Unless Raul Fuentes was clairvoyant, Ben couldn’t see any other explanation either. In the blink of an eye, the situation had totally reversed.
Two men from nearby tables had eased from their seats and were slowly advancing. Ben gave them another warning stare and said in German, ‘Easy. Nobody’s getting hurt here.’
Raul was still questioning the woman. Now that she realised she wasn’t about to be murdered, she was coming out more freely with answers.
‘Ich habe es mir gerade gekauft … I – I buy it!’
‘When?’ Raul demanded.
‘She says recently,’ Ben said. She looked too frightened to be lying. In a gentler tone than Raul’s, he asked her in German to tell him exactly when and where she had purchased the piece of jewellery.
‘Not long ago … I think three weeks. I saw it in a window for sale … A pawnshop. I wouldn’t normally go into those places but it was so beautiful I—’
Ben said to Raul, ‘She says she bought it from a pawnshop three weeks ago.’
‘Bullshit!’ Raul spat, enraged. ‘Now, listen, you—’
‘Cool it, Raul.’ Ben was still holding up a hand to warn away the heroes from the nearby tables. It wasn’t easy to smile reassuringly in that position, but he needed to put the woman at her ease. ‘Please, Fräulein, tell me the name of the shop where you found it.’
The woman gave an address, and Ben repeated it back to her twice. She was crying, partly from shock and fear, and probably also partly because she thought she’d lost her precious pendant.
‘Let her have it,’ Ben said.
‘No way she’s getting it back. It’s Catalina’s.’
‘You can’t steal it from her. She’s telling the truth. For Christ’s sake, look at her. She’s scared to death.’ Ben held out his hand. Reluctantly, after a beat, Raul dropped the pendant into his palm. Ben returned it to the woman. ‘There. Everything’s fine. Please sit down and finish your tea. We’re leaving.’ He repeated it more loudly for the rest of the room to hear. ‘Okay? No problems here. We’re going now.’ He pulled a few euros from his pocket to pay for their drinks and left them on an empty table as they retreated towards the door. Then they spilled back out into the rainy street and ran for the car before the police arrived.
‘This is getting to be a habit since I met you,’ Ben said as he accelerated the Kia up the street.
Chapter Twelve
Around the corner, Ben squealed the car sharply into the kerbside and punched the address the woman had given him into the on-board satnav.
‘I was right,’ Raul was saying over and over. ‘I was right. Something happened to her.’
‘Let’s take this one step at a time, okay?’ Ben said.
Raul turned to face him with liquid eyes. ‘You see I was right, don’t you?’
‘About the diamonds,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all we know for now. Stay calm.’
‘How can I stay calm, damn it? A pawnshop. Can’t you see? It proves she was kidnapped. Whoever took her sold the jewels for some quick cash. Bastards!’ Raul punched the dash so hard that he cracked the plastic and left a smear of blood.
‘Don’t wreck the car,’ Ben said.
The address was just a few blocks away. If the woman lived in the area, it increased the chances of her frequenting both the shop and the café. Which meant it wasn’t the impossible coincidence Ben had first thought. How Catalina Fuentes’ pendant had ended up there, and what this turn of events signified, were questions still to be answered.
As they pulled up outside ten minutes later, Ben could see why a respectable middle-class denizen of Munich might not readily admit to shopping in the place. He’d seen shabbier pawnshops, but he really couldn’t remember when.
‘Are you coming in?’ he said to Raul.
‘Are you joking with me?’
‘Fine. Then try not to beat the guy up, all right? I’ll handle it.’
A bell tinkled as Ben pushed open the door, and a hanging sign saying GEÖFFNET slapped against the glass. There were no other customers. The pawnshop smelled stuffy inside, and there was so much clutter in the windows that it blocked much of what little light the grey sky was throwing down. Ben wondered if the murky ambiance was also meant to camouflage the crappy quality of most of what was on sale in the place. The usual assortment of golf clubs and hockey sticks and electric guitars and saxophones and exercise machines and dinner sets and racks of clothing and air rifles and a thousand other dingy-looking items traded for ready cash by their former owners stood, hung or were stuffed inside crowded shelves around the walls. A closed office door marked PRIVÄT lay behind the counter, which housed a glass-topped display cabinet that constituted the pawnshop’s jewellery wares not displayed in the window, consisting mainly of watches, along with a few brooches and earrings, bracelets and strings of fake pearls nestling in velvety little presentation boxes.
