Page 12 of Nothing Watching

It was the similarities that they were going to have to pick up on now, Juliette knew. And not just the similarities between each of the women physically, but the other things they had in common. Where they had been, and who they had interacted with.

They had some idea about Hannah, thanks to their time at the hostel, but now it was time for them to go to the residence of Iris Davies, the exchange student, and find out what they could pick up from there.

“Thank you, Doc,” she said.

“I hope you can find this man. He seems to be killing on a fast interval,” the doctor observed, voicing the worry that Juliette had been trying to smother in her own mind.

“I hope so too,” she admitted.

They turned and left the scrupulously clean autopsy room, heading back to the lobby, where the two police officers were waiting with Sierra.

As Juliette looked at the young woman, Sierra raised her eyebrows.

Speaking in a low voice, she said, “I’ve been looking on Hannah’s social media, and I think I’ve found something. Do you want to take a look?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Guys, just because a girl is blond and walking on her own, doesn’t make her public property. You can’t just come up and talk to me or walk with me. AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND GERMAN!

Juliette read and reread the comment on Hannah’s social media, which Sierra had found, and which was just a few days old.

“She was definitely feeling threatened. Definitely some unwanted attention,” Juliette confirmed.

Below that comment, she read what Hannah’s friends back in America had said.

Shame, are you okay? Anyone giving you problems?one of them had asked.

Hannah had replied,No problems. Just a general rant!

Another had asked,Hey Han, you okay? You feeling safe? Want to come home?

She’d replied with a shrugging emoji.This place is safe. I mean, there are, like, police everywhere. I guess I’m just annoyed.

Juliette stared at this exchange, her mind racing ahead.

“It definitely doesn’t sound like she was in danger,” she concluded. “At least, she didn’t think so. But there are two possibilities here.”

Wyatt nodded. “I’m guessing the first one is that she did sense the killer watching her but he stayed out of sight so that she didn’t notice him?”

“Exactly,” Juliette said.

“And the second one?”

“It’s just a possibility, but if she was feeling annoyed by the level of general attention, especially if she was out in public doing the leafleting, that might be why she’d chosen to come back home along the back roads. And that would have made it easy for the killer to follow her and target her,” Juliette said sadly.

Wyatt grimaced. “Yeah. It would have played right into his hands.”

She reread the comments, wishing that Hannah had said more, but there clearly wasn’t more to say. She had not felt specifically threatened by any one person, and if she had, she hadn’t mentioned it. Not to her online friends or to her housemates at the backpackers lodge.

“Let’s go and speak to Iris’s connections,” she said. “Perhaps that will allow us to find a common thread.”

*

Half an hour later, Juliette was retracing the last walk that Iris had taken before encountering her killer.

Driving slowly, Fischer eased past the pillared frontage of the Arts University of Berlin. Juliette took in the imposing white marble statue of a goddess on its tall, square plinth outside the building’s entrance. If she remembered correctly from her time here, this was created in a Neo-Baroque style, and one of Berlin’s finest examples of sculpture.

It was amazing how the information came back to her as she gazed at the university’s facade, with the statue and its glorious trees in the front yard, where Iris had been doing a year of her Master’s degree in literature.

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