‘Breathe deeply …’ she said to the client, who she reckoned was about the same age as her own son and who lay on his back, his eyes closed tight. ‘We are travelling back. Back to a time beyond life but before death. Only once we confront the life that has gone before can we experience rebirth.’
She pressed down on her client’s forehead. Her fingers were covered with large rings, some of which bore astrological symbols. Her client had pale, flawless skin and she compared the smooth perfection of his brow with the wrinkles on the back of her hand and the thickening of her once-slender fingers. Why, she thought, do our bodies age, yet inside we feel exactly the same as we did half a lifetime ago?
‘Go back …’ Her voice was just above a whisper. ‘Go back to your childhood. Do you remember? Then back further. Further back …’
Beate had always struggled to make ends meet. Or, more correctly, she had struggled to make ends
meet while maintaining a low profile. She had hated the idea of becoming a small-time capitalist but hated the idea of working for someone else even more. Beate also had to think of her son. She had done her best to make sure that he never wanted for anything. As a single mother, it had been difficult for her. And, of course, there had always been the added difficulty of how deeply someone would look into her history when she applied for a job. She had started off with a small fashion business in the Viertel, but, as time went on, it became clear that Beate’s idea of Schanzenviertel chic was out of step – a decade out of step – with what customers were looking for. After the shop had closed, she had struggled to find something that she could do to earn money. Then she came up with the Rebirthing concept. Beate knew it was all nonsense. Some part of her, deep down inside, found the idea of reincarnation attractive – plausible, even – but the whole ‘Rebirth Induction’ thing was a pile of crap. She ought to know: after all, it had been Beate who had invented it.
She looked down at the client lying on the floor. He was a regular and had been coming for three months. Since Hans-Joachim and Gunter’s murders she had taken the decision to see no new clients. No strangers. The deaths had shocked her. Frightened her. After all, although their paths had not crossed in twenty years, Hans-Joachim had lived only a couple of streets away.
Now Beate would admit only those clients whom she had dealt with for some time. She had even tried spinning a new thread of ‘group therapy’ so that she would see more than one client at a time. But because of the intimately personal nature of her
‘treatment’, her clients were reluctant to participate in group sessions. Beate’s most inspired idea had been to set up a website through which she could conduct on-line consultations. She had even bought some software which let people type in their dates and places of birth and receive an outline of a likely past life. And all paid for through a secure on-line credit card system. No risk, no outlay, all profit.
At the heart of Beate’s business was an essentially simple idea: that everyone had lived before, several times, and that there had to be a key to unlocking those past lives. Of course, with an exponentially growing global population, for everyone to have had a past life was a statistical impossibility. Beate, who had studied applied mathematics at the Universität Hamburg, knew that only too well. But there had been a time, long ago, when she had been prepared to suspend her disbelief in the name of something bigger. Furthermore, the world today was full of people seeking something to make sense of their existence; or wanting to seek refuge in some other truth, some other life: anything that offered them something less banal than their everyday existences. So Beate, the atheist, the rationalist, the mathematician, had established herself as a New Age guru who helped people rediscover their past lives. She had learned the basic principles of hypnotism, although she doubted that she had ever successfully hypnotised a client. It was more likely that they deluded themselves that they were in a hypnotic state so that they could believe the nonsense they spouted about a past life; could believe that it came from somewhere deeper than simply a mixture of imagination, wish-fulfilment and something they had probably read somewhere once. But to cover
herself she had talked about ‘guided meditation’, placing the onus on the client for their own hypnosis.
But the original concept had been flawed: Beate had learned very quickly that once she had helped a client to uncover one ‘past life’ the client went away happy – and a source of income walked out of the door. She had realised that she needed to add another dimension to her ‘therapy’: something that would prolong the course of treatment. It was then that she came up with both the idea for the website and the concept of ‘Whole Person Rebirth’. The principle was that to be ‘complete’ one had to uncover
all
one’s past lives, combine them with one’s current existence and to then undergo a ‘rebirthing’ where one became whole and put behind everything in the past and began anew. A true new life.
