Ursula Archer - Five

The minutes seemed to pass at a painfully slow pace. Everything within Beatrice wanted to creep towards the crack, open it wide and climb down. If it is the Owner’s hiding place, then we’ll probably find Sigart there too .

The thought intensified her impatience. Florin’s hand grabbed her wrist, and she realised she had already started to crawl out of the thicket. He pulled her back and laid an arm around her shoulder. ‘No going it alone this time.’

‘But what if Sigart’s down there?’

‘Then he’ll have to hold on for another five minutes.’

Beatrice fingered the round metal cache tin through her jacket pocket. Its contents shed new light on the events, although she couldn’t yet figure out how, not conclusively at any rate. She closed her eyes and counted the minutes. Was that the sound of someone whimpering? The wind carried a quiet, feeble noise towards her – but maybe it was just the sound of the wind itself, a plaintive, restless whisper.

By the time the three police cars were parked on the path, Beatrice was already kneeling down by the cellar opening. She had heard the approaching engine sounds, and from then on had been deaf to Florin’s warnings.

Could she hear anything? A voice, breathing?

She laid her ear against the crack, recoiling involuntarily as a puff of air wafted out of the cellar towards her.

All of a sudden, she was back in Evelyn’s bedroom with the smell of blood – but here it was mixed with the stench of putrid flesh. Beatrice sat down, took a deep breath and tried to banish the unwelcome images. Images of red.

Shadowy figures armed with lights climbed down the slope. Whispered instructions, hushed voices.

Then Florin was standing next to her. ‘Let’s go in.’

They were only halfway down the steps before Beatrice cursed herself for having waited so long.

Sigart was lying on the floor, shaking. He was pressing his maimed left hand to his chest, his mouth moving silently.

‘Call an ambulance!’ Florin shouted to one of their colleagues.

Beatrice knelt down next to Sigart. There was a cut on the side of his neck, but they didn’t need to worry too much about that as it seemed to be healing well. She ignored the stench coming from his hunched-up form. And she only half took in the surroundings: the noose hanging from the ceiling, the wooden table she recognised from the Owner’s photos, the saws on the wall. She concentrated all her attention on Sigart, touching his forehead gently. He flinched away from her as though she had electrocuted him. Then he lay there, motionless, wheezing and trying to say something.

I have to calm him down. Explain that we’ll talk later . But her curiosity was stronger. She leant over to him, tried to breathe evenly and put her ear next to his mouth.

‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘Not… another… one. Please don’t…’

Ashamed, Beatrice sat back up. Florin had come over to her side. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘Nothing that can help us. He’s pleading with us not to cut another of his fingers off.’

When the ambulance arrived, the emergency doctor diagnosed wound inflammation and severe dehydration. ‘He probably hasn’t had anything to drink for two days now. But if he doesn’t get sepsis then he has a good chance of surviving.’

Only once Sigart had been taken away did they pay more attention to the cellar. It was roughly twenty square metres. Around the wooden table were three chairs, and towards the back of the room Beatrice discovered a device which was roughly the size of a laser printer. She only realised its purpose – the wrapping of food products – when she saw the vacuum bags lying next to it. In a corner, half covered by bloody muslin bandages, was a pair of red women’s shoes.

Drasche arrived as dawn was breaking. He worked silently, and they left him in peace. He did the same, knowing that they had to get an impression of the place where Liebscher, Beil and Estermann had been killed. On a small stainless-steel bottle which Drasche was in the process of sealing away in his evidence bag, there was a sticker with the letters HF . Hydrofluoric acid.

The table’s surface was ploughed with notches and covered with red and brown flecks. If Beatrice stood in front of it, a little to the side, the perspective was exactly the one she knew from the picture messages, only without the hand and severed fingers.

The noose on the ceiling brought to mind the strangulation marks on Christoph Beil’s neck.

So this was where it had all happened.

Drasche had taken the tobacco tin cache, but the signatures in the logbook were firmly etched in Beatrice’s memory: Wishfulthinker28, AlphaMale, GarfieldsLasagne. DescartesHL, ChoristInTheForest.

Five.

The feeling of having stumbled upon a critical gap in her line of thought, the feeling which had crept chillingly up her spine the first time she read the entry, was no longer as intense as it had been initially, but it was still there. It lurked, ready to be summoned, in the recesses of her mind.

At the hospital, they were optimistic. They had treated Sigart’s wounds and he was responding well to the antibiotics they had given him. His psychological condition, however, was described as critical, veering from distracted and depressed to completely apathetic. ‘You’ll have to wait a little longer to speak to him,’ explained the doctor.

So Beatrice immersed herself yet again in online research. Stefan had already explained a while back that profiles set up on Geocaching.com couldn’t be erased: once you were registered, that was it. And true to his word, the pseudonyms from the cache log were all still there. AlphaMale – such a humble codename could only belong to Estermann. His quota was indeed over 2,000 caches. 2,144, to be precise – not a single unconquered find. In comparison, Christoph Beil’s 423 finds seemed downright modest. GarfieldsLasagne – had Dalamasso been witty enough to name herself after a plump cartoon cat and his favourite meal? Her profile showed only twenty-four caches; according to the log entries she had found them all with ChoristInTheForest.

They were a couple, thought Beatrice. Christoph and Melanie; they must have met at the Mozarteum, after a choir rehearsal perhaps.

A man old enough to be her father, as Carolin Dalamasso had put it. And married, so no wonder Melanie hadn’t wanted – or been able – to introduce him to her parents.

She was the last one, the one who had remained unharmed. It was hard to imagine the Owner would give up now, but so far no one had tried to get close to her. Her watchers hadn’t reported any unusual events.

‘Blood traces from Liebscher, Beil, Sigart and Estermann. And small amounts from Papenberg too. The saws were used to cut up Liebscher’s body, and Nora Papenberg’s fingerprints were found on the handle. A vacuum-packing machine has been taken off for investigation. The bags match those we found in the caches.’ Drasche stood in the conference room, leaning against the back of his chair as if he couldn’t carry the weight of his body without help. ‘So it’s as good as proven that the cellar was the scene of the crimes. You’ll have to work the rest out yourselves – all the evidence is there.’

‘And you say the Owner imprisoned Sigart in the building his family burnt to death in?’ Hoffmann’s question was directed at Florin.

‘In the cellar of the building. Yes, it looks that way.’

‘A particularly perfidious form of sadism?’ That, in turn, was addressed to Kossar.

‘I’d interpret it like that, yes.’ Beatrice noticed, not without a degree of satisfaction, that he had become more cautious since his ‘random victim’ theory had been proven so grossly inaccurate.