‘Give me your report as soon as you can.’
Wednesday 4 June, 6.00 a.m. St Pauli, Hamburg.
On the way out, Fabel got Beller to go with him to the apartment downstairs. There was already a uniformed officer there, drinking tea with a bird-like old woman with paper skin. This apartment was an exact copy, in layout at least, of the one above. But decades of habitation had etched itself into the walls of this flat, until it had become an extension of the old woman who lived in it. In contrast, it was someone’s death, not their life, that had made the only mark on the apartment above.
The officer rose from the armchair when Fabel walked in but Fabel motioned for him to relax. Beller introduced the woman as Frau Steiner. She stared up at Fabel with large, round, watery eyes. The combination of her gaze and her bird-like frailty made Fabel think of an owl. There was a table and chairs against one wall. Fabel pulled up one of the chairs and sat facing the old woman.
‘Are you all right, Frau Steiner? I know this must be a shock for you. Such a terrible business. And I’m sure that you must find it disturbing to have all of us tramping around the place. So much noise …’
As Fabel spoke, the old woman leaned forward and creased her brow over her owl eyes, as if concentrating hard on his words. ‘It’s all right, the noise doesn’t bother me … I’m a bit deaf, you know.’
‘I see,’ said Fabel, raising his voice slightly. ‘So you won’t have heard anything last night?’
Frau Steiner suddenly looked deeply sad. ‘That’s the thing, I probably did … I probably heard something but didn’t realise it.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Fabel.
‘Tinnitus. I’m afraid it goes along with my deafness. I take my hearing aid out when I sleep … every night I hear sounds … bumps, high-pitched whines … even sounds like screams. But it’s just my tinnitus. Or rather, I never know whether it’s my tinnitus or not.’
‘I see, I’m sorry. That must be unpleasant.’
‘You have to shut it out. Otherwise you’d go mad.’ She shook her small, bird-like head slowly, as if too sudden a movement might damage it. ‘I’ve had it a long, long time, young man. Since July 1943, to be exact.’
‘The British bombing?’
‘I’m glad you know your history. I’m afraid I have to live with mine. Or at least the echoes of it. I was caught outside when the first wave came over. Both eardrums shattered, you see. And this …’ She pulled up a black woollen sleeve to reveal an impossibly thin arm. The skin was puckered and mottled pink and white. ‘Burns on thirty per cent of my body. But it’s the tinnitus that has marked me most.’ She paused for a moment; a sadness seemed to well in the owl eyes. ‘I cannot stand the thought of that poor girl crying out for help and me not hearing it.’
Fabel looked past the woman’s head and took in the collection of old black-and-white photographs on the dresser behind her: her as a child and as a young woman, even then with owl eyes; her with a man with a shock of black hair; another photograph of the same man wearing what Fabel thought at first was a Wehrmacht uniform, then he recognised it as that of a wartime Police Reserve Battalion. No children. No photographs less than fifty years old.
‘Did you see her much?’
‘No. In fact I only spoke to her once. I was brushing the landing when she passed on her way up.’
‘Did you talk to her?’
‘Not really. She said hello and something about the weather and went on up. I would have asked her in for a cup of coffee, but she seemed in a hurry. She looked like a businesswoman or something … very smartly dressed. Expensive shoes, as I remember. Beautiful shoes. Foreign. Other than that day, I only heard her on the stairs occasionally. I thought she probably went away on business a lot or something.’
‘Did she have lots of visitors. Men, specifically?’
Her face creased in concentration again. ‘No … no, I can’t say that I saw much of anybody.’
‘I know this is a very unpleasant matter, but I have to ask you, Frau Steiner – was there anything that made you think she may have been a prostitute?’
Impossibly, the owl eyes widened. ‘No. Certainly not. Is that what she was?’
‘We don’t know. If she were, I would have expected you to see more men coming and going.’
‘No, I can honestly say I was only aware of two or three visitors to the flat. But now you mention it they were all men, I never saw another woman.’
‘Can you describe them?’
‘No, not really,’ she shook her head again, slowly. ‘I can’t even be sure if there were more than, say, two men visiting. I maybe saw the same person more than once.’ She pointed past Fabel, down the hall, to the semiopaque bronze-glass panel in her apartment door. ‘I just saw shapes through the door – figures more than anything.’
‘So you wouldn’t be able to recognise any of them?’
‘Only the young man who sub-let the apartment to her …’
‘That would be Klugmann, sir,’ interjected Beller. ‘He was the one who discovered the body and called us.’
‘Did he come around often?’ Fabel asked.
The old woman gave a shrug of her insubstantial shoulders. ‘I only saw him a couple of times. Like I say, he could have been one of the figures I saw go up and down, or he was maybe only here the couple of times I saw him.’ She looked towards the glass panel in the door at the end of the short hall. ‘That’s what it means to become old, young man. Your world shrinks and shrinks until it’s reduced to just shadows passing your door.’
‘When was Herr Klugmann’s most recent visit, that you know about?’
‘Last week … or maybe the week before. I’m sorry, I didn’t really pay much heed.’
‘That’s all right, Frau Steiner. Thank you for your time.’ Fabel rose from the armchair.
‘Herr Hauptkommissar?’ The watery owl eyes blinked.
‘Yes, Frau Steiner?’
‘Did she suffer terribly?’
There was no point in lying. It would soon be all over the papers. ‘I’m afraid she did. But she’s at peace now. Goodbye, Frau Steiner. If there is anything you need, please ask one of the officers.’
The words didn’t seem to have sunk in, the old woman simply sat shaking her head. ‘Tragic. So tragic.’
As they left the flat Fabel turned to Beller. ‘You said you were first on the scene?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And there was no one hanging around?’
‘No, sir. Just the guy who phoned us … and by that time the young couple from the downstairs flat.’
