Eternal

16.

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

12.15 a.m.: Nordenham Railway Station, 145 Kilometres West of Hamburg

Fabel had left his car abandoned, skewed at an angle and with the headlights still full on. He and Werner had come round the south end of the station building. Following Fabel’s orders, Anna, Maria and Henk drove round to the north end. To Fabel’s intense annoyance, the Nordenham uniformed units had announced their arrival from kilometres away, with lights and sirens blazing in the cool night. Three units came around the back and sides of the building, while three more skidded to a halt on the far side of the railway tracks, their headlights trained on the platform and station building.

After the sirens, after the running, after the shouted orders, it suddenly became very quiet. Fabel now stood on the station platform and became very aware of his rapid breathing: he could hear it in the sudden silence; he could see it bloom as grey clouds in the still, thin, chill air. Fabel was filled with a deep sense of unease. There seemed an inevitability, a surreal familiarity in the fact that this group of people should come together in this place at this time. A feeling of destiny fulfilled.

But it was another group of people who had cast the mould for this destiny. It had all been so cleverly organised. No one would look too closely for deeper meaning in the death of a murderer and terrorist. With the demise of Franz Muhlhaus, it would be seen that the head, the brain and the heart of The Risen had been excised. His death meant the death of the organisation. The deal that Paul Scheibe had brokered anonymously with the security services had been that no further inquiries would be made about The Risen. And, of course, there had been a guarantee that The Risen would simply disappear.

The lights of the Nordenham police cars, ranged along the far side of the tracks, illuminated the figures on the platform like players on a stage, their exaggerated shadows cast giant on the facade of the railway station.

Fabel drew his service automatic as he ran towards them.

‘I would stop there, if I were you.’ Frank Grueber called across to Fabel. The blade in his hand glittered cold and keen in the night. Grueber had forced the man before him to his knees. ‘Do you think that I care if I die here, Fabel? I am eternal. There is no such thing as death. There is only forgetting… forgetting who you were before.’

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

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

Fabel made a movement of his head, hoping that his team would interpret it as a signal to hold back.

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

Grueber stood staring back at the headlights with eyes that seemed to shine with an even brighter, even starker, even colder gleam. He held the kneeling man by his hair, angling his head back so that the throat lay exposed and white. Above the throat, above the terror-contorted face, the flesh of the kneeling man’s forehead had been sliced across in a straight line the full width of his brow, just below the hairline, and the wound gaped slightly as Grueber yanked the man’s head back by the hair. A pulse of blood cascaded down the kneeling man’s face and he let out a high, animal yelp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a scream. And the sound of gunfire.

Fabel turned in the direction of the shot in time to see Maria fire again. Her first shot had hit Grueber in the thigh and he had buckled. Her second caught his shoulder and he lost his grip on the kneeling man. Werner rushed forward, grabbed Grueber’s captive and pulled him clear.

Maria moved forward, keeping her gun trained on Grueber, who had now sunk to his knees. Her face was streaked with tears.

‘No, Frank,’ she said. ‘Tonight no one dies. I’m not going to let you do that. Drop the knife. There’s no one left to hurt.’

Grueber looked at the retreating figures of Werner and the man Grueber had intended to kill. The final sacrifice. He looked up at Maria and smiled. A sad little-boy smile. Then he took a long, deep breath. There was a flashing bright arc as he swung the blade up with both hands and brought it back down with all his strength into his own chest.

‘Frank!’ Maria screamed and ran forward.

Grueber’s head sank slowly forward and down. As he died, he spoke a single word into the night.

‘Traitors…’

1.40 a.m.: Wesermarsch-Klinik Hospital, Nordenham

When Fabel and Werner entered the hospital room on the third floor of the Wesermarsch-Klinik, Criminal Director Horst van Heiden was already there, standing at the bedside of Hamburg’s head of government, First Mayor Hans Schreiber. The nurse at the desk had informed Fabel that Schreiber had been given a mild sedative but was otherwise alert.

Schreiber’s forehead was covered by a heavy surgical dressing, but Fabel could see that the ridge of his browline had swollen and discoloured in protest at the violence done to his scalp. The rest of his face had a puffed-up appearance and Fabel would hardly have recognised him. Schreiber turned in Fabel’s direction but clearly did not have the strength to ease himself up into a sitting position. He smiled weakly.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Fabel,’ said the First Mayor. ‘I owe you my thanks.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘I owe you my life. If you hadn’t got there when you did. If Frau Klee had not fired when she did

…’ He left the thought hanging, to emphasise the unspeakable alternative.

Fabel nodded. ‘I was just doing my job.’

Schreiber indicated his bandaged head. ‘I’m told that I will need plastic surgery. There’s quite a bit of nerve damage, too.’ Two uniformed officers entered. Fabel ordered them to take their position outside the room.

‘No one is to enter other than the medical professionals directly involved in Herr Schreiber’s care,’ Fabel said to the two officers as they left.

‘My wife will be here later,’ said Schreiber.

‘No one,’ repeated Fabel.

‘Surely that isn’t necessary, Herr Fabel,’ protested Schreiber. ‘The danger is past. Grueber is dead and he was clearly acting alone under his own insane agenda.’

‘So why did he pick you?’ asked Fabel. ‘Every other victim was directly connected to Red Franz Muhlhaus and The Risen. Why did he single you out?’

