Chapter Eight

Vienna

Detective Sergeant Markus Kinski never forgot a face. And when he’d spotted the woman across the crowded square he’d instinctively followed her.

It was a cold afternoon in Vienna and snow threatened from a heavy sky. She filtered through the crowds of tourists and shoppers. She was wearing a navy-blue cape and matching beret, casual but expensive. Kinski was hanging back thirty yards, locked on to his target, his old greatcoat flapping in the December chill, when he saw her go inside the tearoom.

He paused at the entrance and watched her through the glass. It was one of those frilly kinds of joints, like an over-decorated wedding cake, which Vienna was full of and which Kinski, still an East Berliner in his heart, hated.

She took a table in the far corner. Laying her blue cape beside her, she took a paperback from her handbag and began to read. Kinski went inside and sat himself down where he could observe her over the top of his newspaper. He was too bulky for the little round marble-topped table and the slender chair felt creaky and rickety under him. Everything was so fucking dainty.

Kinski had been the officer in charge and was in the interview room when they’d brought Madeleine Laurent in for questioning, almost a year ago, after the Llewellyn drowning case. She’d been blonde, with long hair. The woman sitting opposite him now was a brunette, her hair cut in a bob that disguised the contours of her face. But the features were the same. The dark-brown eyes that were scanning the menu and then flashing up as the waiter came to her table-those were the same too. She ordered Sacchertorte and a hot cocoa with cream and a dash of green chartreuse.

Greedy bitch, he thought. And your German suddenly got a whole lot better. But it had to be her. It was her.

Kinski ordered an espresso. Straight, black, no sugar. He leaned back in his creaking chair and pretended to read the paper. He cast his mind back to the Llewellyn case.

Madeleine Laurent. Twenty-six years of age. Nationality French. Married to Pierre Laurent, a French diplomat posted in Vienna. The scandal had been neatly covered up. Laurent’s people had leaned hard on the cops to keep quiet about Madeleine’s indiscretion with the foreigner Oliver Llewellyn. Her tearful statement had been recorded and filed-and then suddenly nobody could find it any more. It seemed just to vanish from the records. By then the coroner’s report was already in, so nobody had made much of the clerical snafu.

Nobody except Kinski. But when he’d asked questions he’d been formally instructed to leave off. It was a sensitive matter. The case was closed. A few days later they’d heard that the diplomat was being pulled out of Austria and given a new three-year posting, somewhere conveniently far away. Venezuela, Kinski remembered. He’d smarted over it for weeks afterwards.

If it was the same woman, what was she doing back here? Visiting friends for Christmas? Maybe he should just give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was wasting his time.

But his gut told him differently, and twenty-six years as a cop-the first nine of those served in the hard streets of Communist East Berlin-had taught Markus Kinski not to ignore a hunch.

He went to the gents and shut himself in a cubicle, then dialled the number he’d memorized from the tearoom menu.

Kinski was back finishing his coffee when the manageress called out across the counter. ‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen-is there a Madeleine Laurent here? I have an urgent message for her. No?’ The manageress scanned around the room, shrugged, and went back to what she was doing.

The woman had frozen when the name was called. Her cup stopped an inch from her mouth, then she collected herself and set it down without drinking. She looked around her nervously. Kinski smiled behind his paper. Got you.

The woman gathered her cape and bag, abandoned the half-eaten Sacchertorte. She hurried to the counter, paid, and left the tearoom.

Kinski tossed money down on the table and followed her. She slipped between the bustling shoppers and hailed a taxi. Kinski’s path was blocked by bodies. He pushed through angrily. He was twenty feet from her when she hopped into the car. A slim leg disappeared inside, the door slammed and the taxi melted into the traffic.

‘Scheisse!’

Back at the tearoom, he asked for the manageress. When she appeared he flashed his badge. ‘Polizei. A woman left here two minutes ago. She paid by card. I want her name.’

The manager went coolly over to the stack of credit-card slips on the counter. She handed him the topmost one. Kinski glanced at it.

The name and signature on the credit-card slip wasn’t Madeleine Laurent. It was Erika Mann.