by Craig Russel
He was tall and his heavy shoulders were encased in an exotic armour and draped in a black cloak. He removed his ornate helmet. His face was built of sharp Slavic angles and possessed a callous handsomeness. His eyes were a piercing, bright and dreadfully cold emerald-green and they burned into hers. He smiled at her: a lover’s smile, but the eyes stayed cold. He stood close to her. So close that she could feel his chill breath on her.
‘He is here,’ she said, looking into the green eyes but speaking to a doctor in another dimension.
‘I am here,’ said the cruelly handsome Slav.
‘Are you afraid?’ Minks’s voice, the voice from another dimension, suddenly became fainter. Further away.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Now I am afraid. But I like this fear.’
‘Do you feel anything other than fear?’ asked Minks, but his voice had faded almost beyond hearing. Maria felt her fear change. Sharpen.
‘Your voice is becoming faint,’ she said. ‘I can hardly hear you. Why is your voice fainter?’
Minks replied, but his voice had now drifted so far away and she couldn’t make out his answer.
‘Why can’t I hear you?’ Now there was a new magnitude to her fear. It burned furnace raw and deep. ‘Why can’t I hear you?’ She screamed into the dark sky with its too-big moon.
Vasyl Vitrenko leaned forward, tilting down to kiss her on the forehead. His lips were dry, cold. ‘Because you’ve got it wrong, Maria.’ His voice was heavy with an Eastern European accent. ‘Dr Minks isn’t there. This isn’t one of your hypnotherapy sessions. This is real.’ He reached beneath his billowing black cloak. ‘This is no dream. And there’s no one here except you and me. Alone.’
Maria wanted to scream but couldn’t. Instead she stared as if hypnotised at the evil moonlight gleam on Vasyl Vitrenko’s long, broad-bladed knife.
9.10 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina had never seen a human scalp before, but she knew with absolute certainty that that was exactly what she was looking at. To start with, it had been the colour of the hair that had prevented her identifying it as something human. Red. Unnaturally red.
But there was now no doubt in her mind that this was human hair. Glistening wet hair. And skin. A large ragged disc of it. It had been nailed to the bathroom door with three panel pins. The top of it had folded over, revealing a little of the puckered bloody underside where the skin had been sliced and pulled away from the skull beneath. A long ‘Y’ shape of glistening red streamed from it and down the wooden bathroom door.
Blood.
Kristina shook her head. No. Not again. She had seen too much blood in her life. No more. Not now. Not when she had just got her life back. This was so unfair.
She leaned forward again and felt her legs shudder, as if they were struggling to support the weight of her body. Yes, there was blood, but there was too much of it to be blood alone. And too vivid a red. The same vivid red as the sodden, matted hair.
Her pulse thudded in her ears, a tempo that increased as a simple but obvious thought hit her. Whose hair?
Kristina reached out with trembling fingers and pressed them against an area of the door’s wooden surface that was not streaked with glistering red.
‘Herr Hauser…?’ Her voice was high and tremulous.
She pushed and the door of the bathroom swung open.
9.12 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
Vitrenko smiled at Maria. He looped his arm around her back and pressed her close to him, as if they were about to dance. She could feel the unyielding solidity of his body tight against hers.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said, and meant it. Her terror subsided. He eased his body from hers but still held her firm. He lifted the knife and ran its keen edge over her shoulders, her breast and let it rest just below her chest, its cold sharp tip pressing lightly into the soft space just below her sternum.
‘Do you want me to do it?’ he asked. ‘Again?’
‘Yes. I want you to do it again.’ She looked into the green eyes that still shone cold and cruel.
There was a crash of thunder. Then another. She felt the knife-point pressure on her abdomen increase, and the keen pain as the tip pierced her skin. There were another two loud claps of thunder and the world around her dissolved into darkness.
Maria opened her eyes and found herself looking across at Dr Minks. He held his hands together before him as if he had been clapping. The thunder that had brought her back. She straightened herself up and looked around his office, as if reassuring herself that she was back in reality.
‘You closed me out, Maria,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want me there.’
‘He took control,’ she said, and coughed when she realised that her voice was shaking.
