‘Yes. Vitrenko knew how to press all the right buttons with MacSwain. MacSwain is clearly sociopathic. Vitrenko realised that. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Anyway, John MacSwain had a very poor relationship with his own father. My guess is that Vitrenko has stepped into the paternal role, and wrapped the whole thing up in some kind of Viking mumbo-jumbo. MacSwain was probably first enlisted to find women for the rituals Vitrenko organised … which were, in reality, nothing more than disguised gang rapes. Vitrenko must have seen how deep MacSwain’s psychopathy went. It was then that Vitrenko gave MacSwain his sacred missions to carry out. My guess is that MacSwain sent the e-mails but the wording was supplied by Vitrenko.’
‘But why do you suspect MacSwain?’ asked Maria. ‘Now – after all this time?’
‘It’s his name. It’s been in front of us all along.’ Fabel flipped open the book on the table before him. ‘The origins of the name “MacSwain”. It is an Anglicised form of an Irish and Scots Gaelic name. The prefix Mac is patronymic … it stands for “son of”. The Swain part comes from the Viking invaders who settled on the western isles of Scotland. It is a Gaelicised and then Anglicised form of the Old Norse name Svein, meaning boy.’
Fabel paused. He could sense the electricity in the air. They all knew what he was going to say next, but they had to hear him say it.
‘MacSwain means “Son of Sven”.’
‘I knew it!’ Werner said. ‘And so did Anna. There was something didn’t gel with MacSwain.’
‘I’ve just had a chat with Norbert Eitel,’ continued Fabel, ‘who is still in custody downstairs. I told him that I knew all about Vitrenko and MacSwain’s part in the rapes. He didn’t answer me, mainly because his lawyer told him not to, but the look on his face said it all. The look of a man who has got in too deep. MacSwain’s our man all right.’ Fabel turned to Maria. ‘We still have that team on him?’
‘I’ve sent an extra officer over, but the surveillance guy who’s been watching MacSwain says he hasn’t moved all evening.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel, ‘I want everyone ready to roll in twenty minutes. Maria, tell the surveillance team to stand by.’
A uniformed policewoman knocked and stuck her head around the conference room door.
‘There’s someone in reception to see you, Herr Haupt-kommissar. A Frau Kraus …’
Margarethe Kraus could have been any age between forty-five and sixty-five. She was one of those women for whom the compensation of having looked middle-aged in youth was that she would probably still look middle-aged when she was in her late seventies. Whatever family resemblance there had been between mother and son must have been erased from Hansi’s features by his years of drug abuse. Frau Kraus had a round, empty face and smallish brown eyes that wore a look of immeasurable weariness, as if she had never left a moment of her life behind her, instead carrying it with her everywhere she went.
She was sitting in the reception waiting room, by the window, which gleamed obsidian against the night outside. Her small hands were folded over a small envelope. She stood up awkwardly when Fabel came in.
‘Frau Kraus?’ Fabel smiled and extended his hand. ‘I’m so sorry about your loss.’
Margarethe Kraus smiled bitterly. ‘I lost Hansi many years ago. The difference is now we have a body to grieve.’
Fabel found he had no words. He nodded with a careful balance of sympathy and understanding. After a silence that seemed longer than it was, Fabel said:
‘You wanted to see me, Frau Kraus. Was it about Hansi?’
The eternally middle-aged woman did not speak, but handed Fabel the envelope. Fabel made a confused expression.
‘It’s from Hansi,’ she said.
Fabel opened the envelope. The letter had been written in pencil, but remarkably neatly. It was as if some distant memory of schoolroom discipline had invested itself into the writing. For Hansi, this had obviously been an important letter. It made painful reading. The majority of the letter was of a highly personal nature: basically, Hansi was apologising to his mother for the worry and distress he had caused her and his sisters. Fabel had begun to wonder why Frau Kraus had chosen to share this intimacy with him when he reached the closing paragraphs.
The reason I write now, Mutti, after so many years, is because I think my troubles are over. I don’t want you to be sad or frightened, but I have to tell you that I think someone may be coming after me. If I am right, then I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. If something bad happens to me, I want you to take this letter to Kriminalhauptkommissar Jan Fabel at the police Präsidium. He is an honest policeman, I think, and he will be able to get the people who have done whatever it is they have done with me.
