‘And, despite his appearance, he didn’t die recently. But, as you can see from his clothing, he is no relic of the Middle Ages.’ Severts indicated the area of the excavation they were in with a sweep of his hand. ‘The evidence around the body gives me an idea how it happened. Our geophysics and the records we have for this site suggest that where we are standing was a loading wharf during the Second World War.’
Brauner moved across to the band of glittering dirt. He picked some up and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Glass?’
Severts nodded. ‘It was sand. Everything here is basically the same pale sand. It’s just that some has been mixed with black ash while this outer ring has been subjected to such intense heat that it has turned into crude glass crystals.’
Fabel nodded grimly. ‘The British firebombing of nineteen forty-three?’
‘That would be my guess,’ said Severts. ‘It would fit with what we know of this location. And with this form of mummification, which was a common result of the intense temperatures created by the firestorm. It looks to me as if he took cover in some kind of quayside air-raid shelter, improvised with sandbags. There must have been an incendiary burst very close which, basically, baked and buried him.’
Fabel’s gaze remained locked on the mummified body. Operation Gomorrah. Eight thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of incendiaries and high explosives had been dropped on Hamburg by the British by night, the Americans by day. In parts of the city the temperature of the air, out in the open, had reached more than a thousand degrees. Some forty-five thousand Hamburg citizens had burned in the flames or been roasted to death by the intense heat. He gazed at the thin features, made too fine by having the moisture sucked from the flesh beneath the skin. He had been wrong. Of course he had seen bodies like this before: old black-and-white photographs from Hamburg and from Dresden. Many had been baked into mummies without being buried: dried out within moments, exposed to blast-furnace temperatures in the airless open streets or in the air-raid shelters that had been turned into bake ovens. But Fabel had never seen one in the flesh, albeit desiccated flesh.
‘It’s difficult to believe this man has been dead for more than sixty years,’ he said eventually.
Brauner grinned and slapped his broad hand on Fabel’s shoulder. ‘It’s simple biology, Jan. Decomposition requires bacteria; bacteria require oxygen. No oxygen, no bacteria, no decomposition. When we dig him out, we’ll probably find some limited putrefaction in his thorax. We all carry bacteria in our gut, and when we die they’re the first things to start work on us. Anyway, I’ll do a full forensics on the body and then I’ll pass it on to the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf for a full autopsy. We might still be able to confirm a cause of death, which I would gamble a year’s salary on being asphyxiation. And we’ll be able to work out the rough biological age of the corpse.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. He turned to Severts and his student, Brandt. ‘I don’t see that we need to hold up the rest of your excavation. But if you find anything in your dig that relates or you think relates to the body, please let me know.’ He handed Severts his Polizei Hamburg contact card.
‘I will do,’ said Severts. He nodded in the direction of the corpse, who still shunned them with his turned shoulder, as if trying to return to a rudely disturbed sleep. ‘Looks like he wasn’t a murder victim after all.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘That all depends on your point of view.’
1.50 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
The call had come in as Fabel was making his way back to the Presidium. Werner had phoned to say that he and Maria were in the Schanzenviertel. A killer had been caught, almost literally red-handed, cleaning up the murder scene and about to dispose of the body.
It was clear that Werner had everything in hand, but Fabel felt the need to get involved in a ‘live’ inquiry after a morning with a cold case that was almost certainly sixty years old and not a homicide. He told Werner that he would head straight over to the address he had given.
‘By the way, Jan,’ Werner said, ‘I think you ought to know we’ve got a bit of a celebrity victim… Hans-Joachim Hauser.’
Fabel recognised the name immediately. Hauser had been a reasonably prominent member of the radical Left in the 1970s: he was now a vocal environmental campaigner who had a taste for the media limelight. ‘God… that’s weird…’ Fabel spoke as much to himself as to Werner.
‘What is?’
‘Synchronicity, I suppose. You know, when something that you would not expect to encounter that often crops up several times in a short space of time. On the way into the Presidium today I heard Bertholdt Muller-Voigt on the radio. You know, the Environment Senator. He was giving his boss Schreiber a really rough time. And two or three nights ago he was in my brother’s restaurant at the same time as me and Susanne. If I remember rightly, Muller-Voigt and Hauser used to be very much of a double act back in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.’ Fabel paused, then added gloomily: ‘That’s all we need. A public-figure murder. Any sign of the press yet?’
‘Nope,’ said Werner. ‘Mind you, despite his best efforts, and unlike his chum Muller-Voigt, Hauser really was yesterday’s news.’
Fabel sighed. ‘Not any more…’
There was an untidy exuberance to the Schanzenviertel. It was a part of Hamburg that, like so many others in the city, was undergoing a great many changes. The Schanzenviertel lay just to the north of St Pauli and had not always enjoyed the most salubrious of reputations. The quarter still had its problems, but it had recently become the focus for more affluent incomers.
And, of course, it was the ideal city quarter in which to live if you were a left-wing environmental campaigner. The Schanzenviertel had the credentials of Cool in exactly the right mix: it was one of the most multicultural of Hamburg’s districts and its vast range of fashionable restaurants meant that most of the world’s cuisines were represented. Its arthouse cinemas, the open-air theatre in the Sternschanzen Park and the requisite number of pavement cafes made it trendy enough to be up and coming; but it also had enough social problems, principally drug-related, not to be seen as too ‘yuppie’. It was the kind of place in which you cycled and you recycled, where you wore second-hand chic, but where, while you sat sipping your fair-trade mocha at a pavement table, you tapped away at your ultra-cool, ultra-slim, ultra-expensive titanium laptop computer.
Hans-Joachim Hauser’s residence was on the ground floor of a solidly built 1920s apartment block in the heart of the quarter, near where Stresemannstrasse and Schanzenstrasse crossed each other. There was a clutch of police vehicles, in the Polizei Hamburg’s new silver and blue livery, parked outside and the pavement in front of the block’s entrance was ringed with red-and-white-striped crime scene tape. Fabel parked his BMW untidily behind one of the patrol cars and a uniformed officer headed determinedly over from the perimeter tape to tackle him; Fabel got out of the car and held up his oval Kriminalpolizei disc as he strode towards the building and the uniform backed off.
Werner Meyer was waiting at the doorway of Hauser’s apartment. ‘We can’t go in yet, Jan,’ he said, gesturing to where, a little way down the hall, Maria was talking to a young, boyish-looking man in white forensics coveralls. His surgical mask hung loose around his neck and he had the hood pulled down from a thick mop of black hair above a pale bespectacled face. Fabel recognised him as Holger Brauner’s deputy, Frank Grueber, whose archaeology background he had discussed with Brauner and Severts. Grueber and Maria were clearly talking about the crime scene, but there was a relaxed informality about Grueber’s posture as they talked. Fabel noticed that Maria, in contrast, leaned back against the wall with her arms folded in front of her.