Fabel waited.
He was beginning to feel that almost drunk sensation that comes with too little sleep. He could have done without the early-hours drive back to Hamburg from Norddeich. Susanne had decided to stay with Gabi and his mother, making the most of her two days off before taking the train back on Wednesday.
The killer was stretching them. They now had so many concurrent murders to deal with, forensics to process and interviews to conduct that Fabel had given Maria total control of the Ungerer murder inquiry. It was not a decision that had sat easily with him. He valued Maria above all the members of his team, perhaps even above Werner. She was a startlingly intelligent woman who combined a methodical approach and an eye for detail with speed. But he still was not convinced she was ready for this. Physically, she was fit. She had even been given a clean bill of health psychologically. Officially. But Fabel could see something in Maria’s eyes that he hadn’t seen before. He couldn’t specify it, but it bothered him.
Unfortunately, at the moment, he had no choice but to hand the Ungerer case file over to Maria. There were lots of compromises being made: he had Anna back on duty, even though she could no longer hide the winces of pain if something rubbed against her injured thigh; he had Hermann working full-time in the Mordkommission, despite him not being fully KriPo-trained; and he had two Sexual Crime SoKo members drafted in to bolster his team.
Still Fabel waited. There were two things that he could have predicted on his drive to the Altes Land: the first was that the von Klosterstadts weren’t the type to answer their own door, the second was that they would keep him waiting. The last time he had been here, the rawness of Laura’s death had ensured him an immediate audience. This time, the blue-business-suited butler who answered the door conducted him to a reception hall in which he had now sat for twenty minutes. Half an hour was his limit. Then he would go looking for them.
Margarethe von Klosterstadt emerged from the drawing room that Fabel had been in during his last visit. She closed the doors behind her: clearly, this interview was going to be conducted in the hall. He stood up and shook hands with her. She gave a polite smile and apologised for keeping him waiting; the smile and the apology both lacked sincerity. Frau von Klosterstadt wore a dark navy suit which emphasised her narrow waist. The expensive, high-heeled cream court shoes tensed her calf muscles and Fabel again had to push from his mind how sexually attractive he found her. She indicated that he should sit again and she took the seat next to him.
‘What can I do for you, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar?’
‘Frau von Klosterstadt, I have to be frank with you. There are elements to this inquiry that lead us to believe that your daughter’s death may have been the work of a serial murderer. A psychotic. Someone who has a twisted, perverted perspective. Part of that perspective means that details of his victims’ lives – specifics that may seem remote or insignificant to us – take on an especial meaning.’
Margarethe von Klosterstadt arched one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows inquisitively, but Fabel could detect nothing more than patient politeness in the glacial eyes. Fabel paused for a heartbeat before continuing.
‘I have to ask you about your daughter’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion, Frau von Klosterstadt.’
The patient politeness disappeared from the pale blue eyes; an Arctic storm welled up somewhere deep within them but did not, yet, break through.
‘What, might I ask, leads you to ask such an offensive question, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar?’
‘You don’t deny that Laura had an abortion?’ Fabel asked. She did not answer but held him in her steady gaze. ‘Listen, Frau von Klosterstadt, I am making every effort to deal with these matters as discreetly as possible, and it would be much easier if you were to be direct with me. If you force me to, I will get all kinds of warrants to go stomping about in your family’s affairs until I get to the truth. That would be, well, unpleasant. And it could be more public.’
The Arctic storm now raged and rattled against the panes of Margarethe von Klosterstadt’s eyes, yet still did not break through. Then it was gone. Her expression, her perfect poise, her voice remained unchanged, yet she had surrendered. Something she was clearly not used to. ‘It was just before Laura’s twenty-first birthday. We sent her to the Hammond Clinic. It’s a private clinic in London.’
‘How long before her birthday?’
‘A week or so before.’
‘So it was almost exactly ten years ago?’ Fabel’s question was more to himself. An anniversary. ‘Who was the father?’
There was an almost imperceptible tensing of her posture. Then a smile flickered across her lips.
‘Is that really necessary, Herr Fabel? Do we really need to go into all of this?’
‘I’m afraid so, Frau von Klosterstadt. You have my word that I will be discreet.’
‘Very well. His name was Kranz. He was a photographer. Or rather he was an assistant to Pietro Moldari, the fashion photographer who launched Laura’s career. He was a nobody then, but I believe he’s done rather well for himself since.’
‘Leo Kranz?’ Fabel recognised the name immediately. But he didn’t associate it with fashion shoots. Kranz was a well-regarded photojournalist who had covered some of the world’s most dangerous war-zones over the last five years. Margarethe von Klosterstadt read the confusion in Fabel’s face.
‘He gave up fashion photography for press work.’
‘Did Laura have anything to do with him? Afterwards, I mean.’
‘No. I don’t think they had been particularly involved. It was an unfortunate . . . episode . . . and they both put it behind them.’
Did they? wondered Fabel. He remembered Laura’s austere, lonely villa in Blankenese. He doubted very much if Laura von Klosterstadt had left anything of her sadness behind her.
‘Who knew about the abortion?’ he asked.
Margarethe von Klosterstadt didn’t answer for a moment. She regarded Fabel silently. Somehow she managed to sprinkle just enough disdain into that look to make Fabel feel uncomfortable, but not enough for him to actually confront her. He thought idly of Möller, the pathologist, who always tried to achieve this level of arrogant haughtiness: in comparison, he was a clumsy amateur; Frau von Klosterstadt was world-class at it. Fabel wondered if she practised on the servants.
‘We’re not in the habit of sharing details of our family affairs with the outside world, Herr Fabel. And I am certain that Herr Kranz had absolutely no interest in making his involvement widely known. As I say, it was a family matter and it was kept within the family.’
‘So Hubert knew about it?’
Another frosted silence, then: ‘I didn’t feel that was necessary. Whether Laura told him or not, I don’t know. But I’m afraid they were never close as brother and sister. Laura was always distant. Difficult.’
Fabel kept his expression blank. It was clear who had been the favoured child in this family. He remembered the contempt with which Heinz Schnauber had spoken about Hubert. Two things had become clear to him: first Heinz Schnauber really was the closest thing Laura had known to family, and second, this interview was going to yield nothing. And it was going to yield nothing because, once again, he was asking questions of an acquaintance, not a mother. He looked at Margarethe von Klosterstadt: she was elegant, classically beautiful and one of those women whose age only seemed to intensify their sexiness. In his mind, he overlaid the image of Ulrike Schmidt, the prematurely aged occasional prostitute and regular drug user, whose skin and hair had dulled. Two women who were so different they could have belonged to different species. But one thing united them: their profound lack of knowledge of their own daughters.
Something dull and heavy dragged at Fabel as he made his way back to his car: a leaden, gloomy sadness. He looked back at the vast, immaculate house and thought of a little girl growing up there. Isolated. Dislocated from any sense of real family. He thought of how she had escaped this gilded prison merely to build one of her own, high on the Blankenese banks of the Elbe.
Fabel had to admit that her killer could not have made a more appropriate choice for his fairy-tale princess. And he felt certain now that her killer, at some point, must have had some kind of contact with her.