Eternal

Craig Russell
Prologue
1.

Twenty-Eight Days After the First Murder: Thursday, 15 September 2005.

Nordenham Railway Station, Nordenham, 145 Kilometres West of Hamburg

Fabel could not help but reflect on the irony that Nordenham railway station was a terminus. In so many ways, this was where their journey ended. From here, there was nowhere else left to go.

The headlights of the police cars ranged on the other side of the tracks illuminated the platform as if it were a stage. It was a crystal moment: diamond-sharp and clear and hard. Even the painted plaster facade of the turn-of-the-century station seemed bleached of colour: its edges etched with artificial clarity, like an architectural drawing, or a theatre set against which were cast the giant shadows of the two figures on the platform, one standing, the other forced to its knees.

And nothing was sharper or clearer than the bright, eager gleam on the blade in the hand that hung at the side of the figure who stood, illuminated, behind the kneeling man.

Fabel’s mind raced through the thousand possible ways this could all end. Whatever his next words were, whatever action he now took, would have consequences; would set in train a sequence of events. And an all too conceivable consequence would be the death of more than one person.

His head ached with the weight of it. Despite the time of year, the night air felt meagre and sterile in his mouth and made grey ghosts of his breath, as if in coming together to this moment, to this low-lying landscape, they had actually reached a great altitude. It seemed as if the air was too thin to carry any sound other than the desperate half-sobbed breathing of the kneeling man. Fabel glanced across at his officers, who stood, taking aim in the hard, locked-muscle stance of those who stand on the edge of the decision to kill. It was Maria he paid most attention to: her face bloodless, her eyes glittering ice-blue, the bone and sinew of her hands straining against the taut skin as she gripped her SIG-Sauer automatic.

Fabel made an almost imperceptible movement of his head, hoping that his team would interpret his signal to hold back.

He stared hard at the man who stood in the centre of the harsh cast light. Fabel and his team had struggled for months to put a name, an identity, to the killer they had hunted. He had turned out to be a man of many names: the name he had given himself in his perverted sense of crusade was ‘Red Franz’; while the media, in their enthusiastic determination to spread fear and anxiety as far as possible, had christened him the ‘Hamburg Hairdresser’. But now Fabel knew his real name.

In front of Red Franz, facing in the same direction, was the middle-aged man whom he had forced to his knees. Red Franz held the kneeling man by a fistful of grey hair, angling his head back so that the throat lay exposed and white. Above the throat, above the terror-contorted face, the flesh of his forehead had been sliced across in a straight line the full width of his brow, just below the hairline, and the wound gaped slightly as Red Franz yanked his head back by the hair. A pulse of blood cascaded down the kneeling man’s face and he let out a high-pitched animal yelp.

And all the time the blade by Red Franz’s side sparkled and gleamed with malevolent intent in the night.

‘For Christ’s sake, Fabel.’ The kneeling man’s voice was tight and shrill with terror. ‘Help me… Please… Help me, Fabel…’

Fabel ignored the pleading and kept his gaze locked like a searchlight on Red Franz. He held his hand out into empty air, as if halting traffic. ‘Easy… take it easy. I’m not playing along with any of this. No one here is. We’re not going to act out the parts you want us to play. Tonight, history is not going to repeat itself.’

Red Franz gave a bitter laugh. The hand that held the knife twitched and again the blade flashed bright and stark.

‘Do you honestly think that I am going to walk away? This bastard

…’ He yanked again on the hair and the kneeling man yelped again through a curtain of his own blood. ‘This bastard betrayed me and all that we stood for. He thought that my death would buy him a new life. Just like the others did.’

‘This is pure fantasy…’ said Fabel. ‘That was not your death.’

‘Oh no? Then how is it that you started to doubt what you believe while you searched for me? There is no such thing as death; there’s only remembrance. The only difference between me and anyone else is that I have been allowed to remember, like looking through a hall of windows. I remember everything.’ He paused, the small silence broken only by the distant sound of a late-night car passing through the town of Nordenham, behind the station and a universe away. ‘Of course history will repeat itself. That’s what history does. It repeated me… You’re so proud that you studied history in your youth. But did you ever truly understand it? We’re all just variations on the same theme – all of us. What was before will be again. He who was before shall be again. Over and over. History is all about beginnings. History is made, not unmade.’

‘Then make it your own history,’ said Fabel. ‘Change things. Give it up, man. Tonight history won’t repeat itself. Tonight no one dies.’

Red Franz smiled. A smile that was as scalpel-bright and hard and cold as the knife in his hand. ‘Really? Then we must see, Herr Chief Commissar.’ The blade flashed upwards to the kneeling man’s throat.

There was a scream. And the sound of gunfire.