by Craig Russel
The concept of a Murder Commission policeman having an academic background obviously fazed Severts somewhat, because he stopped and looked at Fabel in blank appraisal for a moment. Severts had a long, lean face. After a moment his wide mouth broke into a smile.
‘Really? Cool.’ He recommenced leading Fabel and Brauner to the corner of the site. They had to step down two levels and stood on an area about five metres square. Each level was smooth and even and Fabel noticed that he could still, just, see out across ground level around them. He couldn’t imagine the patience that would be needed for such work – then he gave a small laugh as the image of Werner came to mind.
The excavated ground beneath them was banded, like rock strata laid on their side: a strange mix of pale sand, dry, black earth and some kind of bright, coarse silicate that glittered in the sunlight. The surface was punctuated with fragments of what looked like rough sacking and then broke into more irregular rubble and stone towards the edges of the area. In one corner of the excavation the upper half of a man’s body had been exposed. He was recumbent, on his side with his back to them, but lying at a slight angle so that he remained buried from the waist down. It gave him the appearance of lying in bed.
‘We found him early this morning,’ Severts explained. ‘The team like to get started early… get down here before rush hour.’
‘Who found him?’ asked Fabel.
‘Franz Brandt. He’s a postgrad student of mine. After we exposed enough of the body to establish that it wasn’t ancient, we stopped and contacted the Polizei Hamburg. We photographed and documented every stage of the exposure.’
Fabel and Brauner moved closer to the body. It certainly wasn’t ancient. The dead man was wearing a suit jacket of coarse blue serge. They moved around the body until they could see the face. It was thin, pale and pinched, topped with frazzled wisps of blond hair. The closed eyes were sunken into the skull and the neck seemed too thin and scrawny for the still-white shirt collar. The dead man’s skin had the look of old, yellowing paper and his wide, sharp jaw was patchily stubbled with two or three days’ pale growth. The emaciation made fixing the dead man’s age difficult, but there was something about the face and the patchy stubble that suggested youth. His lips were slightly parted, as if he were about to speak, and one hand seemed to grasp at something in the air. Something invisible to the living.
‘He can’t have been here long,’ said Fabel, squatting down. ‘As far as I can see, decomposition is limited. But it’s the weirdest corpse I’ve come across in a while. He looks like he has starved to death.’ He stood up and looked around the site, his expression puzzled. ‘It took a lot of effort for someone to bury him this deep. A lot of effort and a lot of time. I don’t see how they could have done it without being noticed, even at night.’
‘They didn’t,’ said Severts. ‘There was no sign of the ground around him having been disturbed.’
Brauner bent closer to the body. He touched the face with his latex-sheathed fingers, then, sighing in frustration, he snapped off one of his forensic gloves and touched the papery skin with his naked hand. He smiled grimly and turned to Severts, who nodded knowingly.
‘He didn’t starve to death, Jan,’ said Brauner. ‘It’s lack of moisture and air that’s done this to him. He’s desiccated. Completely dried out. A mummy.’
‘What?’ Fabel crouched down again. ‘But he looks like a normal corpse. I thought mummified bodies were all brown and leathery.’
‘Only the ones you find in bogs.’ A tall, lean young man with red hair tied back in a ponytail had joined them.
‘This is Franz Brandt,’ said Severts. ‘As I told you, it was Franz who uncovered the body.’
Fabel stood up and shook hands with the young red-haired man.
‘When I first saw him I suspected right away that he had been mummified.’ Brandt continued his explanation. ‘Dr Severts here is a leading expert on the subject and I have a great interest in mummies myself. The bog bodies you’re thinking about go through a different process entirely: the acids and the tannin in peat bogs tan the skin of the bodies within them. They literally turn into leather bags: sometimes all that’s left is their hide, while the internal organs and even the bones can dissolve to nothing.’ He nodded towards the body. ‘This fellow has the appearance of a desert mummy. The emaciated appearance and the parchment texture of the skin… he’s been dried out almost immediately in an oxygen-deprived environment.’
