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  Fabel watched his team through the partition. This was the machine that would be brought to bear on hunting down Paula’s killer. These were the people who would be sent off in different directions, to perform their separate allocated tasks, until they were all brought together in the final moment of resolution. It fell to Fabel to maintain the overview, to see beyond the detail. It was his judgement, his arrangement of the disparate investigative elements, that would determine whether they found Paula’s killer or not. It was a responsibility that he tried not to dwell on, because when he did he found it almost unbearable. It was at such times that he questioned the choices he had made. Would it have been so bad to settle for a life as an academic in some provincial university? Or as a teacher of English or history in a Frisian school? Maybe if he had, his marriage to Renate would have survived. Maybe he would have slept through each night without dreams of the dead.

  Anna Wolff knocked at the door and entered. Her pretty face with its dark eyes and too-red lips was clouded with a gloomy expression. She nodded gravely in response to Fabel’s unspoken question.

  ‘Yep. Paula Ehlers went missing on her way home from school. I searched the database and then spoke to the Norderstedt Polizeidirektion. Her age fits as well. But there is something that really doesn’t fit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Like I say, her age would fit with the dead girl … now. Paula Ehlers went missing three years ago, when she was thirteen.’

  4.

  7.50 p.m., Wednesday, 17 March: Norderstedt, north of Hamburg

  It normally only took about half an hour to drive from the Präsidium to Norderstedt, but Fabel and Anna Wolff stopped on the way to get something to eat. The Rasthof café was all but empty, apart from a couple of drivers who, Fabel assumed, belonged to the lorry and large panel van parked outside. The truckers sat together at the same table, silently and gloomily eating their way through a mountain of food. Fabel idly observed the two drivers, both of whom had the sag-belly builds of lethargic middle age; but, as he passed them, Fabel noticed that one of the drivers could only have been in his late twenties or early thirties. There was something about such a waste of youth that depressed Fabel. He thought of what lay ahead of him and Anna: of a life and youth not wasted but stolen, and a family left broken and lacking wholeness. Of all of the things he had to deal with as a murder detective, the thing that got to him most was the homes of the missing. Particularly where the missing person was a child. Such households always had a sense of the incomplete; of the unresolved. More often than not, there was simply the overwhelming sense of waiting: waiting for the husband, the wife, the son or the daughter to come home. Or for someone to end the waiting by telling them that the missing was now the dead. Someone like Fabel.

  Fabel and Anna Wolff took a table at the end of the café furthest from the truckers, where their conversation wouldn’t be overheard. Anna ordered a Bratwurst hot dog and coffee. Fabel took an open sandwich and some coffee. When they were seated, Anna laid the file she had brought in from the car on to the table, turning it around so that it was the right way up for Fabel to read.

  ‘Paula Ehlers. She was thirteen when she disappeared – in fact she went missing the day after her thirteenth birthday – which would make her sixteen now. Like the note said, she lived in Buschberger Weg, in the Harksheide district of Norderstedt. She lived about only ten minutes’ walk from her school, and according to the report from the Norderstedt KriPo, she disappeared at some point during that ten-minute walk.’

  Fabel flipped open the file. The face that smiled out at him from the photograph was that of a freckled, smiling girl. A child. Fabel frowned. He thought back to the body on the beach; to the face that had stared blankly at him from the cold sand. He compared the pre- and post-puberty Paulas. There was a common architecture to the faces, but the eyes seemed different. Was it just the difference between the androgyny of childhood and the near-womanhood of a sixteen-year-old? Were they the changes wrought in a face by three years of God knows what kind of hardship? The eyes. He had stared so long into the dead girl’s eyes as she had lain, dead but as if alive, on the beach at Blankenese. It was the eyes that bothered Fabel.

  Anna took a mouthful of Bratwurst before continuing. When she spoke she tapped the file with the finger of one hand while holding the other hand before her mouth as if to shield the file from crumbs.

  ‘The Norderstedt police did all the right things. They even carried out a re-enactment of her walk home. When they still didn’t find her after a month they gave the case dual status as a missing person and possible murder.’

