Five (10 page)

Beatrice looked up. ‘Do you mind me asking why you took so many pictures? You must have hardly had time to eat.’

A shy smile. ‘It’s a new camera. I wanted to see what it can do. I really love photography, you know.’

Finally, some pictures of people. A young woman with an updo, wearing a short electric blue dress. A man with glasses and an expensive-looking suit – if Beatrice’s memory served her correctly, he was sitting outside right now, waiting to be questioned.

Then, right at the end, Nora Papenberg. The clothes she was wearing in the picture were without a doubt the same as those she had been found in. The jeans, the red silk jacket, the blouse with the delicate flower pattern. High-heeled red shoes which matched the jacket. The shoes that hadn’t yet turned up.

Nora was beaming into the camera, making a victory sign with the fingers on her right hand.

The next picture. Nora sitting next to the woman in the blue dress. ‘Is that Irene …?’

‘Irene Grabner,’ Drabcek eagerly completed her sentence. ‘Yes. She always dolls herself up like that.’

It suited her though, Beatrice reflected. She clicked further forwards. Nora and Irene with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling. Then a picture of the young man in a suit, one of Winstatt and another woman, and numerous shots of the whole table; the group now seemed to be complete. Drabcek was taking the photographs, of course, although she was in a few of the last ones herself. ‘Nora took those,’ she said softly.

Nora. Beaming happily in every shot. Beatrice continued to scroll through the images. Aperitifs, the group clinking glasses. The meal being served. A few close-ups of sumptuously presented plates. The colleagues, eating. Conversations.

Then, suddenly, Nora’s seat was empty. Beatrice squinted. Was she visible in the background at all? No, not in this photo. The next one had been taken from a wider angle, but the background was blurred. Another picture, a red splodge which looked like the colour of Nora’s jacket.

Five photos later, she was back at her seat. Even on the small display, Beatrice could see that something must have happened, as Nora was no longer smiling. Her eyes were gazing past the lens. Into nothing. Or into herself. In one of the subsequent shots, she had pulled the candle across the table towards her and was staring into the little flame.

Then came a series of photos in which Nora was nowhere to be seen. They were all of her colleagues, laughing, toasting, gesticulating. A half-full and an empty bottle of wine stood on the table.

I can’t let myself think too single-mindedly
, Beatrice reminded herself. The call wasn’t necessarily the catalyst. It’s entirely possible that she really had just drunk too much alcohol and given herself a headache.

In the next photo, she was sitting there, both elbows propped on the table in front of her, holding her head. Then there were several of the desserts, followed by a group picture in which Nora’s chair was empty again.

Nora didn’t appear in any of the final photos. Beatrice passed the camera to Stefan. ‘We’ll copy the pictures to a memory stick and take them with us. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Sure, no problem.’

While Stefan pulled a laptop and USB cable from his bag, Beatrice leant over the desk and looked at Rosa Drabcek silently for a few moments. Usually this made people begin to talk hurriedly, blurting out things that they might not otherwise say, but Drabcek clearly wasn’t one of those people. She remained silent.

‘Was there anything about Nora Papenberg’s behaviour that stood out that evening? Even something seemingly minor?’

She shook her head. ‘No. She was just her usual self – until the headache started, anyway, but even that wasn’t out of the ordinary for her. She used to get migraines from time to time. She always had a packet of tablets on her desk.’

‘Did Nora mention who she was speaking to on the phone?’

‘No. But then I didn’t ask.’

‘Okay. I’d like you to tell me about the evening from your perspective.’

Her narrative differed only marginally from what Winstatt had told them. Once they had finished, Beatrice saw Rosa Drabcek to the door of the office and asked her to send Irene Grabner in.

Even without the electric blue dress, Grabner looked – how had Rosa put it? – dolled up, that was it. But she was clearly one of those women who could wrap themselves in a tablecloth and still look fantastic. Stefan was beaming at her, transfixed. Beatrice shot him a quick, chiding glance, upon which he toned down his smile to a more professionally acceptable level.

