Fabel had been at his desk since seven-thirty. He had again gone through the BKA files that Ullrich had lent him and had taken out the sketch pad from his desk and plotted out as much as he could from the information at his disposal.
He phoned Bertholdt Müller-Voigt’s office. After he explained who he was, Fabel was told that the Environment Senator was working from home, which he often did, as yet another visible commitment to reducing his travel kilometres and therefore his impact on the environment. His secretary said she could, however, get right back to Fabel with an appointment for that day.
Fabel made another call. Henk Hermann had got Fabel the number for Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist.
‘Hello, Frau Fischmann? This is Principal Chief Commissar Jan Fabel of the Polizei Hamburg. I work for the Murder Commission, and I am currently investigating the murder of Hans-Joachim Hauser. I wondered if it would be possible to meet. I think you could help me with some background information …’
‘Oh … I see …’ The woman’s voice at the other end sounded a lot younger and lacked the authority that Fabel had somehow expected. ‘Okay … how about three p.m. at my office?’
‘That’s fine. Thank you, Frau Fischmann. I have the address.’
Within a few minutes of hanging up from Ingrid Fischmann, Bertholdt Müller-Voigt’s secretary phoned back saying that the Senator could fit Fabel in if he could make his way directly to Herr Müller-Voigt’s house. She gave Fabel an address near Stade in the Altes Land, outside Hamburg and on the south side of the Elbe. He doesn’t mind me clocking up the kilometres, thought Fabel as he hung up.
Müller-Voigt’s house was a huge modern home that had ‘expensive architect’ written in every angle and detail, and Fabel reflected on how the former left-wing environmentalist firebrand seemed to have embraced conspicuous consumption with great enthusiasm. As he approached the front door, however, Fabel noticed that what had appeared to be blue marble tiling along the whole front elevation was, in fact, a façade made up entirely of solar panels.
Müller-Voigt answered the door. As Fabel remembered him from Lex’s restaurant, he was a smallish but fit-looking man with broad shoulders and a tanned face broken by a broad, white-toothed smile.
‘Herr Chief Commissar, please … do come in.’
Fabel had heard of Müller-Voigt’s charm: his primary weapon, apparently, with women and political opponents alike. It was well known that he could turn it off whenever necessary. He could be an aggressive and highly outspoken opponent. The politician showed Fabel into a vast living room with a pine-lined double-height vaulted ceiling. He offered Fabel a drink, which the detective declined.
‘What can I do for you, Herr Fabel?’ asked Müller-Voigt, sitting down on a large corner sofa and indicating that Fabel should do likewise.
‘I’m sure you’ve heard of the deaths of Hans-Joachim Hauser and Gunter Griebel?’ asked Fabel.
‘God, yes. Terrible, terrible business.’
‘You knew Herr Hauser rather well, I believe.’
‘Yes, I did. But not socially for years. Not so much at all recently, in fact. I would bump into Hans-Joachim at the occasional conference or action meeting. And, of course, I knew Gunter, too. Not so well, and I hadn’t seen him for an even longer time than Hans-Joachim, but I did know him.’
Fabel looked startled. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Müller-Voigt – did you say you knew both victims?’
‘Yes, of course I did. Is that strange?’
‘Well …’ said Fabel. ‘My entire purpose in coming here was to see if you could cast light on any possible connection between the two victims. A connection, I have to add, that so far we have been unable to establish. Now it looks like you are that link.’
‘I’m flattered that I seem so important to your investigation,’ said Müller-Voigt, smiling. ‘But I can assure you that I was not the only connection. They knew each other.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Absolutely. Gunter was a strange fellow. Tall and lanky and not much of a talker, but he was active in the student movement. It doesn’t surprise me that the connection didn’t appear on your radar, though. He dropped out of sight after a while. It was as if he lost interest in the movement. But he and Hans-Joachim were both members of the Gaia Collective for a while. As was I.’
‘Oh?’
‘The Gaia Collective was a very short-lived phenomenon, I have to admit. A talking shop more than anything. I gave up on it when it became too … esoteric, I suppose you would say. The political objectivity got muddied with wacky philosophies – Paganism, that kind of thing. The Collective just sort of evaporated. That happened a lot back then.’
‘How well did Hauser and Griebel know each other?’ asked Fabel.
‘Oh, I don’t know. They weren’t friends or anything. Just through the Gaia Collective. They might have met outside, but I wouldn’t know about that. I know that Griebel was highly regarded for his intellect, but I have to say I always found him a very dull fellow. Very earnest and rather one-dimensional … like a lot of the people involved in the movement. And not particularly communicative.’
‘And you’ve had no contact with Griebel since the Gaia Collective days?’
‘None,’ said Müller-Voigt.
‘Who else was involved?’
‘It was a long time ago, Herr Fabel. A lifetime away.’
‘There are bound to be some people you recall.’
Fabel watched Müller-Voigt as he rubbed at his trimmed, greying beard thoughtfully. Fabel found it impossible to get the measure of the man or of how much, if anything, he was holding back.
‘I remember there was a woman I was involved with for a while,’ said Müller-Voigt. ‘Her name was Beate Brandt. I don’t know what happened to her. And Paul Scheibe … he was a Gaia Collective member too.’
‘The architect?’
‘Yes. He has just won a major architectural project in the HafenCity. He is the only person from the group that I still have regular contact with, if you exclude the odd times when I would run into Hans-Joachim. Paul Scheibe was and still is a very talented architect … very innovative in designing minimum-environmental-impact buildings. This latest concept for the Überseequartier of the HafenCity is inspired.’
Fabel made a note of the names Beate Brandt and Paul Scheibe. ‘Do you remember anyone else?’
‘Not really … not names, anyway. I never really did get into the Gaia Collective, if you know what I mean.’
‘Do you remember if Franz Mühlhaus was involved with the Collective?’
Müller-Voigt looked taken aback by the mention of the name, then his expression became clouded with suspicion. ‘Oh … I see. It’s not my possible connection to the victims that interests you at all, is it? If you’ve come here to question me about Red Franz Mühlhaus because of the false allegations that Ingrid Fischmann has been circulating, then you can get the hell out of my house.’
Fabel held up a hand. ‘Firstly, I am here exclusively because I am trying to establish a connection between the victims. Secondly – and I do assure you of this, Herr Senator – this is a murder inquiry and you will answer all the questions I have for you. I don’t care what your position is: there is a maniac out there mutilating and murdering people who were connected to your circle in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. We can either do this here or at the Presidium, but we’re going to do it.’