  Fabel flipped through the rest of the file. Brauner had sent up half a dozen enlarged photocopies of the note. One was now pasted to the incident board in the main Mordkommission office; another lay in the file before Fabel.

  ‘After a year, they relaunched the case,’ Anna continued. ‘They stopped and questioned everyone walking or driving through the area on the anniversary of Paula’s disappearance. Again, despite their best efforts, nothing. It was a Kriminalkommissar Klatt, from the Norderstedt KriPo who ran the investigation. I phoned him this afternoon … he’s basically put himself at our disposal, even given us his home address if we want to call in after we’ve spoken to the Ehlers. According to Klatt, there were no real leads at all, although Klatt said he did look very closely at one of Paula’s teachers …’ Anna turned the file partly back towards her and flicked through the pages of the report that the Norderstedt police had faxed to the Präsidium. ‘Yes … a Herr Fendrich. Klatt has admitted he had nothing on Fendrich, other than an uneasy gut feeling he had about the relationship between Fendrich and Paula.’ Fabel stared at the freckled face in the photograph. ‘But she was only thirteen …’

  Anna made a ‘you should know better’ face. Fabel sighed: it was a naive, even stupid comment to have made. After more than a decade leading a murder squad, there was little about what people were capable of that should surprise him, least of all the possibility of a paedophile teacher becoming fixated on one of his charges.

  ‘But Klatt couldn’t find anything concrete on which to base his suspicions?’ asked Fabel. Anna had taken another mouthful and shook her head.

  ‘He questioned him more than once.’ Anna spoke through her food, again shielding her lips with her fingertips. ‘But Fendrich started to make noises about harassment. Klatt had to back right off. To be fair to Fendrich, in the absence of any other investigative route to follow, I get the impression there was a fair amount of clutching at straws.’

  Fabel looked out of the window at the double image of the illuminated car park and his own darkly reflected face. A Mercedes pulled up and a couple in their thirties got out. The man opened the back door and a girl of about ten stepped out and automatically took her father’s hand. It was an instinctive and habitual gesture: the innate expectation that children have to be protected. Fabel turned back to Anna.

  ‘I’m not convinced it’s the same girl.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not saying it isn’t. It’s just that I’m not sure. There are differences. Especially the eyes.’

  Anna leaned back in her seat and pursed her lips. ‘Then it’s one hell of a coincidence, Chef. If it’s not Paula Ehlers then it’s someone who looks hell of a lot like her. And someone who had her name and address in her hand. Like I say, a hell of a coincidence … and if there’s one thing I’ve learned not to believe in, it’s a coincidence.’

  ‘I know. Like I said, it’s just that something doesn’t gel.’

  The B433 runs straight through Norderstedt on its way north into Schleswig-Holstein and into Denmark. Harksheide lies to the north of the town centre and Buschberger Weg is to the right of the B433. As they approached the turn-off for Buschberger Weg, Fabel noted that the school Paula attended lay further up the main road, ahead and to the left. Paula would have crossed this busy thoroughfare to get home, and might have walked along its length for a while. This was where she had been taken. On one s
ide or the other: more than likely on the Hamburg-bound carriageway.

  It was as Fabel had expected. There was a dark electricity in the Ehlerses’ household: something between anticipation and dread. The house itself was the most ordinary of dwellings: a single-storey bungalow with a steep red-tiled roof: the type of home you see from the Netherlands to the Baltic coast, from Hamburg to the northern tip of Danish Jutland. An immaculate, well-stocked but unimaginative garden framed the house.

  Frau Ehlers was in her early forties. Her hair had clearly been as blonde as her daughter’s, but the decades had muted its lustre by a tone. She had the pale Nordic look of a Schleswig-Holsteiner, the people of Germany’s slender northern neck: light blue eyes and skin that had been prematurely aged by the sun. Her husband was an earnest-looking man whom Fabel placed at around fifty. He was tall and a touch too lean: schlaksig, as they say in Northern Germany. He too was fair, but a further tone duller than his wife’s colouring. His eyes were a darker blue and shadowed against the pale skin. In the moment of introduction, Fabel processed the images before him with the images in his memory: the Ehlers, the girl in the file photograph, the girl in the sand. Again something snagged in his brain: some barely perceptible inconsistency.

