‘But that story is about appearance. About a physical similarity between father and son. The son’s personality was totally different,’ said Fabel.
‘Yes,’ replied Susanne. ‘But the mother suspected
that beneath the surface similarity the person was somehow the same. A variation on a theme.’
‘I remember,’ said Henk Hermann, looking thoughtful, ‘when I was a child, I used to get so fed up with my mother and my grandmother always going on about how like my grandfather I was. Looks, mannerisms, personality – the whole package. I used to get so fed up with hearing, “Oh, that’s just his grandad …” or, “Isn’t he the spit of his grandad …” To me he was someone buried, literally, in history. He had died in the war, you see. There were photographs of him around the place and I couldn’t see what they were on about. Then, when my grandmother died and I was an adult, I found all those photographs of him again. And it
was
me. There was even one of him in his
Wehrmacht
uniform. I tell you, that was a spooky experience, seeing my face in that uniform. It really makes you think. I mean, someone just like me living through those times …’
They moved on to a new topic. But Fabel had noticed that Henk seemed more subdued than normal for the rest of the evening and found himself regretting having brought up the subject.
The pub was just around the corner from Fabel’s flat and he and Susanne walked home. When they arrived, Fabel opened the door to the apartment and made an exaggeratedly gentlemanly sweep of his arm to indicate that Susanne should precede him into the flat.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Susanne. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘I’ll survive …’ he said and kissed her. ‘Thanks for caring.’ He switched on the light.
They both saw it at the same time.
Fabel heard Susanne’s shrill scream and was surprised to feel any hint of drunkenness swept suddenly from him by the tidal wave of horror that washed over them both.
Fabel ran across the room. He unholstered his service automatic and snapped the carriage back to put a round in the chamber. He turned to Susanne. She stood frozen, both hands clamped to her mouth and her eyes wide with shock. Fabel held up his hand, indicating that she was to stay where she was. He moved over to the bedroom, threw the door wide and stepped inside, sweeping the room with the gun. Nothing. He switched on the bedroom light to check again and then moved on to the bathroom.
The apartment was clear.
Fabel moved back towards Susanne, putting his gun down on the coffee table as he crossed the room. He put his arm around her and steered her towards the bedroom, placing his body between her and the apartment’s picture window.
‘Stay in there, Susanne. I’ll phone for help.’
‘Christ, Jan – in your
home
…’ Her face was drained of colour and her tear-streaked make-up stood out harshly against the pallor.
He closed the bedroom door behind her and crossed the living room again, deliberately not looking at the picture window that had given him so much pleasure, with its ever-changing vista across the Alster. He snapped up the phone and hit the pre-set dial button for the Presidium. He spoke to the duty Commissar in the Murder Commission and told him that Anna Wolff, Henk Hermann, Maria Klee and Werner Meyer would be on their way to their respective homes and that he was to call them
on their cellphones and tell them to make their way to his apartment.
‘But first of all,’ he said, hearing his own voice dull and dead in the quiet of his apartment, ‘send a full forensic team. I have a secondary murder locus here.’
He hung up, resting his hand on the phone for a moment and deliberately keeping his back to the window. Then he turned.
In the centre of the window, pressed flat against it and adhering to the glass by means of its own stickiness and strips of insulating tape, was a human scalp. Viscous rivulets of blood and red dye streaked the pane. Fabel felt sick and turned his face from it, but found that he could not banish the image from his brain. He made his way over to the bedroom and to the sound of Susanne sobbing. In the distance, he heard the growing clamour of police sirens as they made their way towards him along Mittelweg.
Fabel had arranged for a female officer to take Susanne home to her own flat and stay with her there. Susanne had recovered significantly from the shock and had sought to apply her professional detachment as a practising forensic psychologist. But the truth was that this killer had reached out and touched their personal lives. Something that no one had done before. Fabel tried to contain the fury that raged within him. His home. The bastard had been here, in his private space. And that meant that he knew more about Fabel than Fabel knew about him. It also meant that Susanne had to be watched. Protected.
