‘Could you get on to the state archives and see if we can dig anything up? I’d like to find out if there is any surviving next of kin we should notify.’
Anna looked at the information Fabel handed her and shrugged. ‘Okay, Chef.’
Fabel did the rounds of his officers to get updates on progress. The two scalping murders had eclipsed everything else and Fabel was glad that the Kiez brawl killing was the only other continuing case, because it was a comparatively easy one to tie up. Fabel often caught himself thinking like that: grateful that the violent ending of another human’s life was conveniently straightforward and therefore less demanding on his team’s resources. He hated the forced callousness of being an investigator of the deaths of others.
‘Still nothing on the phone accounts of either victim,’ Henk Hermann anticipated Fabel’s question. ‘We’ve found no numbers that cannot be accounted for.’
Fabel thanked Henk and made his way back to his office. It still nagged at Fabel. He had a gut instinct that the victims had known their killer.
11.45 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
The room was filled with the rich, sweet smell of incense. The blinds were drawn and the room was illuminated by the soft, dancing light of two dozen candles.
Beate Brandt sat with her eyes closed, one hand resting on the forehead and the other on the chest of her client. Her hair was long, cascading over her shoulders, just as it had when she was eighteen. But the glossy, sensual lustre with which it had once ensnared men’s hearts had faded over a decade ago. Now it was more grey than black and its sheen had been replaced by a dry coarseness. Similarly, Beate’s dark beauty, which she had inherited from her Italian mother, had faded. The strong bone structure and the fineness of her features remained, but the skin in which they were wreathed had become creased and wrinkled, as if someone had stored a fine painting carelessly.
‘Breathe deeply…’ she said to the client, who she reckoned was about the same age as her own son and who lay on his back, his eyes closed tight. ‘We are travelling back. Back to a time beyond life but before death. Only once we confront the life that has gone before can we experience rebirth.’
She pressed down on her client’s forehead. Her fingers were covered with large rings, some of which bore astrological symbols. Her client had pale, flawless skin and she compared the smooth perfection of his brow with the wrinkles on the back of her hand and the thickening of her once-slender fingers. Why, she thought, do our bodies age, yet inside we feel exactly the same as we did half a lifetime ago?
‘Go back…’ Her voice was just above a whisper. ‘Go back to your childhood. Do you remember? Then back further. Further back…’
Beate had always struggled to make ends meet. Or, more correctly, she had struggled to make ends meet while maintaining a low profile. She had hated the idea of becoming a small-time capitalist but hated the idea of working for someone else even more. Beate also had to think of her son. She had done her best to make sure that he never wanted for anything. As a single mother, it had been difficult for her. And, of course, there had always been the added difficulty of how deeply someone would look into her history when she applied for a job. She had started off with a small fashion business in the Viertel, but, as time went on, it became clear that Beate’s idea of Schanzenviertel chic was out of step – a decade out of step – with what customers were looking for. After the shop had closed, she had struggled to find something that she could do to earn money. Then she came up with the Rebirthing concept. Beate knew it was all nonsense. Some part of her, deep down inside, found the idea of reincarnation attractive – plausible, even – but the whole ‘Rebirth Induction’ thing was a pile of crap. She ought to know: after all, it had been Beate who had invented it.
She looked down at the client lying on the floor. He was a regular and had been coming for three months. Since Hans-Joachim and Gunter’s murders she had taken the decision to see no new clients. No strangers. The deaths had shocked her. Frightened her. After all, although their paths had not crossed in twenty years, Hans-Joachim had lived only a couple of streets away.
Now Beate would admit only those clients whom she had dealt with for some time. She had even tried spinning a new thread of ‘group therapy’ so that she would see more than one client at a time. But because of the intimately personal nature of her ‘treatment’, her clients were reluctant to participate in group sessions. Beate’s most inspired idea had been to set up a website through which she could conduct on-line consultations. She had even bought some software which let people type in their dates and places of birth and receive an outline of a likely past life. And all paid for through a secure on-line credit card system. No risk, no outlay, all profit.
At the heart of Beate’s business was an essentially simple idea: that everyone had lived before, several times, and that there had to be a key to unlocking those past lives. Of course, with an exponentially growing global population, for everyone to have had a past life was a statistical impossibility. Beate, who had studied applied mathematics at the Universitat Hamburg, knew that only too well. But there had been a time, long ago, when she had been prepared to suspend her disbelief in the name of something bigger. Furthermore, the world today was full of people seeking something to make sense of their existence; or wanting to seek refuge in some other truth, some other life: anything that offered them something less banal than their everyday existences. So Beate, the atheist, the rationalist, the mathematician, had established herself as a New Age guru who helped people rediscover their past lives. She had learned the basic principles of hypnotism, although she doubted that she had ever successfully hypnotised a client. It was more likely that they deluded themselves that they were in a hypnotic state so that they could believe the nonsense they spouted about a past life; could believe that it came from somewhere deeper than simply a mixture of imagination, wish-fulfilment and something they had probably read somewhere once. But to cover herself she had talked about ‘guided meditation’, placing the onus on the client for their own hypnosis.
But the original concept had been flawed: Beate had learned very quickly that once she had helped a client to uncover one ‘past life’ the client went away happy – and a source of income walked out of the door. She had realised that she needed to add another dimension to her ‘therapy’: something that would prolong the course of treatment. It was then that she came up with both the idea for the website and the concept of ‘Whole Person Rebirth’. The principle was that to be ‘complete’ one had to uncover all one’s past lives, combine them with one’s current existence and to then undergo a ‘rebirthing’ where one became whole and put behind everything in the past and began anew. A true new life.
The irony was not wasted on Beate. Here, in this room within her apartment, she spouted a home-grown mixture of New Age claptrap and psychobabble about reincarnation and rebirth. Like the others in the group, she had reinvented herself, putting distance between herself and her past life. Unlike some of the others, however, Beate had chosen to keep as low a profile as possible. Whereas some of the group had clearly felt immune to discovery, she had sought anonymity. But it seemed that keeping a low profile offered no protection. Hans-Joachim Hauser had always been a self-promoting, self-important egotist; but she had guessed that Gunter Griebel, like her, had chosen to live his life as unnoticed as possible. Yet someone had noticed.
She cast a glance at the wall clock. This session seemed to be taking for ever. The young patient was convinced that he had multiple past lives to uncover, yet claimed there was some obstacle in the way, something he could not navigate around. Beate sighed patiently and tried to ease him through the years, through the centuries, to discover who and when he had been before.