‘No, he didn’t,’ said Dr Minks. ‘You took control. He doesn’t exist in your dreams. You recreate him. You control his words and actions. It was your will that sought to exclude me.’ He paused and crumpled back into his chair, again examining his notes, but the frown did not fade from his brow. ‘You saw the same landmarks and motifs again?’
‘Yes. The galleon where the harbour-police patrol boat was that night and the castle where the old barn was. What I don’t understand is why it is all so elaborate in the dream. Why is he dressed in armour? And why is everything changed into some kind of historical counterpart?’
‘I don’t know. It could be that you are trying, in your mind, to place what happened that night into the past… A distant past: like a previous life, almost. Do you feel like it’s the same night as you were stabbed?’
‘Yes and no. It’s like the same night, but in another dimension or universe or something. Like you said, as if it were a completely different time, as well.’
‘And, in this scenario, you let your attacker come close to you? You permit him to have close personal contact?’
‘That’s the thing I can never understand,’ said Maria. ‘Why do I allow him to touch me, when I can’t let anyone else touch me?’
‘Because he is the origin of your trauma. The source of your fear. Without this man, you would have no post-traumatic stress, no aphenphosmphobia, no panic attacks.’ Minks took out a thick leather-bound pad and started to scribble on it. He ripped a page out and handed it to Maria. ‘I want you to take these. I feel we have too big a mountain to climb with therapy alone.’
‘Drugs?’ Maria did not reach to take the prescription. ‘What is it?’
‘Propanolol. A beta blocker. The same sort of thing that I’d prescribe if you had high blood pressure. It’s a very mild dose and I only want you to take one eighty-milligram tablet on, well, difficult days. You can make it a hundred and sixty milligrams if it’s really bad. You don’t suffer from asthma or any respiratory problems, do you?’
Maria shook her head. ‘What does it do?’
‘It is a noradrenalin inhibitor. It restricts the chemicals that your body generates when you’re afraid. Or angry.’ Dr Minks thrust the prescription in Maria’s direction and she took it from him.
‘Will it affect my performance at work?’
Minks smiled and shook his head. ‘No, it shouldn’t do. Some people feel tired or lethargic with it, but not in the same way it would if I were to give you Valium. This might slow you down a little, but otherwise you should feel no ill effects. And, as I said, I only want you to take it when you really feel you need to.’
Dr Minks stood up and shook Maria’s hand. She noticed that the psychologist’s palm was cool and fleshy. And rather moist. She pulled her hand away a little too quickly.
After confirming the following week’s appointment with Minks’s secretary, Maria made her way to the elevator. As she did so she paused to take two things from her shoulder bag. The first was a handkerchief with which she wiped vigorously at the hand that Minks had shaken. The second was her police service-issue SIG-Sauer nine-millimetre automatic, sheathed in its clip-on holster, which she attached to the belt of her trousers befor
e pressing the button to summon the lift.
9.12 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina Dreyer stood framed in the bathroom doorway. She opened her mouth to scream, but her fear strangled the sound in her throat. For four years, twice a week, Kristina had cleaned Herr Hauser’s bathroom until it shone scalpel-bright. She had wiped every surface, swept every corner, polished every tap and fitting. It was a space so familiar to her that she could have navigated it with her eyes closed.
But not today. Today it was an unknown hell.
The bathroom was large and bright. A tall curtainless window, its lower half frosted glass, looked out onto the small square courtyard behind the apartment. At this time of morning when the sun was angled right, it flooded the bathroom with light. For some, the decor would have been too clinical. But not for Kristina, for whom nothing could be too clean; too sterile. The entire room was lined with ceramic tiles: large and pale sky-blue on the floor; smaller and bright white on the walls. Herr Hauser’s bathroom had always been a delight to clean because the light sought out each corner and the tiles always responded to Kristina’s abstergent touch with a keen gleam.