There were two policemen in the Präsidium canteen when I was there with Herr Meyer. They sat down behind us and to the left. They were an older man and a younger man. The younger man had very short blond hair and was built like a muscleman or weightlifter. I asked Herr Meyer who the muscleman was. He said it was Lothar Kolski. Lothar Kolski is the man I saw shoot the man in the swimming pool. The older man at the same table is the man who told him to do it. I did not say anything at the time because I was so shocked to see them in police headquarters. I thought that maybe the police were behind the killing but I know now that isn’t true. Herr Fabel will know what to do.
I am afraid, but not as afraid as I thought I would be. I am no good. I never have been. It is better this way.
I am so sorry, Mutti. I was not the son you deserved, and you were a far better mother than I deserved.
Lovingly yours
Hansi
When he had finished reading, Fabel stared at the letter for a long while. Then he looked up to Margarethe Kraus.
‘I am so very, very sorry, Frau Kraus. Thank you for bringing this in.’
‘Was Hansi really killed by a policeman?’
‘Hansi was murdered by criminals, Frau Kraus.’ Fabel fixed her with an earnest stare. It wasn’t a lie. ‘But I promise you we will get them.’ He held up the letter. ‘And this is what we’ll get them with.’
Margarethe Kraus smiled politely, as if someone had just given her directions to the bus station. ‘I’d better go. It’s very late.’
Fabel shook her hand. It was cold and a little moist. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to stay a little longer. I need to get an officer to take a full statement from you. Then we’ll have someone drive you home. I’m afraid we’ll need to have someone watch over you for a few days … just until we get this sorted out.’
Frau Kraus shrugged her small shoulders resignedly. ‘I’ll wait here then,’ she said and sat back down where she had been, refolding her hands over her lap, this time without having the last letter from her son beneath them.
Van Heiden was waiting for Fabel as he left the reception room. Fabel handed him the letter and pointed to the relevant paragraph.
‘I take it I can leave this to you, Herr Kriminaldirektor?’ asked Fabel. Van Heiden didn’t respond, but Fabel could read the near future in Van Heiden’s furious gaze: Buchholz and Kolski didn’t know it, but there was an express train heading straight for them.
‘I came to give you this, Fabel.’ Van Heiden handed him an e-mail.
YOU THINK YOU ARE CLOSE TO ME, BUT IT IS I WHO COME CLOSER TO YOU. I HAVE GIVEN YOU SO MANY MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES, HERR FABEL. THIS IS THE ONE YOU WILL NEVER FORGET. I AM GOING TO ENJOY THIS ONE MOST OF ALL.
IT IS IN THE NATURE OF A WOMAN TO DECEIVE. THEY ARE BORN POISONED WITH GUILE AND FALSITY AND SPEND THEIR LIVES REFINING THEIR SKILLS AS LIARS AND DECEIVERS. IT IS POETIC, IS IT NOT, THAT THE SON OF SVEN WILL SPREAD THE WINGS OF THE DAUGHTER OF DAVID.
SON OF SVEN
Saturday 21 June, 10.00 p.m. Harvestehude, Hamburg.
Fabel had fought to keep the team within the boundaries of urgency without crossing over into outright panic. The meaning in the e-mail had been crystal clear. The Daughter of David. The deception she had attempted on MacSwain. He was going after Anna.
Maria had tried to get Anna on the phone. No reply. Fabel ordered a team to go round immediately to Anna’s apartment in Eimsbüttel and force entry if necessary. In the meantime, Fabel led the assault on MacSwain’s home.
The surveillance officer outside MacSwain’s apartment block confirmed that the Briton had not come out since he returned at 5.56 p.m. There had been no obvious movement in the apartment other than the lights coming on at 7.30. The surveillance officer had even wandered over to check that MacSwain’s Porsche was still in its parking bay in the Tiefgarage. Fabel sent half the team, led by Maria, up the stairwell while he and Werner took the other half, plus the heavy door-ram, up in the brushed-steel elevator.
