JF03 - Eternal (32 page)

The house lights dimmed, and Fabel watched as there was a flurry of activity over by the illuminated platform, where a white canopy concealed Paul Scheibe’s vision of the future from the expectant and increasingly agitated audience. Paulsen, Scheibe’s deputy, was in animated discussion with two other members of the architect’s team.

After a pause, Paulsen awkwardly took centre stage at the podium in front of the display. For a moment he looked apprehensively at the microphone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your patience. Unfortunately, Herr Scheibe has been unexpectedly and unavoidably detained by a family emergency. Obviously, he is doing his best to get here as soon as he possibly can. However, the power and innovation of Paul Scheibe’s work speaks for itself. Herr Scheibe’s vision for the future of HafenCity and for the state of Hamburg itself is a bold and striking concept that reflects the ambition of our great city.’

Paulsen paused. He looked across to the side of the hall, where a woman whom Fabel took to be another member of the Scheibe team had just entered. The woman gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head and Paulsen turned back to the audience with a weak and resigned smile.

‘Okay … I think that … em … it would be best if we were simply to proceed with the presentation … Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure, on behalf of the Architekturbüro Scheibe, to unveil Herr Scheibe’s creatively unique and daring new aesthetic for the HafenCity’s Überseequartier. I give you
KulturZentrumEins
…’

Paulsen stood to one side and the pristine white
canvas canopy began to rise. The audience began to applaud, but with muted enthusiasm, as the vast architectural model was revealed.

The applause died.

As the canvas covering disappeared up and out of the spotlight, a silence fell across the hall. A silence that seemed to freeze the moment. Fabel knew what he was seeing, yet his brain refused to process the information. The rest of the audience were similarly trapped in that fossilised moment as they too sought to grasp the impossibility of what they were looking at.

The spotlights, one red, one blue and the main white light, had been carefully sited to pick out every edge, every angle of the vast white architectural model: to dramatise, to emphasise. But the creativity they illuminated with such stark drama and emphasis was not Paul Scheibe’s.

The screaming began.

It spread from person to person like a white-hot flame. Shrill and penetrating. Through it, Fabel could hear Anna Wolff cursing. Several people, particularly those nearest the display, vomited.

The landscape in miniature lay under the lights. But the centrepiece,
KulturZentrumEins
, was itself not visible. Paul Scheibe’s naked body had crushed it beneath its weight. It was as if some vast, hideous god had been cast out from the heavens and had smashed into the Earth in the HafenCity. Scheibe sat, semi-recumbent, among the shattered elements of his vision. His naked flesh gleamed blue-white in the spotlights and his blood glistened bright red on the model. Whoever had placed the corpse here had used part of the display to prop it up, and Scheibe gazed out at his audience.

His scalp had been removed. It lay at his feet, spread out and dyed, like those of the other victims, unnaturally red. The gore-streaked dome of his skull glistened under the lights. His throat had been slashed.

Fabel was suddenly aware that he was running. He pushed members of the stunned audience out of his way as he rushed forward and they gave way unprotestingly, as if he were charging through a storeroom of shop-window mannequins. He sensed Anna, Henk and Werner in his wake.

One of the press photographers lifted his camera and it flashed in the auditorium. Anna shouldered her way through to the photographer, grabbed his camera with one hand and shoved him backwards with the other. The photographer started to protest and demanded his camera back.

‘It’s not your camera any more. It’s police evidence.’ She scanned the rest of the press photographers with her laser gaze. ‘And that goes for the rest of you. This is a murder scene and I’ll seize any camera used here.’

By now Fabel had reached the front and grabbed hold of Paulsen, who still stood gazing blankly at the display.

‘Get your people out into the corridor! Now!’ he shouted into Paulsen’s face. He turned to his officers. ‘Anna, Henk … get the audience out into the corridor too. Werner … secure the main door and make sure that no one leaves the building.’ He snapped open his cellphone and hit the pre-set button for the Murder Commission. He gave orders that the forensics team were to be dispatched and that he needed uniformed units to secure the scene immediately. He also arranged for extra plain-clothes
officers to attend to take statements from every member of the audience. As soon as he hung up from talking to the Murder Commission he hit another button.

