Eternal jf-3

by Craig Russel

  Maria’s expression hardened, but she remained silent.

  ‘With the greatest respect to our colleagues at LKA Six and the BKA,’ said Fabel, ‘I have to point out that the only people who ever came close to capturing Vitrenko were myself and Frau Klee. And Frau Klee nearly paid for it with her life. So, although I admit that it was irregular for her to pursue her investigation solo, I believe she is due a little more respect as a professional police officer than is being shown here.’

  Van Heiden frowned but Turchenko spoke before he had a chance to respond.

  ‘I have read the file on what happened on that night, and I am aware of the great courage displayed by Frau Klee, yourself and the two unfortunate officers who lost their lives. It is my duty to track down Colonel Vitrenko and I am grateful for all that you have already done. I am ashamed that my country produced such a monster and I promise you that I am totally committed to bringing Vasyl Vitrenko to justice. I am, so to speak, passing through Hamburg as I follow his trail. I would be most obliged if I could ask any further questions that come to mind during my stay here.’

  Fabel examined the Ukrainian. He had the look of an intellectual rather than a police officer, and his quiet, determined manner and the perfect but stilted and accented German with which he spoke seemed to invite trust.

  ‘If we can be of help, of course we shall,’ said Fabel.

  ‘In the meantime’ – Ullrich spoke directly to Maria – ‘I would be obliged if you could supply a full report on your dealings with the missing prostitute and anything else you have discovered.’

  Fabel and Maria made to leave.

  ‘Before you go, Herr Fabel…’ Van Heiden leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the desk. ‘Where are we with these two scalping murders?’

  ‘We know that the woman found at the first scene is not directly linked to the murder and forensics are trying to find out to whom the hairs left behind as signatures belong. There is a possibility – but at this stage it is only a possibility – that the victims might have been selected because they were gay. We’re currently checking that out. Other than that, we are pretty much without any strong leads.’

  Van Heiden’s expression was one of expected disappointment. ‘Keep me informed, Fabel.’

  Fabel and Maria did not exchange a word until they exited from the lift.

  ‘My office,’ said Fabel. ‘Now.’

  As instructed by Fabel, Maria closed the door behind her after she entered his office.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Maria?’ Barely contained anger stretched Fabel’s quiet tone taut. ‘I expect this kind of behaviour from Anna occasionally, but not from you. Why do you insist on keeping things from me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chef. I know you told me not to follow up the Olga X case…’

  ‘I’m not just talking about that. I’m talking about you keeping things from me generally. Things I ought to know. For example, why the hell didn’t you tell me that you are a patient at Dr Minks’s Fear Clinic?’

  There was a beat of silence and Maria stared blankly at Fabel. ‘Because, frankly,’ she said at last, ‘it is a personal issue that I didn’t think was your concern.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Maria, your psychological state is such that you have to seek treatment in a phobia clinic and you’re telling me that, as your commanding officer, it’s none of my business? And don’t try to tell me this isn’t work-related. I saw your face when Turchenko told us who his target is.’ Fabel sat back in his chair, letting the tension ease from his shoulders. ‘Maria, I thought you trusted me.’

  Again Maria did not answer right away. Instead she turned to the window and looked out over the tops of the thick, high swathe of trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Then she spoke in a quiet, flat voice without looking at Fabel.

  ‘I suffer from aphenphosmphobia. It’s reasonably mild but it has been getting progressively worse and Dr Minks has been treating me for it. It means that I have a fear of being touched. That’s what Dr Minks is treating me for. I cannot bear the close physical presence of others. And it is a direct result of Vitrenko stabbing me.’

  Fabel sighed. ‘I see. Is the treatment working?’

  Maria shrugged. ‘Sometimes I feel that it is. But then something sparks it off again.’

  ‘And this obsession with the Olga X case… I take it that was because you thought Vitrenko was involved?’

  ‘Not at first. It was just… well, you were there at the murder scene. It just got to me. Poor kid. I just felt it was wrong for her to die that way. Then, yes… I saw that there was possibly a Vitrenko connection.’

