Eternal

15.

Twenty-Seven Days After the First Murder: Wednesday, 14 September 2005.

1.00 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

The days were losing their definition: running into each another with a seamless lethargy. Fabel had grabbed a couple of hours of fractured sleep at the Presidium. But the fact that two murders, executed in totally different ways by the same killer, had coincided meant that, even with all the resources at his disposal, he was working himself and his team harder and longer than he should. They were all tired. When you were tired, you did not work at maximum efficiency. And they were hunting a maximum-efficiency killer.

It had been the morning before Fabel had found the time to head home for a few hours’ sleep and a shower that would, hopefully, refresh his senses and his ability to think.

Fabel found himself, frustratingly, driving home through the start of the early-morning rush-hour flow and it was eight o’clock by the time he turned the key in the door of his apartment. As he did so, the images from Brandt’s home haunted him. He half expected to find another scalp in his apartment. This had been his refuge. His secure place away from the madness and violence of others. No more. The windows had been thoroughly cleaned, as had the rest of the apartment, but he could have sworn he smelled the subtlest hint of blood hanging in the air. The morning sun burned bright in the sky above the Alster and flooded into Fabel’s east-facing windows. Yet, to Fabel’s weary eyes, somehow the light seemed sterile and cold. Like in a mortuary.

The alarm woke him up just before noon. He had found it difficult to sleep with the sound of the city around him and when he rose he was disappointed to find that the dragging weight of his tiredness clung to him. He took a shower and decided to have something to eat before heading back into the Presidium.

‘There’s a package on your desk, Chef,’ said Anna as Fabel passed through the Murder Commission on the way to his office. ‘It arrived this morning while you were out. Given what’s been happening it was held up downstairs by security and run through the scanner twice. It’s clean.’

‘Thanks.’ Fabel entered his office and hung his jacket on the back of his chair. The package was large and thick and when he opened it he found a heavy file in a blue cover, held together by two thick rubber bands. Tucked under one of the bands was a tape cassette; there was a ‘with compliments’ card under the other. He took out the card and stared at it for a long time, almost as if, although the handwriting was neat and clear, he could not comprehend the meaning of it.

As promised. Hope this helps. With friendly greetings, I. Fischmann.

He stared at a note written by the woman to whom he had spoken only two weeks before. It seemed impossible that, in that small space of time, the intelligence, the being behind the handwriting had been extinguished.

Fabel removed the cassette and the bands from the file. Ingrid Fischmann had painstakingly put together a dossier of all the information she had on The Risen, as well as background information on Baader-Meinhof and other militant and terrorist groups. She had photocopied and scanned articles, photographs, files. Nothing was in its original form: she had made the effort to make copies for Fabel of all the most important files. Except now he held in his hands all that survived of Ingrid Fischmann’s work: the ghosts of the originals she had been so keen to keep safe, but which had been destroyed in the explosion and the fire that followed.

It took him a while to locate a cassette player in the building and it was a full fifteen minutes before it was delivered to his office. While he waited he flicked through the other material in the file; it was certainly comprehensive and it would take Fabel a long time to go through it in detail, but he knew he would have to. In that information could be the smallest detail, the finest thread that would provide the coherence he desperately sought for this case.

After the uniformed officer delivered the cassette player, Fabel closed his office door, something that everyone who worked with him knew to be a signal that he did not want to be disturbed, and he switched his phone to voicemail. The cassette that Ingrid Fischmann had sent Fabel was not of the same vintage as the original recording, and it was clear from the static hiss as soon as he pressed the Play button that it was probably a copy of a copy. He turned the volume up slightly to compensate. There were a few clunks and the muffled sound of a microphone being moved. Then a man’s voice.

‘My name is Ralf Fischmann. I am thirty-nine years old and I was the chauffeur for Herr Thorsten Wiedler of the Wiedler Industries Group. For performing this duty, I was shot three times, once in the side and twice in the back by the terrorists who kidnapped Herr Wiedler. I cannot understand what my sin was that I deserved to be shot. But, for that matter, I cannot understand what great sin Herr Wiedler has committed to deserve being torn from his family.

‘It has been more than two months since I was shot. The doctors started off by being cheerily optimistic and telling me that it was like allowing a bruise to heal. That, when the swelling in my spinal chord went down, who knows? Well, the swelling has gone down now and they don’t sound so optimistic any more. I am a cripple. I will never walk again. I know that already, just as the doctors know it but won’t yet admit it. I am a simple man. I am not stupid, but I was never one for great ambition. All I wanted to do was work hard, provide for my family and be as good a person as I could. Somehow, the way I have lived my life, honestly and modestly, was offensive to someone. So offensive that they deemed it necessary to put bullets in my spine.

‘I have been working for Herr Wiedler for three years. He was a good man. I use the past tense because I think it highly unlikely that he is still alive. A good man and a good employer. He came from Cologne and was typically friendly and down-to-earth… he treated all his employees as equals. If you did something wrong, something he was not happy about, he would tell you. By the same token, he would buy you a drink in the pub and talk to you about your family. He was always asking about how my daughter Ingrid and my son Horst were getting along. He knew that Ingrid was a bright little thing and promised me that she would go far.

‘The work I did for Herr Wiedler was general driving. I drove him between his home and office every day, and to meetings in Hamburg and all across the Federal Republic. Herr Wiedler hated flying, you see. If we were travelling the length of the country, to Stuttgart or Munich, for example, he would take my mind off the boredom of so much autobahn driving by chatting with me. Sometimes he would do some paperwork in the back of the car, but generally he would sit up front with me and talk. Herr Wiedler really liked to talk. I liked him very much and found him to be the kind of man that, were he not my employer, I would gladly call a friend. I like to think he thought the same way about me.

‘On the morning of the fourteenth of November nineteen seventy-seven we were both in the car. I had collected Herr Wiedler, as usual, from his family home in Blankenese. Unlike most other mornings, when I would take Herr Wiedler directly to his office, I had picked him up later in the morning and we were heading directly to Bremen, where Herr Wiedler had a meeting with a client company. This is something that I have puzzled about ever since the kidnapping. I would have understood it better if the ambush had taken place on our normal route to the Wiedler main offices, which were to the north, but they were waiting for us on our way into the city centre where we would join the A1 towards Bremen. I can only conclude from this that the terrorists had someone on the inside of the Wiedler company, or that some of the gang followed us from the Wiedler residence and were in touch with the others via walkie-talkie.

‘It was about ten thirty a.m. We were just about to join the autobahn when I saw a black Volkswagen van, stationary but sitting at an angle that suggested it had swerved suddenly. A man in a business suit was waving his arms frantically around his head and there was what looked like a body lying in the middle of the road. It looked to me as if the person on the road had been hit by the van. I pulled over to the side of the road. There was another car behind us and it stopped too. Herr Wiedler and I ran over to the injured person on the road. A young couple got out of the car behind us and followed us. When we got near to the body we saw that it was wearing blue overalls and we could not tell if it was a man or a woman. Then, suddenly, the person on the ground leaped to their feet and we saw that they were wearing a ski mask over their face. I think it was a man, but not a particularly tall man. He had a sub-machine gun. The man in the business suit and smart coat produced a handgun and pointed it at us. We all froze. Herr Wiedler, me and the young couple. Suddenly two more people in blue boiler suits and ski masks leaped out from the VW van. They had sub-machine guns too. I remember thinking that the terrorist who had pretended to be a businessman was the only one who was not wearing a ski mask and I made sure I got a good look at him. He saw this and got very angry and shouted at me and the others to stop looking at him.

