Fabel cut him off. ‘And I have to tell you that that is of absolutely no interest to me. If you are here in your capacity as Hamburg’s Innensenator and you wish to discuss this case objectively and in its entirety, then I’d be delighted to do so. But if you’ve been sent here because Frau von Klosterstadt’s nose is out of joint because I had to ask a few personal questions about her daughter, then I suggest you leave now.’
Ganz stared at Fabel with something approaching fury in his eyes. Impotent fury, because he couldn’t deny what Fabel had said. He stood up, turned towards van Heiden and blustered: ‘This is outrageous. I will not sit here and be lectured on protocol by one of your junior officers.’
‘Herr Erster Hauptkommissar Fabel is hardly a junior officer,’ was all van Heiden said. Ganz snatched up his briefcase and stormed out of the office.
‘For God’s sake, Fabel,’ said van Heiden, once Ganz was gone. ‘You could at least try to make my life a little bit easier. It doesn’t do the Polizei Hamburg any favours if you make an enemy of the Innensenator of Hamburg.’
‘I’m sorry, Herr Kriminaldirektor, but what I said is true. Ganz has been sent here because I found out that Laura von Klosterstadt had an abortion ten years ago, arranged by her, to be honest, cold-hearted bitch of a mother. She became pregnant by Leo Kranz, the photographer. But before he was famous, so he didn’t register on Margarethe von Klosterstadt’s social radar.’
‘Is that relevant, do you think?’ asked Heiner Goetz.
‘Not directly. It may, however, suggest that the killer had an intimate knowledge of the von Klosterstadt family. It’s just that the whole “Rapunzel” thing involves pregnancy and illegitimacy. And I reserve the right to pursue all and any leads.’
‘Understood, Herr Fabel,’ said van Heiden, gloomily. ‘But you could perhaps try to distinguish between suspects and senior Hamburg politicians when it comes to your approach. Anyway, what do we have on this latest killing? This is fast becoming the number-one Hamburg news story.’
Fabel ran through what they had to date, including the killer’s choice of grave and why Fabel thought it was a deliberate smokescreen.
‘I think you’re right not to pursue Fendrich too aggressively,’ said Heiner Goetz. ‘I checked up with the Schleswig-Holstein Staatsanwaltschaft. They never had anything more than a police officer’s suspicion against Fendrich. I don’t want to end up with him pursuing us through the courts for harassment.’
Van Heiden sat back in his chair and placed his hands, fingers splayed and arms locked, on the vast cherrywood expanse of his desk. It was an intense posture, as if he were prepared for some dynamic physical action. He looked at Fabel, but it was as if he were somewhere and some time else.
‘When I was a child, I used to love the Grimms’ fairy tales. “The Singing, Ringing Tree”, that kind of thing. I think the thing I liked most was that they were always much darker than the usual children’s tales. More violent. That’s why kids liked them.’ Van Heiden leaned forward. ‘You’ve got to find him, Fabel. And soon. At the rate this maniac is killing, we don’t have the luxury of weeks or months to track him down. He’s escalating far too fast.’
Fabel shook his head. ‘No … He’s not escalating, Herr Kriminaldirektor. This is no feeding frenzy. All these killings have been worked out in detail – maybe years in advance. He’s working to a pre-planned timetable.’
Fabel stopped speaking, but his tone suggested he hadn’t said all he had to say. Van Heiden picked up on it.
‘Okay, Fabel – let’s hear it.’
‘It’s just a feeling I’ve got. Another reason we have to get him quickly. I think what we’ve seen so far is the prelude. I have this feeling that he’s building up to something big. A finale. Something spectacular.’
Once he was back in his own office, Fabel took out his sketch pad again. He turned over from the page on which he had summarised the inquiry to date and took a fresh, blank page. It looked up at him, inviting him to commit some new thought process to paper. Along the top he wrote the names of each of the fairy tales so far imitated by the killer. Underneath he wrote down words he associated with each tale. As he predicted, the closer he came to the most recent murder, Little Red Riding Hood, the more he wrote down: themes, names, relationships. Grandmother. Stepmother. Mother. Witch. Wolf. He was still still working his way through the tales when his desk phone rang.
