‘Hi, Chef, how was your break?’
‘Too short, Werner,’ said Fabel and he shook hands with Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer. Werner had worked with Fabel longer, and more closely, than anyone else in the Murder Commission. His intimidating physical presence was actually totally at odds with his approach to police work. Werner was an almost obsessively methodical processor of evidence whose attention to detail had been the key factor in solving more than a few difficult cases. He was also Fabel’s close friend.
‘You should have taken another day,’ said Werner. ‘Stretched it over another weekend.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘I only have a few days’ leave left and I want to take another long weekend on Sylt in a couple of months. My brother’s birthday.’ The two men made their way along the curving corridor that followed, like all the main corridors of the Presidium, the circle of the central atrium. ‘Anyway, it’s been pretty quiet recently. Makes me nervous. I feel we’re overdue a big case. What’s been happening?’
‘Certainly nothing we had to bother you with,’ said Werner. ‘Maria got the Olga X case tied up, and there’s been a brawl killing in St Pauli, but other than that not much. I’ve set up a team meeting to brief you.’
The team assembled in the Murder Commission’s main meeting room just before noon. Fabel and Werner were joined by Senior Criminal Commissar Maria Klee: a tall, elegant woman in her thirties. She had a look that one would not automatically associate with a police officer. Her blonde hair was expensively cut and her restrained, tasteful grey suit and cream blouse gave her more the look of a corporate lawyer. Maria shared the second line of command under Fabel with Werner Meyer. Over the last year and a half, Werner and Maria had begun to jell as colleagues, but only after the team had nearly lost her in the same operation that had left another of the Murder Commission’s team dead.
There were two younger officers already at the table when Fabel arrived. Criminal Commissars Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann were both proteges of Fabel’s. He had picked each for their very different styles and attitudes. It was Fabel’s management style to team up opposites: where others would see the potential for strife, Fabel would see the opportunity for a balance of complementary qualities. Anna and Henk were still finding that balance: it had been Anna’s former partner, Paul Lindemann, who had been killed. And he had died trying to save her life.
Anna Wolff looked even less like a police officer than Maria Klee, but in a completely different way. She was more youthful-looking than her twenty-eight years, and she habitually dressed in jeans and an oversized leather jacket. Her pretty face was topped by black hair cut short and spiky, and her large dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were always emphasised by dark mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. It would have been much easier to imagine Anna working in a hair salon rather than as a Murder Commission detective. But Anna Wolff was tough. She came from a family of Holocaust survivors and had served in the Israeli army before returning to her native Hamburg. In fact, Anna was probably the toughest member of Fabel’s team: intelligent, fiercely determined but impulsive.
Henk Hermann, Anna’s partner, could not have contrasted more with her. He was a tall, lanky man with a pale complexion and a perpetually earnest expression. Just as Anna could not have looked less like a police officer, Henk could not have looked more like one. The same could also have been said about Paul Lindemann, and Fabel knew that, initially, the physical similarity between Henk and his dead predecessor had taken the other members of the team aback.
Fabel looked around the table. It always struck him as odd just how different this disparate group of people were. An unlikely family. Very different individuals who had somehow stumbled into a very peculiar profession and into an unspoken dependence on each other.
Werner led Fabel through the current caseload. While he had been on leave, there had only been one murder: a drunken Saturday-night fight outside a nightclub in St Pauli had ended with a twenty-one-year-old haemorrhaging to death in the street. Werner handed over to Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann, who summarised the case and the progress to date. It was the type of murder that made up ninety per cent of the Murder Commission’s workload. Depressingly simple and straightforward: a moment of senseless rage, usually fuelled by drink, leaving one life lost and another in ruins.
‘Do we have anything else on the books?’ Fabel asked.
‘Just tying up the loose ends on the Olga X case.’ Maria flipped back through a few pages in her notebook. Olga X not only had no surname, her first name was unlikely to have been Olga. But the team had felt the need to give her some kind of identity. No one knew for sure where Olga had come from, but it was certainly somewhere in Eastern Europe. She had been working as a prostitute and had been beaten and strangled to death by a customer: a fat, balding thirty-nine-year-old insurance clerk called Thomas Wiesehan from Heimfeld with a wife and three children and no criminal record of any kind.
Dr Moller, the pathologist, had estimated Olga’s age to have been between eighteen and twenty.
Fabel looked puzzled. ‘But Werner told me that the Olga X case is all done and dusted, Maria. We have a full admission of guilt and unshakeable forensics to back it up. What “loose ends” do you have to tie up?’
‘Well, none really on the murder itself. It’s just I get the feeling there’s a people-trafficking connection to this. Some poor kid from Russia or God knows where being trapped into a prostitution career with promises of a proper job and a place in the West. Olga was a victim of slavery before she became a victim of murder. Wiesehan killed her all right… but some gang boss put her there for him to kill.’
Fabel examined Maria closely. She reflected his gaze with her frank, unreadable blue-grey eyes. It was not like Maria to invest herself so deeply in a case: Anna, yes; even Fabel himself. But not Maria. Maria’s efficiency as a detective had always been typified by her cool, professional, detached approach.
‘I understand how you feel,’ Fabel sighed. ‘I really do. But that’s not our concern. We had a murder to solve and we’ve solved it. I’m not saying that we just leave it there. Pass everything you’ve got on to Vice. And a copy to LKA Six.’ Fabel referred to the Polizei Hamburg’s newly re-formed, ninety-officer-strong State Crime Bureau 6 unit, the so-called Super LKA, that had been set up specifically to take on organised crime.
Maria shrugged. There was nothing to read in her pale blue-grey eyes. ‘Okay, Chef.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Fabel.
The phone rang before anyone had a chance to answer. Werner picked up the receiver and made confirming noises as he scribbled notes on a pad.
‘Right on cue,’ said Werner as he hung up. ‘A body’s been uncovered at an archaeological dig, down by the Speicherstadt.’
‘Ancient?’
‘That’s what they’re trying to establish, but Holger Brauner and his team are on their way.’ Werner referred to the forensics-squad leader. ‘Whom shall I pass this to, Chef?’
Fabel held out an open hand across the table. ‘Give it to me. You guys have enough on, tidying up this brawl killing.’ Fabel took the pad and wrote the details down in his notebook. He stood up and took his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘And I could do with some fresh air.’
Noon: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina knew that she was face to face again with Chaos. She had lived with it for years. It had taken her to the brink of madness once before and she had cut it out of her life: an excision that had been as traumatic and as painful as if she had carved it out in flesh from her own body.
Now Chaos stormed and raged around her. Some distant sea wall had been breached and a tidal wave of turmoil had been silently hurtling towards her, waiting to collide with her the moment she opened the door to Herr Hauser’s apartment. In that moment she knew that she faced the greatest struggle of her life: that she must defeat Chaos anew.