‘The two masked men from the VW van ran over and grabbed Herr Wiedler and started to rush him over to the van while the other two kept their guns aimed at us. I stepped forward and the man in the overalls raised his gun, so I stopped and kept my hands up. That was all I did. I made no other move and the time for action was past. That is why I do not understand why he shot me. The man in the business suit said I was looking at him again and the next thing I remember was the sound of his gun. I remember thinking then that they must have been using blanks, because there was no way he could have missed me at that range, but I felt no pain, no impact. Nothing. Then I was aware of something wet at my side and running down my leg. I looked down and saw that I was bleeding from a wound just above my hip. I turned away and started to walk back to the car. I wasn’t thinking straight: it must have been the shock. I just remember thinking that I had to get to the car and sit down. Then I heard two more shots and I knew I had been hit in the back. My legs just stopped working and I fell flat on my face. I could hear the woman from the young couple screaming, then a screech of tyres as the van drove off with Herr Wiedler in it. I didn’t see this, because I was face down, but I know that’s what it was.

‘The young couple ran over to me and then the woman ran off down the road to get help while the young man stayed with me. It was the strangest sensation. I lay there with my cheek pressed against the road surface and I remember thinking that it felt warmer than I did. I also remember thinking that I had let Herr Wiedler down. That I should have done more. I was going to die anyway, so I should have made it count. Then I started to think about my wife Helga and little Ingrid and Horst and how they were going to have to manage without me. It was then that I got really angry and decided that I was not going to die. As I lay waiting for the ambulance to come, I concentrated hard on staying conscious and the way I did that was by trying to remember every detail of the face of the man who had not been able to hide his face. If he could be caught, I thought, they would get the rest of them.

‘It is those details that I was able to give to the police artist. I made him rework the picture over and over again. When he asked me if we had captured a good general likeness of the terrorist, I said he had, but that his job was not over. I told him that we could get it to an exact likeness of the man who shot me. So we did the drawing over and over again. What we finished up with was no artist’s impression. It was a portrait.

‘I will be confined to this wheelchair for the rest of my life. Over the last two months I have tried to understand what it is that these people think they can achieve with violence. They say this is a revolution, a rebellion. But a rebellion against what? The time will come when I shall have my reckoning. I may die first, but this tape, and the likeness I helped create of the terrorist who shot me, is my statement.’

Fabel pressed the Stop button. Now he understood why Ingrid Fischmann had been so motivated to uncover the truth. The voice on the tape had made Fabel feel obligated to find the people who had kidnapped and murdered Thorsten Wiedler and consigned Ralf Fischmann to a short and unhappy butt-end of a life spent in a wheelchair; he could not imagine the pressure that Ingrid, as Fischmann’s daughter, must have felt.

He opened the file and searched through it for the artist’s impression that Ralf Fischmann had described in the tape. He found it. An electric current coursed through his skin and ruffled the hairs at the nape of his neck. Ralf Fischmann had been right: he had pushed the police artist to a level of detail far beyond the usual bounds of the pictures of suspects that they normally circulated. It was, indeed, a proper portrait.

Fabel looked hard at a very real face of a very real person. And it was a face he recognised.

‘Now I understand, you bastard,’ Fabel said out loud to the face before him. ‘Now I know why you never wanted anyone to take your photograph. The others all had their faces hidden – you were the only one that anyone saw.’

Fabel laid the image of a young Gunter Griebel down on his desk, rose from his chair and flung the door of his office open.

1.20 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

Werner had assembled the entire team in the main meeting room. Fabel had asked Werner to arrange the meeting so that he could share his discovery about Gunter Griebel. It was now clear that all the victims had been members of Red Franz Muhlhaus’s terror group, The Risen. It was also more than likely that they were all involved in the Thorsten Wiedler kidnap and murder. Fabel was convinced that the motive for these killings lay in that event: but the person most motivated to carry out the murders, Ingrid Fischmann, was herself dead. She had mentioned a brother, as had her father on the tape recording. Fabel had decided to get someone on to tracing her brother and establishing his whereabouts at the times of each murder.

All of Fabel’s thinking, however, was to be overtaken.

Most of the Murder Commission team, like Fabel, had been seriously deprived of sleep over the last couple of days, but he could tell that something had blown away all weariness from them. They sat, expectantly, around the cherrywood conference table, while a row of dead, scalpless faces – Hauser, Griebel, Schuler and Scheibe – looked down at them from the inquiry board. They had not had time to obtain an image of the latest victim, Beate Brandt, but Werner had written her name next to the other images: a space prepared for her among the dead, like a freshly dug but still empty grave. Centred above the row of victims, the intense gaze of Red Franz Muhlhaus radiated across the room from the old police photograph.

‘What have you got?’ Fabel sat down at the end of the table nearest the door and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, as if trying to banish the tiredness from them.

Anna Wolff stood up.

‘Well, to start with, we’ve been alerted about a missing-person report. A Cornelius Tamm has been reported missing.’

‘The singer?’ asked Fabel.

‘That’s the one. A bit before my time, I’m afraid. It’s shown up on our radar because Tamm is a contemporary of the other victims. He went missing three days ago after a gig in Altona. His van hasn’t been found, either.’

‘Who’s following it up?’ asked Fabel.

‘I’ve got a team on it,’ said Maria Klee. She looked as tired as Fabel felt. ‘Some of the extra officers we’ve had allocated. I’ve told them that they’re probably looking for the next victim.’

‘Are you okay?’ asked Fabel. ‘You look shattered.’

‘I’m fine… just a headache.’

‘What else have we got?’ Fabel turned back to Anna.

‘We’ve been trying to work out what this has all been about.’ Anna Wolff smiled. ‘Has Red Franz Muhlhaus, supposedly dead for twenty years, returned from the grave? Well, maybe he has. I checked through all the records we’ve got on Muhlhaus, as well as media stuff from the time.’ Anna paused and flicked through the file that sat before her on the table. ‘Maybe Red Franz has come back to avenge himself. In the form of his son. Muhlhaus was not alone on that railway platform in Nordenham. He had his long-term girlfriend Michaela Schwenn and their ten-year-old son with him. The boy saw it all. Watched his father and mother die.’

Fabel felt a tingle in the nape of his neck, but said, ‘That doesn’t mean that this son is out for revenge.’

‘According to the GSG Nine officers on the scene, Muhlhaus’s dying word was “traitors”. These killings aren’t motiveless psychotic attacks, Chef. This is all about vengeance. A blood feud.’ Anna paused again. There was the hint of a smile playing around the corners of her full red lips.

