153The lawyer in me would’ve recommended I stick to my old habits and go on exactly as before. Yet thanks to my mindfulness coach, in the very first hour of my very first day back at work after my very first murder I’d already thrown a lot of habits overboard: I’d left my company car at home, gotten a coffee at McDonald’s – oh yes, and I had threatened the three founding partners of my firm instead of letting them threaten me. A satisfying experience.

I had once again taken the liberty of not doing what I didn’t want to do, which in this case would’ve been to grovel.

I took stock of what I felt: miraculously, I neither had a stomach ache nor felt any insecurity. Quite the opposite, in fact: my stomach felt great – maybe I should get McDonald’s coffee more often.

I had no doubt that my bosses would agree to my proposal. So I confidently started packing up the personal things in my office. It wasn’t that much: a few photos of Emily, an external hard drive with copies of documents and work emails, as well as various keys for bank lockers where I had stored countless documents for Dragan. Strictly speaking, the hard drive and lockers didn’t fall under the category of personal belongings. But it was now 154in everyone’s interest that I would no longer burden the firm with these matters.

Last but not least, I got all the blank letterhead and powers of attorney signed by Dragan out of my office safe. Ten years of work – and it all fitted in one briefcase.

With the briefcase under my arm, I next did something I hadn’t done in years: I went to a home improvement store. I needed plaster to turn the mould of Dragan’s thumb into a cast. I also liked its symbolic meaning: turning Dragan’s negative into a positive.

My visit to the home improvement store did me good. This place was designed to meet the needs of people who wanted to create something with their own two hands. Any spanners for sale here weren’t going to be thrown into anyone’s works, but used on something that would be a part of someone’s home. Anyone going to a home improvement store is a person of action – they live in the present and have a firm grip on their future – and now I was one of them! I bought a small bag of modelling plaster to give Dragan’s quietly decaying thumb a bright new future. After paying at the register, I put the bag in my briefcase.

At that moment, my phone rang. It was the office.

‘Hello?’

‘I’m connecting you with Mr Von Dresen,’ Ms Bregenz said in her automaton voice.

I waited for my usual impulse to remark on the woman’s affected mannerisms, but it never came. I just waited mindfully for the line to click and the voice of my soon-to-be-former boss to come on.155

‘Von Dresen speaking. We accept your offer.’

There we go. ‘What does that mean in concrete terms?’

‘Your employment will be terminated as of the first of May, and you will receive ten months’ salary severance pay. You will take with you Mr Sergowicz and any associated clients. Mr Sergowicz will confirm in writing that he has been looked after exclusively by you and will continue to be looked after exclusively by you in the future. This covers any claims against our firm.’

‘Sounds good. Please send it to my personal email address.’

‘It’ll be on your desk shortly.’

‘I won’t be coming back to the office today.’

‘Now listen here, it is still up to us to determine when you are expected to be in the office!’

‘Well, you can always fire me if that’s more convenient. After all, you’re still my boss. Speaking of which, as long as my termination agreement is not in effect, let alone signed, Mr Sergowicz remains an official client of your firm. So I assume you will take over liaising with the press until then.’

‘The press? What are we supposed to tell them?’

‘The same thing I am now telling you on Mr Sergowicz’s behalf: “No comment.”’

Yes! Ten months of severance pay would soon be in my account, and I already had a hundred thousand euros from Dragan in cash. No more obligations to that shitty firm, and my annoying client could no longer annoy anyone either. And on top of that, my current employer would keep the press off me in the name of that client and thus confirm that he was still alive. Even though he wasn’t.156

More objectively: could I have been any more mindful? Breitner’s book had begun to hold a mystical significance. Now all I had to do was make sure the police didn’t arrest me for murder, and that neither Dragan’s gang nor its competition suspected what had really happened to Dragan.

Breathing the air of freedom, I walked home through a city in bloom to check if all was right with Dragan’s right thumb.

*

I had put the silicone thumb mould in my bathroom. The material felt like it had firmed up pretty well. And the thumb was definitely ready to come out – that much was clear from the smell. Unfortunately, I had no idea how long silicone takes to dry out completely. Appropriately enough, the internet offers a rule of, well, thumb. Each centimetre of silicone requires twenty-four hours of drying time. Since I had simply pressed the thumb into the tube, the layer of silicone was quite thick on all sides. So to be on the safe side, I’d have to wait at least three to four days.

But the internet also offered plenty of tips on how to speed up the drying process. A room heated to around 20 degrees with high humidity would help things along. So I ran the shower a bit and implored my heater to keep the foggy bathroom at a happy 20 degrees. I wanted to give the silicone one more day. Mindfulness is not a one-way street, silicone has needs too.

