Maria’s brain processed all the available data at the highest possible speed. She tried to draw a curtain across the panic that hammered to get in and assessed her situation. Grueber had told her that she had to put her hands behind her back, presumably to allow him to bind her. Then she would be powerless. But she had good reason to believe that, despite his insanity and despite the extreme violence and ritualistic mutilation of his victims, he didn’t intend to kill her. She was not part of his string. Not a victim on his list. But there had been others who had got in the way: Ingrid Fischmann and Leonard Schüler. Grueber had killed them despite them not being on his list. He had even scalped Schüler to make a point by sticking his scalp to Fabel’s window.
Maria remembered the call that Grueber had made to her cellphone when she had been at the apartment of Franz Brandt’s girlfriend. He had set it up
so that she would step out of the apartment while he remotely detonated the bomb inside. He had wanted her to live.
She did what Grueber asked and placed her hands behind her back. He bound her wrists with rope and she knew that he must have put the gun down, on the kitchen counter. For a split second she measured her chances of knocking him off balance and seizing the gun. But then she felt the rough bite of the rope as it tightened against her skin.
Grueber took Maria by the arm, not roughly, and led her out of the kitchen, along the hall to where the stairway rose up from the entrance vestibule. There was a low-arched doorway beneath the stairway which Grueber had previously told Maria led to a cellar crammed with storage boxes. He indicated with a wave of Maria’s gun that she should step back from him while he recovered the key from his pocket. He opened the door, reached in and switched on a light before beckoning for Maria to precede him into the cellar.
As she did so, she began bitterly to regret not having taken her chances before he had tied her hands.
Fabel was sitting at his desk, staring at a photograph and trying to wrest its true meaning from it, when his phone rang. It was Susanne phoning from her flat and Fabel was, for a moment, a little fazed.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You sound strange.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, still looking at the picture on his desk. ‘Just tired.’
‘When will you be home?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel, ‘I’m completely bogged down with stuff here. I reckon I won’t be through until pretty late on. There’s no point in waiting up for me. In fact, it’s probably better if I stay at my place tonight. It’ll save me disturbing you when I get in.’
‘Okay,’ she said and there was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. You sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I just need to get some sleep. Listen, I’d better get on … I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Fabel hung up and left his hand resting on the phone. He remembered having had so many similar telephone conversations with his wife, Renate. Late-night calls from the Murder Commission, or a murder scene, or a morgue. He had made too many such calls and his marriage and his wife’s fidelity had been steadily eroded by them.
But this time he had been less than honest with Susanne about his reasons for not coming over. Tonight he needed to be alone, he needed his own time and space to think about things. He felt buried under an unbearable weight that could not be shifted with a single huge effort. It was like rubble that he had to dig himself out from under, piece by piece.
And one of the pieces lay on the desk before him. Everyone has a past.
Everyone has been someone else once. It was the thought that had occurred to him as he had looked at the family photograph of the young, pre-terrorist Franz Mühlhaus; when Anna had described the photograph of the newly married Ulrike Meinhof. A life before the life we know.
Fabel had spent the last two hours going through
the file that Ingrid Fischmann had sent him immediately before her death. He had spread the contents out over his desk: press cuttings, interviews, a chronology charting the evolution and diversification of protest, activist and terrorist groups, photocopies from books of German domestic terrorism.
And photographs.
The picture itself had nothing to do with the case he was investigating. And it had nothing to do with what had happened to him twenty years ago. It had to do with something, and someone, totally different.
Fabel had found the photograph, with a sticker note attached to the back, at the end of Fischmann’s file. It dated from 1990, a time when the will and the
raison d’être
of Left-wing activism was waning fast. The Wall had just come down and two former Germanys were still embracing each other with enthusiasm and hope. It was a time when the world watched millions across Eastern Europe rise in true protest against communist dictatorships. The old slogans of Left-wing activism had begun to ring hollow; even to sound embarrassing.
The caption attached to the photograph read: ‘Christian Wohlmut, Munich-based anarchist, wanted on suspicion of attacks on US governmental and commercial interests within the Federal Republic. Photographed with unknown female.’
