Eternal jf-3

by Craig Russel

  ‘Verrater…’

  Traitors.

  Part One

  1.

  Three Days Before the First Murder: Monday, 15 August 2005.

  List, Island of Sylt, 200 Kilometres North-West of Hamburg

  It was a moment he wanted to hang on to.

  His senses reached out into every corner of the land, the sea and the sky around him. He stood on naked feet and felt the texture of the dry sand that abraded his soles and squeezed between his toes. He felt as if this place, this time, was all he could remember of himself. Here, he thought, there was no past, no future, only this perfect moment. Sylt lay long and thin and low in the North Sea, offering no profile to hinder the hastening wind that pushed at the vast sky above, seeking out the more substantial flank of Denmark beyond. As he stood there, the wind protested at his presence by tugging angrily at the fabric of his chinos, snapping the loose tails and collar of his shirt and flapping the broken wing of blond hair that hung over his forehead. It scoured his face and pushed into the creases of his skin as he stood watching the scurry of the clouds across the impossibly huge pale-blue shield of the sky.

  Jan Fabel was a man of a little over medium height and in his early forties, but a certain boyishness lingered indistinctly, like a reluctant evictee, in his appearance, in his lean, angular frame and in the flapping blond hair. His eyes were a pale blue and shone with intelligence and wit, but at that moment were reduced to narrow slits in the folds of the creased face that he presented to the angry wind. His face was tanned and unshaven and, just as the lingering boyishness in his posture hinted at the youth who had preceded him, the silver that sparkled in the gold of his three-day-old stubble prefigured the older man to come.

  A woman approached from the dunes behind him: she was as tall as him and was dressed in a shirt and trousers of white linen. She also was barefoot, but carried a pair of low-heeled black sandals in one hand. The wind wrapped itself around her too, pressing and smoothing the white linen sleek against the curves of her body and making wild cables of her long dark hair. Fabel did not see Susanne approach and she stood behind him, dropping the sandals onto the sand and snaking her arms through his arms and around his body. He turned round and kissed her for a long time, before they both turned back to face the sea.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ he said at last, ‘that you could almost forget who you are, just standing here.’ He looked down at his naked feet and pushed at the sand with his toe. ‘It’s been wonderful. I’m so glad you came with me. I just wish we didn’t have to leave tomorrow.’

  ‘It has been wonderful. It really has. But, unfortunately, we have our lives to get back to…’ Susanne smiled consolingly, and when she spoke her voice was spun through with a light Bavarian accent. ‘Unless, that is,’ she continued, ‘you want to ask your brother if he needs another waiter.’

  Fabel drew a deep breath and held it for a moment. ‘You know, would that be so bad? Not to have to deal with all the crap and the stress.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ve obviously never worked as a waiter.’

  ‘I could always do something else. Anything else.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I know you. You would start missing it within a month.’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re right. But I feel like a different person here. Someone I prefer being.’

  ‘That’s just being on holiday…’ The wind blew a webbed veil of hair across Susanne’s face and she tugged it out of the way.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s being here. It’s not the same thing. Sylt has always been special for me. I remember the first time I came here – I felt I’d known it all my life. This is where I came after I was shot,’ Fabel said, and his hand brushed, involuntarily, against his left flank, as if he were unconsciously checking that the two-decades-old wound had really healed after all. ‘I guess I always associate this place with getting better. With feeling safe and at peace, I suppose.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes when I think of the world out there…’ He nodded vaguely over the sea to where the mass of Europe lay unseen. ‘The world we have to deal with, I get scared. Don’t you?’

  Susanne nodded. ‘Sometimes. Yes, I do.’ She circled him with her arm and placed her hand over his, over where his wound had been. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m getting chilly. Come on, let’s go and eat…’

  Fabel did not follow right away. Instead he let the North Sea wind scour his face for a few moments more, watching the waves froth against the wide shore and the few wind-driven clouds scud across the huge shield of sky. He listened to the cry of the seabirds and the fuzzy roaring of the ocean and wished, desperately, that he could think of some alternative to becoming a waiter. Or any alternative to becoming, once more, an investigator of death.

