‘I take it there’s no chance of that.’
‘None, I’m afraid. I wanted to be a policeman since I was a kid. It was just one of these things you know about yourself.’ He paused. ‘So. What do you think? Do I pass?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, this is what this is all about, isn’t it? To see if you can work with me?’
Anna grinned. ‘You’ll do … But actually that wasn’t the intention. It’s just that we’ll be working together and I know that I haven’t been, well, very welcoming. I’m sorry. But I think you can understand that things are still a little bit raw. After Paul, I mean. Anyway …’ She raised her glass. ‘Welcome to the Mordkommission …’
41.
10.15 p.m., Wednesday, 14 April: St Pauli, Hamburg
The last time he had worked on him, about a year before, Max had become accustomed to his customer’s long silences. Max had taken them as a sign of his interest, fascination even, in what Max had to say about his craft.
But tonight the huge man had not spoken since he had come in through the door and now he simply stood, wordlessly, in the middle of Max’s studio. Dominating it. Filling it. And all that could be heard was the huge man’s breathing. Slow. Heavy. Deliberate.
‘Is there something wrong? Are you okay?’ Max asked.
Another silence seemed to stretch for ever until, at last, the huge man spoke. ‘When you worked on me the last time I asked you to keep no record of it. Or tell anyone about it. I paid you extra for that. Did you do as I asked?’
‘Yes, I did. I did … and if anyone has told you different it’s a lie!’ protested Max. He wished that the big guy would sit down. Standing this close to him, in the tight confines of the studio, Max was getting a painful neck looking up at him. The big man held up a hand. He removed his coat and the shirt underneath, exposing to Max his own handiwork. His vast, muscled torso was covered with words, with sentences, with entire stories, all tattooed into his flesh in black, old-Gothic script. The slightest movement, a twitch of a muscle, and the words writhed, as if themselves alive.
‘Is that the truth? No one knows about the work you did on me?’
‘No one. I swear. It’s kinda like a doctor-patient thing … you say you want it kept quiet, then I keep it quiet. I wish I could talk about it, though. It’s the best fuckin’ work I ever did. And I’m not just saying that because you’re the customer.’
The big man fell silent again. This time his silence was unbroken except by the sound of his breathing that again filled the tiny studio. Deep-sounding, resonant breaths from that cavernous barrel of a chest. His breathing came faster.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ asked Max, his voice now high with something that lay between unease and outright fear.
Again no answer. The big man reached down to his coat and took something from one of the pockets. It was a child’s tiny rubber mask. A wolf mask. He pulled it across his big face and the lupine features stretched and distorted.
‘What’s with the comedy mask?’ Max asked, but his mouth was dry and his voice sounded strange. He was aware of his heart hammering in his chest. ‘Look. I’m really busy. I stayed open just for you. Now, if you want something …’ He did his best to squeeze some authority into his stretched, frightened tone.
‘Clever Hans …’ The big man smiled and tilted his head to one side. It was a childish posture that looked bizarre, surreal, on a man of his stature. The stretching of his neck rippled the words that looped around the base of his throat.
‘What? My name isn’t Hans. You know that. It’s Max …’
‘Clever Hans …’ repeated the big man, tilting his head the other way.
‘Max – I’m Max. Look, big guy, I don’t know what you’re on. You take a little something tonight? I think you’d better come back when –’
The big man stepped forward and slammed both hands simultaneously on either side of Max’s head, clamping it and squeezing hard.
‘Oh …’ he said. ‘Clever Hans, Clever Hans …’
‘My name isn’t Hans! My name isn’t Hans!’ Max was screaming now. His entire world had filled with a white, electric fear. ‘I’m Max! Remember me? Max! The tattoo guy!’
Behind the stretched, grotesque mask, the huge features of the big man’s face suddenly melted into sadness and his tone was pleading, plaintive. ‘Clever Hans, Clever Hans … why don’t you cast friendly eyes on her?’