Whoever Catalina Fuentes’ ex-boyfriend Austin J. Keller was, Ben thought, he’d have to be pretty seriously rich to be able to afford a bobby dazzler like the spiral galaxy pendant. All the weirder, then, that it should have ended up in a dump like this, sitting among a pile of third-rate trinkets. Either Catalina must have hated the guy so much after they split up that she didn’t give a damn, or else she had to be desperate. Desperation oozed from every crack of this place.
Ben was gazing at the jewellery when the office door opened and a squat man with a scrappy beard, a flowery shirt and a pronounced leg length discrepancy limped through it.
Ben decided to skip the preliminaries. ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’
The guy shrugged, like saying, ‘So-so.’
Switching from German, Ben asked him, ‘Are you the owner?’
The guy’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I am the proprietor. What is this concerning?’
‘We’re here to inquire about an item of jewellery you sold about three weeks ago. A pendant made of diamonds, shaped in a spiral, blue at the centre, about so big, with a silver mount. Very distinctive. I think you know the one I mean.’
The guy made a big deal of trying to remember, but Ben could tell he knew exactly what piece he was talking about. ‘Ja. What about it?’
‘We’d like to know who sold it to you.’
‘Are you cops?’
Ben shook his head.
The guy pulled a face. He probably would have spat on the floor if he hadn’t been in his own premises. ‘Then is none of your fucking business who sold it to me. I do not remember anyway. Now I have business to run. You are not here to buy, the door is that way.’
Ben nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned and walked towards the door.
Raul stared at him. ‘Just like that?’
Ben said nothing. He reached the door, flipped the open sign around so that it read GESCHLOSSEN, then popped the latch. Then he walked back to the counter and said, ‘Your business is now closed until we say it isn’t. Ist das klar, mein dicker Freund?’
Three shades paler, the pawnshop owner raised his hands. ‘I want no trouble.’
‘That’s good,’ Ben said. ‘Because my associate here has a tendency to get extremely violent when people piss him off. Once he starts, I can’t stop him. The last person who pissed him off, he—’
‘Okay, okay.’ The guy glanced nervously at Raul, suddenly all eager to help.
‘What’s your name?’ Ben asked.
‘Mattias. Mattias Braunschweiger.’
‘Okay, Mattias. Now let’s rack our brains and see if we can’t remember who sold us that diamond cluster. I don’t believe pieces like that come your way every week.’
‘A woman sold it to me.’
Raul and Ben exchanged looks.
‘Description,’ Ben said.
‘Very beautiful woman. Dark. She looked familiar to me. I think afterwards, she is a movie star. Or singer.’
Ben smiled. The pawnshop had ‘haunt of the rich and famous’ written all over it. ‘Would you remember her face?’
‘You would not f
orget her,’ Braunschweiger said, showing yellow and grey teeth.
‘Is this her?’ Raul asked. He took a photo from his wallet. It was a duplicate of the one framed over his desk at home, showing himself and Catalina on a sandy beach. He’d folded it in half so that only she was visible.
Braunschweiger squinted at the picture and nodded. ‘Ja. That is the woman.’ His eyes darted back up at Ben and Raul. ‘You are not cops?’
‘Just tell us about the woman.’
‘She had lot of things to sell. Very good stuff. I show you.’
He limped back through the door that said PRIVÄT. Ben watched him in case he tried to run, though he wouldn’t have got far on that leg. Braunschweiger reappeared a moment later, carrying a tray that glittered even in the dingy light. There was a delicate gold watch with a tiny rectangular case, several pairs of diamond earrings and a bracelet studded with small emeralds. The stuff was on a different planet to the trash in the display cabinet.