There was only one door in and out of the apartment. The only other way out was onto the balcony and the three-storey drop to the pavement outside. Two body-armoured MEK officers swung the metre-long door-ram between them, silently counting out the beats until, on the fourth swing, it slammed into the door and splintered the lock. MacSwain’s door flew inwards and the armed MEK team burst in, fanning the empty space of the apartment with their Heckler and Koch sub-machine pistols.
Fabel knew instantly that the apartment was empty. Within three or four minutes the team confirmed his feeling.
‘Fuck!’ said Werner. ‘How could this happen again?’
‘Because we were looking the other way,’ said Fabel. ‘I should have listened to Anna and kept a full surveillance team on the bastard.’
At the mention of her name the two officers exchanged a knowing, almost frightened look. ‘Chase up the team and see if they’ve found Anna.’
Werner snapped open his cell phone.
‘Chef … come and see this …’ Maria beckoned him over to a small box room, more a large storage cupboard, off the main living area. MacSwain had managed to squeeze a small computer table and chair into the tiny space. The walls were covered with photographs, cuttings and handwritten notes. Two ceiling spotlights illuminated the mural displays, as if they were some kind of museum exhibit. The focus was a carved wooden mask. It was a close replica of the carving Fabel had seen in the book that Otto had given him. The book that MacSwain had too. The bearded mouth was twisted in a berserker’s snarl, the one eye hole shadowed black by the angle at which the spotlights cast their beams.
Maria had to move back to allow Fabel access to the box room. He imagined the door closed behind him and a spanner ratcheted up the claustrophobia in Fabel’s chest a notch. Fabel could see that this was more than a space allocated for a special purpose. This was another dimension: a world away from the world outside. This was where MacSwain would sit, the closed box-room door as dense and impenetrable as an iron drawbridge, immersed in a universe of alternative truths and morals and beliefs that had been conjured around him. How much MacSwain had conjured himself, and how much of Vitrenko’s hand could be seen in it, Fabel was unsure.
Something shone bronze-gold in the spotlights. The oval shape of an embossed Kriminalpolizei shield hung by its beaded chain from a panel pin. It was this shield that had been the key to Angelika Blüm’s flat, to her trust; it was this shield that had deceived Blüm into believing that her killer had been Fabel. Maria leaned past her boss and indicated a newspaper cutting that was pinned on top of the layers of others.
‘Christ,’ she muttered, ‘it’s you.’
The article, a year old, had been cut from from the Hamburger Morgenpost. Fabel’s photograph sat at the top of a couple of columns about his arrest of Markus Stümbke. Stümbke had stalked and murdered a female member of the Senate, Lise Kellmann. The article was obviously a follow up to the main story, because it went into greater depth, as the headline promised, about Fabel’s background and history with the Polizei Hamburg. MacSwain had underlined a reference to Fabel’s mixed British-German parentage and the fact that he was occasionally referred to as der englische Kommissar. Fabel scanned the rest of the display. It was almost all devoted to Viking mythology and history. A map of northern Europe showed the routes taken by the Vikings: down the Volga into the heart of the Ukraine, alone the North Sea and Baltic Coasts and, again highlighted in red, the route they took to raid and settle on the coasts of northern Scotland. With that red felt-tipped pen, MacSwain had sewn a thread of spurious personal history; a thin but unbreakable web of perverted justification for his actions.
‘Notice something missing?’ Fabel asked Maria. She nodded.
‘No pictures or details of the victims … no trophies.’
‘Exactly.’
Serial killers habitually sought a ‘relationship’ with those they murdered, even if the first contact had been the act of killing itself. There were no references here. Not to Ursula Kastner, not to Angelika Blüm, not to Tina Kramer. There were no surreptitiously taken photographs of the victims prior to death. There were no articles of clothing. There were no trophies.
‘It’s because he didn’t pick his own victims,’ Fabel said. ‘They were selected for him. The object of MacSwain’s obsession isn’t his victim, it’s the person who is guiding him. His spiritual father: Vitrenko. It’s Vitrenko who fills the gap left by a natural father who didn’t give a shit.’
Something else struck Fabel.
