JF03 - Eternal (10 page)

‘Funny …’

‘What is?’ asked Fabel.

‘This hair is red. Naturally red, not dyed like the scalp. Anyway, it’s too long to have been the victim’s. Does the suspect have red hair?’

‘No,’ answered Fabel, and Maria and Werner exchanged looks. Kristina Dreyer had been taken from the scene before Fabel had arrived.

When Fabel entered the interview room, Kristina Dreyer’s expression was almost one of relief. She sat, small and forlorn, dressed in the too-big white forensic coverall they had given her when they took her own clothes for analysis.

‘Hello, Kristina,’ said Fabel, and drew up a chair next to Werner and Maria. As he did so, he handed Werner a file.

‘Hello, Herr Fabel.’ Tears welled up in Kristina’s dull blue eyes and one escaped across the roughened terrain of her cheekbone. There was a stretched vibrato in her voice. ‘I hoped it would be you. I’ve got all messed up again, Herr Fabel. It’s all gone … crazy … again.’

‘Why did you do it, Kristina?’ asked Fabel.

‘I had to. I had to clear it all up. I couldn’t let it win again.’

‘Let what win?’ asked Maria.

‘The madness. The mess … all that blood.’

Werner, who had been flicking through the file, closed it and leaned back in his chair with an expression that suggested everything had suddenly fallen into place for him.

‘I’m sorry, Kristina,’ said Werner. ‘I didn’t recognise
your name to start with. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?’

Kristina looked to Fabel with a beseeching terror in her eyes. Fabel noticed that, at the same time, she began to tremble, and her breathing became laboured and fast. Fabel had seen frightened suspects before, but there was something body-racking about the terror that seemed suddenly to seize Kristina, and an alarm sounded somewhere in Fabel’s mind.

‘Are you feeling all right, Kristina?’ he asked. She nodded.

‘This isn’t the same. This isn’t the same at all …’ she said to Werner. ‘The last time …’ Her voice trailed off and Fabel noticed that the trembling had become a pronounced shake.

‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ he asked again.

It all happened so fast that Fabel didn’t have time to react. Kristina’s breathing took on an emphatic, urgent stridor; her face first flushed a bright, feverish red and then drained of all colour. She half-rose from her chair and grasped the edges of the table with a grip that turned her detergent-reddened knuckles yellow-white. Each inhalation became a long spasm that convulsed her body, yet her exhalations seemed short and insubstantial. She looked like someone trapped in a vacuum: desperately sucking at the void to fill her screaming lungs. Kristina lurched forward, jackknifing at the waist, her head coming down fast and hard towards the table top. Then, as if tugged at by an invisible rope, she lurched to the right and keeled over sideways. Fabel rushed forward to catch her.

Maria moved so fast that Fabel did not notice her send her chair crashing to the floor. Suddenly
she had shouldered him out of the way and had grabbed Kristina firmly by the upper arms and eased her to the floor. She loosened the zip of Kristina’s coveralls at the neck.

‘A bag …’ Maria barked at Fabel and Werner, who stared down at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Get me a bag. A paper bag, a carrier bag – anything.’

Werner dashed from the room. Fabel kneeled down next to Maria. She took hold of Kristina’s face between her hands and locked stares with her.

‘Listen to me, Kristina, you’re going to be all right. You’re just having a panic attack. Try to control your breathing.’ Maria turned to Fabel. ‘She’s in a state of extreme panic. She’s over-oxygenating her bloodstream … Get a doctor.’

Werner burst back in the room, clutching a brown paper bag. Maria placed it over Kristina’s nose and mouth, clamping it tight. Each gasping breath crumpled the bag in on itself. Eventually something approaching a regular rhythm returned to Kristina’s breathing. Two paramedics came into the interview room and Maria stood up and moved back to let them work.

‘She’ll be all right now,’ she said. ‘But I think you’d better let Frau Doctor Eckhardt carry out her assessment before we re-interview her.

‘That was very impressive,’ said Werner. ‘How did you know what to do?’

Maria shrugged, unsmiling. ‘Basic first aid.’

But, for the second time in a day, there was something about Maria’s body language that gave Fabel a vague feeling of uneasiness.

Fabel, Maria and Werner sat in the Police Presidium canteen, drinking coffee at a table near the wide
window that looked over and down to the Riot Squad barracks across the car park below.