‘Okay…’ Fabel sighed. ‘Let’s hear it. You’ve obviously got a killer blow to deliver…’

Her smile broadened. She pointed towards the black-and-white photograph of Muhlhaus on the inquiry board.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how some images become icons. How we automatically associate an image with a person and the person with a time and a place, with an idea…’

Fabel made an impatient face and Anna continued.

‘I remember being shocked to see a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof before she became a shaggy-haired, jeans-wearing terrorist. It was of her and her husband at a racecourse. She was dressed as a typical demure nineteen sixties Hausfrau. Before her radicalisation. It got me thinking and I searched for other photographs of Muhlhaus. As you know, they are notoriously thin on the ground. This image we have here is the one that we are familiar with, the one that was used on the wanted posters in the nineteen eighties. It’s black and white but, as you can see, Muhlhaus’s hair is very, very dark. Black. But then I remembered the photographs of Andreas Baader when he was arrested in nineteen seventy-two. With his dark hair dyed ash-blond.’

Anna took a large glossy print and taped it next to the police photograph. This time the photograph was in full colour. It was of a younger Franz Muhlhaus, without his trade-mark goatee beard. But there was one feature that stood out above all others. His hair. In the police wanted poster Muhlhaus’s hair had been combed severely back from his broad pale brow, but in this photograph it frothed across his forehead and framed his face in thick, tangled ringlets. And it was red. A luxuriant red flecked with golden highlights.

‘The nickname “Red Franz” didn’t come from his politics. It was his hair.’ Anna stabbed a finger onto the black-and-white photograph and looked directly at Fabel. ‘Do you see? All the time he was on the run, he hid his distinctive red hair by dying it dark. The BKA got intelligence that Muhlhaus had darkened his hair and they changed the image accordingly. But there’s more… apparently Muhlhaus’s son had the same distinctively coloured hair. And when they were on the run together Muhlhaus dyed his son’s hair too.’

There was a small silence after Anna stopped speaking. Then Werner gave voice to what they were all thinking.

‘Shit. The thing with the scalps and the hair dye.’ He turned to Fabel. ‘Now you’ve got your symbolism.’

‘What do we know about what happened to the son?’ Fabel asked Anna.

‘Social services won’t release the file until we get a warrant to access the information. I’m already onto it.’

Fabel stared at the photograph of the young Muhlhaus. He would have been in his late teens or early twenties. It was clearly an amateur photograph, taken outdoors in the sunshine of a long-distant summer. Muhlhaus smiled broadly at the camera, narrowing his pale eyes against the sunlight. A carefree, happy youth. There was nothing written in that face to suggest a future tied to murder and violence. Just as Anna had described the photograph of Ulrike Meinhof. Fabel had always found images such as this fascinating: everyone had a past. Everyone had been someone else once.

Fabel’s attention focused on the hair that shone red and gold in the summer sun. He had seen hair like that before. He had seen it only hours before.

‘Anna…’ He turned round from the inquiry board.

‘ Chef?’

‘Check out Beate Brandt’s background as a priority. I need to know what relationship, if any, she had with Franz Muhlhaus.’ Fabel turned to Werner. ‘And I need you to check out that address that Franz Brandt gave us. I think we need to have another chat with him.’

Fabel’s cellphone rang at that moment. It was Frank Grueber, who had been heading up the forensics team at Beate Brandt’s home.

‘I take it you’ve found another hair?’ said Fabel.

‘We have,’ said Grueber. ‘Our guy is getting poetic. He left it arranged on the pillow next to her body. But that’s not all. We’ve been checking the entire house to see if the killer slipped up when entering the house.’

‘And?’

‘And we’ve found traces of something in a desk drawer. In her son’s bedroom-cum-study. It looks as if a quantity of explosives has been stored there.’

2.10 p.m.: Eimsbuttel, Hamburg

It had all fallen into place for Fabel as they had sped across Hamburg to the address in Eimsbuttel that Franz Brandt had given Werner.

Brandt had been cool. Very cool. While Fabel had been questioning him, Brandt had asked Fabel why the killer dyed the hair red. He had already known the reason but had used his mock grief to camouflage his intent as he interrogated the interrogator: trying to find out how much the police knew about his motives. He had even sat with a poster of the other Red Franz, the bog body, on the wall above them and had talked about how ‘Red Franz’ had been his nickname at university.

It all fitted: the same hair, the same choice of profession, even the same forename. Brandt’s age also fitted. It was Fabel’s guess that Beate Brandt had taken in the ten-year-old Franz after he had witnessed his father and his natural mother die in the gun battle on the platform at Nordenham. Maybe Beate had been motivated by guilt. Whatever the treachery that had been committed, she had been part of it and, despite being brought up as her son, Franz had administered the same ritual justice to her as he had to his other victims.

They pulled up at the cordon that the MEK unit had set up at the end of the street. The first thing Fabel had arranged was for an MEK weapons support unit to be deployed. Fabel had often wondered if there was ever really a distinction between a terrorist and a serial killer: both killed in volume, both worked to an abstract agenda that was often impossible for others to understand. Brandt, however, had blurred the distinction between them like no other. His crimes of vengeance were carried out with the ritualistic symbolism of a florid psychosis, yet he coolly planted sophisticated bombs to dispose of anyone who presented a threat. And when Brandt had called Fabel on his cellphone to tell him he was sitting on a bomb, he had used voice-altering technology, just in case Fabel recognised his voice from their previous brief encounter down at the HafenCity site.

The address that Franz Brandt had given was a four-storey apartment block with an entrance directly onto the street, limiting the opportunity to storm the apartment with complete surprise.

‘Get your men to cover the back,’ Fabel told the MEK commander. ‘This guy doesn’t think we suspect him yet and I’ve got a legitimate reason for questioning him again about his mother’s death. That’s if she was his natural mother. I’ll take two of my team up with me to his door.’

‘Given what you’ve told me about this guy, I don’t think that’s advisable,’ said the MEK commander. ‘Especially if he is as skilled as he appears to be with explosives. I’ve contacted the bomb squad and they’ve got a unit on the way. I say we wait until they get here, then my guys go in with bomb-squad support.’

Fabel was about to protest when the MEK commander cut him short. ‘You and your team can follow us in but, if you insist on going it alone, you could end up with dead officers.’

The MEK man’s statement stung Fabel. He had been there before, facing down a dangerous opponent in a confined environment. And it had cost lives.

‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘But I need this guy alive.’

The MEK commander’s expression darkened. ‘That’s what we always aim to achieve, Herr Chief Commissar. But this person is obviously a professional terrorist. It’s not always that easy.’

Fabel, Maria, Werner, Anna and Henk were all given bulletproof body armour and followed on as the MEK team of four officers and a bomb-disposal specialist made their way along the front of the building, moving in their practised crouching run, keeping their profiles low and their bodies pressed close to the apartment block wall. After they entered the building, the MEK commander indicated with a hand gesture that Fabel and his officers were to stay in the lobby, while the special-weapons team went up the stairs. Fabel found it remarkable that a team of heavily built, heavily armed men, bulked up with body armour, could move with such stealth.