‘And, despite his appearance, he didn’t die recently. But, as you can see from his clothing, he is no relic of the Middle Ages.’ Severts indicated the area of the excavation they were in with a sweep of his hand. ‘The evidence around the body gives me an idea how it happened. Our geophysics and the records we have for this site suggest that where we are standing was a loading wharf during the Second World War.’
Brauner moved across to the band of glittering dirt. He picked some up and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Glass?’
Severts nodded. ‘It was sand. Everything here is basically the same pale sand. It’s just that some has been mixed with black ash while this outer ring has been subjected to such intense heat that it has turned into crude glass crystals.’
Fabel nodded grimly. ‘The British firebombing of nineteen forty-three?’
‘That would be my guess,’ said Severts. ‘It would fit with what we know of this location. And with this form of mummification, which was a common result of the intense temperatures created by the firestorm. It looks to me as if he took cover in some kind of quayside air-raid shelter, improvised with sandbags. There must have been an incendiary burst very close which, basically, baked and buried him.’
Fabel’s gaze remained locked on the mummified body. Operation Gomorrah. Eight thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of incendiaries and high explosives had been dropped on Hamburg by the British by night, the Americans by day. In parts of the city the temperature of the air, out in the open, had reached more than a thousand degrees. Some forty-five thousand Hamburg citizens had burned in the flames or been roasted to death by the intense heat. He gazed at the thin features, made too fine by having the moisture sucked from the flesh beneath the skin. He had been wrong. Of course he had seen bodies like this before: old black-and-white photographs from Hamburg and from Dresden. Many had been baked into mummies without being buried: dried out within moments, exposed to blast-furnace temperatures in the airless open streets or in the air-raid shelters that had been turned into bake ovens. But Fabel had never seen one in the flesh, albeit desiccated flesh.
‘It’s difficult to believe this man has been dead for more than sixty years,’ he said eventually.
Brauner grinned and slapped his broad hand on Fabel’s shoulder. ‘It’s simple biology, Jan. Decomposition requires bacteria; bacteria require oxygen. No oxygen, no bacteria, no decomposition. When we dig him out, we’ll probably find some limited putrefaction in his thorax. We all carry bacteria in our gut, and when we die they’re the first things to start work on us. Anyway, I’ll do a full forensics on the body and then I’ll pass it on to the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf for a full autopsy. We might still be able to confirm a cause of death, which I would gamble a year’s salary on being asphyxiation. And we’ll be able to work out the rough biological age of the corpse.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. He turned to Severts and his student, Brandt. ‘I don’t see that we need to hold up the rest of your excavation. But if you find anything in your dig that relates or you think relates to the body, please let me know.’ He handed Severts his Polizei Hamburg contact card.
‘I will do,’ said Severts. He nodded in the direction of the corpse, who still shunned them with his turned shoulder, as if trying to return to a rudely disturbed sleep. ‘Looks like he wasn’t a murder victim after all.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘That all depends on your point of view.’
1.50 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
The call had come in as Fabel was making his way back
to the Presidium. Werner had phoned to say that he and Maria were in the Schanzenviertel. A killer had been caught, almost literally red-handed, cleaning up the murder scene and about to dispose of the body.
It was clear that Werner had everything in hand, but Fabel felt the need to get involved in a ‘live’ inquiry after a morning with a cold case that was almost certainly sixty years old and not a homicide. He told Werner that he would head straight over to the address he had given.
‘By the way, Jan,’ Werner said, ‘I think you ought to know we’ve got a bit of a celebrity victim… Hans-Joachim Hauser.’
Fabel recognised the name immediately. Hauser had been a reasonably prominent member of the radical Left in the 1970s: he was now a vocal environmental campaigner who had a taste for the media limelight. ‘God… that’s weird…’ Fabel spoke as much to himself as to Werner.
‘What is?’
‘Synchronicity, I suppose. You know, when something that you would not expect to encounter that often crops up several times in a short space of time. On the way into the Presidium today I heard Bertholdt Muller-Voigt on the radio. You know, the Environment Senator. He was giving his boss Schreiber a really rough time. And two or three nights ago he was in my brother’s restaurant at the same time as me and Susanne. If I remember rightly, Muller-Voigt and Hauser used to be very much of a double act back in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.’ Fabel paused, then added gloomily: ‘That’s all we need. A public-figure murder. Any sign of the press yet?’
