‘Now I understand, you bastard,’ Fabel said out loud to the face before him. ‘Now I know why you never wanted anyone to take your photograph. The others all had their faces hidden – you were the only one that anyone saw.’
Fabel laid the image of a young Gunter Griebel down on his desk, rose from his chair and flung the door of his office open.
Werner had assembled the entire team in the main meeting room. Fabel had asked Werner to arrange the meeting so that he could share his discovery about Gunter Griebel. It was now clear that all the victims had been members of Red Franz Mühlhaus’s terror group, The Risen. It was also more than likely that they were all involved in the Thorsten Wiedler kidnap and murder. Fabel was convinced that the motive for these killings lay in that event: but the person most motivated to carry out the murders, Ingrid Fischmann, was herself dead. She had mentioned a brother, as had her father on the tape recording. Fabel had decided to get someone on to tracing her brother and establishing his whereabouts at the times of each murder.
All of Fabel’s thinking, however, was to be overtaken.
Most of the Murder Commission team, like Fabel, had been seriously deprived of sleep over the last couple of days, but he could tell that something had blown away all weariness from them. They sat, expectantly, around the cherrywood conference table, while a row of dead, scalpless faces – Hauser, Griebel, Schüler and Scheibe – looked down at them from the inquiry board. They had not had time to obtain an image of the latest victim, Beate Brandt, but Werner had written her name next to the other images: a space prepared for her among the dead, like a freshly dug but still empty grave. Centred above the row of victims, the intense gaze of Red Franz Mühlhaus radiated across the room from the old police photograph.
‘What have you got?’ Fabel sat down at the end of the table nearest the door and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, as if trying to banish the tiredness from them.
Anna Wolff stood up.
‘Well, to start with, we’ve been alerted about a missing-person report. A Cornelius Tamm has been reported missing.’
‘The singer?’ asked Fabel.
‘That’s the one. A bit before my time, I’m afraid. It’s shown up on our radar because Tamm is a contemporary of the other victims. He went missing three days ago after a gig in Altona. His van hasn’t been found, either.’
‘Who’s following it up?’ asked Fabel.
‘I’ve got a team on it,’ said Maria Klee. She looked as tired as Fabel felt. ‘Some of the extra officers we’ve had allocated. I’ve told them that they’re probably looking for the next victim.’
‘Are you okay?’ asked Fabel. ‘You look shattered.’
‘I’m fine … just a headache.’
‘What else have we got?’ Fabel turned back to Anna.
‘We’ve been trying to work out what this has all been about.’ Anna Wolff smiled. ‘Has Red Franz Mühlhaus, supposedly dead for twenty years, returned from the grave? Well, maybe he has. I checked through all the records we’ve got on Mühlhaus, as well as media stuff from the time.’ Anna paused and flicked through the file that sat before her on the table. ‘Maybe Red Franz has come back to avenge himself. In the form of his son. Mühlhaus was not alone on that railway platform in Nordenham. He had his long-term girlfriend Michaela Schwenn and their ten-year-old son with him. The boy saw it all. Watched his father and mother die.’
Fabel felt a tingle in the nape of his neck, but said, ‘That doesn’t mean that this son is out for revenge.’
‘According to the GSG Nine officers on the scene, Mühlhaus’s dying word was “traitors”. These killings aren’t motiveless psychotic attacks,
Chef
. This is all about vengeance. A blood feud.’ Anna paused again. There was the hint of a smile playing around the corners of her full red lips.
‘Okay …’ Fabel sighed. ‘Let’s hear it. You’ve obviously got a killer blow to deliver …’
Her smile broadened. She pointed towards the black-and-white photograph of Mühlhaus on the inquiry board.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how some images become icons. How we automatically associate an image with a person and the person with a time and a place, with an idea …’
Fabel made an impatient face and Anna continued.
‘I remember being shocked to see a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof before she became a shaggy-haired, jeans-wearing terrorist. It was of her and her husband at a racecourse. She was dressed as a typical demure nineteen sixties
Hausfrau
. Before her radicalisation. It got me thinking and I searched for other photographs of Mühlhaus. As you know, they are notoriously thin on the ground. This image we have here is the one that we are familiar with, the one that was used on the wanted posters in the nineteen eighties. It’s black and white but, as you can see, Mühlhaus’s hair is very, very dark. Black. But then I remembered the photographs of Andreas Baader when he was arrested in nineteen seventy-two. With his dark hair dyed ash-blond.’
