Niels closed his hand around the butt of the pistol still hidden in his pocket. But for some reason he hesitated. There was something about this situation, this environment, this event, that suddenly seemed overpoweringly familiar. Niels felt himself enter a fugue of deja vu. He felt he had taken the pistol out of his pocket but knew he had not.
But then, Niels realised he knew what was going to happen before it did happen, and that this realisation had nothing to do with deja vu. Merc-Man pulled the sleeve of his jacket down over the palm of his hand in an improvised glove and snatched at the handle of the car. The door swung open and the man stepped forward. It was at that exact moment that the five litres of accelerant that Niels had dropped in through the shattered window ignited. It was like watching a flower blossom: a huge, curved, beautiful ball of flame burst out through the open door and up through the burning soft top. For a couple of seconds, Merc-Man disappeared into the flame, was consumed by it. Then Niels heard screaming. The girlfriend screaming. Onlookers screaming. He even heard a strangled, guttural cry, helmet-muffled, come from Harald behind him. But above it all, shrill and inhuman, he heard the screams of Merc-Man. The ball of flame surged up into the sky and Merc-Man was revealed again. His entire body was burning. All of him. A single walking, screaming flame. He staggered forward and fell onto the paving. A couple of onlookers ran forward and threw their coats over the burning man. Two men in the crowd suddenly noticed Niels and Harald and pointed at them.
Niels remained static, staring at the burning man and trying to remember if he really had seen him burn before, so many times that Niels couldn’t count them. In that moment, he realised that none of what he was seeing was real. That everything they had tried to convince him of at the hospital had been lies. This was not reality. This was a fiction; an imitation. He did not really exist and what he had just witnessed had not really happened.
‘For Christ’s sake, Niels…’ He heard Harald’s voice urgent behind him. ‘Get on the fucking bike. Now!’
It took the men in the crowd a second or two to work out the chronology of events, to apportion the blame for what they had witnessed. By the time they had started to run towards Niels, he was already on the back of the stolen bike. Harald accelerated away, not stopping at give-ways and causing a couple of cars to come to a screeching halt.
Sitting on the pillion seat, Niels still had the image of the screaming, burning man bright in his mind as they made their escape through the Schanzenviertel’s narrow streets. And he heard the strangest sound. Laughter.
His own laughter.
Chapter Twelve
‘Where are you now?’
‘In the car. Hands-free.’
‘I’m impressed,’ said Susanne. ‘Welcome to the twenty-first century.’
‘This isn’t the twenty-first century,’ said Fabel. ‘I distinctly remember on TV back in the 1970s they promised that by now we’d all be scooting about on hovercars, wearing silver jumpsuits and taking our holidays on the moon. How’s Wiesbaden?’
‘Bourgeois. More bourgeois than Hamburg, if you can imagine that. Where are you going? Are you taking advantage of my absence to have a tryst with some lithe blonde?’
‘Hardly. I’m off to see Berthold Muller-Voigt. At his domicile, don’t you know?’
‘Since when did you hobnob with the Schickeria? What do you have to see him about?’
‘Don’t know yet. He asked me. Funny thing…’
‘In what way funny?’
‘Just that he’s usually so cool and in control. Something’s shaken him up. What, I think I’m about to find out. You missing me?’
‘Terribly, but the young Italian waiter from the restaurant is keeping my mind off it. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow.’
‘By the way, what did you mean, “ Poppenbutteler Schleuse ”?’
‘What?’
‘The text you sent me. Enigmatic, I’ll give you that.’
‘Jan, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Earlier today,’ he sighed. ‘I was having lunch at the Fahrhaus cafe and I got a text from you. It said “ Poppenbutteler Schleuse ”. Nothing else.’
‘And I thought you never drank at lunchtimes.’
‘I’m not joking, Susanne. It came from your number.’
‘Well, I didn’t send it. Definitely. Maybe you do have a blonde stashed away somewhere and she’s telling you where to meet for that tryst. I believe there’s a really good restaurant there.’
‘I’m being serious, Susanne.’
‘So am I,’ she said emphatically. ‘I didn’t send you that text. Oh, Jan, you know what you’re like with technology. It took me ages to show you how to work an mp3 player and now you’d be lost without it. That message can’t have come from me. You better check with work. Maybe it was Anna Wolff. You know something? I sometimes get the feeling that Anna would like a little tryst with you up at Poppenbutteler Schleuse herself.’
‘Anna?’ Fabel snorted. ‘You’re way off there. For a psychologist, your insight stinks. But I will check with the office tomorrow and see if it was someone there who sent the text.’
Fabel realised that he was already approaching Stade. He hated talking on the phone while driving; even with hands-free he felt you were taken away from the road you were travelling. Particularly when trying to puzzle out who could have sent you a cryptic text message and why they had sent it.
‘Got to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Sleep well.’
The sky had cleared a little and the sun was already low, painting the town of Stade red as Fabel approached it. He reflected that it was probably the only thing that had painted that particular town red for a long time: Stade was a sleepy, picturesque small town of canals, cobbled streets and gable-ended medieval buildings on the edge of the Altes Land — the Old Land — on the south side of the Elbe, about forty kilometres to the west of Hamburg. It was the kind of place that gave Fabel a sense of comfort. It appealed to the historian in him: Stade was over a thousand years old and one of the oldest settlements in Northern Germany. During the Middle Ages this small provincial town had been, in turn, a Swedish city, a Danish stronghold and a Hanseatic city-state in its own right. Now Stade was part of the Greater Hamburg Metropolitan Area, but nothing much seemed to change it and it stood, quiet, pretty and sedate on the banks of the River Schwinge, watching the passing of time and human follies with stately detachment.
Fabel cursed as he found himself passing through the town’s ancient centre. He had been to Muller-Voigt’s home, on the outskirts of the town, before and had not had to drive through the town to get there. Fabel had been sure he would have been able to find it without any trouble and had not bothered to key the address into the satnav. The truth was that Fabel hardly ever programmed the satnav. Something told him it was the most human thing to find your own way, and that quite often some of the best things happened to you, the best discoveries made, when you had lost your way.
Which was all well and good on a philosophical level, he thought, but not when you were late for an appointment with one of Hamburg’s most influential politicians.
He made his way through Stade’s pretty centre, out into the countryside and found his bearings, driving along a narrow, straight ribbon of road beside the high banks of a canal. The sun was filtered through the tops of the trees, squeezing through a letter box of clear sky between the flat landscape below and a parallel bank of dark cloud above. The trees thickened into a dense wedge at the side of the road and Fabel swung into the long drive that he knew led up to Muller-Voigt’s home.