‘It’s because he didn’t pick his own victims,’ Fabel said. ‘They were selected for him. The object of MacSwain’s obsession isn’t his victim, it’s the person who is guiding him. His spiritual father: Vitrenko. It’s Vitrenko who fills the gap left by a natural father who didn’t give a shit.’
Something else struck Fabel.
‘There are no files from Angelika Blüm’s apartment. And the missing video camera isn’t here either. He’s passed them on. He was told how to perform the murder and what to take from the scene.’ Werner appeared at his shoulder. With Maria and Werner now both behind him, he felt trapped in the tiny, airless space. He turned around and indicated the open space of the living area with a determined nod of his head. They all moved out.
‘It’s Anna,
Chef
,’ Werner’s face was clouded with worry. ‘It’s not good. She’s not in her apartment and she’s left her bag and cell phone behind.’
Saturday 21 June, 10.00 p.m. The Elbe near the Landungsbrücken, Hamburg
.
The day that had been was trying to be remembered in a sky spun through with red and in the pleasant, lingering warmth of the night air. Franz Kassel lifted his cap and smoothed back the fine strands of sandy hair over his scalp. His shift was nearly at an end and he was looking forward to a cold beer. Or maybe a few. It had been a quiet shift and Franz had been able to savour what had attracted him to the Wasserschutzpolizei in the first place: hearing the delicate sounds of the water and the gentle creakings and ringings of boats at moor; watching the ever-changing light, passing beneath the vast, looming hulls of ships as he patrolled. Most of all, there was the different perspective it offered. Things always looked different from the water. You saw more. The Hamburg he saw every day was totally different from the one seen from dry land. He felt privileged to have this unique viewpoint.
He knew not everyone shared his sense of privilege: like Gebhard, the Polizeiobermeister who had the helm and was guiding the WS25 back towards the Landungsbrücken station. For Gebhard, the WSP was just a job; he had only been in the WSP for three years and already he talked incessantly to the other crew members about training and transfer to a land-based MEK.
Kassel watched as Gebhard steered towards the shore. Gebhard was competent, but he clearly lacked the feel for the water that Kassel believed was essential for any true river cop. It was something that lay within the natural sailor: the awareness of the river as a living entity. Gebhard, on the other hand, treated the Elbe as a water-filled autobahn on which he was no more than a traffic cop. Kassel left him to it and went to stand on the deck. The breeze cooled his face and he sighed the contented sigh of a man who has found his place and knows it. It was then that he spotted a boat he recognised exit from the moorings by the Überseebrücke. Kassel raised his binoculars. It was the Chris Craft 308 Cruiser they had been asked to watch the other night. He slipped quickly back into the cabin and ordered Gebhard to follow the cruiser, but at a safe distance.
‘But it’s end of shift,
Chef
,’ protested Gebhard.
Kassel replied by staring emptily at Gebhard who shrugged and wheeled the WS25 back out into the Elbe. Kassel had no idea if the young lady from the Mordkommission still had an interest in this vessel, but he thought he had better check it out. He picked up the radio phone and asked to be patched through to Oberkommissarin Klee at the Mordkommission.
Saturday 21 June, 10.00 p.m. The Elbe, near Hamburg
.
There was no dominant form to Anna’s consciousness. If confusion can be defined as a form, then that would be closest to the shape her mind took. But even confusion connects with other feelings, other emotions. You get confused and angry, or confused and frightened, or confused and amused. But Anna’s confusion was of itself, totally unanchored. A moment of lucidity would come. Then it would pass. It was like flying through patches of dense cloud; every now and then the plane breaks free and the brightness of the blue sky dazzles for a moment, then is lost.
She was awake. She recognised the interior of MacSwain’s boat. Her hands were tied behind her back and she lay on her side on the bed. She knew now where she was and what had happened. MacSwain had drugged her. He had been in her apartment. He had mixed a cocktail of flunitrazepam or clonazepam and gammahydroxybutyrate into her drinking water. She didn’t have her gun. She didn’t have her cell phone. Fabel had given her time off so no one would miss her. She was on her own and she would have to make her own escape. In the space of a few seconds all of these facts were crystal clear to her. In the next instant they were gone. She had no idea where she was or what was happening to her. Then something like sleep enveloped her.
