Raul paused sadly for a moment, then went on. ‘Anyway, four years ago, a British television producer asked her if she’d present this six-part series on astronomers in history. Not the ones everyone’s heard of, like Galileo and Newton. Ones like the female American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, who have been kind of overstepped and forgotten but are still really important. You know?’
Ben just spread his hands. He knew how to navigate by the constellations when GPS went down, but that was about the sum total of his astronomical knowledge.
‘She was young, beautiful, intelligent and as well qualified for the job as anyone, and she thought it was a worthy project to get involved in. She had no idea what great TV it would make and how popular she’d become as a result. She took a sabbatical from her teaching and writing, and travelled all over with the film crew. A year later, the first episode aired on BBC, then RTL in Germany and all around Europe. Suddenly, she was this big media celebrity. It just kind of exploded, not because of the subject matter – I mean, who really cares about a bunch of dead astronomers? It was her the people loved. She set the screen on fire. Next thing, she was getting offers from all over the place for more mainstream shows, and had to start cutting her teaching down to part-time just to fit all the work in. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing her.’
‘I haven’t watched it in a while,’ Ben said truthfully. His last place of residence of any duration had been a monastery in the French Alps, where the monks had barely even heard of TV. His being there was another long story, one he didn’t intend to share.
Raul went on, ‘And magazines like this one couldn’t get enough of her. She was the darling of the media. She used to laugh about it all, this science academic getting to rub shoulders with movie stars and pop singers, like she couldn’t take it too seriously and was just enjoying the ride while it lasted. And the money, too.’
‘Okay,’ Ben said. He was soaking up information fast, but he still didn’t understand why Raul Fuentes thought his celebrity sister had been kidnapped. Rich people got kidnapped all the time. The motive was almost invariably financial, which meant the victim’s family could generally expect to receive a ransom demand within hours, sometimes within minutes of the abduction. But that hadn’t happened in this case.
‘She didn’t talk much about the dark side of it all,’ Raul went on. ‘Like all those damn photographers always hanging around, trying to get a shot of her, so many she started having to sneak out of the house in disguise. I think she accepted it, like it just went with the territory. But then the Lukas Geerts thing happened.’
‘Lukas Geerts?’
The corners of Raul’s mouth downturned and he looked as if he’d just got a whiff of something out of a sewer. ‘A Belgian IT consultant and amateur astronomy nerd who’d become fixated on her after watching her on TV. This creep somehow managed to convince himself he was in love with her, and that he could make her love him too, if only he could meet her. He travelled to Munich, hung around the university and followed her home. It was easy for him to find out where she lived, and somehow got her personal mobile number too. Next thing, he was turning up there the whole time. He’d sit outside her place in his car and phone her, ten, twenty times a day. I mean, he had her face tattooed on his arm. Can you believe that?’
Ben had once pursued a child abuser and kidnapper who’d tattooed the names of his victims in Gothic script on every part of his own body, including his genitals. Ben could believe more or less anything.
‘Catalina was freaked out by him and wouldn’t have anything to do with him, of course, but on his Facebook page he was making out that he and she were an item. He created images on Photoshop showing them holding hands. I kept telling her she should report it to the police, but she actually felt sorry for him because he was mentally deranged. Then it got even worse, with the porn stuff he was doctoring to make it look like them together, and putting up online. In the end, she had to get the police involved and there was a restraining order and criminal charges. It was only then it turned out he was guilty of the attempted rape of some poor girl in Zeebrugge a year earlier, and he ended up sentenced to eighteen months behind bars.’
‘I understand. So you think Geerts has come back after her, except now he’s angry and prepared to go to extremes to make her his.’
Ben wasn’t liking the sound of it. Suddenly, the idea of foul play entered the scenario and sounded plausible enough to be a concern. If the motive was about revenge or possession rather than money, a ransom demand became immaterial.
Raul shook his head. ‘No, because Geerts is dead. A few months into his sentence, one of his fellow prisoners stuck a shank between his ribs. I wasn’t exactly sorry.’
‘That would tend to rule him out of the equation,’ Ben said.
‘Him, but not a hundred others. Who’s to say some other lunatic hasn’t turned up there in Munich with a delusional fixation about her? There are crazy people everywhere.’
Ben had been expecting a little more substance to Raul’s kidnap premise. ‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Have you mentioned this to the German police? To the investigator, Klein?’
Raul shook his head. ‘Not yet. It’s a new theory. The only one that makes sense to me.’
‘That’s not a theory, Raul. It isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s more like a guess, based on nothing but the emotions you’re feeling.’
‘That’s why I need someone to help me,’ Raul said.
‘Help you do what?’
‘Prove that she’s not dead. Find who took her, and get her back. I want you to come with me to Germany. I’ll pay for the flight and all expenses. I still have a little bit of savings left over. Whatever we don’t spend on the trip, you take as a fee.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ Ben said tersely.
‘You have to help me. You’re the only person I’ve met who can.’
Ben took out his cigarettes and Zippo, fished out a Gauloise and bathed its tip in the lazy orange flame of the lighter. He puffed for a few moments as he reflected. Thinking that Germany was a long way away, and that he’d come back here to offer Raul moral support, not to get involved in what was almost certain to be a dead-end undertaking that would only cause further heartache. Raul might soon find himself wishing he’d attended his sister’s funeral, after all.
Raul was watching him, worriedly trying to read his thoughts. ‘You told me never to give up. You said those words to me.’
Ben went on smoking. He thought about the girl he’d seen from the bus. Thought about the real reason he’d come back here. If he was honest with himself, maybe it hadn’t been just to offer moral support. Maybe he needed to do more than that, for his own sake as much as that of a stranger he’d met in a bar only that day.
He knew he couldn’t turn away, any more than he could have sat back and let Raul take a bad beating in there.
‘I don’t want you getting your hopes up,’ he said. ‘You have to be ready for the worst. The odds are slim.’
For the first time since Ben had met him, Raul Fuentes allowed himself a smile of relief. ‘One in a billion. But it wouldn’t be the first time those odds paid off, would it?’
Ben looked at him.
‘So you’ll help me?’ Raul said.
Ngari Prefecture
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