‘I am going to ruin you, Fabel,’ Norbert spoke through tight teeth. ‘You are not going to get away with this.’
He jabbed Fabel in the chest again, giving an extra push as if dismissing something worthless. Fabel’s hand shot up and seized Norbert’s wrist.
‘Keep your hands to yourself.’
Norbert tried to wrench his hand away but Fabel held it fast. He looked down at it and was about to throw it back into Norbert’s chest. Instead he froze. Fabel stared blankly at Norbert’s now clenched fist and Norbert tried to wrench it free again. Again it merely wobbled from side to side in a mini arm-wrestling tussle. Fabel’s grip tightened around Norbert’s wrist, turning the captured fist an angry red. Fabel looked up from the fist and into Norbert’s eyes. He smiled. Coldly and malevolently.
‘I’ve got you,’ said Fabel and his voice was filled with a quiet, bitter triumph. ‘Now I’ve got you.’
Norbert Eitel’s eyes searched Fabel’s face for some sort of meaning. Fabel allowed himself one more look. There, on the back of Norbert Eitel’s left hand. A scar. Or more like two scars that coincided to form a slightly distorted wishbone shape. Just as Michaela Palmer had described it.
Fabel managed to force the grin from his face before he swung open the door of interview room number one. He didn’t enter but merely leaned in. Wolfgang Eitel, Waalkes and the two corporate-crime officers stopped their exchange and all turned to the door, as if caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
‘Just to let you know that, as far as I am concerned, you are free to go when these gentlemen are finished with you.’
Wolfgang Eitel’s face lit up with a cold, malicious triumph. Fabel started to leave, then checked himself and leaned back in, as if some incidental detail had suddenly occurred to him.
‘Oh, by the way, your son Norbert has been charged with rape, attempted murder and suspicion of being an accessory to murder.’
Fabel closed the door and allowed his smile to return as he heard the explosion of voices in the interview room.
Fabel was halfway down the hall when Paul Lindemann came running up to him. ‘
Chef
, I’ve just had Werner on the phone. He wants you to go over to Harburg. He’s found Hansi Kraus. Dead.’
Saturday 21 June, 3.30 p.m. Harburg, Hamburg
.
In his twenty years as a policeman, most of which had been with the Mordkommission, Fabel had visited dozens of death scenes. It was something you either got used to or you didn’t. Fabel had never become accustomed to intimacy with death. Each new scene left its own tiny scar somewhere deep within him. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had never been able to separate the humanity from the corpse; the spirit from the meat.
Death is nothing if not imaginative in the variety of its guises. Each had its especial unpleasantness and Fabel had seen most of them. There was the horrific: the body fished from the Elbe after a month with the eels, or the gory tableaux laid out for him by this latest killer. There was the bizarre: the sex games gone wrong, or the unusual choice of murder weapon. There was the surreal, like the drugs trafficker who had been shot in the back of the head while he sat eating at the kitchen table, and who, post-mortem, had remained seated upright, fork still in the hand that rested on the table, as if pausing between scooping mouthfuls, while the plate before him had been spattered with fragments of bone, brain and blood. Then there was the pathetic, where the victims had sought escape from inevitable death behind a curtain or under a bed in a desperate attempt to conceal themselves from their killers; the body coiled into a foetal position, hugging into itself and making itself small.
Hansi Kraus’s demise fell somewhere between the pathetic and the sordid. The small, filthy room in which he had taken his leave of the world was as unpleasant as it could have been. The paintwork, the walls, every surface in the room, even the single naked light bulb that hung desolately from the ceiling, was coated in a greasy dust. Despite Werner having opened the room’s only window wide, a stale odour hung in the air like a malevolent spirit defying exorcism.
Hansi, who was now beyond feeling cold or hot, lay with his heavy greatcoat partially covering his legs. His eyes were open, sunken balls in the sockets of his skull-like face. Decomposition, thought Fabel bitterly, had had a head start, thanks to Hansi’s active participation in wasting his own body to a skeleton. One sleeve of a shirt that had once known a pattern was pulled up to the halfway point on Hansi’s meagre left bicep. A rubber-tubing tourniquet remained wrapped but loosened just above the elbow joint and there was a fresh puncture mark in his forearm, just discernible among the hideous track marks, the road map of a decade’s journey through hard addiction. A syringe lay empty in the limp grip of Hansi’s right hand.
