‘Die Strasse ist gesperrt,’ the driver said.
Tayte didn’t know what that meant. He thought it was something about the road. A second later the driver confirmed it.
‘Road closed,’ the driver said, slowly, as he pointed ahead through the windscreen.
In the low light Tayte couldn’t fully make out what the driver wanted him to see. He opened his door, leaned out and saw the bridge that arched over the railway tracks more fully. There was a barrier with a temporary road sign in front of it. It appeared that the bridge had been closed for repairs. Tayte checked his watch. He had less than ten minutes to reach the address he’d been given and he hoped whoever had sent him the text message asking to meet him was prepared to wait. He took out his phone and brought up the ‘maps’ app. He punched in the address and the GPS soon found him. It showed that he wasn’t far away. He saw the bridge and the road layout, which turned to the left after the bridge, running alongside the railway tracks for a short distance. The address he’d been sent was no more than a few hundred metres away.
Tayte got back into the taxi. ‘Can you wait here for me?’ he said, pointing his finger at the ground.
The confused look on the taxi driver’s face was far from promising.
‘You,’ Tayte said, now pointing at the driver as he tried to think how to say ‘wait’ in German. ‘Stay,’ he added when nothing came to him.
All he got back from the driver were several German words that this time he did recognise. The driver wanted his fare. Tayte sighed and shook his head as he handed the money over, thinking that he could call another cab to come and get him when the time came to go back. He grabbed his briefcase and got out of the car. Then he made for the walkway that led over the bridge, which was thankfully still open to pedestrians.
For a moment he thought the driver must have understood him after all because the taxi was still there as Tayte began to cross the bridge. But then he heard the car’s engine rev up and he turned back to see the taxi speed away to collect his next fare, leaving Tayte alone on the bridge, wondering what the hell he was doing there.
‘Why couldn’t they have picked a busier place, or waited until morning?’ he said to himself, knowing that if he wasn’t so desperate for answers he wouldn’t have come out at such a late hour, especially if he’d known how isolated the area was.
He took a deep breath and continued over the bridge until he reached the last of the street lamps. There were no other lights in the area as far as he could see. As he followed the road around to his left—as the map on his phone dictated—it became so dark that he had to use his phone as a torch to light his way between the trees, which now seemed to have thickened around him. He kept going and it grew so quiet that, being the great lover of Broadway shows that he was, he felt the urge to whistle a show tune to keep himself company. But he thought better of it. If he had been lured there for some nefarious reason, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself until he had to.
When at last the trees cleared, Tayte walked beside the rail tracks for a short while, and he enjoyed the openness, thinking that he’d at least be able to see anyone or anything that came at him out of the darkness. Nothing did, and after a while he began to relax. There were buildings ahead. A few had lights at their windows and that calmed him further. He checked the map again and turned to his right at a small junction in the road he’d been following. The area appeared to be some kind of industrial estate, which accounted for how quiet it was, given the hour. He saw a number on one of the buildings, which was essentially a long brick wall with an aluminium door and a few small windows higher up. At the end of the brick wall he came to a wire fence with a few spotlights at intervals along it, shining into a yard where large wooden cable drums sat here and there like rolls of hay in a farmer’s field. There was an office-like building partway along the fence and when Tayte reached it, he saw that it was the address he was looking for.