It sat on top of the CD player. At first glance it looked like simply another piece of audio equipment: a small grey metal box with a red light that flashed in time with the beeping sound.
As Fabel stared at the device, hypnotised by the red light flashing in rhythm with the beeps, he wondered why he was standing stock-still and not running for his life.
It was then that the beeping changed to a constant tone, and the red light on the bomb’s detonator stopped flashing and remained on.
When Maria Klee stepped back into the apartment, her cellphone still in her hand, the faces that turned towards her seemed drained of both their colour and expression.
‘I miss something?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Fabel. ‘I think that something just missed us.’
The bomb-disposal technician stood with the grey metal detonator box clutched in his black-gloved hand, its wires trailing. When the light had turned
to a constant red he had lunged forward and simply yanked the detonator and its wires free. ‘Nothing to lose,’ he explained afterwards. His colleague was now carefully taking the CD player and amplifier from the shelves.
‘Got it,’ he said, easing a small plastic-wrapped grey package from behind the unit. ‘It’s safe.’
‘Well done,’ said Fabel to the first technician. ‘If you hadn’t moved so quickly …’
The bomb-squad man shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that. I acted more from a reflex than anything else. It would have been impossible for me to move fast enough to disconnect the detonator in time. It was the device itself that failed. Misfired for some reason or other. My guess is that there was a fault in the detonator. I think it’s unlikely that the wires worked loose – from what I gather about the bomb under your car, this guy is pretty meticulous.’
The other technician carefully lowered the package of explosives into a thick-walled container. ‘The mass of the device was enough to kill everyone inside the flat, but it would not have compromised the integrity of the structure, other than blowing the windows halfway to Buxtehude.’
‘I guess I really did miss something,’ said Maria.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ asked Fabel.
‘Oh … it was Frank. I mean Frank Grueber. He’s back from the murder scene at Brandt’s mother’s house. He took some hair from Brandt’s bedroom. From a hairbrush. He managed to rush a DNA analysis to see if there is a familial link between his hair and the ancient hair.’
‘And?’
‘Enough common markers to suggest a very close
relationship. Probably father and son. It looks like we’ve found Red Franz junior.’
There is a weariness that comes after being in a situation of great danger and threat. The adrenalin that has coursed through the body lingers and sucks up every last bit of energy. Muscles that have done nothing but have been drawn as taut as violin strings begin to ache and a jittery, nauseating exhaustion settles into the brain and body. As Fabel made his way back to his car, he felt totally spent.
Werner placed his reassuring bulk into the passenger seat of Fabel’s BMW. The two men sat for a moment, not speaking.
‘I’m getting too old for this crap,’ he said. ‘I really thought we’d had it in there. I’ve never been so scared in my life.’
Fabel sighed. ‘Unfortunately, Werner, I have been. That’s the third time I’ve been at the business end of a bomb and I’ve had enough. All I have ever wanted to do was to protect people. That’s what being a policeman has always meant to me – putting ourselves between the ordinary man, woman or child and danger. Years ago, when Renate and I were still together and Gabi was a kid, we went over to the United States for a holiday. New York. I remember seeing an NYPD police car go by. It said, in English, “
To Protect and Serve
” on the side. I remember thinking then that we should put that on all Polizei Hamburg cars. I thought: that’s what I do, what I am.’
‘Jan,’ said Werner, ‘it’s been a hell of a long day. Let me drive. I’ll take you home.’
‘What are we doing here, Werner? Some lunatic is wreaking revenge on people who conspired to kill
others twenty years ago. A murderer killing murderers. You have to admit it, there is some kind of natural justice at work here. Our country was almost ripped apart by these wankers. I still have bullet fragments in me from an eighteen-year-old girl’s gun. And for what? What was achieved by Franz Weber’s death? By me blowing the face off a young girl who should have had her head filled by nothing more than boys and what she should wear to the disco? She would have been thirty-eight now, Werner. If I hadn’t killed her. If Svensson hadn’t got his claws into her, she would have been running her kids to school. She would have been going to the gym three times a week to try to reduce her waist. And maybe, now and again, she would have thought to herself, wasn’t I mad when I was young? What was I thinking about? She would have had kids, Werner. An entire generation has been wiped out because I squeezed a trigger.’