Nice try, thought Fabel. He looked over the whole sordid scene. Really nice try. This was a murder masquerading as a drug death that would slip swiftly and quietly into a statistic. It was the kind of anonymous, unsurprising death that passed by with nothing other than a perfunctory official recording by the police: another junkie succeeds in finally poisoning himself to death. Except this junkie had a story to tell and someone had silenced him before he could tell it.
‘You informed the local boys yet?’
Werner shook his head. ‘I wanted you to see it first. Very convenient, isn’t it?’
‘And one hell of a coincidence. I want Holger Brauner’s team to do their thing. Inform the local Polizeidirektion, but tell them we are treating this as a suspected murder, and that means it’s a Mordkommission case.’
Fabel looked back down at Hansi. Again he couldn’t help seeing past the corpse, past the junkie, to someone’s son, to a person who must once have had dreams and hopes and ambitions.
‘You said that Hansi seemed to get suddenly uneasy at the Präsidium?’ he asked Werner. ‘In the canteen?’
‘Yes, he did. I thought it was really odd the way he suddenly seemed uncomfortable and desperate to get away.’
‘And I told you that he was probably just itching for his next fix. But what if that wasn’t it? What if, after we make him trudge through mug shot after mug shot, he sees one or both of the killers right there in the Präsidium?’
‘He was okay to start with … there were a few uniforms in the canteen, some KriPo. The usual mix. He didn’t start to get jumpy until we sat at the table. In fact we were sitting there a while before he started …’ Werner’s face emptied of expression and his eyes moved as if the images from his recall were playing out in front of him. ‘That’s it!’ Then the sudden illumination of his expression faded just as quickly. He looked at Fabel grimly. ‘Oh shit …’
Saturday 21 June, 5.30 p.m. Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg
.
Fabel and Werner made their way directly to Van Heiden’s office as soon as they got back from the squalor of Hansi Kraus’s squat. Even as they were shown into Van Heiden’s office, Fabel thought he could still smell a hint of the musty, unclean odour that had lurked heavily in the air, as if it had partially invested itself into the fabric of his jacket. He felt the urge, almost an obsessive compulsion, to get home to shower and change.
Van Heiden was clearly in no mood for chit-chat. ‘Are you sure about this, Fabel?’ The Kriminaldirektor asked the question almost before the office doors had closed behind him and Werner. Volker, who was already seated in front of Van Heiden’s desk, didn’t rise from his chair but nodded in Fabel’s direction when he and Werner entered. Fabel noticed there were two red folders – personnel files – on the desk. ‘This is a very serious allegation …’
‘No, Herr Kriminaldirektor, I’m not sure. All we actually have are a handful of facts of which we can be reasonably certain …’
Fabel and Werner now stood before the broad expanse of Van Heiden’s desk. Van Heiden beckoned for them to take the two vacant chairs next to Volker. They both sat down and Fabel continued.
‘Herr Volker’s intelligence tells us that there is some kind of leak from within the Polizei Hamburg selling information to this new Ukrainian outfit and, for all we know, to other organised-crime outfits. Whoever this leak is, he, she or they have a motive for killing anyone who can identify them. Oberst Volker believes that they identified Klugmann as an undercover federal agent and either exposed him to the Ukrainians or killed him themselves.’
‘And it looks like they did their own dirty work,’ interjected Werner. ‘Hansi Kraus told us that the killers he saw were Germans, not foreigners. And they enjoy their work. According to the forensic pathologist, the bastards tortured Klugmann before they murdered him. And, of course, the Ukrainian-made automatic that Hansi found was left behind to point us in the wrong direction.’
Fabel took up the story again. ‘And when Kraus is brought in here to look at mug shots, Werner takes him down to the canteen where something or someone spooks him so badly he can’t get out of the place quickly enough. The next thing we know, Kraus is found lying dead in his squat from a beautifully staged overdose.’
Van Heiden had sat grim-faced throughout. Fabel had noticed that Volker’s attention had not been focused on the speakers, but on Van Heiden’s reaction to what was being said.
