‘You have a photo of her kidnapper?’
Mats had shouted so loud into the phone that Feli worried her taxi driver had heard every word.
‘Yes,’ she said tersely and hoped she could pay for her trip with a card. She’d spent her last cash buying Ibuprofen for the pain and Kytta natural ointment for the swelling. Just her luck to grasp at the door frame in the dark the very moment the bathroom door slammed shut.
Not true.
Someone had slammed it shut.
On purpose!
Someone who’d switched off the light to make sure he could harm her. On one of the most sensitive spots of the body, there where all the nerve endings ran together.
There was good reason why the world’s most brutal henchmen concentrated on the extremities when performing torture during interrogation.
At first, when the pain rushed up her arm with the force of a heavily loaded freight train, she was certain her fingers had not only been smashed but severed. She had expected to see her ring, middle and index fingers lying on the floorboards in Nele’s hallway. But once she finally managed to turn the light back on, she saw her hand was not a bloody stump, and the bones of her fingers were all still connected. They apparently weren’t broken, either, even though she could hardly move them because of all the bruising under the skin.
‘Say that again: you have a photo of Nele’s kidnapper?’ asked Mats, who still couldn’t believe it. ‘How did you get it?’
Feli couldn’t hold her phone with her uninjured hand that great either. Meanwhile, all those burst blood vessels in her injured one felt like they were swelling to the size of a bowling ball. Of course it had to be the left! She and Janek had their wedding rings fitted for their left hands, intending to wear them on the same side as their hearts. Her ring finger now looked like it had been worked over with a sledgehammer. How was she going to tell her husband-to-be?
It was easier explaining to Mats how she thought she’d seen the kidnapper’s face.
‘In Nele’s building, there’s a pharmacy on the ground floor. When the pharmacist was helping me bandage my hand, I noticed the cameras over the front door.’
‘Are you saying you recognised the kidnapper on a surveillance video?’ Mats asked.
‘I am.’
The taxi, an old Volvo smelling like sweat and wet dog, stopped behind a big, tall truck, either in a traffic jam or at a stoplight. There was also noise on the line, and for a moment Mats’ voice sounded like an alien’s before the metallic reverberation faded.
‘I still don’t understand. Wasn’t the intruder trying to break in?’
‘Screw that. One of the cameras caught the street along with the sidewalk.’
They drove on again.
‘It’s actually illegal, but recently the cars parked on the street were getting their tyres slashed. The residents got together and started filming the sidewalk and parts of the road. I told the pharmacist that a friend of mine had a similar issue just this morning and suspected the culprit was a taxi driver who picked up customers around here. So he let me look at the video.’
‘I see. Clever. So on the video, you saw Nele getting into a taxi?’
‘At 5:26 a.m. It stopped right in front of Nele’s building. And, yes, your daughter got in. Heavily pregnant. Waddling too, like her water had just broken.’
‘My God. But how do you know this was the kidnapper for sure? I mean, maybe they took her right to the clinic?’
‘Not likely.’ Feli spoke even lower. ‘Because there was a second taxi, too,’ she whispered with a glance at the driver, who didn’t seem to take any notice of her or show any reaction in the rear-view mirror.
‘Say again?’ Mats asked in confusion. ‘A second taxi? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It came over an hour later. At 6:30 exactly. Listen to this, Mats. This second cab was the real one. Ordered through Med-Call, a service specialising in patient rides. I’d listened to a message from the driver on Nele’s answering machine beforehand so I just called him back. Bingo! Nele’s ride to the clinic had been ordered weeks ago, for 5:30. But yesterday someone called, wanting to cancel. The service told the caller this wasn’t possible – on such short notice he’d still have to pay. They wanted a credit card, but the caller decided to keep the ride instead and asked to reschedule it for later.’
‘I don’t quite understand,’ Mats said. ‘How did the kidnappers know which cab company Nele was using?’
‘Probably didn’t. But there’s only a handful of dispatchers in the city, actually only three big ones. I’m guessing they called all of them on the off chance they could cancel Nele’s order. That’s how they found out about the scheduled time.’
They were crossing Prenzlauer Allee at the spot where Ostseestrasse turned into Wisbyer Strasse heading west.
‘What for?’ Mats asked, a little slow on the uptake apparently from so much stress.
‘Makes sense; think about it. To push back the pick-up time so that the kidnappers could get there before the ride service.’
‘You mean with that first taxi?’
About time, Feli thought with a sigh. ‘That’s right.’
‘Nele was abducted by a cab driver?’ Mats nearly screamed it.
And now Feli was getting another call.
She moved the phone away from her ear to see who was calling.
Crap.
Janek. What was she supposed to tell him?
‘Sorry, honey, but I’m in the middle of hunting down criminals for my ex-lover right now, so you might have to get started on your own down at the registry office.’
If she had any sense left at all, she would hang up on Mats and tell the driver to turn around as fast as possible and take her home. But ‘sensible’ wasn’t exactly the first word her friends used to describe her, unlike ‘impulsive’ or ‘gullible’. She might well be deceiving herself right now, convincing herself she needed to save Mats’ daughter from a grave emergency, but the reality was (and as a psychiatrist she was more than qualified to analyse herself) she was really doing this for herself, first and foremost. Her feelings for Mats were nothing like they used to be, having faded and yellowed after all these years of radio silence. But they hadn’t disappeared, only gathered dust like forgotten furniture in an abandoned home. And despite the sorry circumstances, she nevertheless liked the feeling of this man finally needing her again, a man she thought she would never get over.
‘A cab driver!’ Mats shouted again, and her call-waiting stopped. Janek had hung up.
‘At least someone pretending to be one,’ Feli said. ‘I can’t make out the licence plate on the video.’
‘But you have an image of the kidnapper?’
‘Yes, he looks like a typical student. Tall and skinny, gangly. Messy hair, open sandals.’
‘Can you make out his face?’
‘Even better…’
The driver of the taxi abruptly hit the brakes and apologised for seeing the light on Bornholmer too late. Feli loosened her belt again.
‘What’s that mean, you have something better? Tell me. My daughter’s life is at stake.’
She nodded. ‘When he got out to wait at his double-parked taxi, he was holding a bag. He put it in the trunk. The logo on the bag—’
‘Was what?’ Mats interrupted, losing all patience.
‘It’s the same as the bag in Nele’s bathroom. The one with her meds in it.’
She was about to spell it out but Mats beat her to it: ‘The Wedding Medical Centre.’
‘Exactly,’ Feli said, and glanced at the taxi’s navigation screen.
They would be there in about fifteen minutes.