Van Heiden made no protest at being disturbed at home: he knew that for Fabel to call it must be urgent. Fabel heard himself describing the scene to van Heiden in a dead, toneless voice. Van Heiden seemed to react more to the very public context in which the body had been found than to the fact that someone else had lost their life.

After he ended his call to van Heiden, Fabel found himself alone in the auditorium. Alone except for that which had once been Paul Scheibe. Scheibe had had something to tell Fabel. Something valuable, maybe something that would not be told willingly. Now Scheibe sat elevated on his throne of smashed balsa and card, scalped, naked and dead: a crownless, silent king looking out over his empty kingdom.

Leonard Schüler had had too much to drink. It was not uncommon for him to do so. And, after all, it had been a hard week. He was still haunted by that face – that cold, pale, emotionless face at the window of Hauser’s apartment – but it came to his mind less and less as the days went by. More than ever, he was convinced that he had done the right thing in not giving a complete description of the killer to the police. Leonard Schüler, who did not believe in any thing much any more and was not one for deep thought, had found himself thinking back to that night, to the man in the window, and
wondering if there really was such a thing as the devil.

But it was time to forget about it. To put it where it belonged, in the past.

Schüler had felt like celebrating and had met up with friends in the bar on the corner two blocks away from his flat. It was a raucous, smoky place, buzzing with crude exuberance and over-loud rock music. It was exactly the kind of place he needed to be.

It was one in the morning when he left. He did not stagger as he walked, but he was aware that the normally unconscious act of taking a step now required a degree of concentration. It had been a good night, and a lot of steam had been let off: a bit too much for Willi, the landlord. But as he walked home, Schüler was aware of a hollow feeling inside. This was his life. This was all he had amounted to. He had not come from the best background, true, but others from similar circumstances had done more, made more of themselves. He was honest enough to blame himself for the failures in his life, although, in darker moments, he allowed himself to share some of the responsibility with his mother. Schüler’s mother was still a young woman, in her forties, having given birth to Leonard when she was eighteen. Leonard had never known his father, and doubted if his mother even knew for sure who he was. It was a subject his mother had always avoided, claiming that Leonard’s father had been a boyfriend who had died from an undisclosed disease before they could marry. But, by putting together the tiny and disparate scraps that he had been able to garner about his mother’s
past life, and by a lot of reading between the lines, Leonard had come to suspect that she had worked as a prostitute at one time in her life, and he often speculated that his anonymous male parent might have been a client.

But all that had been before Leonard’s first memories of the world. His mother, as a single parent, had brought him up on her own and had displayed an anachronistic sense of shame about it. At some time in Leonard’s infancy, his mother had become a ‘born-again’ Christian. She was now the model of prissy probity and abstemiousness, and his childhood had been overshadowed by the omnipresence of religion. He had hated his mother’s righteousness for as long as he could remember. It had embarrassed him. Irritated him. He would have been less ashamed of his mother if she had still sold blow jobs to strangers. Leonard often thought that that was why he had become a thief: to witness his mother’s shame.

‘Thou shalt not steal …’ she had repeated over and over, shaking her head when the police had brought him home the first time. ‘Thou shalt not steal … Do you know what will become of you, Leonard?’ she had said. ‘The devil will come for you. The devil will come for you and take you straight to hell.’

It had been those words that had echoed in Leonard’s head when the senior detective had talked to him; when he had described what that psycho would do to him if he knew about him. If he found him.

Schüler knew that he was not stupid. He had no illusions about the act that had conceived him. A quick, grubby fuck for a few Deutschmarks. But he
always imagined that his biological father would perhaps have been a wealthy, successful businessman or professional of some kind who, probably drunk at the time, had been a one-off customer of his mother’s. Someone with a bit going on up top. A better class of person. How else could Leonard explain his own intelligence? He had gone to a comprehensive
Gesamtschule
school and there was no doubt that, with just a little effort on his part, he could have passed his
Abitur
leaving exam, which would have guaranteed him a place at university. But Schüler had not made that effort. He had worked out that there were two ways to get the things you wanted in life: you could earn them, or you could steal them. And earning them required too much effort.

