Eternal

11.

Fourteen Days After the First Murder: Thursday, 1 September 2005.

12.02 a.m.: Grindelviertel, Hamburg

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.

‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Leonard?’ The bound man stared uncomprehendingly at the killer.

‘Do you believe in reincarnation? It’s not a complicated question.’

Leonard shook his head vigorously. His eyes were wide, wild. Scared. They searched the face of his assailant for any sign of sympathy or compassion, for anything approaching a human emotion.

‘You don’t? Well, you’re in the minority, Leonard. The vast majority of the population of this world include reincarnation in their belief systems. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism… many cultures find it natural and logical to have a belief in some kind of return of the soul. In villages in Nigeria you’ll often come across an ogbanje… a child who is the reincarnation of someone who died in childhood themselves. Sorry… you don’t mind if I talk while I’m getting everything ready, do you?’ The dark-haired man stood up and removed a large square sheet of black polyurethane from the holdall; he then took out a black plastic bag. Behind his gag, Leonard made an incomprehensible noise that the killer seemed to take as assent and he continued with his lecture.

‘Anyway, even Plato believed that we existed as higher beings and were reincarnated in this life as a punishment for falling from grace – something that was part of early Christian belief, actually, until it was excised and branded as heresy. If you think about it, reincarnation is easy to accept because we have all had experiences that cannot be explained any other way.’ The killer spread out the square plastic sheet on the floor and stepped onto it. He removed his jacket and his shirt, folded them carefully and put them into the black bag. ‘It happens to us all… we meet someone that we have never met before in our lifetime, yet we experience that strange sense of recognition or we feel that we have known them for years and years.’ He took off his shoes. ‘Or we will go somewhere new, somewhere we have never been before, yet we feel an unaccountable familiarity with the place.’ He unbuckled his belt, then removed his trousers, which he placed with his shoes in the bag. He now stood on the black square in only his socks and underwear. His body was pale, thin and angular. Almost boyish. Fragile. From the holdall he took out a white one-piece coverall suit, like those used by forensic experts at the scene of a crime, except this one seemed to be coated with a plastic sheen. Leonard suddenly felt sick as he realised that it was the kind of protective clothing used by abattoir workers. ‘You see, Leonard, we’ve all been here before. In one form or another. And sometimes we come back, or are sent back, to resolve some outstanding issue or another from a previous life. I have been sent back.’

The man took a hairnet from the holdall, tucked his thick dark hair in it and then pulled the hood of his coverall up and over it, pulling the drawstring closed until it formed a circle tight around his face. He covered his feet with blue plastic overshoes before starting to clear a space in the centre of the room, moving furniture and Leonard’s few personal belongings into the corners with great care, as if afraid of breaking anything. ‘Don’t worry, Leonard, I’ll put everything back the way it was…’ He smiled a cold, empty smile. ‘When we’re finished.’

He paused, looking around the room as if inspecting its readiness for whatever he had planned next. He carefully refolded the square of black plastic and replaced it in the holdall.

Leonard felt the sting of tears in his eyes. He thought of his mother. About how disappointed she had been in him. About how he had stolen to hurt her.

The killer unfolded a second heavy-duty sheet of black plastic, much larger than the first, and laid it on the space he had cleared. He then came around behind Leonard, grabbed the back of his chair, tilted it backwards and started to ‘walk’ it across the floor on its two rear legs onto the black plastic. Leonard could now feel and hear his own pulse, the blood rushing in his ears, his lips throbbing against the insulating tape gag.

‘Anyway,’ continued the killer. ‘It’s not simply that I believe in reincarnation. I know it to be a fact. A law of nature, as sound and incontrovertible as gravity.’ He took a velvet roll-pouch from his holdall and placed it on the black plastic next to the chair. ‘You see, Leonard, I have been given a gift. The gift of memory – memory beyond birth, beyond death. Memory of my past lives. I have a mission to fulfil. And that mission is to avenge an act of betrayal in my last life. That was why I was there that night when you saw me, when you were skulking around behind Hauser’s apartment. That was the very beginning of my quest. Then, the next night, I killed Griebel. But there is more that I have to do, Leonard. Much more. I can’t let you interfere with that.’

The dark-haired man took a couple of steps back and examined his victim, bound tightly to his chair. He adjusted the black plastic sheeting, smoothing it flat. Then he scanned the walls of the room, seeming to assess them. He moved across to one wall and ripped down a poster of an American rock group, revealing the stain that Leonard, in an uncharacteristically house-proud moment, had sought to conceal. Again the killer stepped back and surveyed the wall.

‘This will do nicely.’ He turned back to Leonard and smiled broadly, revealing his perfect white teeth. ‘Do you know, Leonard, that scalping was part of the European cultural tradition since its very beginnings?’

Leonard screamed, but his cries were reduced to frantic high-pitched mumbling behind the gag of insulation tape.

‘All of those who have contributed their blood to our lineage did it: the Celts, the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths and, of course, the ancient Scythians on the lonely, empty Steppes that were the cradle of Europe. To take the scalps of those who had succumbed to us in battle, or simply to take the scalp of a personal enemy whom we had killed in single combat to settle a disagreement or grudge, is at the very heart of our cultural identity. We were scalp-takers and we did so with pride. Have you heard of an ancient Greek historian called Herodotus?’

There was no answer from Leonard other than the desperate, body-racking sobs of a man facing a terrible death protesting against his bonds and gag. The killer took no notice and continued to talk in his relaxed, chatty manner, as if he were at a dinner party. It was his calm, his nonchalance, that Leonard feared most: it would have been easier to understand, to deal with, if the man who was about to take his life had been enraged, or afraid, or in any form of heightened emotion.