  ‘Maria, the Vitrenko case was just that… a case. We can’t turn it into some kind of personal crusade. Like Turchenko said, we all want to bring Vitrenko to justice.’

  ‘But that’s just it…’ There was an urgency in Maria’s voice that Fabel had not heard before. ‘I don’t want to bring him to justice. I want to kill him…’

  2.30 p.m.: Hamburg Altstadt, Hamburg

  Paul Scheibe stood outside the Rathaus city chambers. The vast plain of Rathausmarkt, Hamburg’s main city square, seemed to writhe with tourists and shoppers under the hot summer sun. Scheibe had worn a lightweight suit in black linen and a white, collarless shirt to the meeting with Hamburg’s First Mayor Hans Schreiber and the city’s Environment Senator Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Yet despite the lightness of the fabric Scheibe felt clammy trickles of sweat gather on the nape of his neck and in the small of his back. The meeting had been arranged to congratulate him on the selection of his KulturZentrumEins design for the site on the HafenCity’s Uberseequartier and Scheibe had done his best to look pleased and interested. Perhaps that was why so many people had asked him if everything was all right: Scheibe’s professional trade mark had always been his arrogance; his aloofness from the crude commercial aspect of architecture. But everyone had been happy and the champagne corks had popped. And there had been lots of champagne; now Scheibe’s mouth tasted coppery and dry and the alcohol had had no effect on him other than to enervate him.

  Life must go on, he had thought to himself. And maybe it will. Maybe it was just a coincidence that two members of the cast of his previous life had been murdered. The same way. By the same person. Or maybe it wasn’t.

  He watched the sightseers and the shoppers, the office workers and the business people scuttle across the Rathausmarkt. A street musician was playing Rimsky-Korsakov on an accordion somewhere over by the Schleusenbrucke bridge across the Alsterfleet. Paul Scheibe was surrounded by people, by noise; he stood at the very heart of a great city. He had never felt so isolated or exposed. Was this what it was like to be hunted?

  He walked. He walked quickly and with a sense of purpose that he did not understand, as if the act of deliberate motion would stimulate some idea about what he should do next. He crossed the Rathausmarkt diagonally and headed up Monckebergstrasse. The throng of people grew denser as he came into the main pedestrianised part of Monckebergstrasse, lined with stores. Still he let his feet lead him. He felt hot and dirty, his hair was beginning to cling to his damp scalp and he wished that he could cast off the mantle of warm summer air that seemed to stifle his ability to think. He did not want to die. He did not want to go to prison. He had made a name for himself and he knew that the wrong step taken now would tarnish that name for ever.

  He stopped outside an electrical store. A regional NDR news programme played mutely on a large-screen TV behind the glass. It was a pre-recorded interview with Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Scheibe had found it hard enough to stomach Muller-Voigt’s sneery, patronising presence at the lunch and now he watched as he smiled his politician smile at him through the glass. It was as if he were mocking Scheibe, just like he used to all those years ago.

  Muller-Voigt had always possessed, naturally and without effort, the kind of self-confident poise and intellectual credibility that Scheibe worked so hard to project. Muller-Voigt had always been smarter, had always been cooler, had always been at the focus of
things. Paul Scheibe found it impossible to forgive Bertholdt Muller-Voigt any of these things. But there was something else that fuelled Scheibe’s loathing for his contemporary, something deeper and more fundamental that burned white-hot at the core of his hatred: Muller-Voigt had taken Beate from him.

  Of course, back then they had all forsworn anything so bourgeois as monogamy, and Beate, the raven-haired, half-Italian mathematics student with whom Scheibe had been besotted, would never have allowed any man to think of her as belonging to him. But it was the closest that Paul Scheibe had ever been to love. It wasn’t just that Muller-Voigt had slept with Beate; it was that he had done so with the same thoughtless arrogance with which he had slept with dozens of other women. It had meant nothing to him then and Scheibe was pretty certain that today Muller-Voigt probably wouldn’t even remember it.

