JF03 - Eternal (14 page)

‘And you don’t know what that area was?’ asked Fabel. He understood when van Heiden said that ‘science was not his thing’. Nothing was Criminal Director van Heiden’s thing other than straightforward police work: and the more bureaucratic side of police work at that.

‘They did tell me, but it was all in one ear and out the other. Something to do with genetic inheritance, whatever that means. All I
do
know is that the press are already getting very steamed up about it. Apparently the details of the method of killing have been leaked to the media – this whole scalping thing.’

‘It didn’t come from one of my team,’ said Fabel. ‘I can guarantee that.’

‘Well,
someone
leaked it.’ Van Heiden’s tone suggested he was not entirely convinced by Fabel’s assurance. ‘In any case, I need you to move fast on this one. Griebel was clearly a major loss to the scientific community, and that means there will be political flak to contend with. Added to that is the minor political celebrity of the first victim.’

‘Obviously, I’m dealing with this case as a priority,’ said Fabel, not disguising his irritation that van Heiden obviously felt the need to give him a nudge. ‘And that has nothing to do with the status of the victims. If they had been down-and-outs I would be treating the case with the same urgency. The focus
of my concern is that we clearly have two murders close together in commission where the disfigurement of the corpses indicates a psychotic agenda.’

‘Just keep me updated on progress, Fabel.’ Van Heiden hung up.

Fabel had told Susanne he would be working half the night so she hadn’t come round to his place. They met for lunch in the
Friesenkeller
near the Rathausmarkt, Hamburg’s main city square. Despite Susanne being the psychologist who would work with Fabel on profiling the killer, they didn’t discuss the case: they had an unspoken rule of keeping their professional and personal relationships very separate. Instead they chatted idly about their holiday on Sylt, about going back for Lex’s birthday, and about the forthcoming election.

After lunch, Fabel headed into the Presidium. He had scheduled a meeting with his team, calling everyone in from their weekend. Holger Brauner and Frank Grueber came into the conference room shortly after Fabel had arrived: Fabel was pleased to see that the two most senior forensics officers had both taken the time to attend. Brauner had two forensic-trace collection bags with him, making Fabel hopeful that something of value had been retrieved from the second murder locus.

The inquiry board was quickly set up, with photographs of the two victims: photographs taken in life and those taken in death at the scenes. Maria had written a brief biography of each victim. Despite them being roughly the same age, there was no evidence that their paths had ever crossed.

‘Obviously, Hans-Joachim Hauser had enjoyed an element of public recognition in his time.’ Maria indicated one of the photographs on the board. It
had been taken in the late 1960s: a young, girlish Hauser was stripped to the waist and his long wavy hair hung down to his naked shoulders. The photograph had been intended to look natural but was contrived; posed. Fabel realised that the young and arrogant Hauser had been making a statement, a reference, with this photograph: it was deliberately redolent of the image that Fabel had seen in Hauser’s apartment, the one of Gustav Nagel, the nineteenth-century environmental guru. There was a cruel irony in the contrast between the cascade of dark hair in the photograph of the youth and the image beside it, of the dead, scalped, middle-aged Hauser.

‘Gunter Griebel, on the other hand,’ continued Maria, moving across to his side of the board, ‘seemed to have actively sought to avoid the limelight. The acquaintances we have spoken to, including his boss whom I got on the phone, all say that he even hated having his photograph taken for periodicals or at university events. So it would appear that the killer was not motivated by envy of Hauser’s fame.’

‘Is there any suggestion that Griebel might have been gay?’ asked Henk Hermann. ‘I know that he had been widowed recently but, with the first victim being openly homosexual, I wondered if we may have a sexual or homophobic motive here.’

‘There’s absolutely nothing that we’ve found so far to suggest anything like that,’ said Maria. ‘But we’re still checking into the victims’ respective backgrounds. And if Griebel was a closet gay then he will of course have been secretive about it and we may never find out for sure.’