Müller-Voigt’s stare was locked on Fabel. Fabel realised that the intensity of the politician’s gaze came not from fury but from the fact that he was appraising Fabel, trying to decide if he was bluffing or not. It was clear that Müller-Voigt had been in too many political tussles to become easily rattled. Fabel found his cool, emotion-free detachment disturbing.
‘I don’t know what you think of me and my type, Herr Chief Commissar.’ Müller-Voigt let the tension ease from his posture and leaned back into the sofa. ‘I mean those of us who were active in the protest movement. But we changed Germany. Many of the liberties, many of the fundamental values and freedoms that everyone takes for granted about our society, are directly attributable to us taking a stand back then. We are nearing a time, if in fact we have not already reached it, when we can again be proud of what it is to be German. A liberal, pacifist nation. We did that, Fabel. My generation. Our protests blew the last dark cobwebs out of the corners of our society. We were the first generation without a direct memory of the war, of the Holocaust, and we made it clear that our Germany was going to have nothing to do with that Germany.
‘I admit I was on the streets. I admit that things got heated. But at the heart of my beliefs lies my pacifism: I don’t believe in doing violence to the Earth and I don’t believe in doing violence to my fellow man. Like I said, in the heat of the moment there were things I did back then that I regret now, but I could never – not then, not now – take a human life for the sake of a political conviction, no matter how strongly held. For me, that is what differentiates me from what went before.’
Müller-Voigt paused, keeping Fabel fixed with his gaze. ‘If there is a question lurking there that you maybe don’t want to ask, then let me answer it for you. Despite Ingrid Fischmann’s insinuations, and despite the political capital that the First Mayor’s wife has sought to make of them, I was not, in any way, involved with the kidnap and murder of Thorsten Wiedler. I had nothing whatsoever to do with it or the group behind it.’
‘Well, like I said, my sole interest is in the connection between the two victims,’ said Fabel. ‘I merely wanted to know if Mühlhaus had been a member of the Gaia Collective.’
‘Good God, no. I think I would remember that.’ Müller-Voigt looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Although I do understand why you ask. Mühlhaus had a pretty odd perspective on the movement and there were certain similarities between his ideas and those of the Collective. But no … Red Franz Mühlhaus had absolutely no involvement.’
‘Who was the Collective’s leader?’
For a moment Müller-Voigt looked confused by Fabel’s question. ‘There was no leader. It was a collective. Therefore it had a collective leadership.’
They talked for another fifteen minutes before Fabel rose and thanked Müller-Voigt for his time and for being cooperative. In return, Müller-Voigt wished Fabel the best of luck in tracking down the killer.
As Fabel turned out of the sweeping drive and onto the road back to the city, he considered the fact that he now had a point of direct contact between Hans-Joachim Hauser and Gunter Griebel, and he thought back on how open Müller-Voigt had seemed. So why was it, thought Fabel, that he felt as if Müller-Voigt had told him exactly nothing?
As he headed back to Hamburg along the B73, Fabel phoned Werner. He told him about the link between the victims and went through the highlights of what else Müller-Voigt had said to him.
‘I need to talk to this architect, Paul Scheibe,’ he said. ‘Could you get a contact number and arrange something? If you try his practice number, that would probably be best.’
‘Sure, Jan. I’ll get back to you.’
Fabel had just turned onto the A7 and was heading towards the Elbtunnel when his car phone buzzed.
‘Hi, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘I have just had the strangest conversation with the people at Scheibe’s architectural practice. I spoke to his deputy, a guy called Paulsen. He got really quite wound up when I said I was phoning from the Murder Commission … He thought I was phoning because we’d found Scheibe’s body or something. According to Paulsen, Scheibe attended a lunch reception at the Rathaus on Monday and hasn’t been seen since. Apparently the formal launch of this big HafenCity project is being held tonight and they’re worried that he isn’t going to show. Looks like we’ve got a missing person.’
‘Or a murder suspect on the run,’ said Fabel. ‘Send someone over there to get details. I think we should turn up at the launch party this evening ourselves. I’ll be back in before five. I’m heading up to the University right now and then I’m meeting the journalist Fischmann at three. Anything else?’
‘Only that Anna has turned up a lead on your World War Two mummy. The family no longer lives in that street. They were bombed out during the war, but Anna’s tracked down someone who was a friend of the dead guy. Do you want her to follow it up?’
‘No, it’s okay. I want to do it. It was my call-out. Tell Anna to leave the details on my desk.’
Fabel had just hung up when his car phone buzzed again.
‘Fabel …’ he said impatiently.
There was a sound of electronic static. Then a voice that was not human.
‘You are going to get a warning …’ The voice was distorted, as if through an electronic voice-changer. Fabel checked the caller display but no number had registered.
‘Who the hell is this?’ Fabel asked.
‘You will get a warning. Only one.’ The line went dead.
Fabel stared ahead at the traffic heading towards the Elbtunnel. A crank call. Maybe even someone who did not realise they had reached a police officer’s number. But somewhere, at the back of his head, an alarm was sounding.
‘Have you found the relatives of our HafenCity dweller?’ Dr Severts smiled and offered Fabel a chair.
‘No. Not yet, unfortunately. I’m afraid I’ve had much more pressing things on my mind.’
‘This so-called Hamburg Hairdresser?’
‘Yes. It’s proving to be a …’ Fabel sought the right word. ‘… Challenging case for us. And, to be honest, I am clutching at any straws I can think of.’
‘Why do I get the feeling that I’m one of those straws?’
‘I’m sorry, but I am trying to approach this from every angle. I need to establish the significance of this maniac taking the scalp of his victims. I just thought you might be able to give me a historical perspective on it.’
‘I have to say that the significance is not difficult to read, as far as I can see,’ said Severts. ‘Taking the head or the scalp of a vanquished enemy is one of the oldest and most widely practised forms of trophy-taking. When you kill an enemy, you take his scalp. By doing so you haven’t just killed your enemy, you have belittled or humiliated him, and you have a trophy to prove your success as a warrior. Every continent has experienced at least one culture where taking the head or the scalp of enemies has been a major feature.’
‘I don’t know …’ Fabel frowned as he conjured up the image of Griebel’s study, his thinning scalp dyed an unnatural red and pinned to his bookshelves. ‘This killer doesn’t remove the scalp from the murder scene. He makes an exhibition of it, displaying it prominently in the home of his victim.’
