Fabel sighed into the phone. ‘Anna… point?’
‘Just that he won’t be turning up for the interview. He’s already spilled his guts — in the Reeperbahn. And Chef, he said it was a woman who cut him and then she told him to let us know who she was. She told him to say it was the Angel.’
‘Shit.’ Fabel used the English word and looked across at his ex-wife. The fire had been extinguished and she now wore the expression of hostile resignation that she had always had when work had called him away. ‘I’ll be right there.’
They had taken Westland across town to the emergency room at the hospital in St Georg. There was no point in Fabel going there: from what he had heard, Westland was in no condition for an interview. Instead he took the Ost-West Strasse into the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Sinful Mile. Where ropers had once woven hawsers for sailing ships, giving the Reeperbahn its name, now strip clubs and sex shops, bars and theatres neon-sparkled in the icy night. By the time Fabel arrived at Davidwache he was already in a bad mood. The meeting with Renate had gone as ill-temperedly as expected and he had lost his MP3 player: whenever he felt stressed, he plugged it into his BMW’s stereo system. No music, more stress.
The press had already gathered en masse outside the Davidwache station and three uniformed officers were holding them at bay. In addition to the media circus outside the station, there was some other separate commotion being created in Davidstrasse, to the side of the station. Young riot squad officers in their gear were struggling to load groups of resisting women into the large green police wagons. Some of the media had leached around into Davidstrasse to take pictures of the sideshow, but a fusillade of camera flashes saluted Fabel as he made his way from the car to Davidwache’s double doors. A television news camera crew had jostled its way to the front; Fabel recognised the reporter as Sylvie Achtenhagen, who worked for one of the satellite channels. Great, he thought, as if the media limelight wasn’t bad enough, he had that bitch on his case.
‘Principal Detective Chief Commissar Fabel’ — Achtenhagen emphasised his full rank for the camera — ‘can you confirm that the victim of this attack was Jake Westland, the British singer?’
Fabel ignored her and walked on.
‘And is it true that this is the work of the so-called Angel of St Pauli? The serial killer the Polizei Hamburg failed to catch in the nineteen-nineties?’ Then, when he still did not respond: ‘Are we to take it that your involvement, as head of this proposed so-called “Super Murder Commission”, is significant? Are you being called in to clean up the mess the Polizei Hamburg made of the original investigation?’
Fabel pulled a mask of patience over his irritation and turned to the reporter. ‘The Police Presidium’s press and information department will make a full statement in due course. You should know the drill by now, Frau Achtenhagen.’
He turned his back on her and walked through the double doors and up the steps into Davidwache police station. The small reception area was crammed with personnel. He could hear shouting from through the back and to the left, from the custody area. Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped heavy-set man in his fifties and a pretty dark-haired woman wearing jeans and a biker jacket that was at least one size too big for her. Fabel smiled grimly at Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer and Criminal Commissar Anna Wolff.
‘How in God’s name did Achtenhagen find out about the Angel claim?’ asked Fabel.
‘Money talks,’ said Anna Wolff. ‘That bitch isn’t above bribing ambulance crew or hospital staff to get a scoop.’
‘You’re probably right. She’s all we need. She practically built her career on the Angel case.’ Fabel nodded in the direction of the commotion outside in Davidstrasse. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘A case of perfect timing,’ said Werner. ‘A feminist group decided to pick tonight of all nights to stage a protest. They invaded Herbertstrasse. They object to a Hamburg street being closed off to women. They claim it’s against their human rights or something.’
‘They’ve got a point, to be honest,’ said Fabel. He sighed. ‘Okay
… what have we got?’
‘The victim is Jake Westland, fifty-three years old, British national,’ Werner read from his notebook. ‘And yes, he is that Jake Westland. From what we can gather he was having a little impromptu jaunt around the Reeperbahn — and not to recapture the spirit of the Beatles, if you catch my drift. Funny, though… I would have thought it would have been the gay bars he would have been interested in — him being English, that is…’
Fabel responded to Werner’s joke with an impatient face.
‘I don’t know why they do it,’ continued Werner. ‘These celebrities, I mean. Anyway, Westland deliberately gave his bodyguards the slip and disappeared into Herbertstrasse. Next thing a working girl on her way into the Kiez finds him with his insides turned into his outsides. He tells her that his attacker told him that she was the Angel, then he passes out.’
‘What’s his condition?’
‘He was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. Apparently the girl who found him knew a bit about first aid. But my guess is that his producers are already planning a memorial greatest-hits CD.’
‘We’ve got the girl who found him through the back,’ said Anna Wolff. She exchanged a look with Werner and her red-lipsticked mouth broke into a grin. ‘And the bodyguards. I thought you’d like to interview them personally.’
‘Okay, Anna,’ Fabel said, with a sigh, ‘what’s the deal?’
‘Westland was being looked after by Schilmann Security and Close Personal Protection.’
‘Martina Schilmann?’
‘You and she used to be close, I believe?’
‘Martina Schilmann was an excellent police officer,’ said Fabel.
‘Then she must have been a better cop than she is a bodyguard,’ said Werner.
A uniformed superintendent joined them. He was shorter than Fabel and had thick, dark, unruly hair.
‘What I really want to know is,’ he said sternly as he shook hands with Fabel, ‘did anyone get his autograph?’
‘Hello, Carstens,’ said Fabel, with a grin. ‘Still cracking tasteless jokes?’
‘Comes with the territory.’ Carstens Kaminski was in charge of the Davidwache team. Davidwache — Polizei Hamburg’s Police Commissariat 15 — was the station that controlled the Kiez, Hamburg’s 0.7 square kilometres of red-light district centred on the Reeperbahn. Every weekend the normal population of ten thousand residents would swell as over two hundred thousand visitors would pass through the Kiez, some of whom would be drunk, some of whom would be relieved of their wallets or valuables. And for some, their walk on the wild side would end in real disaster.
The uniformed officers who worked out of Davidwache had to have a particular skilclass="underline" they had to be able to talk. The Kiez was an area populated by pimps, hookers, petty crooks and not so petty crooks; visited by young men from the suburbs who often drank too much, too quickly. Most of the situations that the Davidwache officers were faced with demanded sympathy and humour and more than one reveller had been talked into going home peacefully and out of a night in the cells. Carstens Kaminski had been born and grew up in St Pauli and no one was as in tune with the rhythm and changing mood of the Kiez. He also had the typically down-to-earth St Pauli sense of humour.
‘What’s the deal with the protest?’ asked Fabel.
‘It’s a group called Muliebritas. Or more correctly it was organised by a feminist magazine called Muliebritas,’ explained Kaminski. ‘They stormed into Herbertstrasse and there was everything but all-out war with the hookers. God knows it would have been bad enough at the best of times, but with this Westland thing going on as well… We asked them to disperse, explaining that they were interfering with a crime scene and investigation, but the concept of consensual policing seems to have been lost on them.’ There was another burst of shouting from the custody area, as if to underline his statement. ‘Anyway, you’re not here for them. By the way, did you know Martina’s here?’ Kaminski grinned.