  And now, two decades later, every time Paul Scheibe met Muller-Voigt – or even heard the politician’s name mentioned – it provoked exactly the same feelings of envy and loathing in Scheibe that it had provoked back then, when they had been students. Afterwards, Scheibe had built a new life for himself, a different and successful life. But Muller-Voigt had somehow managed to build an even more successful new life. Most of all, Muller-Voigt had remained on the fringes of Scheibe’s world: a constant and unwelcome reminder of the old days. But now Muller-Voigt was not the only reminder of that time.

  Scheibe pressed his forehead against the electrical store’s window, expecting it to be cool, but it reflected the damp warmth of his brow. A passing shopper bumped shoulders with him and nudged him out of his reverie. What was he doing here? What was he going to do next? He knew he had stridden out of the Rathausmarkt determined to find an answer.

  He had to find somewhere to think. Somewhere to make sense of it all.

  Scheibe tore his gaze from the TV screen and started to walk purposefully on up Monckebergstrasse. Towards the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof railway station.

  2.30 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

  There is a bureaucracy of death: each murder case generates a mountain of forms to be filled and reports to be filed. After the meeting with the Ukrainian policeman and Markus Ullrich, Fabel had found it difficult to focus on the paperwork that had piled up. There were so many things circulating in his head that he lost track of time and he suddenly realised that he had not eaten since breakfast.

  He took the lift down to the Police Presidium’s canteen and placed a filled roll and a coffee on his tray. The canteen was all but empty and he headed over towards the window to take a seat. It was then that he noticed Maria sitting with Turchenko. The Ukrainian detective was leaning back in his chair, looking down at the coffee that sat on the table in front of him, and seemed to be in the middle of a detailed explanation of something. Maria was concentrating on the Ukrainian’s words. There was something about the set-up that Fabel did not like.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.

  Turchenko looked up and smiled broadly. ‘Not at all, Herr Chief Commissar. Be my guest.’

  Maria also smiled, but her expression suggested that she was irritated by the interruption.

  ‘You speak excellent German, Herr Turchenko,’ said Fabel.

  ‘I studied it at university. Along with law. I spent some time in the former East Germany as a student. I have always had a fascination for Germany. Which made me the obvious choice to send here to try to track down Vitrenko.’

  ‘Do you have a special-forces background too?’ asked Fabel.

  Turchenko laughed. ‘God, no… in fact, I have not been a police officer that long. I was a criminal and civil lawyer in Lviv. After the Orange Revolution, in which I had been active, I became a criminal prosecutor and was then approached by the new government. They asked me if I would oversee the setting up of a new organised-crime unit to deal with people-smuggling and forced prostitution. Basically, my job is to stop what has become the new slave trade. I was chosen because I am free from the taint of the old regime.’

  ‘Things are changing in Ukraine, I believe.’

  Turchenko smiled. ‘Ukraine is a beautiful country, Herr Fabel. One of the most beautiful in Europe. People here have no idea. It is also a country laden with almost every type of natural bounty – an incredibly fertile land that was the bread basket of the former USSR. It is also rich in every kind of mineral and it has enormous potential for tourism. I love my country and I have a great belief in what it can become. And what I believe it will become is one of the richest and most successful nations in Europe. It will take more than a generation to achieve, of course, but it will happen. And the first steps have been taken – democracy and liberalisation. But there are problems. Ukraine is divided. In western Ukraine, we look to the West for our future. But in eastern Ukraine, there are still those who believe we belong in some kind of unity with Russia.’ Turchenko paused. ‘You Germans should be able to understand this. Your country has been reborn many times, and sometimes the incarnation has not been a good one. This is our rebirth in Ukraine. Our country is beginning a new life. A life that we took to the streets to create. And people like Vasyl Vitrenko have no part in it.’

  ‘Vitrenko is extremely dangerous game to hunt,’ said Fabel. ‘You will have to take a lot of care.’

