Möller was silent for a moment. When he spoke his voice lacked its usual imperiousness. ‘As you know, I should be able to do that from dental records. But I’m afraid the quickest and surest way would be to have cheek swabs taken from the missing girl’s mother. I’ll get a DNA comparison rushed through the lab here at the Institut.’
Fabel thanked Möller and hung up. He made another call, to Holger Brauner, and, knowing that he could rely on Brauner’s tact, asked him if he could take the cheek swabs from the mother himself.
By the time Fabel had hung up, he could see, through the glazed partition that separated his office from the main open-plan area of the Mordkommission, that Anna Wolff and Maria Klee were now both at their desks. He buzzed through to Anna and asked her to come into his office. When she came in he pushed the mortuary photograph of the dead girl across his desk to her.
‘I want to know who she really is, Anna. I’d like to know by the end of the day. How have you been getting on so far?’
‘I’ve got a check running on the BKA database of missing persons. The chances are that she’ll be listed. I’ve put a filter on the search for females between ten and twenty-five and prioritised any cases within a two hundred kilometres’ radius of Hamburg. There can’t be that many.’
‘This is your thing for today, Anna. Drop everything else and concentrate on establishing this girl’s identity.’
Anna nodded. ‘Chef …’ She paused. There was an awkwardness in her stance, as if she was unsure of what she was going to say next.
‘What’s up, Anna?’
‘That was tough. Last night, I mean. I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards.’
Fabel gave a cheerless smile and indicated that Anna should sit down. ‘You weren’t the only one.’ He paused. ‘You want to be put on something different?’
‘No.’ Anna’s response was emphatic. She sat down opposite Fabel. ‘No … I want to stay on this case. I want to find out who this girl is and I want to help find the real Paula Ehlers. It’s just that it was pretty hard to watch a family being torn into pieces for a second time. The other thing was – and I know this sounds crazy – but I could almost sense Paula’s … well, not her presence, more her lack of presence in the home.’
Fabel remained silent. Anna was tracing out a thought and he wanted her to follow it through.
‘When I was a kid, there was this girl in my school. Helga Kirsch. She was about a year younger than me and a mousy little thing. She had the kind of face you never notice but would recognise as someone you knew if seen out of context. You know, if you saw her in town at the weekend or something.’
Fabel nodded.
‘Anyway,’ continued Anna, ‘one day we were all assembled in the school hall and we were told that Helga had gone missing … that she’d gone out on her bike and just disappeared. I remember that after that I started, well, noticing that she wasn’t there. Someone I’d never even spoken to but had taken up some kind of space in my world. It took a week before they found her bike, and then her body.’
‘I remember,’ said Fabel. He had been a young Kommissar at the time and had been involved at the edges of the case. But he had remembered the name. Helga Kirsch, thirteen years old, raped and strangled in a small field of dense grass next to the cycle path. It had taken a year to track down her killer, only after another young life had been snuffed out by him.
‘From the moment her disappearance was announced to the day her body was found there was this weird feeling in the school. Like someone had taken away a small part of the building that you couldn’t identify but you knew wasn’t there any more. After she was found there was this grief, I suppose. And guilt. I used to lie in bed at night and try to remember if I had ever spoken to Helga, or smiled, or had any kind of interaction with her. And of course I hadn’t. But the grief and the guilt were a relief after that feeling of absence.’ Anna turned and looked out through Fabel’s window at the cloud-bruised sky. ‘I remember talking to my grandmother about it. She talked about when she was a girl during the Hitler time, before she and her parents went into hiding. She said that that was what it was like for them then: that someone they knew would be taken in the night by the Nazis – sometimes a whole family – and there would be this inexplicable space in the world. There wasn’t even the knowledge of death to fill it.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Fabel, even though he couldn’t. Anna’s Jewishness had never been a feature in his choosing her for the team, either positively or negatively. It simply hadn’t registered on Fabel’s radar. But every now and then, like now, he sat across a table from her and was aware that he was a German policeman and she was Jewish, and the weight of an unbearable history seemed to descend on him.
