It was at the mention of Severts’s name that it fell into place for Fabel.
‘That’s where we met before. It’s been bothering me. It was you who discovered the mummified body down at the HafenCity site.’
‘That’s right,’ said Brandt bleakly. His mind was on things other than where he had previously met the detective investigating his mother’s brutal murder.
‘You’re not aware of your mother expecting any visitors last night?’
‘No. She told me that she was going to have an early night.’
Fabel caught sight of Frank Grueber, who had entered the room and nodded now to indicate that the scene was clear for Fabel to enter.
‘Is there anywhere you can spend the night?’ Fabel asked Brandt. ‘If not, I can arrange for a car to take
you to a hotel.’ Fabel thought about his own recent situation; about how he had been torn from his own home by an act of violence.
Brandt shook his shock of red hair. ‘That’s not necessary. I have a friend, a girl, who I can stay with. I’ll phone her.’
‘Okay. Leave the address and number where we can reach you. I really am so terribly sorry for your loss, Franz.’
The days were losing their definition: running into each another with a seamless lethargy. Fabel had grabbed a couple of hours of fractured sleep at the Presidium. But the fact that two murders, executed in totally different ways by the same killer, had coincided meant that, even with all the resources at his disposal, he was working himself and his team harder and longer than he should. They were all tired. When you were tired, you did not work at maximum efficiency. And they were hunting a maximum-efficiency killer.
It had been the morning before Fabel had found the time to head home for a few hours’ sleep and a shower that would, hopefully, refresh his senses and his ability to think.
Fabel found himself, frustratingly, driving home through the start of the early-morning rush-hour flow and it was eight o’clock by the time he turned the key in the door of his apartment. As he did so, the images from Brandt’s home haunted him. He half expected to find another scalp in his apartment. This had been his refuge. His secure place away from the madness and violence of others. No more.
The windows had been thoroughly cleaned, as had the rest of the apartment, but he could have sworn he smelled the subtlest hint of blood hanging in the air. The morning sun burned bright in the sky above the Alster and flooded into Fabel’s east-facing windows. Yet, to Fabel’s weary eyes, somehow the light seemed sterile and cold. Like in a mortuary.
The alarm woke him up just before noon. He had found it difficult to sleep with the sound of the city around him and when he rose he was disappointed to find that the dragging weight of his tiredness clung to him. He took a shower and decided to have something to eat before heading back into the Presidium.
‘There’s a package on your desk,
Chef
,’ said Anna as Fabel passed through the Murder Commission on the way to his office. ‘It arrived this morning while you were out. Given what’s been happening it was held up downstairs by security and run through the scanner twice. It’s clean.’
‘Thanks.’ Fabel entered his office and hung his jacket on the back of his chair. The package was large and thick and when he opened it he found a heavy file in a blue cover, held together by two thick rubber bands. Tucked under one of the bands was a tape cassette; there was a ‘with compliments’ card under the other. He took out the card and stared at it for a long time, almost as if, although the handwriting was neat and clear, he could not comprehend the meaning of it.
As promised. Hope this helps. With friendly greetings, I. Fischmann
.
He stared at a note written by the woman to whom he had spoken only two weeks before. It
seemed impossible that, in that small space of time, the intelligence, the being behind the handwriting had been extinguished.
Fabel removed the cassette and the bands from the file. Ingrid Fischmann had painstakingly put together a dossier of all the information she had on The Risen, as well as background information on Baader-Meinhof and other militant and terrorist groups. She had photocopied and scanned articles, photographs, files. Nothing was in its original form: she had made the effort to make copies for Fabel of all the most important files. Except now he held in his hands all that survived of Ingrid Fischmann’s work: the ghosts of the originals she had been so keen to keep safe, but which had been destroyed in the explosion and the fire that followed.
