The curious mixture of professional and personal items in the study reminded Fabel of the room in which they had found Gunter Griebel’s body, although a great deal more cash had been spent on this environment. Fabel was disturbed by the similarity and for a second his imagination took him to a place he did not want to be: what if the maniac they were hunting was turning his attention on Fabel and his team? In an unbidden and sudden image that formed in his mind, Fabel saw young Frank Grueber bound to his antique leather chair, the top of his head disfigured. He thought of Maria, who had already survived the horror of a knife attack, sleeping upstairs, and of how her experience had caused her to develop a phobia of physical contact. He thought back to how, during the same previous inquiry, Anna had been drugged and abducted. And now there had been the atrocity in his own home.
Fabel felt the urge to grab his keys and rush off to the Presidium, but Grueber had been right: he was too exhausted and too muddled to be of any use to anyone. He would rest up for a couple of hours, maybe even sleep, before going in.
He wandered over to the walnut bookshelves. Fabel had always felt comforted when he was surrounded by books and Grueber’s collection was extensive but not wide-ranging in subject matter. Archaeology formed the core of his library: the rest of the books covered history from various periods, geology, forensic technologies and methodologies and anatomy. Everything that was not archaeology was a related subject.
Taking a couple of volumes from the shelves, Fabel slumped onto the antique leather chesterfield. The first book that had caught his interest dealt with mummies. It was a large-format book with big glossy colour plates and in it Fabel discovered exactly the same photograph of Cherchen Man that Severts had shown him. Again Fabel felt awe as he looked on the perfectly preserved face of a fifty-five-year-old man who had died three thousand years before Fabel had been born. He read for a minute and then flicked through the book again until he came across the equally striking image of Neu Versen Man: Red Franz. He felt a lurch in his gut when he looked at the skeletonised skull with its shock of thick red hair. It reminded him of the scalps that the killer had been leaving behind at each scene. The book detailed Red Franz’s discovery on Bourtanger Moor, near the small town of Neu Versen, in November 1900. It also offered a hypothesis on the nature of Red Franz’s life and death. How he had, during his lifetime, been wounded in battle. Of how his life had been ended by having his throat cut, perhaps ceremonially, before he was interred in the dark peaty bog of Bourtanger Moor.
Fabel flicked through some more pages. Each colour plate showed a face from the past, preserved in dank bogs or in arid deserts or prepared for the afterlife by the surgeon-priests of whom Grueber had spoken. Fabel tried to read, to focus his attention on something that would take his mind from everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, but his eyelids felt leaden.
He fell asleep.
It had been a while since Fabel had had one of his dreams. And it had been even longer since he had admitted having one to Susanne, who he knew was concerned about the way the stresses and horrors of his working days manifested themselves in the vivid nightmares that haunted his sleep.
He dreamed that he stood on a vast plain. Fabel, who had grown up on the baize-green flatlands of Ostfriesland, knew that this was somewhere else. Somewhere that was as alien as it was possible to be. The grass he stood in came halfway up his calf, but was dry and brittle: bone-coloured. The horizon in the distance was so uncompromisingly flat and sharp that it made his eyes hurt to look at it. Above it a vast sky that sat colourless and leaden was broken only by sickly streaks of rust-coloured clouds.
Fabel turned a slow three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything looked the same: an unbroken, sanity-shredding sameness. He stood and wondered what to do. There was no point in walking, for there was nowhere to walk to and there was no landmark to guide his walking. This was a world without direction, without destination.
Suddenly there were figures in the landscape, moving towards him. They were not together, walking several hundred metres apart like a strung-out camel train crossing a featureless desert.
The first figure drew near. A tall, lean man, dressed in brightly coloured clothes. He had a neatly trimmed beard and longish light brown hair that fingered the air with tangled wisps as he walked. Fabel held out his hand, but the figure did not seem to notice and instead walked straight past him as if he wasn’t there. As he did so, Fabel noticed that the man’s face was unnaturally thin, his eyelids unevenly pulled down. His bottom lip was twisted, revealing the teeth on one side of his face. Fabel recognised him. He held out his hand to Cherchen Man, who walked on by, blind to Fabel’s presence. The next figure who passed him was a very tall, graceful woman whom Fabel recognized as the Beauty of Loulan.
But as the third figure approached there was a terrible sound. Like thunder but louder than any thunder Fabel had ever heard before. He felt the dry earth shake and crack beneath him, bristling the dry grass, and suddenly, all around him, broken black buildings, like jagged blackened teeth, thrust up out of the ground. The third figure was smaller than the others and was dressed in modern clothes. He drew near: a youth with fine wispy fair hair, wearing a blue serge suit that was too big for him. By the time he had reached Fabel, an ugly black city of angular buildings, as empty as death, had grown all around them. Like the other mummies who had walked past Fabel, the youth’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes were sunken and shadowed. As he walked he held one arm stiffly out before him in the same death-frozen gesture as when Fabel had first seen him, half-buried in the sand of the Elbe waterfront. As he reached Fabel he did not, as the others had done, simply pass by. Instead he tilted his head and looked, with his hollow eyes, up at the vast bleak sky.
Fabel looked up too. The sky darkened as if filled with birds, but he recognised the dull, menacing drone of ancient warplanes. The drone grew louder, deafening, as the planes came overhead. Fabel stood, mute and motionless, watching the bombs cascade from the sky. A great storm began to rage, the excoriatingly hot air swirled and screamed, and the black buildings now glowed like coals. Yet Fabel and the youth remained untouched by the firestorm raging around them.
For a moment the youth looked blankly at Fabel, with his expressionless, ageless face. Then he turned away and walked the few paces to where the nearest building raged with fire, greedily sucking on the air to feed the great flame that lived within. The youth lay down before the building, which Fabel thought may have been the Nikolaikirche, pulled a red blanket of molten asphalt and embers over himself, and went to sleep, his outstretched arm reaching out to the burning building.
Fabel sat upright, still halfway in his dream, for a few moments straining his ears for the sound of bombers overhead. He looked around and recognised Grueber’s study with its expensive antiques, its walnut bookshelves and the half-finished bust of a long-dead girl from Schleswig-Holstein.
Fabel looked at his watch: it was now six-thirty. He had slept for another two hours. He still felt the lead of exhaustion in his limbs but, hearing movement in the kitchen, he went through to find Maria Klee drinking a coffee.
‘You fit enough to come in with me?’ His question sounded more like a statement than he would have liked. Maria nodded, stood up and took a final sip of her coffee. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the team together. We’re going to go over everything we’ve got. Again. There’s got to be something we’re missing here.’