‘Hello, Chef. It’s Maria. Could you meet me at the Institut für Rechtsmedizin? The Wasserschutzpolizei have just pulled a body out of the Elbe. And Chef, I’d cancel any plans for lunch.’
Everyone who dies in Hamburg without an appointment ends up in the mortuary of the Institut für Rechtsmedizin. All sudden deaths for which a doctor will not issue a death certificate are brought there. A body that had been weighted down and thrown into the Elbe was a prime candidate for accommodation.
As soon as Fabel entered the mortuary, he felt the usual leaden swell of revulsion and dread. There was always that smell. Not just the smell of death, but of disinfectant, of floor cleaner: a nauseous cocktail that was never overpowering, but it was always there. An attendant led Fabel, Maria and the Kommissar from the Wasserschutzpolizei patrol boat that had found the body through into the chill mortuary, lined with steel cabinets. Fabel noted with unease that the harbour policeman looked decidedly reluctant as they headed towards where the attendant had stopped, resting his hand on the handle of the appropriate cabinet. The harbour cop had, of course, already seen the body when it was fished out of the river and was clearly not too happy about coming face to face with it again.
‘This one’s a bit stinky.’ The mortuary attendant gave his warning a moment to sink in; then he turned the handle, opened the door and slid out the metal tray that held the body. A stench washed over them in a nauseating wave.
‘Shit!’ Maria took a step back and Fabel was aware of the Wasserschutz Polizeikommissar tensing beside him. For his part, Fabel fought to keep control of his disgust; and of his stomach, which lurched heavily at the sight and smell of the corpse before him.
A naked man lay on the body tray. He would have been about one metre seventy-five tall. It was difficult to tell what his build, or even ethnicity, had been, because his body had distended and discoloured in the water. Most of his swollen torso was covered in ornate tattoos that had paled slightly as they had been pulled across the stretched, blotched skin. The tattoos mainly consisted of intricate patterns and designs, rather than the usual naked women, hearts, skulls, daggers and dragons. A deep indentation ran all around the bloated torso, like a massive crease, and the over-tight skin had ruptured. The dead man had long, greying hair that had been pulled back from the face and tied into a ponytail.
His throat had been cut. Fabel could see vestiges of the straight lateral slash, but elsewhere along the cut the skin and flesh looked torn.
But it was in the devastation of the face that the true horror lay. The flesh around the eye sockets and the mouth was ripped and ragged. Bone gleamed through flaps of empurpled skin and pink flesh. The victim’s teeth grinned a lipless grin.
‘My God … What the hell has happened to his face?’ asked Fabel.
‘Eels,’ said the Wasserschutz Kommissar. ‘They always go for wounds first. That’s why I’m guessing that his eyes had been removed before he was dumped. The eels did the rest. Simply found the easiest way into the head and a prime source of protein. Same with the throat wound.’
Fabel recalled reading The Tin Drum by Günter Grass: the description of a fisherman using a dead horse’s head to fish for eels, pulling the head from the water, its eye sockets writhing with eels. Fabel imagined the dead man being hauled up, the eels clinging on to their precious source of food; Fabel’s nausea intensified. He closed his eyes for a moment and focused on forcing back the rising feeling in his chest before speaking again.
‘The deformation around the torso. Any idea what caused it?’
‘Yes,’ said the harbour Kommissar. ‘There was a rope tied
tightly around the body. We retrieved quite a bit of it. Our guess is that a weight was attached before he was thrown into the water. It looks as if the rope broke or the weight separated from it somehow. That’s what brought him up to the surface.’
‘And he was like this? Naked?’
‘Yep. No clothes, no ID, nothing.’
Fabel nodded to the mortuary attendant who slid the corpse back into its cabinet and slammed the door shut. Its ghost still haunted the mortuary in the form of the stench of putrefaction.
‘If you don’t mind,’ he said to the other two officers, ‘I think we should step outside.’
Fabel led Maria and the harbour policeman out into the fresh air of the car park. No one spoke until they reached the open, and only then after they had each taken a deep, cleansing breath.
