Fabel became a statue. He listened to the stillness of the apartment with such intensity that it amplified the surge of blood in his ears and the sound of metal sliding against the stiff leather of his holster as he drew his Walther. He had his back to the office door and felt exposed. Turning swiftly and silently, he slipped back into the hall. Silence. He stood unmoving for half a minute, straining to hear any sounds from the other rooms. Still nothing. The tension eased, but only slightly, from his body and he moved silently along the corridor. Back against the wall, gun raised in his right hand, he pushed the door of the bedroom as wide open as it would go. He swung round into the frame and scanned the room along his gun sight. He took one hand from his gun and fumbled for the light switch. The room was empty. Fabel gave a small laugh: he was being an idiot. He led the gun hang by his side and turned back into the corridor.
The first thought Fabel registered was surprise. How had the man moved so silently and quickly? He must have been in the main living room, waiting to strike. Fabel’s gun arm shot up but he looked down in disbelief as it stopped dead in mid-arc. His attacker had a solid, unyielding grip and Fabel felt as if the bones of his wrist were being crushed into splinters. The pressure seemed to force his hand into an open palm and his Walther clattered onto the wooden flooring. The man was close now and Fabel tried to swing his other fist upwards, but his attacker fastened his free hand around Fabel’s throat. In the adrenalin-slowed time of the attack, Fabel realised that his airway was not blocked, but that his assailant was applying intense pressure to his neck, just below the angle of his jaw. Fabel tried to call out but found himself mute. As the world around him started to cloud into blackness, all Fabel could do was wonder if this was what it was to die, and gaze, fearful and helpless, into the cold, glittering green eyes of the man he had seen outside the Tina Kramer murder scene.
Tuesday 17 June, 5.20 a.m. Uhlenhorst, Hamburg
.
The first thing Fabel became aware of was pain: a pain that exceeded all definition of a headache, that surpassed any hangover: a buzz-saw that seared through his skull. Then the sound of birds, heralding the breaking day with their chorus. Fabel lifted his head slightly and was rewarded with a cold dagger of pain that sliced through him. He let his head fall back again. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there or even what day of the week it was. It took almost a minute for his full consciousness to boot up. The Slavic guy. He sat bolt upright and was shocked with another, even greater jolt, this time with an accompanying surge of vertigo and nausea. He lunged over the side of the bed and vomited. The surging ache in his head did not abate, but he embraced it. Pain meant he was alive. He flopped back onto the bed and fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. It was gone. So was the gun from his holster. He eased himself up slowly so that he could look around the room. He was on Angelika Blüm’s bed. The Slav must have put him there. The pain in Fabel’s head wrapped a shroud around every thought. In the pale grey light he could see that his cell phone, his handgun and his wallet were carefully laid out on the dresser. It took him another five minutes to ease himself off the bed and stagger over to the dresser. He dragged his cell phone across the maple dresser top and stabbed the preset number for the Präsidium.
By lunchtime, every policeman, uniform and KriPo, had a description of the short, powerfully built Slav who had attacked Fabel. The doctor at the Krankenhaus St Georg who examined Fabel could not conceal how impressed he was with the professionalism of the attack. The Slav had very efficiently cut off the blood supply to Fabel’s brain, rendering him unconscious. There had been little permanent damage done, although the pain Fabel was experiencing was the result of brain cells dying, starved of oxygen. The hospital staff insisted on keeping Fabel in overnight for observation and Fabel felt too exhausted and sore to argue. He yielded to a peaceful, dreamless sleep.
Fabel woke shortly after two p.m. The nurse fetched Werner and Maria Klee, who had been waiting patiently outside for Fabel to awake. Maria, with an uncharacteristic informality, sat on the edge of Fabel’s bed. Werner stood, awkwardly. It was as if he felt uncomfortable seeing his boss so vulnerable. He dragged a chair from the corner and sat down only when Fabel insisted that he do so.
‘You sure it was the guy you saw outside the second murder scene?’ Werner asked.
‘No doubt about it. I was looking straight into his eyes.’