  ‘Have you found our little girl?’ Frau Ehlers searched Fabel’s face with an urgency and intensity he found almost unbearable.

  ‘I don’t know, Frau Ehlers. It’s possible. But we need you or Herr Ehlers to make a positive identification of the body.’

  ‘So there’s a chance it isn’t Paula?’ There was a hint of defiance in Herr Ehlers’s tone. Fabel caught Anna’s glance out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘I suppose so, Herr Ehlers, but there’s every indication that it may well be Paula. The victim is taller than Paula was when she went missing, but her height is well within the growth you would expect over the last three years. And there was some evidence that seemed to link her with this address.’ Fabel did not want to tell them that the killer had tagged his victim.

  ‘How did she die?’ asked Frau Ehlers.

  ‘I don’t think we should go into that until we make sure it really is Paula,’ said Fabel. The desperation in Frau Ehlers’s expression seemed to intensify. Her lower lip trembled. Fabel relented. ‘The victim we found was strangled.’

  Frau Ehlers’s body was racked with silent sobs. Anna stepped forward and put her arm around her shoulder, but Frau Ehlers drew back. There was an awkward silence. Fabel found himself sweeping his gaze around the room. There was a large photograph framed on the wall. It had obviously been taken with an ordinary camera and had been enlarged more than it should have been. The texture was grainy and the girl at the centre of the picture gazed out with flash-reddened pupils. It was Paula Ehlers; she was smiling up at the camera from behind a large birthday cake that was emblazoned with the number thirteen. Fabel felt a chill as he realised that she looked out at him from the day before she was snatched from her family.

  ‘When can we see her?’ asked Herr Ehlers.

  ‘We’ve arranged for the local police to take you down tonight, if that’s okay.’ It was Anna who answered. ‘We will meet you there. A car will pick you up about 9.30 p.m. I know it’s late …’

  Herr Ehlers cut her off. ‘That’s all right. We’ll be waiting.’

  On the way back to the car, Fabel could sense a tension in Anna’s movements. And she was silent.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ She looked back at the sad little house with its tended garden and its red roof. ‘That was tough. I don’t know how they have stood it so long. All that waiting. All that hope. They have depended on us to find their little girl and, when we do, we can’t even bring her back alive.’

  Fabel bleeped off the alarm and locks and waited until they were both in the car before answering. ‘I’m afraid that’s the way it works out. Happy endings belong in movies, not in real life.’

  ‘But it was as if they hated us.’

  ‘They do,’ said Fabel resignedly. ‘And who can blame them? Like you say, we were supposed to bring her back alive, not tell them we found her body abandoned somewhere. They were depending on us to deliver the happy ending.’ Fabel started the engine. ‘Anyway, let’s stay focused on the case. It’s time we called in on Kriminalkommissar Klatt.’

  Norderstedt has an officially split personality. It is part of Greater Hamburg, its phone numbers share the Hamburg 040 prefix, and when Fabel and Anna drove up through Fuhlsbüttel and Langenhorn into Norderstedt there had been a sense of an unbroken metropolitan continuum. Yet the Polizei Hamburg has no jurisdiction here: it is the Landespolizei of Schleswig-Holstein that operate in Norderstedt. However, because of their close proximity and the continual overlapping of cases, the Norderstedt police had more contact with the Polizei Hamburg than with their own force in the gentle landscapes and small towns of Schleswig-Holstein. Anna had phoned ahead to arrange for Kommissar Klatt to meet with them at the Polizeirevier Norderstedt-Mitte in the town’s Rathausallee.

  When they arrived at the Polizeirevier, they were not conducted, as they expected, to the main Kriminalpolizei offices; instead a young female uniformed officer led them to a stark, windowless interview room. The female SchuPo asked them if they would like some coffee, to which they both said yes. Anna glanced gloomily around the room and, after the SchuPo had left, she and Fabel exchanged meaningful glances.