There was a great rainbow-shaped smear of blood that arced across the pale blue floor tiles. At its end, Herr Hauser sat slumped where he had been dragged, between the toilet and the side of the bath. Bright blood glistened against the gleaming white porcelain of the toilet bowl. Hauser glowered across the bathroom at Kristina, his mouth gaped wide, with an expression that could have been almost surprise were it not for the way his brow hooded his eyes in a disapproving frown. There was silence, broken only by a dripping tap beating a slow tattoo on the bath’s enamel. Again something gurgled and struggled to free itself from Kristina’s constricted throat: something between a cry and a retch.
Hauser’s face was streaked with gouts of bright viscous blood. Someone had sliced a line, mostly straight but in places ragged, across his forehead about five or six centimetres above his eyebrows. The cut had been deep. To the bone. And it swept around the temples and above the ears. The skin, flesh and hair above the slash had been ripped from Hauser’s head and the blood-mottled dome of his skull was exposed. Hauser’s gore-smeared face and the exposed skull above looked to Kristina like some horrific parody of a boiled egg rammed into an eggcup. Even more blood had soaked into Hauser’s shirt and trousers, and Kristina saw that a second cut ran across his throat and neck. She dropped the cleaning-fluid spray onto the floor and leaned her shoulder against the wall. Suddenly she felt all the strength ebb from her legs and she slid down the wall, her cheek sliding against the chill kiss of the porcelain tiles. She was now slumped in the corner by the door, mirroring the posture of her dead client. She started to sob.
There was so much to clean. So much to clean.
9.15 a.m. Polizei Hamburg Police Headquarters, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
The new headquarters of the Hamburg police – the Police Presidium – lay to the north of Winterhuder Stadtpark city park. It never took Jan Fabel long to drive to Alsterdorf from his Poseldorf apartment, but today was his first day back from four days’ leave. Just a couple of days before he had stood with Susanne on the wide, curving beach at List, on the North Sea island of Sylt. A couple of days and a lifetime away.
Driving through the dapples of sunlight that danced between the trees of the Stadtpark, Fabel felt in no hurry to step back into the reality of his life as head of a murder squad. But as he listened to his car radio, each news report seemed to sink into him like lead, anchoring him further into his accustomed world, while the memory of a long scythe of golden sand under a vast, bright sky drifted further from him.
Fabel caught the end of a report about the forthcoming general election: the conservative CDU/CSU coalition led by Angela Merkel had increased its already dramatic lead in the polls. It looked like Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s gamble of calling an early election was not going to pay off. A commentator discussed Frau Merkel’s change of style and appearance: apparently she had taken Hillary Clinton as a model for her hairstyle. Fabel sighed as he listened to how the various party leaders ‘positioned’ themselves with the electorate: it seemed to him that German politics were no longer about firm convictions or political ideals, but about individuals. Like the British and Americans before them, Germans were beginning to value style over substance; personalities over policies.
While he drove through the sunlit park, Fabel’s attention perked up as he listened while two of those personalities clashed. Hans Schreiber, the Social Democrat First Mayor of Hamburg, was engaged in an ill-tempered debate with Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, the city’s Environment Minister – who was a member of the Bundnis 90/Die Grunen political party. The same Muller-Voigt that Fabel and Susanne had seen in Lex’s restaurant on Sylt. The SPD and the Greens were part of Germany’s ruling coalition, and the political complexion of Hamburg’s city government was also red-green, but there was little evidence in the recorded exchange that Muller-Voigt was, indeed, a Schreiber-appointed minister. The pre-general election cracks in Germany’s political structures were beginning to show. The animosity between the two men over the past month or so had been well documented: Muller-Voigt had referred to Schreiber’s wife, Karin, as ‘Lady Macbeth’ in reference to her ruthless ambitions for her husband; specifically an ambition that he become Federal Chancellor of Germany. Fabel knew Schreiber – knew him better than Schreiber would have liked – and did not find it difficult to believe that he fully shared his wife’s ambitions.
Fabel stopped for a red signal at the traffic lights in Winterhuder Stadtpark. He watched idly as a Lycra-clad cyclist crossed in front of him, then turned to see that the car that had pulled up next to him was being driven by a woman in her thirties. She berated the two children in the rear seat for some misbehaviour or other, conducting her wrath through the rear-view mirror, her mouth moving animatedly, her anger mute behind the closed car windows. Beyond the annoyed mother’s car, a city parks employee brushed litter from the path that ran between towering trees up to the vast dome-capped tower of the Winterhuder Wasserturm.
