‘ Harry Potter and the Ice Maiden…’ Werner said dryly. ‘Is it true those two are an item?’
‘No idea.’ Fabel lied. Maria kept almost all of her personal life locked up tight, along with her emotions, whenever she was at work. But Fabel had been there – the only one there – as she had lain, close to death, after she had been stabbed by one of the most dangerous killers the team had ever hunted. Fabel had shared Maria’s terror in those stretched, tense minutes until the Medicopter had arrived. Their shared fear had been a forced intimacy that had created an unspoken bond between them and, during the two years since, Maria had imparted to her boss small confidences about her personal life – but only those things that could possibly have had some bearing on her work. One of these confidences had been that she had become involved with Frank Grueber.
Down the hall, Grueber concluded his briefing to Maria. He touched her elbow in a gesture of farewell and headed back down the apartment hallway. There was something about that gesture that bothered Fabel. Not the informality of it: rather the almost imperceptible tensing of Maria’s posture in response. As if a very faint electric current had been passed to her.
Maria came back down the hall to the doorway.
‘We still can’t go in,’ she explained. ‘Grueber has his work really cut out for him. The killer – a woman – was disturbed cleaning up the scene. Apparently she made too good a job of it and forensics are finding it hard to pick up anything worthwhile.’ She shrugged. ‘But it’s academic, I suppose. If you catch the killer at the scene then there’s no better forensic trace than that.’
Fabel turned to Maria. ‘The suspect was disturbed cleaning up the scene… by whom?’
‘A friend of Hauser’s…’ said Maria. ‘A very young, pretty male friend of Hauser’s called Sebastian Lang, who found the door unlocked
… although apparently he did have a key himself.’
Fabel nodded. Hans-Joachim Hauser had never made any secret of his homosexuality.
‘Lang had come back to pick something up from the apartment before going into town for lunch,’ continued Maria. ‘He heard noises from the bathroom and, assuming it was Hauser, went through and disturbed the killer as she cleaned up the scene.’
‘Where is the suspect?’ asked Fabel.
‘Uniform have taken her back to the Presidium for us,’ Werner answered. ‘She seems a pretty disturbed individual… no one could get much sense out of her, other than she wasn’t finished cleaning.’
‘Okay. If we can’t get into the crime scene, then we should maybe head back to the Murder Commission and interview the suspect. But I’d like Frau Doctor Eckhardt to do a psychological assessment of her first.’ Fabel snapped open his cellphone and hit a pre-set button.
‘Institute for Legal Medicine… Doctor Eckhardt speaking…’ The voice that answered was female: deep and warm and tinged with a soft Bavarian accent.
‘Hi, Susanne… it’s me. How’s it going?’
She sighed. ‘Wishing we were back on Sylt… What’s up?’
Fabel explained about the arrest of the woman in Schanzenviertel and that he wanted Susanne to do an assessment before they interrogated her.
‘I’m tied up until late afternoon. Is four p.m. okay?’
Fabel looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. If they waited for the assessment it would mean they would not get to interview the suspect until the early evening.
‘Okay. But I think we’ll have to have a preliminary with her beforehand.’
‘Fine. I’ll see you at four at the Presidium,’ said Susanne. ‘What’s the suspect’s name?’
‘Just a second…’ Fabel turned to Maria. ‘What name do we have for the woman in custody?’
Maria flipped open her notebook and scanned her notes for a moment.
‘Dreyer…’ she said eventually.
‘Kristina Dreyer?’
Maria looked at Fabel in surprise. ‘Yes. You know her?’
Fabel didn’t answer Maria but spoke again to Susanne. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and snapped his cellphone shut. Then he turned to Maria. ‘Get Grueber. Tell him I don’t care what stage forensics are at – I want to see the murder scene and the victim. Now.’
2.10 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
It was clear that Grueber recognised the futility of trying to deny the Murder Commission team access to the murder scene. But with a determined authority that did not sit well with his youthful looks he had insisted that, instead of the usual requirement of blue forensic overshoes and latex gloves, the team should all wear the full forensic coverall suits and face masks.
‘She has left us practically nothing,’ explained Grueber. ‘It’s the most thorough clean-up of a scene that I’ve ever come across. She’s gone over almost every surface with a bleach-based cleaner or solution. It destroys practically all forensic traces and degrades any surviving DNA.’
After they were suited up, Grueber led Fabel, Werner and Maria through the hall. Fabel took in each of the rooms as he passed. There was at least one forensic technician working in each. Fabel noticed how tidy and clean the apartment was. It was large and spacious, but had an almost cramped feeling to it that came from the way nearly every free square metre of wall space was devoted to bookshelves. There were magazines carefully stacked on a unit and the hall’s shelves had obviously been used to cope with the overflow of books, vinyl LPs and CDs from the living room. Fabel paused and examined some of the music. There were several Reinhard Mey albums, but they were mostly older stuff that had been reissued on CD. Hauser had obviously felt the need to hear the protest songs of one generation on the technology of the next. Fabel gave a small laugh of recognition as he noticed a CD of Ewigkeit by Cornelius Tamm. Tamm had styled himself as Germany’s Bob Dylan and had enjoyed fair success in the 1960s before taking a spectacular dive into obscurity. Fabel removed a large, glossy-sleeved book from the shelves: it was a collection of Don McCullin’s Vietnam photographs; next to it was a travel book in English and various textbooks on ecology. All was just as you would have expected. Where there was a break in the shelving, any clear wall space had been filled with framed posters. Fabel stopped in front of one: it was a framed black-and-white photograph of a young man with flowing shoulder-length hair and a moustache. He was stripped to the waist and was sitting on a rustic bench, an apple in his hand.
‘Who’s the hippie?’ Werner was now at Fabel’s shoulder.
‘Take a look at the date on the picture: eighteen ninety-nine. This guy was a hippie seventy years before anyone even thought of the concept. This’ – Fabel tapped the glass with his latex-sheathed finger – ‘is Gustav Nagel, patron saint of all German eco-warriors. A century ago he was trying to get Germany to reject industrialisation and militarism, embrace pacifism, become vegetarian and to get back to nature. Mind you, he also wanted us to stop using capital letters with nouns. I don’t know how that fits into a green agenda. Maybe less ink.’
Fabel returned Nagel’s clear-eyed, defiant stare for a moment, and then followed Grueber and the others to the corner of the hall.
The main focus of the forensic team’s attention was at the far end of the hall and in the bathroom itself.
‘We found a couple of plastic bin bags here,’ explained Grueber as they approached the bathroom door. ‘We’ve removed a couple of items separately but the bags are back at Butenfeld.’ Grueber used the shorthand for the forensics unit at the Institute for Legal Medicine, the same facility in which Susanne worked as a criminal psychologist. The Institute was part of the University Clinic at Butenfeld, to the north of the city. ‘One of our finds was this…’ Grueber beckoned to one of the technicians who handed him a large square transparent plastic forensics bag. The plastic was thick and semi-rigid: inside, spread flat, was a disc of thick skin and hair. A human scalp. Viscous puddles of blood had gathered in pockets between the bag’s plastic walls and in its corners.