Susanne laughed. ‘Oh yes –
der englische Kommissar
… I forgot they called you that …’
Fabel smiled back. ‘I’m half Scottish. My mother was a Scot and I was very nearly christened “Iain”. Jan was a compromise. Anyway, a lot of people in Hamburg feel at least a little British. They do call it the most easterly suburb of London … I’m sure as a southerner you know what I mean …’
Susanne put down her glass. ‘Oh yes … I didn’t expect to experience culture shock without leaving Germany, but when I moved up from Munich I have to admit I felt as if I were emigrating to a strange land. The people here can be a little …’
‘Anglo-Saxon?’
‘I was going to say reserved … but yes, now that I’ve lived here, I can see why they say that about Hamburg people …’ She took another sip of her wine. ‘I love it though. It’s a great city.’
‘Yes.’ Fabel looked out over the water. ‘Yes, it is. How long have you been here?’
‘Two years … no, it’s nearer three now. I’m really quite settled here.’
‘What brought you here? Was it your job or is your husband from here?’
She laughed at the obviousness of Fabel’s question. He laughed too. ‘No, Herr Fabel … I’m not married … nor am I otherwise involved. I moved up here because of the position I was offered at the Institut für Rechtsmedizin. And through the Institut I was offered the consultative post with the Polizei Hamburg.’ She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and supporting her chin on a bridge of interlaced fingers. ‘And how does
Frau
Fabel deal with the long hours you have to put in?’
Fabel laughed at the reflection of his own clumsiness. ‘There is no Frau Fabel. Or at least, there isn’t now; I’ve been divorced for about five years.’
‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean …’
Fabel held up his hands. ‘No need. I’ve got used to it. It’s difficult for a partner to put up with this life … and my wife got involved with someone … well, someone who was there when I wasn’t.’
‘I really am sorry.’
‘Like I said, don’t be. I have a beautiful daughter who spends all the time she can with me.’
A silence fell between them. The conversation had taken a suddenly and awkwardly intimate turn and neither seemed to be able to find the way back. Susanne looked out over the water of the Alsterfleet towards the Rathaus square while Fabel pushed a piece of herring around his plate with his fork. After a few seconds of silence they both started to speak at once.
Susanne laughed. ‘You first …’
‘I was just going to ask you …’ Fabel started, aware of his too-tentative tone. He repeated himself, this time more assertively: ‘I was just going to ask you, seeing as you don’t have time just now, if you would perhaps like to have dinner with me sometime …’
Susanne smiled broadly. ‘I would enjoy that. How about next week? Phone me at the office and we’ll arrange it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘God, it’s time I was somewhere else … thanks for the wine, Herr Fabel …’
‘Call me Jan, please …’
‘Thanks for the wine, Jan … I’ll hear from you next week?’
Fabel rose from his chair and shook her hand. ‘You may count on it …’
He watched her as she walked back through the Arcade and the alternating bands of shadow and golden sunlight cast by the colonnades. The beer and his tiredness mingled to give him a sense of unreality. Had she really said yes?
Wednesday 4 June, 9.00 p.m. Aussendeich, near Cuxhaven
.
It was as if she were disconnected from her body, from her immediate environment, from the world. There was a thick viscous coating around her consciousness. Sometimes it thinned and she perceived things more normally, then it would cloud over her again and obfuscate the reality around her. It made her angry, yet even this raw emotion was attenuated by the sludge that enveloped every thought, every sensation, every movement. She fell again. She felt damp leaves clinging to her face; the taste of foetid mulch in her mouth. There were trees all around her. She knew she should know what to call a place like this, but the word ‘forest’ was too distant, required too immense an intellectual effort to recall. She lay for a moment and then staggered to her feet, took a few more steps and fell again. The slime slugged around her consciousness once more, thick and dark this time, and she slipped back into unconsciousness.
