‘Exactly. I want us to get back to the Presidium. I need to talk to Kristina Dreyer. This just isn’t fitting together for me.’
Just then, one of the forensic technicians called over to Grueber. Fabel, Maria and Werner gathered behind Grueber as he crouched down to examine the area indicated by the forensic technician, on the seam between the tiled bath side and the floor. Whatever it was, Fabel couldn’t see it.
‘What are we looking at?’
The technician took out a pair of surgical tweezers, eased something free and held it up. It was a hair.
‘I don’t get it…’ said the technician. ‘I checked here before and completely missed this.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s easy to do,’ said Grueber. ‘I was over here earlier myself and didn’t see it either. The important thing is that you found it.’
Fabel strained to see the hair. ‘I’m surprised you discovered it at all.’
Grueber took the tweezers from the technician and held up the hair to the light. He flipped open a magnifying lens from its case and peered at the hair like a jeweller appraising a valuable diamond.
‘Funny…’
‘What is?’ asked Fabel.
‘This hair is red. Naturally red, not dyed like the scalp. Anyway, it’s too long to have been the victim’s. Does the suspect have red hair?’
‘No,’ answered Fabel, and Maria and Werner exchanged looks. Kristina Dreyer had been taken from the scene before Fabel had arrived.
3.15 p.m.: Police Presidium, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
When Fabel entered the interview room, Kristina Dreyer’s expression was almost one of relief. She sat, small and forlorn, dressed in the too-big white forensic coverall they had given her when they took her own clothes for analysis.
‘Hello, Kristina,’ said Fabel, and drew up a chair next to Werner and Maria. As he did so, he handed Werner a file.
‘Hello, Herr Fabel.’ Tears welled up in Kristina’s dull blue eyes and one escaped across the roughened terrain of her cheekbone. There was a stretched vibrato in her voice. ‘I hoped it would be you. I’ve got all messed up again, Herr Fabel. It’s all gone… crazy… again.’
‘Why did you do it, Kristina?’ asked Fabel.
‘I had to. I had to clear it all up. I couldn’t let it win again.’
‘Let what win?’ asked Maria.
‘The madness. The mess… all that blood.’
Werner, who had been flicking through the file, closed it and leaned back in his chair with an expression that suggested everything had suddenly fallen into place for him.
‘I’m sorry, Kristina,’ said Werner. ‘I didn’t recognise your name to start with. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?’
Kristina looked to Fabel with a beseeching terror in her eyes. Fabel noticed that, at the same time, she began to tremble, and her breathing became laboured and fast. Fabel had seen frightened suspects before, but there was something body-racking about the terror that seemed suddenly to seize Kristina, and an alarm sounded somewhere in Fabel’s mind.
‘Are you feeling all right, Kristina?’ he asked. She nodded.
‘This isn’t the same. This isn’t the same at all…’ she said to Werner. ‘The last time…’ Her voice trailed off and Fabel noticed that the trembling had become a pronounced shake.
‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ he asked again.
It all happened so fast that Fabel didn’t have time to react. Kristina’s breathing took on an emphatic, urgent stridor; her face first flushed a bright, feverish red and then drained of all colour. She half-rose from her chair and grasped the edges of the table with a grip that turned her detergent-reddened knuckles yellow-white. Each inhalation became a long spasm that convulsed her body, yet her exhalations seemed short and insubstantial. She looked like someone trapped in a vacuum: desperately sucking at the void to fill her screaming lungs. Kristina lurched forward, jackknifing at the waist, her head coming down fast and hard towards the table top. Then, as if tugged at by an invisible rope, she lurched to the right and keeled over sideways. Fabel rushed forward to catch her.
Maria moved so fast that Fabel did not notice her send her chair crashing to the floor. Suddenly she had shouldered him out of the way and had grabbed Kristina firmly by the upper arms and eased her to the floor. She loosened the zip of Kristina’s coveralls at the neck.
‘A bag…’ Maria barked at Fabel and Werner, who stared down at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Get me a bag. A paper bag, a carrier bag – anything.’
Werner dashed from the room. Fabel kneeled down next to Maria. She took hold of Kristina’s face between her hands and locked stares with her.
‘Listen to me, Kristina, you’re going to be all right. You’re just having a panic attack. Try to control your breathing.’ Maria turned to Fabel. ‘She’s in a state of extreme panic. She’s over-oxygenating her bloodstream… Get a doctor.’
Werner burst back in the room, clutching a brown paper bag. Maria placed it over Kristina’s nose and mouth, clamping it tight. Each gasping breath crumpled the bag in on itself. Eventually something approaching a regular rhythm returned to Kristina’s breathing. Two paramedics came into the interview room and Maria stood up and moved back to let them work.
‘She’ll be all right now,’ she said. ‘But I think you’d better let Frau Doctor Eckhardt carry out her assessment before we re-interview her.
‘That was very impressive,’ said Werner. ‘How did you know what to do?’
Maria shrugged, unsmiling. ‘Basic first aid.’
But, for the second time in a day, there was something about Maria’s body language that gave Fabel a vague feeling of uneasiness.
Fabel, Maria and Werner sat in the Police Presidium canteen, drinking coffee at a table near the wide window that looked over and down to the Riot Squad barracks across the car park below.
‘So it was your case?’ asked Werner.
‘One of my first in the Murder Commission,’ said Fabel. ‘The Ernst Rauhe case. He was a serious sexual sadist – a serial rapist and murderer who chalked up six victims in the 1980s before he was nailed. He was judged to be criminally insane and they put him in the Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll high-security hospital wing. He’d already been there for several years before I came to the Murder Commission.’
‘He escaped?’ asked Maria.
‘He certainly did…’ It was Werner who answered. ‘I was in uniform at the time and got involved in the manhunt… a lowly grunt traipsing across the moors in search of a lunatic. But he had had help.’
‘Kristina?’
‘Yes.’ Fabel stared at his coffee, swirling its surface with a spoon, as if stirring his memories in the cup. ‘She was a nurse at the hospital. Ernst Rauhe was not particularly intelligent, but he was a consummate manipulator of people. And, as you can see, Kristina doesn’t have the most resilient of personalities. Rauhe persuaded Kristina that she was the love of his life, his salvation. She was absolutely won over by him and became totally convinced that he was innocent of all the charges against him. But, of course, because he had been committed to a mental hospital he would never be believed if he tried to prove it. Or so he claimed.’ Fabel paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘It came out later that Kristina had wanted to campaign for his freedom. But he had convinced her it would be futile and that she needed to hide her support for him from the world, until they were ready to use it to its best advantage.’
‘And that was by helping him escape…’ said Werner. ‘If I remember correctly, she didn’t just help him escape, she hid him in her apartment.’
‘Oh God…’ said Maria. ‘I remember!’
Fabel nodded. ‘As Werner said, almost every uniform and detective unit in Greater Hamburg, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein searched for him. No one considered that he might have had inside help nor that he had been driven away in comfort from the secure wing. For nearly two weeks every barn, outbuilding and doss-house was turned over. It was over a month later that the hospital got in touch. They had been increasingly concerned about the well-being of one of their nurses. She had been losing weight and had turned up for work with bruises. Then she had failed to come into work at all for several days and hadn’t made any kind of contact. It was then that the hospital worked out that, although it had been limited, she had had some contact with Rauhe. In addition to the weight loss and bruises, colleagues had reported that this nurse’s behaviour had become increasingly strange and furtive in the weeks before her disappearance.’