‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Leonard?’ The bound man stared uncomprehendingly at the killer.
‘Do you believe in reincarnation? It’s not a complicated question.’
Leonard shook his head vigorously. His eyes were wide, wild. Scared. They searched the face of his assailant for any sign of sympathy or compassion, for anything approaching a human emotion.
‘You don’t? Well, you’re in the minority, Leonard. The vast majority of the population of this world include reincarnation in their belief systems. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism … many cultures find it natural and logical to have a belief in some kind
of return of the soul. In villages in Nigeria you’ll often come across an
ogbanje
… a child who is the reincarnation of someone who died in childhood themselves. Sorry … you don’t mind if I talk while I’m getting everything ready, do you?’ The dark-haired man stood up and removed a large square sheet of black polyurethane from the holdall; he then took out a black plastic bag. Behind his gag, Leonard made an incomprehensible noise that the killer seemed to take as assent and he continued with his lecture.
‘Anyway, even Plato believed that we existed as higher beings and were reincarnated in this life as a punishment for falling from grace – something that was part of early Christian belief, actually, until it was excised and branded as heresy. If you think about it, reincarnation is easy to accept because we have all had experiences that cannot be explained any other way.’ The killer spread out the square plastic sheet on the floor and stepped onto it. He removed his jacket and his shirt, folded them carefully and put them into the black bag. ‘It happens to us all … we meet someone that we have never met before in our lifetime, yet we experience that strange sense of recognition or we feel that we have known them for years and years.’ He took off his shoes. ‘Or we will go somewhere new, somewhere we have never been before, yet we feel an unaccountable familiarity with the place.’ He unbuckled his belt, then removed his trousers, which he placed with his shoes in the bag. He now stood on the black square in only his socks and underwear. His body was pale, thin and angular. Almost boyish. Fragile. From the holdall he took out a white one-piece coverall suit, like those used by forensic experts at the scene of a crime, except this one seemed to
be coated with a plastic sheen. Leonard suddenly felt sick as he realised that it was the kind of protective clothing used by abattoir workers. ‘You see, Leonard, we’ve all been here before. In one form or another. And sometimes we come back, or are sent back, to resolve some outstanding issue or another from a previous life. I have been sent back.’
The man took a hairnet from the holdall, tucked his thick dark hair in it and then pulled the hood of his coverall up and over it, pulling the drawstring closed until it formed a circle tight around his face. He covered his feet with blue plastic overshoes before starting to clear a space in the centre of the room, moving furniture and Leonard’s few personal belongings into the corners with great care, as if afraid of breaking anything. ‘Don’t worry, Leonard, I’ll put everything back the way it was …’ He smiled a cold, empty smile. ‘When we’re finished.’
He paused, looking around the room as if inspecting its readiness for whatever he had planned next. He carefully refolded the square of black plastic and replaced it in the holdall.
Leonard felt the sting of tears in his eyes. He thought of his mother. About how disappointed she had been in him. About how he had stolen to hurt her.
The killer unfolded a second heavy-duty sheet of black plastic, much larger than the first, and laid it on the space he had cleared. He then came around behind Leonard, grabbed the back of his chair, tilted it backwards and started to ‘walk’ it across the floor on its two rear legs onto the black plastic. Leonard could now feel and hear his own pulse, the blood rushing in his ears, his lips throbbing against the insulating tape gag.
‘Anyway,’ continued the killer. ‘It’s not simply that I believe in reincarnation. I know it to be a fact. A law of nature, as sound and incontrovertible as gravity.’ He took a velvet roll-pouch from his holdall and placed it on the black plastic next to the chair. ‘You see, Leonard, I have been given a gift. The gift of memory – memory beyond birth, beyond death. Memory of my past lives. I have a mission to fulfil. And that mission is to avenge an act of betrayal in my last life. That was why I was there that night when you saw me, when you were skulking around behind Hauser’s apartment. That was the very beginning of my quest. Then, the next night, I killed Griebel. But there is more that I have to do, Leonard. Much more. I can’t let you interfere with that.’
The dark-haired man took a couple of steps back and examined his victim, bound tightly to his chair. He adjusted the black plastic sheeting, smoothing it flat. Then he scanned the walls of the room, seeming to assess them. He moved across to one wall and ripped down a poster of an American rock group, revealing the stain that Leonard, in an uncharacteristically house-proud moment, had sought to conceal. Again the killer stepped back and surveyed the wall.