The quiet weighed heavily on the Murder Commission team in the lobby, then it shattered simultaneously with the door above as the team burst it in. From the hallway Fabel and the others could hear the shouting of the MEK team. Then silence. Fabel indicated to his team to follow him up the stairs, pausing on the landing below. The MEK commander re-emerged from the apartment.

‘It’s clean. But wait there until the bomb squad check it out.’

At that, a second blue-overalled bomb technician rushed past them and up the stairs.

‘The hell with this,’ said Fabel. ‘Brandt has no idea we’re onto him. And this is his girlfriend’s apartment. He won’t have planted a bomb here. I’m going up.’ He took the stairs two at a time, following the bomb technician into the apartment, brushing aside the protests of the MEK commander. Werner gave a shrug and went after his boss, followed by Maria, Anna and Henk.

The apartment was small and everything about the decor and the furnishings suggested a feminine environment. Fabel guessed that Brandt did not spend a lot of time here. It had also been clear that the young archaeologist did not use the room at his mother’s house that much, and the thought crossed Fabel’s mind that Brandt perhaps had another place, a bolt-hole that they did not know about. There was not a lot of point in hanging around: the small flat was overfull with officers and Fabel knew at first glance that there was nothing to be gained by searching the place, although he would have to go through the motions of getting a forensics team in as soon as the flat was given the all-clear.

Maria’s cellphone rang. She struggled to hear the caller over the bustle in the apartment and stepped out into the hall.

It was one of those moments in which a thousand thoughts, a thousand outcomes, flash through one’s mind in a time too small to be measured. It started with one of the bomb technicians suddenly holding a hand up, his back to the rest of the police officers, and shouting a single word: ‘Quiet!’

It was then that Fabel heard it. A beeping noise. The second bomb specialist moved over to the first and removed his helmet, turning his ear to the sound. Everyone turned at the same moment, following the gaze of the bomb-squad men.

It sat on top of the CD player. At first glance it looked like simply another piece of audio equipment: a small grey metal box with a red light that flashed in time with the beeping sound.

As Fabel stared at the device, hypnotised by the red light flashing in rhythm with the beeps, he wondered why he was standing stock-still and not running for his life.

It was then that the beeping changed to a constant tone, and the red light on the bomb’s detonator stopped flashing and remained on.

2.20 p.m.: Eimsbuttel, Hamburg

When Maria Klee stepped back into the apartment, her cellphone still in her hand, the faces that turned towards her seemed drained of both their colour and expression.

‘I miss something?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly,’ said Fabel. ‘I think that something just missed us.’

The bomb-disposal technician stood with the grey metal detonator box clutched in his black-gloved hand, its wires trailing. When the light had turned to a constant red he had lunged forward and simply yanked the detonator and its wires free. ‘Nothing to lose,’ he explained afterwards. His colleague was now carefully taking the CD player and amplifier from the shelves.

‘Got it,’ he said, easing a small plastic-wrapped grey package from behind the unit. ‘It’s safe.’

‘Well done,’ said Fabel to the first technician. ‘If you hadn’t moved so quickly…’

The bomb-squad man shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that. I acted more from a reflex than anything else. It would have been impossible for me to move fast enough to disconnect the detonator in time. It was the device itself that failed. Misfired for some reason or other. My guess is that there was a fault in the detonator. I think it’s unlikely that the wires worked loose – from what I gather about the bomb under your car, this guy is pretty meticulous.’

The other technician carefully lowered the package of explosives into a thick-walled container. ‘The mass of the device was enough to kill everyone inside the flat, but it would not have compromised the integrity of the structure, other than blowing the windows halfway to Buxtehude.’

‘I guess I really did miss something,’ said Maria.

‘Who was that on the phone?’ asked Fabel.

‘Oh… it was Frank. I mean Frank Grueber. He’s back from the murder scene at Brandt’s mother’s house. He took some hair from Brandt’s bedroom. From a hairbrush. He managed to rush a DNA analysis to see if there is a familial link between his hair and the ancient hair.’

‘And?’

‘Enough common markers to suggest a very close relationship. Probably father and son. It looks like we’ve found Red Franz junior.’

There is a weariness that comes after being in a situation of great danger and threat. The adrenalin that has coursed through the body lingers and sucks up every last bit of energy. Muscles that have done nothing but have been drawn as taut as violin strings begin to ache and a jittery, nauseating exhaustion settles into the brain and body. As Fabel made his way back to his car, he felt totally spent.

Werner placed his reassuring bulk into the passenger seat of Fabel’s BMW. The two men sat for a moment, not speaking.

‘I’m getting too old for this crap,’ he said. ‘I really thought we’d had it in there. I’ve never been so scared in my life.’

Fabel sighed. ‘Unfortunately, Werner, I have been. That’s the third time I’ve been at the business end of a bomb and I’ve had enough. All I have ever wanted to do was to protect people. That’s what being a policeman has always meant to me – putting ourselves between the ordinary man, woman or child and danger. Years ago, when Renate and I were still together and Gabi was a kid, we went over to the United States for a holiday. New York. I remember seeing an NYPD police car go by. It said, in English, “ To Protect and Serve ” on the side. I remember thinking then that we should put that on all Polizei Hamburg cars. I thought: that’s what I do, what I am.’

‘Jan,’ said Werner, ‘it’s been a hell of a long day. Let me drive. I’ll take you home.’

‘What are we doing here, Werner? Some lunatic is wreaking revenge on people who conspired to kill others twenty years ago. A murderer killing murderers. You have to admit it, there is some kind of natural justice at work here. Our country was almost ripped apart by these wankers. I still have bullet fragments in me from an eighteen-year-old girl’s gun. And for what? What was achieved by Franz Weber’s death? By me blowing the face off a young girl who should have had her head filled by nothing more than boys and what she should wear to the disco? She would have been thirty-eight now, Werner. If I hadn’t killed her. If Svensson hadn’t got his claws into her, she would have been running her kids to school. She would have been going to the gym three times a week to try to reduce her waist. And maybe, now and again, she would have thought to herself, wasn’t I mad when I was young? What was I thinking about? She would have had kids, Werner. An entire generation has been wiped out because I squeezed a trigger.’

‘It’s what we do, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘If you hadn’t been there during that bank raid, someone else would have died. Maybe many more people.’

‘I want a new life, Werner. A life away from all of this. I have told van Heiden that this case will be my last. It is over – I am resigning from the Polizei Hamburg as soon as this bastard is behind bars. An old schoolfriend has offered me a job. I am going to take it.’

‘You can’t be serious, Jan. I don’t care what you say, we would never have had the number of convictions we have had if you had not been in charge. And, for all your talk about death, every time you’ve put a killer away you have saved God knows how many lives.’

‘Maybe that’s true, Werner. But it’s time for someone else to do it.’ Fabel smiled a weary, sad smile at his friend. ‘My mind’s made up. Anyway, let’s get back to the Presidium. I’ve got a job to finish first.’

Fabel had just turned the ignition key when he felt the weight of Werner’s hand on his arm. When Fabel turned to him, Werner was looking directly ahead through the windscreen, as if hypnotised by something.

‘Tell me I’m not seeing things,’ said Werner, nodding towards the police cordon.

