By lunchtime, every policeman, uniform and KriPo, had a description of the short, powerfully built Slav who had attacked Fabel. The doctor at the Krankenhaus St Georg who examined Fabel could not conceal how impressed he was with the professionalism of the attack. The Slav had very efficiently cut off the blood supply to Fabel’s brain, rendering him unconscious. There had been little permanent damage done, although the pain Fabel was experiencing was the result of brain cells dying, starved of oxygen. The hospital staff insisted on keeping Fabel in overnight for observation and Fabel felt too exhausted and sore to argue. He yielded to a peaceful, dreamless sleep.
Fabel woke shortly after two p.m. The nurse fetched Werner and Maria Klee, who had been waiting patiently outside for Fabel to awake. Maria, with an uncharacteristic informality, sat on the edge of Fabel’s bed. Werner stood, awkwardly. It was as if he felt uncomfortable seeing his boss so vulnerable. He dragged a chair from the corner and sat down only when Fabel insisted that he do so.
‘You sure it was the guy you saw outside the second murder scene?’ Werner asked.
‘No doubt about it. I was looking straight into his eyes.’
Werner’s face hardened. ‘So he’s our guy. He’s “Son of Sven” …’
Fabel frowned. ‘I don’t know. If he is, why didn’t he kill me?’
‘He had a bloody good try,’ said Maria.
‘No … I don’t think he did. The doctor here says it was very professional … that he knew how to render me unconscious. If he wanted to kill me he could have finished me off, silently and with no fuss, instead of laying me out on Blüm’s bed.’
‘But we’ve sighted him at two murder locations. That more than makes him a suspect,’ protested Werner.
‘But why was he there after the murder? And why choose now to turn over her apartment, instead of when he was there committing the murder?’
‘Maybe he thought he’d left something behind,’ Maria suggested.
‘We all know this killer doesn’t leave anything behind. Anyway, Brauner’s team went through that apartment at a microscopic level. They wouldn’t miss anything, and our guy would know that. The other thing is, the guy who attacked me doesn’t fit the description the girl from the apartment building gave us.’ Fabel paused. The sunlight through the tall, narrow hospital window sliced a bright triangle across the floor of Fabel’s room and glittered coldly on the porcelain and the stainless-steel pipes and taps of the washstand by the door. His head ached and he closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. He spoke without opening his eyes. ‘What is really bothering me is the strength of that old guy, and the way he was able to put me out so professionally. That takes training.’
Werner stretched his legs out, resting his feet on the steel bars beneath Fabel’s hospital bed. ‘Well, both you and Maria say he looks foreign. Like a Russian. If he is so handy, could he be one of the “Top Team” – the Ukrainian outfit Volker was talking about?’
‘Could be, I suppose.’ Fabel still didn’t open his eyes. ‘Everything about him says special forces. But again, why didn’t he finish the job?’
‘It’s a big thing to kill a Hamburg policeman,’ said Werner. ‘Klugmann is one thing, but murder a Mordkommission Hauptkommissar and you’d have nowhere to hide.’
‘Whoever he was and whatever he was doing there,’ said Maria, ‘we’ve got the whole of Hamburg out there looking for him.’
Fabel slowly eased himself up, the effort stretching his voice. ‘I’m not so sure he’s going to be that easy to find, Maria. What about MacSwain? Have we got him under close watch?’
‘Paul and Anna are on him tight,’ said Werner. ‘They’re there most of the time, even when we’ve got others on shift. I think they’re afraid of another screw-up like the Klugmann surveillance.’
‘Good. I’ll be out of here tomorrow and we can go over everything. In the meantime, if anything comes up, let me know.’
‘Okay, Chef,’ said Werner. Fabel closed his eyes again and rested his head on the pillow. Werner looked across to Maria and jutted his chin in the direction of the door. Maria nodded and rose from the bed.
‘We’ll see you later, Chef,’ she said.
The day passed between gazing out of the window, flicking through the daytime TV stations in the vain search for anything worth watching, and sleeping. As the day went on, Fabel became aware of a growing stiffness in his neck and a tenderness below the angle of his jaw, where the Slav’s thumb had squeezed off the blood supply to his brain.
