7.30 p.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg
Fabel spent the afternoon reading the BKA files. Everything was as Ullrich had described it: Hauser and Griebel had inhabited the same landscape, had followed similar paths, had known the same people, but there was no evidence to suggest that those paths had ever crossed. Still, logic suggested that it was not impossible that at least they knew of each other. And just because no contact had been established by the security services it did not mean that they had in fact never met.
Susanne was working late at the Institute for Legal Medicine, so Fabel returned home alone. His lunch with Ullrich meant that he still had no appetite to speak of, so he took a sandwich and a bottle of Jever through to the living room and set them on the coffee table next to his laptop and the files. He sat for a moment sipping his beer and looking through his picture windows out over the Alsterpark and the wide expanse of Alster, whose water glittered gently in the early evening light. It was a scene that should have put him at peace, but something he could not quite identify nagged at him. Fabel was an orderly man: he needed balance in his universe; logic in the mechanics of his life. And, as with most orderly men, this necessity came from his fear of the chaos that often raged within him. It had scared him to see the same paranoia displayed at its most extreme in Kristina Dreyer. The tenuous connections and the broad coincidences that surrounded the two murder victims offended his need for order. When he looked at them from a distance, he could perceive a network of interconnecting threads, but when he drew close it all fell apart like a spider’s web in the wind.
Fabel heard the sound of the door of his flat being opened and Susanne’s voice announcing her arrival. She came in and in a gesture of exaggerated exhaustion flopped down into the sofa next to Fabel, dumping her keys, bag and cellphone next to her. She kissed Fabel.
‘Tough day?’ he asked.
Susanne nodded wearily. ‘You too?’
‘More confusing than anything. Let me get you a glass of wine…’ When Fabel came back from the kitchen he went on to explain about his meeting with Ullrich and the information in the files. ‘Do you think I’m barking up the wrong tree with this? The personal histories of the victims, I mean?’
‘Frankly… yes.’ Susanne’s voice was tinged with tired irritation. Fabel was breaking their unspoken rule against talking about work during their free time together. ‘You’re overcomplicating this. Think it through. Look at the disfigurement of the bodies. The killer’s small rituals, including pinning up the scalps as a display. It’s the work of a psychopath. You see a significance in the background of the victims, but they share a similar background because they’re roughly the same age. It could be as simple as your killer having a psychotic hostility to middle-aged men. And the mutilation of the bodies has psychosis written all over it. Think about politically motivated murder… nine times out of ten we’re talking about assassination: a bomb planted in a street, a bullet through the head.’
Fabel sipped his beer. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said and rose from his chair. ‘Anyway, I’ll go and fix you something to eat.’
7.40 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Stefan Schreiner loved the Schanzenviertel. It was, for him, the most energetic, most varied, most vibrant part of Hamburg. His apartment was here. As was his beat.
Schreiner had been a Commissar in the uniformed branch of the Polizei Hamburg for seven years and he had been patrolling the Schanzenviertel for the last four of those years. Schreiner prided himself on being in tune with the Schanzenvierteclass="underline" he was known by shopkeepers, by residents, even by those who peddled the occasional bit of dope, as a laid-back and easygoing street cop. But it was also known that, while he was willing to turn the odd blind eye where it did no harm, Stefan Schreiner was an honest, dedicated and efficient police officer.
The same could not be said of the officer with whom he had been teamed for the back shift: Peter Reinhard had the blue shoulder pips of a Polizeimeister, and was therefore Schreiner’s subordinate. Schreiner reckoned that Polizeimeister was as far as Reinhard would ever get in the Polizei Hamburg. He watched his junior officer walk back to the car from the snack stand, a plastic-lidded paper coffee cup in each hand. Reinhard was a huge man who spent a disproportionate amount of time lifting weights in the gym and there was more than an element of swagger in the way he moved. It wasn’t a good idea to swagger in the Schanzenviertel if you were a cop, thought Schreiner. He had spent so much time building bridges here and Reinhard was not the kind of partner he liked to be seen with.
Reinhard squeezed into the passenger seat of the silver and blue Mercedes patrol car and handed Schreiner one of the coffees. As he did so, he smoothed down his blue tie and shirt front, making sure he had not spilled anything on them.
‘These new uniforms are cool, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘’Spose so.’ It was not an issue that had occupied Schreiner much. The Polizei Hamburg uniforms had changed over the previous year from the traditional green and mustard to a dark blue.
‘They remind me of American uniforms…’ Reinhard paused. ‘N – Y – P – D…’ He pronounced the initials the English way. ‘The old ones were crap – they made you look like you were a forestry warden.’
‘Mmmm…’ Schreiner was only half listening. He sipped his coffee and watched a cyclist approach down the narrow street. Schreiner suddenly thought how much better it would be to patrol the quarter on a bike. It was done in other parts of the city. He would ask about it. The cyclist drew closer. The other advantage would be that there would not be room for Reinhard on a bike.
‘I just think that these are more like police uniforms…’ Reinhard seemed content to carry on the discussion with himself. ‘I mean, blue is the international colour for police…’
The bicycle passed the patrol car and Schreiner nodded to the cyclist, who ignored him. It was not uncommon in the Schanzenviertel for locals to be wary of the police, even hostile towards them. There was still a hangover from more radical days when the police were seen as fascists by the average Viertel dweller.
‘Shit!’ Suddenly Schreiner was galvanised into action. He thrust his coffee towards Reinhard to hold, splashing some on his junior officer’s precious blue uniform shirt. Schreiner threw open the car door and stepped out.
‘Just a minute! Stop!’ he called after the cyclist, who looked over his shoulder at the policeman and responded by peddling hard away from him. Schreiner jumped back into the patrol car, slammed the door and gunned the engine. He took off from his standing start so violently that more coffee slopped over Reinhard’s shirt.
7.40 p.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg
‘What I don’t get,’ said Fabel as he placed a plate of pasta in front of Susanne, ‘is why did the BKA reinvestigate Griebel recently? Surely there is no significant national interest to be protected in Griebel’s research?’
‘You said he was an epigeneticist?’ Susanne took a mouthful of too-hot pasta and made a fanning movement in front of her mouth with her hand before continuing. ‘What kind of work was he involved in?’
Fabel gave her a breakdown of all he knew, and the little that he understood, about Griebel’s work. ‘Some of the other stuff he was involved in – you know, all this inherited-memory stuff – sounds a bit, well, unscientific to me.’
‘Not really,’ said Susanne. ‘An amazing amount of the DNA that is passed from one generation to the next has no known use: while the human genome was being mapped it revealed that more than ninety-eight per cent of our DNA is so-called “junk DNA”… or, to give it its proper name, “non-coding”.’
‘What do you think this DNA is for?’
‘God knows. Some scientists believe that it’s the accumulated defences against retroviruses. You know, all the bugs that we’ve fought off throughout our history as a species. Others believe that some of it has specific functions that we simply don’t understand. One theory is that we inherit instinctive behaviours through it, even that it contains genetic memories. That actual experiences from an ancestor can be passed on to his or her descendants.’