A sound. Somewhere in the black chasm something made a noise so small and so indistinct that Fabel could not identify it. He froze and extended the Walther out before him in the vague direction of the sound. He strained his ears. Nothing. He took his fix on the insubstantial glow in the window and edged towards it. By occasionally shifting his position sideways he could identify where the pillars stood and as he reached one he would run his left hand around and up it to check for a light switch.
He heard it again. A moan. Or a voice muffled.
‘Vitrenko?’ He called out again, this time with a tentative tone in his voice, as if unsure which Vitrenko, father or son, might answer him. The answer came in a low, stifled cry, as if from someone gagged. Fabel snapped his head round in the direction of the sound. His ears strained hard, but the silence of the warehouse was already filling with the jack-hammer thudding of his own pulse. He tightened his grip on the Walther, aware that his palms, like his face, were now sleeked with sweat.
He was now close to the office cabin. Fabel guessed that the steps were just a few feet from him. He had reached another pillar and laid his free hand flat against it. He felt the ridge of a cable conduit running vertically down the pillar. He swiftly ran his hand down and found the square switch box. Fabel took a long, slow, silent breath and moved himself back and out from the pillar, stretching his arm out straight with the fingers of his left hand resting on the switch. He again loosened and then tightened his grip on his pistol, and readied to fire at whatever awaited him when he hit the lights.
Fabel pressed the light switch and a bank of about a dozen striplights, spanning the mid-section of the warehouse, flickered reluctantly into life and illuminated a scene from hell.
The girl with the golden hair, the girl who had seemed so full of youth and lithe vigour, was pinned, dead, against the side of the Portakabin. Her naked, butchered body, the lungs ripped from the body cavity, had been nailed in the same manner as the victims in the photographs taken two decades ago in a distant land. Blood and viscera glittered like wet paint splashed across the wall of the elevated office cabin. In losing her life she had lost her humanity: Fabel struggled to see the person she once was, instead irresistibly drawn to the feeling that he was looking at the twisted carcass of some grotesque, human-headed bird. He cursed the thought, for it was exactly what the killer had wanted to create. Fabel fought for his next breath and staggered back, coming to rest against a pillar. He so desperately wanted to look away, but found he could not tear his eyes from the tableau of horror before him.
Again, Fabel heard a low, muffled groan. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awoken he spun, gun poised, in the direction of the sound. The old Ukrainian was standing upright against the pillar that faced the horror on the cabin wall. He was bound tight with wire, a loop of which had been fixed above and behind his head, then drawn down and tight under his jawline. The wire had cut deep into the old man’s flesh and the front of his shirt was soaked black-red with his blood. His mouth had been sealed with a broad swathe of tape. Fabel could see that the Slav was still alive, his eyes wild and staring. The realisation hit Fabel low in the gut: Vitrenko had made his own father watch. He had repeated his own history and made the poor bastard bear witness as he ripped the breathing lungs from the girl’s body. Fabel lunged forward and placed his hands on either side of the old man’s head, and the green eyes locked Fabel’s in a wild, intense gaze. He was trying to say something.
‘Wait … wait …’ said Fabel, hastily examining the lethally tight wire bond, completely at a loss as to where to begin extricating the Slav before he bled to death. ‘I’ll get you out …’
The Ukrainian shook his head violently, causing the wire to slice even deeper into his flesh, and something that should have been a scream struggled behind the tape. Fabel backed away, shocked.
‘For Christ’s sake, keep still …’ Fabel holstered his gun and started to ease the tape from the mouth. Again the Ukrainian reacted violently, jerking his head in a sideways and downwards nod. Fabel followed the direction of the green eyes.
Then he saw it.
Strapped to the pillar, next to the old man’s ankles, was a large, thick metal disc that Fabel recognised as some type of anti-tank charge. Clamped to the mine was a fist-sized, black electrical box with a flickering green light. Fabel’s terror tightened itself around him another notch as he realised that the two thick wires that snaked out from the box were the same wires that bound the Ukrainian to the pillar. His entire body was primed. And the flashing green light on the box suggested there was also some kind of timing device. Once more the bound man started to make urgent gestures with his head and eyes, as if trying to nudge Fabel back in the direction of the warehouse door.