Anna took a large glossy print and taped it next to the police photograph. This time the photograph was in full colour. It was of a younger Franz Mühlhaus, without his trade-mark goatee beard. But there was one feature that stood out above all others. His hair. In the police wanted poster Mühlhaus’s hair had been combed severely back from his broad pale brow, but in this photograph it frothed across his forehead and framed his face in thick, tangled ringlets. And it was red. A luxuriant red flecked with golden highlights.
‘The nickname “Red Franz” didn’t come from his politics. It was his hair.’ Anna stabbed a finger onto the black-and-white photograph and looked directly at Fabel. ‘Do you see? All the time he was on the run, he hid his distinctive red hair by dying it dark. The BKA got intelligence that Mühlhaus had darkened his hair and they changed the image accordingly. But there’s more … apparently Mühlhaus’s son had the
same distinctively coloured hair. And when they were on the run together Mühlhaus dyed his son’s hair too.’
There was a small silence after Anna stopped speaking. Then Werner gave voice to what they were all thinking.
‘Shit. The thing with the scalps and the hair dye.’ He turned to Fabel. ‘Now you’ve got your symbolism.’
‘What do we know about what happened to the son?’ Fabel asked Anna.
‘Social services won’t release the file until we get a warrant to access the information. I’m already onto it.’
Fabel stared at the photograph of the young Mühlhaus. He would have been in his late teens or early twenties. It was clearly an amateur photograph, taken outdoors in the sunshine of a long-distant summer. Mühlhaus smiled broadly at the camera, narrowing his pale eyes against the sunlight. A carefree, happy youth. There was nothing written in that face to suggest a future tied to murder and violence. Just as Anna had described the photograph of Ulrike Meinhof. Fabel had always found images such as this fascinating: everyone had a past. Everyone had been someone else once.
Fabel’s attention focused on the hair that shone red and gold in the summer sun. He had seen hair like that before. He had seen it only hours before.
‘Anna …’ He turned round from the inquiry board.
‘
Chef
?’
‘Check out Beate Brandt’s background as a priority. I need to know what relationship, if any, she had with Franz Mühlhaus.’ Fabel turned to Werner. ‘And I need you to check out that address
that Franz Brandt gave us. I think we need to have another chat with him.’
Fabel’s cellphone rang at that moment. It was Frank Grueber, who had been heading up the forensics team at Beate Brandt’s home.
‘I take it you’ve found another hair?’ said Fabel.
‘We have,’ said Grueber. ‘Our guy is getting poetic. He left it arranged on the pillow next to her body. But that’s not all. We’ve been checking the entire house to see if the killer slipped up when entering the house.’
‘And?’
‘And we’ve found traces of something in a desk drawer. In her son’s bedroom-cum-study. It looks as if a quantity of explosives has been stored there.’
It had all fallen into place for Fabel as they had sped across Hamburg to the address in Eimsbüttel that Franz Brandt had given Werner.
Brandt had been cool. Very cool. While Fabel had been questioning him, Brandt had asked Fabel why the killer dyed the hair red. He had already known the reason but had used his mock grief to camouflage his intent as he interrogated the interrogator: trying to find out how much the police knew about his motives. He had even sat with a poster of the other Red Franz, the bog body, on the wall above them and had talked about how ‘Red Franz’ had been his nickname at university.
It all fitted: the same hair, the same choice of profession, even the same forename. Brandt’s age also fitted. It was Fabel’s guess that Beate Brandt had taken in the ten-year-old Franz after he had
witnessed his father and his natural mother die in the gun battle on the platform at Nordenham. Maybe Beate had been motivated by guilt. Whatever the treachery that had been committed, she had been part of it and, despite being brought up as her son, Franz had administered the same ritual justice to her as he had to his other victims.
