JF03 - Eternal (6 page)

But not today. Today it was an unknown hell.

The bathroom was large and bright. A tall curtainless window, its lower half frosted glass, looked out onto the small square courtyard behind the apartment. At this time of morning when the sun was angled right, it flooded the bathroom with light. For some, the decor would have been too clinical. But
not for Kristina, for whom nothing could be too clean; too sterile. The entire room was lined with ceramic tiles: large and pale sky-blue on the floor; smaller and bright white on the walls. Herr Hauser’s bathroom had always been a delight to clean because the light sought out each corner and the tiles always responded to Kristina’s abstergent touch with a keen gleam.

There was a great rainbow-shaped smear of blood that arced across the pale blue floor tiles. At its end, Herr Hauser sat slumped where he had been dragged, between the toilet and the side of the bath. Bright blood glistened against the gleaming white porcelain of the toilet bowl. Hauser glowered across the bathroom at Kristina, his mouth gaped wide, with an expression that could have been almost surprise were it not for the way his brow hooded his eyes in a disapproving frown. There was silence, broken only by a dripping tap beating a slow tattoo on the bath’s enamel. Again something gurgled and struggled to free itself from Kristina’s constricted throat: something between a cry and a retch.

Hauser’s face was streaked with gouts of bright viscous blood. Someone had sliced a line, mostly straight but in places ragged, across his forehead about five or six centimetres above his eyebrows. The cut had been deep. To the bone. And it swept around the temples and above the ears. The skin, flesh and hair above the slash had been ripped from Hauser’s head and the blood-mottled dome of his skull was exposed. Hauser’s gore-smeared face and the exposed skull above looked to Kristina like some horrific parody of a boiled egg rammed into an eggcup. Even more blood had soaked into Hauser’s shirt and
trousers, and Kristina saw that a second cut ran across his throat and neck. She dropped the cleaning-fluid spray onto the floor and leaned her shoulder against the wall. Suddenly she felt all the strength ebb from her legs and she slid down the wall, her cheek sliding against the chill kiss of the porcelain tiles. She was now slumped in the corner by the door, mirroring the posture of her dead client. She started to sob.

There was so much to clean. So much to clean.

The new headquarters of the Hamburg police – the Police Presidium – lay to the north of Winterhuder Stadtpark city park. It never took Jan Fabel long to drive to Alsterdorf from his Pöseldorf apartment, but today was his first day back from four days’ leave. Just a couple of days before he had stood with Susanne on the wide, curving beach at List, on the North Sea island of Sylt. A couple of days and a lifetime away.

Driving through the dapples of sunlight that danced between the trees of the Stadtpark, Fabel felt in no hurry to step back into the reality of his life as head of a murder squad. But as he listened to his car radio, each news report seemed to sink into him like lead, anchoring him further into his accustomed world, while the memory of a long scythe of golden sand under a vast, bright sky drifted further from him.

Fabel caught the end of a report about the forthcoming general election: the conservative CDU/CSU coalition led by Angela Merkel had increased its
already dramatic lead in the polls. It looked like Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s gamble of calling an early election was not going to pay off. A commentator discussed Frau Merkel’s change of style and appearance: apparently she had taken Hillary Clinton as a model for her hairstyle. Fabel sighed as he listened to how the various party leaders ‘positioned’ themselves with the electorate: it seemed to him that German politics were no longer about firm convictions or political ideals, but about individuals. Like the British and Americans before them, Germans were beginning to value style over substance; personalities over policies.

While he drove through the sunlit park, Fabel’s attention perked up as he listened while two of those personalities clashed. Hans Schreiber, the Social Democrat First Mayor of Hamburg, was engaged in an ill-tempered debate with Bertholdt Müller-Voigt, the city’s Environment Minister – who was a member of the
Bündnis 90/Die Grünen
political party. The same Müller-Voigt that Fabel and Susanne had seen in Lex’s restaurant on Sylt. The SPD and the Greens were part of Germany’s ruling coalition, and the political complexion of Hamburg’s city government was also red-green, but there was little evidence in the recorded exchange that Müller-Voigt was, indeed, a Schreiber-appointed minister. The pre-general election cracks in Germany’s political structures were beginning to show. The animosity between the two men over the past month or so had been well documented: Müller-Voigt had referred to Schreiber’s wife, Karin, as ‘Lady Macbeth’ in reference to her ruthless ambitions for her husband; specifically an ambition that he become Federal Chancellor of Germany. Fabel knew Schreiber – knew him better
than Schreiber would have liked – and did not find it difficult to believe that he fully shared his wife’s ambitions.