Werner’s face hardened. ‘So he’s our guy. He’s “Son of Sven” …’
Fabel frowned. ‘I don’t know. If he is, why didn’t he kill me?’
‘He had a bloody good try,’ said Maria.
‘No … I don’t think he did. The doctor here says it was very professional … that he knew how to render me unconscious. If he wanted to kill me he could have finished me off, silently and with no fuss, instead of laying me out on Blüm’s bed.’
‘But we’ve sighted him at two murder locations. That more than makes him a suspect,’ protested Werner.
‘But why was he there
after
the murder? And why choose now to turn over her apartment, instead of when he was there committing the murder?’
‘Maybe he thought he’d left something behind,’ Maria suggested.
‘We all know this killer doesn’t leave anything behind. Anyway, Brauner’s team went through that apartment at a microscopic level. They wouldn’t miss anything, and our guy would know that. The other thing is, the guy who attacked me doesn’t fit the description the girl from the apartment building gave us.’ Fabel paused. The sunlight through the tall, narrow hospital window sliced a bright triangle across the floor of Fabel’s room and glittered coldly on the porcelain and the stainless-steel pipes and taps of the washstand by the door. His head ached and he closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. He spoke without opening his eyes. ‘What is really bothering me is the strength of that old guy, and the way he was able to put me out so professionally. That takes training.’
Werner stretched his legs out, resting his feet on the steel bars beneath Fabel’s hospital bed. ‘Well, both you and Maria say he looks foreign. Like a Russian. If he is so handy, could he be one of the “Top Team” – the Ukrainian outfit Volker was talking about?’
‘Could be, I suppose.’ Fabel still didn’t open his eyes. ‘Everything about him says special forces. But again, why didn’t he finish the job?’
‘It’s a big thing to kill a Hamburg policeman,’ said Werner. ‘Klugmann is one thing, but murder a Mordkommission Hauptkommissar and you’d have nowhere to hide.’
‘Whoever he was and whatever he was doing there,’ said Maria, ‘we’ve got the whole of Hamburg out there looking for him.’
Fabel slowly eased himself up, the effort stretching his voice. ‘I’m not so sure he’s going to be that easy to find, Maria. What about MacSwain? Have we got him under close watch?’
‘Paul and Anna are on him tight,’ said Werner. ‘They’re there most of the time, even when we’ve got others on shift. I think they’re afraid of another screw-up like the Klugmann surveillance.’
‘Good. I’ll be out of here tomorrow and we can go over everything. In the meantime, if anything comes up, let me know.’
‘Okay,
Chef
,’ said Werner. Fabel closed his eyes again and rested his head on the pillow. Werner looked across to Maria and jutted his chin in the direction of the door. Maria nodded and rose from the bed.
‘We’ll see you later,
Chef
,’ she said.
The day passed between gazing out of the window, flicking through the daytime TV stations in the vain search for anything worth watching, and sleeping. As the day went on, Fabel became aware of a growing stiffness in his neck and a tenderness below the angle of his jaw, where the Slav’s thumb had squeezed off the blood supply to his brain.
Susanne breezed in mid-afternoon and immediately started to examine Fabel, holding his eyelids back with her thumb and checking each of his eyes in turn and rotating his head with her hands to assess the mobility of his neck.
‘If this is your idea of foreplay,’ grinned Fabel, ‘I have to tell you it isn’t doing it for me.’
Susanne was not in the mood for jokes. Fabel saw that she was genuinely upset and it touched him. She sat on the bed and held his hand for a couple of hours, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, while Fabel dozed. When a nurse came in to usher her out, Fabel was amazed at the fierce authority with which Susanne dismissed her. Susanne stayed until after six and then came back for an hour in the evening. By nine-thirty, Fabel had abandoned himself to a deep, impenetrable, dreamless sleep.
Tuesday 17 June, 8.30 p.m. Harvestehude, Hamburg
.