Susanne breezed in mid-afternoon and immediately started to examine Fabel, holding his eyelids back with her thumb and checking each of his eyes in turn and rotating his head with her hands to assess the mobility of his neck.
‘If this is your idea of foreplay,’ grinned Fabel, ‘I have to tell you it isn’t doing it for me.’
Susanne was not in the mood for jokes. Fabel saw that she was genuinely upset and it touched him. She sat on the bed and held his hand for a couple of hours, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, while Fabel dozed. When a nurse came in to usher her out, Fabel was amazed at the fierce authority with which Susanne dismissed her. Susanne stayed until after six and then came back for an hour in the evening. By nine-thirty, Fabel had abandoned himself to a deep, impenetrable, dreamless sleep.
Tuesday 17 June, 8.30 p.m. Harvestehude, Hamburg.
Anna Wolff could have been a secretary, a hairdresser, a kindergarten teacher. She was petite and vibrant, with a pretty round face that was continually full of energy and habitually made up with dark eye-shadow, mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. Her short hair was raven black and either sleeked flat or waxed spiky. One of the things that threw observers off any track that would lead them to conclude that she was, in fact, a Kriminalkommissarin, was her youthfulness. Anna was twenty-seven but could have passed for someone in her late teens.
Paul Lindemann, on the other hand, couldn’t have been anything other than a policeman. Lindemann’s father, like Werner Meyer’s father, had been a Wasserschutz policeman, patrolling by boat Hamburg’s circulatory system of waterways, canals, harbours and quaysides. Paul was one of those northern Germans whom Fabel described as ‘scrubbed Lutherans’, clean, groomed, austere people who often found it difficult to bend to change. Paul Lindemann looked today pretty much as he would have done if he had been the same age in the 1950s or ’60s.
Fabel habitually teamed up Anna and Paul. They were chalk and cheese, and Fabel had always believed in putting together teams of individuals who viewed things totally differently: if you came at the same object from opposing angles, you were likely to see more of the whole. Anna and Paul made an odd couple and for months the imposed partnership had sat ill with both of them. Now they worked together with deep mutual respect and regard for their respective, different but complementary talents. It was the kind of success Fabel had hoped to achieve with Maria and Werner, whose potential as a team had yet to be realised.
Tonight, both Anna and Paul felt edgy. Fabel was more than a boss. He had been mentor to both of them and had, by selecting them for his Mordkommission team, set the sights higher for their future careers. To both, Fabel had seemed invulnerable. Now he was lying in a hospital bed in the Krankenhaus St Georg. They would have given anything to have been out searching for Fabel’s attacker, rather than keeping tabs on some British yuppie.
There was a newspaper and tobacco stall on the corner of MacSwain’s street. A coffee machine sat behind the counter and outside there was the usual brushed aluminium elbow-high tables for customers to stand and drink their coffee. Anna stood at one of the four tables, from which she had a clear view of the crossroads and MacSwain’s apartment block as well as the exit from the Tiefgarage underneath. If anyone came out, on foot or by car, Anna would be able to track the direction they took and radio to Paul, who was parked further down the block with a view from the other direction. It was dark now and Anna was on her third coffee, which she was trying to make last. Any more would mean a jittery,
sleepless night. The sullen, overweight stallholder barely acknowledged her existence, but when three skinheads in their uniform of field-green jerkins came up to buy some cigarettes, he muttered something to them and nodded in her direction. The fat stallholder and the skinheads burst into crude laughter. Anna kept her gaze firmly on the apartment building. The three skinheads came up to Anna’s table, one on one side and two on the other. One of the skins, a tall, bull-necked youth with bad skin, leaned into Anna.
‘What’s up darlin’, you been stood up?’
Anna neither answered nor looked in their direction.
The bull-necked skinhead leered at his comrades and laughed. ‘I’d get all stood up for you, babe …’
‘What, all ten centimetres of you?’ said Anna with a sigh and still without looking in the skinhead’s direction.