Fabel followed his gaze. A young couple was remonstrating with a uniformed officer and the man was pointing towards the apartment building.

Fabel and Werner threw open the car doors at the same time and started sprinting across to where Franz Brandt stood arguing with the policeman.

9.30 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

Fabel had led the questioning of Franz Brandt. Anna and Henk had taken his girlfriend, Lisa Schubert, into another interview room. Franz Brandt had responded to Fabel’s questions with confused disbelief, then distress and, eventually, raw and bitter anger. He claimed to know nothing about the bomb in Schubert’s apartment and became increasingly incensed by the suggestion that he was in any way involved in his mother’s death. After Fabel suspended the interview and Brandt was removed to a cell, he spoke with Anna and Henk, who confirmed that Lisa Schubert had responded similarly. She had even shown signs of mild shock.

Fabel did not like it. Brandt had been so clever and so careful throughout his campaign. He had seemed always to be a step ahead. It just did not fit for him to adopt such a thoughtless strategy of transparent denial. But, there again, he was clearly mad to have committed the crimes that he had.

Fabel went back to his office. He had sent Maria home earlier: she had started to look really unwell and her headache had not lifted. Anna and Henk had stayed on. The warrant had come through and Anna had secured the codes and passwords with which to access the social-services records; they were now focused on establishing as a legal fact that Franz Brandt was the ten-year-old boy who had watched Red Franz Muhlhaus die on Nordenham railway station. The boy who had heard his father with his dying words call for revenge on those who had betrayed him. After they came out of the interview, Fabel told Werner he could go home and get some rest, but he had said that he had ‘stuff to do’ in the office first.

Fabel took the Ingrid Fischmann file out of the drawer and laid it on his desk. As he did so, he sighed the sigh of a man going over old ground again in search of answers.

9.30 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

Grueber had given Maria two codeine before he had gone to take a shower. She went into the vast kitchen for a glass of water to take them with.

What had started as a vague general headache had found its focus and become a sharp migraine that pressed mercilessly behind Maria’s retinas. She had always had a thing about taking headache pills: a hint of the austere Lutheran within telling her it was better to let nature take its course. But water and North German Puritanism alone were not going to fix this one. She took a tumbler from a kitchen cabinet and filled it with water. As she turned the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the tiled kitchen floor. Maria cursed and looked around for where she might find a pan and brush. She found them in the under-sink cupboard, where Grueber obviously kept cleaning materials.

There was something about the container, shoved to the back of the cupboard and facing away from the door, that drew Maria’s attention. She had the feeling that it had been deliberately put out of sight, out of reach. And that was why she knelt down on the hard kitchen tiles and stretched into the cupboard to pull the container out.

Hair dye.

It was the craziest conclusion to draw, and it burned in her mind only for a split second: her brain ran a slide show of the murder scenes, with the severed scalps soaked in red dye. And Grueber standing there, in his forensic overalls, holding the hair dye in his hand. Then it was gone. It was a mad thought: what possible connection could Frank have to the victims? She looked again at the plastic bottle. It was dark brunette; not red. She sighed and started to put it back but paused, bringing it out to re-examine it. It was Grueber’s hair colour. Very dark brunette. Almost black. Frank dyed his hair?

Maria replaced the container at the back of the cupboard, the label facing away as she had found it, and she put back the other items that had originally obscured it from view. She allowed herself a smile at her boyfriend’s vanity. Why did he dye his hair? Was it that he had gone prematurely grey? Maria had seen the photographs of his parents who both had the same dark hair as Grueber but had not gone white before their time as far as she could see. Unless, of course, they too dyed their hair. She stared in at the hair dye under the sink for a moment. Maria could not understand why such a small mystery was causing a fluttering of unease deep within. It had been hidden. Maybe it belonged to a former girlfriend. But why had he placed it where he had, rather than throwing it out?

Maria stood up and her heel crunched on a fragment of broken glass. He was there when she turned around. Standing close. Too close. He was standing where Vitrenko stood in her dreams. His eyes were totally different in colour and in shape, but for the first time ever Maria could see they held the same emotionless, callous cruelty.

She knew. She smiled at Grueber and said light-heartedly, ‘I didn’t see you there. You gave me a fright.’ But she knew.

Frank Grueber offered a cold, sterile reflection of Maria’s smile. He reached out his hand and stroked back a short strand of blonde hair from Maria’s brow.

‘Do you remember the first time we met?’ he said.

Maria nodded. ‘You were processing that body in Sternschanzen Park. Fabel was away and I was leading the investigation…’ Maria smiled again. She tried to look relaxed. Her gun was out in the hall where she had left it on the antique hallstand. So many antiques in this house. Everything was to do with the past.

‘That’s right.’ Grueber continued to stroke her hair, her cheek, his gaze empty and focused somewhere and sometime else. ‘I remember the very first time I saw you. After a single second everything was locked into my head, every feature, every gesture. It was as though I recognised you. As though we had known each other before but couldn’t remember where and when. Did you feel like that?’

Maria thought about lying, but shrugged instead. She tried to work out the distance to the kitchen door, then to the hallstand, then the time to unholster her gun and take the safety off. If she hit him hard enough…

Grueber smiled. He took his other hand from behind his back and raised Maria’s gun, pressing it gently into the soft flesh under her jaw.

‘I love you, Maria. I don’t want to hurt you, but if I must, I must. It means that we will have to wait until our next lives to see each other again.’

Maria tilted her head back, but Grueber maintained the gun barrel’s pressure, placing his other hand on the nape of her neck, cradling the back of her head. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Maria. I’m quite capable of killing us both. Please don’t force me. We’ve died together once before. On a railway platform a long, long time ago. But this is not our time. Not yet.’

‘Why, Frank? Why did you kill all those people?’

Grueber smiled. ‘Come, Maria. You still haven’t seen everything there is to the house.’

9.45 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

Anna Wolff arched her back and rubbed her eyes. She needed a break from the computer screen. She had spent the last hour going through the social-services records to find where and when Beate Brandt had adopted Franz. There was nothing. She went out into the hall and got herself a coffee from the machine. A couple of other Murder Commission officers came along and she chatted to them for a while, deliberately putting off going back to the computer screen and the endless names in the archive.

She had just headed back into the office when Henk came in.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked. Anna grimaced.

‘It’s not. I can’t find any record of Brandt going into care or of his adoption by Beate Brandt.’

‘That’s because I think we’ve been looking at the whole thing the wrong way round.’ Henk sat on the edge of Anna’s desk. There was a hint of triumph in his smile. ‘I think we’d better go and see Fabel.’

9.55 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

Maria’s brain processed all the available data at the highest possible speed. She tried to draw a curtain across the panic that hammered to get in and assessed her situation. Grueber had told her that she had to put her hands behind her back, presumably to allow him to bind her. Then she would be powerless. But she had good reason to believe that, despite his insanity and despite the extreme violence and ritualistic mutilation of his victims, he didn’t intend to kill her. She was not part of his string. Not a victim on his list. But there had been others who had got in the way: Ingrid Fischmann and Leonard Schuler. Grueber had killed them despite them not being on his list. He had even scalped Schuler to make a point by sticking his scalp to Fabel’s window.

