‘And you’ve had no contact with Griebel since the Gaia Collective days?’
‘None,’ said Müller-Voigt.
‘Who else was involved?’
‘It was a long time ago, Herr Fabel. A lifetime away.’
‘There are bound to be
some
people you recall.’
Fabel watched Müller-Voigt as he rubbed at his trimmed, greying beard thoughtfully. Fabel found it impossible to get the measure of the man or of how much, if anything, he was holding back.
‘I remember there was a woman I was involved with for a while,’ said Müller-Voigt. ‘Her name was Beate Brandt. I don’t know what happened to her.
And Paul Scheibe … he was a Gaia Collective member too.’
‘The architect?’
‘Yes. He has just won a major architectural project in the HafenCity. He is the only person from the group that I still have regular contact with, if you exclude the odd times when I would run into Hans-Joachim. Paul Scheibe was and still is a very talented architect … very innovative in designing minimum-environmental-impact buildings. This latest concept for the Überseequartier of the HafenCity is inspired.’
Fabel made a note of the names Beate Brandt and Paul Scheibe. ‘Do you remember anyone else?’
‘Not really … not names, anyway. I never really did get
into
the Gaia Collective, if you know what I mean.’
‘Do you remember if Franz Mühlhaus was involved with the Collective?’
Müller-Voigt looked taken aback by the mention of the name, then his expression became clouded with suspicion. ‘Oh … I see. It’s not my possible connection to the victims that interests you at all, is it? If you’ve come here to question me about Red Franz Mühlhaus because of the false allegations that Ingrid Fischmann has been circulating, then you can get the hell out of my house.’
Fabel held up a hand. ‘Firstly, I am here exclusively because I am trying to establish a connection between the victims. Secondly – and I do assure you of this, Herr Senator – this is a murder inquiry and you
will
answer all the questions I have for you. I don’t care what your position is: there is a maniac out there mutilating and murdering people who were connected to your circle in the nineteen seventies
and nineteen eighties. We can either do this here or at the Presidium, but we’re going to do it.’
Müller-Voigt’s stare was locked on Fabel. Fabel realised that the intensity of the politician’s gaze came not from fury but from the fact that he was appraising Fabel, trying to decide if he was bluffing or not. It was clear that Müller-Voigt had been in too many political tussles to become easily rattled. Fabel found his cool, emotion-free detachment disturbing.
‘I don’t know what you think of me and my type, Herr Chief Commissar.’ Müller-Voigt let the tension ease from his posture and leaned back into the sofa. ‘I mean those of us who were active in the protest movement. But we changed Germany. Many of the liberties, many of the fundamental values and freedoms that everyone takes for granted about our society, are directly attributable to us taking a stand back then. We are nearing a time, if in fact we have not already reached it, when we can again be proud of what it is to be German. A liberal, pacifist nation. We did that, Fabel. My generation. Our protests blew the last dark cobwebs out of the corners of our society. We were the first generation without a direct memory of the war, of the Holocaust, and we made it clear that
our
Germany was going to have nothing to do with
that
Germany.
‘I admit I was on the streets. I admit that things got heated. But at the heart of my beliefs lies my pacifism: I don’t believe in doing violence to the Earth and I don’t believe in doing violence to my fellow man. Like I said, in the heat of the moment there were things I did back then that I regret now, but I could never – not then, not now – take a human life for the sake of a political conviction, no matter
how strongly held. For me, that is what differentiates me from what went before.’
Müller-Voigt paused, keeping Fabel fixed with his gaze. ‘If there is a question lurking there that you maybe don’t want to ask, then let me answer it for you. Despite Ingrid Fischmann’s insinuations, and despite the political capital that the First Mayor’s wife has sought to make of them, I was not, in any way, involved with the kidnap and murder of Thorsten Wiedler. I had nothing whatsoever to do with it or the group behind it.’
‘Well, like I said, my sole interest is in the connection between the two victims,’ said Fabel. ‘I merely wanted to know if Mühlhaus had been a member of the Gaia Collective.’
‘Good God, no. I think I would remember that.’ Müller-Voigt looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Although I do understand why you ask. Mühlhaus had a pretty odd perspective on the movement and there were certain similarities between his ideas and those of the Collective. But no … Red Franz Mühlhaus had absolutely no involvement.’