  Fabel turned and followed Susanne towards the dunes and his brother’s hotel and restaurant that lay beyond.

  The North Frisian island of Sylt lies almost parallel to the coastline where the neck of Germany becomes Denmark. Sylt is now connected to the mainland by a thread of man-made causeway, the Hindenburgdamm, upon which a rail line conveys Germany’s wealthy and famous to their favoured domestic holiday location. The island also has a regional airport and a regular ferry service running to and from the mainland, and in summer the narrow roads and traditional villages of Sylt clog with shining Mercedes and Porsches.

  Partly in reference to his hotel’s origins as a farmhouse, Fabel’s elder brother Lex habitually described these affluent seasonal immigrants as his ‘summer herd’. Lex had run this small hotel and restaurant in List, at the northern tip of Sylt, for twenty-five years. The combination of Lex’s indisputable talent as a chef and the restaurant’s unbroken view over a scythe of golden sand and the sea beyond had guaranteed a steady stream of guests and diners throughout the season. The hotel had originally been a traditional Frisian farmhouse and had retained its facade of Fachwerk oak beams and sat solidly, turning its wide-roofed, resolute shoulder to the North Sea winds. Lex had added the modern restaurant extension, which wrapped itself around two sides of the original building. The hotel offered only seven guest rooms, all of which were booked up months in advance. But Lex also had a separate small suite of rooms tucked into the low ceilings and wide beams under the rafters of the old farmhouse, which he never let out. He kept these rooms for use by family and friends. Most of all, he kept them for when his brother came to stay.

  Fabel and Susanne came down to dine about eight. The restaurant was already filled with smart, well-heeled-looking customers, but, as he had done throughout their stay, Lex had reserved one of the best tables for Fabel and Susanne, over by the picture window. Susanne had changed her linen shirt and trousers for a black sleeveless dress. She had dressed her long raven hair up onto her head and her elegant slender neck was exposed. The dress hugged her figure and stopped high enough above the knee to display her shapely legs but low enough to look restrained and tasteful.

  Fabel was very much aware of Susanne’s beauty, as he was of the male heads that turned in their direction as they entered the restaurant. Their relationship had lasted more than a year and they had passed through the awkward stages of mutual discovery. They were now an established couple, and Fabel drew a feeling of security and comfort from it. And when Gabi, his daughter, spent time with him and Susanne he had, for the first time since his marriage to Renate broke up, a sense of being part of a family.

  Boris, Lex’s Czech head waiter, led them to their table. The low sun had repainted in more golden hues the bands of sand, sea and sky that filled the panoramic window. Once they were seated, Boris asked them in pleasantly accented German if they wanted anything to drink before their meal. They ordered white wine and Susanne went through the restaurant nesting ritual of settling into her chair and checking out the other diners. Someone over Fabel’s shoulder seemed to catch her attention.

  ‘Isn’t that Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, the politician?’

  Fabel started to turn. Susanne placed her hand on his forearm and
squeezed.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jan, don’t be so obvious. For a policeman, your surveillance skills stink.’

  He smiled. ‘That could explain my lousy conviction rate…’ He turned again, this time making a deliberately clumsy show of taking in all of the restaurant. To his left and behind him sat a fit-looking man in his early fifties, wearing a dark jacket and roll-neck sweater, both of which had the contrived casualness of a seriously expensive designer label. The man’s receding hair was swept severely back and some grey flecked his neatly trimmed beard. He had the studied arty look of a successful film director, musician, writer or sculptor. Fabel recognised him, however, as someone whose art was controversial politics. The slim blonde woman who sat with him was easily twenty years his junior. She sat poised and radiated a sleek, insolent sexuality. Her gaze caught Fabel’s for a moment. He turned back to Susanne.