‘So it was your case?’ asked Werner.

‘One of my first in the Murder Commission,’ said Fabel. ‘The Ernst Rauhe case. He was a serious sexual sadist – a serial rapist and murderer who chalked up six victims in the 1980s before he was nailed. He was judged to be criminally insane and they put him in the Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll high-security hospital wing. He’d already been there for several years before I came to the Murder Commission.’

‘He escaped?’ asked Maria.

‘He certainly did …’ It was Werner who answered. ‘I was in uniform at the time and got involved in the manhunt … a lowly grunt traipsing across the moors in search of a lunatic. But he had had help.’

‘Kristina?’

‘Yes.’ Fabel stared at his coffee, swirling its surface with a spoon, as if stirring his memories in the cup. ‘She was a nurse at the hospital. Ernst Rauhe was not particularly intelligent, but he was a consummate manipulator of people. And, as you can see, Kristina doesn’t have the most resilient of personalities. Rauhe persuaded Kristina that she was the love of his life, his salvation. She was absolutely won over by him and became totally convinced that he was innocent of all the charges against him. But, of course, because he had been committed to a mental hospital he would never be believed if he tried to prove it. Or so he claimed.’ Fabel paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘It came out later that Kristina had wanted to campaign for his freedom. But he had convinced her it would be futile and that she needed to hide her support for him from
the world, until they were ready to use it to its best advantage.’

‘And that was by helping him escape …’ said Werner. ‘If I remember correctly, she didn’t just help him escape, she hid him in her apartment.’

‘Oh God …’ said Maria. ‘I remember!’

Fabel nodded. ‘As Werner said, almost every uniform and detective unit in Greater Hamburg, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein searched for him. No one considered that he might have had inside help nor that he had been driven away in comfort from the secure wing. For nearly two weeks every barn, outbuilding and doss-house was turned over. It was over a month later that the hospital got in touch. They had been increasingly concerned about the well-being of one of their nurses. She had been losing weight and had turned up for work with bruises. Then she had failed to come into work at all for several days and hadn’t made any kind of contact. It was then that the hospital worked out that, although it had been limited, she had had some contact with Rauhe. In addition to the weight loss and bruises, colleagues had reported that this nurse’s behaviour had become increasingly strange and furtive in the weeks before her disappearance.’

‘And that nurse was Kristina Dreyer.’ Maria concluded the thought.

Fabel nodded. ‘Our first thought was that Rauhe had stalked her after his escape, having targeted her while a patient; and that he had subsequently abducted and probably murdered her. So the Murder Commission became involved. I took a unit up to Kristina’s flat in Harburg. We heard sounds from inside … whining … so we broke down the door.
And, just as we’d expected, there was a murder scene waiting for us. But it wasn’t Kristina who’d been murdered. She was standing, naked, in the middle of the apartment. She was covered from head to toe with blood. In fact, the whole room was covered in blood. She was holding an axe in her hand and there, on the floor, was what was left of Ernst Rauhe.’

‘Now we’ve got history repeating itself?’ said Maria.

Fabel sighed. ‘I don’t know. It just doesn’t fit. It came out during the investigation that Ernst Rauhe had amused himself during the latter part of his liberty by repeatedly raping and torturing Kristina. She had been a pretty little thing, apparently, but in the last few days he beat her face to a pulp. But it was maybe the psychological torment he inflicted more than the physical abuse that drove her to kill him. He had made her crawl around naked, like a dog. He wouldn’t let her wash. It was awful. Then, repeatedly, he strangled her, always almost to the point of death. She realised that it was only a matter of time before he tired of her. And when he tired of her, she knew that he would murder her, as he had all the others.’

‘So she struck first?’

‘Yes. She hit him in the back of the head with the axe. But she was too small and light and the blow didn’t kill him. When he came at her, she just kept hacking and hacking at him with the axe. Ernst Rauhe eventually bled to death, but the evidence showed that Kristina went on hacking at him long after he was dead. There was blood, flesh and bone all over the place. She had really mashed up his face. At that time it was by far the worst murder scene I had ever attended.’

Maria and Werner sat quiet for a moment, as if transported to the small rented apartment in Harburg, where a younger Fabel had stood, stunned and horrified in a scene from hell.

