by Craig Russel
There were two younger officers already at the table when Fabel arrived. Criminal Commissars Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann were both proteges of Fabel’s. He had picked each for their very different styles and attitudes. It was Fabel’s management style to team up opposites: where others would see the potential for strife, Fabel would see the opportunity for a balance of complementary qualities. Anna and Henk were still finding that balance: it had been Anna’s former partner, Paul Lindemann, who had been killed. And he had died trying to save her life.
Anna Wolff looked even less like a police officer than Maria Klee, but in a completely different way. She was more youthful-looking than her twenty-eight years, and she habitually dressed in jeans and an oversized leather jacket. Her pretty face was topped by black hair cut short and spiky, and her large dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were always emphasised by dark mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. It would have been much easier to imagine Anna working in a hair salon rather than as a Murder Commission detective. But Anna Wolff was tough. She came from a family of Holocaust survivors and had served in the Israeli army before returning to her native Hamburg. In fact, Anna was probably the toughest member of Fabel’s team: intelligent, fiercely determined but impulsive.
Henk Hermann, Anna’s partner, could not have contrasted more with her. He was a tall, lanky man with a pale complexion and a perpetually earnest expression. Just as Anna could not have looked less like a police officer, Henk could not have looked more like one. The same could also have been said about Paul Lindemann, and Fabel knew that, initially, the physical similarity between Henk and his dead predecessor had taken the other members of the team aback.
Fabel looked around the table. It always struck him as odd just how different this disparate group of people were. An unlikely family. Very different individuals who had somehow stumbled into a very peculiar profession and into an unspoken dependence on each other.
Werner led Fabel through the current caseload. While he had been on leave, there had only been one murder: a drunken Saturday-night fight outside a nightclub in St Pauli had ended with a twenty-one-year-old haemorrhaging to death in the street. Werner handed over to Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann, who summarised the case and the progress to date. It was the type of murder that made up ninety per cent of the Murder Commission’s workload. Depressingly simple and straightforward: a moment of senseless rage, usually fuelled by drink, leaving one life lost and another in ruins.
‘Do we have anything else on the books?’ Fabel asked.
‘Just tying up the loose ends on the Olga X case.’ Maria flipped back through a few pages in her notebook. Olga X not only had no surname, her first name was unlikely to have been Olga. But the team had felt the need to give her some kind of identity. No one knew for sure where Olga had come from, but it was certainly somewhere in Eastern Europe. She had been working as a prostitute and had been beaten and strangled to death by a customer: a fat, balding thirty-nine-year-old insurance clerk called Thomas Wiesehan from Heimfeld with a wife and three children and no criminal record of any kind.
Dr Moller, the pathologist, had estimated Olga’s age to have been between eighteen and twenty.
Fabel looked puzzled. ‘But Werner told me that the Olga X case is all done and dusted, Maria. We have a full admission of guilt and unshakeable forensics to back it up. What “loose ends” do you have to tie up?’
‘Well, none really on the murder itself. It’s just I get the feeling there’s a people-trafficking connection to this. Some poor kid from Russia or God knows where being trapped into a prostitution career with promises of a proper job and a place in the West. Olga was a victim of slavery before she became a victim of murder. Wiesehan killed her all right… but some gang boss put her there for him to kill.’
Fabel examined Maria closely. She reflected his gaze with her frank, unreadable blue-grey eyes. It was not like Maria to invest herself so deeply in a case: Anna, yes; even Fabel himself. But not Maria. Maria’s efficiency as a detective had always been typified by her cool, professional, detached approach.
‘I understand how you feel,’ Fabel sighed. ‘I really do. But that’s not our concern. We had a murder to solve and we’ve solved it. I’m not saying that we just leave it there. Pass everything you’ve got on to Vice. And a copy to LKA Six.’ Fabel referred to the Polizei Hamburg’s newly re-formed, ninety-officer-strong State Crime Bureau 6 unit, the so-called Super LKA, that had been set up specifically to take on organised crime.
