‘Where is the suspect?’ asked Fabel.
‘Uniform have taken her back to the Presidium for us,’ Werner answered. ‘She seems a pretty disturbed individual … no one could get much sense out of her, other than she wasn’t finished cleaning.’
‘Okay. If we can’t get into the crime scene, then we should maybe head back to the Murder
Commission and interview the suspect. But I’d like Frau Doctor Eckhardt to do a psychological assessment of her first.’ Fabel snapped open his cellphone and hit a pre-set button.
‘Institute for Legal Medicine … Doctor Eckhardt speaking …’ The voice that answered was female: deep and warm and tinged with a soft Bavarian accent.
‘Hi, Susanne … it’s me. How’s it going?’
She sighed. ‘Wishing we were back on Sylt … What’s up?’
Fabel explained about the arrest of the woman in Schanzenviertel and that he wanted Susanne to do an assessment before they interrogated her.
‘I’m tied up until late afternoon. Is four p.m. okay?’
Fabel looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. If they waited for the assessment it would mean they would not get to interview the suspect until the early evening.
‘Okay. But I think we’ll have to have a preliminary with her beforehand.’
‘Fine. I’ll see you at four at the Presidium,’ said Susanne. ‘What’s the suspect’s name?’
‘Just a second …’ Fabel turned to Maria. ‘What name do we have for the woman in custody?’
Maria flipped open her notebook and scanned her notes for a moment.
‘Dreyer …’ she said eventually.
‘Kristina Dreyer?’
Maria looked at Fabel in surprise. ‘Yes. You know her?’
Fabel didn’t answer Maria but spoke again to Susanne. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and snapped his cellphone shut. Then he turned to Maria. ‘Get
Grueber. Tell him I don’t care what stage forensics are at – I want to see the murder scene and the victim. Now.’
It was clear that Grueber recognised the futility of trying to deny the Murder Commission team access to the murder scene. But with a determined authority that did not sit well with his youthful looks he had insisted that, instead of the usual requirement of blue forensic overshoes and latex gloves, the team should all wear the full forensic coverall suits and face masks.
‘She has left us practically nothing,’ explained Grueber. ‘It’s the most thorough clean-up of a scene that I’ve ever come across. She’s gone over almost every surface with a bleach-based cleaner or solution. It destroys practically all forensic traces and degrades any surviving DNA.’
After they were suited up, Grueber led Fabel, Werner and Maria through the hall. Fabel took in each of the rooms as he passed. There was at least one forensic technician working in each. Fabel noticed how tidy and clean the apartment was. It was large and spacious, but had an almost cramped feeling to it that came from the way nearly every free square metre of wall space was devoted to bookshelves. There were magazines carefully stacked on a unit and the hall’s shelves had obviously been used to cope with the overflow of books, vinyl LPs and CDs from the living room. Fabel paused and examined some of the music. There were several Reinhard Mey albums, but they were mostly older stuff that had been reissued on CD.
Hauser had obviously felt the need to hear the protest songs of one generation on the technology of the next. Fabel gave a small laugh of recognition as he noticed a CD of
Ewigkeit
by Cornelius Tamm. Tamm had styled himself as Germany’s Bob Dylan and had enjoyed fair success in the 1960s before taking a spectacular dive into obscurity. Fabel removed a large, glossy-sleeved book from the shelves: it was a collection of Don McCullin’s Vietnam photographs; next to it was a travel book in English and various textbooks on ecology. All was just as you would have expected. Where there was a break in the shelving, any clear wall space had been filled with framed posters. Fabel stopped in front of one: it was a framed black-and-white photograph of a young man with flowing shoulder-length hair and a moustache. He was stripped to the waist and was sitting on a rustic bench, an apple in his hand.
‘Who’s the hippie?’ Werner was now at Fabel’s shoulder.
‘Take a look at the date on the picture: eighteen ninety-nine. This guy was a hippie seventy years before anyone even thought of the concept. This’ – Fabel tapped the glass with his latex-sheathed finger – ‘is Gustav Nagel, patron saint of all German eco-warriors. A century ago he was trying to get Germany to reject industrialisation and militarism, embrace pacifism, become vegetarian and to get back to nature. Mind you, he also wanted us to stop using capital letters with nouns. I don’t know how that fits into a green agenda. Maybe less ink.’
