‘His identity card,’ said Severts. ‘Now you have a name for your body.’
The identity card felt dry and brittle in Fabel’s hands. Everything seemed to be different shades of the same brown, including the photograph. He could, however, make out the unsmiling face of a young blond man. Adolescence lingered in the face, but the harder angles of manhood were becoming apparent. Fabel was surprised that he recognised him instantly as the body by the river.
Karl. The face Fabel was looking at now, the face he had looked down on in the HafenCity site was that of Karl Heymann, born February 1927, resident in Hammerbrook, Hamburg. Fabel read the details again. He would have been seventy-eight. Fabel found the fact difficult to comprehend. Time had simply stopped for Karl Heymann, sixteen years old, in 1943. He had been condemned to an eternal youth.
Fabel examined the leather wallet. It too had lost any suppleness and its surface was like coarse parchment under the detective’s fingertips. Inside were the remains of some Reichsmark notes and a photograph of a young blonde girl. Fabel’s first thought was that it was Heymann’s sweetheart, but he could just discern a common look. A sister, perhaps.
Fabel thanked Severts and, as he rose to his feet, handed him back the photograph of Cherchen Man. As Severts opened the box file to replace the picture, another image caught Fabel’s eye.
‘Now there’s someone I know…’ Fabel smiled. ‘An East Frisian, like myself. May I?’
Fabel removed the photograph. Unlike the other mummies, the face was almost completely skeletonised, with only intermittent patches of brown leathery skin stretched across the fleshless bone. What made this mummy remarkable was the fact that his full, thick mane of hair, along with his beard, had remained completely intact. And it had been his hair that had given him his name. Because, although this mummy was officially known by the name of the Frisian village near to which he had been uncovered in 1900, it had been his mane of vibrant, strikingly red hair that had captured the imagination of archaeologists and public alike.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Severts. ‘The famous “Red Franz”. Or more correctly, Neu Versen Man. Magnificent, isn’t he? And from your neck of the woods, you say?’
‘More or less. I’m from further north in Ostfriesland. Norddeich. Neu Versen is on the Bourtanger Moor. But I’ve known about Red Franz since I was a kid.’
‘Now he’s a perfect example of what I was saying about these people having a second life – a life in our time. He’s currently touring the world as part of the “Mysterious People of the Bog” exhibition. He’s in Canada at the moment, if I’m right. But he highlights what Franz Brandt said to you down at the HafenCity about the different types of mummification. He is a bog body and totally different from the Urumchi bodies. All his flesh has rotted away and only his skin remains, toughened and tanned by the bog’s acids into what is basically a leather sack containing his skeleton. But it’s his hair that’s amazing. Obviously it wasn’t that colour originally. It has been dyed by the tannins in the bog.’
Fabel stared at the image in his hands as he listened to Severts. Red Franz, the corona of his red hair flamebursting from his skull, his jaw gaping wide, seemed to scream out at Fabel. The hair. The dyed red hair.
Fabel felt a chill run down his spine.
11.00 a.m.: Altona Nord, Hamburg
Maria asked Werner if he could cover for an hour or so. However, while she asked she was already standing up and taking her jacket from the back of her chair, making it more of a statement than a request. Werner pushed his chair back from his desk, which faced Maria’s, and leaned back, looking at her appraisingly.
‘He’s not going to be happy if he finds out…’ Werner rubbed his bristly scalp with both hands.
‘Who?’ Maria said. ‘Find out what?’
‘You know what I’m talking about. You’re off to sniff around this Olga X case, aren’t you? The Chef has made it clear that you’re to drop it.’
‘I’m just doing what he asked me. I’m going over to Organised Crime to brief them on the background. Will you cover for me or not?’
Werner responded to the aggressive edge in Maria’s voice by shrugging his heavy shoulders. ‘I can handle anything that comes in.’
It depressed Maria each time she saw it.
This structure had once contained a purpose. At one time people had spent their working days here, had eaten their lunches in the canteen, had chatted with each other or had discussed productivity, profits, wage rises. This wide single-storey building in Altona-Nord had been a factory once: a small one, probably engaged in light engineering or something similar, but now it was a bleak, empty shell. Hardly any of the windows remained intact; the walls were scarred by patches of missing plaster or punctuated by graffiti; the floors were thick with powdery plaster dust and piles of rubble or litter.
It was an unlikely venue for love.
But this building provided somewhere for the ‘lower end’ of Hamburg’s prostitution business to conduct its trade: mostly heroinor other drug-dependent girls who undercut the prices of the more appealing Herbertstrasse and other Kiez hookers. The girls who worked down here were volume traders: turning over as many tricks as fast as possible to feed their habits or their pimps’ wallets. The evidence was there, starkly presented in the bleak daylight: used condoms lay scattered across the filthy factory floor.
Olga X had not been a drug user. The post-mortem had established that. Olga had been driven to sell her body in this sordid, squalid place by some other compulsion.
Maria walked across the large void of the main part of the factory, stopping a few metres short of the corner. Ironically, it was clean and empty: the forensic team who had attended the scene had removed every piece of rubble for examination. That had been three months ago, and it seemed that this particular corner had been avoided by the girls who brought their clients here. Perhaps they felt it was jinxed. Or haunted. Only one item had been added: a small posy of wilted flowers sat forlornly in the corner. Someone had left it as a pathetic remembrance of the life that had been snuffed out there.
Maria remembered the corner the way it had been when she had first seen it. As if her mind had photographed and filed the scene, it always came perfect and complete to her recollection. Olga had not been a big girl. She had been slightly built and light-boned and had lain in a tangle of legs and arms in this corner, her blood and the dust of the floor mixed in a dull, gritty paste. Maria had never let murder scenes get to her the way her male colleagues did. But this killing had got to her. She had not really understood why seeing the fragile remains of an anonymous prostitute had caused her sleepless nights, but the thought had come to her more than once that it might have had something to do with the fact that she herself had so very nearly become a murder victim. The other thing that had stung her about this girl’s death was the way Olga had been cheated. Most of the murders that the Polizei Hamburg Murder Commission investigated belonged to a certain milieu: the hard-core drinkers and drug users, the thieves and the dealers, and, of course, the prostitutes. But this girl had been forced into this world. What had seemed the promise of a new life in the West with a proper job and a brighter future had been a sham. Instead Olga, or whatever her real name had been, had handed over her own cash, probably all the money she had or could scrape together, to sell herself unknowingly into slavery and a sordid, anonymous death.
Maria knelt down and examined the wilted posy. It wasn’t much, but at least someone had recognised that a person, a human being with a past, with hopes and dreams, had lost her life here. Someone had cared enough to lay the flowers here; and now, after a lot of discreet asking around, Maria knew who that someone was.