Anna turned back from the window. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have a point, really, just that it got to me.’ She stood up and held Fabel in her disconcertingly frank gaze. ‘I’ll get your ID for you, Chef.’
After Anna had gone, Fabel took out the sketch pad from his desk drawer, laid it on his desktop and flipped it open. He spent a moment looking down on the wide expanse of white paper it presented. Empty. Clean. Another symbol of a new case beginning. Fabel had used these sketch pads for more than a decade of murder investigations. It was on these thick, brilliant sheets, meant for a much more creative task, that Fabel would summarise incident boards, note down abbreviated names of people, places and events, and trace lines between them. These were his sketches: his outlines of a murder inquiry into which he would invest first light and shade, then detail. First, he plotted the locations: the beach at Blankenese and Paula’s home in Norderstedt. Then he wrote down the names he had encountered in the last twenty-four hours. He listed the four members of the Ehlers family and in so doing gave form to the absence that Anna had described: three members of a family – father, mother and brother – accounted for; three people you could track down and find, to whom you could talk and of whom you could form a living image in your brain. Then there was the fourth member. The daughter. To Fabel she was still a concept, an insubstantial collection of other people’s impressions and memories; an image caught on film blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
If Paula was a concept without form, then there was also the girl they found on the beach: a form without a concept; a body without an identity. Fabel wrote down the words ‘blue eyes’ at the centre of the sheet. There was, of course, a case number he could have used, but in the absence of a name ‘blue eyes’ was the closest he could get. It sounded more like a person and less like the dead thing that a case number made it. He drew a line from ‘blue eyes’ to Paula, making a break midway. In this space he drew a double question mark. Fabel was convinced that in this gap lay the killer of the girl on the beach and the abductor and probable murderer of Paula Ehlers. It could, of course, have been two people. But not two or more people acting independently of each other. Whether it was an individual, a pair or a larger team, whoever killed ‘blue eyes’ had also taken Paula Ehlers.
It was then that the phone rang.
7.
6.30 p.m., Thursday, 18 March: Norddeich, East Frisia
It was a place he had called home. A place that he had always considered to have defined him. But now, standing here in a landscape that was all horizon, he knew that he belonged elsewhere. Hamburg was the place that truly defined who Jan Fabel was. Who he was now. Who he had become. Fabel’s dislocation from this landscape had come in two stages: the first had been when he had moved out of the family home and travelled inland, to Oldenburg, where he had studied English and History at the newly founded Carl von Ossietzky Universität. Then, after graduating, he had moved on to the Universität Hamburg to study European History. And to live a new life.
Fabel parked his BMW at the back of the house. He got out and swung open the rear door and reached in for his hastily packed holdall. As he straightened up he paused for a moment, standing silent, absorbing all the shapes and sounds that had been his constants as a child: the continuous slow-rushing
pulse of the sea hidden by the fringe of trees behind the house and the dyke and dunes beyond; the simple, earnest geometry of his parents’ house, squat and resolute under its vast red-tiled roof; the pale green grasses that rippled like water in the fresh Frisian breeze; and the massive sky that fell hard on to the flat-ironed landscape. The sharp panic he had felt when he had received the call in the Präsidium had soothed to a low but constant ache during the three-and-a-half hour drive along the A28, and had been assuaged even further by seeing his mother sitting up in the hospital bed in Norden, telling Fabel to stop fussing and to make sure that his brother Lex didn’t get all worked up about it either.
But now, amongst the familiarities of his childhood, the keenness of that first panic was renewed. He fumbled for the spare key in the pocket of the coat he had slung across the holdall and unlocked the heavy wooden kitchen door. The bottom of the door still showed, under its years of varnish, the dark scuff marks where Fabel and his brother, laden with schoolbooks, used to push at it with their feet. Even now, with a leather holdall and expensive Jaeger coat rather than a schoolbag on his arm, he felt the instinct to push the door with his foot as he turned the handle.