‘Okay … the evidence points to corrupt police officers. But what evidence do we have against these two officers in particular?’ said Van Heiden, picking up the red personnel files and throwing them across the wide expanse of his desk so that they came to rest the right way round in front of Fabel.
‘We have no hard, objective evidence as yet, Herr Kriminaldirektor,’ answered Fabel. ‘But the physical descriptions we got from Hansi match them perfectly. What’s more …’ Fabel flipped open the first file and stabbed a finger at the photograph in the top right-hand corner of the first page – ‘when I was in his office, I noticed several boxing trophies, one of which was for junior light-heavyweight in Hamburg-Harburg. That is where he grew up. Hansi Kraus mentioned that the older of the two hitmen was whining about how the area he grew up in was going to the dogs.’ Fabel flipped open the second file. ‘Kraus also described the second, younger man, the one who pulled the trigger, as looking like some kind of muscleman. I couldn’t think of a better description to match this guy.’
‘It all seems very flimsy and circumstantial,’ said Van Heiden.
‘It is,’ said Fabel, ‘until we get some hard evidence against them. We’re starting with a complete forensic exam of the murder scene. The local guys know that this is being treated as a murder, and I’m sure word has already got back to our chums here. But the most compelling piece of, admittedly subjective, evidence is Kraus’s reaction in the Präsidium canteen.’ Fabel looked over to Werner.
‘I tried to pinpoint the exact moment that Hansi started to get jumpy,’ said Werner. ‘Then I remembered these two,’ he pointed at the files, ‘coming in and sitting down not far from where we were. It was then that Kraus started to act like he had an electric wire up his ass. He even asked me who the big guy with the muscles was. I told him.’
‘You asked me if I’m sure about this. Well, I’m sure these are our guys all right.’ Fabel nodded his head in the direction of the open files, with the two faces staring blankly out from the windows of their photographs at their accusers. ‘They are in exactly the right position to sell extremely valuable intelligence … they’re high-enough ranking and they’re in the right department.’ He fixed Van Heiden with a candid stare. ‘Am I sure we can prove it? No. Whether we can get enough evidence to convict them is an entirely different proposition.’
There was another small silence as they all looked down at the photographs of Kriminalhauptkommissar Manfred Buchholz and Kriminalkommissar Lothar Kolski of LKA7.
Saturday 21 June, 8.00 p.m. Speicherstadt, Hamburg
.
Fabel parked, as before, on Deichstrasse before crossing over to the Speicherstadt on foot. Again the vast hulks of the warehouses loomed against the darkening sky, the red brickwork seeming to smoulder like dull embers in the failing light. He retraced his steps to the former Klimenko warehouse and swung the heavy door open. It had been dark enough on his last visit; this time, there were no lights on. The vast belly of the warehouse had swallowed the evening whole, with any hint of light from the distant windows or the open door sucked into oblivion. Fabel cursed himself for not having brought a flashlight. He knew there were neon striplights scattered throughout the warehouse, hanging down like trapeze bars from the high ceiling; he guessed that there must be a switch near the door, but he had no idea where.
‘Major Vitrenko!’ His voice resounded against the walls before being swallowed up by the darkness. He muttered a curse before calling out ‘Vitrenko!’ once more. Despite his irritation, Fabel could not help seeing the irony in calling out that particular name. It was almost an analogy of his investigation, chasing a monstrous spectre in the dark. There was no reply. Fabel peered into the warehouse, narrowing his eyelids and craning his head forward, as if the action would filter out some of the darkness. He thought he could see a dim oblong glow set deep into the gloom. From memory, Fabel reckoned that the pale light would fit with one of the Portakabin’s narrow windows. He called out once more. Silence. This wasn’t right. He checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was after eight and he knew that a man as habituated to military regulation and precision as the Ukrainian must have been would not be late. Fabel reached under his jacket and slipped his Walther from its holster. He cursed his lack of foresight: he had not considered there would be any danger in meeting the Ukrainian again. No one knew Fabel was here. He was alone. He reached out and slapped and slid the palm of his left hand on the wall next to the door, but his exploring hand refused to find the switch.