Following their visit with Tobias and Elijah Kaufmann, Tayte had entered another address into the hire car’s sat-nav system, and he and Jean were now heading east to the apartment that his mother, and possibly his father, had given as their temporary address to the Kaufmanns when they visited them in 1973. According to Tobias Kaufmann the apartment was near a man-made waterway called the Eisbach, a tributary of the river Isar that had become popular among surfers because of its shallow, yet fast flowing currents. It took less than twenty minutes to get there, and while Tayte thought it would be great to find the same person still living there from 1973, he somehow doubted it. It was an apartment after all. People moved on and people died. He knew the odds were slim, but it wasn’t something he could dismiss without being sure.
Tayte turned the car into the street they had been directed to and drove a short distance to the end of what was no more than a tight lane. There were trees to one side, buildings to the other. He supposed one of the buildings had to be the apartments they were looking for. The street had no through road, but instead ran out to a walkway that, according to the sign he could see, led through a dense cover of foliage to the Eisbach.
He and Jean got out of the car and began to look around for the address. The signs weren’t clear, but the building nearest to them gave every indication of being an apartment block, so they went closer. It was a small unit, painted red with a number of shuttered windows on three floors. There was only one entrance as far as Tayte could see. He paused in front of it to check the number for the address he’d written down, and he must have looked as if he needed help because someone called out to him.
‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’
Tayte wheeled around to see an elderly woman in a large straw sun hat, bent double in the small garden to the side of the building. She straightened up with considerable effort and dropped her secateurs into the front pocket of her apron.
Tayte didn’t know what she’d just said, and he wasn’t sure what to say in reply. He was about to ask whether she spoke English, which was one of the few phrases he had learned, but Jean answered for him.
‘Ich spreche kein Deutsch,’ she said, slowly as though she had to think about it. All the same, Tayte was impressed.
‘Engl?nder?’ the woman asked.
Tayte recognised that word. ‘Ja,’ he said, not wanting to confuse matters by telling her he was American. He threw Jean a smile, in response to which she just rolled her eyes at him.
‘You are looking for someone?’ the woman said.
‘Yes. Someone who lived in apartment twelve in 1973. Possibly someone called Karl, and his wife, Sarah.’
The woman shook her head. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘In 1973, Geoffrey Johnston lived at number 12. He was English, also. I should know, we shared the same floor.’
‘I see,’ Tayte said. His hopes were up. If the woman standing in front of him had lived there in 1973 there was every chance this Geoffrey Johnston could still be there, too. ‘Does Herr Johnston still live here?’
The woman shook her head, ‘He died around forty years ago.’
‘I see,’ Tayte said again. ‘Forty years?’ He glanced at Jean and she raised an eyebrow, letting him know that she was thinking the same thing he was—that Johnston had died close to the time his mother and Karl had visited Elijah Kaufmann.
‘Do you know how he died?’ Jean asked.
‘Drowned,’ the woman said. She pointed towards the trees and the pathway that led to the nearby Eisbach. ‘They found his body caught up by the bridge.’
Tayte looked at Jean again, suspicion of foul play now written all over his face. He made a mental note to look into the particulars of Johnston’s death online, sure that the death would have been reported in the newspapers.
Tayte gave the woman a smile. ‘Well, thanks for your time.’ He was about to head back to the car when he paused and took out the photograph of his mother. ‘Before we go, do you recognise this woman?’
The old lady scrunched her face up as she scrutinised the image. She seemed unsure. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps?’
‘I can’t say. She’s familiar, yes, but don’t ask me why.’
It didn’t matter. Tayte already knew that his mother had been staying at this address in 1973, or at least that she and Karl knew Geoffrey Johnston well enough to have given his address to Elijah Kaufmann as a point of contact.
‘Danke,’ Tayte said with a bow.
When he and Jean were halfway back to the car, he said, ‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘No. Although the timing of Johnston’s death could be a coincidence.’
‘Yes, it could,’ Tayte agreed, but he didn’t like it one bit. ‘I want to look into Johnston some more when we get back to the hotel.’
They reached the car and Tayte took his notebook out from his jacket pocket. He wrote Johnston’s name down, along with ‘Eisbach’ and ‘Bridge’ and ‘Drowned early to mid-1970s’, wondering whether Johnston had in fact been murdered. As they got into the car he couldn’t stop himself from thinking that if that were true then perhaps his mother and Karl had shared a similar fate. In which case, he and Jean were clearly dealing with the kind of people who were prepared to kill to keep their secrets.
Chapter Twelve