The Day After the First Murder: Friday, 19 August 2005.
8.57 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
She stood for a moment and looked up at the sky, screwing up her eyes against the morning sun that shone so optimistically on the Schanzenviertel. It was her first appointment of the day. She checked her watch and allowed herself a small, tight smile of satisfaction. 8.57 a.m. Three minutes early.
Above all else, Kristina Dreyer prided herself on never being late. In fact, as she was about many things in her life, Kristina was obsessive about her punctuality. It was part of her reinvention of herself: of how she defined the person she had become. Kristina Dreyer was someone who had known Chaos: she had known it in a way that most people could never begin to imagine. It had engulfed her. It had stripped her of her dignity, of her youth and, most of all, it had ripped away from her any sense of control over her life.
But now Kristina was back in charge. Where her life had previously been anarchy and tumult beyond her understanding, far less her control, it was now characterised by her absolute regulation of every day. Kristina Dreyer led her life with an uncompromising exactitude. Everything about her life was simple, clean and neat: her clothes, including her working clothes, her small, pristine apartment, her VW Golf, with the lettering Dreyer Cleaning on the door panels; and her life, which, like her apartment, she had chosen to share with no one.
Kristina’s uncompromising exactitude really came into its own in her work. She was supremely good at her job. She had built up a client list across Eimsbuttel that meant her week was full, and each customer trusted her for her thoroughness and honesty. And most of all, they trusted her for her total reliability.
Kristina cleaned well. She cleaned apartments, she cleaned villas. She cleaned homes large and small, for young and old, for German and foreigner. Every home, every task, was approached with the same scrupulously methodical approach. No detail was missed. No corner cut.
Kristina was thirty-six but looked considerably older. She was a short, thinnish woman. At one time in her life, less than a dozen years before but a lifetime away, her features had been fine; delicate. Now it merely seemed as if her skin was pulled too tight over the angular framework of her skull. Her high, sharp cheekbones jutted aggressively from her face and the skin that stretched across them was slightly reddened and rough. Her nose was small, but again, just below the ridge, bone and cartilage seemed to protest against being confined and hinted at an ancient break.
Three minutes early. She let the smile fade. Being too early was almost as bad as being too late. Not that her customer would be any the wiser: Herr Hauser would already be at work. But Kristina’s punctuality meant that the order of her universe was maintained; that no randomness would enter into it and spread, like cancer, to become sanity-and life-threatening Chaos. The way it had been before.
She turned the key and opened the door, pushing against the spring with her back as she swung her vacuum cleaner into the hallway.
The way Kristina thought of it was that she had given birth to herself. She had no children – and no man to father children – but she had created herself anew: given herself a new life and put aside all that had gone before. ‘Don’t let your history define who you are or who you can become,’ someone had once said to her when she had been at her lowest. It had been a turning point. Everything had changed. Everything that had been part of that old life, that dark life, had been abandoned. Dumped. Forgotten.
But now, as Kristina Dreyer stood, halfway across the threshold of the apartment that she was due to clean that bright Friday morning, history reached out from her old life and seized her by the throat in an unyielding grip.
That smell. The rich, nauseous, coppery odour of stale blood hanging in the air. She recognised it instantly and started to shake.
Death was here.
9.00 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
The anxiety was hidden deep. To the casual observer, there was nothing in her composure that hinted at anything other than confidence and absolute self-certainty. But Dr Minks was no casual observer.
His first patient of the day was Maria Klee, an elegant young woman in her thirties. She was very attractive, with blonde hair combed back from the broad, pale brow; her face was a little long and seemed to have stretched the nose a fraction of a centimetre too low and made it slightly too narrow and therefore robbed her of true beauty.
Maria sat opposite Dr Minks, her slender, expensively trousered legs crossed with her manicured fingers resting on her knee. She sat upright: perfectly composed, alert but relaxed. Her grey-blue eyes held the psychologist in a steady, assured, yet not defiant gaze. A look that seemed to say that she was expecting a question to be posed, or a proposition to be expounded, but that she was perfectly content to wait, patiently and politely, for the doctor to speak.
For the moment, he didn’t. Dr Friedrich Minks took his time as he examined the patient’s notes. Minks was of indeterminate middle age: a short, dumpy man with dull skin and thinning black hair; his eyes were dark and soft behind the panes of his spectacles. In contrast to his poised patient, Minks looked as if he had been dropped into his chair and that the impact had crumpled him further into his already crumpled suit. He looked up from his notes and took in the carefully constructed edifice of confidence that Maria Klee presented with her body language. Nearly thirty years of experience as a psychologist allowed him to see through the sham instantly.
‘You are very hard on yourself.’ Minks’s long-gone Swabian childhood still tugged on his vowels as he spoke. ‘And I have to say that is part of your problem. You know that, don’t you?’
Maria Klee’s cool grey eyes didn’t flicker, but she gave a small shrug. ‘What do you mean, Herr Doktor?’
‘You know exactly what I mean. You refuse to allow yourself to be afraid. It’s all part of these defences you’ve built around yourself.’ He leaned forward. ‘Fear is natural. After what happened to you, to feel fear is more than natural… it’s an essential part of the healing process. Just as you felt pain as your body healed, you have to feel fear to allow your mind to heal.’
‘I just want to get on with my life, Dr Minks. Without all this nonsense getting in the way.’
‘It’s not nonsense. It’s a stage of post-trauma recovery that you have to go through. But because you see fear as a failure and you fight against your natural reactions, you are stretching out this stage of recovery… and I’m worried it’s going to be stretched out indefinitely. And that is exactly why you are having these panic attacks. You have sublimated and repressed your natural fear and horror at what happened to you until it has burst through the surface in this distorted form.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Maria said. ‘I have never tried to deny what happened to me. What he… what he did to me.’
‘That’s not what I said. It’s not the event that you’re denying. You’re denying your right to experience fear, horror, or even outrage at what this man did to you. Or that he has yet to be held to account for his actions.’
‘I don’t have time for self-pity.’
Minks shook his head. ‘This has nothing to do with self-pity. This has everything to do with post-trauma stress and with the natural process of healing. Of resolution. Until you resolve this conflict within, you will never be able to connect properly with the world around you. With people.’
‘I deal with people every day.’ The patient’s grey-blue eyes now glinted with defiance. ‘Are you saying I’m compromising my effectiveness?’
‘Perhaps not now… but if we do not start laying ghosts to rest, it will, ultimately, manifest itself in how you conduct yourself professionally.’ Minks paused. ‘From what you’ve told me, you are increasingly showing signs of aphenphosmphobia. Considering the type of work you’re involved with, I would have thought it would present significant difficulties. Have you discussed this with your superiors?’
‘As you know, they arranged physical and psychological therapy.’ Maria angled her head back slightly and there was a defensive edge to her voice. ‘But no. I haven’t discussed these current… problems with them.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Minks, ‘you know my feelings on this matter. I feel that your employers should be aware of the difficulties you’re having.’ He paused. ‘You mentioned this man with whom you began a relationship. How is that going?’
‘Okay…’ There was no longer a defiant tone in Maria’s voice and some of the tense energy seemed to have seeped from her shoulders. ‘I am very fond of him. And he of me. But we haven’t… we haven’t been able to be intimate yet.’
‘Do you mean you have no physical contact… no embracing or kissing? Or do you mean sex?’
‘I mean sex. Or anything approaching it. We do touch. We do kiss… but then I start to feel…’ She drew her shoulders up, as if her body were being squeezed into a small space. ‘Then I get the panic attacks.’
‘Does he understand why you withdraw from him?’
‘A little. It’s not easy for a man – for anyone – to feel that their touch, their close proximity, is repellent. I’ve explained some of it to him and he’s promised to keep it to himself. I knew he would anyway. But he understands. He knows I’m seeing you… well, not you specifically… He knows I’m seeing someone about my problem.’
‘Good…’ Minks smiled again. ‘What about the dreams? Have you had any more?’
Maria nodded. Her defences were beginning to crumble and her posture sagged a little more. Her hands still rested on her knee but the manicured fingernails now gathered up a small clutch of expensive tailoring.
‘The same thing?’ asked Minks.
‘Yes.’
Dr Minks leaned forward in his chair. ‘We need to go back there. I need to visit your dream with you. You understand that, don’t you?’
‘Again?’
‘Yes,’ said Minks. ‘Again.’ He gestured for her to relax into her seat.
‘We’re going back to your dream. Back to where you see your attacker again. I’m going to start counting, now. We’re going back, Maria… one… two… three…’
9.00 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina left the door open, leaning the vacuum cleaner and her cleaning tray as checks against the door spring; leaving her escape route clear. Old instincts started to rouse themselves from somewhere deep within her, awoken by the scent of fresh death in the air. She became aware of a rhythmic rushing noise and realised that it was the sound of her pulse in her ears. She reached down and picked up a spray bottle of cleaning fluid from her tray, gripping it tight in her trembling hand, like a gun.
‘Herr Hauser?’ She called into the hall, into the quiet rooms beyond. She strained to hear any sound, any movement. Any sign of something living within the apartment. She gave a jump as a car drove past on the street outside, the thudding bass of raucous American dance music synchronising with the pulsating rush of blood in her ears. The apartment remained silent.
Kristina edged down the hall towards the lounge, the hand with the cleaning-fluid bottle held out hesitantly before her, the other offering uncertain support, tracing its way along the bookshelves that lined the hallway wall. As she did so, Kristina couldn’t help her trembling fingers registering a hint of dust on a shelf needing special attention.
She felt her anxiety ease as she stepped into the bright lounge and found nothing untoward, other than that Herr Hauser had left it particularly untidy: a whisky bottle and half-drained glass sat on the table beside the armchair; some books and magazines lay scattered on the sofa. Kristina had always marvelled that someone who was always so concerned about the environment in general could be so careless of his personal surroundings. Kristina Dreyer, the assiduous cleaner of other people’s homes, swept the room with her gaze, registering and mentally timetabling the work that needed doing. But a former Kristina, a past-tense Kristina, screamed at her from deep within that there was death here: its wraith smell hanging in the stuffy air of the apartment.
She stepped back out into the hall. She stopped in her tracks, as if the energy from even the slightest movement had to be diverted to her hearing. A sound. From the bedroom. Something tapping. Someone tapping. She moved towards the bedroom door. She called out ‘Herr Hauser’ once more and paused. No answer, except the ominous sound from within the bedroom. Her grip tightened on the cleaning-fluid bottle and she threw open the door so hard that it banged against the wall and swung back, slamming shut again in her face. Again she pushed it open, more carefully this time. The bedroom was large and bright, with off-white walls and a polished wooden floor. The window was open slightly and a breeze stirred the vertical blinds, which tapped rhythmically against the window. Kristina let go the breath she did not know she had been holding with a half-laugh, half-sigh of relief. But still the anxiety didn’t fully leave her, and pulled her back out into the hall.
The apartment’s hall was L-shaped. Kristina moved with slightly more confidence now and made her way down to where the hall took a right turn and led to a second bedroom and the bathroom. As she turned the corner, she noticed that the second bedroom’s door was open, casting the bright sunlight from the windows onto the bathroom door, which was closed. Kristina froze.
There was something nailed to the bathroom door. She felt a nauseous surge of terror. It was some kind of animal pelt. A small animal, but Kristina couldn’t guess what kind. The fur was wet and matted and bright red. Unnaturally red. It was as if the pelt had been freshly skinned and blood ran down the white painted surface of the door.
She edged her way towards the door, her breaths coming short and fast, the searchlight of her gaze locked on the oozing rawhide.
She stopped half a metre from the door and stared at the pelt, trying to make sense of it. Her hand reached out, as if to touch it, her fingers stopping just short of the glossy red fur.
It took a time too brief to be measured for her brain to analyse what her eyes were seeing and to make sense of it. The thought was a simple one. A simple statement of fact. But it ripped into Kristina and in that instant shredded her ordered world. She heard an inhuman shriek of terror reverberate along the hall and tumble out through the still-open front door. Somehow, as the fragile fabric of Kristina Dreyer’s world was rent asunder, she realised that the shriek was hers.
So much terror. So many long-forbidden memories flooding back. All from a single realisation.
What she was looking at was not fur.
9.10 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
Maria stood in the heart of the dreamscape field. As it always was in her dream, reality was exaggerated. The moon that hung in the sky was over-large and over-bright, like a stage light. The grasses caressing her naked legs and swirling silently to the command of an unheard breeze moved too sinuously. There was no sound. There were no odours. For the moment, Maria’s world was stripped down to two senses: sight and sensation. She looked out across the field. The silence was broken by a soft voice with a hint of a Swabian accent. A voice that belonged somewhere other than the world she now stood in.
‘Where are you now, Maria?’
‘I’m there. I’m in the field.’
‘Is it the same field and the same night?’ the spirit voice of the psychologist asked.
‘No… no, it’s not. I mean it is… but everything is different. It’s larger. Wider. It’s like the same place but a different universe. A different time.’ Far in the distance she could see a galleon – its great white sails rippled insubstantially in a weak wind as it sailed towards Hamburg. It seemed to drift through the swirling grass instead of the water. ‘I see a ship. An old-fashioned sailing ship. It’s going away from me.’
‘What else?’
She turned and looked in another direction. A broken building, like a ruined castle, sat small and dark at the edge of the field, as if at the edge of the world. A cold, harsh light seemed to shine from one of the windows.
‘I see a castle, where the disused barn should be. But I am so far away from it. Too far away from it.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘No. No, I am not afraid.’
‘What else do you see?’
Maria turned around and gave a small jump. He had been there, behind her, all the time. And because she had dreamed the same dream so many times before she had known he was going to be there, yet she had still given a start when she found herself face to face with him again. But, as in all her dreams before, she felt none of the raw, stark fear that his face stimulated in her waking hours: whenever she saw it in a photograph, or whenever it appeared suddenly and unbidden from within the dark hall of memory where she tried to keep it locked up.
He was tall and his heavy shoulders were encased in an exotic armour and draped in a black cloak. He removed his ornate helmet. His face was built of sharp Slavic angles and possessed a callous handsomeness. His eyes were a piercing, bright and dreadfully cold emerald-green and they burned into hers. He smiled at her: a lover’s smile, but the eyes stayed cold. He stood close to her. So close that she could feel his chill breath on her.
‘He is here,’ she said, looking into the green eyes but speaking to a doctor in another dimension.
‘I am here,’ said the cruelly handsome Slav.
‘Are you afraid?’ Minks’s voice, the voice from another dimension, suddenly became fainter. Further away.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Now I am afraid. But I like this fear.’
