A noise woke him up. There was a rumble of thunder beyond the picture windows and the soft crackle of rain on the panes, then the urgent trilling of the phone. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello Jan. It’s Werner. You’d better get down here,
Chef
… there’s been another one.’
The storm continued to rage. Electrical flashes danced across the Hamburg skyline, throwing out the black silhouettes of the Fernsehturm television tower and the spire of St Michaelis like flat stage scenery. The wipers on Fabel’s BMW, switched to their fastest setting, fought to clear the windscreen of the barrage of thick viscous globs that exploded against the glass and turned street lamps and the headlights of oncoming cars into fractured stars. Fabel had picked up Werner Meyer at the Polizeipräsidium, and now Werner’s considerable bulk was squeezed into the front passenger seat, filling the car with the smell of the rain-soaked fabric of his coat.
‘This definitely look like our guy?’ asked Fabel.
‘From what the guy from Davidwache KriPo said, yep … looks like our guy.’
‘
Shit
.’ Fabel used the English word. ‘So he’s definitely a serial. Did you call forensics?’
‘Yep.’ Werner shrugged his vast shoulders, ‘I’m afraid it’s that asshole Möller. He’ll already be there. Maria’s at the scene as well and Paul and Anna are waiting for us at Davidwache.’
‘What about an e-mail? Anything through yet?’
‘Not yet.’
Fabel took the Ost-West-Strasse into St Pauli and turned into the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Sündige Meile – sinful mile – which still glittered joylessly in the five a.m. rain. The downpour dulled to a heavy drizzle as Fabel swung the car into the Grosse Freiheit. Traditional indecency and imported middlebrow banality were waging war, and this was the front line. Porn shops and stripclubs were fighting a rearguard action against the invasion of trendy wine bars and musicals imported from Broadway or London’s West End. Bright promises of ‘Live Sex’, ‘Peep Show’ and ‘Hardcore Movies’ competed with even brighter signs for
Cats, The Lion King
and
Mamma Mia
. Somehow Fabel found the sleaze less offensive.
‘Did you get the message that a Professor Dorn has been trying to get in touch?’ asked Werner. ‘He said he needed to talk to you about the Kastner case …’
‘Mathias Dorn?’ Fabel kept his gaze on the road, as if the act of concentration would keep at bay the ghosts that stirred, somewhere deep and dark in his memory.
‘Don’t know. He just said he was Professor Dorn and you knew him at the Universität Hamburg. He’s very keen to talk to you.’
‘What the hell has Mathias Dorn got to do with the Kastner case?’ Fabel’s question was to himself. He turned into Davidstrasse. They passed the narrow opening of Herbertstrasse, concealed by a baffle of screens. Fabel had worked this district years ago and knew that beyond the screens prostitutes sat bleakly illuminated in their windows while the shadowy forms of browsing customers floated insubstantially in the lamplit drizzle. Love in the twenty-first century. Fabel drove on, passing through the pulse of dance music that bled into the night from the Weisse Maus in Taubenstrasse, and he pulled up outside the red brick ship’s-prow front of the Davidwache police station. A couple sheltered in the doorway: the man was tall and lanky with sandy hair; the girl was petite and pretty, with spiky black hair and fire-truck-red lips. She wore an oversized black leather jacket. Seeing them in this context, Fabel couldn’t help thinking just how young they both looked.
‘Hi
Chef
,’ Kriminalkommissarin Anna Wolff dropped into the rear seat and slid over, allowing her partner, Paul Lindemann, to climb in and slam the door after him. ‘I got directions from the Davidwache KriPo. I’ll tell you where to go …’
They drove out of Davidstrasse. St Pauli’s sham glamour now degraded into sheer seediness. The garish neon promises of libidinousness had the night to themselves and reflected bleakly on the rain-soaked pavements. The occasional pedestrian shambled along, shoulders hunched against the rain, resisting or accepting beckoned invitations from the spiritlessly enthusiastic stripclub doormen. Another turn: the descent continued. Doorways were now occupied either by gaunt and cheerless-looking prostitutes, some frighteningly young, others unfeasibly old, or by drunken down-and-outs. From one doorway an animated bundle of rags slurped from a bottle and yelled obscenities at the passing cars, at the prostitutes, at everybody and at nobody. And behind the doors, behind these blank, blind windows, the trade of flesh was conducted. This was Hamburg’s eternal twilight: a place where human beings could be bought for any purpose and at any price; a place of dark sexual anarchy where people came to explore the murkiest corners of their souls.