When she awoke, it had become darker. An instinct too powerful to be dulled by the drug seized her and she clambered to her feet. There were lights ahead. Moving lights flickering through the silhouette trunks of the trees. It was her instinct that reached through to pull her towards the lights, not any full recognition that ahead lay a road, help, rescue. She stumbled a couple of times more, but now she was being pulled towards the lights as if she was on the end of a tugged line. The ground underfoot became more even, with fewer snagging roots or branches to trip her. The lights grew bigger. Brighter.
Clarity came to her just before the truck hit her. She heard the scream of tyres and gazed, with wide but undazzled eyes, into the headlights as they hurtled towards her. Her overwhelming feeling was one of surprise: she could not understand why, knowing that she was going to die, she was so totally free of fear.
Wednesday 4 June, 11.50 p.m. Altona, Hamburg.
With most of the office workers and shoppers long gone, the basement Parkhaus was almost empty of cars. The tyres of the Saab yielded a restrained screech as it took the steep sharp turn from the down ramp onto the pillared square of parking places. Instead of parking, it stopped on the main throughway; the headlamps dimmed to side lights.
A Mercedes, which had been concealed in a parking place behind a pillar, pulled out suddenly and drove up to the Saab, stopping when the two cars were almost nose to nose. Neither could now make a quick exit. The Turks got out first, from the Mercedes. Three; heavily built. Two stood on either side of the car, leaving the doors open and resting their arms on them, using them as shields before their bodies.
The third Turk, older and more expensively dressed than the other two, walked up to the Saab, leant down and tapped with his knuckles on the driver’s window. There was the buzz and clunk of an opening electric window.
Then a sound like a loud pop.
The two Turks standing by the Mercedes saw an explosive plume of blood spurt from the back of the older man’s head as the bullet, fired from inside the Saab, exited his skull. Before they could react there was a series of more loud pops, in rapid succession like hailstones hitting off a roof, this time from behind them.
Like the older Turk, they too were dead before they hit the ground.
Two tall men, both blond, emerged from the shadows behind the Turks’ Mercedes. As one methodically picked up the spent shells from the Parkhaus floor, the other calmly walked across to the bodies of the three Turks, firing a single conclusive shot into the head of each; again picking up the spent shells and placing them in the pocket of his thigh-length leather coat. Both men then made their way towards the Saab, simultaneously unscrewing the silencers from their Heckler and Koch semi-automatics. They casually stepped over the bodies, and climbed into the rear passenger seats of the Saab, which carefully reversed into a parking place to complete a three-point turn before driving towards the up ramp.
Thursday 5 June, 10.00 a.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.
There was now a solid, dreamless wedge of sleep between Fabel and the events of the day before; yet when he woke, a bone-aching tiredness clung to him. He dragged himself through the routine of a shave and a shower and dressing. A
Hamburger Morgenpost
lay on his doormat; he placed it on the hall table without opening it.
He drank his coffee over by the picture windows, gazing blankly out over Hamburg. A steel sky clamped down on the city, sucking the colour from the water, the parks and the buildings, but a hint of rose bloom behind the clouds promised something better for later in the day. You’re somewhere out there, he thought, you’re under the same sky and you’re waiting to do it again. You can’t wait to do it again. And we can’t wait for you to make a mistake. The thought clenched in his belly like a fist.
As Fabel stood watching the sky and sipping his coffee, he went over in his mind what they had got so far. He had the jigsaw pieces that were all supposed to fit: a corrupt ex-cop, a prostitute murdered horrifically, a previous victim, four months before, with no shared history or other connection with the second murdered girl, and an egomaniacal sociopath claiming responsibility for the murders by e-mail. But whenever Fabel tried to put the pieces together they snagged on each other. All of it made sense at front of mind, but in some dark, small room at the back of Fabel’s brain, where it was being run through a deeper wash, a little red warning light was flashing brightly.
Fabel drained his coffee cup. He took a long deep breath, drawing in both air and the view across the Alster, then turned, picked up his jacket and his keys, and left for his office.
