Fabel and Susanne came down to dine about eight. The restaurant was already filled with smart, well-heeled-looking customers, but, as he had done throughout their stay, Lex had reserved one of the best tables for Fabel and Susanne, over by the picture window. Susanne had changed her linen shirt and trousers for a black sleeveless dress. She had dressed her long raven hair up onto her head and her elegant slender neck was exposed. The dress hugged her figure and stopped high enough above the knee to display her shapely legs but low enough to look restrained and tasteful.
Fabel was very much aware of Susanne’s beauty, as he was of the male heads that turned in their direction as they entered the restaurant. Their relationship had lasted more than a year and they had passed through the awkward stages of mutual discovery. They were now an established couple, and Fabel drew a feeling of security and comfort from it. And when Gabi, his daughter, spent time with him and Susanne he had, for the first time since his marriage to Renate broke up, a sense of being part of a family.
Boris, Lex’s Czech head waiter, led them to their table. The low sun had repainted in more golden hues the bands of sand, sea and sky that filled the panoramic window. Once they were seated, Boris asked them in pleasantly accented German if they wanted anything to drink before their meal. They ordered white wine and Susanne went through the restaurant nesting ritual of settling into her chair and checking out the other diners. Someone over Fabel’s shoulder seemed to catch her attention.
‘Isn’t that Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, the politician?’
Fabel started to turn. Susanne placed her hand on his forearm and squeezed.
‘For God’s sake, Jan, don’t be so obvious. For a policeman, your surveillance skills stink.’
He smiled. ‘That could explain my lousy conviction rate…’ He turned again, this time making a deliberately clumsy show of taking in all of the restaurant. To his left and behind him sat a fit-looking man in his early fifties, wearing a dark jacket and roll-neck sweater, both of which had the contrived casualness of a seriously expensive designer label. The man’s receding hair was swept severely back and some grey flecked his neatly trimmed beard. He had the studied arty look of a successful film director, musician, writer or sculptor. Fabel recognised him, however, as someone whose art was controversial politics. The slim blonde woman who sat with him was easily twenty years his junior. She sat poised and radiated a sleek, insolent sexuality. Her gaze caught Fabel’s for a moment. He turned back to Susanne.
‘You’re right. It’s Muller-Voigt. I’m sure Lex will be delighted to know that his restaurant is cool enough to attract the darlings of the environmental Left.’
‘Who’s that with him?’
Fabel grinned gleefully. ‘I don’t know, but she’s certainly environmentally friendly.’
Susanne tilted her head slightly to one side: a pose of concentration that, for Fabel, was uniquely Susanne’s. ‘Seriously, I think I’ve seen her before. It’s hard to keep up with his sexual exploits. He seems to relish the headlines they generate in the tabloid press.’
‘He’s not so keen on the headlines Fischmann has been generating about him.’ Fabel referred to Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who made it her business to ‘out’ people in public life who had flirted with left-wing extremism or terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.
‘Do you think it’s true, Jan?’ Susanne leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. ‘I mean, about him being connected to the Wiedler case?’
‘I don’t know… There’s a lot of speculation and circumstantial stuff. But nothing that would remotely add up to a case as far as the Polizei Hamburg are concerned.’
‘But?’
Fabel screwed his face up as if trying to weigh the imponderable. ‘But who knows what the BKA Federal Crime Office have on him.’ Fabel had read Fischmann’s article on Muller-Voigt. In it she had written about the abduction and later assassination in 1977 of the wealthy Hamburg industrialist Thorsten Wiedler. Wiedler had ordered his chauffeur to stop at the scene of what appeared to be a serious road accident. The accident had been faked by members of Franz Muhlhaus’s notorious terrorist gang. Muhlhaus was infamously known as ‘Red Franz’. The terror group he had headed had been as nebulous as the politics behind it and Muhlhaus had been the only one to have been tracked down.
The Red Franz group had shot Wiedler’s chauffeur, bundled the industrialist into the back of a van and had driven off. The chauffeur had only just survived his injuries. Wiedler, however, was not to survive his captivity. Exactly what had happened to him remained a mystery. The last known image of Wiedler was his bruised and camera-flash-bleached face, above a held-up newspaper showing the date, staring bleakly out of a photograph sent to his family and the media by his captors.
An announcement had been made that the industrialist had been ‘executed’ but the body, unlike those of other terrorist victims, had not been dumped somewhere it could be found. This successfully fudged the date of Wiedler’s death and removed any opportunity to examine his body for forensic evidence. Despite hundreds of arrests, and the fact that everyone knew it was Muhlhaus’s group behind the abduction, no one had ever been convicted of the murder.
In her article, the journalist Ingrid Fischmann had made much of the fact that Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, at that time a much more radical political figure, had been picked up and questioned by the police for forty-eight hours. The truth was that almost every political activist had been turned over in the desperate search for Wiedler. Ingrid Fischmann had, however, highlighted the fact that while nothing was known about the other members of the terrorist group involved there was evidence to suggest that the driver of the van in which Wiedler was abducted had gone on to achieve public prominence. She had left her readers to infer that the driver had been Muller-Voigt without making a direct accusation that would allow him to sue.
Fabel turned again to look at the small, arty-looking man with the sexy blonde companion. They were having a conversation without looking at each other, their expressions empty, as if merely filling silence between each forkful with their words. Muller-Voigt made an unlikely terrorist suspect, but his politics had been radical. In the 1970s and 1980s he had hung out with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer and other left-wing and green notables. Now he promoted politics that were difficult to define. Despite his mixed political directions, he had managed to be elected to the Hamburg Senate and was Environment Senator in the Hamburg State Government of First Mayor Hans Schreiber.
‘Anyway,’ concluded Fabel, ‘we will probably never know how deeply he was involved. If at all.’
Boris returned and took their orders. For the rest of the meal they indulged in the idle, mildly melancholic talk of a couple at the end of a much-enjoyed holiday. As they ate and chatted, the sun slowly melted into the sea, bleeding its colour out into the water. They took their time over their food and the other diners thinned out to a handful of tables and the buzz of conversation lessened. As their coffee arrived, Lex, Fabel’s brother, emerged from the kitchen and came over to their table. He was significantly shorter than Fabel and his hair was thick and dark. His face had the well-creased look of someone who had spent a lifetime smiling. Fabel’s mother was Scottish, but any Celtic genes seemed to have concentrated themselves in his brother. Lex was older than Fabel, but had always seemed the younger in spirit. It had always been the more sensible Fabel who had pulled his older brother out of scrapes when they had been kids in Norddeich. Back then, Lex’s immaturity had irritated Fabel. Now he envied it. Lex still wore his chef’s tunic and checked trousers, and although his good-natured features broke into their habitual smile there was a weariness about his movements.