‘God, that was bad,’ said Fabel at last. He snapped open his cell phone and phoned Holger Brauner. He explained about their find and asked if Brauner could do a DNA check to see if the spare pair of eyes they’d found in the Friedhof matched the body from the river. After he hung up, he thanked the harbour policeman for his time. When they were alone, he turned to Maria.
‘You know what the rope and the weight means?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We weren’t supposed to find this one.’
‘Exactly. Let’s assume for a moment that we do get a match between this body and our spare pair of eyes. It makes this victim nothing more than a donor – he was killed simply for his eyes.’
‘I suppose that’s possible.’
‘Maybe. But does having a second pair of eyes to “cast on Gretel” enhance the tableau that much? Why not just use Ungerer’s eyes? Or, if you’re going to have more than one pair of eyes, why add just one more pair? Why not half a dozen?’
Maria frowned. ‘What’s your point?’
‘Simply this. I’m right back to where I was when we had Olsen as our prime suspect – when we had a motive for him killing Grünn and Schiller, but for none of the others.’ He indicated the Institut für Rechtsmedizin with a nod of his head. ‘That man in there didn’t just die for his eyes. He was killed for a reason. He’s a diversion that our guy was forced to take. And that’s why he didn’t want – or need – us to find the body.’
‘Why?’ Maria’s frown still didn’t lift. ‘Why did he have to kill this guy?’
‘Maybe he knew who was committing these murders. Or maybe he simply had a piece of information that the killer didn’t want us to get to.’ Fabel rested his hands on his hips and turned his face up to the grey sky. He closed his eyes and rubbed at his sinuses again. ‘Get the SpuSi guys to see if they can get a decent fingerprint and arrange for some photographs of his tattoos. I don’t care if we visit every tattooist in Hamburg … we have to get an identity for him.’
As they drove back to the Präsidium, the storm, which had lurked broodily all day in the heavy air, broke.
55.
3.00 p.m., Monday, 26 April: St Pauli, Hamburg
As Anna had predicted, Fendrich had been unable to offer any kind of solid alibi for his whereabouts on the night the last murder had taken place. He hadn’t even been able to say that he had been watching television and give an account of the evening’s programmes. Instead, he had spent the evening reading and doing some preparation for the following day’s class work. It was clear that Anna now felt sorry for Fendrich. He had, apparently, been totally distraught at the violation of his mother’s grave. Fabel had suspected that Anna had perhaps gone further than she should in putting his mind at rest by letting him in on Fabel’s theory that he was being used as a diversion by the real killer.
At least they knew to whom the eyes belonged. DNA tests had confirmed that one pair belonged to Bernd Ungerer, while the second pair matched the body fished out of the Elbe. Holger Brauner had also run tests on the river body’s hair. They confirmed that the tattooed dead man was a drug user, but did not suggest recent heavy use. Möller, the pathologist, confirmed that the cause of death was the single, wide cut to the throat and that no water had been present in the lungs. The victim was dead before he was dumped in the water.
And now they had secured Durchsuchungsbeschluss entry and search warrants for two premises. The first was for the apartment of Lina Ritter, a known prostitute who had been reported missing by her sister. Ritter’s files had been accessed and had revealed that she was, indeed, the woman whose body had been posed, dressed in a traditional Tracht costume, in the Garten der Frauen in Ohlsdorf cemetery.
The second warrant was for this place, a tattoo studio in a seedy part of Sankt Pauli. It hadn’t taken them long to find it. The SchuPo in each of Hamburg’s Stadtteile city divisions had been told to check out every tattoo parlour in their area, and to show the images of the tattoos around to see if anyone recognised them. A sharp young Obermeister had decided not to shrug off the fact that this particular studio seemed always to be closed and did some asking around in the neighbourhood. No one knew where Max Bartmann was, but it was unusual for him not to be open. His business seemed to be his life, and, anyway, he lived over the shop.
