Fabel was suddenly aware that he was running. He pushed members of the stunned audience out of his way as he rushed forward and they gave way unprotestingly, as if he were charging through a storeroom of shop-window mannequins. He sensed Anna, Henk and Werner in his wake.
One of the press photographers lifted his camera and it flashed in the auditorium. Anna shouldered her way through to the photographer, grabbed his camera with one hand and shoved him backwards with the other. The photographer started to protest and demanded his camera back.
‘It’s not your camera any more. It’s police evidence.’ She scanned the rest of the press photographers with her laser gaze. ‘And that goes for the rest of you. This is a murder scene and I’ll seize any camera used here.’
By now Fabel had reached the front and grabbed hold of Paulsen, who still stood gazing blankly at the display.
‘Get your people out into the corridor! Now!’ he shouted into Paulsen’s face. He turned to his officers. ‘Anna, Henk… get the audience out into the corridor too. Werner… secure the main door and make sure that no one leaves the building.’ He snapped open his cellphone and hit the pre-set button for the Murder Commission. He gave orders that the forensics team were to be dispatched and that he needed uniformed units to secure the scene immediately. He also arranged for extra plain-clothes officers to attend to take statements from every member of the audience. As soon as he hung up from talking to the Murder Commission he hit another button.
Van Heiden made no protest at being disturbed at home: he knew that for Fabel to call it must be urgent. Fabel heard himself describing the scene to van Heiden in a dead, toneless voice. Van Heiden seemed to react more to the very public context in which the body had been found than to the fact that someone else had lost their life.
After he ended his call to van Heiden, Fabel found himself alone in the auditorium. Alone except for that which had once been Paul Scheibe. Scheibe had had something to tell Fabel. Something valuable, maybe something that would not be told willingly. Now Scheibe sat elevated on his throne of smashed balsa and card, scalped, naked and dead: a crownless, silent king looking out over his empty kingdom.
11.45 p.m.: Grindelviertel, Hamburg
Leonard Schuler had had too much to drink. It was not uncommon for him to do so. And, after all, it had been a hard week. He was still haunted by that face – that cold, pale, emotionless face at the window of Hauser’s apartment – but it came to his mind less and less as the days went by. More than ever, he was convinced that he had done the right thing in not giving a complete description of the killer to the police. Leonard Schuler, who did not believe in any thing much any more and was not one for deep thought, had found himself thinking back to that night, to the man in the window, and wondering if there really was such a thing as the devil.
But it was time to forget about it. To put it where it belonged, in the past.
Schuler had felt like celebrating and had met up with friends in the bar on the corner two blocks away from his flat. It was a raucous, smoky place, buzzing with crude exuberance and over-loud rock music. It was exactly the kind of place he needed to be.
It was one in the morning when he left. He did not stagger as he walked, but he was aware that the normally unconscious act of taking a step now required a degree of concentration. It had been a good night, and a lot of steam had been let off: a bit too much for Willi, the landlord. But as he walked home, Schuler was aware of a hollow feeling inside. This was his life. This was all he had amounted to. He had not come from the best background, true, but others from similar circumstances had done more, made more of themselves. He was honest enough to blame himself for the failures in his life, although, in darker moments, he allowed himself to share some of the responsibility with his mother. Schuler’s mother was still a young woman, in her forties, having given birth to Leonard when she was eighteen. Leonard had never known his father, and doubted if his mother even knew for sure who he was. It was a subject his mother had always avoided, claiming that Leonard’s father had been a boyfriend who had died from an undisclosed disease before they could marry. But, by putting together the tiny and disparate scraps that he had been able to garner about his mother’s past life, and by a lot of reading between the lines, Leonard had come to suspect that she had worked as a prostitute at one time in her life, and he often speculated that his anonymous male parent might have been a client.
But all that had been before Leonard’s first memories of the world. His mother, as a single parent, had brought him up on her own and had displayed an anachronistic sense of shame about it. At some time in Leonard’s infancy, his mother had become a ‘born-again’ Christian. She was now the model of prissy probity and abstemiousness, and his childhood had been overshadowed by the omnipresence of religion. He had hated his mother’s righteousness for as long as he could remember. It had embarrassed him. Irritated him. He would have been less ashamed of his mother if she had still sold blow jobs to strangers. Leonard often thought that that was why he had become a thief: to witness his mother’s shame.
‘Thou shalt not steal…’ she had repeated over and over, shaking her head when the police had brought him home the first time. ‘Thou shalt not steal… Do you know what will become of you, Leonard?’ she had said. ‘The devil will come for you. The devil will come for you and take you straight to hell.’
It had been those words that had echoed in Leonard’s head when the senior detective had talked to him; when he had described what that psycho would do to him if he knew about him. If he found him.
Schuler knew that he was not stupid. He had no illusions about the act that had conceived him. A quick, grubby fuck for a few Deutschmarks. But he always imagined that his biological father would perhaps have been a wealthy, successful businessman or professional of some kind who, probably drunk at the time, had been a one-off customer of his mother’s. Someone with a bit going on up top. A better class of person. How else could Leonard explain his own intelligence? He had gone to a comprehensive Gesamtschule school and there was no doubt that, with just a little effort on his part, he could have passed his Abitur leaving exam, which would have guaranteed him a place at university. But Schuler had not made that effort. He had worked out that there were two ways to get the things you wanted in life: you could earn them, or you could steal them. And earning them required too much effort.
And this was how he had ended up. Jobless, twenty-six years old, a thief. Was it too late to change things? To start afresh? To build a new life?
He swung open the main door of his apartment building. Each step up the stairwell seemed to take a monumental effort. He unlocked the door of his apartment and threw the keys onto the second-hand dresser by the door. Leaning against the door frame for a moment, he stood on the threshold between the stark light of the stairwell and the dark of his flat. There was a click as the hall light, on an economy timer, went out, plunging Schuler into total darkness. He breathed it in for a moment, the hoppy taste of beer thick in his mouth and his head suddenly light without a visual anchor.
The light in his living room snapped on. Schuler stood blinking, trying to work out how he had accidentally hit the light switch, when he saw him sitting in the chair by the television. The same man. The same face that had gazed out at him through the window of Hauser’s flat. The killer.
The devil had come to take him to hell.
11.
Fourteen Days After the First Murder: Thursday, 1 September 2005.
12.02 a.m.: Grindelviertel, Hamburg