The irony was not wasted on Beate. Here, in this room within her apartment, she spouted a home-grown mixture of New Age claptrap and psychobabble about reincarnation and rebirth. Like the others in the group, she had reinvented herself, putting distance between herself and her past life. Unlike some of the others, however, Beate had chosen to keep as low a profile as possible. Whereas some of the group had clearly felt immune to discovery, she had sought anonymity. But it seemed that keeping a low profile offered no protection. Hans-Joachim Hauser had always been a self-promoting, self-important egotist; but she had guessed that Gunter Griebel, like her, had chosen to live his life as unnoticed as possible. Yet someone
had
noticed.
She cast a glance at the wall clock. This session seemed to be taking for ever. The young patient was
convinced that he had multiple past lives to uncover, yet claimed there was some obstacle in the way, something he could not navigate around. Beate sighed patiently and tried to ease him through the years, through the centuries, to discover who and when he had been before.
Sometimes she felt like screaming in the faces of her clients that it was all a sham, a fraud; that there was nothing to uncover other than their own inadequacies and failure to come to terms with the fact that this world, here and now, was all there was to life. It always amused Beate that, in uncovering their past lives, most of her clientele displayed the same lack of chronological and technical accuracy as the average historical-romance novelist. Many clients were middle-aged women who fulfilled some fantasy by remembering a past life as a beautiful courtesan, a voluptuous village maid or a fairy-tale princess. Few ‘past lives’ involved the plagues, diseases, famines and extreme poverty that had been commonplace throughout history.
But this young man was different. He had approached the whole process with earnestness. From the very beginning he had spoken with conviction about his need to visit a previous life. It was as if he were seeking some form of truth. A real past. A real life.
The one thing that Beate could not deliver.
‘Can you see anything yet?’ she asked.
The young man furrowed his broad, pale brow in concentration. Beate had noticed how attractive he was from their first meeting. And she had had the strangest feeling that she had known him from somewhere. At one time, she could have had him. At one time, she could have had any man. Any
thing
.
The world had rolled itself out before her, wide and fresh and clean, waiting for Beate’s footfall. Then it had all turned to dust.
‘I see something,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Yes, I see something. A place. I am standing in front of a large building and I am waiting for something or someone.’
‘Is this in this lifetime, or a time before?’
‘Before. It was before.’
‘Describe the building.’
‘It is large. Three storeys high. It has a wide front with several doors. I am standing outside it.’ The young man kept his eyes closed, but suddenly there was a great urgency in his voice. ‘I see it. I see it all so clearly.’
‘What do you see?’ Beate glanced again at the wall clock. If he had seen into a previous life, then it had better be a short one or he would be paying for an extra hour.
‘Two lives. Three lives, counting this one. It is all so clear to me and I see each one as if I were remembering yesterday.’
‘Three lives, you say?’
‘Three lives, but one life. A continuum. Death was not the end: it was merely a brief interruption. A pause.’
That, thought Beate, I have got to remember. ‘A continuum with death as a brief interruption.’ Brilliant. I can use that. ‘Go on,’ she urged her young client. ‘Tell me about your first life. Is that when you stood outside this large building?’
‘No … no, that was the second time. That was the time before.’
‘Tell me about your first life. Where are you? Who are you?’ Beate struggled to keep the impatience from her voice.
‘It’s not important. My first life was simply preparation … I was being readied.’
‘When was this?’
‘A millennium ago. Longer. I was sacrificed and laid in the bog. Under the muddy water. Then they laid hazel and birch branches over me and weighted them with stones. It was so cold. So dark. Ten hundred years in the dark and cold. Then I was reborn.’
‘As whom were you reborn?’
‘Someone …’ The client’s frown deepened. ‘Someone … you
knew
.’