The studio was tiny. A single room with a window that would have looked directly out on to the street, had it not been covered by the photographs and illustrations pasted to it, displaying to passers-by the talents of the tattooist within. Hardly any natural light managed to squeeze past the collage of examples and Fabel had to switch on the naked ceiling bulb to see clearly. He thanked the SchuPo and asked him to wait outside, leaving Fabel and Werner in the cramped studio. There was a couple of old, battered leather armchairs, arranged on either side of a small side table with some magazines scattered on it. A padded physiotherapy table was pushed up against one wall and a swivel stool sat next to it. An angle-poise lamp was fixed to the edge of the table. A tangle of wires hung from a wall socket, leading to a metal box with a switch and a dial, then to an aluminium tattoo machine. Three other machines lay on the table. A wall-mounted cabinet held rows of tattoo inks in a vast range of colours, tattoo stencils, needles, a box of surgical gloves and sterile swabs.
Before touching anything, Fabel took a pair of forensic gloves from his jacket pocket and snapped them on. Like the window, the walls were lined with sample tattoo patterns and photographs of satisfied customers. It would take an age to sort through all these images to see if any of them matched the tattoos on the dead man. A large poster, showing a vista of mountain and sea, captioned in large capitals NEW ZEALAND, was one of only two non-tattoo-related wall decorations. The other was a notice, handwritten in felt pen, which laid out the rules of the studio: no smoking, no kids, no drink or drugs, no disrespect.
Fabel examined the photographs more closely. They were not all close-up flash images of vivid new tattoos: some showed two or more people grinning at the camera, turning a shoulder or a hip towards the lens to display their bodies’ artworks. One person featured in all of the pictures: a thin man with dark hair, going grey, tied back in a ponytail. His face was pinched and the cheeks sunken and he had the look of a drinker. Fabel focused on one picture in particular. It was summer and the man with the ponytail wore a black vest as he was photographed with a fat woman who had obviously just had a floral motif tattooed on the fleshy breast she exposed for the photograph. Fabel could see that the man in the picture was, himself, covered in tattoos. But they weren’t as colourful as those of his customers. And they consisted of designs and patterns.
‘Werner …’ Fabel called him over, without taking his eyes from the picture. ‘I think we may have found our guy. Not a customer; the tattooist himself.’
There was a doorway from the studio. The door had been removed, obviously to maximise the meagre space, and had been replaced with a curtain of multicoloured plastic strips. Werner continued checking the studio while Fabel explored the rest of the premises. He parted the plastic strips and stepped into a tiny square hall. To the right was a cupboard-sized room that contained a toilet and hand washbasin. Directly ahead of Fabel was a steep stair
well that snapped sharply right, then right again, taking him to the upstairs level. There were three tiny rooms. One combined a kitchen and sitting room and was furnished with a sofa and a leather armchair. The armchair matched those in the studio, but was in much better condition. There was also an ancient-looking TV and a stereo system. The second room was the bedroom. It was so small that the only furniture was the bed, a bookcase along one wall, and a lamp that sat on the floor next to the bed.
The tiny flat depressed Fabel. It was dingy but clean, and Bartmann had obviously kept it tidy. But it was the kind of functional, soulless space of a man living alone. Fabel thought about his own apartment, with its smart furnishings, beechwood floors and stunning views over the Alster. It was in a different league. But there was something about this space that had encapsulated Bartmann’s life that was depressingly similar. As he stood there, in a dead man’s dead apartment, Jan Fabel made a decision about his own life.
Fabel checked beneath the bed and found a large, flat portfolio case. He pulled it out and laid it on the bed before opening it. It contained pen-and-ink drawings, charcoal sketches and a couple of paintings. They were of uninspiring subjects – trees, buildings, still lifes – and were clearly studies set to test and stretch the technical abilities rather than the imagination of the artist. Fabel recognised that the artist’s craftsmanship was excellent. Each study was initialled ‘M.B.’
Fabel left the portfolio on the bed and moved over to examine the bookcase. This was clearly Bartmann’s library of all things relating to the tattooist’s craft. There were scholarly texts on the history of body art, books on semi-pornographic ‘fantasy’ art, and manuals for tattooing equipment. But there were three books that didn’t fit. And one of them caused Fabel to feel a small current of excitement tingle across his scalp. Gebrüder Grimm: Gesammelte Märchen. The Collected Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Next to the fairy tales, Fabel found two books on the old German Gothic scripts: Fraktur, Kupferstich and Sütterlin.
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