Maria shrugged. There was nothing to read in her pale blue-grey eyes. ‘Okay, Chef.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Fabel.
The phone rang before anyone had a chance to answer. Werner picked up the receiver and made confirming noises as he scribbled notes on a pad.
‘Right on cue,’ said Werner as he hung up. ‘A body’s been uncovered at an archaeological dig, down by the Speicherstadt.’
‘Ancient?’
‘That’s what they’re trying to establish, but Holger Brauner and his team are on their way.’ Werner referred to the forensics-squad leader. ‘Whom shall I pass this to, Chef?’
Fabel held out an open hand across the table. ‘Give it to me. You guys have enough on, tidying up this brawl killing.’ Fabel took the pad and wrote the details down in his notebook. He stood up and took his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘And I could do with some fresh air.’
Noon: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina knew that she was face to face again with Chaos. She had lived with it for years. It had taken her to the brink of madness once before and she had cut it out of her life: an excision that had been as traumatic and as painful as if she had carved it out in flesh from her own body.
Now Chaos stormed and raged around her. Some distant sea wall had been breached and a tidal wave of turmoil had been silently hurtling towards her, waiting to collide with her the moment she opened the door to Herr Hauser’s apartment. In that moment she knew that she faced the greatest struggle of her life: that she must defeat Chaos anew.
It was midday now. She had worked at the bathroom all morning. Once more the porcelain shone sterile and cold; the gleam had been restored to the floor. Herr Hauser now lay in the bath. Kristina had fought Chaos with Method. She had refused to let her terror blind her and she had shaped a strategy for restoring the bathroom to order.
She had begun by hoisting Herr Hauser into the bath, to contain the mess in one area. As she had struggled with him, his exposed skull, cold and clammy with blood and ribbons of remaining tissue, had pressed against her cheek. Kristina had had to run to the toilet bowl to vomit, had taken a few moments to recompose herself, and then had returned to her task. She had stripped Herr Hauser and placed his blood-soaked garments into a plastic bin bag. Then she had taken the shower head down from its cradle and rinsed the blood from him by hand. She had placed a second black plastic bin bag over his head and neck, binding it tight with some parcel tape which she’d found in one of Herr Hauser’s drawers, and had sealed the bag around his shoulders. Then she had carefully removed the shower curtain from its rail and wrapped Herr Hauser’s body in it, again taking some parcel tape and binding the improvised shroud tight.
Kristina had once more been faced with lifting Hauser’s dead weight. She had lugged the body out of the bath and had laid it on the clean floor, and had then set about sanitising the bath. Herr Hauser had always insisted that Kristina use environmentally friendly cleaning materials: vinegar to clean the toilet, that kind of thing. It had made Kristina’s job that much harder, but she hadn’t minded. She loved scrubbing, scouring and polishing. But this task was too much. She had used bleach on the bath, toilet and sink and had washed the floor and wall tiles with a bleach solution. Then she had gone over every surface with an antibacterial spray.
Now she was done. She had not defeated Chaos. She knew this. She had merely deflected it. She had been here the whole morning: it meant that she had let down the other customer who was scheduled in her diary for before lun
ch on Fridays. It would not even have been so bad if she had only been late for them: she simply hadn’t turned up. It would have a domino effect on an entire day’s clients – then tomorrow’s, and then a whole week’s. A reputation for punctuality and reliability that it had taken four years to build up was gone in four hours. Her cellphone had started to ring just after her next appointment was due and Kristina had been forced to switch it off so that she could concentrate on her task.
Kristina surveyed the bathroom. At least here order had been restored. With the exception of the carefully polythene-shrouded Herr Hauser, who lay untidily on the floor by the tub, the bathroom looked cleaner and shone brighter than ever.
