‘The group?’
‘We all work for the same people. But I’m not going to tell you who. As it is, they would kill me if they knew I was talking to you at all.’
Maria took hold of Nadja’s hand and held it palm up. With her other hand she stuffed some fifty-Euro notes into it and closed Nadja’s fingers around the cash.
‘This is important to me.’ Maria held Nadja’s gaze with her pale blue-grey eyes. ‘
I
’m paying you for this information. Not the police.’
Nadja opened her fist and looked at the crumpled notes. She pushed them back towards Maria. ‘Save your money. I didn’t agree to meet you to get money from you. Anyway, I can make more than this in a couple of hours tonight.’
‘But you won’t get to keep it, will you?’ Maria made no move to take the money back. ‘How did you come to know Olga?’
Nadja laughed emptily and shook her head. Every movement seemed electrified by fear. She paused to light a cigarette and Maria saw that her hands trembled. She tilted her head back and forced a jet of smoke into the thick, warm air. ‘You think that your money means anything? I used to think that money was answer to all evils. And I thought that Germany was where I could make money. And this is how I ended up. But I take your money. And I take it because I have to prove that every second I out of their sight I earning for them.’
Nadja took three fifty-Euro notes and handed the rest back to Maria. ‘The girl you call Olga. She not Russian, she from Ukraine. She brought here by the same people who brought me.’
Maria felt the thrill of a suspicion being confirmed. ‘People traffickers?’
There was a noise from somewhere outside the building, near the main doors. Both women turned and watched the door for a moment before continuing their conversation.
‘You should know this,’ said Nadja. ‘Things have changed in Hamburg. Before there used to be only two types of whore: the girls that work the Kiez in St Pauli – you even get university students up there making extra cash – and the junkies who do it to get drugs. These girls very bottom of the business. Now you got something new. Us. The other girls, they call us the Farmers’ Market … we brought in from East like cattle and sold off. Most girls from Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. Many also from Albania and a few from Poland and Lithuania.’
‘Who runs the Farmers’ Market?’
‘If I tell you, you go looking for them. Then they work out who tell you about them and they kill me. But they torture me first. Then they kill my family. You no idea what these people like. When they bring girls in they start by raping them. Then they beat them and say that they kill our families back home if we not earn good for them.’
‘And this is what happened to you?’
Nadja didn’t answer, but a tear began to trace the outline of her nose before she swept it away with a brisk movement of her hand.
‘And they did it to the girl you call Olga. She
trusted them. They told her they had a good job for her in West. She trusted them because they were Ukrainian like her.’
‘Ukrainians?’ Maria felt a tightness in her chest: as if her body were clenching around her old wound. ‘Did you say the people behind the Farmers’ Market are Ukrainians?’
Nadja looked nervously out towards the factory door. ‘I must go now …’
Maria stared hard at the skinny young prostitute. ‘Does the name Vasyl Vitrenko mean anything to you?’
Nadja shook her head. Maria suddenly scrabbled in her bag. She produced a head-and-shoulders colour photograph of a man wearing a Soviet military uniform.
‘Vasyl Vitrenko. Maybe you’ve heard it in connection with the people who are farming these Eastern European girls? Could this man be the person in charge?’
‘I would not know. I don’t recognise him. I give my money to different man.’
‘Are you sure you’ve never seen him?’ Maria held the photograph closer to Nadja’s face and her voice became infused with urgency. ‘Look at his face.
Look
at it.’
Nadja examined the picture more closely. ‘No … I’ve never seen him before. It is not a face to forget.’
The tension seemed to evaporate from Maria’s posture. She looked down at the photograph in her hands. Vasyl Vitrenko stared back at her with emerald eyes that were as cruel and cold and bright as the centre of hell.
‘No …’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’
Dirk Stellamanns had been a uniformed officer when Fabel had first joined the Polizei Hamburg. Dirk was a large, amiable bear of a man with a ready smile. It had been from Dirk that Fabel had learned all the things about being a policeman that you did not learn in the State Police School: the subtleties and the nuances, the way to walk into a room and read the situation and assess the dangers with your first scan.
