‘This … gentleman … is Hansi Kraus,’ said Yilmaz. ‘He has some information … indeed some evidence … he wishes to share with you.’ Yilmaz nodded to the Turk who had been leaning against one of the desks. The Turk reached behind him and picked up a bundle of soiled rags. He carefully unfolded the corners to reveal a glittering gold-coloured nine-millimetre automatic. The flanks of the gun were ornately tooled and the word in Cyrillic was engraved into them. Beneath, in the Latin alphabet, were the words MADE IN UKRAINE.
‘Herr Kraus wants to hand this over as material evidence in the murder of Hans Klugmann,’ said Yilmaz. ‘He apologises for the delay … he had intended to hand it in, but it completely slipped his mind.’
‘Where did you find this?’ Fabel asked Hansi Kraus.
Kraus looked from Yilmaz to the other Turk to Fabel. ‘In the swimming pool. I was there when that guy got his in the head.’
‘You witnessed the murder of Hans Klugmann?’
Kraus nodded.
‘Did you see his killers?’
Kraus hesitated. The tough Turk shifted on his desk, creaking the leather of his jacket. Kraus glanced at him and nodded again.
‘Could you recognise them again?’
‘Yes. An older guy and a younger guy. They both looked fuckin’ hard. The younger guy was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was the young guy who popped the dead guy.’
Fabel gestured to the other Turk, who handed him the gun. Fabel kept his hands flat and held the gun as if he were holding a hot roast on an oven mitt. MADE IN UKRAINE. ‘Were they foreigners? Did you hear them speaking Russian or something like that?’
‘No … I mean yes, I did hear them, but no, they weren’t foreigners. They were German. The older guy was banging on about the area having gone to shit. He said something about having brought a girl to the swimming pool when he was younger. They definitely weren’t Ivans.’
‘What about the gun? Where did you get that?’
‘I saw them dump it in a trash can. When they left I went and got it out.’
‘You followed them?’
‘No. They dumped the gun in the trash can inside the Schwimmhalle.’
‘They didn’t make any effort to hide it?’
‘Not much. And there’s a canal just a few metres from the pool. I guess they didn’t care if it was found or not.’
‘Or maybe they wanted it found …’ Yilmaz suggested.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ agreed Fabel. ‘German hitmen – a Ukrainian weapon. It would appear they were trying to point us in the wrong direction.’ He turned back to Hansi. ‘I need you to come down to the Präsidium and make a full statement. And I need you to look at some mug shots; see if you can identify the shooters.’
Hansi Kraus nodded. He looked less than happy about it, but had the doomed air of someone who accepts that shit happens. And usually to him.
Fabel placed a hand on the shoulder of Kraus’s grubby military overcoat. ‘Listen Hansi, I can’t make you do this. And nor can Herr Yilmaz or anyone else …’ He looked pointedly at the other Turk who returned his gaze disinterestedly. ‘Your evidence is only good if you give it freely and honestly.’
Kraus gave a bitter laugh. ‘Nice world you live in, Herr Hauptkommissar … I’ll give you your statement.’
Fabel led Kraus out to his car. Yilmaz walked with them to the door. ‘I appreciate your help on this, Herr Yilmaz,’ Fabel said, and meant it.
Yilmaz smiled broadly and gave a dismissive shrug.
‘But I take it you understand that this doesn’t buy you any favours from me,’ said Fabel. ‘I owe you for this, but I’ll never compromise the law or myself to help you out.’
‘That is something I already know.’ Yilmaz laughed. ‘I didn’t expect anything in return. That’s the problem with dealing with an honest policeman. The only thing I’d ask is that my part is kept out of Hansi’s statement.’
‘That’s one compromise I can make. Thanks again. Goodbye, Herr Yilmaz.’
All the way back to the Präsidium, Fabel had kept his window open to mitigate the influence Hansi’s overcoat was having on his upholstery. When Fabel arrived, he handed Hansi over to Werner and told him to order something from the canteen for their guest to eat. Looking at Kraus, however, led Fabel to believe that they would have to turn him loose reasonably soon: his eyes were becoming increasingly mobile, darting from side to side, like those of a hunted animal. There was also a nervous intensity to his movements. Fabel knew Hansi needed a fix and they had only so long to get information out of him.