She leaned back against the wall, a cleaning cloth hanging in her rubber-gloved hand, and allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. It was then that she became aware of someone standing behind her in the bathroom doorway. She turned suddenly and they both gave a start. A tall, slim, dark-haired young man with delicate features and large bewildered blue eyes stared at Kristina, then saw the shower-curtain mummy by the bath. His face blanched grey-white and he made a startled noise before turning and running down the hall towards the door.
Kristina gazed blankly at the now empty doorway for a moment before turning back to the bathroom.
There was a corner she had perhaps missed.
Noon: HafenCity site, by the Speicherstadt, Hamburg
If there was any landscape that defined the city of Hamburg for Fabel, it was this one.
As he drove down Mattenwiete and across the Holzbrucke bridge towards the Elbe, the horizon opened up ahead of him and the elaborate spires and gables of the Speicherstadt pierced a stretched silk sky of unbroken blue.
Speicherstadt means ‘Warehouse City’ and that was exactly what it was: towering ornate red-brick warehouses, row after row, interlaced with cobbled streets and canals, dominating the city’s waterfront. These beautiful nineteenth-century buildings had been the lungs that had breathed life into Hamburg commerce.
For Fabel, there was something about the architecture of the Speicherstadt that summed up his adopted city for him. The architecture was ornate and confident, but always practical and restrained. It was how Germany’s richest city and its people displayed wealth and success: clearly, but with decorum. The Speicherstadt was also a symbol of Hamburg’s independence and its special status as a city-state within Germany. An independence that had, at various times in Hamburg’s history, been more than a little precarious. The statues of Hammonia and Europa, the personifications of Hamburg and Europe as goddesses, stood guard on the stanchions of Brooksbrucke bridge and looked down on Fabel as he crossed into the Speicherstadt.
Until recently the Speicherstadt had been the world’s biggest bonded area, with customs posts at every point of entry. Fabel passed the old customs office to his right, which had found a new life as a trendy coffee shop. Across from the coffee shop, on the other side of the cobbled Kehrwieder Brook, the first warehouse in the Speicherstadt had also found a new role: a snaking queue of tourists and locals were waiting to be admitted to the ‘Hamburg Dungeon’, an idea that Hamburg, along with many other ideas, had imported from Britain. Fabel could never understand the need that others felt to be made afraid, to experience ersatz horrors, when he felt he had had a bellyful of the real thing.
Fabel turned left into Kehrwieder Brook before taking Kibbelsteg, which dissected the Speicherstadt in a straight, unbroken line, and the vast brick warehouses on either side, trimmed and capped with ornate verdigris-tinged bronze, glowed red in the midday sun. Here all kinds of real trades were still carried out. Cradles, suspended from the jutting winches at the tops of the warehouses, hoisted up deep stacks of oriental carpets and, as he passed the Kaffeerosterei, the warm air filled with the Speicherstadt’s trade-mark smell, the rich odour from the coffee roasters preparing the beans for storage.
Fabel drove on and eventually the nineteenth century surrendered to the twenty-first, as he passed under an arching forest of perpetually moving cranes that marked Germany’s biggest building site. Hamburg’s HafenCity.
Hamburg had always been a city of opportunists: of traders and entrepreneurs. The city’s fiercely independent character was founded on its ability to look beyond its own horizons and connect with the wider world. In the Middle Ages, Hamburg’s politicians had always been merchants, businessmen. And, invariably, they would put trade before politics. Nothing had changed.
The HafenCity was a big idea, just as the Speicherstadt had been before it. A bold vision. It would take up to twenty years to complete. One row at a time, the new cathedrals of commerce, all steel and glass and youthful energy, were taking their serried places behind the old: the stately red-brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt. Two visions, born in separate centuries, fused by the heat of the same ambition: to make Hamburg Europe’s leading trading port. The HafenCity was being completed in planned stages. A row of buildings would be built all at the one time, combining luxury apartments with sleek, electronic-age office blocks; once complete, the next row would be started. Yet as high-speed internet connections were plumbed into each shining new building, the smell of the roasting coffee beans would drift in, reminding the brave new twenty-first century world that the old Speicherstadt was still very much part of the city’s life.
