Susanne did not seem to understand his reluctance; she had even hinted that it was his fear of change, his inability to break away from routines that was holding them back. But it was more than that. Exactly what it was he had yet to define, but something twisted in his gut whenever he thought about giving up his apartment. He had, after all, been lucky to buy where and when he did. But what was more important to Fabel was that it had been in that apartment that he had rebuilt himself after the break-up of his marriage. It was there that he had redefined who Jan Fabel was. He had found his new life.
Frau Haarmeyer led them through to the kitchen. As in the other rooms, the outer wall was all window. The kitchen shone with glass and brushed steel and was filled with a faint, pleasant odour of coffee. Fabel idly wondered if the developers had a special spray to infuse the kitchen with its appealing fragrance, or if it was the phantom aroma of the coffee roasters in the nearby Speicherstadt.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ asked Frau Haarmeyer with an enthusiasm that was as fake as her hair colour.
‘Very impressive…’ Susanne shot Fabel a meaningful look.
‘Great,’ he responded with the same degree of conviction as Frau Haarmeyer. He again looked down to the site where they had found the mummified corpse. The archaeological dig had been completed weeks ago and now the developers had moved in. Bright yellow earth-movers and tractors, small and scarab-like from Fabel’s elevated position, moved across the site; the next phase of Hamburg’s vision for the future was being superimposed on a past where a young man had been suffocated and baked to death by the hellish heat of a man-made firestorm.
Fabel felt the dull anxiety of unfinished business. He had promised himself that he would find the family of the mummified man, and he still had to achieve that.
As the estate agent explained, yet again, that they would have a view of the Kaispeicher A with its amazing new opera house and concert hall, and how this was going to be among the most desirable addresses in Hamburg, Fabel’s gaze remained on the building site in the distance and below them. He wondered how an estate agent would market a memento mori as a sales feature of a property.
It was cool outside, but the sun was shining and the sky was a silky pale blue.
‘I really liked that place,’ Susanne said as they walked back to the car. Buried somewhere in the softness of her faint Bavarian accent was a sharp edge. ‘You didn’t say much.’
Fabel explained about the view.
‘Would it really bother you that much?’ asked Susanne in a tone that suggested it should not. ‘It’s better than the memory of… well, that…’
‘The other thing,’ Fabel sought a less subjective reason for rejecting the apartment, ‘is it just seemed so… I don’t know, cold. Soulless. Like living in an office block.’
Susanne sighed. ‘Well, I liked it.’
‘I’m sorry, Susanne. It’s just that with this case still going on, my mind’s not up to dealing with moving.’
‘Listen, Jan, this case has given us one of the main reasons for getting you out of that apartment. We can afford this place. It would mean a new start for us. Together.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I promise.’
11 a.m.
Cornelius Tamm woke up in stages.
His first sensation was pain: a great blooming of it in the side of his face and a pounding in his head. Next he became aware of sounds: indistinct and as if in the far distance. A metallic whirring and the sound of air being moved mechanically. Then came a growing awareness that he was not free to move, but the drug that had been administered by his assailant confused his sense of his own body and he could not work out for the moment why his movements were restricted. As the sense of the geography of his body returned, he realised that he was bound to a chair, his hands tied behind him and some kind of gag taped over his mouth. Finally, as his consciousness was at last restored to him in its full pain and horror, Cornelius’s eyes opened and slowly focused on his new environment.
To start with he thought he was sitting in a cave that had glistening grey walls. Then he realised that he was surrounded by curtains of thick, almost opaque plastic sheeting. The chair to which he was bound also rested on a sheet of heavy-duty black polyurethane. He felt a churning between his gut and his chest: it was clear that the sheeting was intended to contain a mess. And that mess would be his blood and flesh as his life was brought to an end. He struggled violently against his bonds. The effort turned up the volume of the pain and a rivulet of blood escaped from the nostril on the side of his face that had been hit. The chair to which he was tied was obviously robustly built, because it hardly moved on its carpet of polyurethane.
Cornelius got the impression that he was in some kind of cellar. Whoever had brought him here had been painstaking in their preparation of the chamber: even the ceiling had been covered with plastic, stretched tight and held in place with strips of black tape. But a single bulb hung from it and Cornelius could see grey plaster around the light fitting. The ceiling was low: too low for it to belong in a room used for normal living or working, and he continued to hear the metallic whirring sound, like an air-conditioning system in a factory.
The curtains of dense plastic parted and a figure entered the small space. Cornelius recognised the young man who had been sitting by the bar during his gig; who had been waiting for him with an iron bar in the courtyard of the brewery pub. He was wearing a pale blue coverall suit with blue plastic overshoes. His black hair was hidden beneath an elasticated plastic shower cap. As he entered, he pulled a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, and when he spoke his voice was slightly muffled.
‘Hello, Cornelius. It has been more than twenty years since I last saw you. You look, if you don’t mind me saying, like crap. I have never understood why men of your age wear their hair in a ponytail. The world has moved on since you were a student, Cornelius. Why haven’t you moved on with it?’ He leaned close, placing his face a few centimetres from his captive’s. ‘Do you recognise me, Cornelius? Yes… it’s me. It’s Franz. I’m back.’
Cornelius felt as if he was going as mad as his tormentor. For a moment he considered the similarity in appearance between the young man and the person he claimed to be. But it was impossible. Franz had been dead twenty years, and the resemblance was only superficial. Still, it had been enough to trigger that feeling of recognition when Cornelius had first noticed him at the gig.
‘You are a nobody, Cornelius. No one cares about your stupid lyrics any more. You even succeeded in making a mess of your marriage. You are the most comprehensive of failures – you have failed as a father, as a husband, as a musician. You betrayed me so that you could turn your back on one life and start another. Is this it? Is this what you have done with the time, the life, that you bought by betraying me?’
Cornelius stared at his tormentor, his eyes wide with terror and awe at the monumentality of the man’s madness. He clearly believed he was who he claimed to be. Then, through the fear and the pain, Cornelius realised that he had seen this person before.
‘At least Gunter tried to do something with his life. At least he used the time he obtained through his treachery in trying to do something positive. But you, Cornelius. You gave me up for nothing… to waste your future on trying to recapture the past. You betrayed me. You and the others.’
The young man squatted down and opened out the velvet roll-pouch on the carpet of black sheeting. He exposed three blades, all forged in the same way from single pieces of glittering steel, but each one a slightly different shape and size.