The woman bent over the toilet tank and picked up something with a pair of long tweezers. She got out a little Ziploc bag with her other hand, shook it open with a quick motion, and deposited what she had found into the bag.

“The skin is punctured here,” Schäfer said to Augustin, pointing with the end of a ballpoint pen to the sole of one of Ulrich’s feet.

Heloise couldn’t make herself look at Ulrich’s distorted face again and limited her observations to his torso on down.

“This is where the blood is coming from,” Schäfer continued. “If it was suicide, he would have to have been bleeding from his foot before he kicked the stool aside.”

“There’s no blood on the stool,” Augustin said.

“How the hell did he get up there?” Schäfer stood up and looked around the room. “There’s the stool, the toilet, the edge of the tub …” He pointed to the things as he spoke. “If he was bleeding from his foot when he came into the bathroom, there would be spatter or prints on the floor, and there should be blood on the furniture or whatever high point he jumped from.”

“There isn’t,” Augustin said.

“He certainly didn’t suffer the injury after he jumped.”

“Well, maybe he was thrashing around and kicking vigorously as the noose tightened around his neck.”

“Changed his mind at the last minute?”

“Yes, that always happens. The body automatically fights to survive.”

“And then—what? Then he hit something or other and hurt his foot before he lost consciousness?”

Lisa Augustin shrugged.

“Okay, what would that be, then?” Schäfer asked, looking around. “What could he have hit from here, given the distance from where he’s hanging?”

They both stood and looked around the bathroom for a moment.

Then Schäfer shook his head. “There isn’t anything he could have reached from here, not from that height.”

Heloise sensed a warm breath on the back of her neck, and when she turned around, she was hit by a scent she recognized as Pierre Cardin aftershave. It reminded her of standing in the bathroom of her childhood home and singing into the microphone-like glass bottle with the convex mirrored lid that had made her face look like it bulged out weirdly and her nose appear huge. Like the Snapchat filter of its day.

A friendly-looking man with a thick moustache, like Thomson and Thompson from the Tintin comics, stood behind her. He politely gestured that he would like to get by her. “May I?”

The man’s voice caused Schäfer to peek down the hall toward the door, where he noticed Heloise.

“Kaldan,” he barked. “Out!”

Heloise hurried away from the bathroom doorway and pretended she was going into the living room. But she stayed in the hallway, out of view but within earshot.