And this was how he had ended up. Jobless, twenty-six years old, a thief. Was it too late to change things? To start afresh? To build a new life?

He swung open the main door of his apartment building. Each step up the stairwell seemed to take a monumental effort. He unlocked the door of his apartment and threw the keys onto the second-hand dresser by the door. Leaning against the door frame for a moment, he stood on the threshold between the stark light of the stairwell and the dark of his flat. There was a click as the hall light, on an economy timer, went out, plunging Schüler into total darkness. He breathed it in for a moment, the hoppy taste of beer thick in his mouth and his head suddenly light without a visual anchor.

The light in his living room snapped on. Schüler stood blinking, trying to work out how he had accidentally hit the light switch, when he saw him sitting
in the chair by the television. The same man. The same face that had gazed out at him through the window of Hauser’s flat. The killer.

The devil had come to take him to hell.

Leonard knew, the instant he saw the man with the gun sitting in the corner by the television, that he was going to die. One way or another.

The first thing that struck Leonard was how dark the young man’s hair was – too dark against his pale complexion. He was holding a black automatic and Leonard noticed that he was wearing white surgical gloves. The man with the gun stood up. He was tall and slim. Leonard reckoned that he could have taken him on, easily, if it had not been for the gun in his hand. Rush him, thought Leonard. Even if he squeezes off a round, at least you will die quickly. He might even miss. Leonard thought of the two pictures the police had shown him; of what this tall, dark young man with a pale, impassive face had done. Leonard thought hard, so hard that his head hurt. Why don’t you just rush him? What have you got to lose? A bullet is better than what he’ll do to you if you let him.

‘Relax, Leonard.’ It was as if the dark-haired man had read his thoughts. ‘Take it easy and there’s no reason for you to get hurt. I just want to talk to you. That’s all.’

Leonard knew he was lying. Just rush him. But he wanted to believe the lie.

‘Please, Leonard … please sit down so we can talk.’ The man indicated the chair that he had just vacated.

Do it now … grab the gun. Leonard sat down. The other man watched him impassively. The same lack of emotion, of expression.

‘I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them anything,’ Leonard said earnestly.

‘Now, Leonard,’ the dark-haired man said, as if reproaching a child, ‘we both know that’s not true. You didn’t tell them
everything
. But you did tell them enough. And it would be most inconvenient if you were to tell them anything more than you have.’

‘Listen, I don’t want any part of this. You must know that. You can see that I’m not going to tell them any more than I already have. I’ll go away … I promise … I’ll never come back to Hamburg.’

‘Take it easy, Leonard. I’m not going to hurt you. Unless you try anything silly. I just want to discuss our …
situation
with you.’ The dark-haired man leaned against the wall and placed the gun on the table next to Leonard’s keys.
Do it! Do it now!
Leonard’s instincts were screaming at him, yet he sat as if his body had fused with the chair. The dark-haired man reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs. He tossed them to Leonard before picking up the gun again. ‘Now don’t panic, Leonard. This is merely for my protection, you understand. Please … put them on.’

Now. Do it now. If you put these on, he will have total control of you. He will be able to do anything
he wants. Do it! Leonard snapped the handcuffs on one wrist, then the other.

‘Okay,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘Now we can relax.’ But as he spoke he walked into Leonard’s bedroom and returned with a large black leather holdall. ‘Now don’t be alarmed, Leonard. I just need to secure you.’ He produced a roll of thick black insulating tape from the holdall and started to wrap it across Leonard’s chest and upper arms and around the chair back. Tight. Then he took a strip and stretched it across Leonard’s mouth. Leonard’s protests were reduced to loud muffles. The combination of the gag and the over-tight tape made it difficult for him to breathe, and the hammering of his heart was exaggerated in his confined chest. Satisfied that Leonard no longer represented a threat, the other man again laid the gun on the table. He pulled over the only other chair in the apartment and drew it opposite and close to Leonard’s. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rested his chin on a cradle of interlaced fingers. He seemed to study Leonard for a long time. Then he spoke.