‘Do you feel anything other than fear?’ asked Minks, but his voice had faded almost beyond hearing. Maria felt her fear change. Sharpen.
‘Your voice is becoming faint,’ she said. ‘I can hardly hear you. Why is your voice fainter?’
Minks replied, but his voice had now drifted so far away and she couldn’t make out his answer.
‘Why can’t I hear you?’ Now there was a new magnitude to her fear. It burned furnace raw and deep. ‘Why can’t I hear you?’ She screamed into the dark sky with its too-big moon.
Vasyl Vitrenko leaned forward, tilting down to kiss her on the forehead. His lips were dry, cold. ‘Because you’ve got it wrong, Maria.’ His voice was heavy with an Eastern European accent. ‘Dr Minks isn’t there. This isn’t one of your hypnotherapy sessions. This is real.’ He reached beneath his billowing black cloak. ‘This is no dream. And there’s no one here except you and me. Alone.’
Maria wanted to scream but couldn’t. Instead she stared as if hypnotised at the evil moonlight gleam on Vasyl Vitrenko’s long, broad-bladed knife.
9.10 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina had never seen a human scalp before, but she knew with absolute certainty that that was exactly what she was looking at. To start with, it had been the colour of the hair that had prevented her identifying it as something human. Red. Unnaturally red.
But there was now no doubt in her mind that this was human hair. Glistening wet hair. And skin. A large ragged disc of it. It had been nailed to the bathroom door with three panel pins. The top of it had folded over, revealing a little of the puckered bloody underside where the skin had been sliced and pulled away from the skull beneath. A long ‘Y’ shape of glistening red streamed from it and down the wooden bathroom door.
Blood.
Kristina shook her head. No. Not again. She had seen too much blood in her life. No more. Not now. Not when she had just got her life back. This was so unfair.
She leaned forward again and felt her legs shudder, as if they were struggling to support the weight of her body. Yes, there was blood, but there was too much of it to be blood alone. And too vivid a red. The same vivid red as the sodden, matted hair.
Her pulse thudded in her ears, a tempo that increased as a simple but obvious thought hit her. Whose hair?
Kristina reached out with trembling fingers and pressed them against an area of the door’s wooden surface that was not streaked with glistering red.
‘Herr Hauser…?’ Her voice was high and tremulous.
She pushed and the door of the bathroom swung open.
9.12 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
Vitrenko smiled at Maria. He looped his arm around her back and pressed her close to him, as if they were about to dance. She could feel the unyielding solidity of his body tight against hers.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said, and meant it. Her terror subsided. He eased his body from hers but still held her firm. He lifted the knife and ran its keen edge over her shoulders, her breast and let it rest just below her chest, its cold sharp tip pressing lightly into the soft space just below her sternum.
‘Do you want me to do it?’ he asked. ‘Again?’
‘Yes. I want you to do it again.’ She looked into the green eyes that still shone cold and cruel.
There was a crash of thunder. Then another. She felt the knife-point pressure on her abdomen increase, and the keen pain as the tip pierced her skin. There were another two loud claps of thunder and the world around her dissolved into darkness.
Maria opened her eyes and found herself looking across at Dr Minks. He held his hands together before him as if he had been clapping. The thunder that had brought her back. She straightened herself up and looked around his office, as if reassuring herself that she was back in reality.
‘You closed me out, Maria,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want me there.’
‘He took control,’ she said, and coughed when she realised that her voice was shaking.
‘No, he didn’t,’ said Dr Minks. ‘You took control. He doesn’t exist in your dreams. You recreate him. You control his words and actions. It was your will that sought to exclude me.’ He paused and crumpled back into his chair, again examining his notes, but the frown did not fade from his brow. ‘You saw the same landmarks and motifs again?’
‘Yes. The galleon where the harbour-police patrol boat was that night and the castle where the old barn was. What I don’t understand is why it is all so elaborate in the dream. Why is he dressed in armour? And why is everything changed into some kind of historical counterpart?’
‘I don’t know. It could be that you are trying, in your mind, to place what happened that night into the past… A distant past: like a previous life, almost. Do you feel like it’s the same night as you were stabbed?’
‘Yes and no. It’s like the same night, but in another dimension or universe or something. Like you said, as if it were a completely different time, as well.’
‘And, in this scenario, you let your attacker come close to you? You permit him to have close personal contact?’
‘That’s the thing I can never understand,’ said Maria. ‘Why do I allow him to touch me, when I can’t let anyone else touch me?’
‘Because he is the origin of your trauma. The source of your fear. Without this man, you would have no post-traumatic stress, no aphenphosmphobia, no panic attacks.’ Minks took out a thick leather-bound pad and started to scribble on it. He ripped a page out and handed it to Maria. ‘I want you to take these. I feel we have too big a mountain to climb with therapy alone.’
‘Drugs?’ Maria did not reach to take the prescription. ‘What is it?’
‘Propanolol. A beta blocker. The same sort of thing that I’d prescribe if you had high blood pressure. It’s a very mild dose and I only want you to take one eighty-milligram tablet on, well, difficult days. You can make it a hundred and sixty milligrams if it’s really bad. You don’t suffer from asthma or any respiratory problems, do you?’
Maria shook her head. ‘What does it do?’
‘It is a noradrenalin inhibitor. It restricts the chemicals that your body generates when you’re afraid. Or angry.’ Dr Minks thrust the prescription in Maria’s direction and she took it from him.
‘Will it affect my performance at work?’
Minks smiled and shook his head. ‘No, it shouldn’t do. Some people feel tired or lethargic with it, but not in the same way it would if I were to give you Valium. This might slow you down a little, but otherwise you should feel no ill effects. And, as I said, I only want you to take it when you really feel you need to.’
Dr Minks stood up and shook Maria’s hand. She noticed that the psychologist’s palm was cool and fleshy. And rather moist. She pulled her hand away a little too quickly.
After confirming the following week’s appointment with Minks’s secretary, Maria made her way to the elevator. As she did so she paused to take two things from her shoulder bag. The first was a handkerchief with which she wiped vigorously at the hand that Minks had shaken. The second was her police service-issue SIG-Sauer nine-millimetre automatic, sheathed in its clip-on holster, which she attached to the belt of her trousers before pressing the button to summon the lift.
9.12 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina Dreyer stood framed in the bathroom doorway. She opened her mouth to scream, but her fear strangled the sound in her throat. For four years, twice a week, Kristina had cleaned Herr Hauser’s bathroom until it shone scalpel-bright. She had wiped every surface, swept every corner, polished every tap and fitting. It was a space so familiar to her that she could have navigated it with her eyes closed.
But not today. Today it was an unknown hell.
The bathroom was large and bright. A tall curtainless window, its lower half frosted glass, looked out onto the small square courtyard behind the apartment. At this time of morning when the sun was angled right, it flooded the bathroom with light. For some, the decor would have been too clinical. But not for Kristina, for whom nothing could be too clean; too sterile. The entire room was lined with ceramic tiles: large and pale sky-blue on the floor; smaller and bright white on the walls. Herr Hauser’s bathroom had always been a delight to clean because the light sought out each corner and the tiles always responded to Kristina’s abstergent touch with a keen gleam.
There was a great rainbow-shaped smear of blood that arced across the pale blue floor tiles. At its end, Herr Hauser sat slumped where he had been dragged, between the toilet and the side of the bath. Bright blood glistened against the gleaming white porcelain of the toilet bowl. Hauser glowered across the bathroom at Kristina, his mouth gaped wide, with an expression that could have been almost surprise were it not for the way his brow hooded his eyes in a disapproving frown. There was silence, broken only by a dripping tap beating a slow tattoo on the bath’s enamel. Again something gurgled and struggled to free itself from Kristina’s constricted throat: something between a cry and a retch.
Hauser’s face was streaked with gouts of bright viscous blood. Someone had sliced a line, mostly straight but in places ragged, across his forehead about five or six centimetres above his eyebrows. The cut had been deep. To the bone. And it swept around the temples and above the ears. The skin, flesh and hair above the slash had been ripped from Hauser’s head and the blood-mottled dome of his skull was exposed. Hauser’s gore-smeared face and the exposed skull above looked to Kristina like some horrific parody of a boiled egg rammed into an eggcup. Even more blood had soaked into Hauser’s shirt and trousers, and Kristina saw that a second cut ran across his throat and neck. She dropped the cleaning-fluid spray onto the floor and leaned her shoulder against the wall. Suddenly she felt all the strength ebb from her legs and she slid down the wall, her cheek sliding against the chill kiss of the porcelain tiles. She was now slumped in the corner by the door, mirroring the posture of her dead client. She started to sob.
There was so much to clean. So much to clean.
9.15 a.m. Polizei Hamburg Police Headquarters, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
The new headquarters of the Hamburg police – the Police Presidium – lay to the north of Winterhuder Stadtpark city park. It never took Jan Fabel long to drive to Alsterdorf from his Poseldorf apartment, but today was his first day back from four days’ leave. Just a couple of days before he had stood with Susanne on the wide, curving beach at List, on the North Sea island of Sylt. A couple of days and a lifetime away.
Driving through the dapples of sunlight that danced between the trees of the Stadtpark, Fabel felt in no hurry to step back into the reality of his life as head of a murder squad. But as he listened to his car radio, each news report seemed to sink into him like lead, anchoring him further into his accustomed world, while the memory of a long scythe of golden sand under a vast, bright sky drifted further from him.
Fabel caught the end of a report about the forthcoming general election: the conservative CDU/CSU coalition led by Angela Merkel had increased its already dramatic lead in the polls. It looked like Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s gamble of calling an early election was not going to pay off. A commentator discussed Frau Merkel’s change of style and appearance: apparently she had taken Hillary Clinton as a model for her hairstyle. Fabel sighed as he listened to how the various party leaders ‘positioned’ themselves with the electorate: it seemed to him that German politics were no longer about firm convictions or political ideals, but about individuals. Like the British and Americans before them, Germans were beginning to value style over substance; personalities over policies.
While he drove through the sunlit park, Fabel’s attention perked up as he listened while two of those personalities clashed. Hans Schreiber, the Social Democrat First Mayor of Hamburg, was engaged in an ill-tempered debate with Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, the city’s Environment Minister – who was a member of the Bundnis 90/Die Grunen political party. The same Muller-Voigt that Fabel and Susanne had seen in Lex’s restaurant on Sylt. The SPD and the Greens were part of Germany’s ruling coalition, and the political complexion of Hamburg’s city government was also red-green, but there was little evidence in the recorded exchange that Muller-Voigt was, indeed, a Schreiber-appointed minister. The pre-general election cracks in Germany’s political structures were beginning to show. The animosity between the two men over the past month or so had been well documented: Muller-Voigt had referred to Schreiber’s wife, Karin, as ‘Lady Macbeth’ in reference to her ruthless ambitions for her husband; specifically an ambition that he become Federal Chancellor of Germany. Fabel knew Schreiber – knew him better than Schreiber would have liked – and did not find it difficult to believe that he fully shared his wife’s ambitions.
Fabel stopped for a red signal at the traffic lights in Winterhuder Stadtpark. He watched idly as a Lycra-clad cyclist crossed in front of him, then turned to see that the car that had pulled up next to him was being driven by a woman in her thirties. She berated the two children in the rear seat for some misbehaviour or other, conducting her wrath through the rear-view mirror, her mouth moving animatedly, her anger mute behind the closed car windows. Beyond the annoyed mother’s car, a city parks employee brushed litter from the path that ran between towering trees up to the vast dome-capped tower of the Winterhuder Wasserturm.
The everyday routine of a city. Small lives with small worries about small things. People who did not deal with death as their day-to-day business.
The news switched to the latest from London, which had recently been rocked by suicide bombings. A second campaign of attacks had failed, most likely because of faulty detonators. Fabel tried to reassure himself that Hamburg was far away from such troubles. That it was another land. The terrorism that had rocked Germany in the 1970s and 1980s had passed into history, roughly at the same time as the Wall had come down. But there was a saying in Germany about Hamburg: If it rains in London, they put up their umbrellas in Hamburg. It was a sentiment that the half-British Fabel had always liked, that had given him a sense of place, of belonging; but today it gave him no cheer. Today, nowhere was safe.
Even in Hamburg, terrorism and its consequences were insidiously encroaching on people’s daily lives. Just driving into Hamburg city centre from his flat in Poseldorf had been changed for Fabel since the atrocities of 11 September in the USA. The American Consulate in Hamburg sat on the shore of the Alster and the shore-front road had been permanently sealed off after the attacks, meaning that Fabel had had to change the route to work he had taken every day since moving to Poseldorf.
The lights changed and the driver behind him tooted his horn, snapping Fabel out of his reverie. He turned up towards the Presidium.
The next item on the radio news was, ironically, about the protests over the closure of the British General Consulate in Hamburg. Germany’s most Anglophile city was stung by the suggestion. Hamburg also prided itself on being, after New York, the city with the most consulates in the world. But the ‘War on Terror’ was changing how states connected with each other. As Fabel pulled up in the secure car park of the Presidium, the future took a shadowy and vague form in his mind and darkened his post-leave mood even more.
Hamburg’s police headquarters – the Police Presidium – was less than five years old and still had the look and feel of a new building, like a newly tailored coat yet to yield to the shape of its wearer. The architectural concept behind the Presidium was to recreate the ‘Polizei Stern’, the police star, in building form, with the five-storey Presidium radiating outward towards each compass point from an unroofed circular atrium.
The Murder Commission – the Polizei Hamburg’s homicide squad – was on the third floor. As he emerged from the lift, Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped, middle-aged man with a tree-stump build. He had a file tucked under one arm and was carrying a coffee in his free hand. His heavy features broke into a smile as he saw Fabel.
‘Hi, Chef, how was your break?’
‘Too short, Werner,’ said Fabel and he shook hands with Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer. Werner had worked with Fabel longer, and more closely, than anyone else in the Murder Commission. His intimidating physical presence was actually totally at odds with his approach to police work. Werner was an almost obsessively methodical processor of evidence whose attention to detail had been the key factor in solving more than a few difficult cases. He was also Fabel’s close friend.
‘You should have taken another day,’ said Werner. ‘Stretched it over another weekend.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘I only have a few days’ leave left and I want to take another long weekend on Sylt in a couple of months. My brother’s birthday.’ The two men made their way along the curving corridor that followed, like all the main corridors of the Presidium, the circle of the central atrium. ‘Anyway, it’s been pretty quiet recently. Makes me nervous. I feel we’re overdue a big case. What’s been happening?’
‘Certainly nothing we had to bother you with,’ said Werner. ‘Maria got the Olga X case tied up, and there’s been a brawl killing in St Pauli, but other than that not much. I’ve set up a team meeting to brief you.’
