‘You can’t be serious, Jan. I don’t care what you say, we would never have had the number of convictions we have had if you had not been in charge. And, for all your talk about death, every time you’ve put a killer away you have saved God knows how many lives.’
‘Maybe that’s true, Werner. But it’s time for someone else to do it.’ Fabel smiled a weary, sad smile at his friend. ‘My mind’s made up. Anyway, let’s get back to the Presidium. I’ve got a job to finish first.’
Fabel had just turned the ignition key when he felt the weight of Werner’s hand on his arm. When Fabel turned to him, Werner was looking directly ahead through the windscreen, as if hypnotised by something.
‘Tell me I’m not seeing things,’ said Werner, nodding towards the police cordon.
Fabel followed his gaze. A young couple was remonstrating with a uniformed officer and the man was pointing towards the apartment building.
Fabel and Werner threw open the car doors at the same time and started sprinting across to where Franz Brandt stood arguing with the policeman.
9.30 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg
Fabel had led the questioning of Franz Brandt. Anna and Henk had taken his girlfriend, Lisa Schubert, into another interview room. Franz Brandt had responded to Fabel’s questions with confused disbelief, then distress and, eventually, raw and bitter anger. He claimed to know nothing about the bomb in Schubert’s apartment and became increasingly incensed by the suggestion that he was in any way involved in his mother’s death. After Fabel suspended the interview and Brandt was removed to a cell, he spoke with Anna and Henk, who confirmed that Lisa Schubert had responded similarly. She had even shown signs of mild shock.
Fabel did not like it. Brandt had been so clever and so careful throughout his campaign. He had seemed always to be a step ahead. It just did not fit for him to adopt such a thoughtless strategy of transparent denial. But, there again, he was clearly mad to have committed the crimes that he had.
Fabel went back to his office. He had sent Maria home earlier: she had started to look really unwell and her headache had not lifted. Anna and Henk had stayed on. The warrant had come through and Anna had secured the codes and passwords with which to access the social-services records; they were now focused on establishing as a legal fact that Franz Brandt was the ten-year-old boy who had watched Red Franz Muhlhaus die on Nordenham railway station. The boy who had heard his father with his dying words call for revenge on those who had betrayed him. After they came out of the interview, Fabel told Werner he could go home and get some rest, but he had said that he had ‘stuff to do’ in the office first.
Fabel took the Ingrid Fischmann file out of the drawer and laid it on his desk. As he did so, he sighed the sigh of a man going over old ground again in search of answers.
9.30 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg
Grueber had given Maria two codeine before he had gone to take a shower. She went into the vast kitchen for a glass of water to take them with.
What had started as a vague general headache had found its focus and become a sharp migraine that pressed mercilessly behind Maria’s retinas. She had always had a thing about taking headache pills: a hint of the austere Lutheran within telling her it was better to let nature take its course. But water and North German Puritanism alone were not going to fix this one. She took a tumbler from a kitchen cabinet and filled it with water. As she turned the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the tiled kitchen floor. Maria cursed and looked around for where she might find a pan and brush. She found them in the under-sink cupboard, where Grueber obviously kept cleaning materials.
There was something about the container, shoved to the back of the cupboard and facing away from the door, that drew Maria’s attention. She had the feeling that it had been deliberately put out of sight, out of reach. And that was why she knelt down on the hard kitchen tiles and stretched into the cupboard to pull the container out.
Hair dye.
It was the craziest conclusion to draw, and it burned in her mind only for a split second: her brain ran a slide show of the murder scenes, with the severed scalps soaked in red dye. And Grueber standing there, in his forensic overalls, holding the hair dye in his hand. Then it was gone. It was a mad thought: what possible connection could Frank have to the victims? She looked again at the plastic bottle. It was dark brunette; not red. She sighed and started to put it back but paused, bringing it out to re-examine it. It was Grueber’s hair colour. Very dark brunette. Almost black. Frank dyed his hair?
Maria replaced the container at the back of the cupboard, the label facing away as she had found it, and she put back the other items that had originally obscured it from view. She allowed herself a smile at her boyfriend’s vanity. Why did he dye his hair? Was it that he had gone prematurely grey? Maria had seen the photographs of his parents who both had the same dark hair as Grueber but had not gone white before their time as far as she could see. Unless, of course, they too dyed their hair. She stared in at the hair dye under the sink for a moment. Maria could not understand why such a small mystery was causing a fluttering of unease deep within. It had been hidden. Maybe it belonged to a former girlfriend. But why had he placed it where he had, rather than throwing it out?
Maria stood up and her heel crunched on a fragment of broken glass. He was there when she turned around. Standing close. Too close. He was standing where Vitrenko stood in her dreams. His eyes were totally different in colour and in shape, but for the first time ever Maria could see they held the same emotionless, callous cruelty.
She knew. She smiled at Grueber and said light-heartedly, ‘I didn’t see you there. You gave me a fright.’ But she knew.
Frank Grueber offered a cold, sterile reflection of Maria’s smile. He reached out his hand and stroked back a short strand of blonde hair from Maria’s brow.
‘Do you remember the first time we met?’ he said.
Maria nodded. ‘You were processing that body in Sternschanzen Park. Fabel was away and I was leading the investigation…’ Maria smiled again. She tried to look relaxed. Her gun was out in the hall where she had left it on the antique hallstand. So many antiques in this house. Everything was to do with the past.
‘That’s right.’ Grueber continued to stroke her hair, her cheek, his gaze empty and focused somewhere and sometime else. ‘I remember the very first time I saw you. After a single second everything was locked into my head, every feature, every gesture. It was as though I recognised you. As though we had known each other before but couldn’t remember where and when. Did you feel like that?’
Maria thought about lying, but shrugged instead. She tried to work out the distance to the kitchen door, then to the hallstand, then the time to unholster her gun and take the safety off. If she hit him hard enough…
Grueber smiled. He took his other hand from behind his back and raised Maria’s gun, pressing it gently into the soft flesh under her jaw.
‘I love you, Maria. I don’t want to hurt you, but if I must, I must. It means that we will have to wait until our next lives to see each other again.’
Maria tilted her head back, but Grueber maintained the gun barrel’s pressure, placing his other hand on the nape of her neck, cradling the back of her head. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Maria. I’m quite capable of killing us both. Please don’t force me. We’ve died together once before. On a railway platform a long, long time ago. But this is not our time. Not yet.’
‘Why, Frank? Why did you kill all those people?’
Grueber smiled. ‘Come, Maria. You still haven’t seen everything there is to the house.’
9.45 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg
Anna Wolff arched her back and rubbed her eyes. She needed a break from the computer screen. She had spent the last hour going through the social-services records to find where and when Beate Brandt had adopted Franz. There was nothing. She went out into the hall and got herself a coffee from the machine. A couple of other Murder Commission officers came along and she chatted to them for a while, deliberately putting off going back to the computer screen and the endless names in the archive.