‘Herodotus is considered the father of history. He travelled the then-known civilised world and wrote about the peoples he encountered. But Herodotus also wandered into the unknown lands, the wild lands, beyond the cultured world. He visited the Ukraine, which was the heart of the Scythian kingdom, and documented the lives of those he found there.’

The killer examined the wall again where he had torn down the poster. He paused for a moment to remove the tacks and fragments of poster left there, brushing the stained surface with his latex-gloved hand. ‘According to Herodotus, Scythian warriors would scrape away all the flesh from the inside of the scalps they had taken and would then continuously rub them between their hands until they became soft and supple. Once they had done this, they would use the scalps at feasts as napkins, hanging them on the bridles of their horses between uses. The more scalp-napkins a warrior had, the greater his status among the others. According to Herodotus, many of the most successful warriors would even sew their collected scalps together to make cloaks.’

Something like awe fleeted across the killer’s otherwise empty face. ‘And we are not talking about some remote land and distant people. This was our culture. This was where we all have roots.’ He paused and seemed to be deep in thought for a moment. ‘Think of this… think of a hall filled with ninety, maybe a hundred people. It is not a lot. And each person in this room is as closely related as it is possible to be: father and son, mother and daughter. Imagine that, Leonard, but imagine that they are all the same age, ninety generations brought together at the same time of life. Across this room you can see the family similarities. Maybe six, seven, eight generations back you see a face just like yours. That is all that separates you and me from those Scythian warriors, Leonard. Ninety closely related individuals. And the truth is, the truth that I have come to learn, is that it is not just our features, our gestures, our aptitude for certain skills or the propensity for particular talents that are repeated across the generations. We repeat ourselves, Leonard. We are eternal. We come back, time and again. Sometimes our lifetimes even overlap. As mine have. I have been my own father, Leonard. I have seen the same time from two perspectives. And I can remember them both…’

The dark-haired man took the dark blue velvet roll-pouch and unrolled it on the black plastic sheeting. He stood back for a moment, examining his preparations. Leonard looked down at the laid-flat roll-pouch. On it lay a large knife, its handle and blade forged from a continuous piece of glittering stainless steel. Leonard’s sobbing grew in intensity. He started to struggle wildly but impotently against his bonds. The killer laid his hand gently on Leonard’s shoulder, as if to comfort him.

‘Settle yourself, Leonard. You chose this. Remember you wondered about trying to wrestle the gun from me? Oh yes, Leonard, I could read you like a book. But you decided not to. You chose to hang on to every last second of life, no matter how terrible. Do you want a laugh, Leonard?’ He picked up the gun and held it out towards his captive. ‘It’s not even real. It’s a replica. You consigned yourself to me, to this death, based on the idea of a gun. On a lump of functionless metal.’

Behind his gag Leonard wailed. His face was streaked wet with tears.

‘Now, Leonard,’ said the killer without malice. ‘I know that you are not very happy with this life. So now I am going to send you on to your next. But first, do you see the space I cleared on the wall over there? That’s where I’m going to pin up your scalp.’ He paused, ignoring the desperate muffled screaming of his victim, as if he was thinking something through. Then a smile broke across his face: a cold, callous smile of a terrible intensity that did not belong on the hitherto expressionless mask. ‘No… not there… now that I think about it, I have a much, much better place for it…’

10.00 p.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg

Fabel had been awake for twenty-four hours.

All hell had broken loose with the media and with anyone who had a say in anything in Hamburg. Fabel found himself, once again, having to plan out the course of the investigation while navigating around the twin whirlpools of media attention and political pressure. It was another feature of his work that wore him down: there must have been a time when policing had been much easier, when the only pressure on an investigator had been to detect and apprehend the perpetrator.

Having spent almost all day at the scene, Fabel had come back to the Presidium for a major strategy meeting. All of a sudden, resources ceased to be an issue and Fabel found himself with detectives from across Hamburg allocated to him. He set up a major incident room in the main conference hall, having the incident boards and files moved there from the Murder Commission. A weary Fabel had found himself addressing a fifty-strong audience of detectives, uniform branch commanders and top brass. He had also noticed that Markus Ullrich and a couple of his BKA buddies had come along for the show: Fabel could not now deny that there was a political dimension, and possibly some kind of terrorist element, to the case.

Susanne had driven them home in Fabel’s car. She said that he was too tired to drive and that he needed some sleep. Fabel said that what he needed was a drink. Anna, Henk and Werner had all said they would come along too. It was clear that they needed to take time out and catch their breaths after the events of the last twenty-four hours. Maria, too, agreed to meet at Fabel’s usual pub in Poseldorf, but she was going to wait for Frank Grueber and they would both take a taxi.

It was nearly ten p.m. by the time they arrived. Bruno, the head barman, greeted Fabel enthusiastically. Fabel shook his hand and smiled a weary ‘it’s been a tough day’ smile. Fabel, Susanne and the team sat at the bar and ordered their drinks. A CD was playing the football song ‘ Hamburg, meine Perle ’ and a group of young people at the far end of the bar were singing along to Hamburg’s unofficial anthem with immense gusto. Their passion seemed to intensify as they delivered the verse that informed Berliners that ‘we shit on you and your song’. It was loud, it was raucous, it was cheerful. Fabel soaked it up. It was the vulgar, ebullient sound of life, of vigour; it was a million miles away from the death realm where he and his officers had spent the last thirty-odd hours. It was what he needed to hear.

