‘Give me to the end of this case, Chef. Then I’ll go quietly.’
‘Okay.’ Fabel hesitated for a moment. ‘I’m short-staffed as it is. But while you’re still part of this unit, I need you to rein in that independence a little.’
After Anna left, Fabel sat looking out of his window over the snow-frosted treetops of Winterhude Park. The expression on Anna’s face lingered in his mind. He recalled too the eager if prickly Anna he had recruited five years before. It had been Anna’s edge, her drive that had convinced him she would be an asset to the team. Somehow, somewhere during those five years he had lost his way with her.
But the thing that churned in his gut was that he was still not convinced he was handling it right.
Fabel’s thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Ulrich Wagner, from the BKA Federal Crime Bureau. Fabel liked Wagner, but could have done without the interruption: he was keen to prepare for his team briefing. After the usual chit-chat, Wagner got down to business.
‘There’s a Federal Republic-wide alert gone out — I don’t know, maybe you’ve seen it — about Margarethe Paulus.’
‘Sorry, I haven’t,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m up to my eyes with this St Pauli murder. The alleged return of the so-called “Angel of St Pauli”.’
‘Well, in a way that’s why I’m calling. Margarethe Paulus was confined to the state mental hospital in Mecklenburg, which isn’t too far away from you. She’s been in there for thirteen years. Three weeks ago she decided to discharge herself. Unofficially. There’s not been a trace of her since. Margarethe Paulus is considered to be a highly dangerous individual. Before she was committed there was a spate of armed robberies, all very efficiently executed and all carried out by a lone woman. It was all very cool and organised. Each time it was a woman of completely different appearance, hitting a different type of target — a bank, then a store, then a security van. But always for cash. Never jewellery or any other loot that would have had to be fenced. And that meant no need to involve any third party.’
‘So how did they get her?’ asked Fabel.
‘They didn’t. The Mecklenburg police were never able to put together enough evidence to identify the woman, far less to nail Margarethe Paulus. But she started to think bigger. Look for accomplices. Or at least that’s what we think was going on. She got involved with a biker gang. The story she told is that she met up with them to discuss potential cooperation. But they weren’t interested and things turned nasty. Three of the gang attempted to rape her.’
‘Attempted?’
‘I’ve seen the crime-scene photographs, Jan. It’s almost impossible to believe that a woman, alone against three hardened villains, could have done all that. But forensics proved that she did.’
‘She killed all three?’
‘More than that. She castrated them. From what the Mecklenburg forensics people could ascertain, she killed two instantly, and castrated them post-mortem. But the third, the ringleader… she kept him alive and conscious throughout the whole process. It was his screaming that alerted people in the neighbourhood who then called the police.’
‘God…’ Fabel considered what Wagner had told him. ‘That fits with the original Angel murders.’
‘It does. But they couldn’t have been committed by her. She was incarcerated in the State Mental Hospital at the time. However, when I saw the report on the latest killings…’
‘I get your point,’ said Fabel. ‘But this time there’s no castration. Evisceration, yes, but balls intact. Can you email me the relevant stuff on her, including the most up-to-date images?’
‘I’ve already arranged it.’
‘The Mecklenburg police will have a record of her DNA: could you arrange for that to be sent too? This time our killer may have left a trace of herself behind. A hair.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Wagner. ‘So you maybe have a break this time.’
‘Maybe. But I’m not counting on it.’
Fabel held his team briefing in the Murder Commission’s incident room. In addition to his now depleted core team of Werner, Anna and Anna’s partner Henk Hermann, there were other detectives who had been drafted in by Fabel to beef up the team. Thomas Glasmacher was a large, burly blond who, at the moment, was sniffing and sneezing into his handkerchief, struggling, as he had been for the last week, to fight off a winter cold. Dirk Hechtner was smaller and dark-haired. Fabel had borrowed Hechtner from a Police Direction in Hamburg-Harburg. In their brief careers to date, both Glasmacher and Hechtner had shown a great deal of promise as well as an ability to think unconventionally when needed. Neither was aware of the fact that Fabel was considering recruiting them both permanently. In total, Fabel had to find four new investigators for his unit: five once Anna was gone. In addition, he was going to push for specialists to be attached to the Commission.
There were three photographs of Jake Westland on the incident board: an enlargement of his passport photograph, a publicity photograph and the last photograph that would ever be taken of him, lying bleached of colour on a slab in Eppendorf’s mortuary. On the other side of the board were smaller pictures of five other men and some cuttings from newspapers. Fabel walked over to the board and wrote four words in red marker: MOTIVATED, STALKER, ANGEL and COPYCAT.
‘Okay, you’ve all read through the case file as we have it so far. The only direct witness to the murder was Westland himself — and his account only comes to us second-hand. As far as I can see, these four categories are the options which present best at the moment.’ He pointed to the word MOTIVATED. ‘Everything seems to point to Westland being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Westland’s actions last night after the concert seemed all to be spur-of-the-moment. But if for a moment we assume that someone knew he would be at the back of Herbertstrasse and when he would be there, then we could be looking at a premeditated, motivated murder. Westland’s wallet, diary and cellphone are missing, so we could be looking at theft as a motive, although I feel that’s highly unlikely. He had a few minutes alone and undisturbed in his dressing room earlier in the evening. It could be that his phone and diary were taken to hide details of a planned meeting, though God knows why he would pre-arrange to meet anyone in a sleazy Kiez backstreet. I’ve been in touch with the British police and asked them to provide us with his cellphone records. In the meantime, I want us to do all the usual investigations into Westland’s background, his marriage, his business affairs — all the usual checks.’
Fabel jabbed a finger at the word STALKER.
‘Jake Westland was a singer, a celebrity. A late seventies, early eighties pin-up. He was also a multimillionaire. He was exactly the kind of figure who attracts the wrong kind of attention from obsessives. I’ve emailed the police in England to see if I can get any information about stalkers, persistent fans, threatening fan mail, that kind of thing. In the meantime, I’ve been able to talk with Westland’s bodyguards…’ Fabel ignored Werner’s knowing smirk. ‘And they confirm that there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary that took place either before or after his concert. They’ve actually been with him during his whole tour, and they say there’s been nothing unusual or that caused them concern since he arrived in Germany. They are also pretty certain that Westland suggested visiting the Kiez as a spur-of-the-moment thing. In short, I think either of these options is unlikely. And that brings us to…’
Fabel circled the word ANGEL.
‘Between nineteen ninety-six and nineteen ninety-nine, five men were murdered in the Kiez district. Their ages ranged from thirty-five to fifty-seven. All the victims were repeat visitors to the Reeperbahn area and all were frequent users of prostitutes. Every victim met his end the same way — throat cut with a single lateral slice. The entry wound was always on the right side of the neck, straight through behind the trachea and out. Death would have been pretty swift and, because the windpipe had been severed, silent. The bodies were found in different parts of the Kiez, more often than not in their own cars. Forensic evidence pointed to them being attacked from the front passenger seat of their own cars. Absolutely no forensic traces — fingerprints, DNA, fibre samples — were ever found. But maybe our killer has slipped up this time — we’ve retrieved a single blonde hair from the scene. If it really does belong to the killer, it’s yet one more difference from the original killings. The other difference is that the original killer certainly never left his or her victims alive long enough to tell us that it was the “Angel” who killed them. The last in the original series, a forty-nine-year-old ship engineer, was found in November ’ninety-nine. Then nothing.’