The whole team turned up. The shock and anger they felt was apparent on all their faces, even on Maria Klee’s. It was her boyfriend, Frank Grueber, who led the forensic team on site, but, realising that his own boss had a close professional and personal relationship with Fabel, Grueber had phoned Holger Brauner at home. Brauner had turned up within minutes of the others and, although he allowed Grueber to process the scene, he scrutinised every sample, every area personally.
Fabel felt nauseated. The shock and horror of what he and Susanne had been faced with, the drink he had consumed earlier, the cumulative exhaustion of not having slept for two days and the violation of his personal space all combined in a sickening churning in his gut. His apartment was too small to hold everyone and the team stood outside on the landing. Fabel had already had to deal with his neighbours, who were displaying that excited, alarmed curiosity that Fabel had seen at countless crime scenes before. But these were
his
neighbours. This crime scene was
his
home.
Fabel was aware that the team had been engaged in some kind of debate out on the landing. Then Maria broke off and came across to him, collecting Grueber on her way.
‘Listen,
Chef
,’ said Maria. ‘I’ve been talking with the others. You can’t stay here and I think Dr Eckhardt needs some time to recover from all this. You’ll have to stay with one of us for a couple of nights at least. It’s going to take hours to process the scene and afterwards … well, you’re not going to want to stay here. Werner said you can stay with him and his wife, but it would be a bit of a squeeze. Then I talked to Frank about it.’
‘I have a big place over in Osdorf,’ said Grueber. ‘Tons of room. Why don’t you pack a few things? Then you can crash there for as long as you need.’
‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. But I’ll check into a hotel …’
‘I think you should take up Herr Grueber’s offer.’ The voice came from behind Fabel. Criminal Director Horst van Heiden stood at the top of the stairs. Fabel looked startled for a moment. He was pleased that his boss had taken the time to come down in person, and in the middle of the night. Then the significance of it hit him.
‘Are you worried about my expense account?’ Fabel smiled weakly at his own joke.
‘I just think that Herr Grueber’s apartment would be more secure than a hotel. Until we get this maniac, you are under personal protection, Fabel. We’ll put a couple of officers outside Herr Grueber’s place.’ Van Heiden glanced across at Grueber, seeking the formality of his approval. Grueber nodded his assent.
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Thanks. I’ll get some stuff together later.’
‘That’s decided, then,’ said van Heiden. Grueber took Fabel’s car keys and said that Maria would take him over to his place and he would drive Fabel’s car over once he had finished processing the scene.
‘Thanks, Frank,’ said Fabel. ‘But I’ll have to go into the Presidium first. We need to get a handle on what this all means.’
Van Heiden took Fabel’s elbow and guided him into a corner. Despite the fog of tiredness that seemed to cloud his every thought, Fabel could not help wondering how van Heiden managed to look so well pressed at two in the morning. ‘This is bad, Fabel.
I don’t like the way this man is targeting you. Do we know how he got in?’
‘So far forensics have been unable to find any hint of a forced entry. And, as usual with this guy, he’s left practically no trace evidence of his presence at the scene.’ Fabel felt another churn in his gut as he referred to his own home as ‘the scene’.
‘So we don’t know how he got in,’ said van Heiden. ‘And God only knows how he found out where you live.’
‘We’ve got a much more pressing question than that to answer …’ Fabel nodded over to where the bright red dyed hair and skin was still plastered to the glass of the window. ‘And that question is: to whom does that scalp belong?’
The entire Murder Commission team had turned out. It unnerved Fabel that van Heiden had felt his continued presence was somehow necessary. Everyone wore the unnatural expressions of people who should be exhausted, yet are agitated with an electric nervousness. Fabel himself found it difficult to focus, but was aware that it was up to him to pull the team, and himself, together.
‘Forensics are still processing the scene,’ he said. ‘But we all know that we’re only going to get whatever this guy decides he wants us to get. This scene differs from the others in two respects. Firstly, we have a scalp but no body. And there has to be a body somewhere. Secondly, we now know for sure that this killer is using these scalps to send a message. In this case directed at me. Some kind of warning or threat. So, if we follow the logic, the scalps
displayed at the other scenes were intended to send out a message. But to whom?’