Fabel wanted to get drunk. After his sixth beer, he could feel its effects; he was aware of the leaden deliberateness in his speech and movements that always came with having drunk that little bit too much. He always came to this point. And never beyond it. Tonight, he thought, tonight just get drunk. The truth was that Fabel never felt comfortable when he had had too much alcohol. He had never in his life got really, seriously drunk, even when he had been a student. There had always been a point when he was drinking that his fear of losing control would kick in. When he would become afraid of making a fool of himself.

Maria and Grueber joined them and they all moved away from the bar and its raucous choir and found a table together at the back of the pub. For some reason, Fabel got onto the subject of Gunter Griebel’s field of work and what Dirk had said to him about his experience.

‘Maybe we all come back,’ said Anna – her gloomy expression did not suggest that she relished the concept. ‘Maybe we are all just variations on the same theme and we experience each consciousness as if it were unique.’

‘There’s this wonderful, tragic Italian short story called “The Other Son” by Luigi Pirandello,’ said Susanne. ‘It is all about this Sicilian mother who gives letters to everyone she hears is emigrating to America, so that they can pass them on to her two sons who emigrated years before but from whom she has never heard. The pain of separation that she feels is enormous. But these sons really had not given her a second thought, while she has a third son who has stayed with her and is as loving and devoted as a son can be. Yet she cannot bear to set eyes on him, far less show him any form of affection or love. It emerges that, years before, while the mother was a young woman, a notorious bandit had raided the village with his gang. While there, he had brutally raped her and, as a result, she had become pregnant. As the child grew, despite being a sensitive and caring boy, he developed a massive build and had become the image of his natural father, the bandit. And every time the mother looked at her devoted, loving son, she felt loathing and contempt. He was not his father. But all she saw was the reincarnation of the bandit who had raped her. It is a tragic and beautifully written story. But it is also one that resonates with us, because it’s something we all do. We see continuity in people.’

‘But that story is about appearance. About a physical similarity between father and son. The son’s personality was totally different,’ said Fabel.

‘Yes,’ replied Susanne. ‘But the mother suspected that beneath the surface similarity the person was somehow the same. A variation on a theme.’

‘I remember,’ said Henk Hermann, looking thoughtful, ‘when I was a child, I used to get so fed up with my mother and my grandmother always going on about how like my grandfather I was. Looks, mannerisms, personality – the whole package. I used to get so fed up with hearing, “Oh, that’s just his grandad…” or, “Isn’t he the spit of his grandad…” To me he was someone buried, literally, in history. He had died in the war, you see. There were photographs of him around the place and I couldn’t see what they were on about. Then, when my grandmother died and I was an adult, I found all those photographs of him again. And it was me. There was even one of him in his Wehrmacht uniform. I tell you, that was a spooky experience, seeing my face in that uniform. It really makes you think. I mean, someone just like me living through those times…’

They moved on to a new topic. But Fabel had noticed that Henk seemed more subdued than normal for the rest of the evening and found himself regretting having brought up the subject.

The pub was just around the corner from Fabel’s flat and he and Susanne walked home. When they arrived, Fabel opened the door to the apartment and made an exaggeratedly gentlemanly sweep of his arm to indicate that Susanne should precede him into the flat.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Susanne. ‘You must be exhausted.’

‘I’ll survive…’ he said and kissed her. ‘Thanks for caring.’ He switched on the light.

They both saw it at the same time.

Fabel heard Susanne’s shrill scream and was surprised to feel any hint of drunkenness swept suddenly from him by the tidal wave of horror that washed over them both.

Fabel ran across the room. He unholstered his service automatic and snapped the carriage back to put a round in the chamber. He turned to Susanne. She stood frozen, both hands clamped to her mouth and her eyes wide with shock. Fabel held up his hand, indicating that she was to stay where she was. He moved over to the bedroom, threw the door wide and stepped inside, sweeping the room with the gun. Nothing. He switched on the bedroom light to check again and then moved on to the bathroom.

The apartment was clear.

Fabel moved back towards Susanne, putting his gun down on the coffee table as he crossed the room. He put his arm around her and steered her towards the bedroom, placing his body between her and the apartment’s picture window.

‘Stay in there, Susanne. I’ll phone for help.’

‘Christ, Jan – in your home…’ Her face was drained of colour and her tear-streaked make-up stood out harshly against the pallor.

He closed the bedroom door behind her and crossed the living room again, deliberately not looking at the picture window that had given him so much pleasure, with its ever-changing vista across the Alster. He snapped up the phone and hit the pre-set dial button for the Presidium. He spoke to the duty Commissar in the Murder Commission and told him that Anna Wolff, Henk Hermann, Maria Klee and Werner Meyer would be on their way to their respective homes and that he was to call them on their cellphones and tell them to make their way to his apartment.

‘But first of all,’ he said, hearing his own voice dull and dead in the quiet of his apartment, ‘send a full forensic team. I have a secondary murder locus here.’

He hung up, resting his hand on the phone for a moment and deliberately keeping his back to the window. Then he turned.

In the centre of the window, pressed flat against it and adhering to the glass by means of its own stickiness and strips of insulating tape, was a human scalp. Viscous rivulets of blood and red dye streaked the pane. Fabel felt sick and turned his face from it, but found that he could not banish the image from his brain. He made his way over to the bedroom and to the sound of Susanne sobbing. In the distance, he heard the growing clamour of police sirens as they made their way towards him along Mittelweg.

1.45 a.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg

Fabel had arranged for a female officer to take Susanne home to her own flat and stay with her there. Susanne had recovered significantly from the shock and had sought to apply her professional detachment as a practising forensic psychologist. But the truth was that this killer had reached out and touched their personal lives. Something that no one had done before. Fabel tried to contain the fury that raged within him. His home. The bastard had been here, in his private space. And that meant that he knew more about Fabel than Fabel knew about him. It also meant that Susanne had to be watched. Protected.