‘Maybe that’s his way of showing off his prowess. Scythian warriors used to wear the scalps of their enemies on the bridles of their horses, simply so that everyone could see them there. Your “Hairdresser” maybe feels that exhibiting them where he has killed the victim is the most effective way of displaying them.’
‘You say that scalping was a common practice. Here too? In this part of Europe?’ asked Fabel.
‘Certainly. There have been many examples discovered in Germany. Particularly in your neck of the woods – Ostfriesland, I mean. That’s not necessarily to say that your Frisian ancestors took more scalps than other cultures, it’s merely that the environmental conditions in Ostfriesland have ensured the preservation of so many bog bodies and artefacts. We talked about Red Franz the last time we spoke. Well, in Bentheim, near the Dutch border and not far from where Red Franz was found, they discovered scalped skulls, and some of the scalps themselves, at a Bronze Age site.’ Severts walked over to his bookshelves and selected a couple of textbooks, bringing them back to his desk. He searched in one of them for a moment. ‘Yes … here’s an example that’s really close to your home town. In the eighteen sixties five bog bodies were recovered from Tannenhausener Moor.’
Fabel knew exactly where Severts was talking about. Tannenhausen was a village that lay in the northern suburbs of Aurich, Ostfriesland’s biggest town. It was a few kilometres south of Norden and Norddeich, where Fabel had grown up. It was an area of rich green moor, dark bogs, ponds and lakes. Tannenhausen sat between three heaths: Tannenhausener Moor, Kreihüttenmoor and Meerhusener Moor. As a boy, Fabel had cycled to the area often. It was a mystical place. And at the heart of the moor was a vast, ancient lake – the Ewiges Meer, the Eternal Sea. The name itself spoke of time immemorial; added to which was the fact that the moor around the lake had been found to be interlaced with wooden walkways that had been constructed four to five thousand years before.
‘All five Tannenhausen bodies had been scalped,’ Severts continued. ‘And similar examples have been found all over Europe, even as far away as Siberia. It seems that it was a very common custom in Bronze Age Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic. In fact, the Scythians did it so much that the ancient Greek word for scalping was aposkythizein.’
Fabel thought for a moment of the Scottish part of his ancestry. The Scots claimed that their original homeland had been Scythia, on the Steppes, and that they had passed through North Africa, pausing for generations in Spain and Ireland before conquering Scotland. He pictured someone maybe not unlike him and not too many generations before, who might have routinely committed the same act as the killer he was hunting.
‘And the significance of scalping was always triumphal?’ he asked. ‘Just to prove how many enemies a warrior had killed?’
‘Mainly, but perhaps not exclusively. There is evidence of scalps being taken from people, including children, who had died natural rather than violent deaths. It would seem to indicate that taking the scalp might have been a way of commemorating or remembering the dead. Of honouring ancestors.’
‘I don’t think that’s what is motivating this guy,’ said Fabel.
Severts leaned back in his chair, the huge poster of the Beauty of Loulan as his backdrop. ‘If you want my opinion – personal rather than professional – then I would say that scalp-taking has been so common across all cultures that it is almost an instinct. I don’t know that much about psychology or about your line of work, but I do know that serial killers and psychos like to take trophies from their victims. I think that taking a scalp is the archetypal form of trophy-taking. Your killer could be doing it just because he feels it’s the thing to do, rather than making any clever cultural or historical reference.’
Fabel stood up and smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He shook hands with Severts. ‘Many thanks for your time, Herr Doctor.’
‘Not at all,’ said Severts. ‘May I ask one favour in return?’
‘Of course …’
‘Please let me know if you manage to track down the family of the mummified body down by HafenCity. It’s not often that I can put a real name and a real life to the human remains I find through my work.’
‘I’m afraid the reverse is true in my line of work,’ said Fabel. ‘But of course I shall.’
Fabel had phoned in to the Presidium and asked Werner to tell Paul Scheibe’s deputy to expect him. The architectural practice was housed in a very modern-looking building, between the NDR radio studios and Innocentia-Park in Harvestehude. The clean lines and sweeping angles of Scheibe’s offices reminded Fabel of Bertholdt Müller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Fabel wondered if Scheibe had been Müller-Voigt’s architect and was annoyed that he had not asked the politician such an obvious question.
The midday sun had drawn a thin veil of cloud over her face, and Fabel took off his sunglasses and sat quietly in the car for a moment before going in. When he had phoned Werner he had also asked him to find out if there was anything that Technical Section could do to track down who had made the hoax call on his car phone. Fabel knew it was unlikely, but the call had disturbed him. The voice-changing electronics seemed very elaborate for a phone hoaxer and Fabel had the uneasy feeling that he might just have spoken to the so-called Hamburg Hairdresser. He watched as a pretty girl walked past the car, laughing as she chatted to someone on her cellphone: someone leading a normal life and having normal conversations.
When Fabel entered through the vast glass doors of the Architekturbüro Scheibe, he was greeted by a tall, thin man of about thirty-five with a shaven head. He introduced himself as Thomas Paulsen, the Deputy Director of the practice. His smile had something of an apology in it.
‘Thank you for coming, Herr Chief Commissar, but I am glad to say that our concerns about Herr Scheibe have been allayed. We heard from him just ten minutes ago.’
‘I’m not here to follow up a missing person,’ said Fabel. ‘I need to talk to Herr Scheibe about a case that I am investigating. Where is he?’
‘Oh … he didn’t say. He apologised for dropping out of sight, but said that a family emergency had come up and he had had to attend to it at very short notice. He had to go out of town immediately after the Rathaus luncheon on Monday, and that’s why we have not been able to get in touch with him since,’ Paulsen explained. ‘I can tell you, we’re all very relieved. The main public and press launch is to take place tonight down at the Speicherstadt. Herr Scheibe has assured us that he will be there to make the presentation.’
‘You spoke to him yourself?’
‘Well, no … not spoke. He sent an e-mail. But he has guaranteed that he’ll be there.’
‘Then so shall I,’ said Fabel. ‘If you hear from Herr Scheibe again, please tell him that he will have to make time to speak to me.’
‘Very well … but I know that he will be extremely busy. There will be—’
‘Trust me, Herr Paulsen: what I have to talk to Herr Scheibe about is much, much more important. I’ll see you – and him – this evening.’
