‘Grueber…’ she said. ‘It’s Frank. He’s mad. He thinks he’s Red Franz Muhlhaus reincarnated – I think he really may be Muhlhaus’s son.’
‘He is,’ said Fabel, untying Maria’s hands and struggling with the parcel tape. He jerked his head questioningly towards the enclosed plastic-screened area.
‘Cornelius Tamm,’ she said. Fabel used a penknife to cut the tape. Maria stood up. ‘Trust me, Jan. It’s not pleasant. But you have to leave that for now… He’s going after his last victim.’
‘Who?’
‘Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Frank said he was going after the most senior member of the group after Muhlhaus. He also said that he was a politician. Look over there. That box. Muhlhaus buried it and told Frank where to find it after his death. It has all the names.’
Fabel opened the box. There were several notebooks, a diary, a small plastic bag, a photograph and a ledger. They were all bound in brown leather that had tarnished with being buried in the damp earth. Fabel examined the photograph. A family snap: Muhlhaus, a woman with long, bone-coloured hair whom Fabel assumed was Michaela Schwenn, and a boy of about nine, clearly Grueber. But it was the woman who captured Fabel’s attention.
‘Shit, Maria,’ said Fabel, handing the photograph to her. ‘Michaela Schwenn – she could be you… the similarity is amazing…’
Maria stared at the image. Fabel went through the rest of the box’s contents. He lifted out the plastic bag and saw that it contained a thick lock of hair. Red hair. Grueber had placed one hair at each scene, and when the forensic team had missed the hair in Hauser’s bathroom the first time round, Grueber had moved it to where it could be found. Fabel flicked through each of the notebooks, scanning the information as quickly as he could to try to find the information he needed. Then he found it.
‘Let’s go!’ He started towards the cellar door, ordering two uniformed officers to stay and preserve the scene. ‘You’ve got the wrong politician, Maria – and I think I know where he’s taking him.’
For a moment, Maria continued to stare at the image of a woman who looked just like her. Then she dropped the photograph back into the box and followed Fabel out of the cellar.
16.
Twenty-Eight Days After the First Murder: Thursday, 15 September 2005.
12.15 a.m.: Nordenham Railway Station, 145 Kilometres West of Hamburg
Fabel had left his car abandoned, skewed at an angle and with the headlights still full on. He and Werner had come round the south end of the station building. Following Fabel’s orders, Anna, Maria and Henk drove round to the north end. To Fabel’s intense annoyance, the Nordenham uniformed units had announced their arrival from kilometres away, with lights and sirens blazing in the cool night. Three units came around the back and sides of the building, while three more skidded to a halt on the far side of the railway tracks, their headlights trained on the platform and station building.
After the sirens, after the running, after the shouted orders, it suddenly became very quiet. Fabel now stood on the station platform and became very aware of his rapid breathing: he could hear it in the sudden silence; he could see it bloom as grey clouds in the still, thin, chill air. Fabel was filled with a deep sense of unease. There seemed an inevitability, a surreal familiarity in the fact that this group of people should come together in this place at this time. A feeling of destiny fulfilled.
But it was another group of people who had cast the mould for this destiny. It had all been so cleverly organised. No one would look too closely for deeper meaning in the death of a murderer and terrorist. With the demise of Franz Muhlhaus, it would be seen that the head, the brain and the heart of The Risen had been excised. His death meant the death of the organisation. The deal that Paul Scheibe had brokered anonymously with the security services had been that no further inquiries would be made about The Risen. And, of course, there had been a guarantee that The Risen would simply disappear.
The lights of the Nordenham police cars, ranged along the far side of the tracks, illuminated the figures on the platform like players on a stage, their exaggerated shadows cast giant on the facade of the railway station.
Fabel drew his service automatic as he ran towards them.
‘I would stop there, if I were you.’ Frank Grueber called across to Fabel. The blade in his hand glittered cold and keen in the night. Grueber had forced the man before him to his knees. ‘Do you think that I care if I die here, Fabel? I am eternal. There is no such thing as death. There is only forgetting… forgetting who you were before.’
Fabel’s mind raced through the thousand possible ways this could all end. Whatever his next words were, whatever action he now took, would have consequences; would set in train a sequence of events. And an all too conceivable consequence would be the death of more than one person.
His head ached with the weight of it. The night air that made grey ghosts of his breath felt meagre and sterile in his mouth, as if in coming together to this moment they had reached a great altitude. It seemed as if the air was too thin to carry any sound other than the desperate half-sobbed breathing of the kneeling man. Fabel glanced across at his officers who stood, white-faced in the harsh light, taking aim in the hard, locked-muscle stance of those who stand on the edge of the decision to kill. It was Maria he noticed most: her face bloodless, her eyes glittering ice-blue, the bone and sinew of her hands straining against the taut skin as she gripped her SIG-Sauer automatic.
Fabel made a movement of his head, hoping that his team would interpret it as a signal to hold back.
He stared hard at the man who stood in the centre of the harsh cast light. Fabel and his team had struggled for months to put a name, an identity, to the killer they had hunted. He had turned out to be a man of many names: the name he had given himself in his perverted sense of crusade was ‘Red Franz’, while the media, in their enthusiastic determination to spread fear and anxiety as far as possible, had christened him the ‘Hamburg Hairdresser’. But now Fabel knew his real name. Frank Grueber.
Grueber stood staring back at the headlights with eyes that seemed to shine with an even brighter, even starker, even colder gleam. He held the kneeling man by his hair, angling his head back so that the throat lay exposed and white. Above the throat, above the terror-contorted face, the flesh of the kneeling man’s forehead had been sliced across in a straight line the full width of his brow, just below the hairline, and the wound gaped slightly as Grueber yanked the man’s head back by the hair. A pulse of blood cascaded down the kneeling man’s face and he let out a high, animal yelp.
‘For Christ’s sake, Fabel.’ The kneeling man’s voice was tight and shrill with terror. ‘Help me… Please… Help me, Fabel…’
Fabel ignored the pleading and kept his gaze locked like a searchlight on Grueber. He held his hand out into empty air, as if halting traffic. ‘Easy… take it easy. I’m not playing along with any of this. No one here is. We’re not going to act out the parts you want us to play. Tonight, history is not going to repeat itself.’
Grueber gave a bitter laugh. The hand that held the knife twitched and again the blade flashed bright and stark.
‘Do you honestly think that I am going to walk away? This bastard
…’ He yanked again on the hair and the kneeling man yelped again through a curtain of his own blood. ‘This bastard betrayed me and all that we stood for. He thought that my death would buy him a new life. Just like the others did.’
‘This is pure fantasy…’ said Fabel. ‘That was not your death.’
‘Oh no? Then how is it that you started to doubt what you believe while you searched for me? There is no such thing as death; there’s only remembrance. The only difference between me and anyone else is that I have been allowed to remember, like looking through a hall of windows. I remember everything.’ He paused, the brief silence broken only by the distant sound of a late-night car passing through the town of Nordenham, behind the station and a universe away. ‘Of course history will repeat itself. That’s what history does. It repeated me… You’re so proud that you studied history in your youth. But did you ever truly understand it? We’re all just variations on the same theme – all of us. What was before will be again. He who was before shall be again. Over and over. History is all about beginnings. History is made, not unmade.’