‘You didn’t see an older man hanging around?’
Beller shook his head thoughtfully.
‘Even later, when the ghouls began to gather? A short, thickset man in his late sixties? He looks foreign … Slavic … maybe Russian.’
‘No sir … sorry. Is it important?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel. ‘Probably not.’
Wednesday 4 June, 7.30 a.m. St Pauli, Hamburg.
The interview room in the Davidwache police station was a study in efficient minimalism. The starkness of the whitewashed walls was broken only by the door and a single window which would have looked out onto Davidstrasse, had its glass not been thick and cloudy, like a sheet of frozen milk, against which the daylight that was dawning outside was reduced to a vague bloom. One end of the interview table was pushed up against the wall, and four tubular metal chairs were arranged, two on either side, at the table. A black interview-recording cassette unit sat at the end of the table. Above it, on the wall, was a notice advising of exits and procedures in case of fire. Above that a sign forbidding smoking.
Fabel and Werner sat on one side of the table. Opposite Fabel was a man of about thirty-five with thick, greasy black hair combed back in glistening strands that continually slipped over his forehead. He was tall and powerfully built, his shoulders straining against the cheap black leather of his too-tight jacket. He had the look of a former athlete gone to seed: an incipient corpulence gelling around the waistline, the eyes shadowed, the skin pale against the black hair and two-day stubble; a face still square and strong, but beginning to show signs of sagging.
‘You are Hans Klugmann?’ Fabel asked without looking up from the report.
‘Yes …’ Klugmann leaned forward, hunching his shoulders, placing his wrists on the edge of the table and picking at the skin on one thumb with the nail of the other. A pose almost like prayer, but for its nervous intensity.
‘You found the girl …’ Fabel flipped over a few pages. ‘“Monique”.’
‘Yes …’ The thumbnail dug deeper. One leg, resting on the ball of the foot, started to bounce in an unconscious twitch under the table. The action made the hands shake rhythmically.
‘It must have been a shock … very unpleasant for you …’
There was genuine pain in Klugmann’s eyes. ‘You could say that …’
‘Monique was a friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet you claim you don’t know her surname?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Look, Herr Klugmann, I have to admit I really need your help here. I’m a very confused man and I’m relying on you to help me clear up my confusion. So far I have the body of an anonymous girl lying dismembered in an apartment where there’s no trace of personal belongings other than a single set of clothes found in a wardrobe … no purse, no papers … for that matter there isn’t even any food other than a litre of milk in the fridge. We also find
some
of the trappings you would expect in an apartment used for prostitution. And the apartment is located conveniently near, but not in, the red-light district. Yet there is no evidence of a lot of male visitors. See why I am confused?’
Klugmann shrugged.
‘And on top of all that we discover that the apartment is officially rented out to a former police special-forces officer who claims not to know his sub-tenant’s full name.’ Fabel waited for the words to sink in. Klugmann sat impassive, staring at his hands. ‘So why don’t you stop jerking us around, Herr Klugmann? You and I both know that the apartment was used for the purposes of prostitution, but in some kind of highly selective way, and that this girl Monique didn’t live there. Listen, I’m not interested in your arrangement with this girl other than in the information you can give me about her. Do I make myself clear?’
Klugmann nodded but did not lift his gaze from his hands.
‘So what was her name?’
‘I told you, I don’t know … I swear that’s the truth. All I ever called her – all she ever called herself – was Monique.’
‘But she was a prostitute?’
‘Okay, maybe … I don’t know … she might have been … maybe part time. Nothing to do with me. She never seemed short of money, so yeah, maybe.’
‘How long have you known her?’
‘Only about three or four months.’
‘If you don’t know her name,’ Werner said, ‘then there must be others who do. Who did she hang out with?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You never met any of her friends?’ Fabel asked without disguising his incredulity.
‘No.’
Fabel pushed a photograph of the first victim, Ursula Kastner, across the desk. ‘Recognise her?’
‘No. Well … yeah … but only from the papers. Isn’t she the lawyer that got murdered? Was she done the same way?’
Fabel ignored the question and left the photograph sitting there. Klugmann didn’t look at it again. Fabel had a feeling that he was deliberately avoiding looking at Kastner’s face. An instinct, somewhere deep inside Fabel’s gut, began to stir.
‘What about Monique’s address before she moved into the flat?’
Klugmann shrugged.
‘This is getting ridiculous.’ Werner leaned forward. His bulk and the brutality of his features gave his movements a menace that often wasn’t intended. In response Klugmann straightened himself in his chair and angled his head back defiantly. ‘You are trying to tell us that this girl moved into your life and into your apartment without you knowing her full name, or anything else about her?’
‘You have to admit, Herr Klugmann,’ said Fabel, ‘I mean, as a former policeman, that it does all seem a bit strange.’
Klugmann relaxed his pose. ‘Yeah. I suppose it does. But I’m telling you the truth. Listen, it’s a different world out there. Monique just, well, sort of appeared one night at the place I work and we got talking …’
‘She was on her own?’
‘Yes. That’s why I got talking to her. Arno, my boss, thought she was an expensive hooker trawling our club and told me to send her on her way. We got talking and she seemed a good kid. She asked me if I knew somewhere she could rent a room or an apartment and I told her about my flat.’
‘Why did you offer her your flat? Why don’t you live there yourself?’
‘I’m … well, sort of
involved
with one of the girls from the Tanzbar … Sonja. I was staying over most nights at her place because it was so close to the Tanzbar. After I leased the new place I moved in with Sonja while it was being decorated. Then I meet Monique, and she says she’s willing to pay well, and in advance, for a decent place to stay. She also said it would only be for maybe six to nine months. So I thought it was a good way to make a few extra euros …’
‘And you were to keep out of the way?’ asked Werner.