Fabel decided to have lunch at Dirk Stellamanns’s stand down by the harbour. The veil of cloud had shifted from the sun and the brightness became more vivid and sharp-edged, highlighting the bright tables and parasols ranged around Dirk’s cabin. It was busy when Fabel arrived but Dirk beamed over the heads of his customers when he saw his friend.
Fabel felt hot and sticky and ordered a Jever beer and a mineral water, along with a cheese-and-sausage roll, and took them over to one of the few free chest-high tables. Once the rush died down, Dirk came over to him.
‘How’s your Apache hunt?’
Fabel made a puzzled face.
‘The scalper – any closer to nailing him?’
‘Doesn’t feel like it.’ Fabel shrugged despondently. ‘I seem to have got bogged down in all kinds of crap. Genetic memories … terrorists … and I could write a book on scalping through the ages …’
‘You’ll get him, Jannick,’ said Dirk. ‘You always do.’
‘Not always …’ Fabel thought of how Roland Bartz had called him Jannick. ‘I’m thinking of chucking it in, Dirk.’
‘The job? You’d never do that. It’s your life.’
‘I don’t know that it is,’ said Fabel. ‘Or if it ever should have been. I’ve been offered something else. A chance to become a civilian again.’
‘I can’t see it, Jan …’
‘I can. I’m fed up with death. I see it around me all the time. I dunno. Maybe you’re right. This case is getting to me.’
‘What did you mean about genetic memory? What’s that got to do with these killings?’
Fabel outlined as briefly and coherently as he could the work that the victim Gunter Griebel had been involved in.
‘You know something, Jan … I believe it. I think there’s something in it.’
‘You?’ Fabel grinned sceptically. ‘You’re joking …’
‘No …’ Dirk’s face was serious. ‘I really do. I remember, I’d only been in the force for a couple of years and we were called to a break-in. It was winter and it had been snowing. This guy had gone out through the back window in the middle of the night and had left his footprints in the snow. The only ones around. So all we had to do was to follow the footprints. We tracked him through the snow, moving fast to catch up with him. And we did, eventually.’
‘What’s your point?’ asked Fabel suspiciously, as if he was expecting a punchline.
‘It’s just that when we were doing it, when we were moving fast and at night, tracking down another human being, I got this really weird feeling. Not a nice feeling. I really felt that I had done it before. I felt it, but I couldn’t remember it.’
‘Don’t tell me you believe in reincarnation?’ asked Fabel.
‘No. No, it’s not that at all. But it was like a memory that wasn’t mine but had been passed down to me.’ Dirk laughed, suddenly self-conscious. ‘You know me … always had a mystical side. It was odd – that’s all.’
The building sat discreetly on a corner in the Schanzenviertel. Its architecture was Jugendstil and Fabel could see that behind the ugly graffiti the elegant stonework had been gracefully styled with Art Deco features. There was no door plate or any other notice on the wall to indicate the function of the offices within and, after he had shouted his name and the nature of his business through the entry system’s speakerphone, Fabel had to wait a few seconds before the buzz and clunk of the door indicated that he could enter.
Ingrid Fischmann was waiting for him at the top of the short flight of stairs. She was in her mid-thirties and had long straight light brown hair. Her face could have been pretty, were it not for the heaviness of her features that made them almost masculine. The shoulder-length hair and the long and loose-fitting skirt and top she wore combined in a vaguely hippie look that seemed out of sync with her age.
She smiled politely and extended her hand in greeting. ‘Herr Fabel, please come in.’
There were two main rooms off the tiny reception hall. One was clearly used exclusively for file storage and reference materials, the other was Frau Fischmann’s office. Despite the clutter of filing cabinets and bookshelves, and the wall planner and noticeboard on the walls, it still had the feel of a converted living room.
‘My apartment is two streets away,’ explained Frau Fischmann as she sat down behind her desk. Fabel noticed a copy of the 1971 ‘wanted’ poster of the Baader-Meinhof gang on the wall over by the office’s only window. Nineteen black-and-white faces were ranged under the title Anarchistische Gewalttäter – Baader/Meinhof-Bande. The poster had taken on an almost iconic status, symbolising a particular moment and mood in German history. ‘I rent these offices. I don’t know why, but I’ve always felt it necessary to separate my living and working environments. The other thing is I use this as an address for all my business correspondence. Given the sensitivity of some of the people I write about, it’s a good idea not to advertise where I live. Please, Herr Fabel, sit down.’
‘May I ask why you write what you write? I mean, most of it happened before your time, really.’
Fischmann smiled, exposing slightly too-big teeth. ‘Do you know why I agreed to meet with you, Herr Fabel?’
‘To help me catch a psychotic killer, hopefully.’
‘Of course, there’s that. But I am a journalist, first and foremost. I smell a story in this, and I expect a little quid pro quo.’
‘I’m afraid I am not interested in horse-trading, Frau Fischmann. My only concern is to catch this murderer before more lives are lost. Lives are more important to me than newspaper stories.’
‘Please, Herr Fabel. I agreed to meet you because I have spent many years exposing the hypocrisy of those who dabbled or actively participated in domestic terrorism in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, and who now seek public office or commercial success. In all my studies I have yet to come across a single solid intelligent reason for these spoilt middle-class brats to have been playing at revolutionaries. What offends me more than anything is the way some figures on the left sought to intellectualise the murder and mutilation of innocent citizens.’ Fischmann paused. ‘As a Hamburg policeman, you will be aware that the Polizei Hamburg experienced its fair share of suffering at the hands of the Red Army Faction and its supporters. You know that the first German policeman to be murdered by the Faction was a Polizei Hamburg officer.’
‘Of course: Norbert Schmid, in nineteen seventy-one. He was only thirty-three.’
‘Followed by the May nineteen seventy-two gun battle between the Polizei Hamburg and the Red Army Faction in which Chief Commissar Hans Eckhardt was wounded and later died.’
‘Yes, I know about that, too.’
‘And then, of course, there was the shoot-out between Hamburg police officers and members of the breakaway gang, the Radical Action Group, following a botched bank raid in nineteen eighty-six. One policeman was killed and another very seriously wounded. The wounded officer was lucky to survive. He shot and killed Gisela Frohm, one of the terrorists. As soon as you said your name, I knew who you were, Herr Fabel. Your name came up in my research into Hendrik Svensson and the Radical Action Group. It was you who shot and killed Gisela Frohm, wasn’t it?’
