She had just headed back into the office when Henk came in.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked. Anna grimaced.
‘It’s not. I can’t find any record of Brandt going into care or of his adoption by Beate Brandt.’
‘That’s because I think we’ve been looking at the whole thing the wrong way round.’ Henk sat on the edge of Anna’s desk. There was a hint of triumph in his smile. ‘I think we’d better go and see Fabel.’
9.55 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg
Maria’s brain processed all the available data at the highest possible speed. She tried to draw a curtain across the panic that hammered to get in and assessed her situation. Grueber had told her that she had to put her hands behind her back, presumably to allow him to bind her. Then she would be powerless. But she had good reason to believe that, despite his insanity and despite the extreme violence and ritualistic mutilation of his victims, he didn’t intend to kill her. She was not part of his string. Not a victim on his list. But there had been others who had got in the way: Ingrid Fischmann and Leonard Schuler. Grueber had killed them despite them not being on his list. He had even scalped Schuler to make a point by sticking his scalp to Fabel’s window.
Maria remembered the call that Grueber had made to her cellphone when she had been at the apartment of Franz Brandt’s girlfriend. He had set it up so that she would step out of the apartment while he remotely detonated the bomb inside. He had wanted her to live.
She did what Grueber asked and placed her hands behind her back. He bound her wrists with rope and she knew that he must have put the gun down, on the kitchen counter. For a split second she measured her chances of knocking him off balance and seizing the gun. But then she felt the rough bite of the rope as it tightened against her skin.
Grueber took Maria by the arm, not roughly, and led her out of the kitchen, along the hall to where the stairway rose up from the entrance vestibule. There was a low-arched doorway beneath the stairway which Grueber had previously told Maria led to a cellar crammed with storage boxes. He indicated with a wave of Maria’s gun that she should step back from him while he recovered the key from his pocket. He opened the door, reached in and switched on a light before beckoning for Maria to precede him into the cellar.
As she did so, she began bitterly to regret not having taken her chances before he had tied her hands.
10.00 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg
Fabel was sitting at his desk, staring at a photograph and trying to wrest its true meaning from it, when his phone rang. It was Susanne phoning from her flat and Fabel was, for a moment, a little fazed.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You sound strange.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, still looking at the picture on his desk. ‘Just tired.’
‘When will you be home?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel, ‘I’m completely bogged down with stuff here. I reckon I won’t be through until pretty late on. There’s no point in waiting up for me. In fact, it’s probably better if I stay at my place tonight. It’ll save me disturbing you when I get in.’
‘Okay,’ she said and there was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. You sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I just need to get some sleep. Listen, I’d better get on… I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Fabel hung up and left his hand resting on the phone. He remembered having had so many similar telephone conversations with his wife, Renate. Late-night calls from the Murder Commission, or a murder scene, or a morgue. He had made too many such calls and his marriage and his wife’s fidelity had been steadily eroded by them.
But this time he had been less than honest with Susanne about his reasons for not coming over. Tonight he needed to be alone, he needed his own time and space to think about things. He felt buried under an unbearable weight that could not be shifted with a single huge effort. It was like rubble that he had to dig himself out from under, piece by piece.
And one of the pieces lay on the desk before him. Everyone has a past.
Everyone has been someone else once. It was the thought that had occurred to him as he had looked at the family photograph of the young, pre-terrorist Franz Muhlhaus; when Anna had described the photograph of the newly married Ulrike Meinhof. A life before the life we know.
Fabel had spent the last two hours going through the file that Ingrid Fischmann had sent him immediately before her death. He had spread the contents out over his desk: press cuttings, interviews, a chronology charting the evolution and diversification of protest, activist and terrorist groups, photocopies from books of German domestic terrorism.
And photographs.
The picture itself had nothing to do with the case he was investigating. And it had nothing to do with what had happened to him twenty years ago. It had to do with something, and someone, totally different.
Fabel had found the photograph, with a sticker note attached to the back, at the end of Fischmann’s file. It dated from 1990, a time when the will and the raison d’etre of Left-wing activism was waning fast. The Wall had just come down and two former Germanys were still embracing each other with enthusiasm and hope. It was a time when the world watched millions across Eastern Europe rise in true protest against communist dictatorships. The old slogans of Left-wing activism had begun to ring hollow; even to sound embarrassing.
The caption attached to the photograph read: ‘Christian Wohlmut, Munich-based anarchist, wanted on suspicion of attacks on US governmental and commercial interests within the Federal Republic. Photographed with unknown female.’
Unknown female. The photograph was blurry and looked as if it had been taken from some distance. The girl, about the right age to be a student, was to the left and slightly to the rear of Wohlmut. She was tall and slim and had long dark hair, but her features were out of focus. But recognisable. To someone who knew her.
Fabel read the file associated with Wohlmut. It had been the last twitching of a dying movement. He had formed a group that had eventually fizzled out, but not before they had planted a couple of crude devices in American targets. A letter bomb had taken the fingers off the right hand of a nineteen-year-old secretarial worker in the offices of an American oil company. Wohlmut had been caught and had spent three years in prison.
Fabel looked again at the tall girl with the long dark hair. Wohlmut was talking to someone off camera, and the girl beside him was listening intently. As she did so, she held her head at a distinctive angle. A pose of concentration.
Everyone has a past. Everyone was someone else once. There was a knock at the door and he slipped the photograph back to the bottom of the file.
Anna and Henk came in.
10.00 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg
There were no storage boxes in Grueber’s cellar. There was no disorder.
The cellar was vast: out of proportion with the small understairs door that served it. Maria scanned the walls to see if she could locate a window or door that opened out directly onto the outside world. But she knew they were too deep. She thought of how the dying evening sun would be dappling the lawn through the bushes and plants of Grueber’s garden. Suddenly Maria became aware of the mass of the house above her; the dark soil that lay, cold and pressing, beyond the cellar walls that surrounded her.
The cellar had a surprising amount of headroom, she guessed somewhere just under two metres, and it had been kitted out as a working environment by Grueber. There were benches and equipment along the walls, bookshelves and metal tool cabinets. She heard a continuous metallic whirring and noticed a large brushed-steel housing bolted to one wall with a fan spinning behind a mesh protector. Maria guessed that Grueber had installed some kind of temperature- and humidity-control system. The space of the cellar was broken up by a series of heavy square pillars that clearly supported the walls above. In the centre of the cellar, four pillars served as the corners of an area that was shielded off in what looked like an improvised clean room, with semi-opaque heavy-duty plastic sheeting providing the walls. Maria felt her fear ratchet up several notches: it was clear that this area had a special purpose and she had a sickening feeling that that purpose might have something to do with her immediate future.