The team assembled in the Murder Commission’s main meeting room just before noon. Fabel and Werner were joined by Senior Criminal Commissar Maria Klee: a tall, elegant woman in her thirties. She had a look that one would not automatically associate with a police officer. Her blonde hair was expensively cut and her restrained, tasteful grey suit and cream blouse gave her more the look of a corporate lawyer. Maria shared the second line of command under Fabel with Werner Meyer. Over the last year and a half, Werner and Maria had begun to jell as colleagues, but only after the team had nearly lost her in the same operation that had left another of the Murder Commission’s team dead.
There were two younger officers already at the table when Fabel arrived. Criminal Commissars Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann were both proteges of Fabel’s. He had picked each for their very different styles and attitudes. It was Fabel’s management style to team up opposites: where others would see the potential for strife, Fabel would see the opportunity for a balance of complementary qualities. Anna and Henk were still finding that balance: it had been Anna’s former partner, Paul Lindemann, who had been killed. And he had died trying to save her life.
Anna Wolff looked even less like a police officer than Maria Klee, but in a completely different way. She was more youthful-looking than her twenty-eight years, and she habitually dressed in jeans and an oversized leather jacket. Her pretty face was topped by black hair cut short and spiky, and her large dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were always emphasised by dark mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. It would have been much easier to imagine Anna working in a hair salon rather than as a Murder Commission detective. But Anna Wolff was tough. She came from a family of Holocaust survivors and had served in the Israeli army before returning to her native Hamburg. In fact, Anna was probably the toughest member of Fabel’s team: intelligent, fiercely determined but impulsive.
Henk Hermann, Anna’s partner, could not have contrasted more with her. He was a tall, lanky man with a pale complexion and a perpetually earnest expression. Just as Anna could not have looked less like a police officer, Henk could not have looked more like one. The same could also have been said about Paul Lindemann, and Fabel knew that, initially, the physical similarity between Henk and his dead predecessor had taken the other members of the team aback.
Fabel looked around the table. It always struck him as odd just how different this disparate group of people were. An unlikely family. Very different individuals who had somehow stumbled into a very peculiar profession and into an unspoken dependence on each other.
Werner led Fabel through the current caseload. While he had been on leave, there had only been one murder: a drunken Saturday-night fight outside a nightclub in St Pauli had ended with a twenty-one-year-old haemorrhaging to death in the street. Werner handed over to Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann, who summarised the case and the progress to date. It was the type of murder that made up ninety per cent of the Murder Commission’s workload. Depressingly simple and straightforward: a moment of senseless rage, usually fuelled by drink, leaving one life lost and another in ruins.
‘Do we have anything else on the books?’ Fabel asked.
‘Just tying up the loose ends on the Olga X case.’ Maria flipped back through a few pages in her notebook. Olga X not only had no surname, her first name was unlikely to have been Olga. But the team had felt the need to give her some kind of identity. No one knew for sure where Olga had come from, but it was certainly somewhere in Eastern Europe. She had been working as a prostitute and had been beaten and strangled to death by a customer: a fat, balding thirty-nine-year-old insurance clerk called Thomas Wiesehan from Heimfeld with a wife and three children and no criminal record of any kind.
Dr Moller, the pathologist, had estimated Olga’s age to have been between eighteen and twenty.
Fabel looked puzzled. ‘But Werner told me that the Olga X case is all done and dusted, Maria. We have a full admission of guilt and unshakeable forensics to back it up. What “loose ends” do you have to tie up?’
‘Well, none really on the murder itself. It’s just I get the feeling there’s a people-trafficking connection to this. Some poor kid from Russia or God knows where being trapped into a prostitution career with promises of a proper job and a place in the West. Olga was a victim of slavery before she became a victim of murder. Wiesehan killed her all right… but some gang boss put her there for him to kill.’
Fabel examined Maria closely. She reflected his gaze with her frank, unreadable blue-grey eyes. It was not like Maria to invest herself so deeply in a case: Anna, yes; even Fabel himself. But not Maria. Maria’s efficiency as a detective had always been typified by her cool, professional, detached approach.
‘I understand how you feel,’ Fabel sighed. ‘I really do. But that’s not our concern. We had a murder to solve and we’ve solved it. I’m not saying that we just leave it there. Pass everything you’ve got on to Vice. And a copy to LKA Six.’ Fabel referred to the Polizei Hamburg’s newly re-formed, ninety-officer-strong State Crime Bureau 6 unit, the so-called Super LKA, that had been set up specifically to take on organised crime.
Maria shrugged. There was nothing to read in her pale blue-grey eyes. ‘Okay, Chef.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Fabel.
The phone rang before anyone had a chance to answer. Werner picked up the receiver and made confirming noises as he scribbled notes on a pad.
‘Right on cue,’ said Werner as he hung up. ‘A body’s been uncovered at an archaeological dig, down by the Speicherstadt.’
‘Ancient?’
‘That’s what they’re trying to establish, but Holger Brauner and his team are on their way.’ Werner referred to the forensics-squad leader. ‘Whom shall I pass this to, Chef?’
Fabel held out an open hand across the table. ‘Give it to me. You guys have enough on, tidying up this brawl killing.’ Fabel took the pad and wrote the details down in his notebook. He stood up and took his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘And I could do with some fresh air.’
Noon: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina knew that she was face to face again with Chaos. She had lived with it for years. It had taken her to the brink of madness once before and she had cut it out of her life: an excision that had been as traumatic and as painful as if she had carved it out in flesh from her own body.
Now Chaos stormed and raged around her. Some distant sea wall had been breached and a tidal wave of turmoil had been silently hurtling towards her, waiting to collide with her the moment she opened the door to Herr Hauser’s apartment. In that moment she knew that she faced the greatest struggle of her life: that she must defeat Chaos anew.
It was midday now. She had worked at the bathroom all morning. Once more the porcelain shone sterile and cold; the gleam had been restored to the floor. Herr Hauser now lay in the bath. Kristina had fought Chaos with Method. She had refused to let her terror blind her and she had shaped a strategy for restoring the bathroom to order.
She had begun by hoisting Herr Hauser into the bath, to contain the mess in one area. As she had struggled with him, his exposed skull, cold and clammy with blood and ribbons of remaining tissue, had pressed against her cheek. Kristina had had to run to the toilet bowl to vomit, had taken a few moments to recompose herself, and then had returned to her task. She had stripped Herr Hauser and placed his blood-soaked garments into a plastic bin bag. Then she had taken the shower head down from its cradle and rinsed the blood from him by hand. She had placed a second black plastic bin bag over his head and neck, binding it tight with some parcel tape which she’d found in one of Herr Hauser’s drawers, and had sealed the bag around his shoulders. Then she had carefully removed the shower curtain from its rail and wrapped Herr Hauser’s body in it, again taking some parcel tape and binding the improvised shroud tight.
Kristina had once more been faced with lifting Hauser’s dead weight. She had lugged the body out of the bath and had laid it on the clean floor, and had then set about sanitising the bath. Herr Hauser had always insisted that Kristina use environmentally friendly cleaning materials: vinegar to clean the toilet, that kind of thing. It had made Kristina’s job that much harder, but she hadn’t minded. She loved scrubbing, scouring and polishing. But this task was too much. She had used bleach on the bath, toilet and sink and had washed the floor and wall tiles with a bleach solution. Then she had gone over every surface with an antibacterial spray.
Now she was done. She had not defeated Chaos. She knew this. She had merely deflected it. She had been here the whole morning: it meant that she had let down the other customer who was scheduled in her diary for before lunch on Fridays. It would not even have been so bad if she had only been late for them: she simply hadn’t turned up. It would have a domino effect on an entire day’s clients – then tomorrow’s, and then a whole week’s. A reputation for punctuality and reliability that it had taken four years to build up was gone in four hours. Her cellphone had started to ring just after her next appointment was due and Kristina had been forced to switch it off so that she could concentrate on her task.
Kristina surveyed the bathroom. At least here order had been restored. With the exception of the carefully polythene-shrouded Herr Hauser, who lay untidily on the floor by the tub, the bathroom looked cleaner and shone brighter than ever.
She leaned back against the wall, a cleaning cloth hanging in her rubber-gloved hand, and allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. It was then that she became aware of someone standing behind her in the bathroom doorway. She turned suddenly and they both gave a start. A tall, slim, dark-haired young man with delicate features and large bewildered blue eyes stared at Kristina, then saw the shower-curtain mummy by the bath. His face blanched grey-white and he made a startled noise before turning and running down the hall towards the door.
Kristina gazed blankly at the now empty doorway for a moment before turning back to the bathroom.
There was a corner she had perhaps missed.
Noon: HafenCity site, by the Speicherstadt, Hamburg
If there was any landscape that defined the city of Hamburg for Fabel, it was this one.
As he drove down Mattenwiete and across the Holzbrucke bridge towards the Elbe, the horizon opened up ahead of him and the elaborate spires and gables of the Speicherstadt pierced a stretched silk sky of unbroken blue.
Speicherstadt means ‘Warehouse City’ and that was exactly what it was: towering ornate red-brick warehouses, row after row, interlaced with cobbled streets and canals, dominating the city’s waterfront. These beautiful nineteenth-century buildings had been the lungs that had breathed life into Hamburg commerce.
For Fabel, there was something about the architecture of the Speicherstadt that summed up his adopted city for him. The architecture was ornate and confident, but always practical and restrained. It was how Germany’s richest city and its people displayed wealth and success: clearly, but with decorum. The Speicherstadt was also a symbol of Hamburg’s independence and its special status as a city-state within Germany. An independence that had, at various times in Hamburg’s history, been more than a little precarious. The statues of Hammonia and Europa, the personifications of Hamburg and Europe as goddesses, stood guard on the stanchions of Brooksbrucke bridge and looked down on Fabel as he crossed into the Speicherstadt.
Until recently the Speicherstadt had been the world’s biggest bonded area, with customs posts at every point of entry. Fabel passed the old customs office to his right, which had found a new life as a trendy coffee shop. Across from the coffee shop, on the other side of the cobbled Kehrwieder Brook, the first warehouse in the Speicherstadt had also found a new role: a snaking queue of tourists and locals were waiting to be admitted to the ‘Hamburg Dungeon’, an idea that Hamburg, along with many other ideas, had imported from Britain. Fabel could never understand the need that others felt to be made afraid, to experience ersatz horrors, when he felt he had had a bellyful of the real thing.
Fabel turned left into Kehrwieder Brook before taking Kibbelsteg, which dissected the Speicherstadt in a straight, unbroken line, and the vast brick warehouses on either side, trimmed and capped with ornate verdigris-tinged bronze, glowed red in the midday sun. Here all kinds of real trades were still carried out. Cradles, suspended from the jutting winches at the tops of the warehouses, hoisted up deep stacks of oriental carpets and, as he passed the Kaffeerosterei, the warm air filled with the Speicherstadt’s trade-mark smell, the rich odour from the coffee roasters preparing the beans for storage.
Fabel drove on and eventually the nineteenth century surrendered to the twenty-first, as he passed under an arching forest of perpetually moving cranes that marked Germany’s biggest building site. Hamburg’s HafenCity.
Hamburg had always been a city of opportunists: of traders and entrepreneurs. The city’s fiercely independent character was founded on its ability to look beyond its own horizons and connect with the wider world. In the Middle Ages, Hamburg’s politicians had always been merchants, businessmen. And, invariably, they would put trade before politics. Nothing had changed.
The HafenCity was a big idea, just as the Speicherstadt had been before it. A bold vision. It would take up to twenty years to complete. One row at a time, the new cathedrals of commerce, all steel and glass and youthful energy, were taking their serried places behind the old: the stately red-brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt. Two visions, born in separate centuries, fused by the heat of the same ambition: to make Hamburg Europe’s leading trading port. The HafenCity was being completed in planned stages. A row of buildings would be built all at the one time, combining luxury apartments with sleek, electronic-age office blocks; once complete, the next row would be started. Yet as high-speed internet connections were plumbed into each shining new building, the smell of the roasting coffee beans would drift in, reminding the brave new twenty-first century world that the old Speicherstadt was still very much part of the city’s life.
Hamburg liked to share its vision of the future, and a thirteen-metre-high observation platform, in the shape of an elevated ship’s bridge, and with the name, in English, HafenCity VIEWPOINT emblazoned against its terracotta-coloured flank, had been erected down by the edge of the Elbe. The viewing platform allowed visitors a 360-degree vista of the future. In one direction they could see where the new Opera House was to be built, its high-tech roof billowing like waves or sails, on top of the old Kaispeicher A storage quay. In the other, their view would arc around and past the new luxury-liner terminal to where the Elbe took a sweep and was spanned by the arched ironwork bridges that connected Hamburg to Harburg. All around the viewing tower the land had been cleared and levelled and lay naked, awaiting its shining new vestments.
Fabel parked on the uneven improvised car park, two hundred metres or so from the viewing platform. Two members of the Polizei Hamburg’s uniformed branch were already at the site and had done their usual thing of cordoning off the scene. In this case, their efforts seemed redundant: archaeology is forensic in its methodology, and the dig site had already been ringed off and divided into quadrants. As Fabel made his way across to the site he saw the familiar figure of Holger Brauner, the forensics chief. Brauner was dressed in his white coveralls and blue shoe-covers, but had his hood down and was not wearing his mask. He was engaged in conversation with a younger, taller man with long dark hair, swept back from his face and tied in a ponytail. The younger man’s dull green T-shirt and his slightly darker green cargo pants hung loosely on his angular frame. They both turned in Fabel’s direction as he approached.
‘Jan…’ Holger Brauner beamed at Fabel. ‘This is Herr Dr Severts, from the Universitat Hamburg’s archaeology department. He’s in charge of the dig. Dr Severts, this is Principal Chief Commissar Fabel from the Murder Commission.’
Fabel shook Severts’s hand. It felt callused and rough, as if the sand and earth in which Severts worked had become ingrained in the skin of his palm. It fitted with the colouring of his clothing; it was as if Severts was himself something of the earth.
‘Dr Severts and I were just discussing how close our disciplines are. In fact, I was explaining that my deputy, Frank Grueber, would have been even better suited to this case. He trained as an archaeologist himself before turning to forensics.’
‘Grueber?’ said Fabel. ‘I had no idea he’d been an archaeologist.’ Frank Grueber had only been a member of Brauner’s team for a little over a year, but Fabel could already see why Brauner had picked him as his deputy: Grueber had shown the same ability as Brauner at a crime scene to read both detail and context. It made sense to Fabel that Grueber had trained as an archaeologist: reading the story of a landscape and that of a crime scene took the same type of intellect. Fabel recalled how he had once asked Grueber why he had become a forensic specialist. ‘Truth is the debt that we owe to the dead’ had been his reply. It was a reply that had impressed Fabel: it was also a reply that fitted just as well with a career as an archaeologist.