As part of an investigation, Fabel had once had to watch a snuff movie. By the very nature of his job, Fabel usually walked onto the stage after the act had been concluded. He saw the corpse, the evidence, the witnesses, and from them had to build a picture of the killing: a slow envisioning of the moment of death. In this case, for the first time, Fabel was to become a witness to the crime he was investigating. He had gazed at the television screen, a vortex of fear and disgust swirling deep in his gut, as an unsuspecting porno actress performed her accustomed part with the usual insipid imitation of ecstasy. Throughout the loveless, crude penetration by three PVC-masked men, she moaned with transparently fake rapture, unaware of the denouement of this particular drama. Suddenly, with a swift and skilled single movement, one of the men tied a leather thong around her neck. Fabel saw the surprise and vague unease on her face: this was not part of the script, if these things were ever scripted, but she played along, miming heightened sexual excitement. Then, as the thong was tightened, her feigned ecstasy became a genuine terror. Her face blackened and she thrashed about wildly as her life was squeezed from her.
They had never caught her killers, and she had joined the accusatory legion of murdered who marched through Fabel’s dreams. The video had been filmed somewhere near here, behind one of these blank windows.
Maybe another was being made now, as they passed by.
Another turn took Fabel into a residential street lined by four-storey apartment blocks. The sudden normality made Fabel feel disoriented. Another turn: more apartments, but this was where the normality ended. A small crowd had gathered around a police cordon, which in turn encircled a knot of police vehicles parked outside a squat 1950s apartment block.
Fabel gave a blast of his horn and a uniformed Obermeister parted the crowd. It was the usual mix of nobodies, faces blank or cheerlessly curious, some in night clothes and slippers, having dashed out from neighbouring apartments, some lifting themselves on tiptoe or twitching heads to see past their fellow ghouls. It was perhaps because he was so used to these crowds that Fabel noticed the old man. As Fabel inched his car through the huddle he saw him: he was in his late sixties, short – no taller than one metre sixty-five – but robustly built. His face seemed like a flat plane edged with sharp angles, particularly in the high cheekbones beneath the small, penetrating green eyes – eyes that, even in the insubstantial light from street lamps and headlights, seemed to gleam bright and cold. It was a face from the East, from around the Baltic or Poland or beyond. Unlike the others, the old man’s expression held something more than a casual, morbid half-interest. And unlike the others, he wasn’t turned towards the bustle of police activity outside the apartment building: he stared directly and intently at Fabel through the side window of the BMW. The uniformed officer moved between the old man and Fabel’s car, bent over and peered in as Fabel held up his Kriminalpolizei shield. The uniform saluted and waved to another to lift the tape and allow Fabel through. When the policeman moved out of the way again, Fabel tried to find the old man with the luminous eyes, but he was gone.
‘Did you see that old guy, Werner?’
‘What old guy?’
‘What about you?’ Fabel asked Anna and Paul over his shoulder.
‘Sorry,
Chef
,’ answered Anna.
‘What about him?’ asked Paul.
‘Nothing …’ Fabel shrugged and drove through to where the other police cars huddled around the entrance to the building.
There were three flights of stairs up to the apartment. The stairwell was bathed in the bleak glow of wall-mounted half globes, one on each landing. As they climbed, Fabel and his team had to stop and flatten themselves against the stairwell walls to allow uniformed officers and forensic technicians to pass. On each occasion they noticed the grim seriousness on the silent faces, some of which were blanched by something more than the dismal electric light. Fabel could tell that something pretty bad waited for them at the top of the stairs.
The young uniformed policeman stood half bent over in a posture like that of an athlete who had just completed a marathon run: the tail of his spine resting against the door frame, his legs slightly bent, his hands spread out over his knees and his head forward and down. He breathed slowly and deliberately, staring intently at the floor at his feet as if absorbing every scratch and scuff on the concrete. He was unaware of Fabel’s presence until the last moment. Fabel held out his oval Kriminalpolizei shield and the young policeman pulled himself stiffly upright. When he pushed back his mop of unruly red-blond hair it revealed a face that was pale behind its constellation of freckles.