Max felt his cheeks being pushed into his teeth. The vice that closed on his head crushed and twisted his features.
‘Clever Hans, Clever Hans … why don’t you cast friendly eyes on her?’
Max’s scream became a high-pitched animal shriek as his attacker’s huge thumbs pressed into the flesh beneath his eyebrows, just above the bulge of his eyelids. The pressure increased and became pain of incredible intensity. The thumbs pushed deeper. Into the sockets. Max’s shriek became a blubbering gurgle as his eyes were forced from his head and the gorge rose in his throat.
Now blind, Max hung limply in the inescapable grip of his immensely strong assailant. His universe now flashed and sparked, and he even thought he could again see the outline of his attacker, as if etched in neon, as his optic nerves and brain tried to make sense of the sudden absence of his eyes. Then darkness. The vice grip was removed. But before Max could slump to the floor, he felt a single hand grab him by the hair and yank him upright. There was a moment of silence in Max’s darkness. Again all he could hear was the even, deep, resonant breathing of the giant who had blinded him. Then he heard the sound of metal being drawn from something. As if from a leather sheath.
Max gave a little jump of surprise as he felt the blow across his neck and throat. A tiny sliver of time, in which he puzzled why the man hadn’t hit him harder, stretched into an infinity. By the time he realised that his throat had been slashed and the warmth he felt splashing spasmodically on to his shoulder and chest was his blood, Max was already slipping into death.
The last thing he heard was the bizarre mix of the deep, resonant voice and childlike tone of his attacker.
‘Clever Hans, Clever Hans … why don’t you cast friendly eyes upon her?’
42.
7.40 p.m., Friday, 16 April: St Pauli, Hamburg
What was that smell? It was an unclean smell. Faint, diffuse and impossible to identify, but unpleasant. Pungent. It was like the odour he would sometimes smell in his home. But it was here too, as if it were following him. Haunting him.
Bernd had taken the S-Bahn. It was difficult to park in the Kiez and he enjoyed the anonymity of public transport whenever he went off on one of his excursions. Anyway, he would probably have a few drinks. Afterwards.
A young woman sat opposite him on the S-Bahn train. She was in her early twenties, with blonde hair cut boyishly short and with a streak of pink through it. Her coat was Afghan style and mid-calf length, but lay open. Her figure was full, verging on plump, and her T-shirt was pulled tight across her breasts. He focused on the band of pale, smooth skin that lay exposed below the bottom of her T-shirt and the low waistband of her hipster jeans. The bared flesh was punctuated by the dimple of her pierced and studded navel.
Bernd gazed at her, at her youth and her ripeness, and felt himself stiffen. Again. The girl looked over and their eyes met. He smiled what he had intended to be a mischevious smile but it formed on his lips as nothing short of a leer. The girl mimed a nauseated shudder, pulled her coat closed and placed her shoulder bag on her lap. He shrugged but kept his smile in place. After a few minutes in which he sought with his eyes to trace out again the delightful but now concealed curves of her young body, the S-Bahn stopped at the next station, Königstrasse. The girl rose to her feet as the automatic doors opened. As she did so she glared at him.
‘Piss off, you creep …’
Bernd rode the train until the next stop. His anticipation rose as he climbed the stairs from the station and exited out into the night. He took a deep breath and was aware that the odour wa
s still there, not a strong smell this time, but insinuated between the damp evening air and the traffic fumes. And all around him, St Pauli glittered.
The S-Bahn station was at the extreme west end of Hamburg’s Sündige Meile – sinful mile. The Reeperbahn stretches long and wide through the heart of the St Pauli district. This was once Hamburger Berg, in the days before they had given the area the name of the local St Paul’s church. It had been a no man’s land between two neighbouring, competing cities: German Hamburg and Danish Altona. It was a low, sodden marshland into which both cities had dumped their waste. And their unwanted. The lepers were sent here to live, shunned by each municipality, down by the river, in the least hospitable part of an already inhospitable bog. Then those who were not permitted to be articled as tradesmen in Altona or Hamburg were told they could ply their trades here, including the ropemakers, who made Reep, as they called it in Low German, and who gave the Reeperbahn, the Ropers’ Way, its name. All these tradesmen were free to follow their previously unlicensed occupations, and the area’s second most famous street took the name Grosse Freiheit: Great Freedom.
