‘Murder?’ Dahlke raised eyelids heavy with mascara. Genuine shock. Her fear cranked up a ratchet. ‘What have I got to do with murder?’
‘You’ve heard about what happened last week? Let’s face it, Frau Dahlke, you can’t have missed it, it’s been all over the press and TV. Jake Westland, the British pop singer.’
Realisation began to dawn on Dahlke’s face. A terrified realisation. She searched Fabel’s face for something. Reassurance, maybe. He withheld it.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with that…’ Her voice was tremulous. ‘I swear I’ve got nothing to do with that.’
‘Frau Dahlke, you are a middle-aged housewife masquerading as a prostitute and you tried to lure one of my male officers into a dark corner. Last week, less than two hundred metres from where you were arrested, Jake Westland was lured into a dark corner and murdered by someone pretending to be a prostitute.’
Dahlke stared at Fabel as if lost for words. Or just lost.
‘I take it you can see the seriousness of your position.’
‘I didn’t… I wouldn’t… I didn’t mean anyone any harm.’
‘Where were you between eleven p.m. on Saturday the twenty-sixth and one a.m. on Sunday the twenty-seventh?’
‘I was at home. In bed.’
‘Who can confirm that?’
‘My husband.’ Again Dahlke’s expression revealed that her fear had suddenly been ratcheted up a couple of notches. ‘Oh please, no… please don’t speak to my husband.’
‘Frau Dahlke, you still don’t seem to understand the seriousness of your position. If we cannot establish your whereabouts for the time of the murder you will be held here for further questioning and we will carry out full forensic searches of your home. If you were at home with your husband then we must have him verify the fact.’
‘But I didn’t do anything wrong!’ she sobbed. ‘I didn’t hurt anyone. I swear.’
‘Do you work, Frau Dahlke?’
‘I work in the local library. Part-time.’
‘And is your husband in employment?’
‘Yes — he’s an engineer.’
‘So why do you work as a prostitute?’
‘I don’t. I…’ Again she looked at Fabel with eyes desperate for some kind of understanding. Then the desperation was gone: her head bowed and her gaze became fixed on the table in front of her. ‘I’ve only done it three times,’ she said, her voice now leaden and dull once more. ‘I don’t do it for the money.’
‘Then why? Why on earth would you put yourself or your health at risk?’
She looked up again. Her eyes were glossy with tears that tumbled down her cheeks, streaking them with mascara. ‘I’m ordinary. I’ve always been ordinary. Dull. I have a dull life with a dull husband and dull kids. I’d never been with another man before I got married. I went into the Kiez one night. Just to look. I don’t know why. I wanted to see what happened. The type of people who go there. I don’t know why I did it, but I went into a bar and this man… I did it with him.’
‘Where?’
‘In his car.’ The sobs were now silent convulsions between statements.
‘I still don’t understand why,’ said Fabel. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘You wouldn’t understand. No man would understand. I did it for the excitement. To be wanted. Desired.’
‘Did you get all that?’ asked Fabel when he met Anna and Werner in the hall. They had been watching the interview on the closed-circuit video monitor in the next room.
‘Yep,’ said Werner. ‘Weird. Do you believe her?’
‘There’s absolutely no way she could have dumped the knife before you arrested her?’ asked Fabel.
‘None,’ said Anna. ‘She was in Werner’s sight all the time and we searched her thoroughly immediately after she was arrested. Nothing. And nothing dropped or dumped, either.’
Fabel shook his head. ‘I give up sometimes. Keep her in and check out her alibi for last week with her husband. And try to be — I don’t know — diplomatic.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe I should ask him if he’s ever seen Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. I’m not being funny, Chef, but there’s no diplomatic way of telling some guy that his wife’s been moonlighting as a hooker. “And, oh, by the way, don’t feel too bad about it: it’s not that she’s struggling on what you give her for housekeeping — she’s doing it for the love of dick.”’
‘Anna’s got a point, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘There’s no sugaring this pill.’
‘Simply keep to the fact that she’s a suspect in a serious crime, and that you need to establish her whereabouts on the night in question. Leave the explaining to her.’
‘Okay, Chef.’
Fabel made his way to his office. He checked his email. There was an internal note from van Heiden to remind him that Politidirektor Vestergaard, the boss of the dead Danish cop, Jespersen, was flying down to see them in a couple of days. Van Heiden helpfully provided the flight’s arrival time.
‘I’ve got nothing better to do,’ muttered Fabel. He really wanted to talk to Jespersen’s boss but he had thought, given that he was up to his neck in a major murder inquiry, that van Heiden could at least have arranged the pick-up.
He looked at his watch. Two a.m. He’d go home, catch four or five hours’ sleep and head back into the Presidium. He yawned. He was really getting too old for this. He thought of Viola Dahlke and the fact that she would be lying, wide awake and afraid, considering every thread as the fabric of her life unravelled. What the hell had she thought she was doing? She had been right: he didn’t understand; just as he hadn’t understood why so many of the people he had encountered in his career had done the things they had done. Human sexuality was a perplexing thing. A lot of the murders he had investigated had had bizarre sexual elements to them and Fabel had been forced to navigate some dark and stormy seas over the years. Sometimes it was as if women remained an unknown continent for him.
He took his English tweed jacket from the back of his chair and unhooked his raincoat from the rack. As he made for the door he almost expected the phone to ring.
It did.
6
It was strange, given the very nature of his job, that the one thing that Fabel had never fully come to terms with was the sudden extinction of life.
He had heard that astronauts, once they are truly in space, look back at the Earth and tend to become, in that instant, either entirely atheistic or totally convinced of the existence of a god. No middle ground. Whether in reality it was as absolute as that, Fabel could understand the experience. He had a similar feeling every time he looked at the dead. A corpse has no humanity: it doesn’t look like someone sleeping, it becomes nothing more than a human-like object. An empty shell. And in Fabel’s case, most of the dead he looked upon had been forcibly evicted from that shell.
Where some would have seen the vessel abandoned by the departing soul, Fabel saw only emptiness. The final shutting down of an interdependence of biological systems. The ending of a universe seen from a never-to-be-repeated viewpoint.
However Armin Lensch had seen the world, he wasn’t seeing it now.
His body lay on a scrubby patch of grass and rubble down near the shore of the River Elbe, close to Hafenstrasse. A few empty beer bottles and the wheel of some long-discarded child’s toy served as his pillow, and the grass on which he lay was framed by broken red bricks from whatever dock building had stood there at one time. The rain had turned to sleet, then to snow so the technicians had erected a white forensics tent to protect the crime scene and had illuminated it with lights on telescopic stands. Like Westland, Lensch had been sliced across the belly and his viscera, spilling sideways from the mouth-like gape of the wound, glistened in the harsh light of the arc lamps the forensic team had erected. A nauseating stench from his sliced-open abdomen lingered in the air of the forensics tent.
A man almost completely concealed in white hooded coveralls, blue latex gloves and a surgical mask came over to Fabel.