‘I have to revalue,’ he explained. ‘I think after I sell the other, price is too small.’
Braunschweiger laid the tray on the counter, and Raul stepped close with a deep frown on his face to examine the things on it. He recognised them immediately. ‘This is Catalina’s,’ he said, holding up the small gold watch. Its rectangular face was studded with minute diamonds.
‘You’re sure?’ Ben said.
‘No question. It’s hers. A Cartier Tank Américaine. She’d always wanted one. I was with her when she bought it. And these earrings. You can see them in a lot of photos of her. And this bracelet—’
‘All right,’ Ben said, convinced. He turned to Braunschweiger. ‘When exactly did she bring you these things?’
‘Exactly? You want date?’ Braunschweiger considered for a moment, then grabbed a thick, well-thumbed ledger from beneath the counter and started flicking back through its pages, which were covered in entries: description of goods, date of transaction, price paid. After a few moments he tapped a page with his thick finger. ‘I find it. She come here Zwölftel Juli.’
July twelfth. Just four days before Catalina’s car had gone over the cliff. Ben and Raul exchanged glances. Raul’s brows were knitted and his jaw was clenched. ‘Are you certain this is right?’ Ben asked Braunschweiger.
‘You want see security recording? This prove it, ja?’
‘Get to it,’ Ben said.
The German led them behind the counter into his office, a poky room that smelled of stale body odour and was choked with clutter and stacked paperwork. On a scarred pine table that served as a desk was Braunschweiger’s grimy computer, hooked up to wires that ran up the wall, attached by duct tape, and disappeared through a hole to connect up to the security camera Ben had noticed in the corner of the ceiling overlooking the counter.
Braunschweiger cleared away piles of mess with a sweep of his arm and scraped up a chair. Air seemed to hiss out of him as he sat. ‘For insurance I must keep video footage one hundred days,’ he explained, pointing at an external hard drive that was plugged into the machine. ‘Then I delete.’
Catalina Fuentes’ car had gone over the cliff eighty-seven days ago. According to the entry on the ledger, the recording of her visit to the pawnshop should still be here.
Ben and Raul stood flanking Braunschweiger’s chair as he turned on the computer and spent a couple of moments dithering about searching for the hard drive icon on his busy desktop. Finding it at last, he clicked with his grubby-looking mouse and a window flashed up showing a menu of video files arranged by month. He scrolled back to July and clicked again, and a list of thirty-one separate files appeared with individual dates. Braunschweiger ran his cursor back to the twelfth of the month, clicked once more, and the screen dissolved to black, then flicked back into life with a wide-angle view of the counter and shop as seen from the raised perspective of the security camera. The light was so dim, it was hard to make anything out. A time readout in the bottom corner of the screen showed that the footage commenced at midnight.
‘I fast-forward,’ Braunschweiger said, and clicked a couple of keys on his keyboard. The image onscreen remained fixed, but the clock started to race ahead with an hour elapsing every few seconds. As dawn approached, the image quickly began to brighten in time-lapse sequence. The clock had hit eight thirty a.m. when the shop’s front door seemed to fly open and a crazily speeded-up Braunschweiger came waddling into the premises, looking as if he could limp for Germany in the Olympics. For a few instants he ricocheted around the shop like a steel bearing in a pinball machine, then shot out of sight. The time readout raced on. Nine a.m. Nine thirty. Nothing happened. The image was completely static.
Then the door flew open again and another figure hurtled into the shop.
‘There,’ Raul said.
Braunschweiger tapped the keys and the image reverted back to normal speed. The time readout said 09:42.
Raul leaned closer to the screen, and swallowed. ‘That’s her.’
Chapter Thirteen
The image was poorly defined, but there was no question that they were looking at Catalina Fuentes. At normal speed, the nervousness in her step was obvious even to a stranger like Ben. Raul was fixed intently on the screen, breathing heavily through his nose.
July twelfth. The last known images of her. Four days before her purported suicide. The day after getting the antidepressants from the doctor.