‘Unfortunately it was. I had no choice.’
‘I know that, Herr Fabel. When I heard it was you who was investigating Hauser’s murder, I felt there was a story in it for me, as I have already admitted.’
‘These killings may have nothing to do with your research. It’s just that the two victims, Hauser and Griebel, were contemporaries and formerly involved, to differing degrees, with radical politics. I’ve looked into their backgrounds and can find no direct link between them. But their histories tend to be populated by the same figures. One of those figures is Bertholdt Müller-Voigt, Hamburg’s Environment Senator. I understand you have been researching Müller-Voigt’s history as an activist.’
‘His history as a terrorist.’ There was a bitterness in Fischmann’s voice. ‘Müller-Voigt has political ambitions that extend far beyond the Hamburg Senate. Big ambitions. He has already declared war on the person who was his closest political ally, First Mayor Hans Schreiber, simply because he sees Schreiber as a potential rival further down the road – a road that Müller-Voigt hopes will lead to Berlin. His ambition offends me because I have absolutely no doubt that he was the driver of the vehicle in which the industrialist Thorsten Wiedler was kidnapped and later murdered.’
‘I know of your claims about Senator Müller-Voigt. I also know that Hans Schreiber’s wife has been quoting you. But do you have proof?’
‘As for Frau Schreiber … I find her husband’s political ambitions only slightly less nauseating than Müller-Voigt’s. She is using me for her own ends, but she is generating a level of public awareness that I could not have achieved alone. But to answer your question … No, I have no proof that will stand up in court. But I’m working on it. I’m sure you’ll know how difficult it is to work on an old case where the trail has long been cold.’
‘That I do.’ Fabel smiled bitterly. He thought of the many cold cases he had reopened during his career. He also thought about his neglected quest to find the family of the teenager who had lain in the dry sand of the harbour for sixty years.
‘Everything else I have done in my career up until now, all of those whose political past I have exposed … it’s all been a preparation for destroying Müller-Voigt’s career and hopefully getting him before a court for his crimes. Something we can perhaps work together to achieve, Herr Chief Commissar.’
‘But why Müller-Voigt? Why have you singled him out?’
There was a cold, bitter determination in Ingrid Fischmann’s expression. She opened a desk drawer, took two photographs from it and handed them to Fabel. The first was of a large black Mercedes limousine of a model that dated back to the 1970s. It was parked outside a large office building and a black-uniformed chauffeur was holding the rear door open for a middle-aged man with thick black-rimmed spectacles.
‘Thorsten Wiedler?’ asked Fabel.
Fischmann nodded. ‘And his chauffeur.’
The second photograph was of the same car, but closer up and parked on a gravel drive. Fabel saw the same chauffeur, but this time without his cap or jacket. The Mercedes gleamed in the sunlight and a bucket and cloth sat next to the front wheel arch. Fabel looked at the photograph and understood everything. The chauffeur was taking a break from cleaning the car and had squatted down on his heels next to a small girl of about six or seven. His daughter.
‘And again,’ said Ingrid Fischmann, ‘Herr Wiedler’s chauffeur. Ralf Fischmann.’
‘I see,’ said Fabel. He handed the photographs back. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thorsten Wiedler’s death made the headlines. My father was left paralysed by the attack and was worth nothing more than a passing mention. He died from his injuries, Herr Fabel, but it took more than five years. It was an experience that also destroyed my mother. I grew up in a home that knew no joy. All because a bunch of middle-class kids with half-baked borrowed ideas felt justified to destroy any life that happened to be on the fringes when they carried out one of their so-called missions.’
‘I understand. And I really am sorry. You are totally convinced that Müller-Voigt was involved?’
‘Yes. The group that carried out the attack was not the Red Army Faction. It was one of the many splinter gangs that cropped up at that time. The one thing that differentiated them from the rest was their more poetic choice of name. Everyone else was obsessed by initials – by the way, did you know that one of the reasons why the Red Army Faction chose that name was because it shared the initials RAF with the Royal Air Force? A sick joke, you see. The Royal Air Force bombed Nazism out of Germany. The new RAF saw it as their role to bomb and murder fascism and capitalism out of the West German state. And of course you had direct contact with the RAG gang set up by Svensson. But this bunch had a much more esoteric turn of mind. They called themselves “The Risen”. Their leader was Franz Mühlhaus, also known as Red Franz.’
Fabel felt a jolt of recognition. The other Red Franz. The object of a very special terror. Red Franz Mühlhaus and his group had been seen as on the extreme fringe of the extreme Left. Fabel thought back to the image he had seen in Severts’s office of the original Red Franz, the mummified bog body that had slept for centuries in the cold, dark peat bog near Neu Versen.
‘Mühlhaus and his group were difficult to classify,’ Ingrid Fischmann continued. ‘They were even viewed with mistrust by the other groups on the extreme anarchistic Left. One could argue that they were in fact not on the Left at all. They were a manifestation of environmental radicalism which very often went hand in hand with leftist groups. But Red Franz and his Risen were not considered to be making a serious contribution to the movement.’
‘Why?’
Ingrid Fischmann pursed her lips. ‘Many reasons. They didn’t have a clearly Marxist agenda. Of course, there were other groups who were not clearly Marxist who were more clearly allied or aligned with Baader-Meinhof, like the West Berlin-based Second of June Movement, which was more anarchist in philosophy. The Risen was not expressly associated with Baader-Meinhof and their focus was environmental. There were, at that time, two areas of common ground for Marxists, anarchists and eco-militants … the anti-nuclear protests of the nineteen sixties onwards. And, of course, Vietnam.’
‘But there still was some doubt about how much common ground was shared with The Risen?’ asked Fabel.
‘Exactly. Like the other groups, they targeted industrialists. But not specifically because they were capitalists – more because of the perceived damage their businesses did to the environment. Same targets, different rationale … in a way, The Risen did not travel the same path as the RAF and other leftist groups, more a coincidentally parallel path. A good example is the kidnap and subsequent murder by Baader-Meinhof-RAF of Hanns-Martin Schleyer in October of nineteen seventy-seven and that of Thorsten Wiedler by The Risen in early November. Both part of the so-called German Autumn of nineteen seventy-seven. The difference is that Schleyer was picked out as a target because first, he had been a former Nazi and an SS Hauptsturmbannführer in Czechoslovakia during the war and second, he was a wealthy industrialist, board member of Daimler-Benz and leader of the West German employers’ federation, with strong political connections with the ruling CDU party. And, of course, the background to Schleyer’s six-week-long kidnap and eventual murder was the whole Mogadishu hijack and the suicides of Raspe, Baader and Ensslin in Stammheim prison.