‘Who was the Collective’s leader?’
For a moment Müller-Voigt looked confused by Fabel’s question. ‘There was no leader. It was a collective. Therefore it had a collective leadership.’
They talked for another fifteen minutes before Fabel rose and thanked Müller-Voigt for his time and for being cooperative. In return, Müller-Voigt wished Fabel the best of luck in tracking down the killer.
As Fabel turned out of the sweeping drive and onto the road back to the city, he considered the fact that he now had a point of direct contact between Hans-Joachim Hauser and Gunter Griebel, and he thought back on how open Müller-Voigt had
seemed. So why was it, thought Fabel, that he felt as if Müller-Voigt had told him exactly nothing?
As he headed back to Hamburg along the B73, Fabel phoned Werner. He told him about the link between the victims and went through the highlights of what else Müller-Voigt had said to him.
‘I need to talk to this architect, Paul Scheibe,’ he said. ‘Could you get a contact number and arrange something? If you try his practice number, that would probably be best.’
‘Sure, Jan. I’ll get back to you.’
Fabel had just turned onto the A7 and was heading towards the Elbtunnel when his car phone buzzed.
‘Hi, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘I have just had the strangest conversation with the people at Scheibe’s architectural practice. I spoke to his deputy, a guy called Paulsen. He got really quite wound up when I said I was phoning from the Murder Commission … He thought I was phoning because we’d found Scheibe’s body or something. According to Paulsen, Scheibe attended a lunch reception at the Rathaus on Monday and hasn’t been seen since. Apparently the formal launch of this big HafenCity project is being held tonight and they’re worried that he isn’t going to show. Looks like we’ve got a missing person.’
‘Or a murder suspect on the run,’ said Fabel. ‘Send someone over there to get details. I think we should turn up at the launch party this evening ourselves. I’ll be back in before five. I’m heading up to the University right now and then I’m meeting the journalist Fischmann at three. Anything else?’
‘Only that Anna has turned up a lead on your World War Two mummy. The family no longer lives in that street. They were bombed out during the
war, but Anna’s tracked down someone who was a friend of the dead guy. Do you want her to follow it up?’
‘No, it’s okay. I want to do it. It was my call-out. Tell Anna to leave the details on my desk.’
Fabel had just hung up when his car phone buzzed again.
‘Fabel …’ he said impatiently.
There was a sound of electronic static. Then a voice that was not human.
‘You are going to get a warning …’ The voice was distorted, as if through an electronic voice-changer. Fabel checked the caller display but no number had registered.
‘Who the hell is this?’ Fabel asked.
‘You will get a warning. Only one.’ The line went dead.
Fabel stared ahead at the traffic heading towards the Elbtunnel. A crank call. Maybe even someone who did not realise they had reached a police officer’s number. But somewhere, at the back of his head, an alarm was sounding.
‘Have you found the relatives of our HafenCity dweller?’ Dr Severts smiled and offered Fabel a chair.
‘No. Not yet, unfortunately. I’m afraid I’ve had much more pressing things on my mind.’
‘This so-called Hamburg Hairdresser?’
‘Yes. It’s proving to be a …’ Fabel sought the right word. ‘…
Challenging
case for us. And, to be honest, I am clutching at any straws I can think of.’
‘Why do I get the feeling that I’m one of those straws?’
‘I’m sorry, but I am trying to approach this from every angle. I need to establish the significance of this maniac taking the scalp of his victims. I just thought you might be able to give me a historical perspective on it.’
‘I have to say that the significance is not difficult to read, as far as I can see,’ said Severts. ‘Taking the head or the scalp of a vanquished enemy is one of the oldest and most widely practised forms of trophy-taking. When you kill an enemy, you take his scalp. By doing so you haven’t just killed your enemy, you have belittled or humiliated him, and you have a trophy to prove your success as a warrior. Every continent has experienced at least one culture where taking the head or the scalp of enemies has been a major feature.’
‘I don’t know …’ Fabel frowned as he conjured up the image of Griebel’s study, his thinning scalp dyed an unnatural red and pinned to his bookshelves. ‘This killer doesn’t remove the scalp from the murder scene. He makes an exhibition of it, displaying it prominently in the home of his victim.’