The whole team turned up. The shock and anger they felt was apparent on all their faces, even on Maria Klee’s. It was her boyfriend, Frank Grueber, who led the forensic team on site, but, realising that his own boss had a close professional and personal relationship with Fabel, Grueber had phoned Holger Brauner at home. Brauner had turned up within minutes of the others and, although he allowed Grueber to process the scene, he scrutinised every sample, every area personally.

Fabel felt nauseated. The shock and horror of what he and Susanne had been faced with, the drink he had consumed earlier, the cumulative exhaustion of not having slept for two days and the violation of his personal space all combined in a sickening churning in his gut. His apartment was too small to hold everyone and the team stood outside on the landing. Fabel had already had to deal with his neighbours, who were displaying that excited, alarmed curiosity that Fabel had seen at countless crime scenes before. But these were his neighbours. This crime scene was his home.

Fabel was aware that the team had been engaged in some kind of debate out on the landing. Then Maria broke off and came across to him, collecting Grueber on her way.

‘Listen, Chef,’ said Maria. ‘I’ve been talking with the others. You can’t stay here and I think Dr Eckhardt needs some time to recover from all this. You’ll have to stay with one of us for a couple of nights at least. It’s going to take hours to process the scene and afterwards… well, you’re not going to want to stay here. Werner said you can stay with him and his wife, but it would be a bit of a squeeze. Then I talked to Frank about it.’

‘I have a big place over in Osdorf,’ said Grueber. ‘Tons of room. Why don’t you pack a few things? Then you can crash there for as long as you need.’

‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. But I’ll check into a hotel…’

‘I think you should take up Herr Grueber’s offer.’ The voice came from behind Fabel. Criminal Director Horst van Heiden stood at the top of the stairs. Fabel looked startled for a moment. He was pleased that his boss had taken the time to come down in person, and in the middle of the night. Then the significance of it hit him.

‘Are you worried about my expense account?’ Fabel smiled weakly at his own joke.

‘I just think that Herr Grueber’s apartment would be more secure than a hotel. Until we get this maniac, you are under personal protection, Fabel. We’ll put a couple of officers outside Herr Grueber’s place.’ Van Heiden glanced across at Grueber, seeking the formality of his approval. Grueber nodded his assent.

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Thanks. I’ll get some stuff together later.’

‘That’s decided, then,’ said van Heiden. Grueber took Fabel’s car keys and said that Maria would take him over to his place and he would drive Fabel’s car over once he had finished processing the scene.

‘Thanks, Frank,’ said Fabel. ‘But I’ll have to go into the Presidium first. We need to get a handle on what this all means.’

Van Heiden took Fabel’s elbow and guided him into a corner. Despite the fog of tiredness that seemed to cloud his every thought, Fabel could not help wondering how van Heiden managed to look so well pressed at two in the morning. ‘This is bad, Fabel. I don’t like the way this man is targeting you. Do we know how he got in?’

‘So far forensics have been unable to find any hint of a forced entry. And, as usual with this guy, he’s left practically no trace evidence of his presence at the scene.’ Fabel felt another churn in his gut as he referred to his own home as ‘the scene’.

‘So we don’t know how he got in,’ said van Heiden. ‘And God only knows how he found out where you live.’

‘We’ve got a much more pressing question than that to answer…’ Fabel nodded over to where the bright red dyed hair and skin was still plastered to the glass of the window. ‘And that question is: to whom does that scalp belong?’

2.00 a.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

The entire Murder Commission team had turned out. It unnerved Fabel that van Heiden had felt his continued presence was somehow necessary. Everyone wore the unnatural expressions of people who should be exhausted, yet are agitated with an electric nervousness. Fabel himself found it difficult to focus, but was aware that it was up to him to pull the team, and himself, together.

‘Forensics are still processing the scene,’ he said. ‘But we all know that we’re only going to get whatever this guy decides he wants us to get. This scene differs from the others in two respects. Firstly, we have a scalp but no body. And there has to be a body somewhere. Secondly, we now know for sure that this killer is using these scalps to send a message. In this case directed at me. Some kind of warning or threat. So, if we follow the logic, the scalps displayed at the other scenes were intended to send out a message. But to whom?’

‘To us?’ Anna Wolff sat slumped in a chair. Her face was naked of its usual lipstick and make-up and looked pale and tired under her shock of black hair. ‘Maybe he feels he’s taunting the police with them. After all, we’ve been in similar territory before. And the fact that he’s used one of our homes as a showplace would seem to support that.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel. ‘If it were just the scalps, maybe. But this thing with dying the hair red… if he is talking to us, then he is using a vocabulary that we don’t understand. Maybe, instead of talking to us, this guy is talking through us. I get the feeling that his main audience is someone else.’

‘That’s as may be, but who is this third victim?’ Van Heiden stood up and walked over to the inquiry board. He examined the images of both victims. ‘If this has got something to do with their histories, then we have to assume that we have another victim in their fifties or early sixties lying somewhere.’

‘Unless…’ Anna stood up suddenly as if stung.

‘Unless what?’ asked Fabel.

‘The guy you had in. The potential witness. You don’t think-’

‘Witness?’ Van Heiden looked surprised.

‘Schuler? I doubt it.’ Fabel paused for a moment. He thought about how he had threatened the small-time crook with the spectre of the scalp-taker. It couldn’t be: there was no way the killer could have found out about him. ‘Anna – you and Henk go and check him out, just in case.’

‘What’s this about a witness, Fabel?’ said van Heiden. ‘You didn’t tell me anything about having a witness.’