‘On the other hand, while Thorsten Wiedler was also a successful industrialist, he was not in the same league as Schleyer. He came from a Social Democrat, working-class background, had been too young to see military service during the war and had no particular political leanings or significance. The reason he was targeted by The Risen was, apparently, that his factories were major polluters. Of course there was a lot of rhetoric about so-called “solidarity” with the RAF during the German Autumn, and Wiedler also represented, in a more modest way, West German capitalism. But his abduction was seen as counter-productive to the “revolution” and served to isolate The Risen even further. I think that was why there was never any full statement issued by the group about Wiedler’s fate. It became an embarrassment to them. The body was never found and the Wiedler family were denied the right to bury and mourn him. But added to all of this was the very “hippie” twist that Red Franz and The Risen gave to their politics. There was a lot of what we would consider New Age claptrap involved.’
‘What kind of claptrap?’ asked Fabel.
‘Well, The Risen is one of the more difficult groups to research, because they were relatively isolated, but one of their group, Benni Hildesheim, became disaffected and defected to the RAF. When Hildesheim was arrested in the nineteen eighties he claimed The Risen had been too wacky for him. He said that they took their name from the belief that Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, would protect itself by generating a band of warriors, of true believers, to defend her when she was in danger. These warriors would rise again and again, across time, whenever needed. Hence, The Risen. Red Franz Mühlhaus used to claim, apparently, that they were drawn together as a group because they had all lived and fought together before, at other times in history when the Earth needed them for protection. It was not something that fitted with the uncompromisingly rational and inflexible Marxist ideology of Baader-Meinhof.’
‘And where do Müller-Voigt and Hans-Joachim Hauser fit in with Red Franz Mühlhaus?’ asked Fabel.
‘Hauser? I don’t know. Hauser was a self-promoter and a hanger-on to others. I don’t know of any direct link to The Risen or Mühlhaus other than that he was a vocal supporter of Red Franz’s earlier “interventions” – disrupting Hamburg Senate sessions, sit-ins at corporate or industrial premises, that kind of thing. But after things started to heat up and banks began to be robbed, bombs planted and people killed, Hauser, like so many others on the trendy Left, suddenly became less vocal in his support. That doesn’t mean to say that he did not become directly involved. In fact, his comparative silence could be easily be taken as him keeping a low profile. As for Müller-Voigt, he and Red Franz got together in the late nineteen seventies. After Mühlhaus was put on the wanted list for the murder of the boss of a Hanover pharmaceutical company, and then, of course, for the Thorsten Wiedler affair, I suspect that Müller-Voigt was operating as a “legal” for The Risen.’
‘But you think his involvement went deeper?’
‘I’ll tell you something very personal, Herr Fabel. My father made a tape. He asked for a cassette recorder while he was still in hospital. He had been a very energetic and fit man and faced with a future in a wheelchair he became deeply depressed. But he became angry, too. He was determined to do anything he could to help find Herr Wiedler and catch his abductors. A long time after my father died, when I was at an age when I was deciding what I should study at university, I listened to the tape. My father described the events of that day in great detail. It was as if he wanted the truth to be known. It was after I listened to that tape that I decided to become a journalist. To tell the truth.’
‘And what did he say?’
Ingrid Fischmann looked undecided for a moment. Then she said, ‘I tell you what, I’ll send you a copy of it. And I’ll dig out some photographs and general information and mail them to you. But, in short, my father said he estimated that there were six terrorists involved. He only got a good look at the face of one of them in particular. The others were wearing ski masks. He was able to give a very detailed description to the police and they produced an artist’s impression of the terrorist. Not that it did any good. As you know, no one was caught for the Wiedler kidnap. Except if you count Red Franz Mühlhaus’s demise as justice.’
‘And how do you know for sure that Bertholdt Müller-Voigt was involved?’ asked Fabel.
‘You remember Benni Hildesheim, whom I mentioned earlier? The defector from The Risen to the Baader-Meinhof group? Well, I interviewed him after his release from prison and he claimed that there were a number of individuals who are influential today who had been either directly involved in the actions of The Risen or who had supplied logistical and strategic support. Safe houses, weapons and explosives, that kind of thing. Hildesheim told me that there were six people involved in the Wiedler kidnapping, which fits with my father’s account. He claimed to know the identity of all six, as well as the identities of everyone in the support network.’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
Ingrid Fischmann gave a small laugh laden with cynicism. ‘Hildesheim displayed a remarkably capitalist streak for a former Marxist terrorist. He wanted money for the information. Of course, he did not know that I was the daughter of one of the group’s victims, but I did tell him he could go to hell. I wanted the truth about who shot my father. But not at any price. Hildesheim seemed convinced that some tabloid would meet his price. He insisted that some of the names would shake the Establishment to its foundations, that kind of crap. You have to remember that this was about the time when Bettina Röhl, Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter, sent a sixty-page letter to the State Prosecutor demanding that Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer be charged and brought to trial for the attempted murder of a policeman in the nineteen eighties. It is not inconceivable that there are others in the government and other high office who have the odd skeleton in the cupboard.’
‘But Hildesheim didn’t get his deal?’ asked Fabel.
‘No. He died before any deal was concluded.’
‘How did he die? Was there anything suspicious about it?’
‘No. No grand conspiracy. Merely a middle-aged man who smoked too much and exercised too little. Heart attack. But he did give me something on account. He told me that he knew for an absolute fact who the driver was that day – and that they had gone on to become a prominent public figure. But getting a firm statement and proof to back it up was part of the deal he struck. Unfortunately he didn’t live to share it with me.’
‘Hildesheim never mentioned Hauser?’
Fischmann shook her head.
‘Nor Gunter Griebel?’
‘’Fraid not … I don’t think I’ve even come across the name in my research.’
They talked for another fifteen minutes. Ingrid Fischmann outlined the history of the militant movement in Germany and its transition from protest to direct action to terrorism. They discussed the aims of the various groups, the support they got from the former communist East Germany, the networks of supporters and sympathisers who made it possible for so many terrorists to evade capture for so long. They also discussed the fact that out there, unknown to others, perhaps even unknown to their closest friends and families, there were people hiding a violent past behind a normal life. Eventually, they had said all there was to be said and Fabel stood up.