‘You were sitting next to Nora Papenberg at the work dinner. Please tell me everything you can remember from the moment after Nora’s phone rang.’

Grabner lowered her head and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with her perfectly manicured hand. ‘We were having so much fun at first,’ she said. ‘Nora was in a really good mood. I mean, it was mostly down to her that we had managed to secure the budget. It was really
her
evening. When her phone rang, she giggled, saying it was sure to be Konrad asking her to smuggle some of the dessert out in her handbag.’ Irene Grabner broke off, looked away. ‘We were really good friends, you know? I’m … I don’t understand … how …’

Stefan nodded. ‘Take your time.’ Noticing that he had lowered his voice by an octave, Beatrice couldn’t help but smile.

‘So, her mobile rang, and Nora looked at the number on the display. “That’s not Konrad,” I remember her saying, but she answered it anyway, saying something a little cheeky like, “Anyone who’s calling me in the middle of a party had better be male, young and gorgeous.”’ Grabner took a deep breath. ‘Then she stopped smiling, stood up and went into a faraway corner of the restaurant. I didn’t hear anything of the conversation – all I could see was her back.’

‘Were there any other people over where she was talking?’ Beatrice interjected. ‘Who might have heard something?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I think she intentionally sought out a quiet spot, so she wouldn’t be disturbed.’

‘And then what?’

‘I asked her who it was, and she just said, ‘Oh, no one you know.’ And that it was nothing important. But from then on, her good mood had vanished. She left soon after, and I wish I’d gone with her. But I didn’t know …’

Grabner’s voice failed her. Beatrice felt the urge to give her a hug, to tell her how well she understood what she was going through. She wanted to tell her to exorcise the word ‘if’ from her mind.

If I had gone with her
.

If I had taken her home
.

If …

Beatrice dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Her own problems had nothing to do with this case. She smiled at the woman, giving her a moment to calm herself down.

‘When Nora left,’ she probed further, ‘did she say she was going to drive home? Or was she going somewhere else?’

‘Home. I’m sure of it. She had one of her headaches, and wanted to go to bed. I remember Herr Winstatt offering to get her a taxi – the company would have paid for it of course – but she said she was fine. The migraine hadn’t kicked in fully, and she didn’t want to leave her car there overnight. That was typical of her, and it would have been pointless trying to convince her otherwise.’

‘Do you have any idea of how much Nora drank?’

Irene Grabner looked at her hands, which were clasped on the table in front of her. ‘Not exactly. But she wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. She knew she would be driving, after all, so she didn’t overdo it.’

No new information arose in their conversations with the rest of the agency colleagues. At the time, none of them had placed any great significance on Nora’s early departure. They were shocked by her death, as could be expected, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in their testimonies. The photos which Erich, the account manager, had taken on his mobile didn’t show anything that Rosa Drabcek’s pictures hadn’t already captured, but Stefan transferred them to his laptop nonetheless.

Before heading off, they had a look at Nora’s desk.

Organised chaos. It was very similar to how Beatrice’s desk looked when she was immersed in a case: the seemingly random distribution of documents on the desk forming an associative network that stretched out before her, all the component parts communicating, forming links, reaching their invisible tentacles out towards one another.

Maybe that’s how Nora had worked, too, when she was dreaming up an advertising campaign. Another parallel jumped out at Beatrice: the yellow Post-its on the computer screen, except here they weren’t from the boss but from Nora herself. That same handwriting again, now so familiar.

Pick up jacket from drycleaners
, said one of the notes. The other two revealed telephone numbers, scribbled alongside the names they belonged to.

‘Do you know who these people are?’ Beatrice asked Max Winstatt, who was waiting behind her.

‘Business contacts. A graphic designer and a client we’re hoping to get a follow-up commission from.’

The desk drawers were much neater than the surface of the desk itself, containing stacks of writing paper, headache tablets, cough sweets and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, 70 per cent cocoa. Seeing it suddenly made Beatrice feel much sadder than any other detail of the case had. It would never have occurred to Nora Papenberg that she wouldn’t be around to finish it.