Back at his office, Fabel cleared his desk of clutter, heaping files into a pile on the floor and pushing his keyboard and mouse to one side. He found a large layout pad in the bottom drawer of his desk and flipped through it until he found a clean page. As he laid the pad on his desk, an image of Angelika Blüm’s apartment came spontaneously to mind. He remembered the cleared coffee table, with objects placed out of the way to allow the unobstructed flow of ideas. He felt another pang of guilt when he thought about a woman he had never met, but whom he now knew so intimately, who had tried so insistently to make contact with him.
Angelika Blüm was the first name he wrote down. Next to her name he wrote that of Ursula Kastner. Then Tina Kramer. He drew a vertical line and divided the page in two, with the three victims’ names on one side. On the other he wrote the names of Hans Klugmann and John MacSwain. Another vertical line. Then he wrote the name Mahmoot had mentioned to him, Vasyl Vitrenko.
Half an hour later Fabel had six vertical columns of names, dates and key facts. Each column was headed by one of the six names he had begun with. The column headed with the name of Vasyl Vitrenko was the sparsest. Fabel had plotted out all of the possible connections, coincidences and commonalities. The result was a tighter summary of what was already on the incident board. But there was no redundancy in redrafting the information. For Fabel the activity itself was the goal: refocusing and reordering his thoughts; a chance to map out the journey he had made. One name appeared regularly in half of the columns: Eitel. The first victim, Ursula Kastner was involved, albeit tangentially, with Neuer Horizont, the major shareholder for which was the Eitel Group; there was no known connection with the second victim, Tina Kramer; the third victim, Angelika Blüm, knew Eitel junior and had interviewed Eitel senior and, according to her friend, Erika Kessler, was working on a negative story about one or both of the Eitels; John MacSwain worked for the Eitel Group. Vitrenko’s outfit seemed to cast a shadow behind the rows of names and facts. Klugmann had been trying to infiltrate the Ukrainians and a Ukrainian-manufactured handgun had been retrieved from the murder scene. But the shooters had not been Ukrainian. Kraus was absolutely certain about that. Angelika Blüm had been working on a story relating to the actions of former Soviet police and security battalions, probably drawing comparisons with the experiences of Hamburg’s BATT101 during the Second World War.
And, of course, Fabel had suffered the ignominy of having his ass kicked by some kind of Slavic senior citizen. To say his attacker had known how to handle himself would be an immense understatement: he was obviously a highly trained professional. Fabel circled Vitrenko’s name. He had no idea how old Vitrenko was. Could the older guy have been Vitrenko himself?
Hans Schreiber, Erste Bürgermeister of the Free and Hanseatic City and State of Hamburg, was also a conspicuous presence. He had known two of the victims, one of them intimately. And he had been the last person to see Angelika Blüm alive – except for her killer.
Fabel leaned back in his chair, placed his hands behind his head and looked down onto the page, as if surveying the landscape of his investigation from high ground. He needed to talk to both Eitels, father and son. He wanted to see his hunch about MacSwain played out. Fabel was not convinced that MacSwain was their man, but there was something that didn’t smell right about him. He looked at Anna Wolff’s proposal for the Friday-night ‘date’ operation. It was well worked out, but Fabel was still uneasy about p
lacing Anna so close to a possible suspect; and they would have to be very careful to avoid accusations of entrapment.
Fabel had been so involved in navigating the deep channels of his own thoughts that the phone startled him. It was Holger Brauner, the head of the scene-of-crime team.
‘Well, Jan, I can honestly say that you make sure life is never dull. That was a very unusual piece of ordnance you brought in.’
‘Is it the murder weapon?’
‘Yes. It is. And like I say, it’s a very, very unusual and interesting piece to turn up in Hamburg.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s a FORT Twelve, that’s what the Cyrillic lettering stands for. It’s a nine-millimetre. Basically it has a nine-by-eighteen Makarov chamber, takes twelve rounds and is a double-action, blowback-operated pistol. And here’s the interesting bit. It is a Ukrainian police and security-forces weapon.’ Fabel absorbed the fact. Another connection. Brauner continued. ‘The Soviet security services relied on Makarov PM pistols, but after the break-up of the Communist bloc, Ukrainian special forces and security services demanded something more reliable, so they bought Czech machinery from the Uhersky Brod factory and started producing the FORT Twelve.’