‘
I
knew you?’ Beate looked down on her client and studied the face. His eyes remained closed. For some reason his claim had disturbed her. It was all nonsense, of course, but she thought back again to their first session. To begin with she had thought she recognised him, that she knew him from somewhere. But then she realised that he merely reminded her of someone else, someone whom, at that time, she could not quite identify.
‘I am there now. The building. I can see it clearly …’ The young man ignored her question. He opened his eyes and looked up towards the ceiling, but his gaze was fixed on somewhere, sometime else. ‘It’s a railway station. I can see that now. I am standing at a railway station. It is a small station but the building behind me is large and old. In front of me, beyond the opposite platform, the land is empty and flat. There is a wide river …’
He fell silent for a moment and an expression of intense concentration spread across his features. Then he shook his head.
‘Sorry …’ He looked at her directly for the first time since the session began. He smiled apologetically. ‘It’s gone.’
‘You said you knew me in this previous life.’
Her client spun his legs around and sat up on the edge of the therapy bench. ‘I dunno … it was just a feeling I got. I can’t explain it or anything.’
Beate considered his words for a moment. Then she looked at her watch. The hour was up.
‘Well, maybe we can pick up where we left off with our next session.’ She checked her diary and confirmed the date and time. Her client rose and put on his jacket. ‘I think the session has done you good this week,’ she said. ‘You look more relaxed than you have since you first started to come here.’
‘I
am
more relaxed.’ He smiled as he walked to the door. ‘I feel as if I’m approaching a very special, very peaceful state of mind. The Japanese have a name for it …’
‘Oh?’ Beate held open the door for him. Her noon appointment would be there at any moment.
‘Yes,’ he said as he left. ‘They call it
zanshin
.’
The café at the Winterhude ferry point was reasonably close to the Police Presidium. Fabel often used it as somewhere he could gather his team to discuss a case less formally: a change of scene, away from the Murder Commission. When Markus Ullrich had called Fabel that morning, Fabel had suggested that they should meet at the Fährhaus café.
Fabel arrived early and ordered a coffee from the waiter who knew him as a regular customer but had no idea that he was a murder detective. Fabel liked the fact that most people would never think of him as a policeman, and he never volunteered the information freely. It was as if he had two identities. Two
separate lives occupying two separate Hamburgs: the city he lived in and loved, and the city he policed. He often wondered if, even after all this time, he belonged in the profession. He was good at his job, he knew that, but each new case, each new cruelty inflicted on one human being by another, chipped away at him. Not for the first time, Fabel was lost in thought about what might have been, who he might have been, had he not taken the decision to join the Polizei Hamburg. And all the time he was aware of Roland Bartz’s business card in his wallet: a ticket back to a normal life.
He snapped out of his reverie when he spotted the squat form of Ullrich coming down the steps to the café. The BKA man was dressed in a dark business suit with a dark shirt and tie and carried a small executive attaché case. He could have been coming to sell Fabel insurance. Fabel thought back to his meeting with Professor van Halen, the business-suited geneticist: it seemed as though the whole world was becoming ‘corporate’.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ he said as he shook Ullrich’s hand. ‘I just thought there was an off chance that you might have something on file about either or both of the murder victims, given their backgrounds.’
The two men sat down and further conversation was suspended while the waiter came over and took their orders.
‘I’ve some interesting stuff for you, Herr Fabel.’ Ullrich held the attaché case across his lap and patted it, as if hinting at treasures hidden within. Then, very deliberately, he set the case down on the floor beside him in a clear ‘for later’ gesture. ‘We have quite a bit to discuss, but before we do I just wanted
to clear the air about the situation with Maria Klee … I hope you didn’t think that I was being too hard on her. But she did compromise a major operation.’
‘I would have much preferred it if you had discussed the matter with me first, instead of going directly to Criminal Director van Heiden.’
Ullrich shrugged. ‘I didn’t really have the opportunity to deal with it that way. The operation’s commanders – especially, I have to say, those from the Polizei Hamburg’s LKA Six – were incensed that Frau Klee was trampling all over their case. It has been a highly sensitive operation.’