‘Sorry, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar, I didn’t see you.’
‘That’s okay. Are you all right?’ Fabel looked into the younger man’s face and rested his hand on his shoulder. The young policeman relaxed a bit and nodded. Fabel smiled. ‘This your first murder?’
The young Polizeimeister looked directly into Fabel’s eyes. ‘No, Herr Hauptkommissar. Not the first. The worst … I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘I’m afraid I probably have,’ said Fabel.
By now, Paul Lindemann and Anna Wolff had arrived at the top of the stairs and joined Fabel and Werner. A scene-of-crime officer, wearing his Tatort tabard, handed each of them a pair of pale blue forensic overshoes and a pair of white surgical gloves. After they had slipped on the gloves and overshoes, Fabel indicated the door of the flat with a movement of his head.
‘Shall we?’
The first thing Fabel noticed was the freshness of the decoration. It was as if the short hall had only recently been painted. The colour was like pale butter: pleasant but bland, neutral, anonymous. There were three doors off the hall. Immediately to Fabel’s left was a bathroom. A brief glimpse inside revealed it to be compact and, like the hall, clean and fresh. It seemed almost unused. Fabel noticed that the scant surfaces and shelves were uncluttered by the knick-knacks that tend to personalise a bathroom. The second door was opened wide and revealed what was obviously the main room in the apartment: a bedroom and living area combined. It too was small, and made even more cramped by the cluster of police and forensics in it; each doing his job in a bizarre dance with the others, arms raised, squeezing past each other in a clumsy ballet. As Fabel entered, he noticed that each face wore a solemnity that one would expect in such a situation but which is, in reality, rare. Normally there would be an element of gallows humour: that inappropriate black levity that somehow allows those who deal with death to remain untouched by it. But not these people. Not here. Here death had reached out and seized them, gripping their hearts with fingers of bone.
When Fabel looked over to the bed, he saw why. Somewhere behind him Werner muttered, ‘
Scheisse!
’
There was an explosion of red. A sunburst of blood had encrimsoned the bed and splashed across the carpet and up the wall. The bed itself was sodden with dark, sticky blood and even the air seemed heavy with its rich, copper odour. At the heart of the bloody eruption, Fabel saw the body of a woman. It was difficult to make out how old, but probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. She was spread-eagled on the bed, her outstretched wrists and ankles bound to the posts, her abdomen grotesquely deformed. She had been sliced open through the chest and the ribs pulled apart and outwards until they looked like the superstructure of a boat. The bony whiteness of the sheared ribs shone through the prised-open mess of raw flesh and glistening dark viscera. Two dark, bloody masses of tissue – her lungs – speckled with frothy, bright blood, lay thrown out over her shoulders.
It was as if she had been blown apart from the inside.
Fabel’s heart pounded so fiercely that he felt as if his chest, too, were going to burst. He knew his face had blanched white. When Werner made his way over to him, squeezing past the police photographer, Fabel saw the same pallor on his face.
‘It’s him again. This is bad,
Chef
. This is really bad. We’ve got the mother of all psychos on the loose here.’
For a moment Fabel found he couldn’t direct his gaze away from the corpse. Then, taking a breath, he turned to Paul.
‘Witnesses?’
‘None. Don’t ask me how this much mayhem could be created without someone hearing, but this is the way she was found. All we’ve got is the guy who found her. No one saw or heard anything.’
‘Any signs of forced entry?’
Paul shook his head. ‘The guy who found her said the door was ajar, but no, no signs of forced entry.’
Fabel moved towards the body. It seemed so cruel that such a violent and terrifying leaving of her life should go unnoticed. Her terror had been a lonely terror. Her death – a death he could not imagine, no matter how graphically it was laid out before him – had been desolate, solitary, in a universe filled with only the cold violence of her killer. He looked beyond the devastation of her body to the face. It was spattered with blood; the mouth gaped slightly and the eyes were open. There was no look of terror: no fear nor hate nor even peace. It was an expressionless mask that gave no concept of the personality that had once lived behind it. Möller, the pathologist, masked and bunny-suited in his white forensic kit, was examining the sliced-open abdomen. He gestured impatiently for Fabel to move back.