‘Archaeology’s loss is forensics’ gain,’ said Brauner. ‘I’m lucky to have him on the team. Actually, Frank has an interesting sideline going. He reconstructs faces from skeletonised archaeological remains. Universities from all over the place send him skulls to rebuild. It’s something I’ve always thought could come in handy in identifying unknown remains… who knows, maybe today’s the day…’
‘Fraid not,’ said Severts. ‘This victim’s got a face… This way, Herr Chief Commissar.’ The archaeologist paused while Fabel put on the blue forensic overshoes that Brauner handed him and then led the way across the archaeological site. In one corner the soil had been dug away deeper, in wide stepped tiers. ‘We have been taking the opportunity that all this land clearance offers to check out the area for early medieval settlement. This would have been largely marshland, and at one point completely inundated, but this has always been a natural harbour and crossing point…’
Brauner interrupted Severts. ‘Chief Commissar Fabel studied medieval European history himself.’
The concept of a Murder Commission policeman having an academic background obviously fazed Severts somewhat, because he stopped and looked at Fabel in blank appraisal for a moment. Severts had a long, lean face. After a moment his wide mouth broke into a smile.
‘Really? Cool.’ He recommenced leading Fabel and Brauner to the corner of the site. They had to step down two levels and stood on an area about five metres square. Each level was smooth and even and Fabel noticed that he could still, just, see out across ground level around them. He couldn’t imagine the patience that would be needed for such work – then he gave a small laugh as the image of Werner came to mind.
The excavated ground beneath them was banded, like rock strata laid on their side: a strange mix of pale sand, dry, black earth and some kind of bright, coarse silicate that glittered in the sunlight. The surface was punctuated with fragments of what looked like rough sacking and then broke into more irregular rubble and stone towards the edges of the area. In one corner of the excavation the upper half of a man’s body had been exposed. He was recumbent, on his side with his back to them, but lying at a slight angle so that he remained buried from the waist down. It gave him the appearance of lying in bed.
‘We found him early this morning,’ Severts explained. ‘The team like to get started early… get down here before rush hour.’
‘Who found him?’ asked Fabel.
‘Franz Brandt. He’s a postgrad student of mine. After we exposed enough of the body to establish that it wasn’t ancient, we stopped and contacted the Polizei Hamburg. We photographed and documented every stage of the exposure.’
Fabel and Brauner moved closer to the body. It certainly wasn’t ancient. The dead man was wearing a suit jacket of coarse blue serge. They moved around the body until they could see the face. It was thin, pale and pinched, topped with frazzled wisps of blond hair. The closed eyes were sunken into the skull and the neck seemed too thin and scrawny for the still-white shirt collar. The dead man’s skin had the look of old, yellowing paper and his wide, sharp jaw was patchily stubbled with two or three days’ pale growth. The emaciation made fixing the dead man’s age difficult, but there was something about the face and the patchy stubble that suggested youth. His lips were slightly parted, as if he were about to speak, and one hand seemed to grasp at something in the air. Something invisible to the living.
‘He can’t have been here long,’ said Fabel, squatting down. ‘As far as I can see, decomposition is limited. But it’s the weirdest corpse I’ve come across in a while. He looks like he has starved to death.’ He stood up and looked around the site, his expression puzzled. ‘It took a lot of effort for someone to bury him this deep. A lot of effort and a lot of time. I don’t see how they could have done it without being noticed, even at night.’
‘They didn’t,’ said Severts. ‘There was no sign of the ground around him having been disturbed.’
Brauner bent closer to the body. He touched the face with his latex-sheathed fingers, then, sighing in frustration, he snapped off one of his forensic gloves and touched the papery skin with his naked hand. He smiled grimly and turned to Severts, who nodded knowingly.
‘He didn’t starve to death, Jan,’ said Brauner. ‘It’s lack of moisture and air that’s done this to him. He’s desiccated. Completely dried out. A mummy.’
‘What?’ Fabel crouched down again. ‘But he looks like a normal corpse. I thought mummified bodies were all brown and leathery.’
‘Only the ones you find in bogs.’ A tall, lean young man with red hair tied back in a ponytail had joined them.
‘This is Franz Brandt,’ said Severts. ‘As I told you, it was Franz who uncovered the body.’
Fabel stood up and shook hands with the young red-haired man.
‘When I first saw him I suspected right away that he had been mummified.’ Brandt continued his explanation. ‘Dr Severts here is a leading expert on the subject and I have a great interest in mummies myself. The bog bodies you’re thinking about go through a different process entirely: the acids and the tannin in peat bogs tan the skin of the bodies within them. They literally turn into leather bags: sometimes all that’s left is their hide, while the internal organs and even the bones can dissolve to nothing.’ He nodded towards the body. ‘This fellow has the appearance of a desert mummy. The emaciated appearance and the parchment texture of the skin… he’s been dried out almost immediately in an oxygen-deprived environment.’
‘And, despite his appearance, he didn’t die recently. But, as you can see from his clothing, he is no relic of the Middle Ages.’ Severts indicated the area of the excavation they were in with a sweep of his hand. ‘The evidence around the body gives me an idea how it happened. Our geophysics and the records we have for this site suggest that where we are standing was a loading wharf during the Second World War.’
Brauner moved across to the band of glittering dirt. He picked some up and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Glass?’
Severts nodded. ‘It was sand. Everything here is basically the same pale sand. It’s just that some has been mixed with black ash while this outer ring has been subjected to such intense heat that it has turned into crude glass crystals.’
Fabel nodded grimly. ‘The British firebombing of nineteen forty-three?’
‘That would be my guess,’ said Severts. ‘It would fit with what we know of this location. And with this form of mummification, which was a common result of the intense temperatures created by the firestorm. It looks to me as if he took cover in some kind of quayside air-raid shelter, improvised with sandbags. There must have been an incendiary burst very close which, basically, baked and buried him.’
Fabel’s gaze remained locked on the mummified body. Operation Gomorrah. Eight thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of incendiaries and high explosives had been dropped on Hamburg by the British by night, the Americans by day. In parts of the city the temperature of the air, out in the open, had reached more than a thousand degrees. Some forty-five thousand Hamburg citizens had burned in the flames or been roasted to death by the intense heat. He gazed at the thin features, made too fine by having the moisture sucked from the flesh beneath the skin. He had been wrong. Of course he had seen bodies like this before: old black-and-white photographs from Hamburg and from Dresden. Many had been baked into mummies without being buried: dried out within moments, exposed to blast-furnace temperatures in the airless open streets or in the air-raid shelters that had been turned into bake ovens. But Fabel had never seen one in the flesh, albeit desiccated flesh.
‘It’s difficult to believe this man has been dead for more than sixty years,’ he said eventually.
Brauner grinned and slapped his broad hand on Fabel’s shoulder. ‘It’s simple biology, Jan. Decomposition requires bacteria; bacteria require oxygen. No oxygen, no bacteria, no decomposition. When we dig him out, we’ll probably find some limited putrefaction in his thorax. We all carry bacteria in our gut, and when we die they’re the first things to start work on us. Anyway, I’ll do a full forensics on the body and then I’ll pass it on to the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf for a full autopsy. We might still be able to confirm a cause of death, which I would gamble a year’s salary on being asphyxiation. And we’ll be able to work out the rough biological age of the corpse.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. He turned to Severts and his student, Brandt. ‘I don’t see that we need to hold up the rest of your excavation. But if you find anything in your dig that relates or you think relates to the body, please let me know.’ He handed Severts his Polizei Hamburg contact card.
‘I will do,’ said Severts. He nodded in the direction of the corpse, who still shunned them with his turned shoulder, as if trying to return to a rudely disturbed sleep. ‘Looks like he wasn’t a murder victim after all.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘That all depends on your point of view.’
1.50 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
The call had come in as Fabel was making his way back to the Presidium. Werner had phoned to say that he and Maria were in the Schanzenviertel. A killer had been caught, almost literally red-handed, cleaning up the murder scene and about to dispose of the body.
It was clear that Werner had everything in hand, but Fabel felt the need to get involved in a ‘live’ inquiry after a morning with a cold case that was almost certainly sixty years old and not a homicide. He told Werner that he would head straight over to the address he had given.
‘By the way, Jan,’ Werner said, ‘I think you ought to know we’ve got a bit of a celebrity victim… Hans-Joachim Hauser.’
Fabel recognised the name immediately. Hauser had been a reasonably prominent member of the radical Left in the 1970s: he was now a vocal environmental campaigner who had a taste for the media limelight. ‘God… that’s weird…’ Fabel spoke as much to himself as to Werner.
‘What is?’
‘Synchronicity, I suppose. You know, when something that you would not expect to encounter that often crops up several times in a short space of time. On the way into the Presidium today I heard Bertholdt Muller-Voigt on the radio. You know, the Environment Senator. He was giving his boss Schreiber a really rough time. And two or three nights ago he was in my brother’s restaurant at the same time as me and Susanne. If I remember rightly, Muller-Voigt and Hauser used to be very much of a double act back in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.’ Fabel paused, then added gloomily: ‘That’s all we need. A public-figure murder. Any sign of the press yet?’
‘Nope,’ said Werner. ‘Mind you, despite his best efforts, and unlike his chum Muller-Voigt, Hauser really was yesterday’s news.’
Fabel sighed. ‘Not any more…’
There was an untidy exuberance to the Schanzenviertel. It was a part of Hamburg that, like so many others in the city, was undergoing a great many changes. The Schanzenviertel lay just to the north of St Pauli and had not always enjoyed the most salubrious of reputations. The quarter still had its problems, but it had recently become the focus for more affluent incomers.
And, of course, it was the ideal city quarter in which to live if you were a left-wing environmental campaigner. The Schanzenviertel had the credentials of Cool in exactly the right mix: it was one of the most multicultural of Hamburg’s districts and its vast range of fashionable restaurants meant that most of the world’s cuisines were represented. Its arthouse cinemas, the open-air theatre in the Sternschanzen Park and the requisite number of pavement cafes made it trendy enough to be up and coming; but it also had enough social problems, principally drug-related, not to be seen as too ‘yuppie’. It was the kind of place in which you cycled and you recycled, where you wore second-hand chic, but where, while you sat sipping your fair-trade mocha at a pavement table, you tapped away at your ultra-cool, ultra-slim, ultra-expensive titanium laptop computer.
Hans-Joachim Hauser’s residence was on the ground floor of a solidly built 1920s apartment block in the heart of the quarter, near where Stresemannstrasse and Schanzenstrasse crossed each other. There was a clutch of police vehicles, in the Polizei Hamburg’s new silver and blue livery, parked outside and the pavement in front of the block’s entrance was ringed with red-and-white-striped crime scene tape. Fabel parked his BMW untidily behind one of the patrol cars and a uniformed officer headed determinedly over from the perimeter tape to tackle him; Fabel got out of the car and held up his oval Kriminalpolizei disc as he strode towards the building and the uniform backed off.
Werner Meyer was waiting at the doorway of Hauser’s apartment. ‘We can’t go in yet, Jan,’ he said, gesturing to where, a little way down the hall, Maria was talking to a young, boyish-looking man in white forensics coveralls. His surgical mask hung loose around his neck and he had the hood pulled down from a thick mop of black hair above a pale bespectacled face. Fabel recognised him as Holger Brauner’s deputy, Frank Grueber, whose archaeology background he had discussed with Brauner and Severts. Grueber and Maria were clearly talking about the crime scene, but there was a relaxed informality about Grueber’s posture as they talked. Fabel noticed that Maria, in contrast, leaned back against the wall with her arms folded in front of her.
‘ Harry Potter and the Ice Maiden…’ Werner said dryly. ‘Is it true those two are an item?’
‘No idea.’ Fabel lied. Maria kept almost all of her personal life locked up tight, along with her emotions, whenever she was at work. But Fabel had been there – the only one there – as she had lain, close to death, after she had been stabbed by one of the most dangerous killers the team had ever hunted. Fabel had shared Maria’s terror in those stretched, tense minutes until the Medicopter had arrived. Their shared fear had been a forced intimacy that had created an unspoken bond between them and, during the two years since, Maria had imparted to her boss small confidences about her personal life – but only those things that could possibly have had some bearing on her work. One of these confidences had been that she had become involved with Frank Grueber.
Down the hall, Grueber concluded his briefing to Maria. He touched her elbow in a gesture of farewell and headed back down the apartment hallway. There was something about that gesture that bothered Fabel. Not the informality of it: rather the almost imperceptible tensing of Maria’s posture in response. As if a very faint electric current had been passed to her.
Maria came back down the hall to the doorway.
‘We still can’t go in,’ she explained. ‘Grueber has his work really cut out for him. The killer – a woman – was disturbed cleaning up the scene. Apparently she made too good a job of it and forensics are finding it hard to pick up anything worthwhile.’ She shrugged. ‘But it’s academic, I suppose. If you catch the killer at the scene then there’s no better forensic trace than that.’
Fabel turned to Maria. ‘The suspect was disturbed cleaning up the scene… by whom?’
‘A friend of Hauser’s…’ said Maria. ‘A very young, pretty male friend of Hauser’s called Sebastian Lang, who found the door unlocked
… although apparently he did have a key himself.’
Fabel nodded. Hans-Joachim Hauser had never made any secret of his homosexuality.
‘Lang had come back to pick something up from the apartment before going into town for lunch,’ continued Maria. ‘He heard noises from the bathroom and, assuming it was Hauser, went through and disturbed the killer as she cleaned up the scene.’
‘Where is the suspect?’ asked Fabel.
‘Uniform have taken her back to the Presidium for us,’ Werner answered. ‘She seems a pretty disturbed individual… no one could get much sense out of her, other than she wasn’t finished cleaning.’
‘Okay. If we can’t get into the crime scene, then we should maybe head back to the Murder Commission and interview the suspect. But I’d like Frau Doctor Eckhardt to do a psychological assessment of her first.’ Fabel snapped open his cellphone and hit a pre-set button.
‘Institute for Legal Medicine… Doctor Eckhardt speaking…’ The voice that answered was female: deep and warm and tinged with a soft Bavarian accent.
‘Hi, Susanne… it’s me. How’s it going?’
She sighed. ‘Wishing we were back on Sylt… What’s up?’
Fabel explained about the arrest of the woman in Schanzenviertel and that he wanted Susanne to do an assessment before they interrogated her.
‘I’m tied up until late afternoon. Is four p.m. okay?’