‘To us?’ Anna Wolff sat slumped in a chair. Her face was naked of its usual lipstick and make-up and looked pale and tired under her shock of black hair. ‘Maybe he feels he’s taunting the police with them. After all, we’ve been in similar territory before. And the fact that he’s used one of our homes as a showplace would seem to support that.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel. ‘If it were just the scalps, maybe. But this thing with dying the hair red … if he is talking to us, then he is using a vocabulary that we don’t understand. Maybe, instead of talking to us, this guy is talking
through
us. I get the feeling that his main audience is someone else.’
‘That’s as may be, but who is this third victim?’ Van Heiden stood up and walked over to the inquiry board. He examined the images of both victims. ‘If this has got something to do with their histories, then we have to assume that we have another victim in their fifties or early sixties lying somewhere.’
‘Unless …’ Anna stood up suddenly as if stung.
‘Unless what?’ asked Fabel.
‘The guy you had in. The potential witness. You don’t think—’
‘Witness?’ Van Heiden looked surprised.
‘Schüler? I doubt it.’ Fabel paused for a moment. He thought about how he had threatened the small-time crook with the spectre of the scalp-taker. It couldn’t be: there was no way the killer could have found out about him. ‘Anna – you and Henk go and check him out, just in case.’
‘What’s this about a witness, Fabel?’ said van
Heiden. ‘You didn’t tell me anything about having a witness.’
‘He’s not. It was the guy who stole the bike from Hauser’s place. He saw someone in the apartment, but could only give a partial and pretty vague description.’
After Anna and Henk had left, Fabel took the rest of the team through the case again. There was nothing. No new leads to follow. This killer was so skilled at eliminating his forensic presence from a scene that they were totally dependent upon what they could deduce from the selection of the victims. Which left them nothing other than the suspicion that it was connected to their political pasts.
‘Let’s take a break,’ said Fabel. ‘I think we could all do with a coffee.’
The Presidium canteen was all but deserted. A couple of uniformed-branch officers sat in the corner, chatting quietly. Fabel, van Heiden, Werner and Maria collected their coffees and made their way across to a table at the opposite end of the canteen from the two uniformed officers. There was an awkward silence.
‘Why did he target you, Fabel?’ asked van Heiden at last.
‘Maybe it’s just to prove that he can,’ said Werner. ‘To show us how clever and resourceful he is. And how dangerous.’
‘Does he seriously think he can frighten off the police? That we’ll drop the case?’
‘Of course not,’ said Fabel. ‘But I do think that Werner has a point. I got this
odd
phone call in the car the other day. At the time I thought it was a hoax. But I’m pretty sure it was our guy. Maybe he
feels he can compromise my effectiveness. Shake me up a bit, as it were. He’s bloody well succeeded. Maybe he even hopes that I’ll be taken off the case if he makes my involvement more personal.’
Another silence. Fabel suddenly wished that he was alone. He needed time to think. He needed to sleep first, then think. A pressure seemed to build in his head. He found that van Heiden’s presence, no matter how well meant, stifled his thought processes. Fabel sipped at his coffee and it tasted bitter and gritty in his mouth. The pressure in his head grew and he felt hot and sweaty. Dirty.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said and headed across to the male toilets. He splashed water on his face, but still did not feel any cooler or cleaner. The nausea hit him so fast that he only just made it into the cubicle before he vomited. His stomach emptied and he continued to retch, his gut clenching in spasms. The nausea passed and he returned to the basin and rinsed his mouth out with cold water. He splashed his face again; this time it made him feel a little fresher. He was aware of Werner’s massive bulk behind him.
‘You okay, Jan?’
Fabel took some paper towels and dried his face, examining himself in the mirror. He looked tired. Old. A little scared.
‘I’m fine.’ He straightened himself up and threw the towels into the wastebasket. ‘Honestly. It’s been a pretty full day. And night.’
‘We’ll get him, Jan. Don’t worry. He’s not going to get away with—’
The ringing of Fabel’s cellphone cut Werner off.
‘Hello,
Chef
…’ Fabel could tell from the tone, from the faint tremulousness in Anna Wolff’s voice,
what she was about to say. ‘I was right,
Chef
, it was him. The bastard’s killed Schüler.’