Fabel wanted to get drunk. After his sixth beer, he could feel its effects; he was aware of the leaden deliberateness in his speech and movements that always came with having drunk that little bit too much. He always came to this point. And never beyond it. Tonight, he thought, tonight just get drunk. The truth was that Fabel never felt comfortable when he had had too much alcohol. He had never in his life got really, seriously drunk, even when he had been a student. There had always been a point when he was drinking that his fear of losing control would kick in. When he would become afraid of making a fool of himself.
Maria and Grueber joined them and they all moved away from the bar and its raucous choir and found a table together at the back of the pub. For some reason, Fabel got onto the subject of Gunter Griebel’s field of work and what Dirk had said to him about his experience.
‘Maybe we all come back,’ said Anna – her gloomy expression did not suggest that she relished the concept. ‘Maybe we are all just variations on the same theme and we experience each consciousness as if it were unique.’
‘There’s this wonderful, tragic Italian short story called “The Other Son” by Luigi Pirandello,’ said Susanne. ‘It is all about this Sicilian mother who gives letters to everyone she hears is emigrating to America, so that they can pass them on to her two sons who emigrated years before but from whom she has never heard. The pain of separation that she feels is enormous. But these sons really had not given her a second thought, while she has a third son who has stayed with her and is as loving and devoted as a son can be. Yet she cannot bear to set eyes on him, far less show him any form of affection or love. It emerges that, years before, while the mother was a young woman, a notorious bandit had raided the village with his gang. While there, he had brutally raped her and, as a result, she had become pregnant. As the child grew, despite being a sensitive and caring boy, he developed a massive build and had become the image of his natural father, the bandit. And every time the mother looked at her devoted, loving son, she felt loathing and contempt. He was not his father. But all she saw was the reincarnation of the bandit who had raped her. It is a tragic and beautifully written story. But it is also one that resonates with us, because it’s something we all do. We see continuity in people.’
‘But that story is about appearance. About a physical similarity between father and son. The son’s personality was totally different,’ said Fabel.
‘Yes,’ replied Susanne. ‘But the mother suspected that beneath the surface similarity the person was somehow the same. A variation on a theme.’
‘I remember,’ said Henk Hermann, looking thoughtful, ‘when I was a child, I used to get so fed up with my mother and my grandmother always going on about how like my grandfather I was. Looks, mannerisms, personality – the whole package. I used to get so fed up with hearing, “Oh, that’s just his grandad…” or, “Isn’t he the spit of his grandad…” To me he was someone buried, literally, in history. He had died in the war, you see. There were photographs of him around the place and I couldn’t see what they were on about. Then, when my grandmother died and I was an adult, I found all those photographs of him again. And it was me. There was even one of him in his Wehrmacht uniform. I tell you, that was a spooky experience, seeing my face in that uniform. It really makes you think. I mean, someone just like me living through those times…’
They moved on to a new topic. But Fabel had noticed that Henk seemed more subdued than normal for the rest of the evening and found himself regretting having brought up the subject.
The pub was just around the corner from Fabel’s flat and he and Susanne walked home. When they arrived, Fabel opened the door to the apartment and made an exaggeratedly gentlemanly sweep of his arm to indicate that Susanne should precede him into the flat.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Susanne. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘I’ll survive…’ he said and kissed her. ‘Thanks for caring.’ He switched on the light.
They both saw it at the same time.
Fabel heard Susanne’s shrill scream and was surprised to feel any hint of drunkenness swept suddenly from him by the tidal wave of horror that washed over them both.
Fabel ran across the room. He unholstered his service automatic and snapped the carriage back to put a round in the chamber. He turned to Susanne. She stood frozen, both hands clamped to her mouth and her eyes wide with shock. Fabel held up his hand, indicating that she was to stay where she was. He moved over to the bedroom, threw the door wide and stepped inside, sweeping the room with the gun. Nothing. He switched on the bedroom light to check again and then moved on to the bathroom.
The apartment was clear.
Fabel moved back towards Susanne, putting his gun down on the coffee table as he crossed the room. He put his arm around her and steered her towards the bedroom, placing his body between her and the apartment’s picture window.
‘Stay in there, Susanne. I’ll phone for help.’
‘Christ, Jan – in your home…’ Her face was drained of colour and her tear-streaked make-up stood out harshly against the pallor.
He closed the bedroom door behind her and crossed the living room again, deliberately not looking at the picture window that had given him so much pleasure, with its ever-changing vista across the Alster. He snapped up the phone and hit the pre-set dial button for the Presidium. He spoke to the duty Commissar in the Murder Commission and told him that Anna Wolff, Henk Hermann, Maria Klee and Werner Meyer would be on their way to their respective homes and that he was to call them on their cellphones and tell them to make their way to his apartment.
‘But first of all,’ he said, hearing his own voice dull and dead in the quiet of his apartment, ‘send a full forensic team. I have a secondary murder locus here.’
He hung up, resting his hand on the phone for a moment and deliberately keeping his back to the window. Then he turned.
In the centre of the window, pressed flat against it and adhering to the glass by means of its own stickiness and strips of insulating tape, was a human scalp. Viscous rivulets of blood and red dye streaked the pane. Fabel felt sick and turned his face from it, but found that he could not banish the image from his brain. He made his way over to the bedroom and to the sound of Susanne sobbing. In the distance, he heard the growing clamour of police sirens as they made their way towards him along Mittelweg.
1.45 a.m.: Poseldorf, Hamburg
Fabel had arranged for a female officer to take Susanne home to her own flat and stay with her there. Susanne had recovered significantly from the shock and had sought to apply her professional detachment as a practising forensic psychologist. But the truth was that this killer had reached out and touched their personal lives. Something that no one had done before. Fabel tried to contain the fury that raged within him. His home. The bastard had been here, in his private space. And that meant that he knew more about Fabel than Fabel knew about him. It also meant that Susanne had to be watched. Protected.
The whole team turned up. The shock and anger they felt was apparent on all their faces, even on Maria Klee’s. It was her boyfriend, Frank Grueber, who led the forensic team on site, but, realising that his own boss had a close professional and personal relationship with Fabel, Grueber had phoned Holger Brauner at home. Brauner had turned up within minutes of the others and, although he allowed Grueber to process the scene, he scrutinised every sample, every area personally.