Fabel looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. If they waited for the assessment it would mean they would not get to interview the suspect until the early evening.
‘Okay. But I think we’ll have to have a preliminary with her beforehand.’
‘Fine. I’ll see you at four at the Presidium,’ said Susanne. ‘What’s the suspect’s name?’
‘Just a second…’ Fabel turned to Maria. ‘What name do we have for the woman in custody?’
Maria flipped open her notebook and scanned her notes for a moment.
‘Dreyer…’ she said eventually.
‘Kristina Dreyer?’
Maria looked at Fabel in surprise. ‘Yes. You know her?’
Fabel didn’t answer Maria but spoke again to Susanne. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and snapped his cellphone shut. Then he turned to Maria. ‘Get Grueber. Tell him I don’t care what stage forensics are at – I want to see the murder scene and the victim. Now.’
2.10 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
It was clear that Grueber recognised the futility of trying to deny the Murder Commission team access to the murder scene. But with a determined authority that did not sit well with his youthful looks he had insisted that, instead of the usual requirement of blue forensic overshoes and latex gloves, the team should all wear the full forensic coverall suits and face masks.
‘She has left us practically nothing,’ explained Grueber. ‘It’s the most thorough clean-up of a scene that I’ve ever come across. She’s gone over almost every surface with a bleach-based cleaner or solution. It destroys practically all forensic traces and degrades any surviving DNA.’
After they were suited up, Grueber led Fabel, Werner and Maria through the hall. Fabel took in each of the rooms as he passed. There was at least one forensic technician working in each. Fabel noticed how tidy and clean the apartment was. It was large and spacious, but had an almost cramped feeling to it that came from the way nearly every free square metre of wall space was devoted to bookshelves. There were magazines carefully stacked on a unit and the hall’s shelves had obviously been used to cope with the overflow of books, vinyl LPs and CDs from the living room. Fabel paused and examined some of the music. There were several Reinhard Mey albums, but they were mostly older stuff that had been reissued on CD. Hauser had obviously felt the need to hear the protest songs of one generation on the technology of the next. Fabel gave a small laugh of recognition as he noticed a CD of Ewigkeit by Cornelius Tamm. Tamm had styled himself as Germany’s Bob Dylan and had enjoyed fair success in the 1960s before taking a spectacular dive into obscurity. Fabel removed a large, glossy-sleeved book from the shelves: it was a collection of Don McCullin’s Vietnam photographs; next to it was a travel book in English and various textbooks on ecology. All was just as you would have expected. Where there was a break in the shelving, any clear wall space had been filled with framed posters. Fabel stopped in front of one: it was a framed black-and-white photograph of a young man with flowing shoulder-length hair and a moustache. He was stripped to the waist and was sitting on a rustic bench, an apple in his hand.
‘Who’s the hippie?’ Werner was now at Fabel’s shoulder.
‘Take a look at the date on the picture: eighteen ninety-nine. This guy was a hippie seventy years before anyone even thought of the concept. This’ – Fabel tapped the glass with his latex-sheathed finger – ‘is Gustav Nagel, patron saint of all German eco-warriors. A century ago he was trying to get Germany to reject industrialisation and militarism, embrace pacifism, become vegetarian and to get back to nature. Mind you, he also wanted us to stop using capital letters with nouns. I don’t know how that fits into a green agenda. Maybe less ink.’
Fabel returned Nagel’s clear-eyed, defiant stare for a moment, and then followed Grueber and the others to the corner of the hall.
The main focus of the forensic team’s attention was at the far end of the hall and in the bathroom itself.
‘We found a couple of plastic bin bags here,’ explained Grueber as they approached the bathroom door. ‘We’ve removed a couple of items separately but the bags are back at Butenfeld.’ Grueber used the shorthand for the forensics unit at the Institute for Legal Medicine, the same facility in which Susanne worked as a criminal psychologist. The Institute was part of the University Clinic at Butenfeld, to the north of the city. ‘One of our finds was this…’ Grueber beckoned to one of the technicians who handed him a large square transparent plastic forensics bag. The plastic was thick and semi-rigid: inside, spread flat, was a disc of thick skin and hair. A human scalp. Viscous puddles of blood had gathered in pockets between the bag’s plastic walls and in its corners.
Fabel examined the contents without taking the bag from Grueber. He ignored the nausea that churned in his gut and the disgusted muttering of Werner behind him. The hair was red. Too red. Grueber read Fabel’s mind.
‘The hair has been treated with dye. And there’s evidence of the dye fresh on the scalp and contiguous skin areas. I can’t tell yet whether the killer used hair dye or some other type of pigment. Whatever was used, my guess is that it was done immediately before the scalp was removed from the body.’
‘Speaking of which… where is it?’ Fabel snapped his attention away from the magnetic horror of the scalp. After all these years in the Murder Commission, after so many cases, he still often found himself left shocked and uncomprehending by the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another.
Grueber nodded. ‘This way – you can guess this isn’t going to be too pleasant to look at…’
Fabel could tell as soon as they set foot in the bathroom that Grueber really had not exaggerated the difficulty they faced forensically. There was absolutely nothing, other than the body-shaped package next to the bath, that would have given any hint that this was a murder scene. Even the air smelled bleach-rinsed and slightly lemony. Every surface gleamed.
‘Kristina Dreyer may be our murder suspect,’ said Werner grimly, ‘but I think I’ll find out what her hourly rate is… we could do with her over at my place.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Maria, without the slightest hint that she had picked up on Werner’s humour. ‘She really is a professional cleaner. She works for herself and had a carload of cleaning materials parked outside… Hence the efficiency with which she tidied this lot up.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got.’
It was as if the forensic specialists had added another layer of bandages to a mummy. The killer had already wrapped the body in the shower curtain and bound it up with parcel tape. Now the forensic technicians had added individually numbered strips of Taser tape to every square centimetre of the outer shower curtain and parcel tape. The body had been photographed from every angle, and would now be moved back to the forensics lab at Butenfeld. Once there, the Taser would be removed strip by strip, and transferred to clear perspex sheets and any forensic traces would therefore be secured for analysis. If the body underneath the shower curtain was discovered to be wearing clothes, the process would be repeated to gather any fibre or other traces from the clothing.
Fabel gazed down at the man-shaped package. ‘Open up the face. I want to make sure this is Hauser.’
Grueber eased away the shower curtain. Underneath, the head and shoulders were encased in black plastic. Fabel gave an impatient nod and Grueber delicately cut through the parcel tape and exposed the face and head. Hans-Joachim Hauser gazed out at them with clouded-glass eyes beneath his frowning brow. Fabel had expected to feel another lurch in his gut, but instead he felt nothing as he looked down at the thing before him. And that was what it was: a thing. An effigy. There was something about the disfigurement of the head, about the exposed bone of the dead man’s cranium, about the blood-drained waxiness of the flesh on Hauser’s face, that robbed the corpse of its humanity.
Fabel had also expected to experience some form of recognition: Hans-Joachim Hauser had been very much involved in the radical movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Hauser had been photographed with the appropriate luminaries of the radical Left over the years – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Petra Kelly, Joschka Fischer, Bertholdt Muller-Voigt – but, despite his best efforts, he had lingered somewhere between the centre and the fringes of the media spotlight. Fabel thought how people seemed trapped in a time: how some found it impossible to move on. The image of Hauser filed in Fabel’s memory was that of a slim, almost girlish young man with long, thick hair, berating the Hamburg Senate in the 1980s. Nothing in the grey, waxy and slightly puffy flesh of the dead face gave Fabel a point of reference from which to retrieve the earlier Hans-Joachim Hauser. Fabel even tried to imagine the corpse with hair. It didn’t help.
‘Nice,’ said Werner, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth. ‘Very nice. A cleaning lady who takes scalps. I don’t suppose she’s a Red Indian, by any chance.’
‘Scalping is an ancient European tradition,’ said Fabel. ‘We were at it millennia before the Native Americans. They probably learned it from European settlers.’
Grueber eased more of the shower-curtain wrapping from the body, exposing Hauser’s neck. ‘Take a look at this…’
There was a wide sweeping gash across the throat. The edge was clean and unbroken, almost surgical, and Fabel could see a stratum of marbled grey and white flesh beneath the skin. The cut was also bloodless: Kristina Dreyer had washed the body and what Fabel could see of it had the look of rinsed death that he associated with mortuary bodies.
Fabel turned to Maria and Werner. He was about to say something when he noticed that Maria was gazing fixedly at Hauser’s mutilated head and neck. It was not a horror-struck stare, nor was it her usual look of cool appraisal: it was more a blank, expressionless gaze, as if what was left of Hans-Joachim Hauser held her hypnotised.
‘Maria?’ Fabel frowned questioningly. Maria seemed to snap back from some distant place.
‘It must have been very sharp…’ she said, dully. ‘The blade, I mean. To cut so cleanly, it must have been razor sharp.’
‘Yes, it was,’ answered Grueber, still crouched at the body. Fabel noticed that although Grueber delivered a professional answer, there was a hint of personal concern in his expression as he looked up at Maria. ‘It might have been a surgical blade, or even an open razor.’
Fabel straightened up. He thought about the woman who had been taken into custody. About a face he vaguely remembered from more than a decade ago.
‘This is all so methodical,’ he said at last. He turned to Werner. ‘You sure the suspect, Kristina Dreyer, was actually caught cleaning this up? I mean, we know for sure that she did all this?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Werner. ‘In fact, the uniform unit had to restrain her. She wouldn’t stop cleaning, even after they arrived.’
Fabel scanned the bathroom once more. It shone as sterile and as cold as an operating theatre. ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ he said at last.
‘What doesn’t?’ asked Maria.
‘Why all of the mutilation? The scalping, the overdone cut to the throat. It all seems significant… as if there’s a message in it.’
‘There usually is,’ said Grueber, who had now straightened his gangly frame and was standing beside the three detectives. They all gazed down, gathered in a semicircle, at the flesh-and-bone effigy of what had once been a human being. When they spoke, it was as if they addressed the corpse: a silent moderator through whom they could better transmit their thoughts. ‘And the whole point of scalping is that you take scalps. I don’t understand why your killer would scalp her victim and then put the scalp in a bin liner with the intention of dumping it.’
‘That’s my point,’ said Fabel. ‘This all points to some kind of message. Some kind of sick symbolism. But it’s almost always done so that others may bear witness to it. It’s hardly ever done especially for the victim, who’s usually dead before the mutilation.’
Maria nodded. ‘So why screw it all up? Why do all of that and then go to so much trouble to clean up the crime scene and hide the body? And why just dump your trophy?’
‘Exactly. I want us to get back to the Presidium. I need to talk to Kristina Dreyer. This just isn’t fitting together for me.’
Just then, one of the forensic technicians called over to Grueber. Fabel, Maria and Werner gathered behind Grueber as he crouched down to examine the area indicated by the forensic technician, on the seam between the tiled bath side and the floor. Whatever it was, Fabel couldn’t see it.
‘What are we looking at?’
The technician took out a pair of surgical tweezers, eased something free and held it up. It was a hair.
‘I don’t get it…’ said the technician. ‘I checked here before and completely missed this.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s easy to do,’ said Grueber. ‘I was over here earlier myself and didn’t see it either. The important thing is that you found it.’
Fabel strained to see the hair. ‘I’m surprised you discovered it at all.’
Grueber took the tweezers from the technician and held up the hair to the light. He flipped open a magnifying lens from its case and peered at the hair like a jeweller appraising a valuable diamond.
‘Funny…’
‘What is?’ asked Fabel.
‘This hair is red. Naturally red, not dyed like the scalp. Anyway, it’s too long to have been the victim’s. Does the suspect have red hair?’
‘No,’ answered Fabel, and Maria and Werner exchanged looks. Kristina Dreyer had been taken from the scene before Fabel had arrived.
3.15 p.m.: Police Presidium, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
When Fabel entered the interview room, Kristina Dreyer’s expression was almost one of relief. She sat, small and forlorn, dressed in the too-big white forensic coverall they had given her when they took her own clothes for analysis.
‘Hello, Kristina,’ said Fabel, and drew up a chair next to Werner and Maria. As he did so, he handed Werner a file.
‘Hello, Herr Fabel.’ Tears welled up in Kristina’s dull blue eyes and one escaped across the roughened terrain of her cheekbone. There was a stretched vibrato in her voice. ‘I hoped it would be you. I’ve got all messed up again, Herr Fabel. It’s all gone… crazy… again.’
‘Why did you do it, Kristina?’ asked Fabel.
‘I had to. I had to clear it all up. I couldn’t let it win again.’
‘Let what win?’ asked Maria.
‘The madness. The mess… all that blood.’
Werner, who had been flicking through the file, closed it and leaned back in his chair with an expression that suggested everything had suddenly fallen into place for him.
‘I’m sorry, Kristina,’ said Werner. ‘I didn’t recognise your name to start with. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?’
Kristina looked to Fabel with a beseeching terror in her eyes. Fabel noticed that, at the same time, she began to tremble, and her breathing became laboured and fast. Fabel had seen frightened suspects before, but there was something body-racking about the terror that seemed suddenly to seize Kristina, and an alarm sounded somewhere in Fabel’s mind.
‘Are you feeling all right, Kristina?’ he asked. She nodded.
‘This isn’t the same. This isn’t the same at all…’ she said to Werner. ‘The last time…’ Her voice trailed off and Fabel noticed that the trembling had become a pronounced shake.
‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ he asked again.
It all happened so fast that Fabel didn’t have time to react. Kristina’s breathing took on an emphatic, urgent stridor; her face first flushed a bright, feverish red and then drained of all colour. She half-rose from her chair and grasped the edges of the table with a grip that turned her detergent-reddened knuckles yellow-white. Each inhalation became a long spasm that convulsed her body, yet her exhalations seemed short and insubstantial. She looked like someone trapped in a vacuum: desperately sucking at the void to fill her screaming lungs. Kristina lurched forward, jackknifing at the waist, her head coming down fast and hard towards the table top. Then, as if tugged at by an invisible rope, she lurched to the right and keeled over sideways. Fabel rushed forward to catch her.
Maria moved so fast that Fabel did not notice her send her chair crashing to the floor. Suddenly she had shouldered him out of the way and had grabbed Kristina firmly by the upper arms and eased her to the floor. She loosened the zip of Kristina’s coveralls at the neck.
‘A bag…’ Maria barked at Fabel and Werner, who stared down at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Get me a bag. A paper bag, a carrier bag – anything.’
Werner dashed from the room. Fabel kneeled down next to Maria. She took hold of Kristina’s face between her hands and locked stares with her.