Maria remembered the call that Grueber had made to her cellphone when she had been at the apartment of Franz Brandt’s girlfriend. He had set it up so that she would step out of the apartment while he remotely detonated the bomb inside. He had wanted her to live.

She did what Grueber asked and placed her hands behind her back. He bound her wrists with rope and she knew that he must have put the gun down, on the kitchen counter. For a split second she measured her chances of knocking him off balance and seizing the gun. But then she felt the rough bite of the rope as it tightened against her skin.

Grueber took Maria by the arm, not roughly, and led her out of the kitchen, along the hall to where the stairway rose up from the entrance vestibule. There was a low-arched doorway beneath the stairway which Grueber had previously told Maria led to a cellar crammed with storage boxes. He indicated with a wave of Maria’s gun that she should step back from him while he recovered the key from his pocket. He opened the door, reached in and switched on a light before beckoning for Maria to precede him into the cellar.

As she did so, she began bitterly to regret not having taken her chances before he had tied her hands.

10.00 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

Fabel was sitting at his desk, staring at a photograph and trying to wrest its true meaning from it, when his phone rang. It was Susanne phoning from her flat and Fabel was, for a moment, a little fazed.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You sound strange.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, still looking at the picture on his desk. ‘Just tired.’

‘When will you be home?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel, ‘I’m completely bogged down with stuff here. I reckon I won’t be through until pretty late on. There’s no point in waiting up for me. In fact, it’s probably better if I stay at my place tonight. It’ll save me disturbing you when I get in.’

‘Okay,’ she said and there was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. You sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I just need to get some sleep. Listen, I’d better get on… I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Fabel hung up and left his hand resting on the phone. He remembered having had so many similar telephone conversations with his wife, Renate. Late-night calls from the Murder Commission, or a murder scene, or a morgue. He had made too many such calls and his marriage and his wife’s fidelity had been steadily eroded by them.

But this time he had been less than honest with Susanne about his reasons for not coming over. Tonight he needed to be alone, he needed his own time and space to think about things. He felt buried under an unbearable weight that could not be shifted with a single huge effort. It was like rubble that he had to dig himself out from under, piece by piece.

And one of the pieces lay on the desk before him. Everyone has a past.

Everyone has been someone else once. It was the thought that had occurred to him as he had looked at the family photograph of the young, pre-terrorist Franz Muhlhaus; when Anna had described the photograph of the newly married Ulrike Meinhof. A life before the life we know.

Fabel had spent the last two hours going through the file that Ingrid Fischmann had sent him immediately before her death. He had spread the contents out over his desk: press cuttings, interviews, a chronology charting the evolution and diversification of protest, activist and terrorist groups, photocopies from books of German domestic terrorism.

And photographs.

The picture itself had nothing to do with the case he was investigating. And it had nothing to do with what had happened to him twenty years ago. It had to do with something, and someone, totally different.

Fabel had found the photograph, with a sticker note attached to the back, at the end of Fischmann’s file. It dated from 1990, a time when the will and the raison d’etre of Left-wing activism was waning fast. The Wall had just come down and two former Germanys were still embracing each other with enthusiasm and hope. It was a time when the world watched millions across Eastern Europe rise in true protest against communist dictatorships. The old slogans of Left-wing activism had begun to ring hollow; even to sound embarrassing.

The caption attached to the photograph read: ‘Christian Wohlmut, Munich-based anarchist, wanted on suspicion of attacks on US governmental and commercial interests within the Federal Republic. Photographed with unknown female.’

Unknown female. The photograph was blurry and looked as if it had been taken from some distance. The girl, about the right age to be a student, was to the left and slightly to the rear of Wohlmut. She was tall and slim and had long dark hair, but her features were out of focus. But recognisable. To someone who knew her.

Fabel read the file associated with Wohlmut. It had been the last twitching of a dying movement. He had formed a group that had eventually fizzled out, but not before they had planted a couple of crude devices in American targets. A letter bomb had taken the fingers off the right hand of a nineteen-year-old secretarial worker in the offices of an American oil company. Wohlmut had been caught and had spent three years in prison.

Fabel looked again at the tall girl with the long dark hair. Wohlmut was talking to someone off camera, and the girl beside him was listening intently. As she did so, she held her head at a distinctive angle. A pose of concentration.

Everyone has a past. Everyone was someone else once. There was a knock at the door and he slipped the photograph back to the bottom of the file.

Anna and Henk came in.

10.00 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

There were no storage boxes in Grueber’s cellar. There was no disorder.

The cellar was vast: out of proportion with the small understairs door that served it. Maria scanned the walls to see if she could locate a window or door that opened out directly onto the outside world. But she knew they were too deep. She thought of how the dying evening sun would be dappling the lawn through the bushes and plants of Grueber’s garden. Suddenly Maria became aware of the mass of the house above her; the dark soil that lay, cold and pressing, beyond the cellar walls that surrounded her.

The cellar had a surprising amount of headroom, she guessed somewhere just under two metres, and it had been kitted out as a working environment by Grueber. There were benches and equipment along the walls, bookshelves and metal tool cabinets. She heard a continuous metallic whirring and noticed a large brushed-steel housing bolted to one wall with a fan spinning behind a mesh protector. Maria guessed that Grueber had installed some kind of temperature- and humidity-control system. The space of the cellar was broken up by a series of heavy square pillars that clearly supported the walls above. In the centre of the cellar, four pillars served as the corners of an area that was shielded off in what looked like an improvised clean room, with semi-opaque heavy-duty plastic sheeting providing the walls. Maria felt her fear ratchet up several notches: it was clear that this area had a special purpose and she had a sickening feeling that that purpose might have something to do with her immediate future.

Grueber seemed to sense her fear. He frowned and there was both anger and sadness in his expression. He reached out and stroked her cheek.

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Maria,’ he said. ‘I would never, ever hurt you. I am not a psychopath. I don’t kill without reason. You should realise that by now. I have been given the gift to see through the veils that separate each life, each existence. And because of that I value life more – not less. The ones who died… they deserved it. But not you. And not Fabel. That’s why I didn’t detonate the bomb I planted in his car. You see, we are all bound together. In each life, we all come together again to resolve that which has been left over from our last incarnation. You, me, Fabel – we have all been here before and we shall be here again. Don’t worry, Maria. I won’t hurt you. It’s just that I can’t let you disturb what must happen tonight. Tonight my vengeance shall be complete.’

‘Frank,’ said Maria. ‘No more killing. Let it end here. I’ll look after you. I’ll help you.’

Grueber smiled at her again. ‘Sweet Maria, you don’t understand, do you? All that I have learned in this lifetime, all the skills I have gained, have been acquired so that I can finish what I must finish tonight.’ He took her by the arm and led her over to the thick semi-opaque sheets.

‘I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. You have seen my reconstruction work. Where I rebuild the dead, applying layer on layer, giving flesh and substance and skin to them. Restoring their identity. Well, I can do the same in reverse – removing the layers from the living. Destroying their identity…’

Grueber pulled back the thick plastic curtain. Maria heard a shrill sound fill the cellar and realised it was her own scream.