Fabel stepped into the kitchen. The house was empty, and silent. He put his bag and coat on the table and stood for a moment, taking in all that had not changed in the kitchen: the floral dishcloths draped over the chrome bar of the cooking range, the old pine table and chairs, the cork wallboard pinned with layers of notes and postcards, the heavy wooden dresser against the wall. Fabel found the child in himself resenting the few and small changes that his mother had made: a new kettle, a microwave oven, a new IKEA-style storage unit in the corner. It was almost as if, somewhere deep down, he felt that these contemporary incursions were tiny betrayals; that his childhood home should not have moved on with the years as he had.
He made himself some tea. It never occurred to him to have a coffee: he was back home in East Frisia where tea-drinking was a central part of life. His mother, although not a Frisian by birth, had enthusiastically embraced the local tea rituals, right down to the pre-noon three-cup tea break known as ‘Elfürtje’ in Frysk, the impenetrable local dialect that lay somewhere between German, Dutch and Old English. He reached into cupboards automatically, every ingredient lying within expected reach: the tea, the traditional ‘Kluntjes’ of crystallized sugar, the white and pale blue cups. He sat at the table and drank the tea, listening for the echoes of his father’s and mother’s voices buried deep in the quiet. The ringing of his cell phone split the silence. It was Susanne; her voice tight with worry.
‘Jan … I just got your message. Are you okay? How’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine. Well, she’s had a small heart attack, but she’s stable now.’
‘You still at the hospital?’
‘No, I’m at home … I mean at my mother’s. I’m going to stay overnight and wait for my brother. He should arrive tomorrow.’
‘Do you want me to come over there? I could leave now and be there in two or three hours …’
Fabel reassured her that there was no need, that he would be fine and that his mother was probably going to be home in a couple of days. ‘It was just a warning shot across the bows,’ he explained. But after he hung up, Fabel suddenly felt very alone. He had bought some pre-made open sandwiches but, finding he couldn’t face eating, he put them in the fridge. He finished his tea and climbed up the stairs to his old bedroom under the vast expanse of the steep pitched roof. Fabel dumped his bag and coat in the corner and lay down on the single bed, not turning on the light. He lay in the dark trying to remember the voice of his long dead father shouting up the stairs for Fabel and his brother, Lex, to get out of their beds. He found that he could only recall his father’s voice encapsulated in a single word. Traanköppe. That was what his father would call in the mornings: ‘Sleepy Head’ in Frysk. Fabel sighed in the dark. That’s what comes with middle age: voices, once heard daily, fading from your memory until just one or two words remain.
Fabel picked up his cell phone from the bedside cabinet and, still without turning on the light, searched through the phone’s memory for Anna Wolff’s home number. It rang several times and then her answering machine kicked in. He decided against leaving a message and, on a hunch, dialled Anna’s direct number at the Präsidium. Anna’s usually bright voice was deadened by tiredness.
‘Chef – I didn’t expect to hear from you … Your mother …’
‘She’s going to be okay. A minor heart attack, or so they say. I was in the hospital most of the afternoon. I’ll be going back later. Did you get anywhere with the girl’s identity?’
‘Sorry, Chef, no, I didn’t. I got the feedback from my BKA search. No missing persons that fit. I’ve widened the search: she’s maybe from another part of Germany, or even somewhere else. You never know with so much traffic in women from eastern Europe.’
Fabel grunted. The trafficking of young women from Russia, the Balkans and elsewhere on the eastern fringes of the West’s wealth had become a major problem in Hamburg. Attracted by promises of everything from modelling contracts to jobs as domestics, these women and girls became virtual slaves and were as often as not sold into prostitution. The birth of a new century had brought with it the rebirth of an old evil: slavery. ‘Keep on it, Anna,’ he told her, although he knew he didn’t need to, for the same reason as he had known he would find her at the Präsidium. Once Anna was focused on a task, she was relentless. ‘Anything else?’
‘Kommissar Klatt turned up this afternoon. I explained that your mother had been taken ill and you’d been called away. I gave him the grand tour of the Präsidium and introduced him to everyone. He seemed to be impressed. Other than that, nothing. Oh, wait, Holger Brauner called. He said he’d arranged the DNA tests and he’ll have them with Möller at the Institut für Rechtsmedizin tomorrow morning.’
