‘I’m sorry, Chef. I know you told me not to follow up the Olga X case…’
‘I’m not just talking about that. I’m talking about you keeping things from me generally. Things I ought to know. For example, why the hell didn’t you tell me that you are a patient at Dr Minks’s Fear Clinic?’
There was a beat of silence and Maria stared blankly at Fabel. ‘Because, frankly,’ she said at last, ‘it is a personal issue that I didn’t think was your concern.’
‘For God’s sake, Maria, your psychological state is such that you have to seek treatment in a phobia clinic and you’re telling me that, as your commanding officer, it’s none of my business? And don’t try to tell me this isn’t work-related. I saw your face when Turchenko told us who his target is.’ Fabel sat back in his chair, letting the tension ease from his shoulders. ‘Maria, I thought you trusted me.’
Again Maria did not answer right away. Instead she turned to the window and looked out over the tops of the thick, high swathe of trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Then she spoke in a quiet, flat voice without looking at Fabel.
‘I suffer from aphenphosmphobia. It’s reasonably mild but it has been getting progressively worse and Dr Minks has been treating me for it. It means that I have a fear of being touched. That’s what Dr Minks is treating me for. I cannot bear the close physical presence of others. And it is a direct result of Vitrenko stabbing me.’
Fabel sighed. ‘I see. Is the treatment working?’
Maria shrugged. ‘Sometimes I feel that it is. But then something sparks it off again.’
‘And this obsession with the Olga X case… I take it that was because you thought Vitrenko was involved?’
‘Not at first. It was just… well, you were there at the murder scene. It just got to me. Poor kid. I just felt it was wrong for her to die that way. Then, yes… I saw that there was possibly a Vitrenko connection.’
‘Maria, the Vitrenko case was just that… a case. We can’t turn it into some kind of personal crusade. Like Turchenko said, we all want to bring Vitrenko to justice.’
‘But that’s just it…’ There was an urgency in Maria’s voice that Fabel had not heard before. ‘I don’t want to bring him to justice. I want to kill him…’
2.30 p.m.: Hamburg Altstadt, Hamburg
Paul Scheibe stood outside the Rathaus city chambers. The vast plain of Rathausmarkt, Hamburg’s main city square, seemed to writhe with tourists and shoppers under the hot summer sun. Scheibe had worn a lightweight suit in black linen and a white, collarless shirt to the meeting with Hamburg’s First Mayor Hans Schreiber and the city’s Environment Senator Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Yet despite the lightness of the fabric Scheibe felt clammy trickles of sweat gather on the nape of his neck and in the small of his back. The meeting had been arranged to congratulate him on the selection of his KulturZentrumEins design for the site on the HafenCity’s Uberseequartier and Scheibe had done his best to look pleased and interested. Perhaps that was why so many people had asked him if everything was all right: Scheibe’s professional trade mark had always been his arrogance; his aloofness from the crude commercial aspect of architecture. But everyone had been happy and the champagne corks had popped. And there had been lots of champagne; now Scheibe’s mouth tasted coppery and dry and the alcohol had had no effect on him other than to enervate him.
Life must go on, he had thought to himself. And maybe it will. Maybe it was just a coincidence that two members of the cast of his previous life had been murdered. The same way. By the same person. Or maybe it wasn’t.
He watched the sightseers and the shoppers, the office workers and the business people scuttle across the Rathausmarkt. A street musician was playing Rimsky-Korsakov on an accordion somewhere over by the Schleusenbrucke bridge across the Alsterfleet. Paul Scheibe was surrounded by people, by noise; he stood at the very heart of a great city. He had never felt so isolated or exposed. Was this what it was like to be hunted?
He walked. He walked quickly and with a sense of purpose that he did not understand, as if the act of deliberate motion would stimulate some idea about what he should do next. He crossed the Rathausmarkt diagonally and headed up Monckebergstrasse. The throng of people grew denser as he came into the main pedestrianised part of Monckebergstrasse, lined with stores. Still he let his feet lead him. He felt hot and dirty, his hair was beginning to cling to his damp scalp and he wished that he could cast off the mantle of warm summer air that seemed to stifle his ability to think. He did not want to die. He did not want to go to prison. He had made a name for himself and he knew that the wrong step taken now would tarnish that name for ever.
He stopped outside an electrical store. A regional NDR news programme played mutely on a large-screen TV behind the glass. It was a pre-recorded interview with Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Scheibe had found it hard enough to stomach Muller-Voigt’s sneery, patronising presence at the lunch and now he watched as he smiled his politician smile at him through the glass. It was as if he were mocking Scheibe, just like he used to all those years ago.
Muller-Voigt had always possessed, naturally and without effort, the kind of self-confident poise and intellectual credibility that Scheibe worked so hard to project. Muller-Voigt had always been smarter, had always been cooler, had always been at the focus of things. Paul Scheibe found it impossible to forgive Bertholdt Muller-Voigt any of these things. But there was something else that fuelled Scheibe’s loathing for his contemporary, something deeper and more fundamental that burned white-hot at the core of his hatred: Muller-Voigt had taken Beate from him.
Of course, back then they had all forsworn anything so bourgeois as monogamy, and Beate, the raven-haired, half-Italian mathematics student with whom Scheibe had been besotted, would never have allowed any man to think of her as belonging to him. But it was the closest that Paul Scheibe had ever been to love. It wasn’t just that Muller-Voigt had slept with Beate; it was that he had done so with the same thoughtless arrogance with which he had slept with dozens of other women. It had meant nothing to him then and Scheibe was pretty certain that today Muller-Voigt probably wouldn’t even remember it.
And now, two decades later, every time Paul Scheibe met Muller-Voigt – or even heard the politician’s name mentioned – it provoked exactly the same feelings of envy and loathing in Scheibe that it had provoked back then, when they had been students. Afterwards, Scheibe had built a new life for himself, a different and successful life. But Muller-Voigt had somehow managed to build an even more successful new life. Most of all, Muller-Voigt had remained on the fringes of Scheibe’s world: a constant and unwelcome reminder of the old days. But now Muller-Voigt was not the only reminder of that time.
Scheibe pressed his forehead against the electrical store’s window, expecting it to be cool, but it reflected the damp warmth of his brow. A passing shopper bumped shoulders with him and nudged him out of his reverie. What was he doing here? What was he going to do next? He knew he had stridden out of the Rathausmarkt determined to find an answer.
He had to find somewhere to think. Somewhere to make sense of it all.
Scheibe tore his gaze from the TV screen and started to walk purposefully on up Monckebergstrasse. Towards the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof railway station.
2.30 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg
There is a bureaucracy of death: each murder case generates a mountain of forms to be filled and reports to be filed. After the meeting with the Ukrainian policeman and Markus Ullrich, Fabel had found it difficult to focus on the paperwork that had piled up. There were so many things circulating in his head that he lost track of time and he suddenly realised that he had not eaten since breakfast.