The Postcard Killers

    He put his index finger on the map and screwed his eyes shut. PostcardKillers, he thought, where the hell are you?

Chapter 123

    THE STOLEN MERCEDES WAS speeding over a bridge with glittering bright blue water on both sides.

    Small, wooded islands strewn with light gray rocks rose on the left and right.

    “Do I turn off up here?” Mac asked, leaning in toward the windshield.

    “What do you think?”

    Sylvia looked down at the road atlas and started to feel sick. She always got carsick when she tried to read on a car trip.

    “Left onto the two-seven-two,” she said grouchily. “Somewhere on the other side of this lake.”

    She fixed her eyes on the horizon, the point where the road disappeared in the distance, just as her mother had taught her.

    Mac slowed down.

    “There’s no need to be so miserable about it,” he said. “This was your idea, after all. I’m doing the best I can.”

    She swallowed and glanced at him, leaning close and giving him a quick kiss on the ear.

    “Sorry, darling,” she cooed. “You’re driving brilliantly.”

    She ran her hand lazily along the dashboard. There was no longer any reason to hide their fingerprints or DNA. On the contrary, it was time to let the world know their message.

    Soon they would be able to sit back and enjoy what they had achieved. Mac braked, signaled, and turned off to the left. They drove past fields with sheep and cattle, past thick groves of trees.

    “It’s kind of beautiful in its own way, don’t you think?” Sylvia said, putting the atlas away. She wasn’t planning to look at it again. They were almost there now.

    Mac didn’t answer.

    The landscape opened up around them as they drove through a small town. To the left were a few houses, to the right a farm. They passed a row of what was once laborers’ housing, a school, and an apartment block. Then they were out the other side. So much for civilization on this road trip. They drove on in silence.

    Mac was looking intently through the windshield.

    “What do you think about that one?” he said, pointing to a farm on the edge of the forest.

    Sylvia leaned forward to check the place out. “Could be. Maybe.”

    Mac slowed down, then stopped the car. “Yes or no?”

    The farmyard seemed quiet and deserted. All the windows and doors were shut. They could see an old Volvo behind a barn, a sedan that must have been the height of style in the early 1980s.

    “This’ll do,” Sylvia said, taking a quick look behind her. No cars in sight.

    “Quickly, now,” she said. “We need to be really careful from here on. No mistakes.”

Chapter 124

    MAC JUMPED OUT OF the car. Sylvia took her seat belt off and slid over to the driver’s seat.

    With a certain amount of effort she put the car in gear. She wasn’t used to driving cars with gears and a clutch. Then she sped off to the far side of the next bend.

    There she stopped.

    She wound down the window and listened over the sound of the engine. The trees sighed; some sort of animal was bleating in the forest. The sound of a car rose and fell in the distance, but nothing came past. She would have to wait here for a while.

    Her eyes settled on some sort of construction in the trees. Planks, a ladder. A tree house, or maybe a hunting post.

    Suddenly she was filled with a feeling of intense hatred and disgust. Imagine, there were people who lived the whole of their pointless lives in godforsaken places like this, working and drinking and fucking and building hunting posts without any awareness that there was anything else, that a higher level of human consciousness even existed. People out here abandoned their lives to meaningless banality, never bothering about brilliance, about aesthetics.

    She tore her eyes from the hunting post and concentrated on the rearview mirror.

    Mac was driving the red Volvo now. He didn’t slow down as he passed her, just carried on at the same carefully precise speed: not too slow, but not too fast either.

    She put the car in gear and followed at a safe distance. Careful. No mistakes.

    Now they had to find a good spot to dump the car from Stockholm, somewhere it would be found relatively quickly, but not immediately. She licked her thumb and pressed it against the wheel. A lovely print. Suck on that, dear police!

    It made her giddy to think of what they’d already achieved, and that was only the start.

    The next part could be even more impressive, their next act. She and Mac were maturing as artists.

Chapter 125

    THE WHOLE CASE WAS breaking open now - and quickly. The killers from Athens lived in Thessaloniki. They weren’t a couple, just two art student friends at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece. They were arrested on the campus, given away by the electronic trail left on their computers.