It wasn’t even Monday afternoon, and a lot of the worries I’d woken up to had already evaporated all on their own. Sure, there were still a few calls to take care of. Wanting to 157put those behind me, I called Peter Egmann at Homicide Command. I just wanted to tell him I had nothing to tell him, but it turned out he had a few things to tell me.

‘Björn, thank you for returning my call. I imagine you must have your hands full right now.’

Cradling my phone between my ear and shoulder, I looked at my hands, which had been full when I was packing up my office just a few hours earlier, which had carried the plaster, and which had just given the silicone mould a tentative squeeze. Now they were full of exactly nothing, and I picked my phone back up again.

‘You certainly have a vivid imagination for a copper. Why should I have my hands full?’

‘Well, your boss is wanted for murder and has gone into hiding. And this morning, one of his soldiers was found dead in the woods. Shot in the head.’

My stomach cramped up again. I had just solved almost every one of my problems, and now suddenly someone had been shot in the head. Setting aside the fact that a layperson like myself was apparently the only person who could properly dispose of a corpse, more bodies just sounded like more trouble for me. Was this the beginning of a gang war with Boris? Perhaps I shouldn’t have put off calling him back.

I plastered a smile over my dark thoughts.

‘My bosses run a law firm. I just sat down with all three of them earlier. If you want to arrest one of them, go ahead. Yet you probably don’t mean my boss, but my client. And I don’t know anything about any headshot.’158

‘Murat Cümgül, a bouncer at one of Toni’s spots. A passer-by found him dead this morning on a bench near the feed dispenser at the deer park.’

I didn’t have to play dumb: I actually had no idea who was responsible for Murat’s death. All I knew was that Murat had tried to reach me the day before. Had he reached me and convinced me to meet, I’d have been sitting on that bench next to him this morning. A chilling fear grabbed a hold of me. It looked like my digital fast had saved my life. But that didn’t mean my life wasn’t still in acute danger. In front of me on the table was my mindfulness guide. I leafed through it until I found the right section:

When fear arises, focus on your breath. Calmly in- and exhale. Feel your breath moving through your body. At your nostrils, for example, or in your abdomen. Keep your mind on your breath, do not judge your fear, and try to appreciate the here and now.

‘Do you have a cold?’ Peter’s question broke the silence.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You’re breathing so heavily.’

I was just breathing consciously. And soon I was consciously feeling better: with every breath, more of my self-confidence returned. Unlike some people in my professional circle, I was still able to breathe, which was clearly a positive. Was there anything else to appreciate about this situation? Well, at least the deceased died in a scenic environment, that was also positive. And I hadn’t shot him, 159that was positive insofar as it meant I could have a completely clear conscience when it came to Peter. So whatever was going on with this murder, here in the present I was fine. The rest would reveal itself in time.

I did not respond to Peter’s observation, but posed a question of my own: ‘Hunting accident?’

‘Must have been a pretty blind hunter if they couldn’t tell a fully zip-tied Turkish guy from a roaring stag. Especially considering they shot him in the back of the head at close range.’

‘Tragic, but what does it have to do with me?’

‘Well, let me put it this way – the number one of Dragan’s gang eliminates the burning number two of Boris’s gang. Subsequently, said number one disappears without a trace, and the deputy of Dragan’s number two is shot in the woods. This could lead to legal complications for all parties involved.’

‘Not all parties.’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘The dead are obviously off the hook.’

‘The real question is: why are they dead in the first place?’

In other words, the police knew as little as I did. I’d have to discuss that with Dragan. Oh right, he was dead too.

‘Maybe you could discuss it with Dragan,’ Peter suggested.

‘At the next opportunity.’

‘When might that be?’

‘You know that’s none of your business, that’s covered by confidentiality.’

‘Björn, we know Dragan left town.’160

‘Then you know more than I do.’

‘He cannot have done so alone.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You’re the only one he called.’

Hm, the only way they’d know that was if they were illegally tapping my phone, which they’d never do, of course. ‘Help me out – what did he say to me?’

‘That he wanted to go for ice cream with you.’

‘How romantic, and what did I say?’

‘You said you wanted to take your daughter to the lake.’

‘And what did I do next?’

‘You drove to the office with your daughter and she had an ice cream there.’

Bloody hell, I hoped Peter wasn’t about to charge me with perverting the course of justice just because that Möller moron saw Emily’s ice-cream-covered face.

‘OK, guilty as charged. My daughter had ice cream at the firm. Any other grounds for suspicion?’

‘We know you then drove to the lake.’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘We were watching you.’

‘You tailed a lawyer and his barely three-year-old daughter the whole weekend? On what legal basis, illegal enjoyment of ice cream?’

‘We weren’t tailing you. I’ll put it this way – a colleague happened to be boating and happened to snap some lovely landscape shots with his telephoto lens.’