  ‘I am a naturally cautious man. And I have your police here to protect me.’ Turchenko made an open-armed gesture, as if embracing the entire Presidium. ‘I have a GSG9 bodyguard with me all the time.’ He gave a small laugh and tapped his temple with his forefinger. ‘I am no man of action. I am a man of thought. I believe that the way to find and capture this monster is to out-think him.’

  Fabel smiled. He liked the small Ukrainian: he was a man who clearly believed in all that he had said. Who had an enthusiasm for what he did for a career. Fabel found himself envying him.

  ‘I wish you luck,’ he said.

  3.40 p.m.: Hohenfelde, Hamburg

  ‘How did it go?’ Julia frowned as she spoke. Cornelius Tamm resented the fact that her frown created so few creases on her brow, as if her youth refused to yield to her concern. It seemed to Cornelius that he was surrounded by youth. It mocked him wherever he went.

  ‘It didn’t.’ Cornelius threw his keys onto the table and took off his jacket.

  Julia was thirty-two; Cornelius exactly thirty years her senior. He had left his wife for Julia three years before, on the eve of his fifty-ninth birthday. His marriage had been almost as old as the woman he had ended it for and Julia was nearer to his children’s age than to his own. At the time, Cornelius had felt that he was regaining a sense of youth, of vigour. Now he just felt tired all the time: tired and old. He sat down at the table.

  ‘What did he say?’ Julia poured him a cup of coffee and sat down opposite him.

  ‘He said my time is past. Basically.’ Cornelius gazed at Julia as if trying to work out what she was doing in his kitchen, his apartment. His life. ‘And he’s right, you know. The world has moved on. And somewhere along the way it left me behind.’ He pushed the coffee aside. He took out a tumbler and a bottle of Scotch from a kitchen cabinet and poured himself a large glass.

  ‘That doesn’t help, you know,’ said Julia.

  ‘It may not cure the disease.’ He took a substantial sip and screwed up his face. ‘But it sure as hell helps the symptoms. It anaesthetises.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Julia’s comforting smile only irritated Cornelius further. ‘You’ll get a deal soon. You’ll see. By the way, someone phoned for you while you were out. About fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They wouldn’t leave a name at first. Then he said to tell you that it was Paul and that he would phone you later.’

  ‘Paul?’ Cornelius frowned as he tried to think which Paul it could be, then dismissed it with a shrug. ‘I’m going to my study. And I’m taking my anaesthetic with me.’

  It was another name that caught his attention. As he stood up, he noticed the copy of the Hamburger Morgenpost on the table. Cornelius pu
t his drink down and picked up the paper. He stared at it long and hard.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Julia. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Cornelius didn’t answer her and stayed focused on the article. It named someone who had died. Been murdered. But the name was one that had already been dead to Cornelius for twenty years. It was the report of the death of a ghost.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said and put the paper down. ‘Nothing at all.’

  It was then that he worked out who Paul was.

  7.40 p.m.: Nordenham Railway Station, 145 Kilometres West of Hamburg

  It was a beautiful evening. The embers of the sun hung low in the sky behind Nordenham and the Weser sparkled quietly as it made its way towards the North Sea. Paul Scheibe had never set foot in Nordenham before, which was an irony when he considered how this small provincial town had cast a giant shadow over his life.

  For a moment, Scheibe became again purely the architect as he gazed at Nordenham railway station. Architecturally, it was not really his kind of thing: but it was, nevertheless, a striking building, albeit in the solid, sometimes austere, traditional North German style. He remembered reading that it was over one hundred years old and was now an officially protected building.

  Here.

  It had happened here. On this platform. This was the stage on which the most important drama in his life had been played out and he had not even been here. Nor had the others. Six people, a hundred and fifty kilometres away, had made a decision to sacrifice a human being on this platform. One life brought to an end, six lives free to begin again. But it had not just been one life that had been lost in this place. Piet had also died here. As had Michaela and a policeman. But Paul Scheibe had never found he could feel guilty about those lost lives – everything else had been eclipsed by the intense feeling of relief, of liberation, that had come from knowing it was all over. But it was not over. Something – some one – had returned from that dark time.