  ‘You’re right. It’s Muller-Voigt. I’m sure Lex will be delighted to know that his restaurant is cool enough to attract the darlings of the environmental Left.’

  ‘Who’s that with him?’

  Fabel grinned gleefully. ‘I don’t know, but she’s certainly environmentally friendly.’

  Susanne tilted her head slightly to one side: a pose of concentration that, for Fabel, was uniquely Susanne’s. ‘Seriously, I think I’ve seen her before. It’s hard to keep up with his sexual exploits. He seems to relish the headlines they generate in the tabloid press.’

  ‘He’s not so keen on the headlines Fischmann has been generating about him.’ Fabel referred to Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who made it her business to ‘out’ people in public life who had flirted with left-wing extremism or terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.

  ‘Do you think it’s true, Jan?’ Susanne leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. ‘I mean, about him being connected to the Wiedler case?’

  ‘I don’t know… There’s a lot of speculation and circumstantial stuff. But nothing that would remotely add up to a case as far as the Polizei Hamburg are concerned.’

  ‘But?’

  Fabel screwed his face up as if trying to weigh the imponderable. ‘But who knows what the BKA Federal Crime Office have on him.’ Fabel had read Fischmann’s article on Muller-Voigt. In it she had written about the abduction and later assassination in 1977 of the wealthy Hamburg industrialist Thorsten Wiedler. Wiedler had ordered his chauffeur to stop at the scene of what appeared to be a serious road accident. The accident had been faked by members of Franz Muhlhaus’s notorious terrorist gang. Muhlhaus was infamously known as ‘Red Franz’. The terror group he had headed had been as nebulous as the politics behind it and Muhlhaus had been the only one to have been tracked down.

  The Red Franz group had shot Wiedler’s chauffeur, bundled the industrialist into the back of a van and had driven off. The chauffeur had only just survived his injuries. Wiedler, however, was not to survive his captivity. Exactly what had happened to him remained a mystery. The last known image of Wiedler was his bruised and camera-flash-bleached face, above a held-up newspaper showing the date, staring bleakly out of a photograph sent to his family and the media by his captors.

  An announcement had been made that the industrialist had been ‘executed’ but the body, unlike those of other terrorist victims, had not been dumped somewhere it could be found. This successfully fudged the date of Wiedler’s death and removed any opportunity to examine his body for forensic evidence. Despite hundreds of arrests, and the fact that everyone knew it was Muhlhaus’s group behind the abduction, no one had ever been convicted of the murder.

  In her article, the journalist Ingrid Fischmann had made much of the fact that Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, at that time a much more radical political figure, had been picked up and questioned by the police for forty-eight hours. The truth was that almost every political activist had been turned over in the desperate search for Wiedler. Ingrid Fischmann had, however, highlighted the fact that while nothing was known about the other members of the terrorist group involved there was evidence to suggest that the driver of the van in which Wiedler was abducted had gone on to achieve public prominence. She had left her readers to infer that the driver had been Muller-Voigt without making a direct accusation that would allow him to sue.

  Fabel turned again to look at the small, arty-looking man with the sexy blonde companion. They were having a conversation without looking at each other, their expressions empty, as if merely filling silence between each forkful with their words. Muller-Voigt made an unlikely terrorist suspect, but his politics had been radical. In the 1970s and 1980s he had hung out with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer and other left-wing and green notables. Now he promoted politics that were difficult to define. Despite his mixed political directions, he had managed to be elected to the Hamburg Senate and was Environment Senator in the Hamburg State Government of First Mayor Hans Schreiber.

  ‘Anyway,’ concluded Fabel, ‘we will probably never know how deeply he was involved. If at all.’