‘He’s not. It was the guy who stole the bike from Hauser’s place. He saw someone in the apartment, but could only give a partial and pretty vague description.’

After Anna and Henk had left, Fabel took the rest of the team through the case again. There was nothing. No new leads to follow. This killer was so skilled at eliminating his forensic presence from a scene that they were totally dependent upon what they could deduce from the selection of the victims. Which left them nothing other than the suspicion that it was connected to their political pasts.

‘Let’s take a break,’ said Fabel. ‘I think we could all do with a coffee.’

The Presidium canteen was all but deserted. A couple of uniformed-branch officers sat in the corner, chatting quietly. Fabel, van Heiden, Werner and Maria collected their coffees and made their way across to a table at the opposite end of the canteen from the two uniformed officers. There was an awkward silence.

‘Why did he target you, Fabel?’ asked van Heiden at last.

‘Maybe it’s just to prove that he can,’ said Werner. ‘To show us how clever and resourceful he is. And how dangerous.’

‘Does he seriously think he can frighten off the police? That we’ll drop the case?’

‘Of course not,’ said Fabel. ‘But I do think that Werner has a point. I got this odd phone call in the car the other day. At the time I thought it was a hoax. But I’m pretty sure it was our guy. Maybe he feels he can compromise my effectiveness. Shake me up a bit, as it were. He’s bloody well succeeded. Maybe he even hopes that I’ll be taken off the case if he makes my involvement more personal.’

Another silence. Fabel suddenly wished that he was alone. He needed time to think. He needed to sleep first, then think. A pressure seemed to build in his head. He found that van Heiden’s presence, no matter how well meant, stifled his thought processes. Fabel sipped at his coffee and it tasted bitter and gritty in his mouth. The pressure in his head grew and he felt hot and sweaty. Dirty.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said and headed across to the male toilets. He splashed water on his face, but still did not feel any cooler or cleaner. The nausea hit him so fast that he only just made it into the cubicle before he vomited. His stomach emptied and he continued to retch, his gut clenching in spasms. The nausea passed and he returned to the basin and rinsed his mouth out with cold water. He splashed his face again; this time it made him feel a little fresher. He was aware of Werner’s massive bulk behind him.

‘You okay, Jan?’

Fabel took some paper towels and dried his face, examining himself in the mirror. He looked tired. Old. A little scared.

‘I’m fine.’ He straightened himself up and threw the towels into the wastebasket. ‘Honestly. It’s been a pretty full day. And night.’

‘We’ll get him, Jan. Don’t worry. He’s not going to get away with-’

The ringing of Fabel’s cellphone cut Werner off.

‘Hello, Chef…’ Fabel could tell from the tone, from the faint tremulousness in Anna Wolff’s voice, what she was about to say. ‘I was right, Chef, it was him. The bastard’s killed Schuler.’

3.00 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

Fabel woke up and felt the panic of the lost.

There was a hint of daylight at the edges of the heavy dark curtains that hung over a window that should not have been where it was. He lay on a bed that was smaller than it should have been and in the wrong position in the wrong room. For a moment that seemed to stretch into infinity he could not work out where he was or why he was there. His disorientation was total and his heart hammered in his chest.

When he remembered, it was in stages. Each part of his recent history colliding with him like a steam train. He remembered the horror in his flat, the nauseating violation of his home; Susanne’s scream; van Heiden’s concerned presence; vomiting in the canteen toilets. The memory of relaxing with Susanne and the team seemed a lifetime away.

He was at Frank Grueber’s. He remembered. They had agreed. He had packed a suitcase and a holdall and Maria Klee had driven him across town to Osdorf. Van Heiden had arranged for there to be a silver and blue patrol car outside.

But immediately before they had come here. Fabel remembered that, too. More horror. This time it had been a sad, pathetic horror: Leonard Schuler, whom Fabel had sought so hard to frighten, sitting strapped to a chair in his squalid little flat, his scalp missing and his throat sliced open, his dead face streaked with blood, with red dye. With tears.

As they had stood gathered around Schuler’s sitting body, they had all thought the same terrible thought that had burned in Fabel’s mind but to which no one had dared give voice: that what Fabel had threatened Schuler with, that terrible fiction he had used to frighten the small-time crook, had really happened to him. Fabel had grasped Frank Grueber, who had led the forensic team at the scene, by the arm and had said pleadingly, ‘Find me something to go on. Anything. Please

…’

Fabel swung his legs around and sat up on the edge of the bed. He rested his elbows on his knees and cradled his head, which still pounded nauseatingly. He felt listless and weary. It was as if a dense damp fog had gathered around him, insinuating itself into his brain, clouding his thought processes and making his limbs heavy and aching. He tried to remember what it was that the sickening feeling that sat in the centre of his chest reminded him of. Then it came to him. It reminded him of bereavement: it was an attenuated form of the grief he had felt when he had lost his father. And when his marriage had died.

Fabel sat on the edge of a strange bed and thought about what it was that he was mourning. Something precious, something special that he had kept separate from his world of work had been violated. Fabel was anything but a superstitious man, but he thought back to how he had broken the unspoken rule of not talking shop with Susanne; of how he had done so in his apartment. It was almost as if he had opened a door and the darkness that he had sought so hard to keep out of his personal world had come rushing in. After nearly twenty years, his two lives had collided.