Unknown female. The photograph was blurry and looked as if it had been taken from some distance. The girl, about the right age to be a student, was to the left and slightly to the rear of Wohlmut. She was tall and slim and had long dark hair, but her features were out of focus. But recognisable. To someone who knew her.
Fabel read the file associated with Wohlmut. It
had been the last twitching of a dying movement. He had formed a group that had eventually fizzled out, but not before they had planted a couple of crude devices in American targets. A letter bomb had taken the fingers off the right hand of a nineteen-year-old secretarial worker in the offices of an American oil company. Wohlmut had been caught and had spent three years in prison.
Fabel looked again at the tall girl with the long dark hair. Wohlmut was talking to someone off camera, and the girl beside him was listening intently. As she did so, she held her head at a distinctive angle. A pose of concentration.
Everyone has a past. Everyone was someone else once. There was a knock at the door and he slipped the photograph back to the bottom of the file.
Anna and Henk came in.
There were no storage boxes in Grueber’s cellar. There was no disorder.
The cellar was vast: out of proportion with the small understairs door that served it. Maria scanned the walls to see if she could locate a window or door that opened out directly onto the outside world. But she knew they were too deep. She thought of how the dying evening sun would be dappling the lawn through the bushes and plants of Grueber’s garden. Suddenly Maria became aware of the mass of the house above her; the dark soil that lay, cold and pressing, beyond the cellar walls that surrounded her.
The cellar had a surprising amount of headroom, she guessed somewhere just under two metres, and
it had been kitted out as a working environment by Grueber. There were benches and equipment along the walls, bookshelves and metal tool cabinets. She heard a continuous metallic whirring and noticed a large brushed-steel housing bolted to one wall with a fan spinning behind a mesh protector. Maria guessed that Grueber had installed some kind of temperature- and humidity-control system. The space of the cellar was broken up by a series of heavy square pillars that clearly supported the walls above. In the centre of the cellar, four pillars served as the corners of an area that was shielded off in what looked like an improvised clean room, with semi-opaque heavy-duty plastic sheeting providing the walls. Maria felt her fear ratchet up several notches: it was clear that this area had a special purpose and she had a sickening feeling that that purpose might have something to do with her immediate future.
Grueber seemed to sense her fear. He frowned and there was both anger and sadness in his expression. He reached out and stroked her cheek.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Maria,’ he said. ‘I would never,
ever
hurt you. I am not a psychopath. I don’t kill without reason. You should realise that by now. I have been given the gift to see through the veils that separate each life, each existence. And because of that I value life more – not less. The ones who died … they deserved it. But not you. And not Fabel. That’s why I didn’t detonate the bomb I planted in his car. You see, we are all bound together. In each life, we all come together again to resolve that which has been left over from our last incarnation. You, me, Fabel – we have all been here before and we shall be here again. Don’t worry, Maria. I won’t hurt you. It’s just that I can’t let you disturb
what must happen tonight. Tonight my vengeance shall be complete.’
‘Frank,’ said Maria. ‘No more killing. Let it end here. I’ll look after you. I’ll help you.’
Grueber smiled at her again. ‘Sweet Maria, you don’t understand, do you? All that I have learned in this lifetime, all the skills I have gained, have been acquired so that I can finish what I must finish tonight.’ He took her by the arm and led her over to the thick semi-opaque sheets.
‘I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. You have seen my reconstruction work. Where I rebuild the dead, applying layer on layer, giving flesh and substance and skin to them. Restoring their identity. Well, I can do the same in reverse – removing the layers from the living. Destroying their identity …’
Grueber pulled back the thick plastic curtain. Maria heard a shrill sound fill the cellar and realised it was her own scream.
‘Henk’s found something out,’ said Anna.
‘Okay,’ said Fabel, leaning back in his chair. ‘Let’s have it …’
‘Like you asked, we’ve been going over Brandt’s history and that of his mother, Beate. Frank Grueber over at forensics has, as you already know, confirmed Franz Brandt’s paternity. He is definitely the son of Franz Mühlhaus.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Fabel wearily.
