Five

by Ursula P Archer

  She thought. Struggled to swallow. ‘And … there was a key in the cache. It was … the key to the cabin?’

  ‘Yes. Which had been used to lock it. From the outside, as I now know.’

  Against her better judgement, Beatrice struggled to accept the conclusion that logically followed. ‘But they were just geocaching! Didn’t you read the entry? What makes you think it was those five who locked the cabin? What would they have gained from doing that?’

  ‘We’ll get to that in a moment. But for now let’s just leave it as this – it was them.’ He took a breath, short and sharp. He tentatively touched his bandages, checking the amputation wounds. ‘I asked myself the same thing at first, of course I did. Was it just a coincidence? Was there really a connection? After all, I didn’t want to make any mistakes. So I looked at the accounts on Geocaching.com, one nickname after the other. Once you’re registered on there, you can’t delete the account, did you know that?’

  ‘So did one of them log the discovery of the tin and write something incriminating?’

  Sigart shook his head. ‘No. But they all deleted the information from their profiles. Only DescartesHL remained active. From the remaining four, there wasn’t a single entry after that day in July. So I knew they had to have had something to do with the fire. And when I spoke to them they all confirmed it, here at this very table.’ Sigart suddenly closed his eyes, as if he was in pain. ‘Please excuse me for a moment.’ He took a small bottle of serum from his medical bag, drew some up into a syringe and injected it into his left arm. ‘The last few days have been rather painful, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

  She watched him, every one of his practised movements. Her mouth was bone dry, and she wanted to ask him for something to drink, but she knew he wouldn’t take too kindly to his carefully staged finale being interrupted to fetch water from the well. And there didn’t seem to be any down here in the cellar.

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked quietly, once he had put his utensils back in the bag. ‘Are you planning to kill me too?’

  He didn’t say no, but instead tilted his head thoughtfully. Regretfully, almost. Beatrice’s blood ran cold. ‘You’re going to kill me?’

  ‘Calm down. You have a chance of getting away alive. Not a particularly big one, admittedly, but it exists. Are your colleagues on the ball? Are they bright? Then you don’t need to worry.’ He smiled. ‘First and foremost, you’re here so I can thank you. Thanks for the hunt, Beatrice. Thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘You’re the first person to ever thank us for hunting them.’

  That seemed to amuse Sigart. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ He leant over, as if he wanted to confide something in her that no one else was supposed to hear. ‘You didn’t hunt me.’ He looked at her, his gaze full of expectation.

  Was this a new game? ‘We were hunting the man who killed Nora Papenberg, Herbert Liebscher, Christoph Beil and Rudolf Estermann,’ she said. ‘Presumably, Melanie Dalamasso was supposed to be his last victim. And it certainly seems like you are this man. The Owner.’

  ‘That’s what you call me? How sweet. And yet so ironic, for I own hardly anything now.’ He propped his elbows on the table, about to put his fingertips together into a steeple when he suddenly seemed to realise it was no longer possible. ‘I thought you would call me Shinigami. I was very particular about my selection of nickname, but then you can’t control everything.’ He sighed, yet this time it had a contented tone to it. ‘You weren’t hunting me. Think about it, Beatrice – you know everything you need to figure it out. So, I found the cache and was on the brink of finding out who was guilty for the death of my children, right? I found out the most important details.’

  ‘Yes. The names.’

  ‘Correct.’ He smiled at her, like a teacher who knew his best pupil could do better. He was eagerly awaiting what she was about to say.

  And all of a sudden, Beatrice realised what had happened, what Sigart had been thanking them for all this time. The realisation lay in front of her like a steep precipice she was slipping helplessly towards.

  The cable tie cut deeply into the skin of her wrists, but she still wrenched against it. It refused to give by even a millimetre.

  ‘Please don’t.’ Sigart lifted his claw-like left hand. It was probably intended to be a calming gesture. But only when the pain became really bad, the unrelenting material chafing away at her skin, only then did Beatrice give up her futile attempt at freeing herself.

  Sigart responded with a contented nod. ‘I knew you wouldn’t take it very well.’

  ‘We played right into your hands,’ whispered Beatrice. ‘You had the names, but not the real ones. Only pseudonyms, and you couldn’t do anything with those.’

  He didn’t say a word, but his eyes demanded that she keep talking.

  ‘We solved the puzzles for you, from the few little details you knew about the five. We found out their true identities so you could kill them. You … you used the results of our investigations for your own revenge. You followed us, didn’t you? And that’s how you knew who we were questioning.’