Catalina looked tense and edgy.
They watched as she walked up to the counter. She was wearing jeans and a light top. Her hair was tied back under a plain black baseball cap and a large pair of sunglasses covered her eyes. She was carrying a shoulder bag, which she unslung and rested on the counter. The figure of Braunschweiger appeared in the corner, just within view of the camera’s range. They seemed to be talking.
‘Is there no sound?’ Ben asked.
Braunschweiger shook his head. ‘Insurance company does not ask for this, so why should I pay for expensive system?’
Onscreen, Catalina was opening up her bag and taking out the items to show him. He was examining each one in turn.
‘What did she say to you?’
‘That these were things from her grandmother. Old woman has died and she does not want them.’
Raul shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why would she say that? Our grandmothers have both been dead for years.’
‘What else did she say?’ Ben asked Braunschweiger.
‘Nothing. That she needs the money fast. My offer is twenty thousand, for all.’ Braunschweiger made a grasping motion that was probably unconscious.
‘Cash?’
Braunschweiger turned away from the screen with a worried frown, as if it had just occurred to him that if he admitted to carrying such large sums of cash on the premises, these two guys would surely beat him up and rob him.
Raul looked ready to punch him in the face. ‘I hate crooks like you who take advantage of people. That’s a fraction of what this stuff was worth. You’re lucky we don’t burn this place to the ground.’
Ben looked at Raul and could see the fury in his eyes. He put a hand on his arm to steady him. He asked Braunschweiger, ‘And she didn’t give any clue why she needed the cash in such a rush?’
‘Nein, she spoke hardly a word. She did not try to argue price. I offer the money, she nods okay, and that is it. I fetch the cash from safe, count it before her and she takes and puts it in the bag, as you see.’ The events were happening on the screen as Braunschweiger narrated them. A few moments later, the transaction was over and Catalina Fuentes left the pawnshop looking just as nervy and tense as she had before. She seemed to pause at the entrance, as if peeking through the door to check the coast was clear. Then she was gone.
Raul kept staring at the empty shop as if waiting for her to return. His face was etched with sadness.
‘You want that I should burn to disc?’ Braunschweiger offered. Maybe he thought that if he was generous, these two wouldn’t beat him up and rob him after all.
‘Do it,’ Ben said.
Braunschweiger delved in a box and came out with a sealed pack of DVD-ROMs. He tore open the packaging and slotted one into the computer, hit a few keys and clicked here and there, and a minute later the file was burned onto it. Ben pocketed the disc, then stepped over to the counter and picked the gold Cartier from the tray. ‘We’ll take this, too.’
‘Ten thousand,’ Braunschweiger said. Generosity had its limits.
Ben shook his head.
‘Seven, then.’
Ben took out his Zippo, clanged it open and thumbed the striker. Braunschweiger stared at the flickering flame, got the message and swallowed. ‘No charge,’ he said. ‘What the hell, I make enough on the necklace.’
‘You’re a credit to your profession,’ Ben said, flicking the lighter shut. He gave the watch to Raul. Raul clutched it tightly in his fist, looking at Braunschweiger as if he would like to make him eat it.
They left the pawnshop and returned to the car. The rainclouds had drawn back like a curtain, and the sunshine was peeping timidly through the gap but it didn’t feel any warmer.
Raul was so worked up that his hands were shaking. Ben didn’t start the engine. He cracked the window open just an inch, so the rain couldn’t get through, and lit a Gauloise. With all the pieces of the puzzle up in the air like confetti spiralling in a wind, it was time to do some serious thinking.
Raul kept staring at his sister’s gold watch. ‘I’m more sure than ever. Who would cash in their precious valuables to raise twenty thousand euros when they’re planning to kill themselves four days later?’
‘Tell me,’ Ben said. ‘Was your sister the kind of person who spent everything she earned on fancy stuff and high living?’
Raul looked at him. ‘Don’t keep talking about her in the past tense. And no, that has never been her way.’
‘Then there’s still plenty in the bank?’