‘Franz Mühlhaus may have been his father, but he was not adopted by Beate Brandt.’ Henk dropped
a photocopy onto Fabel’s desk. ‘Birth certificate for Franz Karl Brandt. Father unknown. Mother Beate Maria Brandt, at that time resident at twenty-two Hubertusstrasse, Niendorf, Hamburg. She didn’t adopt him. He told us the truth: she is his natural mother. He maybe doesn’t even know that Red Franz Mühlhaus is his natural father. There is absolutely nothing to link Beate Brandt to Red Franz Mühlhaus or to suggest that she was a radical of any kind in the nineteen seventies or nineteen eighties. But the DNA proves that she had a child with him.
‘Where that leaves us is with Franz Brandt being Mühlhaus’s son. But
not
Michaela Schwenn’s son. And that, in turn, means he wasn’t the small boy on the platform in Nordenham with his hair dyed black.’
‘A brother?’
‘We know that Mühlhaus had sexual relationships with many of his female followers, as well as with other women who may not have been connected to his movement. It could be that our killer is a half-brother who Brandt probably doesn’t even know exists,’ said Anna.
‘But wait a minute,’ said Fabel. ‘You’re forgetting that Brandt left a bomb in his girlfriend’s apartment to blow us all to pieces.’
‘And then he and his girlfriend walk straight into our hands,’ said Henk. ‘You said yourself that it seemed strange. My guess is that he didn’t know anything about the bomb.’
‘
Shit
,’ said Fabel, in English. ‘That means the killer is still out there. We have to find out what happened to that kid on the platform.’
‘That’s what I meant when I said we were coming at it from the wrong direction,’ said Henk. ‘We were
trying to prove that Brandt was the son we were looking for. Working the connection backwards. We’ll have to check the adoption files again. This time searching for the surname Schwenn.’
‘I have the access codes here.’ Anna waved her notebook. ‘May I use your computer?’
Pushing Ingrid Fischmann’s information file to one side, Fabel stood up and let Anna take his seat. She logged onto the database and entered her search criteria: the name ‘Schwenn’ and the time-frame of 1985 to 1988.
‘Got it!’ she said. ‘I’ve got four names here. Two are nineteen eighty-six adoptions. It’ll be one of these …’ Anna clicked on the first file. ‘Nope – this is a four-year-old girl.’ She clicked on the next. ‘This is a possible … no … the age is wrong.’ She hit the third file.
It was Anna’s expression that shook Fabel. He had expected her usual grin of insolent satisfaction at having nailed a crucial piece of evidence. But she stood up suddenly and Fabel noticed that her face had drained of colour.
‘What is it, Anna?’ asked Fabel.
‘Maria …’ It was as if every muscle in Anna’s face had pulled itself taut. ‘Where is Maria?’
‘I sent her home. She had a migraine,’ said Fabel. ‘She’ll be back tomorrow morning.’
‘We’ve got to find her,
Chef
. We’ve got to find her
now
.’
‘Fascinating, is it not?’
Maria did not hear Grueber’s question. Her ears seemed to ring, every nerve seemed to burn as she
looked down at the male body lying on the metal trestle table. It was naked. Naked not only of clothes, but also of skin. It was sculpted from raw, red sinew. Small round droplets of blood dotted the aluminium surface of the table that supported it.
‘I have invested heavily in making this working environment perfect.’ Grueber did not rant nor rave. Maria gauged the scale of his madness from his measured, conversational tone. ‘I spent a fortune on soundproofing this cellar. The contractors were told that I would be operating noisy equipment down here. That is why I have had to install the air pump and temperature control. When the door is closed, this is totally airtight and soundproof. Which is just as well, because he’ – Grueber indicated the figure on the table, stripped of its skin, of its humanity – ‘screamed like a girl.’
Maria’s head pounded and she felt sick.
‘Oh, sorry – this is Cornelius Tamm.’ Grueber apologised as if he had forgotten to introduce someone at a cocktail party. ‘You know, the singer.’