‘Nope,’ said Werner. ‘Mind you, despite his best efforts, and unlike his chum Muller-Voigt, Hauser really was yesterday’s news.’
Fabel sighed. ‘Not any more…’
There was an untidy exuberance to the Schanzenviertel. It was a part of Hamburg that, like so many others in the city, was undergoing a great many changes. The Schanzenviertel lay just to the north of St Pauli and had not always enjoyed the most salubrious of reputations. The quarter still had its problems, but it had recently become the focus for more affluent incomers.
And, of course, it was the ideal city quarter in which to live if you were a left-wing environmental campaigner. The Schanzenviertel had the credentials of Cool in exactly the right mix: it was one of the most multicultural of Hamburg’s districts and its vast range of fashionable restaurants meant that most of the world’s cuisines were represented. Its arthouse cinemas, the open-air theatre in the Sternschanzen Park and the requisite number of pavement cafes made it trendy enough to be up and coming; but it also had enough social problems, principally drug-related, not to be seen as too ‘yuppie’. It was the kind of place in which you cycled and you recycled, where you wore second-hand chic, but where, while you sat sipping your fair-trade mocha at a pavement table, you tapped away at your ultra-cool, ultra-slim, ultra-expensive titanium laptop computer.
Hans-Joachim Hauser’s residence was on the ground floor of a solidly built 1920s apartment block in the heart of the quarter, near where Stresemannstrasse and Schanzenstrasse crossed each other. There was a clutch of police vehicles, in the Polizei Hamburg’s new silver and blue livery, parked outside and the pavement in front of the block’s entrance was ringed with red-and-white-striped crime scene tape. Fabel parked his BMW untidily behind one of the patrol cars and a uniformed officer headed determinedly over from the perimeter tape to tackle him; Fabel got out of the car and held up his oval Kriminalpolizei disc as he strode towards the building and the uniform backed off.
Werner Meyer was waiting at the doorway of Hauser’s apartment. ‘We can’t go in yet, Jan,’ he said, gesturing to where, a little way down the hall, Maria was talking to a young, boyish-looking man in white forensics coveralls. His surgical mask hung loose around his neck and he had the hood pulled down from a thick mop of black hair above a pale bespectacled face. Fabel recognised him as Holger Brauner’s deputy, Frank Grueber, whose archaeology background he had discussed with Brauner and Severts. Grueber and Maria were clearly talking about the crime scene, but there was a relaxed informality about Grueber’s posture as they talked. Fabel noticed that Maria, in contrast, leaned back against the wall with her arms folded in front of her.
‘ Harry Potter and the Ice Maiden…’ Werner said dryly. ‘Is it true those two are an item?’
‘No idea.’ Fabel lied. Maria kept almost all of her personal life locked up tight, along with her emotions, whenever she was at work. But Fabel had been there – the only one there – as she had lain, close to death, after she had been stabbed by one of the most dangerous killers the team had ever hunted. Fabel had shared Maria’s terror in those stretched, tense minutes until the Medicopter had arrived. Their shared fear had been a forced intimacy that had created an unspoken bond between them and, during the two years since, Maria had imparted to her boss small confidences about her personal life – but only those things that could possibly have had some bearing on her work. One of these confidences had been that she had become involved with Frank Grueber.
Down the hall, Grueber concluded his briefing to Maria. He touched her elbow in a gesture of farewell and headed back down the apartment hallway. There was something about that gesture that bothered Fabel. Not the informality of it: rather the almost imperceptible tensing of Maria’s posture in response. As if a very faint electric current had been passed to her.
Maria came back down the hall to the doorway.
‘We still can’t go in,’ she explained. ‘Grueber has his work really cut out for him. The killer – a woman – was disturbed cleaning up the scene. Apparently she made too good a job of it and forensics are finding it hard to pick up anything worthwhile.’ She shrugged. ‘But it’s academic, I suppose. If you catch the killer at the scene then there’s no better forensic trace than that.’
Fabel turned to Maria. ‘The suspect was disturbed cleaning up the scene… by whom?’
