‘I suppose I did. Anyway, it cost me my wallet.’
‘So why did you wait until this morning to go to Davidwache and tell them about the robbery?’
‘I was going to leave it… notify my credit card companies that I’d lost my wallet and have the cards stopped and forget all about it. But then I thought about the fact that she said she was the Angel. I thought I ought to let you know.’
‘Very public-spirited of you.’
‘Listen, I didn’t have to-’
‘What did this prostitute look like?’
‘She was older than the usual girls. Thirties. Maybe older. She had blonde hair… looked dyed. She was quite tall, about one-seventy-five. Slim. She was attractive, but looked — I don’t know — hardened, I suppose you could say. She was wearing a dark coat and black leather boots.’
‘Okay, I’ll need you to go and talk to one of our police artists here. We need to get a good picture of her. Then I’d like you to go through some mugshots for us, on the off chance that you might recognise someone we already know about.’
‘I need to get back to work.’
‘Fine,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll send someone over to your home this evening to go through them with you. I take it your wife knows about all of this?’
‘Okay…’ said Mann. ‘I’ll do it here.’
Fabel got up to leave the room.
‘There’s one other thing,’ said Mann.
‘What?’
‘Her eyes. If you had seen her eyes. They were so full of hate and anger. That’s why I ran. I knew that if I hadn’t, she would have killed me for sure. She was the Angel. I know she was the Angel.’
Carstens Kaminski was in the Murder Commission when Fabel returned. Kaminski was half-sitting on the edge of Anna Wolff’s desk, smiling and chatting. He was small and dark and had something about him that was relaxed and confident. A charmer. Fabel heard that he had been quite the ladies’ man at one time. If the smile on Anna’s face was anything to go by, he probably still was.
‘Come on through,’ Fabel said to Kaminski and led him into his office.
‘Pretty girl,’ said Kaminski, with a lazy grin. ‘I heard she’s looking for a transfer. I’d sure like to accommodate her.’
Fabel stared at Kaminski incredulously. ‘My God, it doesn’t take long for word to get around, does it?’
‘What did you think of Mann’s story?’ asked Kaminski. ‘Nice office you’ve got, by the way.’ He craned his neck. ‘Can you see the Winterhude Planetarium from here?’
‘Mann’s a creep,’ said Fabel. ‘But I have no doubt that he believes he’s had a real brush with death. Or that he truly believes it was the Angel who mugged him.’
‘But you don’t think it was. Me neither,’ said Kaminski. ‘But the way she approached him suggests to me that she was keeping out of sight of the other girls. That and the way she was dressed makes me think she wasn’t a regular working girl. And she lured him into an isolated courtyard… she may not be the original Angel, but she certainly fits with the killer the other night.’
‘That’s what I thought. Hopefully Mann will be able to give us a good enough artist’s impression or pick her out from the mugs. Having said that, like you say I don’t think she’s a regular in the Kiez. Your guys pick anything else up?’
‘We talked to all the window girls in Herbertstrasse that night. Two of them remember seeing a man they thought was Jake Westland. He came in the Gerhardtstrasse end and made his way straight along the street without looking right or left and out onto Davidstrasse.’
‘That sounds planned,’ said Fabel.
‘I don’t know, Jan,’ said Kaminski, fiddling with the desk calendar on Fabel’s desk. ‘It could simply be that he was trying to give Martina Schilmann and her guy the slip. Just acting on an impulse. If Mann’s hooker is our killer, she certainly didn’t arrange to meet him.’
‘No… but maybe he had arranged to meet someone else and simply ran into the killer. It’s just that it seems so… purposeful, I suppose. The way he rushed along Herbertstrasse and out the other end, knowing he had only minutes before Martina would start looking for him coming out onto Davidstrasse. But whatever Westland’s intentions, I reckon we’ve got an Angel copycat on our hands. I also reckon Jurgen Mann is probably very lucky that he wasn’t her second victim. Brace yourself, Carstens,’ said Fabel. ‘My thinking is that we’re just at the start of a whole new series of killings.’
8
He looked at his watch: four-fifty. Nothing irritated Fabel more than people being late.
He was the first to admit that he was too obsessive about punctuality. Ever since he had been a boy, the idea of being too late for something had tied knots in Fabel’s gut. It was one of those things, like his inability to get drunk, to push himself that one carefree drink too far, that characterised him. That made Jan Fabel who he was.
But this time, as he sat at his desk fuming, Fabel felt justified in his irritation: he had impressed on Jespersen that he was in the middle of launching a major murder inquiry. To be twenty minutes late was more than a lack of courtesy: it was unprofessional. Fabel picked up his phone and called the number he’d been given for Jespersen’s cellphone. It rang for a while and then switched to voicemail. Fabel left a message for Jespersen to call him as soon as possible.
Fabel’s desk phone rang almost instantly he hung up and he answered expecting it to be Jespersen. It wasn’t.
‘Hi, Chef,’ said Anna Wolff. ‘I’ve got something you’ve got to see.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m up in Butenfeld.’ Butenfeld was police shorthand for the morgue at the Institute for Judicial Medicine which was based on the Eppendorf street of that name. ‘You’re really going to want to see this.’
Fabel looked at his watch and thought about the Dane’s infuriating lack of punctuality. ‘Okay, I’ll come right up.’
9
‘How long has the apartment been vacant?’ Ute Cranz turned and smiled at the younger woman. They had spent half an hour viewing the attic apartment and the young female estate agent had done her best to project a maturity and experience that she was clearly years from possessing. She was dressed in a mannish dark blue trouser suit. Why was it, thought Ute, that so many women in business think that to compete with men they have to dress like them?
‘It’s only just become available for rental. We haven’t even advertised it — in fact, we were surprised when you enquired about it. How did you know it was vacant?’
‘I’ve been looking for a flat in this area. I heard that the previous tenant was moving out.’
‘I see,’ said the estate agent, although she didn’t sound entirely convinced. ‘You were right to move quickly. Properties of this quality in Altona don’t tend to hang around. We’ve just completed a full renovation of an apartment building around the corner in Schillerstrasse. We had the apartments filled before we had finished the work.’
‘How much?’ Ute Cranz walked across the lounge to the window, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floor.
‘Well, this is nearly two hundred square metres. And it has a balcony with views out across to Palmaille. The monthly rent is two thousand nine hundred euros. Excluding utilities. That’s pretty standard for this area.’
Ute looked out of the window at the street below. She saw a man approach the front door of the apartment building. He had grey-white hair but had broad shoulders and moved like a younger man. He was dressed in what she would have described as an ‘English-style’ heavy tweed jacket and corded trousers.
‘Is this one of the neighbours?’ she asked the estate agent, who came across to the window and looked down.
‘Yes — yes, it is,’ she said. ‘That’s Herr Gerdes. He has the apartment above. A very quiet neighbour, as are the rest of the people in the building. A nice class of resident, as it were.’
‘I’ll take it.’ Ute turned back to the agent and smiled. ‘But I’d like to see the kitchen again…’