From the moment he arrived in the wide foyer of the Präsidium, Fabel was aware of frenetic activity. A dozen MEK officers, grey and black wraiths clutching their goggles and helmets, trotted past him and headed out to the front where an armoured transport awaited them. He passed Buchholz and Kolski, both of whom were engaged in a conversation with one of the Schutzpolizei’s Ersten Hauptkommisars, who held a blue tactical clipboard. They both looked in Fabel’s direction and nodded briefly and grimly. Fabel nodded back; although he was desperate to know what was going on, he recognised the stern determination on their faces and decided to leave them to it. Gerd Volker, the BND man, came out of the elevator with four hard-looking men as Fabel was about to get in. Volker smiled perfunctorily, wished Fabel a good morning and swept past him before he had a chance to speak.
When Fabel left the elevator, he met Werner in the hall of the Mordkommission.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
Werner pushed a copy of the
Morgenpost
, open at the appropriate page, into Fabel’s hands. ‘Ersin Ulugbay is dead. A real professional job.’
Fabel gave a low whistle. The image in the
Morgenpost
showed a man in an expensive coat sprawled on the blood- and oil-stained concrete. There was nothing in the article to indicate a motive, but it stated that one of the three victims was Ersin Ulugbay, ‘a well-known figure in the Hamburg underworld’. The two other victims, both male and believed to be of Turkish origin, were yet to be identified. Fabel wasn’t surprised that he had encountered so much grim-faced activity downstairs.
‘Shit. There’s going to be one hell of a war out there.’
‘That’s what they’re all preparing for,’ Maria Klee had come alongside Fabel, a cup of coffee in her hand. She lifted the cup. ‘Want one?’ Fabel shook his head. ‘The whole Präsidium is crawling with LKA7 and BND …’ Maria gave a laugh. ‘If it wears a black leather jacket and it goes by initials, it’s here and it’s got a bee up its ass.’
‘I don’t know why they bother,’ shrugged Werner. ‘Let the bastards kill each other. Save us all a lot of time and hassle.’
‘Unfortunately there’s such a thing as crossfire, Werner –’ Fabel handed the paper back to him – ‘and crossfire and innocent passers-by seem always to come together.’
‘That’s as maybe, but I for one won’t be shedding any tears over this piece of shit.’
Fabel moved towards his office. ‘Do you both have a minute?’
Fabel settled behind his desk and motioned for Maria and Werner to sit down. ‘Do we have anything more on our victim from yesterday?’
‘Nothing,’ Maria answered. ‘I’ve done a full check, both with Hamburg and with the Bundeskriminalamt. She didn’t have any kind of criminal record. And still nothing on the bullet wound. We can’t tie her into any shootings involving women in Hamburg over the last fifteen years.’
‘Then widen the net.’
‘I’m already on it,
Chef
.’
‘Anna and Paul are managing the surveillance on Klugmann,’ said Werner. ‘So far he went straight home and has stayed in bed. Last report was the curtains were still drawn and there was no sign of life.’
‘Did we get anything more from any of the residents around the flat where the girl was found? Anyone mention seeing an older Slavic-looking guy?’
‘Who are we talking about?’ asked Maria.
‘Jan saw someone hanging around with the ghouls when we arrived at the murder scene,’ answered Werner.
‘A shortish guy, sixty, maybe older … looked foreign?’
Both Werner and Fabel stared at Maria.
‘You saw him?’
‘I arrived on the scene about fifteen minutes before you, remember? A small crowd had already gathered and he would have been a hundred metres from it, coming from the St Pauli direction. I noticed this older guy … The way I would describe him is looking a bit like Khrushchev … you know, the old Soviet president or whatever they called him … in the sixties.’
‘That’s the guy,’ said Fabel.
‘Sorry, I didn’t think much about it at the time. It wasn’t as if he was fleeing the scene or anything, and the crime scene had been populated for at least an hour, so I didn’t even think of a possible perpetrator … You think he’s the killer?’
‘No …’ Fabel frowned. ‘I don’t know … he just seemed to stand out. It’s probably nothing. But he doesn’t belong to the area and you saw him arriving at the locus. I want to find him for elimination.’