Fabel found the bedside light and switched it on, blinking in the sudden painful brightness. He checked his watch: it was three p.m. He had only slept for three hours. Fabel had been amazed at the size and comfort of Grueber’s apartment. ‘Parents with money – lots of money…’ Maria had said in a mock-conspiratorial tone, her attempt at unaccustomed humour clumsy and inappropriate. Grueber had shown him to a vast spare bedroom that was about the size of the living room in Fabel’s apartment. Fabel dragged himself up from the bed and made his way into the en-suite bathroom; he shaved before stepping into a cool shower that did little to ease his feeling of pollution. He had seen it so many times before, with victims of or witnesses to a violent act. But he had never felt it. So this was what it was like.

Fabel reckoned that Maria and Grueber were still in bed and he did not want to disturb the rest that they both needed after such a gruelling night. He had watched them together when they came home. Fabel had always liked Grueber and found it sad that, although he was clearly very fond of Maria, they did not jell as a couple. Now, of course, Fabel knew the basis for Maria’s lack of intimacy with Grueber, and he could understand the caution with which Grueber displayed any kind of physical affection. But it made him sad to see two young people who obviously had strong feelings for each other unable to function fully as a couple because of an invisible wall between them.

The apartment was on two levels and, after he had showered and dressed, Fabel went downstairs to the kitchen. After a brief search he found some tea and made himself a cup, sitting down at the large oak kitchen table. He heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs and Grueber entered the room. He looked remarkably fresh and Fabel felt a little resentful of his youthful energy.

‘How are you feeling?’ Grueber asked.

‘Rough. Where’s Maria?’

‘She’s grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep. Do you want me to wake her?’

‘No… no, let her sleep. But I’ve got to get back to the Presidium. This is one trail we can’t let go cold.’

‘I’m afraid it’s cooling as we speak,’ said Grueber apologetically. ‘I did my best, I really did. But we got nothing from either scene that is going to help us identify this madman. He did leave his trade-mark single red hair – this time in your apartment rather than at the primary locus. I called Holger Brauner while you were asleep: he said that the hair matched the other two and is of the same antiquity, about twenty to thirty years old.’

‘Nothing else?’ There was a tone of bleak disbelief in Fabel’s voice. Just one break, that was all he wanted. Just for this killer to slip up once.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘ Shit.’ Fabel used the English word. ‘I can’t believe that this bastard can walk into my apartment and plaster a human scalp to a window without leaving a trace.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Grueber, a little defensively this time. ‘But he did. Both Herr Brauner and I checked and double-checked both scenes. If there was anything to find we would have found it.’

‘I know – sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t process them properly. It’s just…’ Fabel let the sentence die with a gesture of impotent frustration. Fabel’s own team had questioned his neighbours over and over again: no one had seen anyone come in or leave his apartment. It was as if they were dealing with a ghost.

‘Whoever this killer is,’ said Grueber, ‘I get this weird feeling every time… almost as if he deprocesses a scene before he leaves it. As if he knows forensic techniques.’

‘What, by the way he cleans up after himself?’

‘More than that.’ Grueber frowned as if trying to focus on something out of his range. ‘I sense three stages to it. Firstly, he must come heavily prepared and sets up something to protect the scene. Sheeting, maybe, and perhaps even some kind of protective clothing that prevents him leaving traces at the scene. Secondly, he must clean up after each murder. We blamed that woman, the cleaner, for destroying forensic evidence at the first murder. She didn’t. There would be none to destroy. Then he leaves his signature – the single ancient red hair – and he does so in a way that he knows we will find. Again, it’s as if he understands how we process a scene.’

‘But you nearly didn’t find it the first time,’ said Fabel.

‘And that was the cleaning woman’s fault. She had partially bleached it and it had been pushed well into the seam at the base of the bath. My guess is that the killer left it somewhere more obvious.’

‘You can’t seriously be suggesting that we are dealing with a forensic technician?’

Grueber shrugged. ‘Or maybe he has read extensively about forensic techniques.’

Fabel stood up. ‘I’m going in to the Presidium…’

‘If you want my opinion,’ said Grueber, pouring Fabel a second cup of tea, ‘you should rest up for the remainder of the day. Whoever this killer is, whether or not he has experience of forensics, he’s smart, and he likes to prove it. But, as we both know, these people are never as smart as their egos tell them they are. He’ll slip up soon. Then we’ll get him.’

‘You reckon?’ said Fabel dismally. ‘After last night I can’t be so sure.’

‘Well, I really do think you should stay here and rest. The fresher you are, the more likely you are to think straight.’ Fabel gave Grueber a sharp look and the younger man held up his hands defensively. ‘You know what I mean… Anyway, like I said before, make yourself at home. In fact… follow me…’

Grueber led Fabel out of the kitchen, along the corridor to a large bright room which Grueber had converted into a study. The walls were lined with bookcases and there were two desks: one was clearly a general working desk with a computer, notepads and files on it; the other was used as some kind of workbench. What caught Fabel’s attention was a clay model head, punctuated at regular intervals, like points on a grid, with small white pegs.

‘I thought this room would interest you – this is where I do my moonlighting. And most of my research.’

Fabel walked over and examined the clay head. ‘I heard about this,’ he said. ‘From Holger Brauner. You’re quite an expert on reconstruction, I believe.’

‘I’m happy to say that I’m kept reasonably busy with it in my spare time. Most of what I get is archaeological, but I’m hoping to use it more in a forensic context. When a body is discovered and is too decomposed for the usual means of identification.’

‘Yes – we would find that very useful. Is there a skull under this?’ asked Fabel. Despite his tiredness he could not help but be intrigued. He could see how Grueber had been building up the layers of soft tissue onto the bone. First the main muscles, then the smaller tendons. It was a perfect representation of a human face stripped of its outer layer of fat and skin. There seemed to Fabel to be an anatomical precision about it. And, in a strange way, it was beautiful. Science becoming art.