It took him a while to locate a cassette player in the building and it was a full fifteen minutes before it was delivered to his office. While he waited he flicked through the other material in the file; it was certainly comprehensive and it would take Fabel a long time to go through it in detail, but he knew he would have to. In that information could be the smallest detail, the finest thread that would provide the coherence he desperately sought for this case.
After the uniformed officer delivered the cassette player, Fabel closed his office door, something that everyone who worked with him knew to be a signal that he did not want to be disturbed, and he switched his phone to voicemail. The cassette that Ingrid Fischmann had sent Fabel was not of the same vintage as the original recording, and it was clear from the static hiss as soon as he pressed the Play button that it was probably a copy of a copy. He turned the volume up slightly to compensate. There
were a few clunks and the muffled sound of a microphone being moved. Then a man’s voice.
‘My name is Ralf Fischmann. I am thirty-nine years old and I was the chauffeur for Herr Thorsten Wiedler of the Wiedler Industries Group. For performing this duty, I was shot three times, once in the side and twice in the back by the terrorists who kidnapped Herr Wiedler. I cannot understand what my sin was that I deserved to be shot. But, for that matter, I cannot understand what great sin Herr Wiedler has committed to deserve being torn from his family.
‘It has been more than two months since I was shot. The doctors started off by being cheerily optimistic and telling me that it was like allowing a bruise to heal. That, when the swelling in my spinal chord went down, who knows? Well, the swelling has gone down now and they don’t sound so optimistic any more. I am a cripple. I will never walk again. I know that already, just as the doctors know it but won’t yet admit it. I am a simple man. I am not stupid, but I was never one for great ambition. All I wanted to do was work hard, provide for my family and be as good a person as I could. Somehow, the way I have lived my life, honestly and modestly, was offensive to someone. So offensive that they deemed it necessary to put bullets in my spine.
‘I have been working for Herr Wiedler for three years. He was a good man. I use the past tense because I think it highly unlikely that he is still alive. A good man and a good employer. He came from Cologne and was typically friendly and down-to-earth … he treated all his employees as equals. If you did something wrong, something he was not happy about, he would tell you. By the same token,
he would buy you a drink in the pub and talk to you about your family. He was always asking about how my daughter Ingrid and my son Horst were getting along. He knew that Ingrid was a bright little thing and promised me that she would go far.
‘The work I did for Herr Wiedler was general driving. I drove him between his home and office every day, and to meetings in Hamburg and all across the Federal Republic. Herr Wiedler hated flying, you see. If we were travelling the length of the country, to Stuttgart or Munich, for example, he would take my mind off the boredom of so much autobahn driving by chatting with me. Sometimes he would do some paperwork in the back of the car, but generally he would sit up front with me and talk. Herr Wiedler really liked to talk. I liked him very much and found him to be the kind of man that, were he not my employer, I would gladly call a friend. I like to think he thought the same way about me.
‘On the morning of the fourteenth of November nineteen seventy-seven we were both in the car. I had collected Herr Wiedler, as usual, from his family home in Blankenese. Unlike most other mornings, when I would take Herr Wiedler directly to his office, I had picked him up later in the morning and we were heading directly to Bremen, where Herr Wiedler had a meeting with a client company. This is something that I have puzzled about ever since the kidnapping. I would have understood it better if the ambush had taken place on our normal route to the Wiedler main offices, which were to the north, but they were waiting for us on our way into the city centre where we would join the A1 towards Bremen. I can only conclude from this that the terrorists had someone on the inside of the Wiedler company, or that some
of the gang followed us from the Wiedler residence and were in touch with the others via walkie-talkie.