It must’ve been the boat that had dropped anchor on the lake that night. If Emily hadn’t helped me shift to 161mindfulness mode, I’d not have been at the home improvement store this morning, but in prison: both if I’d let myself be spotted on the jetty with a live Dragan and if I’d taken the dead Dragan out of the boot on Saturday instead of Sunday.

I summarised the new information.

‘So Dragan called me to go get ice cream. After that, you saw me at my office and at the lake. Yet you didn’t see Dragan, neither at my office, nor at the lake. And it wasn’t me who had an ice cream, but my daughter. I’d like to see you try and get a search warrant for my office or the lake house on that evidence.’

‘Well, there’s one more minor detail …’

‘Which is?’

‘The people living next to the lake house called the police this morning. They found a severed finger with a signet ring on their patio table.’

This was anything but minor. Correctly interpreted, it was actually a clue to the murder I committed. Surprisingly, this didn’t fill me with fear right then, but anger, anger at that bloody bird. Did she have to drop the finger in such plain sight? And where are all those fucking cats when you need them? Why hadn’t the finger been gobbled up?

‘And what does that have to do with Dragan?’ I asked, hopefully sounding bored.

‘The ring on the finger bears a striking resemblance to the one Dragan pressed under the little boy’s chin in the video. This suggests the finger is also Dragan’s. So the finger must have come to the lake either with Dragan or with 162you – or, in the dumbest possible case for you, with both of you at the same time.’

‘The consequences of which being?’

‘The first consequence being that a judge was of the opinion that said finger would certainly justify a search of the lake house. Ten colleagues of mine are scouring the property at this very moment.’

Fuck! One ring finger doesn’t even make up one-thousandth of a person’s body weight. I’d chipped up 99.9 per cent of Dragan without any difficulty, yet this one silly detail led to a search warrant.

But it needn’t be cause for panic. I had chopped up Dragan precisely because there was the possibility of a search, otherwise I could’ve just left him in the boathouse. I was pretty sure that, except for the finger bit, I had done a thorough job. I just had to have faith now.

‘Then I hope your colleagues make sure to leave everything neat and tidy. If anything turns up missing afterwards, Peter, I’ll hold you responsible.’

‘If anything more than this finger turns up, Björn, I’ll hold you responsible.’

We hung up. The consequences of my mindlessness confirmed my need for mindfulness. I breathed in and out for another two minutes and organised my thoughts. As for the search of the house, I just had to wait and see. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of anything dramatic the police might find. And it’d take a few days before any DNA results came in on the finger. Of course, I could immediately start racking my brain over whether the police now assumed 163Dragan was dead; whether that meant they were now looking for his murderer; and whether I was a suspect. But I could also let it go. After all, what did one severed finger really mean? Its former owner would have difficulty becoming a concert pianist, nothing more. I had more pressing matters to contend with, questions I should clear up quick. Above all, I needed to meet Sasha to talk about the hit on Murat – also to determine whether it had been intended to be a hit on me.

Boris I would deal with last. If he had already launched a gang war, a phone call from me couldn’t avert it anyway. And if Boris wasn’t behind Murat’s murder, then he could probably wait a little longer before embarking on a murder spree of his own.

It’s a familiar issue for anyone who suspects or knows their phones are being tapped: conversations are always tense, as you’re always aware of who might be listening. Using disposable prepaid phones is only a semi-solution. After all, you first have to get the other person’s prepaid number without the police finding out.

Dragan and I had developed a method that his entire gang, including Sasha, made great use of. You send an eleven-digit sequence via SMS from your tapped phone to the other person’s tapped phone. Then they simply add those individual digits to those of the sender’s number, and the resulting number is that of the new number they need to call.

So I used the mobile phone I now knew the police were monitoring to send Sasha a text with the numbers 16400177489032. Anyone who doesn’t know my number would have no way to crack this message. And though the police did know my number, they didn’t know how these digits were connected to my phone number, so they wouldn’t know what to do with it. As Sasha knew both, he called me a short time later from a heretofore unknown number.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Thanks for calling me back.’

‘How’s the boss?’

‘Alright, given the circumstances.’

‘Where is he now?’

I almost answered: His thumb is in a tube of silicone, his ring finger in an evidence bag and the rest is being digested by a school of fish …

I managed to stop myself and instead said: ‘For your protection and that of everyone involved, he wants no one to know.’

‘But you do?’

‘Not directly,’ I improvised.

‘But you are in touch.’

‘Of course. He wants business to keep going. We need to meet.’

‘Where and when?’

‘Why don’t you suggest someplace?’ It was always good to let the other person make some decisions. In this case, it would even come in handy. I had no real experience in choosing places to meet conspirators, Sasha did.

‘You know the playground at the Schlosspark?’ he asked.165

‘Of course.’

‘Tomorrow morning, half past eleven.’

That would be during working hours, of course, but for now I would just consider myself ‘on leave’.166