‘But you’re right, Henk … it is a line of inquiry that we should follow up.’ Fabel was keen to encourage the positive contribution from his newest
team member. He joined Maria over by the board and studied the details of the two men; the photographs of them in life and in death. The only live picture of Griebel was a blow-up from some kind of staff group shot. He stood stiffly between two white-coated colleagues, his awkward stance and tense expression clearly communicating his discomfort at being photographed. Fabel focused on the grainy detail of the same long, narrow face with the precariously balanced spectacles that had stared at him from beneath an exposed dome of skull. Why was Griebel so ill at ease in front of a camera? Fabel’s train of thought was broken when Holger Brauner spoke.

‘I think we should talk about the forensic evidence recovered,’ said Brauner. ‘Or rather the lack of it. That’s why Herr Grueber and I came along. I think this will interest you.’

‘When you say lack of forensic evidence, I take it you’re referring to the first killing – where Kristina Dreyer destroyed anything evidential?’

‘Well, that’s the thing, Jan,’ said Brauner. ‘It’s true of both crime scenes. The killer seems to know how to eliminate his forensic presence … except for what he wants us to find.’

‘Which is?’

Brauner placed the two evidence collection bags on the conference table. ‘As you say, Kristina Dreyer destroyed any traces at the first scene, except for this single red hair.’ He pushed one bag forward across the table. ‘But I suspect that there was nothing for her to destroy. We have been able to recover nothing from the second scene either, and we know that was fresh and untouched. It is practically impossible for someone to occupy a space without leaving
retrievable forensic evidence. Unless, that is, he or she goes to considerable lengths to conceal their presence. Even then, they would have to know what they were doing.’

‘And our guy does?’

‘It would appear so. We only found one piece of trace evidence that we cannot allocate to the scene or the victim.’ Brauner pushed the second bag across the table. ‘And it is this … a second hair.’

‘But that’s good,’ said Maria. ‘If these hairs match, then surely that means that we have evidence to link the two murders. And a DNA fingerprint. Obviously the killer has slipped up.’

‘Oh, the two hairs match, all right,’ Brauner said. ‘The thing is, Maria, that this hair is
exactly
the same length as the first hair. And there is no follicle at the end of either. Not only are they from the same head, they were cut from it at exactly the same time.’

‘Great …’ said Fabel. ‘We’ve got a signature …’

‘There’s more …’ said Frank Grueber, Brauner’s deputy. ‘The two hairs were indeed cut from the same head at the same time – but that time was somewhere between twenty and forty years ago.’

Fabel stood alone in the garden at the rear of the late Dr Griebel’s villa, screwing up his pale blue eyes against the bright sun. The house was white-walled and laid out over three storeys under a vast red-tiled roof that swept down on either side to ground-floor level. It was flanked by neighbours that differed only nominally in design. Another row of equally impressive villas stood behind Fabel, presenting their backs and gardens to him.

Griebel’s garden was laid out to lawn with some heavy shrubs and a cluster of trees offering a partial screen. But it was overlooked. The killer had not come in this way. But there was even less opportunity to break in from the front or the sides, unless the killer was as skilled at burglary as he was at forensic-free murder. And Brauner and his team had yet to find any evidence of a forced entry here or at Hans-Joachim Hauser’s apartment.

‘They let you in,’ Fabel said to the empty garden; to the phantom of a killer long gone from the scene. He walked purposefully around to the front of the house and stopped at the main door, which was banded by strips of red-and-white police tape and
bore a police notice forbidding entry. ‘No one saw you here. That means Griebel admitted you quickly. Was he expecting you? Had you arranged to meet him here?’

Fabel took out his cellphone, hit the pre-set button for the Murder Commission and got Anna Wolff.

‘I need Griebel’s phone records for the last month. Everything we can get. Home, office, cellphone. I need names and addresses of anyone he spoke to. Start with the last week. And I want Henk to do the same thing with Hauser’s phone records.’

‘Okay,
Chef
, we’ll get onto it,’ said Anna. ‘Are you coming back to the Presidium?’

‘No. I’ve arranged to meet with Griebel’s colleagues this afternoon. How are Maria and Werner getting on with the Hauser follow-up?’

‘Haven’t heard,
Chef
. They’re still out in the Schanzenviertel. The reason I was asking if you’re coming back in is we’ve had a Dr Severts phoning for you.’

