Eternal

Epilogue

February 2006: Six Months After the First Murder.

Barmbek, Hamburg

Hamburg looked unreal, like some romantic painter’s fantasy of a city. The sheer volume of snow had taken the authorities by surprise and it took them some time to clear the main roads and pavements. Then the snow had stopped and the clouds had cleared, but now the temperature had plummeted and the blankets of snow that bedecked the roofs, the parks and the edges of the streets were frozen fast and sparkling under a brilliant blue sky.

The care home in which Frau Pohle lived was in Barmbek, on the far side of the city. Fabel had phoned the home’s director, Frau Amberg, to arrange the meeting.

‘Frau Pohle is a little confused, Herr Fabel. She finds it difficult to remember things from yesterday, but she has excellent recall of things that happened decades ago. I’m afraid it’s typical for the type of incipient dementia that Frau Pohle suffers from. And she can become easily distressed. I am concerned that she may be disturbed by your visit.’

Fabel had then explained that he had uncovered property belonging to Frau Pohle’s long-time-missing brother. Frau Amberg had then seemed less reluctant and had arranged a time for him to visit.

Fabel took the bus to Barmbek; partly because of the weather but also because lately he seemed to find excuses for not using his car. He had had his BMW convertible for six years and it had served him well. But since the night when he had spent three hours sitting anchored to his seat while the bomb squad defused the device that Grueber had placed beneath it, he had yet to feel comfortable in it.

As Fabel sat in the bus and watched picture-postcard Hamburg drift by, he considered his mission. He did not know why it had become so important to him to find Karl Heymann’s sister and to inform her that her brother’s body had been found. He always imagined that she had suffered from the lack of a funeral for her brother and that she could maybe take some solace or comfort from having a place to visit and mourn her sixty-year-old loss. Frank Grueber had got one thing right: truth is the debt we owe to the dead.

Frau Amberg met Fabel on his arrival and led him into a bright day-room that had picture windows that looked out over a large garden with a fountain at its centre. The garden and the fountain were only hinted outlines under the thick, crisp snow.

Frau Pohle sat in a high-backed chair near the window. It saddened Fabel to see how youthful she was for her eighty-eight years: it seemed to him that she had been cheated by the deterioration within, of her mind. She was very smartly dressed and again it pained Fabel to think that she might have deliberately worn her best outfit because she seldom had visitors. As Fabel approached, she smiled at him eagerly. Expectantly.

‘Good day, Frau Pohle. My name is Jan Fabel. I’ve come to talk to you about your brother, Karl.’ Fabel extended his hand to shake Frau Pohle’s. She grasped it with both of hers.

‘Oh, thank you for coming, Herr…’ Fabel’s name had already escaped her. ‘I am so glad you came. You must be tired, coming all that way. I have been waiting so long for news of Karl. How is he?’ She laughed. ‘I’ll bet he has an awful American accent by now. You tell him when you see him that I am so angry. I can’t remember the last time I heard from him. Please – you sit down and tell me all about Karl’s life over there.’

A care assistant arrived with some tea and biscuits and Frau Pohle went on to explain how Karl had always talked about getting away from Germany and going to America before the Nazis could conscript him into the army. She had always known that he had used the confusion of the bombing raid to disappear, to escape. Was Fabel from America and was Karl well?

Despite the profound sadness that filled him, Fabel smiled as he listened to an old woman’s fantasy about her brother’s survival and his prospering in a far-off land. A fantasy that had sustained Frau Pohle for sixty years; and now, in her fading mind, that fantasy had become a concrete truth.

For fifteen minutes Fabel sat and lied to an old woman. He invented a life and a family that should have been but never was. As he got up to go, Fabel saw the tears in Frau Pohle’s eyes and knew that they came from a bitter joy.

‘ Goodbye, Mrs Pohle,’ he said in English as he left her sitting by the window that looked out over the snow-covered garden.

Sometimes truth is not the debt we owe the dead.

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