10.03 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

‘Henk’s found something out,’ said Anna.

‘Okay,’ said Fabel, leaning back in his chair. ‘Let’s have it…’

‘Like you asked, we’ve been going over Brandt’s history and that of his mother, Beate. Frank Grueber over at forensics has, as you already know, confirmed Franz Brandt’s paternity. He is definitely the son of Franz Muhlhaus.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Fabel wearily.

‘Franz Muhlhaus may have been his father, but he was not adopted by Beate Brandt.’ Henk dropped a photocopy onto Fabel’s desk. ‘Birth certificate for Franz Karl Brandt. Father unknown. Mother Beate Maria Brandt, at that time resident at twenty-two Hubertusstrasse, Niendorf, Hamburg. She didn’t adopt him. He told us the truth: she is his natural mother. He maybe doesn’t even know that Red Franz Muhlhaus is his natural father. There is absolutely nothing to link Beate Brandt to Red Franz Muhlhaus or to suggest that she was a radical of any kind in the nineteen seventies or nineteen eighties. But the DNA proves that she had a child with him.

‘Where that leaves us is with Franz Brandt being Muhlhaus’s son. But not Michaela Schwenn’s son. And that, in turn, means he wasn’t the small boy on the platform in Nordenham with his hair dyed black.’

‘A brother?’

‘We know that Muhlhaus had sexual relationships with many of his female followers, as well as with other women who may not have been connected to his movement. It could be that our killer is a half-brother who Brandt probably doesn’t even know exists,’ said Anna.

‘But wait a minute,’ said Fabel. ‘You’re forgetting that Brandt left a bomb in his girlfriend’s apartment to blow us all to pieces.’

‘And then he and his girlfriend walk straight into our hands,’ said Henk. ‘You said yourself that it seemed strange. My guess is that he didn’t know anything about the bomb.’

‘ Shit,’ said Fabel, in English. ‘That means the killer is still out there. We have to find out what happened to that kid on the platform.’

‘That’s what I meant when I said we were coming at it from the wrong direction,’ said Henk. ‘We were trying to prove that Brandt was the son we were looking for. Working the connection backwards. We’ll have to check the adoption files again. This time searching for the surname Schwenn.’

‘I have the access codes here.’ Anna waved her notebook. ‘May I use your computer?’

Pushing Ingrid Fischmann’s information file to one side, Fabel stood up and let Anna take his seat. She logged onto the database and entered her search criteria: the name ‘Schwenn’ and the time-frame of 1985 to 1988.

‘Got it!’ she said. ‘I’ve got four names here. Two are nineteen eighty-six adoptions. It’ll be one of these…’ Anna clicked on the first file. ‘Nope – this is a four-year-old girl.’ She clicked on the next. ‘This is a possible… no… the age is wrong.’ She hit the third file.

It was Anna’s expression that shook Fabel. He had expected her usual grin of insolent satisfaction at having nailed a crucial piece of evidence. But she stood up suddenly and Fabel noticed that her face had drained of colour.

‘What is it, Anna?’ asked Fabel.

‘Maria…’ It was as if every muscle in Anna’s face had pulled itself taut. ‘Where is Maria?’

‘I sent her home. She had a migraine,’ said Fabel. ‘She’ll be back tomorrow morning.’

‘We’ve got to find her, Chef. We’ve got to find her now.’

10.05 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

‘Fascinating, is it not?’

Maria did not hear Grueber’s question. Her ears seemed to ring, every nerve seemed to burn as she looked down at the male body lying on the metal trestle table. It was naked. Naked not only of clothes, but also of skin. It was sculpted from raw, red sinew. Small round droplets of blood dotted the aluminium surface of the table that supported it.

‘I have invested heavily in making this working environment perfect.’ Grueber did not rant nor rave. Maria gauged the scale of his madness from his measured, conversational tone. ‘I spent a fortune on soundproofing this cellar. The contractors were told that I would be operating noisy equipment down here. That is why I have had to install the air pump and temperature control. When the door is closed, this is totally airtight and soundproof. Which is just as well, because he’ – Grueber indicated the figure on the table, stripped of its skin, of its humanity – ‘screamed like a girl.’

Maria’s head pounded and she felt sick.

‘Oh, sorry – this is Cornelius Tamm.’ Grueber apologised as if he had forgotten to introduce someone at a cocktail party. ‘You know, the singer.’

‘Why?’ Maria found the word from somewhere.

‘Why? Why did I do this? Because he betrayed me. They all did. They did a deal with the fascist authorities and sold me. My life. Piet van Hoogstraat was the only other person the police knew about, so they sent him to identify me. But it was Paul Scheibe who negotiated it all, from a safe distance. The others went along with it. Even Cornelius. My friend.’ He turned to Maria. There was the hint of tears in his eyes. ‘I died, Maria. I died.’ He rested a hand on his chest. ‘I can still feel where the bullets hit me. I saw you die, and then I died, kneeling on that railway platform.’

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean, you died? Who do you think you are, Frank?’

Grueber straightened his back. ‘I am Red Franz. I am eternal. I have lived for nearly two thousand years. And probably before that, but I cannot yet remember. I was a warrior who gave up his life as a sacrifice for his people, for the Earth to renew. Twice. Once over a millennium and a half ago, the second time as Red Franz Muhlhaus.’

‘Red Franz Muhlhaus?’ said Maria incredulously. ‘Without even getting into the whole reincarnation thing, your arithmetic is all wrong. You were born long before Muhlhaus died.’

‘You don’t understand.’ He smiled patronisingly. ‘I was the father and the son. My lifetimes overlapped. I saw my own death from two perspectives. I am my own father.’

‘Oh. I see. I’m sorry, Frank.’ Maria understood it all now. ‘Red Franz Muhlhaus was your father?’

‘We were always on the run. Always. We had to dye our hair. Black.’ Grueber ran a hand through his thick, too-dark hair. ‘Everyone would notice our red hair otherwise. And then we were betrayed. My mother and father were both murdered by GSG Nine troops. A sacrifice organised by those traitors. I watched my father die. I heard him say “traitors”. I was taken away after that. The Gruebers adopted me. They had no children. They couldn’t have them. But they brought me up as if the first ten years of my life hadn’t happened. As if I was their own and always had been. After a while, even I started to feel like all that had happened before had just been a bad dream. I found I couldn’t remember things. It was like all that life was being wiped out. Erased.’

‘What happened, Frank? What happened to change you?’

‘I was at university, studying archaeology. I visited the Landesmuseum in Hanover. It was there that I saw him. Red Franz. He was lying in a display case, his face rotted almost to nothing, but with that glorious mane of red hair still intact. I just knew, in that instant, that I was looking at the remains of a body that I had once occupied. I realised that we can look upon ourselves as we once were. As we lived before. It was then that it all came back to me. I remembered my father telling me that he had hidden a box in an old archaeological site. He had told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was to find the box and I would know the truth.’