‘This will do nicely.’ He turned back to Leonard and smiled broadly, revealing his perfect white teeth. ‘Do you know, Leonard, that scalping was part of the European cultural tradition since its very beginnings?’
Leonard screamed, but his cries were reduced to frantic high-pitched mumbling behind the gag of insulation tape.
‘All of those who have contributed their blood to our lineage did it: the Celts, the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths and, of course, the ancient Scythians on
the lonely, empty Steppes that were the cradle of Europe. To take the scalps of those who had succumbed to us in battle, or simply to take the scalp of a personal enemy whom we had killed in single combat to settle a disagreement or grudge, is at the very heart of our cultural identity. We were scalp-takers and we did so with pride. Have you heard of an ancient Greek historian called Herodotus?’
There was no answer from Leonard other than the desperate, body-racking sobs of a man facing a terrible death protesting against his bonds and gag. The killer took no notice and continued to talk in his relaxed, chatty manner, as if he were at a dinner party. It was his calm, his nonchalance, that Leonard feared most: it would have been easier to understand, to deal with, if the man who was about to take his life had been enraged, or afraid, or in any form of heightened emotion.
‘Herodotus is considered the father of history. He travelled the then-known civilised world and wrote about the peoples he encountered. But Herodotus also wandered into the unknown lands, the wild lands, beyond the cultured world. He visited the Ukraine, which was the heart of the Scythian kingdom, and documented the lives of those he found there.’
The killer examined the wall again where he had torn down the poster. He paused for a moment to remove the tacks and fragments of poster left there, brushing the stained surface with his latex-gloved hand. ‘According to Herodotus, Scythian warriors would scrape away all the flesh from the inside of the scalps they had taken and would then continuously rub them between their hands until they became soft and supple. Once they had done this, they would
use the scalps at feasts as napkins, hanging them on the bridles of their horses between uses. The more scalp-napkins a warrior had, the greater his status among the others. According to Herodotus, many of the most successful warriors would even sew their collected scalps together to make cloaks.’
Something like awe fleeted across the killer’s otherwise empty face. ‘And we are not talking about some remote land and distant people. This was
our
culture. This was where we all have roots.’ He paused and seemed to be deep in thought for a moment. ‘Think of this … think of a hall filled with ninety, maybe a hundred people. It is not a lot. And each person in this room is as closely related as it is possible to be: father and son, mother and daughter. Imagine that, Leonard, but imagine that they are all the same age, ninety generations brought together at the same time of life. Across this room you can see the family similarities. Maybe six, seven, eight generations back you see a face just like yours. That is all that separates you and me from those Scythian warriors, Leonard. Ninety closely related individuals. And the truth is, the truth that I have come to learn, is that it is not just our features, our gestures, our aptitude for certain skills or the propensity for particular talents that are repeated across the generations. We repeat ourselves, Leonard. We are eternal. We come back, time and again. Sometimes our lifetimes even overlap. As mine have. I have been my own father, Leonard. I have seen the same time from two perspectives. And I can remember them both …’
The dark-haired man took the dark blue velvet roll-pouch and unrolled it on the black plastic sheeting. He stood back for a moment, examining his preparations. Leonard looked down at the laid-flat
roll-pouch. On it lay a large knife, its handle and blade forged from a continuous piece of glittering stainless steel. Leonard’s sobbing grew in intensity. He started to struggle wildly but impotently against his bonds. The killer laid his hand gently on Leonard’s shoulder, as if to comfort him.
‘Settle yourself, Leonard. You chose this. Remember you wondered about trying to wrestle the gun from me? Oh yes, Leonard, I could read you like a book. But you decided not to. You chose to hang on to every last second of life, no matter how terrible. Do you want a laugh, Leonard?’ He picked up the gun and held it out towards his captive. ‘It’s not even real. It’s a replica. You consigned yourself to me, to this death, based on the
idea
of a gun. On a lump of functionless metal.’
Behind his gag Leonard wailed. His face was streaked wet with tears.