‘Maybe that’s his way of showing off his prowess. Scythian warriors used to wear the scalps of their enemies on the bridles of their horses, simply so that everyone could see them there. Your “Hairdresser” maybe feels that exhibiting them where he has killed the victim is the most effective way of displaying them.’
‘You say that scalping was a common practice. Here too? In this part of Europe?’ asked Fabel.
‘Certainly. There have been many examples discovered in Germany. Particularly in your neck of
the woods – Ostfriesland, I mean. That’s not necessarily to say that your Frisian ancestors took more scalps than other cultures, it’s merely that the environmental conditions in Ostfriesland have ensured the preservation of so many bog bodies and artefacts. We talked about Red Franz the last time we spoke. Well, in Bentheim, near the Dutch border and not far from where Red Franz was found, they discovered scalped skulls, and some of the scalps themselves, at a Bronze Age site.’ Severts walked over to his bookshelves and selected a couple of textbooks, bringing them back to his desk. He searched in one of them for a moment. ‘Yes … here’s an example that’s really close to your home town. In the eighteen sixties five bog bodies were recovered from Tannenhausener Moor.’
Fabel knew exactly where Severts was talking about. Tannenhausen was a village that lay in the northern suburbs of Aurich, Ostfriesland’s biggest town. It was a few kilometres south of Norden and Norddeich, where Fabel had grown up. It was an area of rich green moor, dark bogs, ponds and lakes. Tannenhausen sat between three heaths: Tannenhausener Moor, Kreihüttenmoor and Meerhusener Moor. As a boy, Fabel had cycled to the area often. It was a mystical place. And at the heart of the moor was a vast, ancient lake – the Ewiges Meer, the Eternal Sea. The name itself spoke of time immemorial; added to which was the fact that the moor around the lake had been found to be interlaced with wooden walkways that had been constructed four to five thousand years before.
‘All five Tannenhausen bodies had been scalped,’ Severts continued. ‘And similar examples have been found all over Europe, even as far away as Siberia. It seems that it was a very common custom in Bronze
Age Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic. In fact, the Scythians did it so much that the ancient Greek word for scalping was
aposkythizein
.’
Fabel thought for a moment of the Scottish part of his ancestry. The Scots claimed that their original homeland had been Scythia, on the Steppes, and that they had passed through North Africa, pausing for generations in Spain and Ireland before conquering Scotland. He pictured someone maybe not unlike him and not too many generations before, who might have routinely committed the same act as the killer he was hunting.
‘And the significance of scalping was always triumphal?’ he asked. ‘Just to prove how many enemies a warrior had killed?’
‘Mainly, but perhaps not exclusively. There is evidence of scalps being taken from people, including children, who had died natural rather than violent deaths. It would seem to indicate that taking the scalp might have been a way of commemorating or remembering the dead. Of honouring ancestors.’
‘I don’t think that’s what is motivating this guy,’ said Fabel.
Severts leaned back in his chair, the huge poster of the Beauty of Loulan as his backdrop. ‘If you want my opinion – personal rather than professional – then I would say that scalp-taking has been so common across all cultures that it is almost an
instinct
. I don’t know that much about psychology or about your line of work, but I do know that serial killers and psychos like to take trophies from their victims. I think that taking a scalp is the archetypal form of trophy-taking. Your killer could be doing it just because he feels it’s the thing to do, rather than making any clever cultural or historical reference.’
Fabel stood up and smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He shook hands with Severts. ‘Many thanks for your time, Herr Doctor.’
‘Not at all,’ said Severts. ‘May I ask one favour in return?’
‘Of course …’
‘Please let me know if you manage to track down the family of the mummified body down by HafenCity. It’s not often that I can put a real name and a real life to the human remains I find through my work.’
‘I’m afraid the reverse is true in my line of work,’ said Fabel. ‘But of course I shall.’
Fabel had phoned in to the Presidium and asked Werner to tell Paul Scheibe’s deputy to expect him. The architectural practice was housed in a very modern-looking building, between the NDR radio studios and Innocentia-Park in Harvestehude. The clean lines and sweeping angles of Scheibe’s offices reminded Fabel of Bertholdt Müller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Fabel wondered if Scheibe had been Müller-Voigt’s architect and was annoyed that he had not asked the politician such an obvious question.