‘It was about ten thirty a.m. We were just about to join the autobahn when I saw a black Volkswagen van, stationary but sitting at an angle that suggested it had swerved suddenly. A man in a business suit was waving his arms frantically around his head and there was what looked like a body lying in the middle of the road. It looked to me as if the person on the road had been hit by the van. I pulled over to the side of the road. There was another car behind us and it stopped too. Herr Wiedler and I ran over to the injured person on the road. A young couple got out of the car behind us and followed us. When we got near to the body we saw that it was wearing blue overalls and we could not tell if it was a man or a woman. Then, suddenly, the person on the ground leaped to their feet and we saw that they were wearing a ski mask over their face. I think it was a man, but not a particularly tall man. He had a sub-machine gun. The man in the business suit and smart coat produced a handgun and pointed it at us. We all froze. Herr Wiedler, me and the young couple. Suddenly two more people in blue boiler suits and ski masks leaped out from the VW van. They had sub-machine guns too. I remember thinking that the terrorist who had pretended to be a businessman was the only one who was not wearing a ski mask and I made sure I got a good look at him. He saw this and got very angry and shouted at me and the others to stop looking at him.
‘The two masked men from the VW van ran over and grabbed Herr Wiedler and started to rush him over to the van while the other two kept their guns aimed at us. I stepped forward and the man in the
overalls raised his gun, so I stopped and kept my hands up. That was all I did. I made no other move and the time for action was past. That is why I do not understand why he shot me. The man in the business suit said I was looking at him again and the next thing I remember was the sound of his gun. I remember thinking then that they must have been using blanks, because there was no way he could have missed me at that range, but I felt no pain, no impact. Nothing. Then I was aware of something wet at my side and running down my leg. I looked down and saw that I was bleeding from a wound just above my hip. I turned away and started to walk back to the car. I wasn’t thinking straight: it must have been the shock. I just remember thinking that I had to get to the car and sit down. Then I heard two more shots and I knew I had been hit in the back. My legs just stopped working and I fell flat on my face. I could hear the woman from the young couple screaming, then a screech of tyres as the van drove off with Herr Wiedler in it. I didn’t see this, because I was face down, but I know that’s what it was.
‘The young couple ran over to me and then the woman ran off down the road to get help while the young man stayed with me. It was the strangest sensation. I lay there with my cheek pressed against the road surface and I remember thinking that it felt warmer than I did. I also remember thinking that I had let Herr Wiedler down. That I should have done more. I was going to die anyway, so I should have made it count. Then I started to think about my wife Helga and little Ingrid and Horst and how they were going to have to manage without me. It was then that I got really angry and decided that I was not
going to die. As I lay waiting for the ambulance to come, I concentrated hard on staying conscious and the way I did that was by trying to remember every detail of the face of the man who had not been able to hide his face. If he could be caught, I thought, they would get the rest of them.
‘It is those details that I was able to give to the police artist. I made him rework the picture over and over again. When he asked me if we had captured a good general likeness of the terrorist, I said he had, but that his job was not over. I told him that we could get it to an exact likeness of the man who shot me. So we did the drawing over and over again. What we finished up with was no artist’s impression. It was a portrait.
‘I will be confined to this wheelchair for the rest of my life. Over the last two months I have tried to understand what it is that these people think they can achieve with violence. They say this is a revolution, a rebellion. But a rebellion against what? The time will come when I shall have my reckoning. I may die first, but this tape, and the likeness I helped create of the terrorist who shot me, is my statement.’
Fabel pressed the Stop button. Now he understood why Ingrid Fischmann had been so motivated to uncover the truth. The voice on the tape had made Fabel feel obligated to find the people who had kidnapped and murdered Thorsten Wiedler and consigned Ralf Fischmann to a short and unhappy butt-end of a life spent in a wheelchair; he could not imagine the pressure that Ingrid, as Fischmann’s daughter, must have felt.
He opened the file and searched through it for the artist’s impression that Ralf Fischmann had
described in the tape. He found it. An electric current coursed through his skin and ruffled the hairs at the nape of his neck. Ralf Fischmann had been right: he had pushed the police artist to a level of detail far beyond the usual bounds of the pictures of suspects that they normally circulated. It was, indeed, a proper portrait.
Fabel looked hard at a very real face of a very real person. And it was a face he recognised.