Fabel stopped for a red signal at the traffic lights in Winterhuder Stadtpark. He watched idly as a Lycra-clad cyclist crossed in front of him, then turned to see that the car that had pulled up next to him was being driven by a woman in her thirties. She berated the two children in the rear seat for some misbehaviour or other, conducting her wrath through the rear-view mirror, her mouth moving animatedly, her anger mute behind the closed car windows. Beyond the annoyed mother’s car, a city parks employee brushed litter from the path that ran between towering trees up to the vast dome-capped tower of the Winterhuder Wasserturm.

The everyday routine of a city. Small lives with small worries about small things. People who did not deal with death as their day-to-day business.

The news switched to the latest from London, which had recently been rocked by suicide bombings. A second campaign of attacks had failed, most likely because of faulty detonators. Fabel tried to reassure himself that Hamburg was far away from such troubles. That it was another land. The terrorism that had rocked Germany in the 1970s and 1980s had passed into history, roughly at the same time as the Wall had come down. But there was a saying in Germany about Hamburg:
If it rains in London, they put up their umbrellas in Hamburg
. It was a sentiment that the half-British Fabel had always liked, that had given him a sense of place, of belonging; but today it gave him no cheer. Today, nowhere was safe.

Even in Hamburg, terrorism and its consequences
were insidiously encroaching on people’s daily lives. Just driving into Hamburg city centre from his flat in Pöseldorf had been changed for Fabel since the atrocities of 11 September in the USA. The American Consulate in Hamburg sat on the shore of the Alster and the shore-front road had been permanently sealed off after the attacks, meaning that Fabel had had to change the route to work he had taken every day since moving to Pöseldorf.

The lights changed and the driver behind him tooted his horn, snapping Fabel out of his reverie. He turned up towards the Presidium.

The next item on the radio news was, ironically, about the protests over the closure of the British General Consulate in Hamburg. Germany’s most Anglophile city was stung by the suggestion. Hamburg also prided itself on being, after New York, the city with the most consulates in the world. But the ‘War on Terror’ was changing how states connected with each other. As Fabel pulled up in the secure car park of the Presidium, the future took a shadowy and vague form in his mind and darkened his post-leave mood even more.

Hamburg’s police headquarters – the Police Presidium – was less than five years old and still had the look and feel of a new building, like a newly tailored coat yet to yield to the shape of its wearer. The architectural concept behind the Presidium was to recreate the ‘Polizei Stern’, the police star, in building form, with the five-storey Presidium radiating outward towards each compass point from an unroofed circular atrium.

The Murder Commission – the Polizei Hamburg’s homicide squad – was on the third floor. As he
emerged from the lift, Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped, middle-aged man with a tree-stump build. He had a file tucked under one arm and was carrying a coffee in his free hand. His heavy features broke into a smile as he saw Fabel.

‘Hi,
Chef
, how was your break?’

‘Too short, Werner,’ said Fabel and he shook hands with Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer. Werner had worked with Fabel longer, and more closely, than anyone else in the Murder Commission. His intimidating physical presence was actually totally at odds with his approach to police work. Werner was an almost obsessively methodical processor of evidence whose attention to detail had been the key factor in solving more than a few difficult cases. He was also Fabel’s close friend.

‘You should have taken another day,’ said Werner. ‘Stretched it over another weekend.’

Fabel shrugged. ‘I only have a few days’ leave left and I want to take another long weekend on Sylt in a couple of months. My brother’s birthday.’ The two men made their way along the curving corridor that followed, like all the main corridors of the Presidium, the circle of the central atrium. ‘Anyway, it’s been pretty quiet recently. Makes me nervous. I feel we’re overdue a big case. What’s been happening?’