‘Now, Leonard,’ said the killer without malice. ‘I know that you are not very happy with this life. So now I am going to send you on to your next. But first, do you see the space I cleared on the wall over there? That’s where I’m going to pin up your scalp.’ He paused, ignoring the desperate muffled screaming of his victim, as if he was thinking something through. Then a smile broke across his face: a cold, callous smile of a terrible intensity that did not belong on the hitherto expressionless mask. ‘No … not there … now that I think about it, I have a much, much better place for it …’
Fabel had been awake for twenty-four hours.
All hell had broken loose with the media and with
anyone who had a say in anything in Hamburg. Fabel found himself, once again, having to plan out the course of the investigation while navigating around the twin whirlpools of media attention and political pressure. It was another feature of his work that wore him down: there must have been a time when policing had been much easier, when the only pressure on an investigator had been to detect and apprehend the perpetrator.
Having spent almost all day at the scene, Fabel had come back to the Presidium for a major strategy meeting. All of a sudden, resources ceased to be an issue and Fabel found himself with detectives from across Hamburg allocated to him. He set up a major incident room in the main conference hall, having the incident boards and files moved there from the Murder Commission. A weary Fabel had found himself addressing a fifty-strong audience of detectives, uniform branch commanders and top brass. He had also noticed that Markus Ullrich and a couple of his BKA buddies had come along for the show: Fabel could not now deny that there was a political dimension, and possibly some kind of terrorist element, to the case.
Susanne had driven them home in Fabel’s car. She said that he was too tired to drive and that he needed some sleep. Fabel said that what he needed was a drink. Anna, Henk and Werner had all said they would come along too. It was clear that they needed to take time out and catch their breaths after the events of the last twenty-four hours. Maria, too, agreed to meet at Fabel’s usual pub in Pöseldorf, but she was going to wait for Frank Grueber and they would both take a taxi.
It was nearly ten p.m. by the time they arrived. Bruno, the head barman, greeted Fabel enthusiastically. Fabel shook his hand and smiled a weary ‘it’s been a tough day’ smile. Fabel, Susanne and the team sat at the bar and ordered their drinks. A CD was playing the football song ‘
Hamburg, meine Perle
’ and a group of young people at the far end of the bar were singing along to Hamburg’s unofficial anthem with immense gusto. Their passion seemed to intensify as they delivered the verse that informed Berliners that ‘we shit on you and your song’. It was loud, it was raucous, it was cheerful. Fabel soaked it up. It was the vulgar, ebullient sound of life, of vigour; it was a million miles away from the death realm where he and his officers had spent the last thirty-odd hours. It was what he needed to hear.
Fabel wanted to get drunk. After his sixth beer, he could feel its effects; he was aware of the leaden deliberateness in his speech and movements that always came with having drunk that little bit too much. He always came to this point. And never beyond it. Tonight, he thought, tonight just get drunk. The truth was that Fabel never felt comfortable when he had had too much alcohol. He had never in his life got really, seriously drunk, even when he had been a student. There had always been a point when he was drinking that his fear of losing control would kick in. When he would become afraid of making a fool of himself.
Maria and Grueber joined them and they all moved away from the bar and its raucous choir and found a table together at the back of the pub. For some reason, Fabel got onto the subject of Gunter Griebel’s field of work and what Dirk had said to him about his experience.
‘Maybe we all come back,’ said Anna – her gloomy expression did not suggest that she relished the concept. ‘Maybe we are all just variations on the same theme and we experience each consciousness as if it were unique.’
‘There’s this wonderful, tragic Italian short story called “The Other Son” by Luigi Pirandello,’ said Susanne. ‘It is all about this Sicilian mother who gives letters to everyone she hears is emigrating to America, so that they can pass them on to her two sons who emigrated years before but from whom she has never heard. The pain of separation that she feels is enormous. But these sons really had not given her a second thought, while she has a third son who has stayed with her and is as loving and devoted as a son can be. Yet she cannot bear to set eyes on him, far less show him any form of affection or love. It emerges that, years before, while the mother was a young woman, a notorious bandit had raided the village with his gang. While there, he had brutally raped her and, as a result, she had become pregnant. As the child grew, despite being a sensitive and caring boy, he developed a massive build and had become the image of his natural father, the bandit. And every time the mother looked at her devoted, loving son, she felt loathing and contempt. He was not his father. But all she saw was the reincarnation of the bandit who had raped her. It is a tragic and beautifully written story. But it is also one that resonates with us, because it’s something we all do. We see continuity in people.’