10
‘What have you got?’ asked Fabel. Anna had been waiting for him at the reception of the Eppendorf mortuary.
‘Well, from the look of it, a middle-aged man and a heart attack,’ said Anna as she led him into the mortuary’s body store.
Fabel stopped in the hall. ‘A heart attack? So what’s that got to do with us?’
‘Not what,’ said Anna. ‘Who. The victim was found dead in his hotel bedroom this morning. On the face of it, the cause of death doesn’t seem suspicious: all the signs are that it was a heart attack but he’ll be given the full treatment, of course. But the victim is a Jens Jespersen, a Danish national.’
‘Shit,’ said Fabel. ‘The Danish police officer. I was supposed to be meeting with him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour ago.’
‘Well, you better not keep him waiting any longer,’ said Anna, with a grin.
A mortuary attendant wheeled a trolley into the centre of the morgue and removed the covering sheet. The man on the trolley was tall; his short-cropped hair was blond and looked a sickly yellow against the grey pallor of his skin. His lips had a bluish tinge. The Danish passport Anna handed Fabel told him that Jens Jespersen was fifty-four years old, but the man on the trolley had the physique of a much younger man and Fabel guessed he was looking at someone who had been serious about keeping fit.
‘He doesn’t look like the usual heart-attack candidate,’ said Anna as if she’d been reading his mind. Fabel took the plastic bag containing the rest of Jespersen’s smaller personal belongings. The watch was a heavy-duty military type. Jespersen’s Danish National Police ID card identified him as a Chefpolitiinspektor, which Fabel guessed would be somewhere equivalent to his own rank. There was a notebook with general reminder notes scribbled in it, including the Hamburg Police Presidium number, but Fabel could see that this was a personal notebook, not one used for police work. On one page of the notebook was the name OLAF, written in block capitals and double underlined. He slipped the notebook back into the plastic evidence holder.
‘Is this it?’ He held up the bag and its contents.
‘That’s it,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, except he didn’t like to sleep alone.’ Anna arced an eyebrow and tossed a second evidence bag to Fabel. This one held a souvenir teddy-bear toy, dressed in nautical gear with a Prinz Heinrich peaked cap. Fabel took the bag from Anna and stared absently at the stuffed teddy.
‘Doesn’t it strike you that something’s missing?’
‘He doesn’t have Moin! Moin! embroidered on his little jumper?’ Anna smirked. ‘I know what you mean. Something is missing. Jespersen was here to talk to you about something, yet there’s no sign of his official notebook, no notes of any kind, no paperwork, except for his travel documents. And take a look at this…’
She tossed Fabel Jespersen’s cellphone. Fabel had to reach quickly to catch it and he scowled at Anna. Flipping the phone open, he searched through its memory.
‘Nothing.’
‘No recorded incoming or outgoing calls,’ said Anna. ‘No stored numbers. No registered service. My guess is someone’s switched SIM cards on him thinking that no one would think to examine his phone.’
‘Damn it,’ said Fabel. ‘Has forensics looked at any of this?’
‘No. The emergency-service doctor who came out to the hotel treated it as a heart attack. Obviously, as a sudden death, the body was sent up here and Moller and his team will have a look at it. I’ve suggested to Moller that he has a good look at it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘You know Moller. Top pathologist but world-leading asshole. He told me not to tell him his job, but you know he’ll give this one the full works. I’ve also told the hotel to seal off the room and alerted Holger Brauner that we may need his forensics boys over there, but I wanted to wait till you saw this. I didn’t want to overstep my authority…’
Fabel fired a warning look at Anna. She stared back, her face empty of expression. It was a trick she had.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the scene has been trodden on by God knows how many by now. I don’t know, Chef, this could be innocent enough and there’s no evidence of it being anything other than natural causes…’
‘No, Anna — you were right. Something stinks here.’
‘If this isn’t kosher,’ said Anna, ‘then we’ve got trouble. If this is a deliberate killing then it’s been a professional job. A very professional job.’
11
In his office with its view out across Hamburg’s Altstadt, Peter Claasens frowned and thought about the questions he had just been asked. He had put the receiver down but sat with his hand resting on the phone, for once oblivious to the rhythmic thumping and clanging that resounded through the building.
He had been reworking a draft of the letter that Emily had asked him to write when the phone had rung. Maybe it was because he had been concentrating on the letter that the journalist’s questions had caught him completely off guard.
The Norwegian hadn’t actually alleged anything, and his questions had been carefully put; yet Claasens could see what he was trying to find out. No one else would have drawn such a clear conclusion from the Norwegian’s questions but they had struck a chord with Claasens. Claasens knew better than to confirm or deny anything to a member of the press: he was scrupulously discreet, maybe even overcautious in his professional life, if not in his private life.
Why had the Norwegian specifically asked about Norivon and shipments to China? It had been that specific question that had struck a nerve and Claasens was worried he had let it show in his voice. It had been two months ago that Claasens had noticed the anomaly: an inconsistency between two shipments and the legally required paperwork. Both shipments had been to China. Claasens had queried them, naturally. Lensch, his contact at Norivon, had sounded equally confused at first. Then, within twenty-four hours, Lensch had come back to him with a reasonable explanation and the paperwork to back it up. Reasonable — but not entirely convincing.
Claasens punched up the account file on his computer and buzzed through for the hard-file paperwork to be brought to him. It was Minna who came in, laid the binder on his desk and walked out again. Sulkily. Claasens cursed himself for having broken his ‘not on my own doorstep’ rule. He had banged Minna for a month or two, tired of her and had then expected everything to go back to business as usual. It hadn’t worked out that way. Minna had been a bitch ever since, and he couldn’t think of a way to get rid of her without making even more trouble for himself.
He suddenly became aware of the reverberating thudding of the workmen again. Peter Claasens’s office was on the top floor of a building in Hamburg’s Altstadt, a block to the north of Willy-Brandt-Strasse and next to the Kontorhaus Quarter. It was a brand-new building, but with a view out over the Speicherstadt and sitting so close to brick-built icons such as the Chilehaus and the Sprinkenhof that it had been designed to be a modern but sympathetic interpretation of a traditional Kontorhaus, with a huge central atrium open to the sky. Claasens had moved his offices there on the scheduled completion date only to find there were dozens of things still to be finished off by the builders. One of them had been the balustrade on his floor around the central atrium, which had meant he had been forbidden to move staff into his offices for a further week. Even now there was a gap in the railings that was blocked off, meaning that staff often had to walk around the entire circumference of the building to reach adjoining offices.
Claasens snapped off the band that held the binder closed. He had slipped Lensch’s paperwork in there along with the original documentation showing the shipment discrepancy. He had tagged the relevant sections with yellow Post-it notes.
Claasens looked at his watch. It was five p.m. The rest of the staff would go and Emily would phone soon, just to check the coast was clear. Emily made everything go away: all the stress, all the hassle. When he was with her he became someone else. Someone better. He smiled, thinking of her phoning; of the cutely ungrammatical German she spoke with her sweet English accent. Then she would come up to his office and they would be alone. But first he had to double-check those figures. Just in case the Norwegian had had a point.