Fabel returned Nagel’s clear-eyed, defiant stare for a moment, and then followed Grueber and the others to the corner of the hall.
The main focus of the forensic team’s attention was at the far end of the hall and in the bathroom itself.
‘We found a couple of plastic bin bags here,’ explained Grueber as they approached the bathroom door. ‘We’ve removed a couple of items separately but the bags are back at Butenfeld.’ Grueber used the shorthand for the forensics unit at the Institute for Legal Medicine, the same facility in which Susanne worked as a criminal psychologist. The Institute was part of the University Clinic at Butenfeld, to the north of the city. ‘One of our finds was this …’ Grueber beckoned to one of the technicians who handed him a large square transparent plastic forensics bag. The plastic was thick and semi-rigid: inside, spread flat, was a disc of thick skin and hair. A human scalp. Viscous puddles of blood had gathered in pockets between the bag’s plastic walls and in its corners.
Fabel examined the contents without taking the bag from Grueber. He ignored the nausea that churned in his gut and the disgusted muttering of Werner behind him. The hair was red. Too red. Grueber read Fabel’s mind.
‘The hair has been treated with dye. And there’s evidence of the dye fresh on the scalp and contiguous skin areas. I can’t tell yet whether the killer used hair dye or some other type of pigment. Whatever was used, my guess is that it was done immediately before the scalp was removed from the body.’
‘Speaking of which … where is it?’ Fabel snapped his attention away from the magnetic horror of the scalp. After all these years in the Murder Commission, after so many cases, he still often found
himself left shocked and uncomprehending by the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another.
Grueber nodded. ‘This way – you can guess this isn’t going to be too pleasant to look at …’
Fabel could tell as soon as they set foot in the bathroom that Grueber really had not exaggerated the difficulty they faced forensically. There was absolutely nothing, other than the body-shaped package next to the bath, that would have given any hint that this was a murder scene. Even the air smelled bleach-rinsed and slightly lemony. Every surface gleamed.
‘Kristina Dreyer may be our murder suspect,’ said Werner grimly, ‘but I think I’ll find out what her hourly rate is … we could do with her over at my place.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Maria, without the slightest hint that she had picked up on Werner’s humour. ‘She really is a professional cleaner. She works for herself and had a carload of cleaning materials parked outside … Hence the efficiency with which she tidied this lot up.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got.’
It was as if the forensic specialists had added another layer of bandages to a mummy. The killer had already wrapped the body in the shower curtain and bound it up with parcel tape. Now the forensic technicians had added individually numbered strips of Taser tape to every square centimetre of the outer shower curtain and parcel tape. The body had been photographed from every angle, and would now be moved back to the forensics lab at Butenfeld. Once
there, the Taser would be removed strip by strip, and transferred to clear perspex sheets and any forensic traces would therefore be secured for analysis. If the body underneath the shower curtain was discovered to be wearing clothes, the process would be repeated to gather any fibre or other traces from the clothing.
Fabel gazed down at the man-shaped package. ‘Open up the face. I want to make sure this is Hauser.’
Grueber eased away the shower curtain. Underneath, the head and shoulders were encased in black plastic. Fabel gave an impatient nod and Grueber delicately cut through the parcel tape and exposed the face and head. Hans-Joachim Hauser gazed out at them with clouded-glass eyes beneath his frowning brow. Fabel had expected to feel another lurch in his gut, but instead he felt nothing as he looked down at the thing before him. And that was what it was: a thing. An effigy. There was something about the disfigurement of the head, about the exposed bone of the dead man’s cranium, about the blood-drained waxiness of the flesh on Hauser’s face, that robbed the corpse of its humanity.
Fabel had also expected to experience some form of recognition: Hans-Joachim Hauser had been very much involved in the radical movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Hauser had been photographed with the appropriate luminaries of the radical Left over the years – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Petra Kelly, Joschka Fischer, Bertholdt Müller-Voigt – but, despite his best efforts, he had lingered somewhere between the centre and the fringes of the media spotlight. Fabel thought how people seemed trapped in a time: how some found it impossible to move on. The
image of Hauser filed in Fabel’s memory was that of a slim, almost girlish young man with long, thick hair, berating the Hamburg Senate in the 1980s. Nothing in the grey, waxy and slightly puffy flesh of the dead face gave Fabel a point of reference from which to retrieve the earlier Hans-Joachim Hauser. Fabel even tried to imagine the corpse with hair. It didn’t help.