MacSwain’s voice woke her. He was talking to someone. He was talking fast and breathlessly and without stopping. She could not make out what he was saying, she was so far beneath the surface of her own consciousness, but she pushed upwards, towards the voice.
She broke the surface. Her head resounded with a pain that reverberated against the sides of her skull. MacSwain continued talking. Anna opened her eyes. MacSwain was sitting opposite, his dead and empty eyes fixed unblinkingly on her, his mouth the only animated part of his face. It was as if someone had turned on a tap that could not be turned off until all of the contents of MacSwain’s ugly mind had spilled out.
‘He explained it all to me,’ he continued, his voice urgent and excited. ‘We make our own myths. We fashion our myths from our legends and we create our legends from our history. Odin is a god. He is the god of all Vikings because all Vikings believe he is a god. Before the myth said he was a god, the legends said he was a king. And before the legends made him a king, the history tells us he was probably a village chieftain in Jutland. But what he was isn’t important. It’s what he has become. Say the word Odin and no one thinks of a scruffy village chieftain. Say the name Odin and the world shakes. That is the truth … that is the truth. That is what Colonel Vitrenko explained to me. He showed me that we are all variations on a theme and we are all connected to our history and to our myths.’
He stopped abruptly. Anna had begun to ease herself up to a sitting position. MacSwain stood up and in two steps he was above her. His fist slammed hard into her temple and the pain in her head exploded. The world darkened a little for Anna, but she didn’t pass out. She lay back down on her side and looked across to MacSwain, who continued talking as if he had simply taken time out to swat a fly.
‘Colonel Vitrenko showed me how there are those to whom we are linked. Like the Colonel and me. He said our kinship is in our eyes, that we must have had the same Viking father somewhere back in time. And me and Hauptkommissar Fabel. Colonel Vitrenko showed me that Herr Fabel and I share the same mix of blood. That we are both half German, half Scottish. That we have both chosen our place. That is why Herr Fabel has been chosen for me as an opponent.’
Anna felt some of the strength come back to her. Her thoughts swam more freely and quickly through the thinning sludge in her head. She eyed MacSwain. He was big and powerfully built, but, although his punch hurt, it lacked power. There were no sounds from the boat other than the lapping of water. Anna guessed that MacSwain had switched the engine off and had come down to have his little heart-to-heart with her. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was her where and when. But she wasn’t as drugged as he thought she was. She would fight. She would fight and fight until the last. He was not going to take her life easily.
‘But we’re not just connected to those who share our time.’ MacSwain continued his monologue. ‘There are those who have come before and those who will come after. And we are the history of those who will come after. And they will make legends of us. I shall become a legend. Colonel Vitrenko shall become a legend. And then, in time, we will take our places next to Odin.’ MacSwain’s eyes suddenly filled with a glacial malice. He stood up and made his way across to Anna. ‘But first sacrifices have to be made.’ He bent over her.
Anna’s first kick caught him on the side of the head, but her awkward position and the enervating effects of the drugs sapped the power from the blow. MacSwain staggered back, more shocked than injured. It bought Anna the time to swing her legs off the bed and stand up. But as soon as she straightened up, her head swirled. She was aware of MacSwain pulling himself upright. The cabin was small and narrow and more of a handicap to the tall MacSwain than to Anna. He rushed her and she brought her foot up hard and fast into his chest, her heel slamming into his sternum. MacSwain’s lungs emptied and he sank to his knees, sucking at the air in the cabin as if trapped in a vacuum.
Anna stepped forward and to the side, her movements hampered by her bound hands. She took time to aim carefully and swung her foot in a vicious kick onto MacSwain’s temple. He was thrown sideways by the force and smashed into the small galley. He groaned and lay still. Anna ran towards the hatch and slammed her shoulder against it. It didn’t budge. She remembered that it was a sliding hatch and she wriggled her arms and wrists down and below her bottom. Squatting first and then sitting, she slipped her hands behind her knees and looped them over her feet. She cast a sideways glance at MacSwain. He groaned again. Anna scrabbled with her still-bound hands to slide the hatch door open. She was going to make it. Out and over the side. Her chances would be better in the water than half doped and trapped in a boat with a psycho.