Bull-Neck’s two companions exploded into laughter, pointing at him derisively. His face clouded and he pulled close to Anna, slipping his hand under her leather jacket and closing it around her breast.
‘Maybe we’ll see how much of me you can take …’
It all happened too fast for Bull-Neck to register. Anna spun around away from the skinhead and then back to face him, throwing his hand away as if with centrifugal force. As she came around to face him again, her hands moved in two swift movements. Her left hand reached down and grabbed the skinhead’s groin while her right elbow slammed into his cheek and then, in a seamless movement, her right hand slipped under her jacket, bringing her SIG-Sauer automatic up and into his face. Hard. She pushed him back, not allowing him to get purchase with his scrabbling feet until he slammed into the stall’s counter. She bent his nose out of shape with the muzzle of the gun, twisting it as she spoke.
‘You wanna fuck with Anna?’ she said in a coquettish voice, tilting her head from side to side and pouting her lips.
Bull-Neck stared at her with terror in his eyes, searching her face as if to assess the extent of her madness and the consequent extent of his danger. Anna swung the gun around at the other two skinheads, stretching her arm out, bolt stiff.
‘What about you boys? You wanna fuck with Anna?’
Bull-Neck’s companions held up their hands and backed away for a few paces before breaking into a run. Anna turned back to Bull-Neck and rammed the muzzle back into his nose, twisting and rotating it as if toying with it. His face started to smear with the blood that had begun to trickle from his nose. Anna made a girlish, disappointed face.
‘They don’t want to fuck with Anna …’ She dropped the cute voice. ‘What about you, dickless? You wanna play?’
The skinhead shook his head vigorously. Anna’s eyes narrowed and darkened.
‘If I ever hear you’ve laid hands on a woman like that again, I’ll come after you personally. Where’s your ID?’
He scrabbled in the pockets of his jerkin and took out his identification card. Anna released his crushed testicles and examined the card.
‘Okay Markus, now I know where you live. Maybe I’ll come visit and we can play some more.’ She leaned forward into his face and hissed. ‘Now fuck off!’ She threw his ID onto the ground so that he had to stoop to pick it up, clutching his bruised groin, before running off in the opposite direction to that taken by his companions. Anna holstered her sidearm and turned to the stallholder.
‘Is there a problem, tubby?’ she said, smiling her sweetest schoolgirl smile.
The stallholder shook his head and held up his hands. ‘No problem at all, Fräulein.’
‘Then give me another coffee, fatboy.’ Anna turned back to look at the apartment block. MacSwain’s lights had gone out. She scanned the exits and the street outside. Nothing. She slipped her radio out from her jacket pocket.
‘Paul … I think MacSwain is moving … you see him come out?’
‘No. You?’
‘No. Got tied up.’ She released the button on her radio and depressed it immediately again when she saw a silver Porsche angle up and out of the exit of the Tiefgarage. ‘We’re on the move. Pick me up, Paul, and zack, zack!’
In a matter of seconds, Paul pulled up in the battered old Mercedes used for surveillance. Battered on the outside, tuned to peak performance under the hood.
The muscles of Paul’s usually expressionless face were struggling with a wry grin as Anna climbed into the car. With her spiky hair, her meticulous make-up and her oversized leather jacket, she looked like a schoolgirl not yet accustomed to the subtleties of cosmetics, going out on her first night clubbing.
‘What’s so funny, Schlaks?’ she asked, using the north-German dialect word for ‘lanky’.
‘You’ve been playing again, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Anna said, keeping focused on the silver Porsche, two cars ahead.
‘While I was parked down the road, two skinheads came running past as if they’d seen the Devil. That wouldn’t be you, would it?’
‘I have absolutely no idea what you mean.’
They pulled up behind a queue at a set of traffic lights. Paul craned his long neck to check if the Porsche had already gone through. It hadn’t. He turned to look at Anna and saw, through the passenger side window, a thickset skinhead, bent over, hands on knees, trying to catch his breath. His face was smeared with blood. He was looking back down the road as if to check he was not being pursued. His eyes came round and met Paul’s. Then he saw Anna. She blew him a long, sensual kiss with her full, fire-truck-red lips, punctuating it with a smacking sound. The skinhead froze with terror, then looked around for an escape route. The lights changed and the Mercedes started to move. Anna crinkled her nose at him and waggled her fingers in a cute ‘bye-bye’.
