Fabel examined the contents without taking the bag from Grueber. He ignored the nausea that churned in his gut and the disgusted muttering of Werner behind him. The hair was red. Too red. Grueber read Fabel’s mind.
‘The hair has been treated with dye. And there’s evidence of the dye fresh on the scalp and contiguous skin areas. I can’t tell yet whether the killer used hair dye or some other type of pigment. Whatever was used, my guess is that it was done immediately before the scalp was removed from the body.’
‘Speaking of which… where is it?’ Fabel snapped his attention away from the magnetic horror of the scalp. After all these years in the Murder Commission, after so many cases, he still often found himself left shocked and uncomprehending by the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another.
Grueber nodded. ‘This way – you can guess this isn’t going to be too pleasant to look at…’
Fabel could tell as soon as they set foot in the bathroom that Grueber really had not exaggerated the difficulty they faced forensically. There was absolutely nothing, other than the body-shaped package next to the bath, that would have given any hint that this was a murder scene. Even the air smelled bleach-rinsed and slightly lemony. Every surface gleamed.
‘Kristina Dreyer may be our murder suspect,’ said Werner grimly, ‘but I think I’ll find out what her hourly rate is… we could do with her over at my place.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Maria, without the slightest hint that she had picked up on Werner’s humour. ‘She really is a professional cleaner. She works for herself and had a carload of cleaning materials parked outside… Hence the efficiency with which she tidied this lot up.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got.’
It was as if the forensic specialists had added another layer of bandages to a mummy. The killer had already wrapped the body in the shower curtain and bound it up with parcel tape. Now the forensic technicians had added individually numbered strips of Taser tape to every square centimetre of the outer shower curtain and parcel tape. The body had been photographed from every angle, and would now be moved back to the forensics lab at Butenfeld. Once there, the Taser would be removed strip by strip, and transferred to clear perspex sheets and any forensic traces would therefore be secured for analysis. If the body underneath the shower curtain was discovered to be wearing clothes, the process would be repeated to gather any fibre or other traces from the clothing.
Fabel gazed down at the man-shaped package. ‘Open up the face. I want to make sure this is Hauser.’
Grueber eased away the shower curtain. Underneath, the head and shoulders were encased in black plastic. Fabel gave an impatient nod and Grueber delicately cut through the parcel tape and exposed the face and head. Hans-Joachim Hauser gazed out at them with clouded-glass eyes beneath his frowning brow. Fabel had expected to feel another lurch in his gut, but instead he felt nothing as he looked down at the thing before him. And that was what it was: a thing. An effigy. There was something about the disfigurement of the head, about the exposed bone of the dead man’s cranium, about the blood-drained waxiness of the flesh on Hauser’s face, that robbed the corpse of its humanity.
Fabel had also expected to experience some form of recognition: Hans-Joachim Hauser had been very much involved in the radical movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Hauser had been photographed with the appropriate luminaries of the radical Left over the years – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Petra Kelly, Joschka Fischer, Bertholdt Muller-Voigt – but, despite his best efforts, he had lingered somewhere between the centre and the fringes of the media spotlight. Fabel thought how people seemed trapped in a time: how some found it impossible to move on. The image of Hauser filed in Fabel’s memory was that of a slim, almost girlish young man with long, thick hair, berating the Hamburg Senate in the 1980s. Nothing in the grey, waxy and slightly puffy flesh of the dead face gave Fabel a point of reference from which to retrieve the earlier Hans-Joachim Hauser. Fabel even tried to imagine the corpse with hair. It didn’t help.
‘Nice,’ said Werner, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth. ‘Very nice. A cleaning lady who takes scalps. I don’t suppose she’s a Red Indian, by any chance.’
‘Scalping is an ancient European tradition,’ said Fabel. ‘We were at it millennia before the Native Americans. They probably learned it from European settlers.’
Grueber eased more of the shower-curtain wrapping from the body, exposing Hauser’s neck. ‘Take a look at this…’
There was a wide sweeping gash across the throat. The edge was clean and unbroken, almost surgical, and Fabel could see a stratum of marbled grey and white flesh beneath the skin. The cut was also bloodless: Kristina Dreyer had washed the body and what Fabel could see of it had the look of rinsed death that he associated with mortuary bodies.
Fabel turned to Maria and Werner. He was about to say something when he noticed that Maria was gazing fixedly at Hauser’s mutilated head and neck. It was not a horror-struck stare, nor was it her usual look of cool appraisaclass="underline" it was more a blank, expressionless gaze, as if what was left of Hans-Joachim Hauser held her hypnotised.
‘Maria?’ Fabel frowned questioningly. Maria seemed to snap back from some distant place.
‘It must have been very sharp…’ she said, dully. ‘The blade, I mean. To cut so cleanly, it must have been razor sharp.’
‘Yes, it was,’ answered Grueber, still crouched at the body. Fabel noticed that although Grueber delivered a professional answer, there was a hint of personal concern in his expression as he looked up at Maria. ‘It might have been a surgical blade, or even an open razor.’
Fabel straightened up. He thought about the woman who had been taken into custody. About a face he vaguely remembered from more than a decade ago.
‘This is all so methodical,’ he said at last. He turned to Werner. ‘You sure the suspect, Kristina Dreyer, was actually caught cleaning this up? I mean, we know for sure that she did all this?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Werner. ‘In fact, the uniform unit had to restrain her. She wouldn’t stop cleaning, even after they arrived.’
Fabel scanned the bathroom once more. It shone as sterile and as cold as an operating theatre. ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ he said at last.
‘What doesn’t?’ asked Maria.
‘Why all of the mutilation? The scalping, the overdone cut to the throat. It all seems significant… as if there’s a message in it.’
‘There usually is,’ said Grueber, who had now straightened his gangly frame and was standing beside the three detectives. They all gazed down, gathered in a semicircle, at the flesh-and-bone effigy of what had once been a human being. When they spoke, it was as if they addressed the corpse: a silent moderator through whom they could better transmit their thoughts. ‘And the whole point of scalping is that you take scalps. I don’t understand why your killer would scalp her victim and then put the scalp in a bin liner with the intention of dumping it.’
‘That’s my point,’ said Fabel. ‘This all points to some kind of message. Some kind of sick symbolism. But it’s almost always done so that others may bear witness to it. It’s hardly ever done especially for the victim, who’s usually dead before the mutilation.’
Maria nodded. ‘So why screw it all up? Why do all of that and then go to so much trouble to clean up the crime scene and hide the body? And why just dump your trophy?’