The hatch door jammed. Anna summoned up every remaining reserve of strength and will and wrenched at it. It slid open and slammed against its housing. The cool, oil-tainted smell of the river flooded the cabin. Anna lunged upwards towards the night.
There was an animal scream behind her. She felt MacSwain’s full weight crash into her. Her face smashed down hard onto the top step that led to the hatch. The thick iron taste of blood filled her nose and mouth. MacSwain seized a fistful of hair and snapped Anna’s head back hard and pulled her back into the cabin. His fist came down hard against her neck; but Anna realised it wasn’t a punch. She felt the cold metal in her neck and the hard sting of a hypodermic needle. Then the night she had so desperately reached for reached back to her and claimed her.
Saturday 21 June, 10.15 p.m. The Elbe, between Hamburg and Cuxhaven
.
Franz Kassel watched the cruiser stop. It was out of the main navigation channels and properly lit-up, unlike the WS25 that had stealthed along behind it. He watched the tall young man emerge on deck. Kassel could not be sure, in the dark and at such a distance, but, when the young man wiped his face with a towel, he could have sworn the towel was stained black. As if with blood. He snapped the binoculars from his eyes and turned to Gebhard.
‘Try to reach Oberkommissarin Klee again. And if you don’t get hold of her, I’m going to pull chummy over just for the hell of it.’
He looked back to the cruiser. There was a plume of foam, white against the black silk of the river.
‘He’s moving …’
Saturday 21 June, 10.25 p.m. Harvestehude, Hamburg
.
The white tiled walls of MacSwain’s bathroom glittered antiseptically and the expensive taps and drying rails had a sharp, cold, scalpel gleam. Fabel, Maria and Werner stared at the shape of a man. A dark blue and red diver’s drysuit hung from the shower rail, dripping onto the bright enamel. It had the unnerving appearance of a cast skin. Something that had been sloughed off after a transition. A dive hood was draped over the bath’s rim.
Werner pointed to the drysuit with a small movement of his chin. ‘This what he wore, you reckon?’
Fabel peered into the bath. Another two drips drummed echoing beats against the bath. Fabel thought he saw the drips bloom a faint pink against the bright white enamel. He took a pen from his pocket and pushed up the lever to close the plug.
‘If it is, then it’s a bad choice for getting the blood out. A drysuit may have an impermeable body, but the collar, ankle and wrist cuffs are neoprene. No matter how often he’s rinsed it through, there will still be blood trapped in the neoprene. No one touches anything in here until Brauner arrives.’
Fabel decided to re-immerse himself in the claustrophobia of MacSwain’s tiny, windowless box room. There were layers and layers of stuff pinned or taped to the walls. Rather than sift through them methodically – a task he would assign to Werner – Fabel let his gaze run its own route across the landscape of MacSwain’s madness. A psychotic topography that Fabel explored whole, not in part. There were articles on the Soviet-Afghan war and cuttings from magazines and books. One in particular caught Fabel’s attention; what struck him as odd was that it was only a segment of what must have been a much larger piece. It had been carefully cut out, yet began and ended in the middle of a sentence:
ensuing discord. Unable to find among themselves a suitable ruler, the Krivichians, Chud and Slavs agreed to seek out a foreign prince or king to govern and establish the rule of law. They looked amongst those Vikings of France that are known as Normans. They sought amongst the Angles of Jutland and England. And they sought amongst the Svear or Swedes of Sweden. These Swedes are also known by the Moors as the Rus, and from their number three brothers, Rurik, Sineus and Truvor, came forth with their families and established dominion over the peoples of the Dnieper. Rurik, the eldest, became ruler of Novgorod, and the lands and the people of that region became known as Russian. Rurik’s brothers both died soon after and Rurik became sole ruler. It was brought to his attention that there was a city to the south that was in great peril. It had been founded by the Polianian ferryman Kii, his brothers Shchek and Khoriv, and his sister Lybed. This city had taken Kii’s name and was known as Kievetz or Kiev and had been governed wisely and well. However, after the death of Kii and his kin, the city had fallen into great peril and was suffering at the cruel hands of the Khazars. Rurik was moved by the plight of the