Your Perfect Year(68)
“I really wish I knew the name of the guy who turned up here.”
“What did he look like?”
“Around forty, quite good looking. You don’t see blue eyes like that very often, especially not with dark hair. Expensively dressed and very polite. That’s about it. Oh, and he seemed tense and nervous, but that only occurred to me in hindsight.”
“That doesn’t give us much to go on.”
“No,” Sarasvati agreed. “In any case, he didn’t see hide nor hair of your Simon; he only had the diary.”
“But if someone talks to him, he might remember something. A minor detail that he thinks is unimportant and only means something in context. Of course, I don’t care about the Filofax itself, but without it we don’t have the slightest clue where to start, and if there’s a chance that someone saw Simon alive, I have to pursue it.”
“Yes, I can understand that. I wish I could help you. But he left after the session and took the diary with him. If only I’d—”
“Did he say what he was going to do with it?”
“Yes. He was going to take it to the lost-and-found at the nearest police station.”
“I’ll call them immediately! Maybe they keep a record of finders’ details,” Hannah said optimistically. “If they do, the officers dealing with Simon’s case will need to know right away.”
“It’s worth trying.”
“It certainly is,” Hannah said. “Thank you for getting in touch.”
“Oh, sweetheart!” Hannah was surprised to find she liked the sudden familiarity. “I wish there was more I could do.” Sarasvati paused for a moment. “Would you like a consultation yourself? I could read the cards for you.”
“Is it possible we could trace Simon that way?”
“No.” Hannah hadn’t expected any other reply. “But we might discover something else.”
“It’s really kind of you. But I don’t want to discover anything except Simon.”
“I understand. Feel free to get in touch anytime. And please let me know how the search for your boyfriend goes.”
“I will,” Hannah promised. They said goodbye and hung up.
She immediately phoned the police officer who’d left her card and told her to call anytime if she had any new information.
“Simon was by the Alster!” she yelled into the phone as soon as the woman picked up. “You need to send some people down there, right now!” Then, even though it indicated a rather pessimistic expectation of the outcome and was therefore contrary to her belief in “laying tracks into the future,” she demanded: “And please, will you finally get a diver on the case?”
“We’ll send officers to the banks of the Alster first,” the police officer said calmly. “We’ll take it from there.”
Hannah ended the call and took a deep breath. Good. The police would now intensify their search for Simon, this time with specific information about where he was last seen.
Next, she Googled the number of the lost-and-found office at the local police station, and asked the man who took her call about the Filofax. Nothing. No one had handed in anything that remotely resembled a diary since New Year’s Eve. Hannah asked the man to call her the minute anyone appeared with a dark-blue leather appointment diary. She couldn’t help sympathizing with his rather surly reply that he was not a personal secretary, so she explained the situation briefly. The official apologized and promised to call her immediately if he or one of his coworkers were handed a diary.
Hannah thanked him courteously and hung up. What now? What could she do?
She picked up her cell phone a third time and called the editorial office of the Hamburg News. She gave them the information and asked them to publish another missing-person notice the following day, telling them to ask the finder of the diary or any other possible witnesses who might have seen Simon by the Alster to get in touch immediately. They promised to make room for it on the front page again.
She thought feverishly about what steps she could take next.
She had to find the man who had the diary! Why hadn’t he handed it in at the lost-and-found as he said he would? What had he done with it instead?
Well, he probably didn’t realize that he could provide valuable information, that on New Year’s morning down by the river he had become entangled in what was literally a matter of life and death. He couldn’t know how desperately she was looking for him. The thought that time was passing without any new information coming in made Hannah feel helpless, impotent, and furious. How could she get hold of the guy who had found Simon’s diary? How on earth?
She had no idea. The finder had visited Sarasvati. Maybe he’d make further attempts and turn up for another appointment before going to the lost-and-found? Sarasvati had said that he really wanted to know who the diary belonged to; Hannah didn’t care whether he was driven by sheer curiosity or a strong sense of civic duty. It was a small chance, but she dug the copy she’d made of Simon’s diary from her bag and leafed through the pages with shaking hands. Where was the next entry containing a date, time, and place, where the mysterious diary finder might appear?
She was disappointed to see that there wasn’t one for another ten days, on January 14. Ten days! If Simon hadn’t turned up or been found by then . . .