They pulled up at the cordon that the MEK unit had set up at the end of the street. The first thing Fabel had arranged was for an MEK weapons support unit to be deployed. Fabel had often wondered if there was ever really a distinction between a terrorist and a serial killer: both killed in volume, both worked to an abstract agenda that was often impossible for others to understand. Brandt, however, had blurred the distinction between them like no other. His crimes of vengeance were carried out with the ritualistic symbolism of a florid psychosis, yet he coolly planted sophisticated bombs to dispose of anyone who presented a threat. And when Brandt had called Fabel on his cellphone to tell him he was sitting on a bomb, he had used voice-altering technology, just in case Fabel recognised his voice from their previous brief encounter down at the HafenCity site.
The address that Franz Brandt had given was a four-storey apartment block with an entrance directly onto the street, limiting the opportunity to storm the apartment with complete surprise.
‘Get your men to cover the back,’ Fabel told the MEK commander. ‘This guy doesn’t think we suspect him yet and I’ve got a legitimate reason for questioning him again about his mother’s death. That’s if she
was
his natural mother. I’ll take two of my team up with me to his door.’
‘Given what you’ve told me about this guy, I don’t think that’s advisable,’ said the MEK commander. ‘Especially if he is as skilled as he appears to be with explosives. I’ve contacted the bomb squad and they’ve got a unit on the way. I say we wait until they get here, then my guys go in with bomb-squad support.’
Fabel was about to protest when the MEK commander cut him short. ‘You and your team can follow us in but, if you insist on going it alone, you could end up with dead officers.’
The MEK man’s statement stung Fabel. He had been there before, facing down a dangerous opponent in a confined environment. And it had cost lives.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘But I need this guy alive.’
The MEK commander’s expression darkened. ‘That’s what we always aim to achieve, Herr Chief Commissar. But this person is obviously a professional terrorist. It’s not always that easy.’
Fabel, Maria, Werner, Anna and Henk were all given bulletproof body armour and followed on as the MEK team of four officers and a bomb-disposal specialist made their way along the front of the building, moving in their practised crouching run, keeping their profiles low and their bodies pressed close to the apartment block wall. After they entered the building, the MEK commander indicated with a hand gesture that Fabel and his officers were to stay in the lobby, while the special-weapons team went up the stairs. Fabel found it remarkable that a team of heavily built, heavily armed men, bulked up with body armour, could move with such stealth.
The quiet weighed heavily on the Murder Commission team in the lobby, then it shattered
simultaneously with the door above as the team burst it in. From the hallway Fabel and the others could hear the shouting of the MEK team. Then silence. Fabel indicated to his team to follow him up the stairs, pausing on the landing below. The MEK commander re-emerged from the apartment.
‘It’s clean. But wait there until the bomb squad check it out.’
At that, a second blue-overalled bomb technician rushed past them and up the stairs.
‘The hell with this,’ said Fabel. ‘Brandt has no idea we’re onto him. And this is his girlfriend’s apartment. He won’t have planted a bomb here. I’m going up.’ He took the stairs two at a time, following the bomb technician into the apartment, brushing aside the protests of the MEK commander. Werner gave a shrug and went after his boss, followed by Maria, Anna and Henk.
The apartment was small and everything about the decor and the furnishings suggested a feminine environment. Fabel guessed that Brandt did not spend a lot of time here. It had also been clear that the young archaeologist did not use the room at his mother’s house that much, and the thought crossed Fabel’s mind that Brandt perhaps had another place, a bolt-hole that they did not know about. There was not a lot of point in hanging around: the small flat was overfull with officers and Fabel knew at first glance that there was nothing to be gained by searching the place, although he would have to go through the motions of getting a forensics team in as soon as the flat was given the all-clear.
Maria’s cellphone rang. She struggled to hear the caller over the bustle in the apartment and stepped out into the hall.
It was one of those moments in which a thousand thoughts, a thousand outcomes, flash through one’s mind in a time too small to be measured. It started with one of the bomb technicians suddenly holding a hand up, his back to the rest of the police officers, and shouting a single word: ‘Quiet!’
It was then that Fabel heard it. A beeping noise. The second bomb specialist moved over to the first and removed his helmet, turning his ear to the sound. Everyone turned at the same moment, following the gaze of the bomb-squad men.