But other trades had been attracted by this great freedom and had found their way into the area, where they had flourished. And those had been the trades of the prostitute and the pornographer.
Now the Danes were long gone and Altona was part of Hamburg. But the area between remained a half-world of libidinousness and raucous vulgarity. In recent years, St Pauli had sought to cover her immodesty with trendy bars, nightclubs, discos and theatres, but in the narrow streets that radiated out from the Reeperbahn desire, flesh and money were still traded.
And this was where Bernd had found his own great freedom. Something had happened to him recently that he could not explain. A liberation. A cutting-free of all of the moral restraint that had been heaped upon him since childhood. Now he stalked the night and expressed every dark desire.
This was his favourite spot – his starting point – standing outside the mouth of the S-Bahn with the Reeperbahn stretched before him in one direction, and the Grosse Freiheit rascally flashing and twinkling invitations from across the street. This was more than a place. It was a time: the bright, delicious moment that lay between anticipation and fulfilment. But tonight, Bernd’s need was even more urgent than before and he had no time to savour the moment. The tingle of dark lust that had started on the U-Bahn had become, as it always did, an unpleasant discomfort, like a pressure needing to be released. A boil that needed to be lanced.
Bernd strode purposefully along the Reeperbahn, ignoring the windows filled with impossibly proportioned sex toys and brushing aside the importunate invitation of a ‘video lounge’ doorman. He turned into Hans-Albers-Platz. The pressure in his groin and the churning in his chest reached a new level of intensity, and he could have sworn he smelled that smell even more acutely, as if the two things were connected; as if the odour combined an aphrodisiac element with repulsion. He was nearly at his goal. He strode straight through the screen baffles that shield Herbertstrasse, the hundred-metre-long brothel street, from the rest of Hamburg.
Afterwards, Bernd crossed the Reeperbahn and made his way to the small pub in Hein-Hoyer-Strasse. It was a typical St Pauli Kneipe. Schlager pop music shouted from the jukebox and the walls were decked out with fishing nets, model ships, Prinz-Heinrich caps and the obligatory cluster of photographs of visitors of various degrees of celebrity. A picture of Jan Fedder, the St Pauli-born star of the long-running TV police series ‘Grossstadtrevier’ had been cut out of a magazine and stuck on the wall, next to a faded photograph of St Pauli’s most famous son, Hans Albers. Bernd shouldered his way through to the bar, ordered an Astra beer and leaned against the counter. The barmaid was overweight, with bad skin and hair that was an unconvincing blonde, yet he found himself considering what his chances would be. Again he thought he smelled that same smell.
It was then that Bernd became aware of the huge man who loomed beside him at the bar.
43.
11.20 a.m., Sunday, 18 April: Norddeich, Ostfriesland
‘I really don’t know why you’re so down on this place.’ Susanne held her face up to the sun and to the breeze that played unimpeded by shadow or obstacle on the vast levels of Wattenmeer mudflats that stretched, unbroken, from horizon to horizon. They walked where the sandy beach began to smudge into the glossy black of the mudflats. The wet, muddy sand seeped between the toes of Susanne’s naked feet as she walked. ‘I think it’s wonderful.’
‘And it has so much to offer.’ Fabel’s smile and tone were mock-enthusiastic. ‘Maybe this afternoon we can all go to the tea museum, or to the “Ocean-Wave Wellenpark” for a swim.’
‘Well, both sound good to me,’ she protested. ‘There’s no need to be so sarcastic. I think, deep down, you don’t hate this place as much as you pretend.’