‘Yes,’ said Grueber. ‘Well, no, not the original. The university sent me a cast. They make a mould in alginate and the cast they create is an absolutely perfect reproduction of the real skull. That’s what I base my reconstructions on.’

‘Who is it?’ Fabel examined the detail of Grueber’s work. It was like looking at one of Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings.

‘She’s from Schleswig-Holstein. But from a time when there was no concept of Schleswig-Holstein or Germany and the language she spoke would not have been related to German. She would have been a Proto-Celtic speaker. She most likely belonged to the Ambroni or Cimbri. That would mean that her native tongue would be closer to modern Welsh than anything else today.’

‘It – she – is beautiful,’ said Fabel.

‘She is, isn’t she? I reckon I’ll have her finished in a couple of weeks. The only thing I have left to do is to add the soft tissue over the muscle layer. That’s what gives living form to the model.’

‘How do you judge the thickness of the tissue?’ asked Fabel. ‘Surely it’s pure guesswork.’

‘Actually, it isn’t. There are guidelines for the thickness of facial tissue for each ethnic group. Obviously, she might have been fat, or particularly thin. But she comes from a time when there was not a surplus of food, and everyday life was much more strenuous than it is today. I think I will manage to get pretty close to what she looked like two thousand, two hundred years ago.’

Fabel shook his head in wonder. As with the image of Cherchen Man that Severts had shown him, he was being offered a window on a life that had burned and been extinguished two millennia before he had been born.

‘Is it mainly bog bodies you work on?’ he asked.

‘No. I’ve reconstructed soldiers killed in the Napoleonic Wars, plague victims from the late Middle Ages, and I get a great deal of work to do on Egyptian mummies. I enjoy them the most – because of their antiquity, I suppose. And the exoticism of their culture. It’s funny, I often feel a bond with the surgeon-priests who prepared the bodies of their kings, queens and Pharaohs for mummification. They were preparing their masters for reincarnation, for rebirth. I often feel that I am fulfilling their task… giving life again to the mummies they prepared.’

Fabel remembered the archaeologist Severts saying something almost identical.

‘The most important thing for me,’ said Grueber, ‘is that what I create should be accurate. Truthful. I do this for the same reason I studied archaeology in the first place, why I chose to become a forensics specialist. The same reason you and Maria chose to become murder detectives. We all believe the same thing: that truth is the debt we owe to the dead.’

‘After last night, I don’t know why I do it any more, if I’m honest.’ Fabel said. He looked at Grueber’s earnest, concerned face. Fabel had been so concerned about Maria, but he could not imagine her being with anyone who would be better for her.

‘Take a look at this.’ Grueber pointed to the side of the reconstructed head, above the temple. ‘This muscle is the first we apply, it’s the temporalis. And this…’ He pointed to a wide sheet of muscle on the forehead. ‘Is the occipitofrontalis. These are the largest muscles in the human head and face. When this killer takes a scalp he cuts around the full circumference of the cranium.’ He picked up a pencil and, without touching the surface of the clay, indicated a sweep across the muscles that he had described. ‘It is comparatively easy to remove a scalp. By cutting through the full dermis all the way around, it can be pulled free with little effort. The scalp basically sits on top of the muscle layer and is anchored by connective tissue. The last two scalps have been taken that way, but he cut much deeper with Hauser, the first victim. Remember he looked almost as if he was frowning? That was because the occipitofrontalis was severed, causing his brow to droop.’ Grueber threw the pencil down on the table. ‘He’s getting more proficient. Our scalp-taker is perfecting his craft.’

For a moment, Fabel was again transported back to the night before, to his apartment. To the example of his ‘craft’ that the killer had left for him.

‘Like I said,’ said Grueber. ‘This guy is not as clever as he thinks he is. I know it’s not much, but at least it proves he doesn’t always do everything perfectly.’ Grueber sighed. ‘Anyway, I thought you might be interested in my library. Maria told me that you studied history. As you know, I’m an archaeologist by training – please help yourself to anything you want to read while you’re here. I’ll have to head in to work… there are a few things I need to tie up and I haven’t had as stressful a night as you.’

After Grueber had gone, Fabel sat and studied the partially reconstructed head. It was as if he were willing it to speak, to flex its fleshless muscles and move the mouth to whisper the name of the monster he was hunting. Grueber himself must have been loaded to afford a place like this. The furnishings were mainly antique and contrasted starkly with the computer and other equipment in the room, which were clearly expensive and state-of-the-art.

The curious mixture of professional and personal items in the study reminded Fabel of the room in which they had found Gunter Griebel’s body, although a great deal more cash had been spent on this environment. Fabel was disturbed by the similarity and for a second his imagination took him to a place he did not want to be: what if the maniac they were hunting was turning his attention on Fabel and his team? In an unbidden and sudden image that formed in his mind, Fabel saw young Frank Grueber bound to his antique leather chair, the top of his head disfigured. He thought of Maria, who had already survived the horror of a knife attack, sleeping upstairs, and of how her experience had caused her to develop a phobia of physical contact. He thought back to how, during the same previous inquiry, Anna had been drugged and abducted. And now there had been the atrocity in his own home.

Fabel felt the urge to grab his keys and rush off to the Presidium, but Grueber had been right: he was too exhausted and too muddled to be of any use to anyone. He would rest up for a couple of hours, maybe even sleep, before going in.

He wandered over to the walnut bookshelves. Fabel had always felt comforted when he was surrounded by books and Grueber’s collection was extensive but not wide-ranging in subject matter. Archaeology formed the core of his library: the rest of the books covered history from various periods, geology, forensic technologies and methodologies and anatomy. Everything that was not archaeology was a related subject.