‘God knows.’ Schreiber’s swollen face was incapable of expression but his tone was one of irritation. Fabel half-expected van Heiden to protest at his questioning of the First Mayor, but the Criminal Director remained silent. ‘Listen, Fabel,’ continued Schreiber. ‘I am in too much pain and too exhausted and distressed to psychoanalyse a lunatic who just tried to kill me or to speculate about his motives. He was mad. He also styled himself as a terrorist. I am the head of the Hamburg city and state government. Go and work it out for yourself. After all, that’s what I pay you to do.’

‘Oh, I have, Herr First Mayor.’ Fabel turned to Werner and held out his hand. Werner handed him a clear plastic evidence wallet. Inside was a thick notebook, its leather binding stained with damp and age. ‘Red Franz Muhlhaus knew that his time was over. He knew that the authorities would track him down. He was, however, determined that he would not be taken alive. He also had very grave doubts about the loyalty of his followers. Particularly his deputy, whom the journalist Ingrid Fischmann identified as Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. It was also Muhlhaus’s deputy who had been the driver of the van that abducted the industrialist, Wiedler, eight years previously. Whereas the rest of the group had disappeared into the undergrowth after the Wiedler kidnapping, Red Franz and the Dutchman, Piet van Hoogstraat, were the only members identifiable by the authorities and were forced to continue to live fugitive lives, funded by their fellow former gang members.’

‘Fabel…’ Schreiber sighed and turned his head painfully in the direction of van Heiden. ‘Can we talk about this some other time?’

‘That’s what happened that day in nineteen eighty-five on the platform in Nordenham,’ Fabel continued as if Schreiber had not spoken. ‘The Dutchman, van Hoogstraat, did not share Muhlhaus’s revolutionary zeal. He was exhausted after nearly a decade of living on the run. He wanted a way out without having to spend the greater part of the remainder of his life behind bars. So a deal was done. A deal to get van Hoogstraat a reduced sentence. A deal conceived by the remaining gang members who wanted to close that chapter in their lives. A deal conceived by Muhlhaus’s deputy and brokered anonymously by the group’s head of planning, Paul Scheibe. They knew that Muhlhaus would not be taken alive, and that his death would finally close the door on the threat of exposure and arrest. They had already bought the Dutchman’s silence with the deal they had done with the authorities, but it was a bonus for them that van Hoogstraat also died on that platform. The silence was total. The Risen would rise no more.’

Fabel paused and looked at the bagged notebook in his hand.

‘It’s funny,’ Fabel said, with a sad half-smile. ‘It was Frank Grueber who said to me once that “truth is the debt we owe to the dead.”’ Fabel moved closer to Schreiber’s bed. ‘The puzzle is, how did Grueber find out the identities of the former members of The Risen? The only people who knew were the members themselves. If Brandt had been the killer, then it would have made sense – his mother, a former member herself, might have confided in her son. But the secret was so great, so closely guarded, that she didn’t even tell Franz Brandt that Muhlhaus was his father. So, how did Frank Grueber discover their identities? After all, he had been adopted when he was eleven and brought up in a different universe with wealthy adoptive parents in Blankenese. His early childhood, constantly on the move, being deprived of any education apart from political brainwashing by his parents, must have seemed like a distant nightmare. But there was one thing he remembered. Like I said, Muhlhaus had not trusted any of his former associates, but there’d been one person he did trust. His son. Franz Muhlhaus was an archaeologist and he must have told the young Frank how the earth protects the truth about the past for future generations. Muhlhaus told his son how he had buried the truth in the earth, carefully wrapped and protected and hidden from the world. He must have made the young Frank memorise the location so that, if Muhlhaus was betrayed, then the others would not be free to live their lives with impunity.’

Hans Schreiber lay still and said nothing, gazing up at the ceiling from beneath his distended brow and swollen eyelids.

‘Red Franz Muhlhaus buried this notebook, along with a number of other documents giving detailed accounts of everything that happened during the active life of The Risen. It also meticulously details each member of the group and their special responsibilities. There is a diary, too. I’ve got someone going through that as we speak. I’m sure we shall uncover a great deal.

‘The funny thing is… the one name I expected to see on the list isn’t there. Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. He wasn’t Muhlhaus’s deputy. He wasn’t even a member of the group. I don’t even think he was an active or secret supporter. You see, terrorist organisations like The Risen are like black holes in space. They are small but their mass, their influence on everything around them, is huge. The gravity they generate sucks in everything within reach. Take, for example, a young lawyer and radical journalist who starts out as a broad supporter, then becomes a member. Then the second-in-command. Not Muller-Voigt. His sole connection with The Risen was that, like Muhlhaus, he had a relationship with Beate Brandt. Something that you and Paul Scheibe could not forgive, because you had both been besotted with her. That was why you couldn’t resist, twenty years on, conspiring to place evidence in Ingrid Fischmann’s hands that would seem to incriminate him. But not enough fully to reignite interest in The Risen. It was a dangerous game to play, particularly when your own wife began to turn up the heat. But the fact is that Muller-Voigt never did cross the line. He cared passionately about the environment and about social justice, but his principles also extended to not taking human life. Ingrid Fischmann got the wrong politician, didn’t she, Herr First Mayor?’

‘My God, Fabel,’ said van Heiden. ‘Are you sure about this?’

‘There’s no doubt. It’s all in here.’ Fabel held up the notebook. ‘And Muhlhaus buried other corroborative evidence with it. We recovered it all from Grueber’s cellar. That was how I knew he was going after Schreiber. He had saved the best until the last.’

Werner stepped forward.

‘Hans Schreiber, I am arresting you for the kidnap and murder of Thorsten Wiedler, on or sometime after the fourteenth of November nineteen seventy-seven. I’m sure that, as a qualified lawyer, you understand your rights under the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany.’