  His face spoke volumes. She had hit the bull’s eye. But what else could we have done? Not work on the case? Not look for the people in the puzzles?

  She thought for a moment, her mind still foggy, then remembered her previous discovery. ‘But you found one of the cachers without any help – Herbert Liebscher. He was stupid enough not to leave the caching scene and you contacted him.’

  ‘Yes, by email, via his geocaching account. Descartes, what a joke. I told him I was a new member and that I wanted to do my first outing with an old hand. I said we were both from Salzburg and that his nickname suggested he was an intelligent guy. He took the bait right away.’

  And you took your time, lulled him into a false sense of security … for the duration of seven whole caches.

  ‘Did you knock him out to bring him here? Or drug him with something?’

  ‘The latter, like I did with you. I wanted his head to be unharmed, I wanted all of his memories from the twelfth of July, all the names.’

  The kaleidoscope had come to a halt; the picture was now clear. ‘But there was a problem with that. He didn’t know the others.’ Beatrice groped around for ideas. ‘He only knew – Nora Papenberg.’

  Sigart’s eyes reflected genuine admiration. ‘Bravo. That’s exactly how it was. The two of them had arranged at some caching meet-up to go on this trip together. It was quite a trek, and they didn’t even find the cache. They were already halfway back when the other three turned up, GPS device in hand. So they all returned together. There wasn’t much time to chat, and people hardly ever remember names the first time they hear them.’

  But Liebscher had known Papenberg, at least by her maiden name, and maybe he also knew the name of the ad agency where she worked. He had told Sigart, filled with fear, probably screaming in pain … and then Sigart had gone to fetch Nora. Used some ruse to call the agency, find out her current surname and maybe even her mobile number. None of that was too difficult; if he had trodden carefully it would probably have taken just twenty minutes.

  The photos from the agency meal were still clear in her memory. Nora’s shocked face as the past came back to haunt her.

  ‘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.’

  He stretched, a little awkwardly, as if he had cramp. ‘It’s time for us to go up now.’

  That was a surprise. And an unexpected opportunity – he would have to untie her hands for that. As soon as her circulation was flowing again, she would have an advantage over him, at least enough for her to flee.

  ‘Please don’t get your hopes up.’ The mouth of the gun wandered to the right again, until it was pointing at Beatrice’s chest. ‘I have a very precise plan for how this will play out. If you try to deprive me of it by running away or putting up a fight, I’ll shoot you on the spot. Reluctantly, but I’ll do it.’ He pushed back his chair and stood up. He looked taller than ever. ‘If you do force me to do so, you won’t be the only one to die. I went back to Mooserhof recently, and Mina brought my coffee. She’s a
pretty little girl. And she’s already starting to know it. From all the toys I brought with me, the only thing she wanted was Hanna’s mirror.’

  Beatrice gasped for air. The memory rushed back. Mina got a really pretty mirror with sparkly flowers around the edge.

  ‘And you gave Jakob a little globe.’ Was that her voice, that hoarse rasp coming from deep inside her throat? Beatrice struggled against the sensation of falling into an abyss, saw Mina and Jakob in front of her, sleeping in the loft, the loft which was entirely made of wood …

  ‘I thought that since your children and mine might have to share the same fate, then they might as well share a few toys too.’ Sigart looked at her searchingly. Was he waiting for a reaction? If her hands had been free, she would have attacked him right there on the spot.

  ‘That’s not what I want, of course,’ he continued in a friendly tone. ‘I just want to make sure you cooperate. If you do, then nothing will happen to your children, I promise. If not, everything is already prepared for my Plan B. I think it’s only fair that you know that.’

  It took some time before the black flood of panic in Beatrice’s mind began to ebb away, leaving her able to think clearly again. She would have to wait until there was a fail-proof chance of overpowering him. ‘Okay. I’ll do what you ask.’

  ‘Until the end?’

  What end? she wanted to ask. Mine? Yours?

  But she swallowed all her questions and took a deep breath. So deep it was as if she was scared it might be her last. ‘Yes. Until the end.’

  He cut through the cable tie with the help of a Stanley knife, a task which took some time as he only had the two remaining digits on his left hand to work with. In his right hand, he was holding the gun against her head. Beatrice felt the steel pressing against a spot behind her ear. She didn’t move, taking shallow breaths and fully expecting the knife to slip and plunge into her palm, but he worked slowly and carefully until her hands were freed. The cable tie clung to the wounds on her right wrist. Beatrice pulled it off carefully, having to make several attempts as her fingers were completely numb.