‘Listen to me, Kristina, you’re going to be all right. You’re just having a panic attack. Try to control your breathing.’ Maria turned to Fabel. ‘She’s in a state of extreme panic. She’s over-oxygenating her bloodstream… Get a doctor.’
Werner burst back in the room, clutching a brown paper bag. Maria placed it over Kristina’s nose and mouth, clamping it tight. Each gasping breath crumpled the bag in on itself. Eventually something approaching a regular rhythm returned to Kristina’s breathing. Two paramedics came into the interview room and Maria stood up and moved back to let them work.
‘She’ll be all right now,’ she said. ‘But I think you’d better let Frau Doctor Eckhardt carry out her assessment before we re-interview her.
‘That was very impressive,’ said Werner. ‘How did you know what to do?’
Maria shrugged, unsmiling. ‘Basic first aid.’
But, for the second time in a day, there was something about Maria’s body language that gave Fabel a vague feeling of uneasiness.
Fabel, Maria and Werner sat in the Police Presidium canteen, drinking coffee at a table near the wide window that looked over and down to the Riot Squad barracks across the car park below.
‘So it was your case?’ asked Werner.
‘One of my first in the Murder Commission,’ said Fabel. ‘The Ernst Rauhe case. He was a serious sexual sadist – a serial rapist and murderer who chalked up six victims in the 1980s before he was nailed. He was judged to be criminally insane and they put him in the Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll high-security hospital wing. He’d already been there for several years before I came to the Murder Commission.’
‘He escaped?’ asked Maria.
‘He certainly did…’ It was Werner who answered. ‘I was in uniform at the time and got involved in the manhunt… a lowly grunt traipsing across the moors in search of a lunatic. But he had had help.’
‘Kristina?’
‘Yes.’ Fabel stared at his coffee, swirling its surface with a spoon, as if stirring his memories in the cup. ‘She was a nurse at the hospital. Ernst Rauhe was not particularly intelligent, but he was a consummate manipulator of people. And, as you can see, Kristina doesn’t have the most resilient of personalities. Rauhe persuaded Kristina that she was the love of his life, his salvation. She was absolutely won over by him and became totally convinced that he was innocent of all the charges against him. But, of course, because he had been committed to a mental hospital he would never be believed if he tried to prove it. Or so he claimed.’ Fabel paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘It came out later that Kristina had wanted to campaign for his freedom. But he had convinced her it would be futile and that she needed to hide her support for him from the world, until they were ready to use it to its best advantage.’
‘And that was by helping him escape…’ said Werner. ‘If I remember correctly, she didn’t just help him escape, she hid him in her apartment.’
‘Oh God…’ said Maria. ‘I remember!’
Fabel nodded. ‘As Werner said, almost every uniform and detective unit in Greater Hamburg, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein searched for him. No one considered that he might have had inside help nor that he had been driven away in comfort from the secure wing. For nearly two weeks every barn, outbuilding and doss-house was turned over. It was over a month later that the hospital got in touch. They had been increasingly concerned about the well-being of one of their nurses. She had been losing weight and had turned up for work with bruises. Then she had failed to come into work at all for several days and hadn’t made any kind of contact. It was then that the hospital worked out that, although it had been limited, she had had some contact with Rauhe. In addition to the weight loss and bruises, colleagues had reported that this nurse’s behaviour had become increasingly strange and furtive in the weeks before her disappearance.’
‘And that nurse was Kristina Dreyer.’ Maria concluded the thought.
Fabel nodded. ‘Our first thought was that Rauhe had stalked her after his escape, having targeted her while a patient; and that he had subsequently abducted and probably murdered her. So the Murder Commission became involved. I took a unit up to Kristina’s flat in Harburg. We heard sounds from inside… whining… so we broke down the door. And, just as we’d expected, there was a murder scene waiting for us. But it wasn’t Kristina who’d been murdered. She was standing, naked, in the middle of the apartment. She was covered from head to toe with blood. In fact, the whole room was covered in blood. She was holding an axe in her hand and there, on the floor, was what was left of Ernst Rauhe.’
‘Now we’ve got history repeating itself?’ said Maria.
Fabel sighed. ‘I don’t know. It just doesn’t fit. It came out during the investigation that Ernst Rauhe had amused himself during the latter part of his liberty by repeatedly raping and torturing Kristina. She had been a pretty little thing, apparently, but in the last few days he beat her face to a pulp. But it was maybe the psychological torment he inflicted more than the physical abuse that drove her to kill him. He had made her crawl around naked, like a dog. He wouldn’t let her wash. It was awful. Then, repeatedly, he strangled her, always almost to the point of death. She realised that it was only a matter of time before he tired of her. And when he tired of her, she knew that he would murder her, as he had all the others.’
‘So she struck first?’
‘Yes. She hit him in the back of the head with the axe. But she was too small and light and the blow didn’t kill him. When he came at her, she just kept hacking and hacking at him with the axe. Ernst Rauhe eventually bled to death, but the evidence showed that Kristina went on hacking at him long after he was dead. There was blood, flesh and bone all over the place. She had really mashed up his face. At that time it was by far the worst murder scene I had ever attended.’
Maria and Werner sat quiet for a moment, as if transported to the small rented apartment in Harburg, where a younger Fabel had stood, stunned and horrified in a scene from hell.
‘Kristina was never convicted of Rauhe’s murder,’ Fabel continued. ‘It was acknowledged that she had been driven temporarily insane by Rauhe’s sadistic treatment of her and, in any case, had a pretty good reason to believe that he was going to kill her. But she did get six years in Fuhlsbuttel for aiding his escape. If he had actually killed someone else while he’d been at liberty, I doubt if Kristina would have got less than fifteen.’
‘You’re right,’ said Maria eventually. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. As far as we know, Kristina had no involvement with Hauser other than as his weekly cleaner. And we saw the mutilation of the corpse. That took time. It was deliberate and it would have taken premeditation… planning. And it was meant to have some kind of significance. From what you’ve said, when Kristina killed Rauhe it was a frenzy, brought on by a build-up of sustained terror that tipped over into sudden panic or fury. It was all hot blood. Hauser’s killing was clearly planned. Cold-blooded.’
Fabel nodded. ‘That’s what I think. Just look at the attack she just had. She’s clearly highly strung. It doesn’t fit with what we saw at the murder scene.’
‘Hold on,’ said Werner. ‘Aren’t we forgetting the fact that she was caught trying to hide her handiwork… if you’re innocent, why try to conceal evidence? Plus, it’s a hell of a coincidence that the person we catch there just happens to have been convicted of killing someone before.’
‘I know,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m not saying that it isn’t Kristina. All I’m saying is that the pieces don’t yet fit and we have to keep an open mind.’
Werner shrugged. ‘You’re the boss…’
5.30 p.m.: Police Presidium, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
By the time that Susanne had given Fabel the okay to re-interview Kristina Dreyer, the accumulated dragging weight of his first day back at work was slowing him down. He and Susanne sat in his office, drinking coffee, and discussed Kristina’s state of mind. The dull, resigned tiredness in Susanne’s dark eyes reflected Fabel’s own. What had started out as a quiet first day back for them both had turned into something complex and taxing.
‘You are going to have to take it very easy with her,’ said Susanne. ‘She’s in a very fragile state. And I really feel that I’d like to sit in on the interview.’
‘Okay…’ Fabel rubbed his eyes, as if trying to banish the tiredness from them. ‘What’s your assessment of her?’
‘It’s clear that she suffers from severe neurosis rather than any kind of psychosis. I have to say that, despite the evidence against her, I feel she is a highly unlikely candidate for this murder. My take on Kristina Dreyer is that she is more victim than perpetrator.’
‘All right…’ Fabel held open the door for Susanne. ‘Let’s go and find out.’
Kristina Dreyer looked small and vulnerable in the white forensic coverall that she was still wearing from earlier in the day. Fabel sat over by the wall and allowed Maria and Werner to lead the interview. Susanne sat beside Kristina, who had declined the right to legal representation.
‘You feel up to talking, Kristina?’ Maria asked, although there was not much solicitude in her voice and she switched on the black tape recorder before waiting for an answer. Kristina nodded.
‘I just want to get this whole thing cleared up,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill Herr Hauser. I hardly ever saw him.’
‘But, Kristina,’ said Werner, ‘you’ve killed before. And we found you cleaning up the scene of this murder. If you want to get this “all cleared up”, why don’t you just tell us the truth? We know you killed Herr Hauser and you tried to cover it up. If you hadn’t been disturbed, you would have got away with it.’
Kristina stared at Werner but didn’t answer. Fabel thought he could see her tremble slightly.
‘Ease up a little, Chief Commissar,’ said Susanne to Werner. She turned to Kristina and softened her tone. ‘Kristina, Herr Hauser has been murdered. What you did by cleaning up the mess has made it very difficult for the police to find out exactly what happened. And the longer it takes them to get to the bottom of it all, the more difficult it will be to find the killer, if it wasn’t you. You need to tell the officers everything you can about exactly what happened.’
Kristina Dreyer nodded again, then shot a look across Maria’s shoulder at Fabel, as if seeking support from the officer who had arrested her over ten years before. ‘You know what happened before, Herr Fabel. You know what Ernst Rauhe did to me…’
‘Yes, I do, Kristina. And I want to understand what happened this time. Did Herr Hauser do something to you?’
‘No… God, no. Like I said, I hardly ever saw Herr Hauser. He was always out at work when I cleaned his place. He would leave me my money in an envelope on the hallstand. He didn’t do anything to me. Ever.’
‘So what happened, Kristina? If you didn’t kill Herr Hauser, why were you found cleaning up the murder scene?’
‘There was so much blood. So much blood. Everywhere. It drove me mad.’ Kristina paused; then, although it still quivered, her voice hardened, as if she had drawn a steel line taut through her nerves. ‘I arrived to clean Herr Hauser’s place this morning, just as usual. I have a key and I let myself in. I knew there was something wrong as soon as I went into the apartment. Then I found… Then I found that thing…’
‘The scalp?’ asked Fabel.
Kristina nodded.
‘Where was it?’ asked Maria.
‘It was pinned out on the bathroom door. It took an age to clean.’
‘Just a moment,’ said Werner. ‘What time did you arrive at Herr Hauser’s apartment?’
‘Eight fifty-seven. Exactly eight fifty-seven a.m.’ As she answered, Kristina rubbed at a point on the surface of the interview table with her fingertip. ‘I’m never, ever late. You can check my appointment book.’
‘So after you found the scalp, you put it in the bin bag and started to clean up the door?’ asked Werner.
‘No. First I went into the bathroom and found Herr Hauser.’
‘Where was he?’
‘Between the toilet and the bath. Half-sitting, sort of…’
‘And you say he was already dead at this point?’ asked Maria.
‘Yes.’ Kristina’s eyes glossed with tears. ‘He was sitting there with the top of his head ripped off… it was horrible.’
‘Okay,’ said Susanne. ‘Just take a moment to calm yourself.’
Kristina sniffed hard and nodded. She absent-mindedly moistened her fingertip with her tongue and rubbed again at the same spot on the table top, as if trying to wipe off some blemish that was totally invisible to the others in the room.
‘It was horrible,’ she continued eventually. ‘Horrible. How could anyone do that to a person? And Herr Hauser seemed so nice. Like I told you, he was almost always at work when I was in to clean, but whenever I did meet him he seemed very friendly and polite. I just don’t know why anyone would do such a thing to him…’
‘What we don’t know or understand,’ said Maria, ‘is why anyone, if they found a murder scene, would choose not to contact the police but instead set about cleaning it up… and in the process destroy essential evidence. If you’re innocent, Kristina, why did you try to hide all traces of the crime?’
Kristina continued to rub at the invisible stain on the veneer surface of the interview table. Then she spoke without looking up.
‘They said I was mentally unsound when I killed Rauhe. That the balance of my mind was disturbed. I don’t know about that. But I do know that in prison, for a while, I was crazy. I nearly lost my mind completely. It was because of what Rauhe did to me. Because of what I did to him.’ She looked up, her face hard, her eyes red-rimmed and moist with tears. ‘I would have panic attacks. Really bad ones. Much worse than the one I had today. I would feel as if I were suffocating, being smothered by the air I was breathing. It was like everything I was afraid of, everything I’d ever been afraid of, and all that terror Rauhe had put me through… all coming together at the one moment. The first time I thought it was a heart attack… and I was glad. I thought I was getting out of this hell. The prison put me on suicide watch and sent me for sessions with the prison psychiatrist. They said I was suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorder.’
‘What form did the OCD take?’ asked Susanne.
‘I developed a severe phobia about contamination… dirt, germs. Especially anything to do with blood. It became so strong that I stopped menstruating. I spent most of my time in prison in and out of the hospital wing. Anything could spark me off. The panic attacks became more and more severe until eventually they put me in the prison hospital wing permanently.’
‘What did they treat you with?’ asked Susanne.
‘Chlordiazepoxide and amitriptyline. They took me off the amitriptyline because it zonked me too much. I also got plenty of therapy and that helped a lot. If you’ve been through my record, you’ll know I was released early.’
‘So the therapy worked?’ asked Werner.
‘Yes and no… I got much better and was able to cope. But it was after I was released that I really started to get better. I was referred to a special clinic here in Hamburg. One that only deals with phobias, anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders.’
‘The Fear Clinic run by Dr Minks?’ asked Maria.
‘Yes… that’s the one.’ Kristina sounded surprised.
There was a brief silence as everyone waited for Maria to follow up her question. But she did not, instead holding Kristina in her steady blue-grey gaze.
‘Dr Minks worked wonders,’ Kristina continued. ‘He helped me get my life back. To get myself together again.’
‘It must have been effective.’ Werner leaned back in his chair and smiled. ‘For you to become a cleaner. I mean, does that not mean you face your worst fear each and every day?’
‘But that’s exactly it!’ Kristina suddenly became animated. ‘Dr Minks got me to confront my demons. My fears. It started in small steps, with Dr Minks there to support me. I was exposed more and more to the things that would trigger my panic attacks.’
‘Flooding…’ Susanne nodded. ‘The object of terror becomes an object of familiarity.’
‘That’s right – that’s exactly what Dr Minks called it. He said I could learn to control and channel my phobia, ultimately diminishing and conquering it.’ It was clear from the manner in which Kristina delivered the words that she was using an unaccustomed vocabulary learned from her psychologist. ‘He showed me that I could control chaos and get my life in order. So much so that it ended up that I became a cleaner.’ She paused and the zeal disappeared from her expression. ‘When I walked into Herr Hauser’s apartment… when I saw Herr Hauser and what had been done to him, I thought my world was falling apart. It was like I was right back in my old apartment, when I…’ She let the thought die. ‘But Dr Minks taught me that I have to stay in control. He told me that I shouldn’t allow my past or my fear to define me, to define what I was capable of becoming. Dr Minks explained that I have to contain what I fear and by doing so contain the fear itself. There was blood. So much blood. It was like I was standing on the edge of a cliff or something. I really felt I was one step away from going mad. I had to take control. I had to get hold of the fear before it got hold of me.’