  Boris returned and took their orders. For the rest of the meal they indulged in the idle, mildly melancholic talk of a couple at the end of a much-enjoyed holiday. As they ate and chatted, the sun slowly melted into the sea, bleeding its colour out into the water. They took their time over their food and the other diners thinned out to a handful of tables and the buzz of conversation lessened. As their coffee arrived, Lex, Fabel’s brother, emerged from the kitchen and came over to their table. He was significantly shorter than Fabel and his hair was thick and dark. His face had the well-creased look of someone who had spent a lifetime smiling. Fabel’s mother was Scottish, but any Celtic genes seemed to have concentrated themselves in his brother. Lex was older than Fabel, but had always seemed the younger in spirit. It had always been the more sensible Fabel who had pulled his older brother out of scrapes when they had been kids in Norddeich. Back then, Lex’s immaturity had irritated Fabel. Now he envied it. Lex still wore his chef’s tunic and checked trousers, and although his good-natured features broke into their habitual smile there was a weariness about his movements.

  ‘Long night?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Every night’s a long night,’ said Lex, pulling up a chair. ‘And we’re only really at the start of the season.’

  ‘Well, that was a truly beautiful meal, Lex,’ said Susanne. ‘As always.’

  Lex leaned over, lifted Susanne’s hand and kissed it. ‘You’re a very intelligent and discerning lady, Susanne. Which is what makes it all the more difficult to understand why you’ve ended up with the wrong brother.’

  Susanne smiled broadly and was about to say something when the sound of raised voices drew their attention to the table in the corner. Muller-Voigt’s companion stood up suddenly, scraping her chair back, and threw down her napkin onto her dessert plate. She hissed something they could not make out at the still-sitting Muller-Voigt and marched out of the restaurant. Muller-Voigt simply stared at his plate, as if trying to read from it what he should do next. He beckoned Boris over with his credit card, paid without checking the bill and walked from the restaurant without looking at any of his fellow diners.

  ‘Maybe it was something to do with his policy on greenhouse gases,’ said Fabel, with a smile.

  ‘He’s been in here a few times over the last month,’ said Lex. ‘Apparently he has a house on the island. I don’t know who the girl is, but she’s not always with him. And it doesn’t look like she’ll be back.’

  Susanne stared at the doorway through which the woman and then Muller-Voigt had left, then shook her head as if trying to shake off the thought that buzzed around it. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere before.’ She took a sip of her coffee. ‘I just can’t, for the life of me, think where it was.’

  2.

  The Night of the First Murder: Thursday, 18 August 2005.

  10.15 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg

  The secret was to remain unnoticed.

  He knew how these things worked: how a meaningless glance into the car from a passer-by, seemi
ngly forgotten in an instant, could be resurrected by an investigator in a week’s or a month’s time and pieced together with a dozen other tiny inconsequences that would lead the police straight to him. He had to diminish his presence at the scene of his crime, in the immediate location, in the area.

  So he sat, unmoving, in the dark and the silence. Waiting for the moment of convergence.

  Hamburg’s Schanzenviertel is an area known for its energy and even this late on a Thursday evening there was a fair amount of activity. But this narrow side street was quiet and lined with cars. It was a risk to use his own car, but a calculated risk: it was a dark VW Polo and anonymous enough to sit inconspicuously among all the other parked cars. No one would notice the car; but the danger was that they might notice him sitting in it. Waiting.

  Earlier, he had switched the car radio on low and had let the chatter wash over him. He had been too preoccupied to listen; his mind too full with the raw energy of anticipation for the reports of the campaigns of the various contenders for the Chancellorship to stimulate the contempt that they normally provoked in him. Then, as the time approached and his mouth grew dry and his pulse grew faster, he had switched the radio off.

  Now he sat in the dark and silence and fought back the emotions that surged up in great waves from deep within. He had to be in the moment itself. He had to shut everything else out and focus. Be disciplined. The Japanese had a word for it: zanshin. He had to achieve zanshin: that state of peace and relaxation, of total fearlessness while facing danger or challenge, that allowed the mind and body to perform with deadly accuracy and efficiency. Yet there was no denying the feeling of a monumental destiny about to be fulfilled. Not only had his entire life been a preparation for this moment, more than one lifetime had been dedicated to bringing him to this place and to this time. The point of convergence was close. Seconds away.