She turned away hastily. ‘That’s all for today. Thank you for your help.’

Winstatt accompanied her and Stefan to the door. ‘If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me.’

‘Of course.’

The car was parked in the next street. Stefan laid the laptop gently on the back seat before getting behind the steering wheel. ‘Oh, shit. This wasn’t a short-stay parking zone, was it?’

Beatrice, who had only just opened the passenger door, leant over and reached for the piece of paper that was tucked under the windscreen wiper. ‘No, it’s just some advertisement, there’s no—’ She had been about to say, ‘plastic sleeve around it’, but the words stuck in her throat. She stared at the unfolded piece of paper shaking in her hand.

TFTH
.

The Owner had sent them another message.

Drasche sniffed disdainfully as he took the little plastic bag Beatrice had put the message into. ‘And I’m assuming you touched it without gloves, right?’

‘Of course. I thought it was just a flyer.’

A grim nod. ‘So you said.’

‘If you had your way,’ said Beatrice, ‘we’d never be allowed to take our gloves off, because the whole world is made up of potential evidence, right?’

A trace of a smile crept across Drasche’s face. ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it.’

Back in her office, Beatrice called the mobile provider to chase up the research on the text message. To her surprise, they were ready with the results.

‘We were just about to call you,’ said the young man at the other end of the phone. She heard him shuffle through his paperwork. ‘The mobile the card is being used with isn’t connected to a network cell right now. It was last connected when the text message was sent, the one you received. At 13.16 at a UMTS cell in Hallein.’

‘What can you tell me about the phone’s owner?’

The
owner
. She tried to rein herself in.
Don’t jump to conclusions
.

‘I can give you the IMEI and the IMSI; in other words, the mobile’s device number and user identification. That’s all, I’m afraid. I can also block the number for you if you like.’

‘No, certainly not!’ The words tumbled out. Every sign of life from the Owner – if it was him who had sent the message – was another chance that he might let his guard down.

Each of the two numbers was fifteen digits long. Beatrice got him to read them out twice to eliminate any possibility of making a mistake. ‘Thank you. I just have one more request – I need a complete list of the connections that were made by this mobile, if you could get that ready for me.’ She gave the man her email address, thanked him again, hung up and leant back in her chair. With any luck, she would have a name soon. If the mobile hadn’t made its way to its owner illegally, then he had blown his cover with that text message. But only if he was that stupid. She pushed the thought away and concentrated on the IMEI she had noted down. She remembered something Florin had told her a few weeks ago when he had turned up in the office with a new phone. Just to be sure, she checked the information online too.

The first eight digits of the IMEI formed the TAC, the Type Approval Code, in which the third to eighth numbers were the decisive ones – denoting device brands and types. If you knew how to read them, that was. Which she definitely didn’t; she would need to consult an expert, or at least Stefan …

Following a flash of inspiration, she typed
TAC end device analysis
into Google and found a link promising to reveal the corresponding mobile model upon the code being entered. Beatrice typed in the first eight digits.

Bingo.

Manufacturer: Nokia Mobile Phones

Model: Nokia N8-00

TAC: 35698804

She felt her pulse start to race, but wasn’t yet sure why. The phone was a Nokia, which wasn’t uncommon by any stretch of the imagination. But in this context …

Rummaging through her papers, she found the notes from her first conversation with Konrad Papenberg, the day they had informed him about his wife’s murder.

There it was. Nokia N8.

I gave it to her for her birthday
.

She stood up and turned the espresso machine on. But on remembering how much coffee she had drunk at the agency and how disgruntled her stomach had been, she turned it off again.

It could be a coincidence, but she doubted it. Gathering up her notes from the conversation with the provider, along with a printout of the online analysis page, she went off to Stefan’s office. ‘Could you find out who this mobile is registered to?’

He glanced at the papers, his finger wandering to the neatly circled IMSI code. ‘Sure, no problem.’