‘Certainly nothing we had to bother you with,’ said Werner. ‘Maria got the Olga X case tied up, and there’s been a brawl killing in St Pauli, but other than that not much. I’ve set up a team meeting to brief you.’

The team assembled in the Murder Commission’s main meeting room just before noon. Fabel and
Werner were joined by Senior Criminal Commissar Maria Klee: a tall, elegant woman in her thirties. She had a look that one would not automatically associate with a police officer. Her blonde hair was expensively cut and her restrained, tasteful grey suit and cream blouse gave her more the look of a corporate lawyer. Maria shared the second line of command under Fabel with Werner Meyer. Over the last year and a half, Werner and Maria had begun to jell as colleagues, but only after the team had nearly lost her in the same operation that had left another of the Murder Commission’s team dead.

There were two younger officers already at the table when Fabel arrived. Criminal Commissars Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann were both protégés of Fabel’s. He had picked each for their very different styles and attitudes. It was Fabel’s management style to team up opposites: where others would see the potential for strife, Fabel would see the opportunity for a balance of complementary qualities. Anna and Henk were still finding that balance: it had been Anna’s former partner, Paul Lindemann, who had been killed. And he had died trying to save her life.

Anna Wolff looked even less like a police officer than Maria Klee, but in a completely different way. She was more youthful-looking than her twenty-eight years, and she habitually dressed in jeans and an oversized leather jacket. Her pretty face was topped by black hair cut short and spiky, and her large dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were always emphasised by dark mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. It would have been much easier to imagine Anna working in a hair salon rather than as a Murder Commission detective. But
Anna Wolff was tough. She came from a family of Holocaust survivors and had served in the Israeli army before returning to her native Hamburg. In fact, Anna was probably the toughest member of Fabel’s team: intelligent, fiercely determined but impulsive.

Henk Hermann, Anna’s partner, could not have contrasted more with her. He was a tall, lanky man with a pale complexion and a perpetually earnest expression. Just as Anna could not have looked less like a police officer, Henk could not have looked more like one. The same could also have been said about Paul Lindemann, and Fabel knew that, initially, the physical similarity between Henk and his dead predecessor had taken the other members of the team aback.

Fabel looked around the table. It always struck him as odd just how different this disparate group of people were. An unlikely family. Very different individuals who had somehow stumbled into a very peculiar profession and into an unspoken dependence on each other.

Werner led Fabel through the current caseload. While he had been on leave, there had only been one murder: a drunken Saturday-night fight outside a nightclub in St Pauli had ended with a twenty-one-year-old haemorrhaging to death in the street. Werner handed over to Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann, who summarised the case and the progress to date. It was the type of murder that made up ninety per cent of the Murder Commission’s workload. Depressingly simple and straightforward: a moment of senseless rage, usually fuelled by drink, leaving one life lost and another in ruins.

‘Do we have anything else on the books?’ Fabel asked.

‘Just tying up the loose ends on the Olga X case.’ Maria flipped back through a few pages in her notebook. Olga X not only had no surname, her first name was unlikely to have been Olga. But the team had felt the need to give her some kind of identity. No one knew for sure where Olga had come from, but it was certainly somewhere in Eastern Europe. She had been working as a prostitute and had been beaten and strangled to death by a customer: a fat, balding thirty-nine-year-old insurance clerk called Thomas Wiesehan from Heimfeld with a wife and three children and no criminal record of any kind.

Dr Möller, the pathologist, had estimated Olga’s age to have been between eighteen and twenty.

Fabel looked puzzled. ‘But Werner told me that the Olga X case is all done and dusted, Maria. We have a full admission of guilt and unshakeable forensics to back it up. What “loose ends” do you have to tie up?’

‘Well, none really on the murder itself. It’s just I get the feeling there’s a people-trafficking connection to this. Some poor kid from Russia or God knows where being trapped into a prostitution career with promises of a proper job and a place in the West. Olga was a victim of slavery before she became a victim of murder. Wiesehan killed her all right … but some gang boss put her there for him to kill.’