‘Absolutely no idea at all,’ said Anna, her face an expression of exaggerated innocence. Paul checked his rear-view mirror. The skinhead was standing in sag-shouldered relief, gazing blankly after the car.
‘Anna, just be careful. One of these days you’re going to end up biting off more than you can chew.’
‘I can handle myself.’
‘And one of these days you’re going to end up with a harassment or brutality claim against you.’
Anna barked a laugh. She gestured with her hand for Paul to take the next left: the Porsche’s indicator was blinking. ‘No self-respecting neo-Nazi skinhead fuckwit is going to admit to having his ass kicked by a one-metre-fifty-eight Jüdin. And if they did, it would be laughed out of court.’
Paul shook his head. Anna, he knew, came from a survivor family: Hamburg Jews who had been hidden by a sympathetic family until the British and the Canadians took Hamburg. She had grown up spiked with defences; defences that had been honed by martial-arts training and three years’ service in the Israeli army.
The sky had turned a velvet blue. Paul focused on the silver Porsche; MacSwain led them out onto Hallerstrasse. The municipal high-rise flats of the Grindelhochhäuser loomed into the darkness. They could have been in an estate in London, Birmingham or Glasgow. The flats had, in fact, been built after the war to hold the families of the soldiers of the British occupying forces. When the British moved out, they handed the flats over to the Hamburg authorities. Now the Grindelhochhäuser, shunned by the population of Hamburg, were occupied mainly by immigrant families. Ukrainian gangs were rumoured to hold sway in this imported concrete jungle.
MacSwain crossed into Beim Schlump and passed Sternschanzen-Park. He turned into Schanzenstrasse.
‘He’s heading towards St Pauli,’ said Anna.
‘Where the second victim was found.’ Paul gave Anna a quick look. ‘But he’s probably just off for a night out …’
It is almost as if St Pauli lies dormant during the day, absorbing the sun’s energy. At night it explodes into supercharged life. As well as the sex trade and musical shows, it has one of the most vibrant club scenes in Europe with venues like The Academy, PAT, Location One and Cult attracting clubbers from all over the city and beyond. Even on a Tuesday night, one of the least pleasure-focused days in the
north-German psyche, the party goes on until dawn.
MacSwain parked in the Spielbudenplatz Parkhaus. Paul dropped Anna at the entrance to watch for MacSwain coming out and parked further down the street. He then took up a position opposite the entrance, in front of Schmidt’s Tivoli. MacSwain emerged from the Parkhaus. He was dressed casually but expensively and moved with a relaxed assurance. He didn’t notice Anna, who turned away and crossed the road before making a U-turn to follow on behind. In the meantime, Paul had picked up MacSwain and was walking about three metres behind him, but on the opposite side of the road.
MacSwain led them out of Spielbudenplatz, diagonally crossed Davidstrasse in front of the Davidwache police station and into Friedrichstrasse. Anna caught up with Paul and linked her arm through his, a simple gesture of intimacy that instantly transformed them into a couple. They passed the Albers-Eck, with its landmark corner doorway. Somewhere, one of the pubs was having a Schlager night, and the enthusiastic blandness of German middle-of-the-road music spilled out into the street. MacSwain crossed Hans-Albers-Platz and walked into a dance club, receiving a nod of acknowledgement from one of two doormen who looked as if between them they kept the German steroid industry in business.
‘Shit,’ said Anna. ‘What do you reckon?’
Paul drew air in through his teeth. ‘Don’t know … it’s going to be heaving in there. If we go in he could come out before we even lay eyes on him. And if we hang around out here, we’re going to stick out like a sore thumb.’ He quickly surveyed the square. ‘We could get some back-up to park themselves out here, but we’re exposed while we wait … Let’s go in and see if we can find him. If we can’t, we meet back at the door in fifteen minutes. Okay?’
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