‘And it’s exclusively non-civilian issue?’
‘As far as I’m aware. I got Kapff, our ballistics and firearms guy, to dig up the information. Basically it’s a police and security services rather than an army weapon.’
‘Thanks, Holger.’ Fabel hung up and then redialled Werner in the interview room. There was no answer. He went out into the main Mordkommission office. Maria Klee was the only one there.
‘You seen Werner?’ Fabel asked. Maria said she hadn’t. ‘I’m heading home. If you see Werner tell him to give me a buzz. I just wanted to know how he got on with Hansi Kraus.’
‘Are you still on for our meeting with the Odinist weirdo. Ten tomorrow morning?’
‘I can hardly wait.’
It was about half past eight when Fabel left the Mordkommission. He called Susanne from his car. She had already eaten but agreed to meet him in a bar in the Milchstrasse. After he hung up he put the top down on his car and slipped a Bap album in the car’s CD player. Fortsetzung Folgt. He turned the volume up and his cell phone off. Tonight he was going to have a night off. Feierabend.
Friday 20 June, 10.00 a.m. Schanzenviertel, Hamburg.
The Schanzenviertel is one of the areas of Hamburg that still has a lingering reputation bordering on the seedy and yet is on the cusp of trendiness. The quarter is packed with a range of restaurants, bars and cafés that reflect the multicultural profile of its population, and there is a rich variety of speciality shops and stores. Yet alongside the cool sit the poor, with sub-standard housing for immigrant families. The large Sternschanzen Park with its monumental Wasserturm attracts families by day and drug dealers by night and has been the scene of anti-drugs protests by the forces of gentrification.
Bjorn Janssen’s enterprise was squeezed between an espresso stand and a sushi bar just off Stresemannstrasse. It was a narrow, cramped space from which he sold books, artefacts and artworks, all of which looked second hand and which were all vaguely New Age.
Bjorn Janssen was not exactly what Fabel had in mind whenever he visualised a Viking. Admittedly he had blond hair, but it was a shade or two darker than Fabel’s own, and carefully but unsuccessfully arranged to conceal the pink sheen of a balding scalp. Janssen was a short and rather plump man who spoke German perfectly but to the music of a distinct Danish accent. The idea of Janssen as a steel-helmed berserker, leaping from a longboat and swinging a Viking battleaxe, stretched beyond both the comical and the physically feasible.
Janssen was standing behind a cluttered counter and extended his hand across the disorder when the two police officers approached. He had a furtive manner about him and Fabel noticed that the surreptitious glances of his watery blue eyes fell frequently onto Maria’s legs and breasts. She caught him at it and her returned gaze very eloquently expressed the word ‘creep’.
‘Herr Janssen.’ Fabel smiled politely. ‘Frau Klee here tells me that you belong to an Odinist cult, and that you may be able to offer us some assistance on a case we’ve been working on.’
Janssen smiled back and shook his head. His expression was one of weary indulgence. ‘No no no, Herr Fabel. I’m not involved in any cult. I am the Gothi – the High Priest – of the Blot of Asatru. I am a practitioner of the original faith system of northern Europe.’
‘Whatever. I would like you to tell us something about the system of beliefs you have. We are investigating murders that have a ritualistic element to them. We believe that this element is perhaps influenced by old Norse rituals.’
‘I can assure you, Herr Fabel, that Asatru is a faith of peace and harmony.’
‘Two values marauding Vikings were particularly renowned for,’ Maria said, levering a sneer into her tone.
Janssen smiled at her and continued. ‘Asatru was the faith of all northern and western Germanic peoples: the Svear, who became the Swedes, the Dan, who became the Danes, the Angles, who became the English, and the various tribes who became the Germans. Men and women, farmers and warriors, freemen and slaves. It was no more exclusively the religion of the raiders than Christianity was the exclusive religion of the Nazis. Anyway, the etymology of the word “Viking” is obscure. Some say it comes from Vik meaning village … that the Vikings were merely villagers who went on trading and raiding journeys when harvests didn’t meet the needs of a growing population. Their beliefs were more founded in nature than in war.’
‘But they made blood sacrifices,’ said Fabel.
