‘Or a murder suspect on the run,’ said Fabel. ‘Send someone over there to get details. I think we should turn up at the launch party this evening ourselves. I’ll be back in before five. I’m heading up to the University right now and then I’m meeting the journalist Fischmann at three. Anything else?’
‘Only that Anna has turned up a lead on your World War Two mummy. The family no longer lives in that street. They were bombed out during the war, but Anna’s tracked down someone who was a friend of the dead guy. Do you want her to follow it up?’
‘No, it’s okay. I want to do it. It was my call-out. Tell Anna to leave the details on my desk.’
Fabel had just hung up when his car phone buzzed again.
‘Fabel…’ he said impatiently.
There was a sound of electronic static. Then a voice that was not human.
‘You are going to get a warning…’ The voice was distorted, as if through an electronic voice-changer. Fabel checked the caller display but no number had registered.
‘Who the hell is this?’ Fabel asked.
‘You will get a warning. Only one.’ The line went dead.
Fabel stared ahead at the traffic heading towards the Elbtunnel. A crank call. Maybe even someone who did not realise they had reached a police officer’s number. But somewhere, at the back of his head, an alarm was sounding.
10.00 a.m.: Archaeology Department, Universitat Hamburg
‘Have you found the relatives of our HafenCity dweller?’ Dr Severts smiled and offered Fabel a chair.
‘No. Not yet, unfortunately. I’m afraid I’ve had much more pressing things on my mind.’
‘This so-called Hamburg Hairdresser?’
‘Yes. It’s proving to be a…’ Fabel sought the right word. ‘… Challenging case for us. And, to be honest, I am clutching at any straws I can think of.’
‘Why do I get the feeling that I’m one of those straws?’
‘I’m sorry, but I am trying to approach this from every angle. I need to establish the significance of this maniac taking the scalp of his victims. I just thought you might be able to give me a historical perspective on it.’
‘I have to say that the significance is not difficult to read, as far as I can see,’ said Severts. ‘Taking the head or the scalp of a vanquished enemy is one of the oldest and most widely practised forms of trophy-taking. When you kill an enemy, you take his scalp. By doing so you haven’t just killed your enemy, you have belittled or humiliated him, and you have a trophy to prove your success as a warrior. Every continent has experienced at least one culture where taking the head or the scalp of enemies has been a major feature.’
‘I don’t know…’ Fabel frowned as he conjured up the image of Griebel’s study, his thinning scalp dyed an unnatural red and pinned to his bookshelves. ‘This killer doesn’t remove the scalp from the murder scene. He makes an exhibition of it, displaying it prominently in the home of his victim.’
‘Maybe that’s his way of showing off his prowess. Scythian warriors used to wear the scalps of their enemies on the bridles of their horses, simply so that everyone could see them there. Your “Hairdresser” maybe feels that exhibiting them where he has killed the victim is the most effective way of displaying them.’
‘You say that scalping was a common practice. Here too? In this part of Europe?’ asked Fabel.
‘Certainly. There have been many examples discovered in Germany. Particularly in your neck of the woods – Ostfriesland, I mean. That’s not necessarily to say that your Frisian ancestors took more scalps than other cultures, it’s merely that the environmental conditions in Ostfriesland have ensured the preservation of so many bog bodies and artefacts. We talked about Red Franz the last time we spoke. Well, in Bentheim, near the Dutch border and not far from where Red Franz was found, they discovered scalped skulls, and some of the scalps themselves, at a Bronze Age site.’ Severts walked over to his bookshelves and selected a couple of textbooks, bringing them back to his desk. He searched in one of them for a moment. ‘Yes… here’s an example that’s really close to your home town. In the eighteen sixties five bog bodies were recovered from Tannenhausener Moor.’
Fabel knew exactly where Severts was talking about. Tannenhausen was a village that lay in the northern suburbs of Aurich, Ostfriesland’s biggest town. It was a few kilometres south of Norden and Norddeich, where Fabel had grown up. It was an area of rich green moor, dark bogs, ponds and lakes. Tannenhausen sat between three heaths: Tannenhausener Moor, Kreihuttenmoor and Meerhusener Moor. As a boy, Fabel had cycled to the area often. It was a mystical place. And at the heart of the moor was a vast, ancient lake – the Ewiges Meer, the Eternal Sea. The name itself spoke of time immemorial; added to which was the fact that the moor around the lake had been found to be interlaced with wooden walkways that had been constructed four to five thousand years before.
‘All five Tannenhausen bodies had been scalped,’ Severts continued. ‘And similar examples have been found all over Europe, even as far away as Siberia. It seems that it was a very common custom in Bronze Age Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic. In fact, the Scythians did it so much that the ancient Greek word for scalping was aposkythizein.’
Fabel thought for a moment of the Scottish part of his ancestry. The Scots claimed that their original homeland had been Scythia, on the Steppes, and that they had passed through North Africa, pausing for generations in Spain and Ireland before conquering Scotland. He pictured someone maybe not unlike him and not too many generations before, who might have routinely committed the same act as the killer he was hunting.
‘And the significance of scalping was always triumphal?’ he asked. ‘Just to prove how many enemies a warrior had killed?’
‘Mainly, but perhaps not exclusively. There is evidence of scalps being taken from people, including children, who had died natural rather than violent deaths. It would seem to indicate that taking the scalp might have been a way of commemorating or remembering the dead. Of honouring ancestors.’
‘I don’t think that’s what is motivating this guy,’ said Fabel.
Severts leaned back in his chair, the huge poster of the Beauty of Loulan as his backdrop. ‘If you want my opinion – personal rather than professional – then I would say that scalp-taking has been so common across all cultures that it is almost an instinct. I don’t know that much about psychology or about your line of work, but I do know that serial killers and psychos like to take trophies from their victims. I think that taking a scalp is the archetypal form of trophy-taking. Your killer could be doing it just because he feels it’s the thing to do, rather than making any clever cultural or historical reference.’
Fabel stood up and smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He shook hands with Severts. ‘Many thanks for your time, Herr Doctor.’
‘Not at all,’ said Severts. ‘May I ask one favour in return?’
‘Of course…’
‘Please let me know if you manage to track down the family of the mummified body down by HafenCity. It’s not often that I can put a real name and a real life to the human remains I find through my work.’
‘I’m afraid the reverse is true in my line of work,’ said Fabel. ‘But of course I shall.’
Noon: Harvestehude, Hamburg
Fabel had phoned in to the Presidium and asked Werner to tell Paul Scheibe’s deputy to expect him. The architectural practice was housed in a very modern-looking building, between the NDR radio studios and Innocentia-Park in Harvestehude. The clean lines and sweeping angles of Scheibe’s offices reminded Fabel of Bertholdt Muller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Fabel wondered if Scheibe had been Muller-Voigt’s architect and was annoyed that he had not asked the politician such an obvious question.
The midday sun had drawn a thin veil of cloud over her face, and Fabel took off his sunglasses and sat quietly in the car for a moment before going in. When he had phoned Werner he had also asked him to find out if there was anything that Technical Section could do to track down who had made the hoax call on his car phone. Fabel knew it was unlikely, but the call had disturbed him. The voice-changing electronics seemed very elaborate for a phone hoaxer and Fabel had the uneasy feeling that he might just have spoken to the so-called Hamburg Hairdresser. He watched as a pretty girl walked past the car, laughing as she chatted to someone on her cellphone: someone leading a normal life and having normal conversations.