‘Nice,’ said Werner, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth. ‘Very nice. A cleaning lady who takes scalps. I don’t suppose she’s a Red Indian, by any chance.’
‘Scalping is an ancient European tradition,’ said Fabel. ‘We were at it millennia before the Native Americans. They probably learned it from European settlers.’
Grueber eased more of the shower-curtain wrapping from the body, exposing Hauser’s neck. ‘Take a look at this …’
There was a wide sweeping gash across the throat. The edge was clean and unbroken, almost surgical, and Fabel could see a stratum of marbled grey and white flesh beneath the skin. The cut was also bloodless: Kristina Dreyer had washed the body and what Fabel could see of it had the look of rinsed death that he associated with mortuary bodies.
Fabel turned to Maria and Werner. He was about to say something when he noticed that Maria was gazing fixedly at Hauser’s mutilated head and neck. It was not a horror-struck stare, nor was it her usual look of cool appraisal: it was more a blank, expressionless gaze, as if what was left of Hans-Joachim Hauser held her hypnotised.
‘Maria?’ Fabel frowned questioningly. Maria seemed to snap back from some distant place.
‘It must have been very sharp …’ she said, dully. ‘The blade, I mean. To cut so cleanly, it must have been razor sharp.’
‘Yes, it was,’ answered Grueber, still crouched at the body. Fabel noticed that although Grueber delivered a professional answer, there was a hint of personal concern in his expression as he looked up at Maria. ‘It might have been a surgical blade, or even an open razor.’
Fabel straightened up. He thought about the woman who had been taken into custody. About a face he vaguely remembered from more than a decade ago.
‘This is all so methodical,’ he said at last. He turned to Werner. ‘You sure the suspect, Kristina Dreyer, was actually caught cleaning this up? I mean, we know for sure that she did all this?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Werner. ‘In fact, the uniform unit had to restrain her. She wouldn’t stop cleaning, even after they arrived.’
Fabel scanned the bathroom once more. It shone as sterile and as cold as an operating theatre. ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ he said at last.
‘What doesn’t?’ asked Maria.
‘Why all of the mutilation? The scalping, the overdone cut to the throat. It all seems significant … as if there’s a message in it.’
‘There usually is,’ said Grueber, who had now straightened his gangly frame and was standing beside the three detectives. They all gazed down, gathered in a semicircle, at the flesh-and-bone effigy of what had once been a human being. When they spoke, it was as if they addressed the corpse: a silent moderator through whom they could better transmit their thoughts. ‘And the whole point of scalping is that you
take
scalps. I don’t understand why your killer would scalp her victim and then put the scalp in a bin liner with the intention of dumping it.’
‘That’s my point,’ said Fabel. ‘This all points to some kind of message. Some kind of sick symbolism. But it’s almost always done so that others may bear witness to it. It’s hardly ever done especially for the victim, who’s usually dead before the mutilation.’
Maria nodded. ‘So why screw it all up? Why do all of that and then go to so much trouble to clean up the crime scene and hide the body? And why just dump your trophy?’
‘Exactly. I want us to get back to the Presidium. I need to talk to Kristina Dreyer. This just isn’t fitting together for me.’
Just then, one of the forensic technicians called over to Grueber. Fabel, Maria and Werner gathered behind Grueber as he crouched down to examine the area indicated by the forensic technician, on the seam between the tiled bath side and the floor. Whatever it was, Fabel couldn’t see it.
‘What are we looking at?’
The technician took out a pair of surgical tweezers, eased something free and held it up. It was a hair.
‘I don’t get it …’ said the technician. ‘I checked here before and completely missed this.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s easy to do,’ said Grueber. ‘I was over here earlier myself and didn’t see it either. The important thing is that you found it.’
Fabel strained to see the hair. ‘I’m surprised you discovered it at all.’
Grueber took the tweezers from the technician and held up the hair to the light. He flipped open a magnifying lens from its case and peered at the hair like a jeweller appraising a valuable diamond.