‘So you started to clean? Is that what you’re saying?’ Werner asked.
‘Yes. The blood first. It took so long. Then everything else. I didn’t let it win.’ Kristina rubbed again at the invisible spot on the table top. One last time. Decisively. ‘Don’t you see? The Chaos didn’t win. I stayed in control.’
7.10 p.m.: Police Presidium, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
The team had a brief meeting after the Kristina Dreyer interview. She remained the prime suspect and she was to be held in custody overnight, but it was clear that none of the team was convinced of her guilt.
After Fabel had wound the meeting up, he asked Maria to stay behind.
‘Is everything okay, Maria?’ he asked her when they were alone. Maria’s expression eloquently transmitted impatience and confusion. ‘It’s just that you didn’t say much in there.’
‘I tend to think there wasn’t much to say, to be honest, Chef. I think we’ll have to see what the forensic and pathology exams tell us about exactly what happened. Not that Kristina Dreyer left us much to go on.’
Fabel nodded thoughtfully, then asked: ‘How do you know about this Fear Clinic she was attending?’
‘It got quite a bit of publicity when it opened. There was an article about it in the Abendblatt. It’s unique, and when Kristina Dreyer said she was attending a special clinic it was the only one that would fit.’ If Maria was hiding something, then Fabel could not read it in her face. Fabel found himself, not for the first time, becoming deeply irritated by her closed-off countenance. After what they had been through together, he felt that he deserved her confidence. He felt the urge to confront her; to ask just what the hell her problem was. But, if there was anything Fabel knew about himself, it was that he was a typical male of his age and background: he habitually repressed spontaneous expression of his feelings. It meant that he approached things in a more measured way; it also meant that he often churned deep inside with the turmoil of his feelings. He dropped the subject. He did not mention that he was concerned about Maria’s behaviour. He did not ask her if her life remained shredded by the horror of what had happened to her. Most of all, he did not give name to the monster whose spectre would, at times like these, stand between them: Vasyl Vitrenko.
Vitrenko had entered their lives as a shadowy suspect in a murder inquiry and had made a very tangible mark on every member of the team. Vitrenko, a Ukrainian, had been a former Spetsnaz officer and was as skilled with the instruments of death as a surgeon was with those of life. He had used Maria as a delaying tactic while he made his escape: callously leaving her life hanging in the balance and forcing Fabel to give up his pursuit.
‘What do you think, Maria?’ he said eventually. ‘About Dreyer, I mean… Do you think she did it?’
‘It’s entirely possible that she took that step into madness again. Maybe she doesn’t remember killing Hauser. Maybe cleaning up the murder scene has wiped the memory of the murder from her mind. Or maybe she is telling the truth.’ Maria paused. ‘Fear can make us all behave in a strange way.’
8.00 p.m.: Marienthal, Hamburg
It was, after all, what Dr Gunter Griebel had devoted much of his life to. As soon as he had seen the pale, dark-haired young man, there had been that instant of recognition; the instinctive knowledge that he was looking at a face that was familiar to him. Someone he knew.
But the young man was not someone whom Griebel knew. As they talked, it became clear that they had not met before. Yet the sense of familiarity remained, and with it the unshakeable, tantalising feeling that complete recognition was only a moment away; that if only he could place the face in a context then all would fall into place. And the gaze of the young man was disconcerting: a laser beam fixed on the older man.
They moved into the study and Griebel offered his guest a drink, which he declined. There was something strange about the way the young man moved around the house, as if each movement was measured, calculated. After a moment’s awkwardness Griebel indicated that his guest should sit.
‘Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,’ said the younger man. ‘I apologise for the unorthodox manner in which I introduced myself to you. I had no intention of disturbing you while you paid your respects to your late wife, but it was pure chance that we were at the same place at the same time, just when I was going to phone you to try to arrange a meeting.’
‘You said you are a scientist yourself?’ Griebel asked, more to prevent an awkward silence than out of genuine interest. ‘What’s your field?’
‘It’s not unrelated to yours, Dr Griebel. I am fascinated by your research, particularly how a trauma suffered in one generation may have consequences for the generations that follow. Or that we pile one memory on another, generation after generation.’ The younger man stretched his hands out on the leather of the armchair. He looked at his hands, at the leather, as if contemplating them. ‘In my own way I am a seeker after the truth. The truth I seek perhaps isn’t as universal as yours, but the answer lies in the same area.’ He brought his laser-beam gaze back to bear on Griebel. ‘But the reason I am here is not professional. It’s personal.’
‘In what way personal?’ Griebel again sought to remember if and where they had met before, or of whom it was that the young man reminded him.
‘As I explained to you when we met in the graveyard, I am looking for answers for some of the mysteries in my own life. All my life I have been haunted by memories that are not mine… by a life that is not mine. And that is why you, your research, interests me so much.’
‘With the greatest respect.’ Griebel’s voice was edged with irritation. ‘I’ve heard all this kind of thing before. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a psychologist and I’m certainly not some kind of quasi-New Age guru. I am a scientist investigating scientific realities. I didn’t agree to meet you to explore the enigmas of your existence. I only agreed to meet you because of what you said about… well, about the past… the names you mentioned. Where did you get those names? What made you think the people you mentioned have anything to do with me?’
The young man smiled a broad, cold, joyless smile. ‘It seems so very long ago, doesn’t it, Gunter? A lifetime ago. You, me and the others? You’ve tried to move on… make a new life. If you can call the bourgeois banality you’ve been hiding behind a life. And all the time trying to pretend that the past didn’t happen.’
Griebel’s brow creased into a frown. He concentrated hard. Even the voice was familiar: tones he had heard – somewhere, sometime – before. ‘Who are you?’ he asked at last. ‘What do you want?’
‘It’s been so very long, Gunter. You all felt safe in your new lives, didn’t you? You all thought that you had put everything behind you. Put me behind you. But you all built your new lives on treachery.’ The younger man indicated Griebel’s study, the equipment, the books, with a dismissive sweep of his hand. ‘You have devoted so much time, so much of your life, to your studies. Your search for answers. You told me that you are a scientist looking for scientific realities; but I know you, Gunter. You are desperately seeking the same truths as I am. You want to see into the past, into what makes us what we are. And for all of your work, you are no further forward. But I am, Gunter. I have seen the answers you seek. I am the answer you seek.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ Griebel asked again.
‘But Gunter… you know already who I am…’ The younger man’s bright, frigid smile stayed fixed in place. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t see?’ He stood up, and removed a large velvet roll-pouch from the briefcase that he had set on the floor beside him.
8.50 p.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg
Fabel felt bone weary. What he had anticipated as an easy first day back had unexpectedly taken a massive, dense form and had lain immovable and unavoidable in his path. He felt as if negotiating round it had sucked all the light from his day and all the energy from his body.
Susanne had arranged to meet a girlfriend in town for dinner and Fabel found himself at a loose end on his first evening back from his vacation. Before leaving the Presidium he phoned his daughter, Gabi, who lived with her mother, to see if she was free to meet up for something to eat, but she had already made plans. Gabi asked how his vacation had been and they chatted for a while before arranging to meet up later in the week. Chatting to his daughter usually brightened Fabel’s mood – she had something of the careless cheerfulness that typified Fabel’s brother Lex – but tonight her unavailability only served to unsettle him further.
Fabel did not feel like cooking for himself. He felt the need to be surrounded by people, so he decided to go back to his apartment to freshen up before going out to eat.
Fabel had lived in the same place for the past seven years. It was a block back from Milchstrasse, in what had become arguably Hamburg’s hippest locations: Poseldorf, in the Rotherbaum district of the city. Fabel’s apartment was an attic conversion in a large turn-of-the-century building. The former grand villa had been ambitiously converted into three separate stylish apartments. Unfortunately, Germany’s economic performance at the time had not been able to match the ambition of the developers and property prices in Hamburg had plummeted. Fabel had seen the opportunity to own rather than rent and had bought the attic studio. He had often thought of the irony of the situation: that he had ended up in this cool, perfectly located apartment because his marriage and the German economy had hit the skids at almost exactly the same time.
Even with the drop in property prices, all Fabel had been able to afford to buy in Poseldorf had been this studio flat. It was small, but Fabel had always felt that the sacrifice of space for location had been worth it. When the developers had converted the building, they had recognised the potential of its view and had installed huge picture windows, almost floor-to-ceiling, along the side of the building that looked over Magdalenen Strasse and the green Alsterpark out onto the park-fringed Aussenalster lake. From his windows, Fabel could watch the red and white ferries crossing the Alster and, on a clear day, he could see all the way across to the stately white villas and the glittering turquoise dome of the Iranian mosque of the Schone Aussicht on the far shore of the Alster.
It had been the perfect place for him. His unshared space. But now, as his relationship with Susanne developed, all that was changing. A new phase in his life was beginning; maybe even a new life. He had asked Susanne to move in with him and it was clear that Fabel’s Poseldorf apartment would be too cramped for two of them. Susanne’s apartment was large enough, but it was rented and Fabel, having made the tricky leap into German home ownership, did not want to go back to renting. They had decided, therefore, to pool their resources and buy anapartment. The economy was pulling out of its eight-year-long dip and Fabel’s current flat would attract a good price, or it could be rented out, and their combined incomes would mean that they would be able to afford somewhere half-decent and not too far away from the city centre.
It all sounded good and sensible, and it had been Fabel himself who had suggested moving in together. But every time he contemplated the move from Poseldorf and his small, independent space with its great views, his heart sank a little. To start with, Susanne had been the reluctant one. Fabel knew she had had a bad relationship before, with a domineering partner. This guy had done a real number on her self-esteem and the relationship had been a disaster for Susanne. The result had been that she was very protective of her independence. That was about all Fabel knew: Susanne was a normally open and frank person but that was all she had been prepared to tell him about it. That part of her past lay sealed and locked from Fabel and anyone else. Nevertheless, she had gradually warmed to the idea of them moving in together and was now, if anything, the driving force behind finding a new place to share.
Fabel parked in the dedicated space for his apartment building and let himself into his flat. He took a quick shower and changed into a black shirt and trousers and a lightweight English jacket before heading out again and walking down to the Milchstrasse.
Poseldorf had started off as the Armeleutegegend – Hamburg’s poor people’s quarter – and it still had the slightly dissonant feel of a village in the heart of a great city. Since the 1960s, however, Poseldorf had become increasingly trendy and, consequently, the financial status of its residents had swung from one extreme to the other. Poseldorf’s image of impeccably chic affluence had been underlined by the success of names like the designer Jill Sander, whose fashion empire had started out as a Poseldorf studio and boutique. The Milchstrasse was at the heart of Poseldorf: a narrow street crowded with wine bars, jazz clubs, boutiques and restaurants.
It took Fabel less than five minutes to walk from his apartment to his favourite cafe-bar. It was already busy when he arrived and he had to squeeze through the throng of customers that had gathered in the bottleneck at the bar. He made his way to the elevated seating area at the rear and sat at a free table in the corner, with the exposed brick of the wall at his back. As he sat down he suddenly felt tired. And old. His first day back at work had taken a great deal out of him and he was finding it harder to get back into the swing of things.
Trying to summon an appetite, he sought to push the image of the scalped head of Hans-Joachim Hauser from his mind. But he found that another strangely took its place: the mortuary photograph of a young, pretty girl with high Slavic cheekbones who had been robbed of her name and her dignity by people traffickers and robbed of her life by a fat, balding nobody. Fabel had agreed with Maria more than he could admit: he would have loved to allow her to follow up the Olga X case, to track down the organised criminals who had dragged the girl down into a life of prostitution by offering the pretence of a new life. But that was not their job.
Fabel’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival at his table of a waiter. He had served Fabel before on several previous occasions and chatted with him unhurriedly before taking his order. It was a small ritual that marked Fabel as a regular; but it also underlined for Fabel himself a sense of place, a sense of belonging. Fabel knew he was a creature of habit: a predictable man who liked routines with which to measure and maintain the order of his universe. As he sat in the cafe that he invariably chose to dine in, he found that he became annoyed with himself: with the fact that the intuitive gambles he was prepared to take in his work did not seem to extend into how he managed his private life. But that was exactly how his private life was: managed. For a moment he thought about making an excuse and leaving; going a few paces down Milchstrasse to dine somewhere different. But he didn’t; instead he ordered a Jever beer and a herring salad. His usual.
The waiter had just brought over his beer when Fabel became aware of someone standing beside him. He looked up to see a tall woman in her mid-twenties, with long dark brown hair and large hazel eyes. She was dressed in a smart skirt and top which were plain and tasteful, but which could not conceal the deadly curves of her figure. She smiled, and her teeth shone in the full, lipsticked mouth.
‘Hello, Herr Fabel… I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
Fabel half-rose. For a second he recognised the face but could not quite put a name to it. Then he remembered.
‘Sonja… Sonja Brun… How are you? Please…’ He indicated the seat opposite. ‘Please sit down…’
‘No… no, thank you.’ She gestured vaguely with her hand towards a group of women sitting at another table, nearer the window. ‘I’m here with friends from work. It was just that I saw you here and wanted to say hello.’
‘Please, do sit down for a moment. I haven’t seen you in over a year. How are you?’ he asked again.
‘I’m fine. I’m more than fine. The job is working out really well. I’ve been promoted. That was the other thing…’ Sonja paused. ‘I really wanted to thank you again for all that you did for me.’
Fabel smiled. ‘There’s no need. You already did that. Many times. I’m just glad things are working out for you.’
Sonja’s expression became serious. ‘It was much more than things working out for me, Herr Fabel. I have a new life now. A good life. No one knows about… well, about the past. I owe that to you.’
‘No, Sonja. You owe that to yourself. You’ve worked very hard to achieve everything that you have.’
There was an awkward pause and then they chatted briefly and pointlessly for a while about Sonja’s work.
‘I must get back to my friends. It’s Birgit’s birthday and we’re out celebrating. It was really nice to see you again.’ Sonja smiled and extended her hand.
‘It was good to see you again, Sonja. And I really am pleased that things are working out for you.’ They shook hands but Sonja lingered for a moment. She held her smile but looked uncertain about what she was going to do next. Then she took a small notebook from her purse and scribbled on it before tearing the sheet out and handing it to Fabel.
