Ursula Archer - Five

Sleep tight. Florin x.

She stared at the three words for a long time. Then she laid the book aside, gazed up at the ceiling and listened to the nocturnal sounds of the hospital.

After a long while, she turned out the light.

Most geocachers are nice people. I know, because I’m one of them. They love nature, treat it with the utmost respect, and even tend to clear away other people’s rubbish if they stumble across it. I just wanted to say that.

If you happen to own a GPS device, find yourself near the coordinates in the book, and feel the urge to seek out the places depicted in it, then I hope you have a great time – you’ll get to see some of Salzburg’s idyllic spots. I admit I had to tweak reality here and there for the sake of the story – like moving the odd rock face by a few hundred metres, for example. But in general you’ll find the places look pretty much the same as they did to Beatrice and Florin, apart from the caches and their gruesome contents, that is. A word of warning: if you get to the final coordinates, watch out for the stinging nettles.

You’ll find a wooden shed there too, by the way, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what’s inside it (it’s not my shed, after all); here, too, I adapted the facts to fit the story. While I’m on the topic, I’d like to apologise to the owners for what I did to their property in my imagination.

A thank you to:

Ruth Löbner, for driving the indecisiveness out of Beatrice and cracking a few really hard nuts with her. I initially used a good few superlatives here when writing about Ruth, before deleting them because she would probably be embarrassed. But that doesn’t make them any less true;

Lieutenant Colonel Andreas Huber, who offered me important and fascinating insights into the work of the Salzburg criminal investigation department, an indispensable help during the writing process. But the ‘poetic licence’ which I employed for the novel and any possible mistakes that slipped past me are solely on my head;

My editor Katharina Naumann, who I overburdened not only with my Austrianisms, but also with number puzzles – the former are probably here to stay, but the latter won’t be. That’s a promise;

My agency, AVA International, who took my announcement at our first meeting (‘I’d like to live from writing, and I’d like to start doing so quickly’) more than literally;

Leon and Michael, who roamed all over Salzburg with me searching for good hiding places for body parts.

Ursula P. Archer was born in 1968, and worked as an editor at a publishing house. After the success of her first young adult novel, she now dedicates much of her time to writing fiction. She lives with her family in Vienna. Five is her first thriller for adults.

Jamie Lee Searle’s recent and forthcoming translations include Andreas Maier’s Das Zimmer and co-translations, with Shaun Whiteside, of Frank Schätzing’s Limit and Floridh Ilies’ 1913 , which was Radio 4 Book of the week. She co-founded the Emerging Translators Network in late 2010, and has been a member of the UK Translators Association Committee since late 2013.

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Published by Vintage 2014

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Copyright © Ursula P. Archer 2012

English translation copyright © Jamie Lee Searle 2014

Ursula P. Archer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published with the title Fünf in 2012 by Wunderlich, Rowolt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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ISBN 9780099583868