There was a great rainbow-shaped smear of blood that arced across the pale blue floor tiles. At its end, Herr Hauser sat slumped where he had been dragged, between the toilet and the side of the bath. Bright blood glistened against the gleaming white porcelain of the toilet bowl. Hauser glowered across the bathroom at Kristina, his mouth gaped wide, with an expression that could have been almost surprise were it not for the way his brow hooded his eyes in a disapproving frown. There was silence, broken only by a dripping tap beating a slow tattoo on the bath’s enamel. Again something gurgled and struggled to free itself from Kristina’s constricted throat: something between a cry and a retch.
Hauser’s face was streaked with gouts of bright viscous blood. Someone had sliced a line, mostly straight but in places ragged, across his forehead about five or six centimetres above his eyebrows. The cut had been deep. To the bone. And it swept around the temples and above the ears. The skin, flesh and hair above the slash had been ripped from Hauser’s head and the blood-mottled dome of his skull was exposed. Hauser’s gore-smeared face and the exposed skull above looked to Kristina like some horrific parody of a boiled egg rammed into an eggcup. Even more blood had soaked into Hauser’s shirt and trousers, and Kristina saw that a second cut ran across his throat and neck. She dropped the cleaning-fluid spray onto the floor and leaned her shoulder against the wall. Suddenly she felt all the strength ebb from her legs and she slid down the wall, her cheek sliding against the chill kiss of the porcelain tiles. She was now slumped in the corner by the door, mirroring the posture of her dead client. She started to sob.
There was so much to clean. So much to clean.
9.15 a.m. Polizei Hamburg Police Headquarters, Alsterdorf, Hamburg
The new headquarters of the Hamburg police – the Police Presidium – lay to the north of Winterhuder Stadtpark city park. It never took Jan Fabel long to drive to Alsterdorf from his Poseldorf apartment, but today was his first day back from four days’ leave. Just a couple of days before he had stood with Susanne on the wide, curving beach at List, on the North Sea island of Sylt. A couple of days and a lifetime away.
Driving through the dapples of sunlight that danced between the trees of the Stadtpark, Fabel felt in no hurry to step back into the reality of his life as head of a murder squad. But as he listened to his car radio, each news report seemed to sink into him like lead, anchoring him further into his accustomed world, while the memory of a long scythe of golden sand under a vast, bright sky drifted further from him.
Fabel caught the end of a report about the forthcoming general election: the conservative CDU/CSU coalition led by Angela Merkel had increased its already dramatic lead in the polls. It looked like Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s gamble of calling an early election was not going to pay off. A commentator discussed Frau Merkel’s change of style and appearance: apparently she had taken Hillary Clinton as a model for her hairstyle. Fabel sighed as he listened to how the various party leaders ‘positioned’ themselves with the electorate: it seemed to him that German politics were no longer about firm convictions or political ideals, but about individuals. Like the British and Americans before them, Germans were beginning to value style over substance; personalities over policies.
While he drove through the sunlit park, Fabel’s attention perked up as he listened while two of those personalities clashed. Hans Schreiber, the Social Democrat First Mayor of Hamburg, was engaged in an ill-tempered debate with Bertholdt Muller-Voigt, the city’s Environment Minister – who was a member of the Bundnis 90/Die Grunen political party. The same Muller-Voigt that Fabel and Susanne had seen in Lex’s restaurant on Sylt. The SPD and the Greens were part of Germany’s ruling coalition, and the political complexion of Hamburg’s city government was also red-green, but there was little evidence in the recorded exchange that Muller-Voigt was, indeed, a Schreiber-appointed minister. The pre-general election cracks in Germany’s political structures were beginning to show. The animosity between the two men over the past month or so had been well documented: Muller-Voigt had referred to Schreiber’s wife, Karin, as ‘Lady Macbeth’ in reference to her ruthless ambitions for her husband; specifically an ambition that he become Federal Chancellor of Germany. Fabel knew Schreiber – knew him better than Schreiber would have liked – and did not find it difficult to believe that he fully shared his wife’s ambitions.
Fabel stopped for a red signal at the traffic lights in Winterhuder Stadtpark. He watched idly as a Lycra-clad cyclist crossed in front of him, then turned to see that the car that had pulled up next to him was being driven by a woman in her thirties. She berated the two children in the rear seat for some misbehaviour or other, conducting her wrath through the rear-view mirror, her mouth moving animatedly, her anger mute behind the closed car windows. Beyond the annoyed mother’s car, a city parks employee brushed litter from the path that ran between towering trees up to the vast dome-capped tower of the Winterhuder Wasserturm.
The everyday routine of a city. Small lives with small worries about small things. People who did not deal with death as their day-to-day business.
The news switched to the latest from London, which had recently been rocked by suicide bombings. A second campaign of attacks had failed, most likely because of faulty detonators. Fabel tried to reassure himself that Hamburg was far away from such troubles. That it was another land. The terrorism that had rocked Germany in the 1970s and 1980s had passed into history, roughly at the same time as the Wall had come down. But there was a saying in Germany about Hamburg: If it rains in London, they put up their umbrellas in Hamburg. It was a sentiment that the half-British Fabel had always liked, that had given him a sense of place, of belonging; but today it gave him no cheer. Today, nowhere was safe.
Even in Hamburg, terrorism and its consequences were insidiously encroaching on people’s daily lives. Just driving into Hamburg city centre from his flat in Poseldorf had been changed for Fabel since the atrocities of 11 September in the USA. The American Consulate in Hamburg sat on the shore of the Alster and the shore-front road had been permanently sealed off after the attacks, meaning that Fabel had had to change the route to work he had taken every day since moving to Poseldorf.
The lights changed and the driver behind him tooted his horn, snapping Fabel out of his reverie. He turned up towards the Presidium.
The next item on the radio news was, ironically, about the protests over the closure of the British General Consulate in Hamburg. Germany’s most Anglophile city was stung by the suggestion. Hamburg also prided itself on being, after New York, the city with the most consulates in the world. But the ‘War on Terror’ was changing how states connected with each other. As Fabel pulled up in the secure car park of the Presidium, the future took a shadowy and vague form in his mind and darkened his post-leave mood even more.
Hamburg’s police headquarters – the Police Presidium – was less than five years old and still had the look and feel of a new building, like a newly tailored coat yet to yield to the shape of its wearer. The architectural concept behind the Presidium was to recreate the ‘Polizei Stern’, the police star, in building form, with the five-storey Presidium radiating outward towards each compass point from an unroofed circular atrium.
The Murder Commission – the Polizei Hamburg’s homicide squad – was on the third floor. As he emerged from the lift, Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped, middle-aged man with a tree-stump build. He had a file tucked under one arm and was carrying a coffee in his free hand. His heavy features broke into a smile as he saw Fabel.