‘A friend of Hauser’s…’ said Maria. ‘A very young, pretty male friend of Hauser’s called Sebastian Lang, who found the door unlocked
… although apparently he did have a key himself.’
Fabel nodded. Hans-Joachim Hauser had never made any secret of his homosexuality.
‘Lang had come back to pick something up from the apartment before going into town for lunch,’ continued Maria. ‘He heard noises from the bathroom and, assuming it was Hauser, went through and disturbed the killer as she cleaned up the scene.’
‘Where is the suspect?’ asked Fabel.
‘Uniform have taken her back to the Presidium for us,’ Werner answered. ‘She seems a pretty disturbed individual… no one could get much sense out of her, other than she wasn’t finished cleaning.’
‘Okay. If we can’t get into the crime scene, then we should maybe head back to the Murder Commission and interview the suspect. But I’d like Frau Doctor Eckhardt to do a psychological assessment of her first.’ Fabel snapped open his cellphone and hit a pre-set button.
‘Institute for Legal Medicine… Doctor Eckhardt speaking…’ The voice that answered was female: deep and warm and tinged with a soft Bavarian accent.
‘Hi, Susanne… it’s me. How’s it going?’
She sighed. ‘Wishing we were back on Sylt… What’s up?’
Fabel explained about the arrest of the woman in Schanzenviertel and that he wanted Susanne to do an assessment before they interrogated her.
‘I’m tied up until late afternoon. Is four p.m. okay?’
Fabel looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. If they waited for the assessment it would mean they would not get to interview the suspect until the early evening.
‘Okay. But I think we’ll have to have a preliminary with her beforehand.’
‘Fine. I’ll see you at four at the Presidium,’ said Susanne. ‘What’s the suspect’s name?’
‘Just a second…’ Fabel turned to Maria. ‘What name do we have for the woman in custody?’
Maria flipped open her notebook and scanned her notes for a moment.
‘Dreyer…’ she said eventual
ly.
‘Kristina Dreyer?’
Maria looked at Fabel in surprise. ‘Yes. You know her?’
Fabel didn’t answer Maria but spoke again to Susanne. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and snapped his cellphone shut. Then he turned to Maria. ‘Get Grueber. Tell him I don’t care what stage forensics are at – I want to see the murder scene and the victim. Now.’
2.10 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
It was clear that Grueber recognised the futility of trying to deny the Murder Commission team access to the murder scene. But with a determined authority that did not sit well with his youthful looks he had insisted that, instead of the usual requirement of blue forensic overshoes and latex gloves, the team should all wear the full forensic coverall suits and face masks.
‘She has left us practically nothing,’ explained Grueber. ‘It’s the most thorough clean-up of a scene that I’ve ever come across. She’s gone over almost every surface with a bleach-based cleaner or solution. It destroys practically all forensic traces and degrades any surviving DNA.’
After they were suited up, Grueber led Fabel, Werner and Maria through the hall. Fabel took in each of the rooms as he passed. There was at least one forensic technician working in each. Fabel noticed how tidy and clean the apartment was. It was large and spacious, but had an almost cramped feeling to it that came from the way nearly every free square metre of wall space was devoted to bookshelves. There were magazines carefully stacked on a unit and the hall’s shelves had obviously been used to cope with the overflow of books, vinyl LPs and CDs from the living room. Fabel paused and examined some of the music. There were several Reinhard Mey albums, but they were mostly older stuff that had been reissued on CD. Hauser had obviously felt the need to hear the protest songs of one generation on the technology of the next. Fabel gave a small laugh of recognition as he noticed a CD of Ewigkeit by Cornelius Tamm. Tamm had styled himself as Germany’s Bob Dylan and had enjoyed fair success in the 1960s before taking a spectacular dive into obscurity. Fabel removed a large, glossy-sleeved book from the shelves: it was a collection of Don McCullin’s Vietnam photographs; next to it was a travel book in English and various textbooks on ecology. All was just as you would have expected. Where there was a break in the shelving, any clear wall space had been filled with framed posters. Fabel stopped in front of one: it was a framed black-and-white photograph of a young man with flowing shoulder-length hair and a moustache. He was stripped to the waist and was sitting on a rustic bench, an apple in his hand.