‘Severts?’ Fabel puzzled for a moment, then remembered the tall young archaeologist whose skin, hair and clothing all seemed toned in with the earth in which he worked. It had been only three days ago that Fabel had stood looking at the mummified body of a man frozen in a moment that had passed more than sixty years ago. And it had been only four days since Fabel had sat in his brother’s restaurant on Sylt, chatting carelessly with Susanne about the most inconsequential things.

‘He’s asked if you could arrange to meet him at the university.’ Anna gave Fabel a cellphone number for Severts.

‘Okay, I’ll give him a ring. In the meantime get onto those phone records.’

‘By the way,’ said Anna, ‘have you seen the papers this morning?’

Fabel felt his heart sink in dull anticipation. ‘No – why?’

‘They seem to have a lot of information about the scenes of crime. They know all about the hair dye as well as that the victims were scalped.’ Anna paused, then added reluctantly: ‘And they’ve given our scalp-taker a name.
Der Hamburger Haarschneider
.’

‘Brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant …’ said Fabel and hung up.

‘The Hamburg Hairdresser’ – the perfect name with which to terrify the entire population of Hamburg.

Scheibe replaced the receiver. The committee member who had been charged with breaking the good news to him had clearly been surprised at Scheibe’s response. Or lack of it. Scheibe had been polite, restrained; modest, almost. Anyone who knew the egotistical Paul Scheibe to any degree would have been amazed at his muted reaction to the news that his concept for
KulturZentrumEins
had won the architectural competition for the Überseequartier site.

But for Paul Scheibe this triumph, which only a few days ago would have seemed the crowning glory to his career, was absorbed as a vague, dull impact somewhere deep in his gut. A bitter victory: almost a taunt, given his current situation. Scheibe was too
consumed with a more immediate, more elemental emotion – fear – to even feign enthusiasm.

He had been driving back to his Blankenese villa when he heard the news on NDR radio. Gunter. Gunter was dead. Scheibe had braked so hard when he pulled his Mercedes over to the kerb that the cars behind had had to swerve to avoid him, the drivers blasting their horns and gesticulating wildly. But Scheibe had been oblivious to all that went on around him. Instead, his universe was filled by one sentence that consumed everything else like an exploding sun: Dr Gunter Griebel, a geneticist working in Hamburg, had been found murdered in his Marienthal home. The rest of the report washed over Scheibe: police sources refused to confirm that Griebel had been murdered in a manner similar to Hans-Joachim Hauser, the environmental campaigner, whose body had been found on the previous Friday.

They had been six. Now they were four.

Paul Scheibe stood in the kitchen of his home, his hand still resting on the wall-mounted phone, gazing blankly out of the window towards his garden and seeing nothing. He watched as a light breeze teased and the sun danced on the branches and blood-red leaves of the acer that he had so carefully cultivated and tended. But he could see nothing other than his own impending death. Then, as if a high-voltage jolt had passed through him, he snatched up the telephone and stabbed in a number. A woman answered and he gave the name of the person he wanted to be put through to. A man’s voice started to say something but Scheibe cut him off.

‘Gunter’s dead. First Hans, now Gunter … this is no coincidence …’ Scheibe’s voice shook with
emotion. ‘This cannot be a coincidence – someone is after us. They are killing us one by one—’

‘Shut up!’ The voice on the other end hissed. ‘You bloody fool – keep your mouth
shut
. I’ll contact you later this afternoon. Or tonight. Stay where you are … and don’t do anything, don’t speak to anyone. Now get off this line.’

The dialling tone burred loud and harsh in Scheibe’s ear. He slowly replaced the receiver. He stared at his hand as it hovered, trembling violently, above the phone. Scheibe leaned forward against the marble kitchen worktop and his head slumped forward. For the first time in twenty years, Paul Scheibe wept.

Fabel had no difficulty in finding the genetics facility in which Griebel had worked. It lay within the same complex of buildings that housed both the Institute for Legal Medicine and the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic where Susanne was based. The University Clinical Complex was the centre for all major clinical and biomedical research in Hamburg as well as many of the city’s main medical functions. Fabel’s main involvement had been through its world-leading forensics facility. It had grown over the years and now stretched back on the north side of Martinistrasse like a small town in its own right.