Anna Wolff could have been a secretary, a hairdresser, a kindergarten teacher. She was petite and vibrant, with a pretty round face that was continually full of energy and habitually made up with dark eye-shadow, mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. Her short hair was raven black and either sleeked flat or waxed spiky. One of the things that threw observers off any track that would lead them to conclude that she was, in fact, a Kriminalkommissarin, was her youthfulness. Anna was twenty-seven but could have passed for someone in her late teens.
Paul Lindemann, on the other hand, couldn’t have been anything other than a policeman. Lindemann’s father, like Werner Meyer’s father, had been a Wasserschutz policeman, patrolling by boat Hamburg’s circulatory system of waterways, canals, harbours and quaysides. Paul was one of those northern Germans whom Fabel described as ‘scrubbed Lutherans’, clean, groomed, austere people who often found it difficult to bend to change. Paul Lindemann looked today pretty much as he would have done if he had been the same age in the 1950s or ’60s.
Fabel habitually teamed up Anna and Paul. They were chalk and cheese, and Fabel had always believed in putting together teams of individuals who viewed things totally differently: if you came at the same object from opposing angles, you were likely to see more of the whole. Anna and Paul made an odd couple and for months the imposed partnership had sat ill with both of them. Now they worked together with deep mutual respect and regard for their respective, different but complementary talents. It was the kind of success Fabel had hoped to achieve with Maria and Werner, whose potential as a team had yet to be realised.
Tonight, both Anna and Paul felt edgy. Fabel was more than a boss. He had been mentor to both of them and had, by selecting them for his Mordkommission team, set the sights higher for their future careers. To both, Fabel had seemed invulnerable. Now he was lying in a hospital bed in the Krankenhaus St Georg. They would have given anything to have been out searching for Fabel’s attacker, rather than keeping tabs on some British yuppie.
There was a newspaper and tobacco stall on the corner of MacSwain’s street. A coffee machine sat behind the counter and outside there was the usual brushed aluminium elbow-high tables for customers to stand and drink their coffee. Anna stood at one of the four tables, from which she had a clear view of the crossroads and MacSwain’s apartment block as well as the exit from the Tiefgarage underneath. If anyone came out, on foot or by car, Anna would be able to track the direction they took and radio to Paul, who was parked further down the block with a view from the other direction. It was dark now and Anna was on her third coffee, which she was trying to make last. Any more would mean a jittery, sleepless night. The sullen, overweight stallholder barely acknowledged her existence, but when three skinheads in their uniform of field-green jerkins came up to buy some cigarettes, he muttered something to them and nodded in her direction. The fat stallholder and the skinheads burst into crude laughter. Anna kept her gaze firmly on the apartment building. The three skinheads came up to Anna’s table, one on one side and two on the other. One of the skins, a tall, bull-necked youth with bad skin, leaned into Anna.
‘What’s up darlin’, you been stood up?’
Anna neither answered nor looked in their direction.
The bull-necked skinhead leered at his comrades and laughed. ‘I’d get all stood up for you, babe …’
‘What, all ten centimetres of you?’ said Anna with a sigh and still without looking in the skinhead’s direction.
Bull-Neck’s two companions exploded into laughter, pointing at him derisively. His face clouded and he pulled close to Anna, slipping his hand under her leather jacket and closing it around her breast.
‘Maybe we’ll see how much of me you can take …’
It all happened too fast for Bull-Neck to register. Anna spun around away from the skinhead and then back to face him, throwing his hand away as if with centrifugal force. As she came around to face him again, her hands moved in two swift movements. Her left hand reached down and grabbed the skinhead’s groin while her right elbow slammed into his cheek and then, in a seamless movement, her right hand slipped under her jacket, bringing her SIG-Sauer automatic up and into his face. Hard. She pushed him back, not allowing him to get purchase with his scrabbling feet until he slammed into the stall’s counter. She bent his nose out of shape with the muzzle of the gun, twisting it as she spoke.
‘You wanna fuck with Anna?’ she said in a coquettish voice, tilting her head from side to side and pouting her lips.
Bull-Neck stared at her with terror in his eyes, searching her face as if to assess the extent of her madness and the consequent extent of his danger. Anna swung the gun around at the other two skinheads, stretching her arm out, bolt stiff.