The everyday routine of a city. Small lives with small worries about small things. People who did not deal with death as their day-to-day business.
The news switched to the latest from London, which had recently been rocked by suicide bombings. A second campaign of attacks had failed, most likely because of faulty detonators. Fabel tried to reassure himself that Hamburg was far away from such troubles. That it was another land. The terrorism that had rocked Germany in the 1970s and 1980s had passed into history, roughly at the same time as the Wall had come down. But there was a saying in Germany about Hamburg: If it rains in London, they put up their umbrellas in Hamburg. It was a sentiment that the half-British Fabel had always liked, that had given him a sense of place, of belonging; but today it gave him no cheer. Today, nowhere was safe.
Even in Hamburg, terrorism and its consequences were insidiously encroaching on people’s daily lives. Just driving into Hamburg city centre from his flat in Poseldorf had been changed for Fabel since the atrocities of 11 September in the USA. The American Consulate in Hamburg sat on the shore of the Alster and the shore-front road had been permanently sealed off after the attacks, meaning that Fabel had had to change the route to work he had taken every day since moving to Poseldorf.
The lights changed and the driver behind him tooted his horn, snapping Fabel out of his reverie. He turned up towards the Presidium.
The next item on the radio news was, ironically, about the protests over the closure of the British General Consulate in Hamburg. Germany’s most Anglophile city was stung by the suggestion. Hamburg also prided itself on being, after New York, the city with the most consulates in the world. But the ‘War on Terror’ was changing how states connected with each other. As Fabel pulled up in the secure car park of the Presidium, the future took a shadowy and vague form in his mind and darkened his post-leave mood even more.
Hamburg’s police headquarters – th
e Police Presidium – was less than five years old and still had the look and feel of a new building, like a newly tailored coat yet to yield to the shape of its wearer. The architectural concept behind the Presidium was to recreate the ‘Polizei Stern’, the police star, in building form, with the five-storey Presidium radiating outward towards each compass point from an unroofed circular atrium.
The Murder Commission – the Polizei Hamburg’s homicide squad – was on the third floor. As he emerged from the lift, Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped, middle-aged man with a tree-stump build. He had a file tucked under one arm and was carrying a coffee in his free hand. His heavy features broke into a smile as he saw Fabel.
‘Hi, Chef, how was your break?’
‘Too short, Werner,’ said Fabel and he shook hands with Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer. Werner had worked with Fabel longer, and more closely, than anyone else in the Murder Commission. His intimidating physical presence was actually totally at odds with his approach to police work. Werner was an almost obsessively methodical processor of evidence whose attention to detail had been the key factor in solving more than a few difficult cases. He was also Fabel’s close friend.
‘You should have taken another day,’ said Werner. ‘Stretched it over another weekend.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘I only have a few days’ leave left and I want to take another long weekend on Sylt in a couple of months. My brother’s birthday.’ The two men made their way along the curving corridor that followed, like all the main corridors of the Presidium, the circle of the central atrium. ‘Anyway, it’s been pretty quiet recently. Makes me nervous. I feel we’re overdue a big case. What’s been happening?’
‘Certainly nothing we had to bother you with,’ said Werner. ‘Maria got the Olga X case tied up, and there’s been a brawl killing in St Pauli, but other than that not much. I’ve set up a team meeting to brief you.’
The team assembled in the Murder Commission’s main meeting room just before noon. Fabel and Werner were joined by Senior Criminal Commissar Maria Klee: a tall, elegant woman in her thirties. She had a look that one would not automatically associate with a police officer. Her blonde hair was expensively cut and her restrained, tasteful grey suit and cream blouse gave her more the look of a corporate lawyer. Maria shared the second line of command under Fabel with Werner Meyer. Over the last year and a half, Werner and Maria had begun to jell as colleagues, but only after the team had nearly lost her in the same operation that had left another of the Murder Commission’s team dead.
