furrowed brow, mouth slightly open. Suddenly she felt the intense urge to stroke the hair off his forehead. She pulled herself together.

Wonderful timing, Bea, incomparable. So typical of you .

‘If we decided not to play by his rules, and not to follow his clues,’ she said, persevering, ‘then we would just be standing around empty-handed. Say if you think I’m wrong.’

A dark look was Florin’s only answer.

‘He’s not making any major mistakes. The only one I can think of so far is the bloody footprint in Sigart’s building. And even that hasn’t been of any use so far.’ She was silenced as Florin made a foolhardy attempt to overtake, cutting up a Jeep Cherokee with a Viennese number plate.

‘Are the victims just collateral? What do you think, Bea? Is he like the Washington sniper in 2002?’

A singer. A loser. A key figure.

‘No, he’s not. He…’ She tried to make sense of her thoughts. ‘He sees a link between his victims. Perhaps it’s a link that only he sees, and maybe it’s completely crazy, but for him, it exists. I’d bet anything on it.’

And he sees a link with me , she thought, even if it is one of a different kind . Kossar was right. Sooner or later, the Owner would make himself known to her.

N47º 54.067 E013º 09.205

A light wind swayed the grass in the field where the police team had gathered. Drasche, who had installed navigation software on his mobile especially for this case, was engaged in a heated discussion with Stefan, whose Garmin GPS was showing a location that was around fifteen metres away from Drasche’s results for the exact same coordinates.

So far, neither of them had found anything, and the search dogs weren’t due to arrive for another half-hour.

Bushes, trees, a lake. There were no rocky crags or hollows that offered themselves up as hiding places. If the Owner had sunk the container in the water, then the coordinates they had worked out were useless anyway, regardless of whether they went by Stefan’s or Drasche’s results.