‘Thanks for taking so much time to talk to me,’ said Fabel. He shook hands with Fischmann. ‘It really has been most useful.’
‘I’m glad. I will send you that information when I can find it. It might be a day or two,’ she said, smiling. ‘Wait a minute and I’ll come down with you. I have to get into town.’
‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I have a few stops to make on the way.’ She perched a pair of glasses on the tip of her nose and searched through her large shoulder bag, eventually pulling out a small black notebook. ‘Sorry … I have this new security alarm. I have to put the code in when I leave and I’m damned if I can ever remember it.’
They paused at the door while Fischmann slowly typed the code into the alarm control panel, checking each number in the black notebook.
Out on the street, Fabel said goodbye to Ingrid Fischmann and watched her receding back as she headed down the street. A young German woman who spent her life investigating the generation before her. A seeker after Truth. Fabel remembered young Frank Grueber’s reason for becoming a forensic specialist: Truth is the debt we owe to the dead.
It could, thought Fabel, almost be Germany’s national motto.
Fabel had got back to the Presidium before five. He had hastily called together a meeting in the Murder Commission and had briefed his team on what he had found out over the course of the day. It was beginning to look like these killings were not random serial murders but that the motive lay in the political histories of the victims.
Anna and Henk had gone over what they had found out, or not found out, at The Firehouse. It looked less and less likely that the killings were linked to Hauser’s sexuality, and Anna had the feeling that the older guy whom Hauser had met at The Firehouse perhaps had more to do with his political past than with his sexual preferences.
‘Maybe it was Paul Scheibe,’ Werner suggested.
‘Then we’ll find out tonight,’ Fabel said. ‘I want you – Anna, Henk, Werner and Maria – to come with me to this launch event. I want us to have a good look around the guests, and I need to have a long chat with Scheibe.’
Fabel had gone home and had eaten, showered and changed before meeting up with the team down at the Speicherstadt. Anna and Henk had arrived first and had spoken to Scheibe’s team.
‘The shit’s hitting the fan,’ Anna told Fabel. ‘It looks like we’ve got a no-show. No one has seen Scheibe. And this is his big night. His staff are getting very agitated because Scheibe has been very insistent that he should be the only one to reveal the concept model. Apparently he has been finishing it off himself and although the Senate have seen the concept, this is the big unveiling for everyone else … he’s supposed to have added a few touches that no one knows about until tonight.’
‘So what are Scheibe’s team going to do?’
‘At the moment they’re going up the wall. They’ve got all Hamburg’s great and good assembled in there, and no star to launch the show.’
‘Has he done this kind of thing before?’
‘Not with something as important as this … But Paulsen has been increasingly worried about him recently. It’s like Scheibe’s been stressed out about something, which apparently is rare for him. Drinking, yes, arrogance and inflated self-belief, yes … but Scheibe is definitely not someone who is prone to stress.’
‘Which would suggest that something new has been added to the mix recently,’ said Werner.
‘Or something old …’ said Fabel. ‘Okay – let’s go mingle.’
Fabel led his team into the hall, showing their oval Kriminalpolizei shields to the disgruntled door staff. The hall was filled with well-heeled, well-groomed people who gathered in small scattered groups, chatting and laughing while uniformed waiting staff kept their Pinot Grigio topped up.
Fabel, Maria and Werner headed over to the far side of the hall; Fabel told Anna and Henk to stay by the door and keep an eye out for any sign of Scheibe arriving. As he made his way through the crowd, Fabel noticed Müller-Voigt holding court with a particularly large cluster. Fabel caught the Environment Senator’s eye and nodded, but Müller-Voigt merely frowned as if confused by Fabel’s presence.
The house lights dimmed, and Fabel watched as there was a flurry of activity over by the illuminated platform, where a white canopy concealed Paul Scheibe’s vision of the future from the expectant and increasingly agitated audience. Paulsen, Scheibe’s deputy, was in animated discussion with two other members of the architect’s team.
After a pause, Paulsen awkwardly took centre stage at the podium in front of the display. For a moment he looked apprehensively at the microphone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your patience. Unfortunately, Herr Scheibe has been unexpectedly and unavoidably detained by a family emergency. Obviously, he is doing his best to get here as soon as he possibly can. However, the power and innovation of Paul Scheibe’s work speaks for itself. Herr Scheibe’s vision for the future of HafenCity and for the state of Hamburg itself is a bold and striking concept that reflects the ambition of our great city.’
Paulsen paused. He looked across to the side of the hall, where a woman whom Fabel took to be another member of the Scheibe team had just entered. The woman gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head and Paulsen turned back to the audience with a weak and resigned smile.
‘Okay … I think that … em … it would be best if we were simply to proceed with the presentation … Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure, on behalf of the Architekturbüro Scheibe, to unveil Herr Scheibe’s creatively unique and daring new aesthetic for the HafenCity’s Überseequartier. I give you KulturZentrumEins …’
Paulsen stood to one side and the pristine white canvas canopy began to rise. The audience began to applaud, but with muted enthusiasm, as the vast architectural model was revealed.
The applause died.
As the canvas covering disappeared up and out of the spotlight, a silence fell across the hall. A silence that seemed to freeze the moment. Fabel knew what he was seeing, yet his brain refused to process the information. The rest of the audience were similarly trapped in that fossilised moment as they too sought to grasp the impossibility of what they were looking at.
The spotlights, one red, one blue and the main white light, had been carefully sited to pick out every edge, every angle of the vast white architectural model: to dramatise, to emphasise. But the creativity they illuminated with such stark drama and emphasis was not Paul Scheibe’s.
The screaming began.
It spread from person to person like a white-hot flame. Shrill and penetrating. Through it, Fabel could hear Anna Wolff cursing. Several people, particularly those nearest the display, vomited.
The landscape in miniature lay under the lights. But the centrepiece, KulturZentrumEins, was itself not visible. Paul Scheibe’s naked body had crushed it beneath its weight. It was as if some vast, hideous god had been cast out from the heavens and had smashed into the Earth in the HafenCity. Scheibe sat, semi-recumbent, among the shattered elements of his vision. His naked flesh gleamed blue-white in the spotlights and his blood glistened bright red on the model. Whoever had placed the corpse here had used part of the display to prop it up, and Scheibe gazed out at his audience.