  ‘Now I know what it must be like to be a suspect,’ said Anna.

  Fabel gave an ironic smile. ‘Quite. Do you think we’re being told something?’

  Anna didn’t get a chance to answer: the interview-room door swung open and a man in his early thirties entered. He was shortish but powerfully built and had a big, friendly but forgettable face fringed with dark hair and a stubbly beard. He smiled broadly at both Hamburg officers and introduced himself as Kriminalkommissar Klatt. He placed the file he had brought under his arm on the interview-room table and indicated that Anna and Fabel should be seated.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve been stuck in here,’ said Klatt. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t my usual location. I’m actually stationed at the Europaallee Revier, but I thought it would be easier for you to find your way here. They are doing me a favour … but I’m afraid our accommodation is a little more modest than I expected.’ He sat down. The geniality on his face was washed away by a more sombre expression. ‘I believe you’ve found Paula …’

  ‘The truth is, Kommissar Klatt, we won’t know for sure until the parents make a positive ID of the body … but yes, it looks like it.’

  ‘It was always just a matter of time.’ There was a resigned sadness on Klatt’s broad face. ‘But you always hope that this is the one you’ll bring back alive.’

  Fabel nodded. Klatt’s sentiments echoed his own. The only difference was that Klatt had a chance: on the whole, he dealt with the living, while Fabel’s job as a murder detective meant that someone had to die for him to become involved. For a fleeting moment Fabel wondered what it would be like to transfer back to a general KriPo office. The female officer returned with the coffee.

  ‘Did you think there was a chance you’d find her alive?’ asked Anna.

  Klatt thought for a moment. ‘No, I suppose not. You know the statistics. If we don’t find them within the first twenty-four hours, then the chances are that they’re never coming back. It’s just that Paula was my first missing kid. I got involved. Maybe too involved. It was tough to see a family in so much pain.’

  ‘She was an only child?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No, there’s a brother … Edmund. An older brother.’

  ‘We didn’t see him at the Ehlerses’ home,’ said Fabel.

  ‘No. He’s about three years older. He’s nineteen or twenty now. He’s doing his national service in the Bundeswehr.’

  ‘I take it you checked him out thoroughly.’ Fabel made it a statement, not a question. Whenever there’s a murder, the first rank of potential suspects is the victim’s immediate family. Fabel
was being careful not to suggest that Klatt didn’t know his job. If Klatt was annoyed, he showed no indication of it.

  ‘Of course. We got a full account of his movements that day. All corroborated. And we went over them again and again. What’s more, he was truly worried sick about his sister. You just can’t act as well as that.’

  Yes, you can, thought Fabel. He had seen countless genuinely distressed lovers, friends or relatives of a victim who had turned out to be their killer. But he had no doubt that Klatt had examined Paula Ehlers’s family thoroughly.

  ‘But you did suspect Paula’s teacher …’ Anna checked through her own copy of the file.

  ‘Fendrich. He was Paula’s German teacher. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was a suspect … it’s just that there was something about him that didn’t gel. But again he was pretty much in the clear as far as an alibi is concerned.’

  Klatt went through the report with Fabel and Anna. It was clear that much of this investigation had etched itself into Klatt’s brain. Fabel knew what it was like to have a case like that: nights where he had desperately sought sleep yet was doomed to gaze up at the dark ceiling, unanswered questions swirling with images of the dead, the distraught and the suspected in the vortex of a restless, exhausted mind. When Klatt was finished and Fabel and Anna could think of no more questions, they rose and thanked him for his time.

  ‘I’ll see you later this evening,’ said Klatt. ‘I take it you’ll be there when the Ehlerses identify the body?’

  Anna and Fabel exchanged glances. ‘Yes,’ said Fabel, ‘we’ll be there. You too?’

  Klatt smiled sadly. ‘Yes, if you don’t mind. I’ll bring the parents down to Hamburg. If this is the conclusion of the Paula Ehlers case, then I’d like to be there. I’d like to say goodbye.’