Dirk Stellamanns had been on the beat in St Pauli, based in the famous Davidwache station. With two hundred thousand people passing every weekend through the two square kilometres of bars, theatres, dance clubs, strip joints and, of course, the notorious Reeperbahn, it was a beat where the policeman’s most effective weapon was his ability to talk to people. Dirk had shown Fabel how you could defuse an explosive situation with a few well-placed words; how someone who seemed destined for arrest could be sent on their way with a smile on their face. It all depended on how you dealt with things. Fabel had been in awe and more than a little envious of Dirk’s verbal skills. He was well aware of his own strengths as a policeman, but also of his weaknesses: sometimes Fabel knew that he could have got more out of a suspect or a witness if he had only handled them a bit better.
Dirk had been there when Fabel and his partner had been shot. A botched robbery by members of a terrorist group had left Fabel seriously wounded. Fabel’s partner had not survived. Franz Webern, twenty-five years old, married for less than three years, father of an eighteen-month-old son, had lain
in the street outside the Commerzbank and had shuddered with cold as the warmth of his blood slipped from him and bloomed dark on the pale asphalt.
It had been the darkest day of Fabel’s career. It had ended with him standing wounded on a pier down by the Elbe, facing a seventeen-year-old girl armed with political clichés and an automatic handgun which she refused to lower.
She refused to lower the gun … Fabel had repeated the phrase like a mantra over the years in an attempt to somehow ease the intolerable burden of the knowledge that he had taken her life; that he had shot her in the face and head and she had tumbled like a broken doll into the dark, cold water. Dirk had been there for Fabel. Every day, whenever he had been off duty. As soon as Fabel regained even the vaguest, most tenuous grasp of consciousness, he had been aware of Dirk’s quiet, solid bulk sitting by his hospital bed.
There were some bonds, Fabel had learned, that, once forged, cannot be broken.
Now Dirk was retired from the police. He had been running this snack cabin down by the harbour for three years. And Fabel came here at least once a fortnight; not because he particularly appreciated Dirk’s variation on the
Currywurst
but because both men felt the need for the aimless, meaningless, trivial banter that rippled on the surface of their friendship.
But sometimes Fabel needed to go deeper. Whenever there was a case that got under his skin, a murder with the power to shock him even after all his years of dealing with death – it was not to
Otto Jensen, his best friend with whom he had much more in common, that Fabel would go. It would be to Dirk Stellamanns.
Dirk’s snack stall was an extension of the man’s already huge personality. It was bright and scrupulously clean and surrounded by a scattering of chest-high tables capped with white parasols. Dirk, his large frame protesting at the tight wrapping of his immaculately white chef’s tunic and apron, beamed a smile when he saw Fabel approach.
‘Well, well … I see you have had your fill of the overpriced eateries of Pöseldorf …’ Dirk spoke to Fabel in Frysk. Both men were East Frisian and had always communicated with each other in the distinctive language of the region: an ancient mix of German, Dutch and Old English. ‘Can I get you some real food?’
‘A Jever and a cheese roll will do fine,’ said Fabel, smiling desolately. He always ordered the same thing when he came down here at lunchtimes. Again he found himself irritated by his own predictability. He took a sip of the crisp, herby East Frisian beer.
‘You look your usual cheery self.’ Dirk leaned forward, his elbows on the counter. ‘What’s up?’
‘Did you read about the Hans-Joachim Hauser killing?’
‘The Hamburg Hairdresser thing?’ Dirk pursed his lips. ‘Hauser and some scientist fellah. You on that?’
Fabel nodded and took another sip of beer. ‘It’s a doozy. God knows how the press got the details, but they’re pretty much accurate. This guy really has been taking scalps.’
‘Is it true he dyes them red?’
Fabel nodded again.
‘What’s all that about?’ Dirk made an incredulous face. ‘God knows I’ve seen a lot of things in my time, but there’s always some sicko who’ll come up with something new to surprise you. This guy must be a complete psycho.’
‘So it would appear.’ Fabel examined his beer glass before taking another sip. ‘Thing is, he doesn’t take his trophies away with him. He pins them up for everyone to find.’
‘A message?’
‘That’s what I’ve begun to wonder.’ Fabel shrugged. Despite the sunshine, he felt a chill deep inside. Maybe it was the beer. Or maybe it was the unthawed splinter of unease that had remained with him ever since he’d seen the photograph of Neu Versen Man: Red Franz, whose hair had been dyed vivid red by a thousand years of sleep in a cold, dark moor.