Taking a couple of volumes from the shelves, Fabel slumped onto the antique leather chesterfield. The first book that had caught his interest dealt with mummies. It was a large-format book with big glossy colour plates and in it Fabel discovered exactly the same photograph of Cherchen Man that Severts had shown him. Again Fabel felt awe as he looked on the perfectly preserved face of a fifty-five-year-old man who had died three thousand years before Fabel had been born. He read for a minute and then flicked through the book again until he came across the equally striking image of Neu Versen Man: Red Franz. He felt a lurch in his gut when he looked at the skeletonised skull with its shock of thick red hair. It reminded him of the scalps that the killer had been leaving behind at each scene. The book detailed Red Franz’s discovery on Bourtanger Moor, near the small town of Neu Versen, in November 1900. It also offered a hypothesis on the nature of Red Franz’s life and death. How he had, during his lifetime, been wounded in battle. Of how his life had been ended by having his throat cut, perhaps ceremonially, before he was interred in the dark peaty bog of Bourtanger Moor.

Fabel flicked through some more pages. Each colour plate showed a face from the past, preserved in dank bogs or in arid deserts or prepared for the afterlife by the surgeon-priests of whom Grueber had spoken. Fabel tried to read, to focus his attention on something that would take his mind from everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, but his eyelids felt leaden.

He fell asleep.

It had been a while since Fabel had had one of his dreams. And it had been even longer since he had admitted having one to Susanne, who he knew was concerned about the way the stresses and horrors of his working days manifested themselves in the vivid nightmares that haunted his sleep.

He dreamed that he stood on a vast plain. Fabel, who had grown up on the baize-green flatlands of Ostfriesland, knew that this was somewhere else. Somewhere that was as alien as it was possible to be. The grass he stood in came halfway up his calf, but was dry and brittle: bone-coloured. The horizon in the distance was so uncompromisingly flat and sharp that it made his eyes hurt to look at it. Above it a vast sky that sat colourless and leaden was broken only by sickly streaks of rust-coloured clouds.

Fabel turned a slow three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything looked the same: an unbroken, sanity-shredding sameness. He stood and wondered what to do. There was no point in walking, for there was nowhere to walk to and there was no landmark to guide his walking. This was a world without direction, without destination.

Suddenly there were figures in the landscape, moving towards him. They were not together, walking several hundred metres apart like a strung-out camel train crossing a featureless desert.

The first figure drew near. A tall, lean man, dressed in brightly coloured clothes. He had a neatly trimmed beard and longish light brown hair that fingered the air with tangled wisps as he walked. Fabel held out his hand, but the figure did not seem to notice and instead walked straight past him as if he wasn’t there. As he did so, Fabel noticed that the man’s face was unnaturally thin, his eyelids unevenly pulled down. His bottom lip was twisted, revealing the teeth on one side of his face. Fabel recognised him. He held out his hand to Cherchen Man, who walked on by, blind to Fabel’s presence. The next figure who passed him was a very tall, graceful woman whom Fabel recognized as the Beauty of Loulan.

But as the third figure approached there was a terrible sound. Like thunder but louder than any thunder Fabel had ever heard before. He felt the dry earth shake and crack beneath him, bristling the dry grass, and suddenly, all around him, broken black buildings, like jagged blackened teeth, thrust up out of the ground. The third figure was smaller than the others and was dressed in modern clothes. He drew near: a youth with fine wispy fair hair, wearing a blue serge suit that was too big for him. By the time he had reached Fabel, an ugly black city of angular buildings, as empty as death, had grown all around them. Like the other mummies who had walked past Fabel, the youth’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes were sunken and shadowed. As he walked he held one arm stiffly out before him in the same death-frozen gesture as when Fabel had first seen him, half-buried in the sand of the Elbe waterfront. As he reached Fabel he did not, as the others had done, simply pass by. Instead he tilted his head and looked, with his hollow eyes, up at the vast bleak sky.

Fabel looked up too. The sky darkened as if filled with birds, but he recognised the dull, menacing drone of ancient warplanes. The drone grew louder, deafening, as the planes came overhead. Fabel stood, mute and motionless, watching the bombs cascade from the sky. A great storm began to rage, the excoriatingly hot air swirled and screamed, and the black buildings now glowed like coals. Yet Fabel and the youth remained untouched by the firestorm raging around them.

For a moment the youth looked blankly at Fabel, with his expressionless, ageless face. Then he turned away and walked the few paces to where the nearest building raged with fire, greedily sucking on the air to feed the great flame that lived within. The youth lay down before the building, which Fabel thought may have been the Nikolaikirche, pulled a red blanket of molten asphalt and embers over himself, and went to sleep, his outstretched arm reaching out to the burning building.

Fabel sat upright, still halfway in his dream, for a few moments straining his ears for the sound of bombers overhead. He looked around and recognised Grueber’s study with its expensive antiques, its walnut bookshelves and the half-finished bust of a long-dead girl from Schleswig-Holstein.

Fabel looked at his watch: it was now six-thirty. He had slept for another two hours. He still felt the lead of exhaustion in his limbs but, hearing movement in the kitchen, he went through to find Maria Klee drinking a coffee.

‘You fit enough to come in with me?’ His question sounded more like a statement than he would have liked. Maria nodded, stood up and took a final sip of her coffee. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the team together. We’re going to go over everything we’ve got. Again. There’s got to be something we’re missing here.’

As he made his way out of Grueber’s apartment, Fabel used his cellphone to call Susanne to check how she was. She told him she was fine, but there was a tone of uncertainty that Fabel had never heard before in her voice. He grabbed his jacket and keys and made his way out to the waiting silver and blue marked police car outside.

Part Two