‘And anyway,’ said Henk, ‘there’s always the outside chance that our guy got sloppy – maybe thinking that we wouldn’t look for a phone contact.’
Fabel smiled grimly. ‘I wish I could believe that… but “sloppy” does not seem to fit with this killer.’
‘There is one thing that’s interesting…’ Henk laid out some pages from a file side by side on Fabel’s desk. They consisted of press cuttings and photographs of Hans-Joachim Hauser. The most recent was a still from an NDR news report. ‘Do you see the common denominator?’
Fabel shrugged.
Henk pointed to each image in turn. ‘Hans-Joachim Hauser was always keen to be seen to practise what he preached. He didn’t have a car and never travelled in other people’s cars.’
Fabel looked at the photographs again. In a couple of them Hauser was pictured cycling through Hamburg’s crowded streets. In the others, Fabel could see the bike either deliberately positioned in the background, or accidentally caught half in shot.
‘It’s missing…’ Henk said.
‘The bike?’
Henk nodded. ‘We’ve checked everywhere and it’s nowhere to be seen. It was very distinctive, covered in hundreds of small stickers with environmental messages on them. He never went anywhere without it. I asked Sebastian Lang, Hauser’s friend, about it…’ Henk emphasised the word ‘friend’. ‘He said that Hauser always kept his bike chained up in the small courtyard behind his apartment. Obviously forensics did a fingertip search in the yard and checked the windows at the back. They found nothing. According to Lang, Hauser had had the same bike since he was a student. It was his pride and joy, apparently.’
Fabel looked at the photographs again. It was a very ordinary, very old-fashioned bicycle; not a particularly obvious choice for a psychotic killer to take as a trophy. Unless, of course, the killer knew of Hauser’s attachment to it. But why would you leave the scalp and take the bike?
‘Do we know if there is anything else missing from Dr Griebel’s home?’
‘Not that we can ascertain…’ It was Anna who answered. ‘Dr Griebel also had a housekeeper – probably not as thorough as Kristina Dreyer, but she says she can’t see anything obviously missing.’
‘Okay…’ Fabel handed the photographs back to Henk. ‘Get on to uniform branch – I want this to be the most hunted missing bicycle in German police history.’
After Henk and Anna had left his office, Fabel phoned Susanne at the Institute for Legal Medicine. Susanne was doing a fuller assessment of Kristina Dreyer before it was decided if charges should be brought against her for wilfully destroying evidence. Officially, she was still a suspect for the first murder, but the single red hair left at each of the murder scenes, as well as the scalping of the victims in exactly the same manner, indicated that they were dealing with the same killer in each case.
‘I’ll have my report ready tomorrow, Jan,’ Susanne explained. ‘To be honest, I am recommending that she has a clinical assessment by a hospital psychologist and we involve social services. My opinion is that she cannot be held responsible for her actions in cleaning up the murder scene.’
‘I tend to agree with you, just from talking to her and knowing her history. But I’m going to talk to this Dr Minks, the Fear Clinic psychologist, about her.’ Fabel paused. ‘It almost wasn’t worth going away, was it? Being hit by all this crap as soon as we got back.’
‘Never mind…’ Susanne’s voice was warm and sounded almost sleepy. ‘Come over to my place tonight and I’ll cook us something nice. We can go through the property pages in the Abendblatt and see what’s available in our price range.’
‘I know two properties that are about to come on the market,’ said Fabel glumly. ‘Their owners have no need for them now.’
5.30 p.m.: Blankenese, Hamburg
By the time the phone rang, Paul Scheibe had managed a good three hours’ drinking. The warmth of the French grape had not, however, managed to thaw the chill of fear that bound his gut tight. His face was pasty and sleeked with a greasy cold sweat.
‘Find a payphone and call me back on this number. Do not use your cellphone.’ The voice on the other end gave the number and the line went dead. Scheibe reached clumsily for a pencil and paper and scribbled down the number.
The late-afternoon light seemed to dazzle Scheibe as he walked from his villa down towards the Elbe shore. Blankenese was built on a steep bank and is famed for its pathways made up of thousands of steps. Scheibe, his feet heavy after his afternoon’s drinking, shambled his way to the payphone that he knew was down by the beach.
His call was answered after one ring. He thought he could hear the sound of heavy equipment in the background. ‘It’s me,’ said Scheibe. The three bottles of Merlot had made his voice thick and slurred.
‘You prick,’ the voice at the other end of the phone hissed. ‘You never, ever use my office or cellphone number for anything other than official calls. After all these years, and particularly with everything that’s going on, I would have thought that you would have had enough sense not to risk exposure.’
‘I’m sorry-’
‘Don’t say my name, you fool…’ The voice at the other end cut him off.
‘I’m sorry,’ Scheibe repeated lamely. Something more than the wine thickened his voice. ‘I panicked. Christ… first Hans-Joachim, now Gunter. This is no coincidence. Someone is taking us out one by one…’
There was a small silence on the other side of the line. ‘I know. It certainly looks like that.’
‘It looks like that?’ Scheibe snorted. ‘For God’s sake, man – did you read what they did to them both? Did you read about the thing with the hair?’
‘I read it.’
‘It’s a message. That’s what it is – a message. Don’t you get it? The killer dyed their hair red. Someone is going after every member of the group. I’m getting out. I’m going to drop out of sight. Maybe go abroad or something…’ There was a note of desperation in Scheibe’s voice: the desperation of a man without a plan, pretending he had a strategy for dealing with something there was no dealing with.
‘You’ll stay where you are,’ the voice on the other end of the phone snapped. ‘If you make a run for it, you’ll draw attention to yourself – and to the rest of us. For the moment the police think they’re looking for a random killer.’
‘So I just sit here and wait to be scalped?’
‘You sit there and wait for instructions. I’ll make contact with the others…’
The phone went dead. Scheibe continued to hold the receiver to his ear and stared blankly out over the grass-fringed sand of the Blankenese shore, across the Elbe and watched as a vast container ship slipped silently by. He felt his eyes sting and a great, leaden sadness seemed to coalesce in his chest as he thought of another Paul Scheibe: the Paul Scheibe he had once been, swaggering with the arrogant certainties of youth. A past-tense Paul Scheibe whose decisions and actions had now come back to haunt him.
The past was tearing his present asunder. His past was catching up with him… and it would cost him his life.
6.
Five Days After the First Murder: Tuesday, 23 August 2005.
10.00 a.m.: Archaeology Department, Universitat Hamburg
Severts’s smile was as wide as his long narrow face would permit. He was not dressed in the same way as he had been on site in the HafenCity: he wore corded trousers, a rough tweed jacket with unfashionably narrow lapels and a checked shirt, open at the neck and with a dark T-shirt underneath. But while the style of his clothing was nominally more formal than it had been on the site, the earth-toned colour scheme remained the same. Severts’s office was bright and spacious but cluttered with books, files and archaeological objects. A vast picture window flooded the room with light, but only afforded a view of another wing of the university.