‘Okay…’ Fabel sighed. ‘Let’s hear it. You’ve obviously got a killer blow to deliver…’
Her smile broadened. She pointed towards the black-and-white photograph of Muhlhaus on the inquiry board.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how some images become icons. How we automatically associate an image with a person and the person with a time and a place, with an idea…’
Fabel made an impatient face and Anna continued.
‘I remember being shocked to see a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof before she became a shaggy-haired, jeans-wearing terrorist. It was of her and her husband at a racecourse. She was dressed as a typical demure nineteen sixties Hausfrau. Before her radicalisation. It got me thinking and I searched for other photographs of Muhlhaus. As you know, they are notoriously thin on the ground. This image we have here is the one that we are familiar with, the one that was used on the wanted posters in the nineteen eighties. It’s black and white but, as you can see, Muhlhaus’s hair is very, very dark. Black. But then I remembered the photographs of Andreas Baader when he was arrested in nineteen seventy-two. With his dark hair dyed ash-blond.’
Anna took a large glossy print and taped it next to the police photograph. This time the photograph was in full colour. It was of a younger Franz Muhlhaus, without his trade-mark goatee beard. But there was one feature that stood out above all others. His hair. In the police wanted poster Muhlhaus’s hair had been combed severely back from his broad pale brow, but in this photograph it frothed across his forehead and framed his face in thick, tangled ringlets. And it was red. A luxuriant red flecked with golden highlights.
‘The nickname “Red Franz” didn’t come from his politics. It was his hair.’ Anna stabbed a finger onto the black-and-white photograph and looked directly at Fabel. ‘Do you see? All the time he was on the run, he hid his distinctive red hair by dying it dark. The BKA got intelligence that Muhlhaus had darkened his hair and they changed the image accordingly. But there’s more… apparently Muhlhaus’s son had the same distinctively coloured hair. And when they were on the run together Muhlhaus dyed his son’s hair too.’
There was a small silence after Anna stopped speaking. Then Werner gave voice to what they were all thinking.
‘Shit. The thing with the scalps and the hair dye.’ He turned to Fabel. ‘Now you’ve got your symbolism.’
‘What do we know about what happened to the son?’ Fabel asked Anna.
‘Social services won’t release the file until we get a warrant to access the information. I’m already onto it.’
Fabel stared at the photograph of the young Muhlhaus. He would have been in his late teens or early twenties. It was clearly an amateur photograph, taken outdoors in the sunshine of a long-distant summer. Muhlhaus smiled broadly at the camera, narrowing his pale eyes against the sunlight. A carefree, happy youth. There was nothing written in that face to suggest a future tied to murder and violence. Just as Anna had described the photograph of Ulrike Meinhof. Fabel had always found images such as this fascinating: everyone had a past. Everyone had been someone else once.
Fabel’s attention focused on the hair that shone red and gold in the summer sun. He had seen hair like that before. He had seen it only hours before.
‘Anna…’ He turned round from the inquiry board.
‘ Chef?’
‘Check out Beate Brandt’s background as a priority. I need to know what relationship, if any, she had with Franz Muhlhaus.’ Fabel turned to Werner. ‘And I need you to check out that address that Franz Brandt gave us. I think we need to have another chat with him.’
Fabel’s cellphone rang at that moment. It was Frank Grueber, who had been heading up the forensics team at Beate Brandt’s home.
‘I take it you’ve found another hair?’ said Fabel.
‘We have,’ said Grueber. ‘Our guy is getting poetic. He left it arranged on the pillow next to her body. But that’s not all. We’ve been checking the entire house to see if the killer slipped up when entering the house.’
‘And?’
‘And we’ve found traces of something in a desk drawer. In her son’s bedroom-cum-study. It looks as if a quantity of explosives has been stored there.’
2.10 p.m.: Eimsbuttel, Hamburg
It had all fallen into place for Fabel as they had sped across Hamburg to the address in Eimsbuttel that Franz Brandt had given Werner.
Brandt had been cool. Very cool. While Fabel had been questioning him, Brandt had asked Fabel why the killer dyed the hair red. He had already known the reason but had used his mock grief to camouflage his intent as he interrogated the interrogator: trying to find out how much the police knew about his motives. He had even sat with a poster of the other Red Franz, the bog body, on the wall above them and had talked about how ‘Red Franz’ had been his nickname at university.
It all fitted: the same hair, the same choice of profession, even the same forename. Brandt’s age also fitted. It was Fabel’s guess that Beate Brandt had taken in the ten-year-old Franz after he had witnessed his father and his natural mother die in the gun battle on the platform at Nordenham. Maybe Beate had been motivated by guilt. Whatever the treachery that had been committed, she had been part of it and, despite being brought up as her son, Franz had administered the same ritual justice to her as he had to his other victims.
They pulled up at the cordon that the MEK unit had set up at the end of the street. The first thing Fabel had arranged was for an MEK weapons support unit to be deployed. Fabel had often wondered if there was ever really a distinction between a terrorist and a serial killer: both killed in volume, both worked to an abstract agenda that was often impossible for others to understand. Brandt, however, had blurred the distinction between them like no other. His crimes of vengeance were carried out with the ritualistic symbolism of a florid psychosis, yet he coolly planted sophisticated bombs to dispose of anyone who presented a threat. And when Brandt had called Fabel on his cellphone to tell him he was sitting on a bomb, he had used voice-altering technology, just in case Fabel recognised his voice from their previous brief encounter down at the HafenCity site.
The address that Franz Brandt had given was a four-storey apartment block with an entrance directly onto the street, limiting the opportunity to storm the apartment with complete surprise.
‘Get your men to cover the back,’ Fabel told the MEK commander. ‘This guy doesn’t think we suspect him yet and I’ve got a legitimate reason for questioning him again about his mother’s death. That’s if she was his natural mother. I’ll take two of my team up with me to his door.’
‘Given what you’ve told me about this guy, I don’t think that’s advisable,’ said the MEK commander. ‘Especially if he is as skilled as he appears to be with explosives. I’ve contacted the bomb squad and they’ve got a unit on the way. I say we wait until they get here, then my guys go in with bomb-squad support.’
Fabel was about to protest when the MEK commander cut him short. ‘You and your team can follow us in but, if you insist on going it alone, you could end up with dead officers.’
The MEK man’s statement stung Fabel. He had been there before, facing down a dangerous opponent in a confined environment. And it had cost lives.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘But I need this guy alive.’
The MEK commander’s expression darkened. ‘That’s what we always aim to achieve, Herr Chief Commissar. But this person is obviously a professional terrorist. It’s not always that easy.’
Fabel, Maria, Werner, Anna and Henk were all given bulletproof body armour and followed on as the MEK team of four officers and a bomb-disposal specialist made their way along the front of the building, moving in their practised crouching run, keeping their profiles low and their bodies pressed close to the apartment block wall. After they entered the building, the MEK commander indicated with a hand gesture that Fabel and his officers were to stay in the lobby, while the special-weapons team went up the stairs. Fabel found it remarkable that a team of heavily built, heavily armed men, bulked up with body armour, could move with such stealth.