‘It’s what we do, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘If you hadn’t been there during that bank raid, someone else would have died. Maybe many more people.’
‘I want a new life, Werner. A life away from all of this. I have told van Heiden that this case will be my last. It is over – I am resigning from the Polizei Hamburg as soon as this bastard is behind bars. An old schoolfriend has offered me a job. I am going to take it.’
‘You can’t be serious, Jan. I don’t care what you say, we would never have had the number of convictions we have had if you had not been in charge. And, for all your talk about death, every time you’ve put a killer away you have saved God knows how many lives.’
‘Maybe that’s true, Werner. But it’s time for
someone else to do it.’ Fabel smiled a weary, sad smile at his friend. ‘My mind’s made up. Anyway, let’s get back to the Presidium. I’ve got a job to finish first.’
Fabel had just turned the ignition key when he felt the weight of Werner’s hand on his arm. When Fabel turned to him, Werner was looking directly ahead through the windscreen, as if hypnotised by something.
‘Tell me I’m not seeing things,’ said Werner, nodding towards the police cordon.
Fabel followed his gaze. A young couple was remonstrating with a uniformed officer and the man was pointing towards the apartment building.
Fabel and Werner threw open the car doors at the same time and started sprinting across to where Franz Brandt stood arguing with the policeman.
Fabel had led the questioning of Franz Brandt. Anna and Henk had taken his girlfriend, Lisa Schubert, into another interview room. Franz Brandt had responded to Fabel’s questions with confused disbelief, then distress and, eventually, raw and bitter anger. He claimed to know nothing about the bomb in Schubert’s apartment and became increasingly incensed by the suggestion that he was in any way involved in his mother’s death. After Fabel suspended the interview and Brandt was removed to a cell, he spoke with Anna and Henk, who confirmed that Lisa Schubert had responded similarly. She had even shown signs of mild shock.
Fabel did not like it. Brandt had been so clever and so careful throughout his campaign. He had
seemed always to be a step ahead. It just did not fit for him to adopt such a thoughtless strategy of transparent denial. But, there again, he was clearly mad to have committed the crimes that he had.
Fabel went back to his office. He had sent Maria home earlier: she had started to look really unwell and her headache had not lifted. Anna and Henk had stayed on. The warrant had come through and Anna had secured the codes and passwords with which to access the social-services records; they were now focused on establishing as a legal fact that Franz Brandt was the ten-year-old boy who had watched Red Franz Mühlhaus die on Nordenham railway station. The boy who had heard his father with his dying words call for revenge on those who had betrayed him. After they came out of the interview, Fabel told Werner he could go home and get some rest, but he had said that he had ‘stuff to do’ in the office first.
Fabel took the Ingrid Fischmann file out of the drawer and laid it on his desk. As he did so, he sighed the sigh of a man going over old ground again in search of answers.
Grueber had given Maria two codeine before he had gone to take a shower. She went into the vast kitchen for a glass of water to take them with.
What had started as a vague general headache had found its focus and become a sharp migraine that pressed mercilessly behind Maria’s retinas. She had always had a thing about taking headache pills: a hint of the austere Lutheran within telling her it was better to let nature take its course. But water
and North German Puritanism alone were not going to fix this one. She took a tumbler from a kitchen cabinet and filled it with water. As she turned the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the tiled kitchen floor. Maria cursed and looked around for where she might find a pan and brush. She found them in the under-sink cupboard, where Grueber obviously kept cleaning materials.
There was something about the container, shoved to the back of the cupboard and facing away from the door, that drew Maria’s attention. She had the feeling that it had been deliberately put out of sight, out of reach. And that was why she knelt down on the hard kitchen tiles and stretched into the cupboard to pull the container out.