Fabel’s voice cracked as he spoke. ‘I can’t … I can’t leave you here …’
Something approaching calm seemed to settle back into the Ukrainian’s green eyes, and with it a quiet, strong resignation. He closed his eyes and made the slightest nodding movement with his head. It was a gesture of release: he was releasing Fabel from all obligation, from death; he was releasing himself from a troubled life.
‘I’ll get help …’ said Fabel, although both men knew that the Ukranian was as far beyond anyone’s help as it was possible to be. Fabel backed away from him, holding his gaze for as long as he could before turning and quickening his pace into a run, then a flat sprint across the empty expanse of the warehouse. Towards the door. Towards life.
Fabel burst out onto the narrow pavement outside the warehouse with such force that his head-ward plunge into the canal beyond was prevented only by the railing he slammed into. His feet slid and scraped on the cobbles as he scrambled along the wall of the neighbouring warehouse. He sat on the cobbles, his back pressed against the red brickwork, braced for what he knew must come. And it did.
There was a thunderous, reverberating whump from deep within the warehouse, as if some giant fist had slammed into the building, and Fabel felt a shockwave pulse through the wall at his back and the ground beneath him. The heavy door of the warehouse was ripped from its frame and the windows at second-storey level burst into a shower of glittering fragments. Fabel fell onto his side and cradled his head in his hands, drawing his knees up to his chest in a foetal position. A billowing wave of white and red flame bloomed through the shattered doorway and windows and then retreated, like an angry animal returning, growling, to its lair. The air was filled with a choking powder of brick dust, smoke and grime. After the earth-shaking violence of the blast, it seemed as if the world had gone still and silent. Then the alarm of every adjacent warehouse began ringing or whining in pale urgency. Fabel pulled himself back upright and sat motionless for what seemed an age. He squeezed his eyes tight closed, but he could not extinguish the fire in the green eyes of a dead old man that burned in his brain. The same eyes that had locked with Fabel’s as he had had the consciousness squeezed from him in Angelika Blüm’s flat. The same eyes that had released Fabel from any obligation to remain with him. The same, sad father’s eyes that, nearly two decades before, had looked upon the horror of the handiwork of his own flesh and blood.
In the distance, he could hear the growing whine of sirens approaching the Speicherstadt. Fabel got to his feet, pressing the palms of his hands against the wall and pushing himself up. Dust had invaded his nose and mouth and he coughed to free his throat of it. He clung to the wall as if moving from it would mean becoming lost in the swirl of dust and darkness, closed his eyes and saw again the horror that Vasyl Vitrenko had painted for him in flesh and blood on the wall in the warehouse; he saw the old man strapped to a pillar and forced to watch the horror and hear the screams of a young woman being dismembered before him. This had been Vitrenko’s masterwork. And Fabel had been intended to see it. With that thought came the realisation that Vitrenko had intended Fabel to live. He had arranged and timed it to perfection: allowing Fabel time to witness his masterpiece, to agonise futilely about how to extricate the old man from the ineluctability of his death and then to escape. That way, Vitrenko had placed two indelible images in Fabel’s mind to haunt him for the rest of his life: the butchered girl; the old man’s resignation to death. And having placed the images safely in Fabel’s mind he blasted them into nothing. Expunged them from reality, leaving them to live only in the gallery of Fabel’s memory.
He slid back down the wall into a sitting position and felt a sob begin to rise in his throat. He forced it back down and rested his head back against the brickwork and waited for help to come.
Saturday 21 June, 8.30 p.m. Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg
.
The Feuerwehr fire commander’s report told Fabel what he already knew: ‘In addition to the explosive charge on the pillar we found evidence of some kind of accelerant in or near to the office cabin … my guess is petroleum. There was nothing much left of the cabin after the blast and whatever was inside it ignited immediately. We found a couple of open five-litre containers. Anyway, it very efficiently destroyed all forensic traces from the murder scene.’