Another group of Wattwanderer passed them and there was an exchange of ‘Moin, Moin’ greetings. These were more serious mudflat explorers, led by a local guide, and they wore shorts above naked legs that were sleek and black with the rich mud of the Watt. Susanne looped her arm through Fabel’s and drew him closer, resting her head on his shoulder as they walked.
‘No,’ answered Fabel. ‘I don’t hate it. It’s just the thing we all have about the place where we grew up, I suppose. A need to escape. Especially if it was provincial. I always felt that Norddeich was as provincial as you can get.’
Susanne laughed. ‘All of Germany is provincial, Jan. Everyone has their Norddeich. Everyone has their Heimat.’
Fabel shook his head and the stiff breeze ruffled his blond hair. He was barefoot too, dressed in an old denim shirt, a faded blue windcheater and chinos that he’d rolled up above his ankles. His pale blue eyes were shaded by a pair of sunglasses. Susanne had never seen Fabel dressed so casually. It made him look boyish. ‘Maybe that’s why fairy tales have endured in Germany longer than elsewhere – because we heeded the warnings never to wander far from the known and easy and comfortable … from our Heimat. But, anyway, this isn’t my Heimat, Susanne. That’s Hamburg. Hamburg is where I truly belong.’ He smiled and steered her gently around in a wide sweep until they faced the shore, where the colour of the sand changed from glossy brown to white-gold, and where the horizon was defined by the thin green ribbon of the dykes. ‘Let’s head back.’
They walked in contemplative silence for a while. Then Fabel pointed to the dyke ahead.
‘When I was a boy, I used to spend hours up there, looking out to sea. It’s amazing how much the sky and sea change here, and how quickly.’
‘I can imagine that. I see you as a very earnest little boy.’
‘You’ve been talking to my mother.’ Fabel laughed. He had been anxious, for reasons he couldn’t define, about bringing Susanne here; about her meeting his mother. Especially as he had decided to combine it with his weekend with his daughter. But, like the evening with Otto and Else, Susanne’s beauty, easy manner and charm had been as winning as ever; even when Susanne had commented to his mother that she still had a hint of a charming British accent. Fabel had flinched inwardly: his mother liked to think that she spoke perfect, accentless German and, as kids, Fabel and his brother Lex had learned not to correct their schoolteacher mother when she got an article wrong. But, somehow, Susanne had managed to make his mother feel as if she’d received a compliment.
They had driven here together from Hamburg. Susanne and Gabi had spent most of the journey making good-natured jokes at Fabel’s expense. The journey, and the weekend here in Norddeich, had pleased and disturbed Fabel in equal measure: for the first time since his divorce from Renate he had experienced a sense of something like a family again.
That morning, Fabel had got up first, leaving Susanne to sleep on. Gabi had headed off early into Norden, Norddeich’s ‘parent’ town. He had made breakfast with his mother, watching her carry out the same kitchen routines that she had when he’d been a boy; but now, despite her fast and almost complete recovery, she moved
more slowly, more deliberately. And she looked frailer. They had talked about Fabel’s dead father, about Lex, his brother and his family and then about Susanne. Resting her hand on Fabel’s forearm, she had said: ‘I just want you to be happy again, son.’ She had spoken to him in English, which, since his childhood, had been the language of intimacy between himself and his mother. Almost as if it were their secret language.
Fabel turned to Susanne and confirmed her observation. ‘You’re right, I was an earnest little boy, I suppose … Too earnest. Too serious, as a boy and as a man. Last time I was here, my brother Lex said the very same thing: “always such a serious kid”. I used to sit up there on the dyke behind the house and look out across the sea, imagining the Angle and Saxon longships sail out towards the Celtic British coast. For me, that defined this place, this coast. I would face the sea and be aware of the vastness of Europe behind me and the open sea before me. I suppose having a British mother had something to do with it too. So much began here. England was born here. America. The whole Anglo-Saxon world from Canada to New Zealand. They gathered here, the Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons … all the Ingvaeones …’ He stopped, as if what he had said had taken him by surprise.
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