‘Here’s my number. Just in case you’re ever in the area…’
Fabel looked down at the piece of paper. ‘Sonja… I…’
‘It’s okay…’ She smiled. ‘I understand. But keep it – just in case.’
They said goodbye and Fabel watched her as she walked back to her friends. She moved on her long shapely legs with the catlike elegance he remembered. Sonja rejoined her friends and they shared a joke and laughed, but she turned her head and looked back at Fabel, holding his gaze for a moment before re-immersing herself in the predictable jollity of an office night out.
He looked again at the scrap of paper and at the telephone number written in large figures.
Sonja Brun.
Fabel had come across her during a case in which a very brave undercover policeman called Hans Klugmann had lost his life. As part of his cover, Klugmann had become the boyfriend of Sonja Brun, a vivacious young girl who had somehow become drawn into porn shoots and part-time prostitution. Klugmann had clearly genuinely felt something for Sonja and had sought to free her from a degrading and self-destructive life. After Klugmann had been killed, Fabel had made a silent promise to a dead colleague: to finish the job and help Sonja escape from Hamburg’s notorious half-world of vice and corruption.
Fabel had used his contacts to find Sonja a small rented apartment on the other side of town, along with a job in a clothes shop. He had obtained details of courses she could take and before long Sonja had moved on to working in a shipping office.
Simple steps, but they had transformed her life at a time when she could have sunk even deeper by giving in to the grief of losing her lover and the anger of discovering that he had been living a lie. Fabel was pleased to see her so settled, and was relieved that she had succeeded in putting so much distance between herself and her past life.
Fabel had known the instant she had handed him her number that he was going to tear it up and drop it into the ashtray as soon as she left. But he found himself staring at the piece of paper and considering for a moment what he should do with it. Then he folded it in half and placed it in his wallet.
Fabel had just finished his coffee when his cellphone rang. He was annoyed that he had forgotten to switch it off. He often found himself out of step, out of time, with the modern world: cellphones in restaurants and bars were one of the many intrusions of twenty-first-century life that he found intolerable. All through the meal, as he had eaten alone, there had been a hollow feeling within him. He knew it was something to do with having encountered Sonja and her new life. It made him think of Kristina Dreyer. Maybe she really had cleaned up the murder scene simply to keep whole the universe of order and punctuality that she had built around herself.
Fabel answered his cellphone.
‘Hi, Jan, it’s me.’ Fabel recognised Werner’s voice. ‘You should have taken my advice about extending your holiday over the weekend…’
10.00 p.m.: Speicherstadt, Hamburg
Most of the lights were now out, but a central spotlight beamed down like a full moon onto the architectural model that stretched across the table top. Paul Scheibe gazed at it. There was still a butterfly flutter of pride in his chest each time that he saw this three-dimensional representation of his vision. His thoughts, his imagination, given solid form, even if that form was in miniature. But soon, very soon, his concepts would be written large on the face of the city. His proposal for KulturZentrumEins – Culture Centre One – overlooking the Magdeburger Hafen would be the centrepiece of the HafenCity’s Uberseequartier. His monument, right at the very heart of the new HafenCity. It would more than match the visual impact of the new concert hall and opera house on Kaispeicher A and it would rival the elegance of the Strandkai Marina.
Building would start in 2007, if his proposal got approval from the Senate and the design jury selected it. There were, of course, other proposals contending, but Scheibe knew with absolute certainty that none of them stood a chance against the boldness and innovation of his vision. At press conferences he had taken to wittily describing the competing proposals as pedestrian-area concepts. His reference was, of course, not to the function of the area but to the pedestrian abilities of his competitors.
The pre-launch party could not have gone better. The press had turned out in force and the presence of Hamburg’s First Mayor, Hans Schreiber, as well as that of the city’s Environment Senator Muller-Voigt and several other key members of the city’s Senate, had underlined the importance of the project. And the full public launch would not take place for another two days.
Now Scheibe stood alone, all his guests gone, and contemplated his vision spread out before him. So close. The sequence of events that was already in train would see his ideas turn into a concrete reality. He would stand in a few short years on a riverfront boardwalk and look up at art galleries, a theatre, performance spaces and a concert hall. And all who viewed it would be stunned by its audacity, its vision, its sheer beauty. Not one building; yet not separate structures. Each space, each form, would link organically, in terms of its architecture and in terms of its function. Like separate but equally vital organs, each element would combine with the others to give life and energy to the whole. And all engineered to have practically zero environmental impact.
It would be a triumph of ecological architecture and engineering. But, most of all, it would be a testament to Scheibe’s radicalism. He took a long thick pull on his glass of Barolo.
‘I thought I’d find you still here.’ The voice was that of a man. He spoke from the shadows over by the doorway.
Scheibe did not turn, but sighed. ‘And I thought you’d gone. What is it? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’
There was a fluttering sound and a folded copy of the Hamburger Morgenpost flew into the pool of light, crashing down onto the miniature landscape. Scheibe snatched up the newspaper, leaning forward and checking the model for damage.
‘For God’s sake, man, be careful…’
‘Look at the front page…’ The voice spoke with an even, steady tone. Still the man made no move out of the shadows.
Scheibe opened out the newspaper. The cover photograph showed the giant Airbus 800 making its maiden flight, captured as it swept over der Michel – the spire of the St Michaelis church. A headline proclaimed that a hundred and fifty thousand proud Hamburg citizens had turned out to watch the fly past. Scheibe turned to the shadows and shrugged.
‘No… smaller article, near the bottom…’
Scheibe found it. Hans-Joachim Hauser’s death had only made it to a headline in a smaller font: 1970s Radical and Eco-warrior found murdered in Schanzenviertel apartment. The article gave what scant details the press had on the death and went on to highlight Hauser’s career. The Morgenpost had found it necessary to use Hauser’s relationships with other, more memorable figures of the radical left to identify him. It was as if he had only existed in reflections. There was very little to report after the mid-1980s.
‘Hans is dead?’ Scheibe asked.
‘More than that – Hans has been killed. He was found earlier today.’
Scheibe turned. ‘You think it’s significant?’
‘Of course it’s significant, you idiot.’ There was little anger in the voice of the man in the shadows: more irritation, as if his low expectations of his partner in the conversation had been confirmed. ‘The fact that one of us has died a violent death could be a coincidence, but we have to make sure there’s no connection to… well, to our former lives, is probably the best way of putting it.’
‘Do they know who did it? It says here that they have someone in custody.’
‘My official contacts at the Police Presidium wouldn’t give me details. Other than to say that it’s early days in the investigation.’
‘You worried?’ Scheibe reconsidered his question. ‘Should I be worried?’
‘It could be nothing. Hans was a pretty promiscuous gay, as you know. It can be a pretty dark world, out there among our mattress-munching chums.’
‘I never took you to be a reactionary homophobic… You keep that side of your personality well hidden from the press.’
‘Spare me the political correctness. Let’s just hope that it was related to his lifestyle – some kind of random thing.’ The man in the doorway paused. For the first time he sounded less than sure of himself. ‘I’ve been in touch with the others.’
‘You’ve spoken to the others?’ Scheibe’s tone was somewhere between astonishment and anger. ‘But we all agreed… You and I – our paths have had to cross – but I haven’t seen any of the others in over twenty years. We all agreed that we should never instigate contact between each other.’ Scheibe’s eyes ranged wildly over the delicate, fragile topography of the KulturZentrumEins model, as if reassuring himself that it was not dissolving, evaporating as they spoke. ‘I don’t want anything to do with them. Or with you. Anything at all. Especially not now…’
‘Listen to me, you self-important little prick… Your precious project counts for nothing. It is an inconsequence… nothing more than a dull expression of your middlebrow egotism and bourgeois conceit. Do you think anyone will be interested in this crap if everything comes out about you? About us? And remember where your priorities lie. You are still involved. You still take orders from me.’
Scheibe threw the newspaper to the floor and took a long and too-fast draught of his Barolo. He snorted with contempt. ‘You’re not telling me that you still believe in all that crap?’
‘This is not about beliefs any more, Paul. This is about survival. Our survival. We didn’t do much for the “revolution”, did we? But we did enough – enough for it still to destroy all our careers if it were to come out now.’
Scheibe gazed into his glass and swirled what was left of his wine contemplatively. ‘The “revolution”… my God, did we really think that was the way forward? I mean, you saw what the East was like when the wall came down – was that really what we were struggling for?’
‘We were young. We were different people.’
‘We were stupid.’
‘We were idealistic. I don’t know about you, but the rest of us were fighting against fascism. Against bourgeois complacency and the same kind of rampant, unfeeling capitalism that we now see turning the whole of Europe, the whole world, into an American-inspired theme park.’
‘Do you ever listen to yourself? You’re a self-parody – and it strikes me that you’ve embraced capitalism pretty enthusiastically yourself. And I do my bit…’ Scheibe let his gaze range over the model again. ‘In my own way. Anyway, I’m not interested in having a political debate with you. The point is that it’s madness for us to be in touch with each other after all these years.’
‘Until we know what’s behind Hans-Joachim’s death, we all have to be vigilant. Maybe the others have noticed something… unusual recently.’
Scheibe turned round. ‘You really think we could be in danger?’
‘Don’t you see?’ The other man became irritated again. ‘Even if Hans’s death is nothing to do with the past, it’s still a murder. And murder means police sniffing about. Raking around in Hans-Joachim’s history. A history we shared with him. And that places us all at risk.’
Scheibe was silent for a moment. When he spoke, it was hesitantly, as if he was afraid of stirring something from a long sleep. ‘Do you think… Could this have anything to do with what happened all those years ago? The thing with Franz?’
‘Just report to me if you notice anything unusual.’ The man in the shadows left Scheibe’s question unanswered. ‘I’ll be back in touch. In the meantime, enjoy your toy.’
Scheibe heard the door of the conference room slam shut. He drained his glass and again examined the model on the round table top: but instead of a radical vision of the future, all he saw was a clutter of white card and balsa.
10.00 p.m.: Marienthal, Hamburg
Dr Gunter Griebel regarded Fabel without interest over the reading glasses that sat almost on the tip of his long, thin nose. He watched Fabel from his leather armchair, one hand resting on the textbook on his lap, the other on the chair’s armrest. Dr Griebel was a man in his late fifties whose tall frame had retained the angular gangliness of his youth but had lately gained a paunchiness around the middle, as though two incompatible physiques had melded together. He was dressed in a check shirt, grey woollen cardigan and grey casual trousers. All of which, like the chair and the textbook on his lap, were liberally spattered with splashes of blood.
Dr Griebel looked for all the world as if he had been so lost in contemplating the content of the textbook on his lap that he had not noticed when someone had slashed open his throat with a razor-sharp blade. Nor did he seem to have been distracted by his assailant then slicing across his forehead and around his head before ripping the scalp from his skull. Beneath the glistening dome of his exposed cranium, Griebel’s long, thin face was expressionless, the eyes blank. Some blood had splashed onto the right lens of his spectacles, like a sample collected on a microscope slide. Fabel watched as it gathered in one corner of the lens as a thick, viscous globule before dripping onto his already gore-stained cardigan.
‘Widower.’ Werner pronounced the lifetime status of the corpse from where he stood behind Fabel. ‘Lived here alone since the death of his wife six years ago. Some kind of scientist, apparently.’
Fabel took in the room. Apart from Fabel, Werner and the departed Dr Griebel, there was a team of four forensic technicians, led by Holger Brauner. Griebel’s house was one of those substantial but not ostentatious villas found in the Nopps part of Marienthal: solid Hamburg prosperity combined with an austere streak of North German Lutheran modesty. This room was more than a study. It had the practical, organised feel of a regular workplace: in addition to the computer on the desk and the books that lined the walls, there were two expensive-looking microscopes, which were clearly for professional use, in the far corner. Next to the microscopes was some other equipment which, although Fabel had no idea of its purpose, again looked like serious scientific kit.
But the centrepiece of the room had been added very recently. There was practically no wall space free of books, so the killer had nailed Griebel’s scalp to the shelves of a bookcase, from where it dripped onto the wooden floor. Griebel had obviously been thinning on top and the scalp was as much skin as hair. It had been stained the same vivid red as Hans-Joachim Hauser’s scalp, but the paucity of hair made it even more nauseating to behold.
‘When was he killed?’ Fabel asked Holger Brauner, still focused on the scalp.
‘Again, you’ll have to get a definitive answer from Moller, but I’d say this one’s very fresh. A matter of a couple of hours, at the most. There’s the beginning of rigor in the eyelids and lower jaw, but his finger joints, which will be the next to go, are still fully mobile. So a couple of hours or less. And the similarities with the Schanzenviertel murder are obvious… I had a quick look at Frank Grueber’s notes.’
‘Who raised the alarm?’ Fabel turned to Werner.
‘A friend. Another widower, apparently. They get together on Friday evenings. Take turns to go to each other’s house. But when he arrived, he found the door ajar.’
‘It sounds like he maybe disturbed our guy. Did he see anyone when he arrived?’
‘Not that he can remember, but he’s in a hell of a state. A fellow in his sixties. A retired civil engineer with a history of heart problems. Finding this’ – Werner indicated Griebel’s mutilated body with a nod of his head – ‘has put him in a state of shock. There’s a doctor giving him the once-over, but it’s my guess that it will be a while before we get much sense out of him.’
For a moment Fabel was distracted by the thought that someone could go through sixty years of life without encountering the kind of horror that was Fabel’s everyday stock-in-trade. The concept filled him with a kind of dull wonder and more than a little envy.
Maria Klee entered the study. The way her eyes were drawn to the scalped body reminded Fabel of how she had seemed almost hypnotised by the disfigurement of Hauser. Maria had always been pretty detached emotionally when examining murder victims, but Fabel had noticed a subtle change in her behaviour at crime scenes, particularly those involving knife wounds. And the change had only been apparent since her return to duty after recovering from her attack. Maria snapped her gaze away from the corpse and turned to Fabel.
‘The uniform units have been doing a door-to-door,’ she said. ‘No one saw anything or anyone unusual today or this evening. But given the size of these properties and the fact that they’re reasonably far apart, it’s not particularly surprising.’
‘Great…’ Fabel muttered. It was frustrating to be so close to the time of commission, only to see a hot trail turn cold.
‘If it’s any consolation, one thing is now certain,’ said Werner. ‘Kristina Dreyer was telling us the truth. She’s still in custody – so this can’t be her.’
Fabel watched as the forensic team started the slow, methodical processing of the body for trace evidence. ‘It’s not much consolation,’ he said dully. ‘The fact is that we have a scalp-taker out there on the loose…’