Grueber let the thick plastic sheeting fall to veil the horror of Cornelius Tamm’s flayed body. He walked over to one of the cabinets ranged along the cellar wall. When he turned his back, Maria struggled furiously to free her hands from the rope bonds. But they were too well tied. Grueber took a rusted metal box from the cabinet.

‘My father’s secret diary and details of his group. I remembered where he’d said it was hidden. Exactly. I went and dug it up and it told me the whole story. And it gave me the names of all the traitors.’ Grueber paused. ‘But it was more than my memory of my childhood that returned that day as I looked down on Red Franz. It was my whole memory. My memory of all that went before this life. I knew that the body I looked at had once been mine. That I had inhabited it more than one and a half thousand years ago. I also knew that I had inhabited my father’s body. That the father and the son were one. The same.’

‘Frank…’ Maria looked at the pale, boyish face. She remembered how she had christened him ‘Harry Potter’ when they had first met. How she had always seen him as a good man. A kind man. ‘You’re ill. You are suffering from delusions. We only live once, Frank. You have got things all… muddled in your head. I understand. I really do. Seeing your parents killed like that. Listen, Frank, I want to help you. I can help you. Just untie me.’

Grueber smiled. He eased Maria over to a chair and made her sit.

‘I know you mean well,’ he said. ‘And I know that when you say you want to help me it’s the truth, not some kind of ploy. But tonight, Maria, the biggest traitor of them all is going to die. He was my closest friend, my deputy in The Risen. He planned the Wiedler kidnap. It was he who pulled the trigger that killed Wiedler. An event he has tried to bury, along with me. He saw me as a hindrance to his political ambitions. Ambitions he continues to follow. But tonight those ambitions, and his life, will come to an end. I can’t let you interfere with what I have to do tonight. Maria. I’m sorry, but I can’t…’

Grueber took a roll of heavy-duty packing tape and wrapped it around Maria’s torso and the back of the chair. Binding her tight. ‘I really can’t allow you to stop me…’ he said, reaching for the velvet roll-pouch.

10.30 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

Fabel and Werner pulled up outside Grueber’s house. The two silver and blue Polizei Hamburg cars behind them had killed their flashing lights at the corner and parked behind Fabel. Four uniformed officers got out.

Werner’s cellphone rang as they all gathered on the pavement. After a brief series of one-word answers, Werner hung up and turned to Fabel.

‘That was Anna. She and Henk weren’t able to get Maria on her cellphone or on her home number. They’ve checked out her apartment. Nobody home. They’re on their way over here.’ Werner looked up at the substantial bulk of Grueber’s villa. ‘If Maria’s anywhere, she’s in there…’

‘Okay.’ Fabel turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Two of you take the back. You two, come with us.’

The main entrance to Grueber’s house was made of oak and had the shape and substance of a church door. It was clear that it would not yield easily to a ram, so Fabel ordered the uniforms to smash one of the huge rectangular windows. He roughly recalled the layout from his brief stay as Grueber’s guest and guided them round to Grueber’s study.

‘When we smash the window, we need to get in and find Maria as fast as we can.’

At Fabel’s signal, the two uniformed policeman swung the door-ram hard and fast into the centre of the window, shattering the glass and the wooden ribs that held the panes in place. The space it cleared was not enough to allow a man to enter and they swung the ram twice more. Fabel unholstered his service automatic and climbed through the shattered window, clambering over Grueber’s desk and sending the reconstructed head of the girl who was two and a half thousand years old tumbling to the floor. Werner and the two uniforms followed him.

Ten minutes later they stood in the main hallway, at the foot of the stairs. They had checked every room, every cupboard. Nothing. Fabel even called out Maria’s name into the void of a house that he knew to be empty.

There was a knock on the front door and Fabel opened it, letting the other two uniformed officers in.

‘We’ve checked the gardens and garage. There’s no one there, Herr Chief Commissar.’

A car pulled up outside and Anna and Henk came running into the hallway.

‘Nothing…’ Fabel said grimly. ‘He’s obviously taken her with him.’

‘Herr Chief Commissar!’ one of the uniformed officers called from behind the ornate stairway. ‘There’s some kind of door here. It could be a cellar…’

10.40 p.m.

Frank Grueber had thrived on knowledge all his life. He had formally studied archaeology and history, but had spent so much of his spare time learning a multitude of disparate skills. His wealthy step-parents had provided him with the means to turn his entire life into one continuous training programme; an endless preparation for his life’s mission. Now, as he stood outside the home of his ultimate target, the sense of convergence was at its strongest. Overwhelming.

Grueber stood on the driveway to the house, the roll-pouch in one hand, Maria’s service pistol in the other, closing his eyes and taking a long, slow, deep breath. He let every emotion drain from his body. He allowed the great calm to descend on him: the calm that would allow him to act with perfect precision and deadly efficiency.

Zanshin.

10.40 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

The small locked door was made of the same heavy oak as the entrance and would not yield to the kicks of the police officers. It was only after several hard slams with the door-ram that it eventually gave way.

‘Maria!’ Fabel called as he struggled through the door and into the cellar.

‘Over here!’

Fabel followed her voice, running through the vast cellar. He found her bound to the chair, close to the plastic-curtained area.

‘Grueber…’ she said. ‘It’s Frank. He’s mad. He thinks he’s Red Franz Muhlhaus reincarnated – I think he really may be Muhlhaus’s son.’

‘He is,’ said Fabel, untying Maria’s hands and struggling with the parcel tape. He jerked his head questioningly towards the enclosed plastic-screened area.

‘Cornelius Tamm,’ she said. Fabel used a penknife to cut the tape. Maria stood up. ‘Trust me, Jan. It’s not pleasant. But you have to leave that for now… He’s going after his last victim.’

‘Who?’

‘Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Frank said he was going after the most senior member of the group after Muhlhaus. He also said that he was a politician. Look over there. That box. Muhlhaus buried it and told Frank where to find it after his death. It has all the names.’

Fabel opened the box. There were several notebooks, a diary, a small plastic bag, a photograph and a ledger. They were all bound in brown leather that had tarnished with being buried in the damp earth. Fabel examined the photograph. A family snap: Muhlhaus, a woman with long, bone-coloured hair whom Fabel assumed was Michaela Schwenn, and a boy of about nine, clearly Grueber. But it was the woman who captured Fabel’s attention.

‘Shit, Maria,’ said Fabel, handing the photograph to her. ‘Michaela Schwenn – she could be you… the similarity is amazing…’

Maria stared at the image. Fabel went through the rest of the box’s contents. He lifted out the plastic bag and saw that it contained a thick lock of hair. Red hair. Grueber had placed one hair at each scene, and when the forensic team had missed the hair in Hauser’s bathroom the first time round, Grueber had moved it to where it could be found. Fabel flicked through each of the notebooks, scanning the information as quickly as he could to try to find the information he needed. Then he found it.

‘Let’s go!’ He started towards the cellar door, ordering two uniformed officers to stay and preserve the scene. ‘You’ve got the wrong politician, Maria – and I think I know where he’s taking him.’

For a moment, Maria continued to stare at the image of a woman who looked just like her. Then she dropped the photograph back into the box and followed Fabel out of the cellar.