‘Yes. And we still do. The hlautbowl is the vessel of the Blot. Today we fill it with honey mead and drink from it before offering up the share apportioned to the gods. Blot is the old Norse word for “blood”. In the olden days the hlautbowl would be filled with blood from a slaughtered animal. It’s a mistake to believe that this was a barbaric or exceptional act. People would slaughter the animal for the Blot in much the same way they would do so for a feast to be shared with a visitor. Asatru has a more immediate relationship with its gods and they were treated more like real, living and participative elements in ordinary, daily life.’
‘And sacrifice no longer plays a part in Asatru?’
‘Oh yes … very much so. The Blot is still a ritual of sacrifice. But in Asatru, the concept of sacrifice is more in the sense of giving. Sometimes we pour the mead onto the ground, to honour the Mother Earth. We give to her in return for what she has given us. Our sacrifices and symbolisms have been subsumed into Christianity. The Roman Catholic Mass, for example, or harvest festivals. And Easter is the theft of the goddess Eostre, who turned herself into a hare and hid golden eggs in the fields. That’s why children still go on egg hunts.’
‘Do women have any role in your religion?’ asked Maria.
‘Indeed they do, Frau Oberkommissarin.’ Janssen’s smile stopped just short of a leer. ‘Women are the creators of life. They are revered in Asatru and often it is the Gythia, or priestess, rather than the Gothi who presides over the Blot.’
Maria looked unimpressed. ‘And what is the special “gift” women are supposed to offer up?’
‘I don’t understand your question …’ answered Janssen, but his expression suggested that he did.
Fabel reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a copy of the photograph taken at the Stadtkrankenhaus Cuxhaven of Michaela Palmer’s forehead. ‘I believe this to be the rune Gebu …’
Janssen shrugged. ‘It could also just be a cross. An X.’
‘This mark was daubed on the forehead of a victim who was forced to take part in a Norse-type ritual. She was repeatedly raped by men wearing masks of a one-eyed, bearded figure.’
Janssen winced. ‘Wotan … or Odin …’ He thought for a moment. ‘Whoever these people are, Herr Fabel, they are committing not just a terrible crime but an offence against a peaceful, gentle faith. Asatru, unlike other f
aiths, believes in the freedoms and rights of the individual as being inviolable. I’ll help you in any way I can.’ Janssen looked more closely at the photograph. ‘Yes … yes … that could be the rune Gebu. Gebu has a specific relevance to the Blot. It is the symbol of giving and of sacrifice. As I said, the two concepts are closely related.’
‘You claim none of your devotees would be involved in something like this?’
‘Certainly not! This is a corruption of our faith. Much in the way a Black Mass is a corruption of Catholicism.’ Janssen paused as if weighing something up.
‘What is it, Herr Janssen?’
‘There were rumours … a couple of years ago.’
‘About what?’ The impatience was clear in Maria’s voice. Fabel gave her a quick look.
‘There are a few Asatru groups in and around Hamburg. We all share the same broad beliefs and are opposed to any negative or violent interpretation of them. But like every other religion there can be a darker aspect. A couple of years ago there was talk of some breakaway group. They were supposed to be few in number and I heard that they were very exclusive in their membership.’
‘And this group was supposed to be on the black-magic side of all of this …’ Maria struggled for a word – ‘religion?’
Janssen nodded. ‘They were supposed to be focused on seidhr … that’s the shamanic tradition in Odinism. You asked about the role of women in Asatru. Well there is a tradition of women being the main practitioners of seidhr. This group, however, were supposed to be mainly or exclusively men.’
‘Do you have any idea who was involved in this group?’
‘I don’t know. Like I say, it was all rumour at the time. But I do know that the word was that this group included very important people. I also heard that there was a foreigner involved with it.’
Fabel and Maria exchanged glances.
‘Could ritualised rape play a part in their ceremonies?’ asked Fabel
‘Not in any traditionally legitimate way. But one element of the Blot is the concept of self-sacrifice. Giving oneself. Maybe it’s a perverted interpretation of that. Certainly the rune Gebu is associated with the “gift” or the sacrifice. It is recited as a galdr or ritual chant during a Blot. There’s also the concept of ond. It means ecstasy. It really means “joy”, but it’s open to perverted interpretation, I suppose. And I won’t deny that there were some dark acts committed by the ancient practitioners. An Arab observer witnessed a woman at a Viking chief’s funeral having sex with seven different men before boarding the funeral longship and being burned alive with the body of the chieftain.’
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