Hamburg liked to share its vision of the future, and a thirteen-metre-high observation platform, in the shape of an elevated ship’s bridge, and with the name, in English, HafenCity VIEWPOINT emblazoned against its terracotta-coloured flank, had been erected down by the edge of the Elbe. The viewing platform allowed visitors a 360-degree vista of the future. In one direction they could see where the new Opera House was to be built, its high-tech roof billowing like waves or sails, on top of the old Kaispeicher A storage quay. In the other, their view would arc around and past the new luxury-liner terminal to where the Elbe took a sweep and was spanned by the arched ironwork bridges that connected Hamburg to Harburg. All around the viewing tower the land had been cleared and levelled and lay naked, awaiting its shining new vestments.
Fabel parked on the uneven improvised car park, two hundred metres or so from the viewing platform. Two members of the Polizei Hamburg’s uniformed branch were already at the site and had done their usual thing of cordoning off the scene. In this case, their efforts seemed redundant: archaeology is forensic in its methodology, and the dig site had already been ringed off and divided into quadrants. As Fabel made his way across to the site he saw the familiar figure of Holger Brauner, the forensics chief. Brauner was dressed in his white coveralls and blue shoe-covers, but had his hood down and was not wearing his mask. He was engaged in conversation with a younger, taller man with long dark hair, swept back from his face and tied in a ponytail. The younger man’s dull green T-shirt and his slightly darker green cargo pants hung loosely on his angular frame. They both turned in Fabel’s direction as he approached.
‘Jan…’ Holger Brauner beamed at Fabel. ‘This is Herr Dr Severts, from the Universitat Hamburg’s archaeology department. He’s in charge of the dig. Dr Severts, this is Principal Chief Commissar Fabel from the Murder Commission.’
Fabel shook Severts’s hand. It felt callused and rough, as if the sand and earth in which Severts worked had become ingrained in the skin of his palm. It fitted with the colouring of his clothing; it was as if Severts was himself something of the earth.
‘Dr Severts and I were just discussing how close our disciplines are. In fact, I was explaining that my deputy, Frank Grueber, would have been even better suited to this case. He trained as an archaeologist himself before turning to forensics.’
‘Grueber?’ said Fabel. ‘I had no idea he’d been an archaeologist.’ Frank Grueber had only been a member of Brauner’s team for a little over a year, but Fabel could already see why Brauner had picked him as his deputy: Grueber had shown the same ability as Brauner at a crime scene to read both detail and context. It made sense to Fabel that Grueber had trained as an archaeologist:
reading the story of a landscape and that of a crime scene took the same type of intellect. Fabel recalled how he had once asked Grueber why he had become a forensic specialist. ‘Truth is the debt that we owe to the dead’ had been his reply. It was a reply that had impressed Fabel: it was also a reply that fitted just as well with a career as an archaeologist.
‘Archaeology’s loss is forensics’ gain,’ said Brauner. ‘I’m lucky to have him on the team. Actually, Frank has an interesting sideline going. He reconstructs faces from skeletonised archaeological remains. Universities from all over the place send him skulls to rebuild. It’s something I’ve always thought could come in handy in identifying unknown remains… who knows, maybe today’s the day…’
‘Fraid not,’ said Severts. ‘This victim’s got a face… This way, Herr Chief Commissar.’ The archaeologist paused while Fabel put on the blue forensic overshoes that Brauner handed him and then led the way across the archaeological site. In one corner the soil had been dug away deeper, in wide stepped tiers. ‘We have been taking the opportunity that all this land clearance offers to check out the area for early medieval settlement. This would have been largely marshland, and at one point completely inundated, but this has always been a natural harbour and crossing point…’
Brauner interrupted Severts. ‘Chief Commissar Fabel studied medieval European history himself.’