Fabel thanked the Feuerwehr captain bleakly and the fireman left the office. There was a despondent silence that Maria tried to fill. ‘Holger Brauner and his forensics team are there now,’ she said. ‘But there’s not much for them to pick through.’
Fabel spoke without looking up at Maria, Werner or Paul. ‘He’s playing with us. With me. He wanted me to see it and to live to tell about it. That’s why he left those women hanging like exhibits in that bloody barn in Afghanistan, for others to bear witness.’ Fabel looked up at his colleagues, and, for the first time, they saw their boss lost and helpless. ‘This is his art. Just like those canvases Marlies Menzel is displaying in Bremen.’
‘What now,
Chef
?’ Werner’s tone was that of a challenge, not a question.
‘Now I’m going home for a shower.’ Fabel had been around too much death in one day. His hair and skin were dusted with powder and his mouth and throat felt caked. ‘Let’s meet back here at the Präsidium at about ten.’
‘Okay,
Chef
. Shall I get the whole team together?’
Fabel smiled. Maria never complained. She just did whatever it took to get the job done.
‘Yes, please, Maria … but leave Anna out of it. I’ve given her twenty-four hours off. I think the whole MacSwain operation exhausted her.’
Maria nodded.
‘But would you contact Kriminaldirektor Van Heiden and see if he will come in for the meeting?’
‘Yes,
Chef
.’
Saturday 21 June, 9.30 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg
.
The three messages on Fabel’s answerphone were like life-lines to a world that lay beyond that of violence and murder: the first was from his daughter Gabi. As he listened to her message he heard the tinkle of laughter that had been spun through her voice since she uttered her first words. Hearing Gabi’s voice at a time like this was like someone tearing down heavy, dusty curtains in a dark and scary room, flooding it with light from outside. But tonight it was just one room within a mansion of darkness.
Gabi wanted to make up for their missed weekend by staying over next weekend, if that suited. There was a concert she wanted to go to,
Die Fantastischen Vier
. Fabel could never wrap his mind around the concept of rap – a musical form born in the ghettos of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and anchored in that particular form of street English – being performed in German. But it was Gabi’s thing: one of the countless points of divergence that grow in number as a child becomes a personality independent of its parent. He sighed heavily, it was by no means certain that this case’s insidious grip on his life would have eased any by the coming weekend.
The second message came from Susanne. She wanted him to give her a ring and let her know how he was. The third was from Fabel’s brother, Lex.
Lex was the elder brother chronologically, but Fabel often felt Lex’s irrepressibly, defiantly youthful spirit made him seem a decade younger. It wasn’t the only stark contrast: Lex was shorter than Fabel and dark-haired with a wickedly Celtic sense of humour that had crinkled the skin around his eyes into permanent creases. Lex ran a restaurant and hotel on Sylt, the North Frisian island that had once been famed only for fishing, but which now netted a much more profitable catch: the rich, the powerful and the famous from Hamburg and Berlin. Lex’s restaurant sat on a low ridge behind the dunes, with a spectacular view of a broad scythe of white sand and the changing palette of the North Sea beyond. Fabel had spent a lot of time at Lex’s. It had become something of a refuge for him. It had been there that Fabel had recuperated after being shot. It was there he retreated when trying to come to terms with the fact that he was no longer a member of a family. No longer a husband. No longer a full-time father.
Lex had no special reason for calling. It was just brother reaching out to brother: a traffic, Fabel guiltily realised, that tended to be too much one-way. Hearing his brother’s voice filled Fabel with an urgent desire to escape Hamburg and spend weeks staring at the ever-changing ocean; to abandon his sharp tailoring and city grooming and loaf around, stubble-jawed, in sun-faded sweatshirt, jeans and deck shoes. The image was clear in his head, to return to his favoured refuge, but this time his imagination painted a companion: Susanne. He made the decision there and then: whenever this hideous case was over, he would ask Susanne to come with him to Sylt.