His scalp had been removed. It lay at his feet, spread out and dyed, like those of the other victims, unnaturally red. The gore-streaked dome of his skull glistened under the lights. His throat had been slashed.
Fabel was suddenly aware that he was running. He pushed members of the stunned audience out of his way as he rushed forward and they gave way unprotestingly, as if he were charging through a storeroom of shop-window mannequins. He sensed Anna, Henk and Werner in his wake.
One of the press photographers lifted his camera and it flashed in the auditorium. Anna shouldered her way through to the photographer, grabbed his camera with one hand and shoved him backwards with the other. The photographer started to protest and demanded his camera back.
‘It’s not your camera any more. It’s police evidence.’ She scanned the rest of the press photographers with her laser gaze. ‘And that goes for the rest of you. This is a murder scene and I’ll seize any camera used here.’
By now Fabel had reached the front and grabbed hold of Paulsen, who still stood gazing blankly at the display.
‘Get your people out into the corridor! Now!’ he shouted into Paulsen’s face. He turned to his officers. ‘Anna, Henk … get the audience out into the corridor too. Werner … secure the main door and make sure that no one leaves the building.’ He snapped open his cellphone and hit the pre-set button for the Murder Commission. He gave orders that the forensics team were to be dispatched and that he needed uniformed units to secure the scene immediately. He also arranged for extra plain-clothes officers to attend to take statements from every member of the audience. As soon as he hung up from talking to the Murder Commission he hit another button.
Van Heiden made no protest at being disturbed at home: he knew that for Fabel to call it must be urgent. Fabel heard himself describing the scene to van Heiden in a dead, toneless voice. Van Heiden seemed to react more to the very public context in which the body had been found than to the fact that someone else had lost their life.
After he ended his call to van Heiden, Fabel found himself alone in the auditorium. Alone except for that which had once been Paul Scheibe. Scheibe had had something to tell Fabel. Something valuable, maybe something that would not be told willingly. Now Scheibe sat elevated on his throne of smashed balsa and card, scalped, naked and dead: a crownless, silent king looking out over his empty kingdom.
Leonard Schüler had had too much to drink. It was not uncommon for him to do so. And, after all, it had been a hard week. He was still haunted by that face – that cold, pale, emotionless face at the window of Hauser’s apartment – but it came to his mind less and less as the days went by. More than ever, he was convinced that he had done the right thing in not giving a complete description of the killer to the police. Leonard Schüler, who did not believe in any thing much any more and was not one for deep thought, had found himself thinking back to that night, to the man in the window, and wondering if there really was such a thing as the devil.
But it was time to forget about it. To put it where it belonged, in the past.
Schüler had felt like celebrating and had met up with friends in the bar on the corner two blocks away from his flat. It was a raucous, smoky place, buzzing with crude exuberance and over-loud rock music. It was exactly the kind of place he needed to be.
It was one in the morning when he left. He did not stagger as he walked, but he was aware that the normally unconscious act of taking a step now required a degree of concentration. It had been a good night, and a lot of steam had been let off: a bit too much for Willi, the landlord. But as he walked home, Schüler was aware of a hollow feeling inside. This was his life. This was all he had amounted to. He had not come from the best background, true, but others from similar circumstances had done more, made more of themselves. He was honest enough to blame himself for the failures in his life, although, in darker moments, he allowed himself to share some of the responsibility with his mother. Schüler’s mother was still a young woman, in her forties, having given birth to Leonard when she was eighteen. Leonard had never known his father, and doubted if his mother even knew for sure who he was. It was a subject his mother had always avoided, claiming that Leonard’s father had been a boyfriend who had died from an undisclosed disease before they could marry. But, by putting together the tiny and disparate scraps that he had been able to garner about his mother’s past life, and by a lot of reading between the lines, Leonard had come to suspect that she had worked as a prostitute at one time in her life, and he often speculated that his anonymous male parent might have been a client.
But all that had been before Leonard’s first memories of the world. His mother, as a single parent, had brought him up on her own and had displayed an anachronistic sense of shame about it. At some time in Leonard’s infancy, his mother had become a ‘born-again’ Christian. She was now the model of prissy probity and abstemiousness, and his childhood had been overshadowed by the omnipresence of religion. He had hated his mother’s righteousness for as long as he could remember. It had embarrassed him. Irritated him. He would have been less ashamed of his mother if she had still sold blow jobs to strangers. Leonard often thought that that was why he had become a thief: to witness his mother’s shame.
‘Thou shalt not steal …’ she had repeated over and over, shaking her head when the police had brought him home the first time. ‘Thou shalt not steal … Do you know what will become of you, Leonard?’ she had said. ‘The devil will come for you. The devil will come for you and take you straight to hell.’
It had been those words that had echoed in Leonard’s head when the senior detective had talked to him; when he had described what that psycho would do to him if he knew about him. If he found him.
Schüler knew that he was not stupid. He had no illusions about the act that had conceived him. A quick, grubby fuck for a few Deutschmarks. But he always imagined that his biological father would perhaps have been a wealthy, successful businessman or professional of some kind who, probably drunk at the time, had been a one-off customer of his mother’s. Someone with a bit going on up top. A better class of person. How else could Leonard explain his own intelligence? He had gone to a comprehensive Gesamtschule school and there was no doubt that, with just a little effort on his part, he could have passed his Abitur leaving exam, which would have guaranteed him a place at university. But Schüler had not made that effort. He had worked out that there were two ways to get the things you wanted in life: you could earn them, or you could steal them. And earning them required too much effort.
And this was how he had ended up. Jobless, twenty-six years old, a thief. Was it too late to change things? To start afresh? To build a new life?
He swung open the main door of his apartment building. Each step up the stairwell seemed to take a monumental effort. He unlocked the door of his apartment and threw the keys onto the second-hand dresser by the door. Leaning against the door frame for a moment, he stood on the threshold between the stark light of the stairwell and the dark of his flat. There was a click as the hall light, on an economy timer, went out, plunging Schüler into total darkness. He breathed it in for a moment, the hoppy taste of beer thick in his mouth and his head suddenly light without a visual anchor.
The light in his living room snapped on. Schüler stood blinking, trying to work out how he had accidentally hit the light switch, when he saw him sitting in the chair by the television. The same man. The same face that had gazed out at him through the window of Hauser’s flat. The killer.
The devil had come to take him to hell.