‘There are no files from Angelika Blüm’s apartment. And the missing video camera isn’t here either. He’s passed them on. He was told how to perform the murder and what to take from the scene.’ Werner appeared at his shoulder. With Maria and Werner now both behind him, he felt trapped in the tiny, airless space. He turned around and indicated the open space of the living area with a determined nod of his head. They all moved out.
‘It’s Anna, Chef,’ Werner’s face was clouded with worry. ‘It’s not good. She’s not in her apartment and she’s left her bag and cell phone behind.’
Saturday 21 June, 10.00 p.m. The Elbe near the Landungsbrücken, Hamburg.
The day that had been was trying to be remembered in a sky spun through with red and in the pleasant, lingering warmth of the night air. Franz Kassel lifted his cap and smoothed back the fine strands of sandy hair over his scalp. His shift was nearly at an end and he was looking forward to a cold beer. Or maybe a few. It had been a quiet shift and Franz had been able to savour what had attracted him to the Wasserschutzpolizei in the first place: hearing the delicate sounds of the water and the gentle creakings and ringings of boats at moor; watching the ever-changing light, passing beneath the vast, looming hulls of ships as he patrolled. Most of all, there was the different perspective it offered. Things always looked different from the water. You saw more. The Hamburg he saw every day was totally different from the one seen from dry land. He felt privileged to have this unique viewpoint.
He knew not everyone shared his sense of privilege: like Gebhard, the Polizeiobermeister who had the helm and was guiding the WS25 back towards the Landungsbrücken station. For Gebhard, the WSP was just a job; he had only been in the WSP for three years and already he talked incessantly to the other crew members about training and transfer to a land-based MEK.
Kassel watched as Gebhard steered towards the shore. Gebhard was competent, but he clearly lacked the feel for the water that Kassel believed was essential for any true river cop. It was something that lay within the natural sailor: the awareness of the river as a living entity. Gebhard, on the other hand, treated the Elbe as a water-filled autobahn on which he was no more than a traffic cop. Kassel left him to it and went to stand on the deck. The breeze cooled his face and he sighed the contented sigh of a man who has found his place and knows it. It was then that he spotted a boat he recognised exit from the moorings by the Überseebrücke. Kassel raised his binoculars. It was the Chris Craft 308 Cruiser they had been asked to watch the other night. He slipped quickly back into the cabin and ordered Gebhard to follow the cruiser, but at a safe distance.
‘But it’s end of shift, Chef,’ protested Gebhard.
Kassel replied by staring emptily at Gebhard who shrugged and wheeled the WS25 back out into the Elbe. Kassel had no idea if
the young lady from the Mordkommission still had an interest in this vessel, but he thought he had better check it out. He picked up the radio phone and asked to be patched through to Oberkommissarin Klee at the Mordkommission.
Saturday 21 June, 10.00 p.m. The Elbe, near Hamburg.
There was no dominant form to Anna’s consciousness. If confusion can be defined as a form, then that would be closest to the shape her mind took. But even confusion connects with other feelings, other emotions. You get confused and angry, or confused and frightened, or confused and amused. But Anna’s confusion was of itself, totally unanchored. A moment of lucidity would come. Then it would pass. It was like flying through patches of dense cloud; every now and then the plane breaks free and the brightness of the blue sky dazzles for a moment, then is lost.
She was awake. She recognised the interior of MacSwain’s boat. Her hands were tied behind her back and she lay on her side on the bed. She knew now where she was and what had happened. MacSwain had drugged her. He had been in her apartment. He had mixed a cocktail of flunitrazepam or clonazepam and gammahydroxybutyrate into her drinking water. She didn’t have her gun. She didn’t have her cell phone. Fabel had given her time off so no one would miss her. She was on her own and she would have to make her own escape. In the space of a few seconds all of these facts were crystal clear to her. In the next instant they were gone. She had no idea where she was or what was happening to her. Then something like sleep enveloped her.
MacSwain’s voice woke her. He was talking to someone. He was talking fast and breathlessly and without stopping. She could not make out what he was saying, she was so far beneath the surface of her own consciousness, but she pushed upwards, towards the voice.
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