The father was clearly no longer part of the picture.
Ulrike Schmidt was a small woman who looked as if she were well into her forties but Fabel knew, from the information supplied by the Kassel police, that she was only in her mid-thirties. She had probably been pretty once, but she now wore the hard-faced weariness of the habitual drug user. The blue of her eyes lacked any lustre and the shadows beneath them had a jaundiced tinge. Her hair was lifeless blonde and she had scraped it back from her face, gathering it into a hasty ponytail; the jacket and trousers she wore had probably passed for smart until comparatively recently, but had not passed for fashionable for a decade or more. It was clear to Fabel that she had fished her outfit out from a meagre wardrobe in an attempt to dress appropriately for the occasion.
And the occasion was to identify her dead daughter.
‘I came up by train . . .’ she said, for the sake of saying something, as they waited for the body to be brought to the viewing room. Fabel smiled bleakly. Anna said nothing.
Before coming to the mortuary in the Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Fabel and Anna had sat with Ulrike Schmidt in the Polizeipräsidium and asked her about her daughter. Fabel remembered how he had prepared himself to delve into every corner of the life of this dead girl, this stranger to him, whom he would know intimately. But he never did get to know the girl on the beach. For a few hours she had been someone else, then she had become nobody again. As they had sat in the Mordkommission’s interview room, Anna and Fabel had tried to add dimensions to the name ‘Martha Schmidt’: to make a dead girl live once more, in their minds. The autopsy had revealed that Martha had been sexually active and they had asked her mother about boyfriends, about who she was friendly with, what she did in her free time – and in the time when she should have been at school. But Ulrike Schmidt’s answers had been vague, uncertain; as if she had been describing an acquaintance, someone on the periphery of her awareness, rather than her own flesh and blood: her daughter.
Now they sat in the ante-room of the state mortuary, waiting to be called to identify Martha’s body. And all Ulrike Schmidt’s conversation revolved around was her journey. ‘Then I took the U-Bahn from the Hauptbahnhof,’ she said, dully.
When they were called forward and the sheet was folded back from the face of the body on the trolley, Ulrike Schmidt looked down on it without expression. For a moment, Fabel felt a small panic rise in his chest as he wondered if this was going to be another failed identification of the ‘Changeling’ body. Then Ulrike Schmidt nodded.
‘Yes . . . yes, that’s my Martha.’ No tears. No sobbing. She stared emptily at the face on the trolley and her hand moved towards it, towards the cheek, but checked itself and fell limply to her side.
‘Are you sure this is your daughter?’ There was an edge to Anna’s voice and Fabel fired a warning look in her direction.
‘Yes. That’s Martha.’ Ulrike Schmidt didn’t look up from the face of her daughter. ‘She was a good girl. A really good girl. She looked after things. After herself.’
‘The day she went missing,’ said Anna, ‘did anything unusual happen? Or did you see anyone unusual hanging about?’
Ulrike Schmidt shook her head. She turned to Anna for a moment, her eyes dull and dead. ‘The police already asked me that. I mean the police at home, in Kassel.’ She turned back to the dead girl on the trolley. The girl who died because she looked like someone else. ‘I told them. About that day . . . that I was having a bad day. I was kind of out of it. Martha went out, I think.’
Anna stared at Ulrike Schmidt’s profile. Hard. Schmidt was oblivious to Anna’s silent reproach.
‘We’ll be able to release the body to you soon, Frau Schmidt,’ said Fabel. ‘I take it that you would like to make arrangements for her to be taken to Kassel for her funeral?’
‘What’s the point? Dead is dead. She doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to her now.’ Ulrike Schmidt turned to Fabel. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but not from grief. ‘Is there somewhere nice here?’
Fabel nodded.
‘Don’t you want to be able to visit her?’ A sharp, bitter incredulity edged Anna’s voice. ‘To visit her grave?’
Ulrike Schmidt shook her head. ‘I wasn’t meant to be a mother. I was a lousy mother when she was alive, I don’t see how I’ll be a better one now she’s dead. She deserved better.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I rather think she did.’
‘Anna!’ Fabel snapped, but Ulrike Schmidt was either ignoring Anna’s reproach or thought it fair comment. She stared at Martha’s body for a silent moment, then turned to Fabel.
‘Is there anything I have to sign?’ she asked.
After Ulrike Schmidt left to catch the train home, Fabel and Anna walked out of the Institut für Rechtsmedizin and into the day. A milky sheet of cloud diffused the sun into a soft-edged brightness and Fabel put on his sunglasses. He rested his hands on his hips and looked up, squinting at the sky; he turned to Anna.
‘Don’t do that again, Kommissarin Wolff. Whatever you think of the likes of Frau Schmidt, you cannot voice your opinions like that. Everyone grieves in a different way.’
Anna snorted. ‘She wasn’t grieving at all. Just a smack-head waiting for her next fix. She doesn’t even care what happens to her daughter’s body.’
‘It’s not our place to judge, Anna. Unfortunately it’s all part of being a Mordkommission officer. We don’t just deal with death, but the aftermath of death too. Its consequences. And sometimes that means being diplomatic. Biting our tongues. If you can’t handle that then you have no place here. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, Chef.’ She rubbed her scalp frustratedly through the short black hair. ‘It’s just . . . it’s just that she’s supposed to be a mother, for God’s sake. There’s supposed to be some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . instinct at work there. To protect your kids. To care about them.’
‘It doesn’t always work that way.’
‘She let this happen to Martha.’ Anna’s tone was defiant. ‘She obviously knocked her about when she was a kid . . . there’s the twist fracture to the wrist from when Martha was about five and God knows what else in the meantime. But, worse than that, she let that poor girl fend for herself in a dangerous bloody world. The result is that she was taken by a maniac, spent God knows how long terrified witless and then she’s killed. And that cow hasn’t the heart to even give her a decent burial, let alone visit her grave.’ She shook her head, as if in disbelief. ‘When I think of the Ehlers, a family torn to pieces for three long years because they have no body to bury, no grave to grieve over . . . and then that cold-hearted bitch who doesn’t give a toss about what we do with her daughter’s body.’
‘Whatever we think of her, Anna, she’s the mother of a murdered child. She didn’t kill Martha and we can’t even prove that her neglect of her was a contributory factor. And that means we still have to treat her like any other grieving parent. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, Herr Hauptkommissar.’ Anna paused. ‘It said in the Kassel report that the mother was an occasional prostitute. You don’t think that she swapped over to pimping for her own daughter? I mean, we know that Martha had sexual partners.’
‘I doubt it. From what I can see from the report it was just, as you said, an occasional thing to feed a habit when necessary. I doubt that Frau Schmidt would be organised enough for anything else. Anyway, you heard the way she spoke about Martha. It clearly wasn’t a close relationship and I get the feeling mother and daughter went their own ways. Did their own thing, as it were.’
‘Maybe Martha was the organised one,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe she was in business for herself.’
‘I doubt it. There’s no suggestion of that in any of the police or social services reports. She had no habit to support. No. I just think that she was trying to be as normal a teenager as her family background would allow.’ Fabel fell silent for a moment, thinking about his own daughter, Gabi, and how much Martha Schmidt had reminded him of her. Three girls of roughly the same age, who looked like each other: Martha Schmidt, Paula Ehlers, and Gabi. Some part deep within him shuddered at the thought. A universe of unlimited possibilities. ‘Let’s get back to the Präsidium . . . I’ve got a bakery to visit.’