‘Kristina was never convicted of Rauhe’s murder,’ Fabel continued. ‘It was acknowledged that she had been driven temporarily insane by Rauhe’s sadistic treatment of her and, in any case, had a pretty good reason to believe that he was going to kill her. But she did get six years in Fuhlsbüttel for aiding his escape. If he had actually killed someone else while he’d been at liberty, I doubt if Kristina would have got less than fifteen.’

‘You’re right,’ said Maria eventually. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. As far as we know, Kristina had no involvement with Hauser other than as his weekly cleaner. And we saw the mutilation of the corpse. That took time. It was deliberate and it would have taken premeditation … planning. And it was meant to have some kind of significance. From what you’ve said, when Kristina killed Rauhe it was a frenzy, brought on by a build-up of sustained terror that tipped over into sudden panic or fury. It was all hot blood. Hauser’s killing was clearly planned. Cold-blooded.’

Fabel nodded. ‘That’s what I think. Just look at the attack she just had. She’s clearly highly strung. It doesn’t fit with what we saw at the murder scene.’

‘Hold on,’ said Werner. ‘Aren’t we forgetting the fact that she was caught trying to hide her handiwork … if you’re innocent, why try to conceal evidence? Plus, it’s a hell of a coincidence that the person we catch there just happens to have been convicted of killing someone before.’

‘I know,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m not saying that it isn’t
Kristina. All I’m saying is that the pieces don’t yet fit and we have to keep an open mind.’

Werner shrugged. ‘You’re the boss …’

By the time that Susanne had given Fabel the okay to re-interview Kristina Dreyer, the accumulated dragging weight of his first day back at work was slowing him down. He and Susanne sat in his office, drinking coffee, and discussed Kristina’s state of mind. The dull, resigned tiredness in Susanne’s dark eyes reflected Fabel’s own. What had started out as a quiet first day back for them both had turned into something complex and taxing.

‘You are going to have to take it very easy with her,’ said Susanne. ‘She’s in a very fragile state. And I really feel that I’d like to sit in on the interview.’

‘Okay …’ Fabel rubbed his eyes, as if trying to banish the tiredness from them. ‘What’s your assessment of her?’

‘It’s clear that she suffers from severe neurosis rather than any kind of psychosis. I have to say that, despite the evidence against her, I feel she is a highly unlikely candidate for this murder. My take on Kristina Dreyer is that she is more victim than perpetrator.’

‘All right …’ Fabel held open the door for Susanne. ‘Let’s go and find out.’

Kristina Dreyer looked small and vulnerable in the white forensic coverall that she was still wearing from earlier in the day. Fabel sat over by the wall and allowed Maria and Werner to lead the interview.
Susanne sat beside Kristina, who had declined the right to legal representation.

‘You feel up to talking, Kristina?’ Maria asked, although there was not much solicitude in her voice and she switched on the black tape recorder before waiting for an answer. Kristina nodded.

‘I just want to get this whole thing cleared up,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill Herr Hauser. I hardly ever saw him.’

‘But, Kristina,’ said Werner, ‘you’ve killed before. And we found you cleaning up the scene of this murder. If you want to get this “all cleared up”, why don’t you just tell us the truth? We know you killed Herr Hauser and you tried to cover it up. If you hadn’t been disturbed, you would have got away with it.’

Kristina stared at Werner but didn’t answer. Fabel thought he could see her tremble slightly.

‘Ease up a little, Chief Commissar,’ said Susanne to Werner. She turned to Kristina and softened her tone. ‘Kristina, Herr Hauser has been murdered. What you did by cleaning up the mess has made it very difficult for the police to find out exactly what happened. And the longer it takes them to get to the bottom of it all, the more difficult it will be to find the killer, if it wasn’t you. You need to tell the officers everything you can about exactly what happened.’

Kristina Dreyer nodded again, then shot a look across Maria’s shoulder at Fabel, as if seeking support from the officer who had arrested her over ten years before. ‘You know what happened before, Herr Fabel. You know what Ernst Rauhe did to me …’

‘Yes, I do, Kristina. And I want to understand
what happened this time. Did Herr Hauser do something to you?’

‘No … God, no. Like I said, I hardly ever saw Herr Hauser. He was always out at work when I cleaned his place. He would leave me my money in an envelope on the hallstand. He didn’t do anything to me. Ever.’