‘Does Maria have an alarm system?’
‘I don’t know…’ Fabel looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded decisively.
Anna shrugged and pushed open the door. There was a loud electronic beeping from the alarm keypad inside in the hall.
‘Bollocks…’ she said. Fabel brushed past her and typed in a sequence of numbers. The display flashed ERROR CODE and continued to beep. He hit the clear button and typed in a new sequence. The beeping stopped.
‘Her date of birth?’ Anna sighed.
‘The date she joined the Polizei Hamburg. I checked both in her file.’
‘What would you have done if neither had worked?’
‘Arrested you for housebreaking,’ said Fabel and headed along the hall.
‘You probably would…’
They stood in the living room of Maria’s flat. It was, exactly as they had expected, pristine, ordered and furnished with immaculate taste. The walls were painted white but were hung with brightly colourful paintings. Oils, and originals. He guessed they would be by up-and-coming artists on the cusp of saleability. Maria was the kind of person to temper her art appreciation with acumen.
‘I always envied Maria, you know,’ said Anna.
‘In what way?’
‘Wanted to be like her. You know… Elegant, cool, together.’
‘She’s not together now.’
‘Do you never feel that way?’ Anna asked Fabel as she examined Maria’s CD collection. ‘You know, wish that you could be someone else? Even for a little while?’
‘I don’t give myself as much to philosophical musings as you do,’ he lied, with a smile.
‘I always thought of myself as too impulsive. Chaotic. Maria was always so disciplined and organised. Having said that…’ Anna indicated the CD collection. ‘This is bordering on the anally retentive. Look at these CDs… all ordered by genre and then alphabetically. Life’s too short…’
Fabel laughed, mainly to disguise the unease he felt at seeing how similar Maria’s taste and way of living were to his. They went through to the flat, checking each room. Fabel found what he was looking for, but had hoped not to find, in the smallest of the three bedrooms.
‘Shit…’ Anna gave a low whistle. ‘This is not good. Not good at all. This is obsessive.’
‘Anna…’
‘I mean, this is the kind of thing we’ve come across with serials
…’
‘Anna – that’s not helping.’
Fabel took in the small room. The walls were covered with photographs, press cuttings and a map of Europe with location pins and notes attached. There wasn’t a square centimetre of clear wall space. But this was no chaos. Fabel could see four defined areas of research: one related to Ukraine, one to Vitrenko’s personal history, one to people smuggling, one to organised crime in Cologne.
‘Maria hasn’t been spending her time recuperating,’ said Anna. ‘She’s been working. On her own.’
‘You’re wrong. This isn’t work. This is vendetta. Maria’s planning her revenge on Vitrenko.’
Anna turned to Fabel. ‘What do we do, Chef?’
‘You take the desk. I’ll go through the filing cabinet. And Anna… this stays between us. Okay?’
‘You’re the boss.’
Fabel and Anna spent two hours going through Maria’s files and notes. They were full of contacts with whom she had spoken, probably using her position as a Polizei Hamburg officer to gain access to otherwise confidential information: the Anti-Trafficking Centre in Belgrade, Human Rights Watch, a people-smuggling expert at Interpol. There were notes on all aspects of current people-trafficking in Europe, a full dossier on Ukrainian Spetsnaz units and a file of even more cuttings that hadn’t made it to the wall display. Among them were articles about a fire in a container truck in which several illegal immigrants heading for the West had been burned to death; about a model in Berlin who had been murdered with acid; about a bloody underworld feud in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia; about a Ukrainian-Jewish crime Godfather who had been found murdered in his luxury apartment in Israel.
‘What have you got?’ he asked Anna.
‘A list of hotels in Cologne. Nothing to say which one she’s going to use, but I’d say it was a short-list. She’s been corresponding with someone in the Interior Ministry of Ukraine. Sasha Andruzky.’
Fabel nodded. What they had been looking at was detailed but peripheral. The solid core of Maria’s research had gone with her to Cologne. He scanned the small bedroom-office for a bag or holdall. ‘Help me pack up some of these files. Then I’ve got a few calls to make.’
4.
Fabel broke the four-hour journey to Cologne under a slate sky at a Raststatte on the A1 and filled up his BMW. A few unconvinced fluffs of snow drifted into his face as he did so. Instead of going into the service-station restaurant, Fabel bought a coffee and a salami roll to take out. He sat in the car with the heater on and consumed his lunch without tasting it, reading through the notes he had made on the information that Scholz had supplied. For Fabel, this process was not unlike reading a novel. It took him to a different time, a different place and a different life. He had all the details of the night when the first victim had died, two years ago. The strange thing was that Fabel found it difficult to place himself in the context of Karneval. The Cologners seemed obsessed with its forced jollity and irreverence. He read about the first victim’s movements on the night she had died. Sabine Jordanski had not officially been working that day, but had spent most of it doing exactly the same kind of thing that she would have done if she had been at work. As it was Women’s Karneval Night she and a group of female friends had planned to take part in a procession through the city before hitting a few of the bars where exuberant Kolsch bands would be playing. Sabine had spent the day colouring first her friends’ hair, then her own. The dyes differed from the ones she normally used: vivid pinks, reds, electric blues and yellows, and often more than one colour was used on a single head. There seemed to be an element of becoming someone else at Karneval, a belief that true release from everyday order only came with a mask, a costume or a radical change of look.
Sabine Jordanski seemed to be a typical Cologner: exuberant, friendly, fun-loving. She was twenty-six and had been working at the salon for four years. There was no boyfriend at the time of her death, or at least no permanent boyfriend who could be traced, but it would have appeared that this was a strictly temporary situation. Sabine had enjoyed the attentions of several young men. On the night of her death she had been seen talking earlier to three men, all of whom had been traced and eliminated from the police’s inquiries. The group of six girls had visited four bars that night. All had been drinking but none was drunk. The girls had walked together to Sabine’s apartment in Gereonswall at about two in the morning and had said goodnight to her outside. There had been several people milling around, but no one whom the girls particularly noticed. No one had seen Sabine go into her apartment, but all had assumed that was what she had done.
She was found the next morning in an alley only two hundred metres from her apartment building. She had been strangled with a red tie which had been left at the scene, partially stripped and 0.468 kilos of flesh had been removed from her right buttock. Time of death had been estimated at around the time her friends had said goodnight to her. Someone had been waiting for her, or had been following the group around the city, stalking them like a lion waiting for a straggler to become separated from the herd.