Hair dye.
It was the craziest conclusion to draw, and it burned in her mind only for a split second: her brain ran a slide show of the murder scenes, with the severed scalps soaked in red dye. And Grueber standing there, in his forensic overalls, holding the hair dye in his hand. Then it was gone. It was a mad thought: what possible connection could Frank have to the victims? She looked again at the plastic bottle. It was dark brunette; not red. She sighed and started to put it back but paused, bringing it out to re-examine it. It was Grueber’s hair colour. Very dark brunette. Almost black. Frank dyed his hair?
Maria replaced the container at the back of the cupboard, the label facing away as she had found it, and she put back the other items that had originally obscured it from view. She allowed herself a smile at her boyfriend’s vanity. Why did he dye his hair? Was it that he had gone prematurely grey? Maria had seen the photographs of his parents who both had the
same dark hair as Grueber but had not gone white before their time as far as she could see. Unless, of course, they too dyed their hair. She stared in at the hair dye under the sink for a moment. Maria could not understand why such a small mystery was causing a fluttering of unease deep within. It had been hidden. Maybe it belonged to a former girlfriend. But why had he placed it where he had, rather than throwing it out?
Maria stood up and her heel crunched on a fragment of broken glass. He was there when she turned around. Standing close. Too close. He was standing where Vitrenko stood in her dreams. His eyes were totally different in colour and in shape, but for the first time ever Maria could see they held the same emotionless, callous cruelty.
She knew. She smiled at Grueber and said light-heartedly, ‘I didn’t see you there. You gave me a fright.’ But she knew.
Frank Grueber offered a cold, sterile reflection of Maria’s smile. He reached out his hand and stroked back a short strand of blonde hair from Maria’s brow.
‘Do you remember the first time we met?’ he said.
Maria nodded. ‘You were processing that body in Sternschanzen Park. Fabel was away and I was leading the investigation …’ Maria smiled again. She tried to look relaxed. Her gun was out in the hall where she had left it on the antique hallstand. So many antiques in this house. Everything was to do with the past.
‘That’s right.’ Grueber continued to stroke her hair, her cheek, his gaze empty and focused somewhere and sometime else. ‘I remember the very first time I saw you. After a single second everything was
locked into my head, every feature, every gesture. It was as though I recognised you. As though we had known each other before but couldn’t remember where and when. Did you feel like that?’
Maria thought about lying, but shrugged instead. She tried to work out the distance to the kitchen door, then to the hallstand, then the time to unholster her gun and take the safety off. If she hit him hard enough …
Grueber smiled. He took his other hand from behind his back and raised Maria’s gun, pressing it gently into the soft flesh under her jaw.
‘I love you, Maria. I don’t want to hurt you, but if I must, I must. It means that we will have to wait until our next lives to see each other again.’
Maria tilted her head back, but Grueber maintained the gun barrel’s pressure, placing his other hand on the nape of her neck, cradling the back of her head. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Maria. I’m quite capable of killing us both. Please don’t force me. We’ve died together once before. On a railway platform a long, long time ago. But this is not our time. Not yet.’
‘Why, Frank? Why did you kill all those people?’
Grueber smiled. ‘Come, Maria. You still haven’t seen everything there is to the house.’
Anna Wolff arched her back and rubbed her eyes. She needed a break from the computer screen. She had spent the last hour going through the social-services records to find where and when Beate Brandt had adopted Franz. There was nothing. She went out into the hall and got herself a coffee from the
machine. A couple of other Murder Commission officers came along and she chatted to them for a while, deliberately putting off going back to the computer screen and the endless names in the archive.
She had just headed back into the office when Henk came in.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked. Anna grimaced.
‘It’s not. I can’t find any record of Brandt going into care or of his adoption by Beate Brandt.’
‘That’s because I think we’ve been looking at the whole thing the wrong way round.’ Henk sat on the edge of Anna’s desk. There was a hint of triumph in his smile. ‘I think we’d better go and see Fabel.’