‘Thanks, Anna. I’ll call in tomorrow and let you know what my movements are likely to be.’
‘Then I’d speak to Werner when you call. He’s concerned about you. About your mother.’
‘I’ll do that.’ Fabel hung up, breaking the connection with his new world, and sank back into the dark and silence of his old.
When Fabel arrived back at the Kreiskrankenhaus Norden, the doctor he had spoken to earlier had gone off duty, but the chief nurse was still there. She was a middle-aged woman with a round, frank and honest face. She smiled as Fabel approached and gave him an update without him having to ask.
‘Your mother is doing just fine,’ she said. ‘She had a sleep after you left this afternoon and we ran another ECG on her. There really is nothing to worry about if she takes things easy.’
‘Is she likely to have another attack?’
‘Well, once you’ve had one, the chances of a second are always higher. But no, not necessarily. The important thing is for your mother to get up and about – and reasonably active – within the next few days. I would say she might be able to go home later tomorrow. Or perhaps the next day.’
‘Thank you very much, nurse,’ said Fabel and turned towards his mother’s room.
‘You don’t remember me, do you, Jan?’ said the nurse. He turned back to her. There was a tentativeness and shyness now in her smile. ‘Hilke. Hilke Tietjen.’
It took a second or two for the name to register and tumble through the piles of others in Fabel’s memory. ‘My God. Hilke. It must be twenty years! How are you?’
‘More like twenty-five. I’m fine, thanks. And you? I heard you were a Kommissar in the Hamburg police.’
‘Erster Hauptkommissar now,’ said Fabel, smiling. He searched the round, middle-aged face for vestiges of the younger, slimmer, prettier face he had always associated with the name Hilke Tietjen. They were there, in the structure of the face, like archaeological traces, overlaid by the years and gained weight. ‘You still live in Norddeich?’
‘No, I live here in Norden. My name’s Hilke Freericks now. You remember Dirk Freericks, from
school?’
‘Of course,’ Fabel lied. ‘You have kids?’
‘Four,’ she laughed. ‘All boys. You?’
‘A daughter, Gabi.’ Fabel was annoyed with himself when he realised he didn’t want to admit he was now divorced. He smiled awkwardly.
‘It was nice to see you again, Jan,’ Hilke said. ‘You must be keen to see your mother.’
‘Nice to see you, too,’ said Fabel. He watched her walk back down the hospital corridor. A small, broad-hipped, middle-aged woman called Hilke Freericks who, twenty-four years before, had been Hilke Tietjen and had been slim with a pretty, freckled face framed with lustrous long red-blonde hair, and who had shared urgent, breathless moments with Fabel amongst the sand dunes of the Norddeich coast. For Fabel, in those stark changes wrought by the passage of nearly a quarter of a century there lay an intolerably depressing and sad contrast. And with it came the same old urge to get as far away from Norddeich and Norden as possible.
Fabel’s mother was sitting up on the chair next to her bed, watching ‘Wetten, Dass …?’ on TV when he entered her room. The sound was turned down and Thomas Gottschalk grinned and chattered mutely. She smiled broadly and switched off the TV with the remote.
‘Hello, son. You look tired.’ Her voice carried an almost comical combination of her British accent and the heavy Frysk dialect with which she spoke German to her son. He bent to kiss her cheek. She patted his arm.
‘I’m fine, Mutti. I’m not the one we should be worrying about. But it all seems to be good news … the nurse said your ECG was normal and you might get out later tomorrow.’
‘You were talking to Hilke Freericks? You two were an item once, as I remember.’
Fabel sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘That was a very, very long time ago, Mutti. I hardly recognised her.’ As he spoke, the image of Hilke, her long red-gold hair shining and her skin translucent in the bright sun of a distant summer, collided with the image of the frumpy middle-aged woman with whom he’d chatted in the corridor. ‘She’s changed.’ He paused. ‘Have I changed so much, Mutti?’
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