‘But why does he do it?’ Fabel posed the question more to himself than to Dirk. ‘What is the significance of the colour red?’
‘Red? It’s the colour of warning, isn’t it? Or political. Red is the colour of revolution, the old East Germany, communism, that kind of crap.’ Dirk paused to serve a female customer. He waited until she was out of earshot before continuing. ‘Wasn’t Hauser on the fringes of all of that stuff back in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies? Maybe your killer has something against Reds.’
‘Could be …’ Fabel sighed. ‘Who knows what goes on in a mind like that? I was talking to someone this morning who suggested that I should be looking at Hauser’s past. Specifically his political past. Maybe even more than I would normally with a case like this. But I don’t remember any suggestion that Hauser
was involved in anything approaching “direct action”.’
‘You never know, Jan. There’s a lot of people in top political jobs now who have skeletons in their cupboards.’
Fabel sipped his beer. ‘I’ll look into it, anyway … God knows I need a straw to clutch at.’
Maria sat on the sofa and held her empty wine glass above her head, waggling it as if ringing a bell. Frank Grueber came through from the kitchen and took it from her.
‘Another refill?’
‘Another refill.’ Maria’s voice was flat and joyless.
‘Are you okay?’ Grueber had been in the kitchen, placing the dishes from the meal he had cooked into the dishwasher. Despite being thirty-two, Grueber retained the look of a schoolboy. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, exposing his slender forearms, and his thick dark hair flopped over his brow, which was furrowed in a concerned frown. ‘You’ve had quite a bit already …’
‘Tough day.’ Maria looked up at him and smiled. ‘I’ve been looking into the background of that young Russian girl who was murdered three months ago.’ She corrected herself. ‘Ukrainian girl.’
‘But I thought you got someone for that?’ Grueber called through from the kitchen. He re-emerged with a glass of red wine, which he placed on the table in front of Maria before sitting down on the sofa next to her.
‘I did … we did. It’s just that she hasn’t got a name. Her own name, I mean. I want to give it back
to her. All she wanted was a new life. To be somewhere and someone else. God knows, at times I can sympathise with that.’ Maria took a long draw on her Barolo. Grueber rested his arm on the back of the sofa and gently stroked Maria’s blonde hair. She gave a weak smile.
‘I’m worried about you, Maria. Have you seen that doctor again?’
Maria shrugged. ‘I’ve an appointment this week. I hate it. And I’ve no idea if he’s doing any good. I don’t know if
anything
would do any good. Anyway, let’s change the subject …’ She gestured towards the large antique sideboard that sat against the living-room wall. ‘New?’ she asked.
Grueber sighed while still stroking her hair. ‘Yes … I bought it at the weekend.’ His tone made it clear that he was reluctant to change the subject. ‘I needed something for that wall.’
‘Looks expensive,’ said Maria. ‘Like everything …’ She swung her wine glass to indicate the room and the house generally.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Grueber.
‘What for?’
‘For being rich. You can’t choose the life you’re born into, you know. I didn’t ask to have wealthy parents any more than other people ask to be born into poverty.’
‘Doesn’t bother me …’ Maria said.
‘Doesn’t it? I make my own way, you know. I always have.’
Maria shrugged again. ‘Like I said, doesn’t bother me. It must be nice to have money.’ She took in the room. The decor was tasteful and clearly very expensive. Maria knew that Grueber owned this large two-floor apartment outright. It was the lower part
of a massive villa in the Hochkamp area of Osdorf. She suspected that he also owned the other part of the house, which was rented out. On its own, the apartment represented a seriously valuable piece of real estate: Maria could only guess at the value of the villa as a whole. Hamburg was Germany’s richest city and Grueber’s parents, Maria knew, were rich even by Hamburg standards. What was more, Frank Grueber was their only child. He had once explained to Maria that his parents had all but given up hope of having a child. As a consequence, Grueber had grown up in a world where all he wanted was lavished on him. And now he stood to inherit a fortune and obviously already had considerable financial resources at his disposal. Why, Maria had often wondered, would you pick the career of a forensic scientist when you could choose to do anything you wanted?