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 skill: 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.
‘Yes,’ said Fabel. ‘Anna told me.’
‘Didn’t you and she …’
‘Yes, Carstens,’ said Fabel, with a sigh. ‘We’ve already been through that. Do we have a description of the woman who attacked Westland?’
‘All he said was she told him she was the Angel. And even that we’ve only got second-hand from the hooker who found him.’
‘How do we know she’s not the “Angel” herself?’
‘From what we can gather she did her best to keep Westland alive until the ambulance arrived. And if this really is the work of the Angel, then the girl who found him would be too young for the original murders. Anyway, despite her trying to hide it behind a tough front she clearly was in shock. We suggested the quack should give her a mild sedative but she told him to stick it.’
‘I want to talk to her anyway.’
‘And Martina?’ Kaminski grinned and cast a look across at Werner and Anna Wolff.
‘And Martina. What about the new CCTV system we’ve installed in the Kiez? Will we have got anything on that?’
‘No,’ said Kaminski. ‘Westland’s attacker was either lucky or very clever – there are no cameras on that street or anywhere near the courtyard. As you know, the compromise we had to make on having cameras in the Kiez was that we had to be selective where we put them – none in a position that could reveal the honourable citizens of our fine city nipping into a peep-show or a sex shop. It means we’ve got a hell of a lot of black holes. But I’ve put a call into the ops room at the Presidium for the recordings from an hour before until an hour after the murder to be collected and analysed. We might get something from the surrounding streets … the attacker making their way to or from the scene. In the meantime, I’m flooding the streets with uniforms …’ Kaminski nodded towards the assembled officers in the lobby. ‘We’ll question every hooker, pimp and club owner in the area. Business isn’t exactly good in the Kiez these days and Westland was hardly an anonymous victim … Something like this is bad for business. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’
‘Thanks, Carstens.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind, Jan, I’ll get back to briefing this lot.’ Kaminski nodded towards the uniforms he had gathered. ‘Unless you want to talk them through what we should be looking for?’
‘No, Carstens, this is your patch,’ said Fabel. He knew that no one knew the Kiez better than Kaminski.
Fabel hung his raincoat up in the station cloakroom, first of all patting his pockets.
‘Lost something?’ asked Anna.
‘Bloody MP3 player …’
Fabel made his way with Werner and Anna through to the rear of the station. Until 2005 Davidwache had been an exclusively uniform-branch station: to keep pace with changing times a new extension had been built onto the rear of the
protected architecture of the original station. It was in this newer part of the building that the detective branch was now based. Kaminski had put the conference room at their disposal for carrying out witness interviews. Fabel looked out of the window over Davidstrasse and part of Friedrichstrasse. He could see the green riot-police vans being driven down to the traffic lights, transporting back to the Police Presidium those protesters whom Davidwache’s tiny cell block could not accommodate.
‘Anna, I think you should lead the questioning of this witness,’ he said. ‘The girl who found Westland, I mean. It sounds like she might be in a pretty bad way.’
‘Why me,
Chef
?’ asked Anna. ‘Because I’m a woman?’
‘I just think she might respond better to you.’ Anna had been on Fabel’s team for five years, but he still found her difficult to handle. To understand. Anna Wolff was much younger-looking than her thirty-one years; she had shortish black hair, was no bigger than one-sixty-two centimetres, and strove for a punky look with her dark mascara, firetruck-red lipstick and oversized biker’s jacket. And, despite Fabel doing his best not to notice, she was very attractive. But, most of all, Anna Wolff was by far the toughest, most aggressive member of his team. As well as the most insubordinate.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Anna with an expression of mock enlightenment. ‘Obviously I’m going to be more understanding. Being female, that is. I’m sorry – I forgot that having a dick presents an insuperable obstacle to sympathy.’
‘I’m not being sexist, Anna. I’m being practical, that’s all.’ Fabel sounded annoyed despite himself. ‘Forget it. I’ll talk to her myself.’
‘I was just saying …’
‘Yes, Anna. You’re always “just saying”. I’ll conduct this interview.’ He looked at his watch. It was two-thirty a.m. ‘Werner, you sit in. Anna, you can go off duty.’
‘Oh, come on … all I said …’
‘I’ll have a team briefing at two p.m. tomorrow. I want to see you in my office first, Anna. Be there at one,’ said Fabel. Anna grabbed her leather jacket from the back of the chair and stormed out.
‘You were a bit rough on her, Jan,’ said Werner when she was gone.
‘She goes too far, Werner. You know that. I’m fed up with every order being challenged or commented on. And I’m sick of complaints coming in about Anna.’
‘We used to call it robust policing, Jan.’
‘Those days are gone, Werner. Long gone. This is the twenty-first century.’
‘You know she has a point, Jan.’ Werner looked unsure of himself. ‘I mean, about the male-female thing. You do tend to get Anna to do the female interviews.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Just that, well, don’t take this the wrong way, but you do tend to treat women like they’re a different species.’
‘How can you say that, Werner? My team has always been balanced. Well, maybe not now. Not since …’
Both men became quiet. The name Maria Klee hung unsaid in the air.
‘Forget it, Jan,’ said Werner a second too late. ‘I just think you should go easy on Anna.’
Fabel’s reply was cut off by a uniformed officer conducting a girl in dark jeans and a navy-blue quilted ski jacket into the room. She clutched a woollen hat and scarf in her hands. Fabel guessed that she was not a street girl: the hookers who worked the streets around Herbertstrasse dressed in bright colours and would stand in groups, holding pastel-coloured umbrellas above their heads whether it was raining or not as a sign to potential customers that they were available for business. Their contrived cheerfulness was so that their customers felt less sordid about the trade they plied.
Fabel kept his smile in place but noticed how young the
girl was: she looked to Fabel not much older than his own daughter, Gabi. He asked her to sit and tried to do what he could to put her at ease. Christa Eisel was pretty – very pretty – with shoulder-length fair hair. From the plainness of her outfit and her obvious attractiveness, Fabel worked out that she must have been a Herbertstrasse window girl who would have changed into a provocative outfit once she was at work. As they talked, Christa kneaded the hat and scarf on her lap, but there was something approaching defiance in her eyes.
‘We’ll need to take that, I’m afraid,’ Fabel said, smiling. Christa looked down at the bloodstained jacket.
‘It’s no good to me now. I’ve left my gloves downstairs. They’re finished too.’ She slipped the jacket off and handed it to Fabel. Werner placed it into a large plastic forensics bag.
‘How long have you been working the area, Christa?’ asked Fabel.
‘Six months. Just weekends. And not every weekend. I have a slot in one of the windows and I do some escort work occasionally.’
‘Are you supporting a habit, Christa? Sorry, but I have to ask.’
The girl looked genuinely taken aback. ‘No … no, of course not.’
‘What do you do? I mean when you’re not working here.’
‘I’m a student. Uni Hamburg.’
‘Oh really? That’s where I went. I studied history. You?’
‘Medicine.’
Fabel stared at Christa for a moment. ‘Medicine? Then why …?’
‘Money. I want to earn extra money.’
‘But this way?’
‘Why not?’ Again defiance glinted in Christa’s eyes. ‘A lot of students do it for extra cash.’
‘You’re clearly a bright, pretty girl with a lifetime of opportunity ahead of you, Christa. I just don’t understand why
you would choose to do what you’re doing. Is this what you think it means to be a woman?’