Ursula Archer - Five

‘What did you say to her, that night on the phone?’

‘That Herbert Liebscher had told me what had happened on the twelfth of July five years ago. That I knew what role she had played in the whole thing. That I would keep quiet if she gave me ten thousand euros, a very modest sum for being able to keep everything hidden. If not, I said I would have no qualms about sending the evidence to her husband and boss – and to the police too, of course.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She tried to placate me. She said she didn’t have ten thousand euros, that she didn’t believe there was any evidence because she hadn’t done anything. We arranged a place to meet, and she came.’ He shrugged. ‘She was terrified of losing everything she had worked so hard for. I told her I could understand that, and that the loss would be a hundred times worse than she could ever imagine. Once she was unconscious, I took her car and brought her here.’

Just like that. Beatrice inhaled deeply and felt a stabbing pain in the muscles of her right shoulder.

‘Was this a prison for your victims?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, when you were in your flat or with your therapist?’

‘I couldn’t have found a better one. The stone walls swallow up every scream, every cry for help. And even if they didn’t – hardly anyone ever comes out here. There used to be two farms, just a few hundred metres away.’

‘Which also burnt down that night.’ Beatrice remembered having read it in the report. No victims, but immense damage to the properties.

‘Nora,’ she continued. ‘The puzzles we found were written in her handwriting.’

Sigart shrugged. ‘She was an ad woman. I liked the way she phrased things. You could almost feel the mystery behind the words. She also knew the most about the other three – women pay much more attention to these things than men do. For two days, the three of us had an intense brainstorming session. Liebscher wasn’t much use, except as a means of exerting pressure on Nora.’

She swallowed. ‘Is that why you cut his ear off?’

‘It certainly sped things up. After that, she suddenly remembered the birthmark and the Schubert Mass. It turns out people do share the odd detail about their lives when they spend an hour hiking together.’

The birthmark. A piece of recently studied choral music. A casual comment about an unfulfilling job, children’s names. Beatrice went through the letters in her mind, including the one about Sigart. A loser .

‘You made it very easy for us to find you.’

‘Why waste time? I was eager to meet you, Beatrice. And you gave me something even at our first meeting, by asking me if I knew Christoph Beil. I had already followed you when you went to his house to question him. The next morning, I walked up and down his street, waiting for him to come out, and then asked him for directions. But I couldn’t see a birthmark. I was unsure, but then when you mentioned the name I knew you would have checked everything and that he was the one. So that enabled me to identify the third person.’

We did his work for him. Looked for the victims . Although…

‘What about Estermann? We didn’t find him, the clues weren’t specific enough – no, wait. Of course. Beil knew him.’

Sigart’s gaze wandered over to the hook that the noose had been hung on. ‘Christoph Beil filled in most of the blanks that Papenberg and Liebscher left open. He was loosely acquainted with Estermann – they had chatted over a beer at a couple of caching events. They spoke on the phone after you questioned Beil, so to a certain extent Estermann had been warned. But just about the police, not about me.’ Lost in thought, Sigart began to tug at his bandage. ‘At the very end, Beil told me a great deal about everything that happened.’

‘You tried to hang him, didn’t you?’

‘I hauled him up there, but then brought him down again. I was never the sadistic type and it wasn’t enjoyable for me, in case you think that.’

‘Where did the graze wounds on his thighs come from?’

Sigart leant back in his chair. He stroked the barrel of the gun over the scarred flesh on his left forearm. ‘He claimed never to have seen the key. So I introduced them to one another.’ He inserted a strange little pause, as if he was trying to work out whether a laugh would be appropriate at this point. ‘He loved his wife a great deal, did you know that? Loved her and betrayed her, but there’s no need to tell her that.’

She didn’t know what he was getting at. He loved his wife? ‘Is that why you killed him with a stab to the heart? Did you give all your victims a symbolic end like that?’

‘After a fashion.’

All of a sudden, the unwelcome memory of Estermann’s corpse leapt back into her mind, and Beatrice wondered whether he had been sitting in the same chair as her when the acid was trickled into his eye.

‘So why the acid with Estermann?’ she asked softly.

Had Sigart not heard her? He was staring past her, at the floor, his expression numb.

‘Because I wanted him to burn,’ he said eventually. ‘From the inside out. And he did.’

The key figure. ‘Was he the one who locked the cabin?’

Sigart didn’t answer. Judging by the look on his face, Estermann was dying again right now in his mind’s eye.

‘What about Melanie Dalamasso?’ Maybe this name would make him carry on talking. ‘She’s severely ill, and you know that. A torn woman. What would you have done with her – cut her up into pieces?’

Wherever he had been in his thoughts, the last few words brought Sigart back to the present. ‘I’m the only one I tore to pieces.’ He raised his mutilated hand. ‘I wouldn’t have killed Melanie Dalamasso. I wouldn’t have touched even a hair on her head.’

‘Because she had already been punished enough by her illness?’

‘Wrong.’ He sighed. ‘Don’t do that, Beatrice. No half-baked theories. Stay on safe ground.’

Was he losing patience? That would be bad. She needed time; the conversation could be made to last all night if she played it right. Her mind grasped for the first scraps of certainty it could find. ‘Nora Papenberg had traces of Herbert Liebscher’s blood on her person. So you forced her to kill him? And then to…’ Her gaze twitched over to the place where the saws had been just a few days ago.

‘Correct.’ Sigart’s healthy hand played with the gun, turning it round and round on the table, always anticlockwise. ‘Tell me why,’ he demanded.

‘So that we came to the wrong conclusions. It gave you more time.’

‘That was certainly a welcome bonus.’

Beatrice was struggling to drag her gaze away from the gun. The thought that he could wound her or kill her if she gave the wrong answer suddenly didn’t seem so far-fetched any more. It was in his eyes. Vengeance for his family might include killing her, even though she didn’t understand why.

‘It’s all connected to guilt,’ she said carefully. ‘I just don’t know what Nora did to make her so guilty that you would do that to her.’ The tattoos on the soles of the woman’s feet came to her mind, the first coordinates that Sigart had left for them. And on such a sensitive spot; every step must have been incredibly painful.

Every step.

Beatrice looked up. No half-baked guesses, Sigart had said. But she risked it.

‘Nora ran away, that day. She could have fetched help or taken the key and opened the cabin, but she ran off.’

A muscle twitched in Sigart’s face. ‘Not bad. And why did I leave Liebscher to her?’

She tried to think, but none of her ideas seemed even the slightest bit logical. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

Sigart leant over the table, gripping the gun tightly in his right hand. ‘She wasn’t very decisive. She wasn’t the kind of person who acts when it’s necessary. So I gave her something to do and left the decision to her. No, two decisions – gun or knife. Him or her.’ He leant back again. ‘In the end she chose him and gun . Nora Papenberg’s personal choice.’