JF03 - Eternal (20 page)

‘I will, Roland.’ Fabel shook his old school friend’s hand warmly. ‘I promise.’

‘Give me a call and the job is yours. But don’t wait too long. I need to get fixed up with someone soon.’

After they had gone, Susanne linked her arm through Fabel’s.

‘What was that all about?’

‘Nothing.’ Fabel turned to her and kissed her. ‘Nice couple, weren’t they?’ he said, and slipped Bartz’s business card into his pocket.

Cornelius Tamm sat and considered just what the generational gap between him and the youth opposite him would be: he was certainly young enough to have been his son; without too much of a stretch of imagination or chronology even his grandson. Cornelius’s seniority in age, however, had not seemed sufficient to deter the young man, who had introduced himself as ‘Ronni’, and who had gelled hair, ugly ears and a ridiculous little goatee beard, from using the informal
du
form of address when he spoke to Cornelius. He obviously felt that they were colleagues; or that his position as head of production entitled him to be informal.

‘Cornelius Tamm … Cornelius Tamm …’ Ronni had spent the last ten minutes talking about Cornelius’s career, and his use of the past tense had been conspicuous. Now he sat repeating Cornelius’s name and looking at him across the vast desk as if he were regarding some item of memorabilia that aroused nostalgia while not having the value of a true antique. ‘Tell me, Cornelius …’ The boy with the big ideas and bigger ears stretched his lips above the goatee in an insincere grin. ‘If you don’t mind
me asking, if you want to do a “greatest hits” CD, why aren’t you doing it with your existing label? It would be much simpler with the rights, et cetera.’

‘I wouldn’t call them my
existing
label. I haven’t recorded with them for years. Most of my work nowadays is doing live concerts. It’s much better … I get a real kick out of interacting with—’

‘I notice you sell CDs on your website.’ The young man cut Cornelius off. ‘How are sales? Do you actually shift any stuff?’

‘I do all right …’ Cornelius had started off by disliking the look of the young man. As well as the irritating goatee beard, Ronni was short and, oddly enough, one of his prominent ears, the right one, projected at a much more dramatic angle from his head than the other. In a remarkably short time, Ronni had succeeded in cultivating Cornelius’s initial vague dislike into a blossoming, fire-red hatred.

‘I guess it’s mostly oldies who buy your stuff … not that there’s anything wrong in that. My dad was a big fan of yours. All that nineteen sixties protest stuff.’ Cornelius had spent hours working on his presentation document, setting out why he felt that a CD of his greatest hits would sell not only to his traditional fan base but to a new generation of disaffected youth. The document lay on the desk in front of Ronni. Unopened.

‘There’s a lot of your
generation
of singer-songwriters out there. I’m afraid that they just don’t sell any more. Those who do make a mark are the ones that have tried to come up with new material that’s relevant today – like Reinhard Mey. But, to be honest, people don’t want politics in their music these days.’ Ronni shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, Cornelius, I just don’t think that we belong together … I mean our label and your style.’

Cornelius watched Ronni smile and felt his hate bloom even more. It was not just that Ronni’s smile was perfunctory and insincere, it was that he had meant Cornelius to
notice
that it was perfunctory and insincere. He picked up his proposal document and smiled back.

‘Well,
Ronni
, I’m disappointed.’ He walked to the door without shaking hands. ‘After all, it’s clear you have a good ear for music. The right one, that is …’

It was clear that Professor von Halen considered he should be present throughout the interview, like a responsible adult being present while two children were questioned by police. It was only after Fabel asked if he could talk alone to Alois Kahlberg and Elisabeth Marksen, the two scientists who had worked with Gunter Griebel, that he reluctantly surrendered his office to Fabel.

Both scientists were younger than Griebel had been and it became evident during Fabel’s questioning that they held their deceased colleague in great esteem. Awe, almost. Alois Kahlberg was in his mid-forties: a small birdlike man who habitually tilted his head back to adjust the angle of his vision, rather than pushing his unfashionably large and thick-lensed spectacles back up to the bridge of his nose. Elisabeth Marksen was a good ten years younger and was an unattractive, exceptionally tall woman with a perpetually flushed complexion.

Fabel questioned them about their dead colleague’s
habits, his personality, his personal life: all that was revealed was Griebel’s two-dimensionality. No matter how much light was focused on him, no shadows formed, no sense of depth or texture emerged. Griebel simply had never had a conversation with Marksen or Kahlberg that was not either work-related or the smallest of small talk.

‘What about his wife?’ Fabel asked.

‘She died about six years ago. Cancer,’ answered Elisabeth Marksen. ‘She was a teacher, I think. He never talked about her. I met her once, about a year before she died, at a function. She was quiet, like him … didn’t seem very comfortable in a social context. It was one of these company functions that we are all more or less compelled to attend, and Griebel and his wife spent most of the time in a corner talking to each other.’

‘Did her death have a big impact on him? Was there anything about his behaviour that changed significantly? Or was he particularly depressed?’

‘It was always difficult to tell with Dr Griebel. Nothing showed much on the surface. I do know that he visited her grave every week. She’s buried somewhere over near Lurup, where her family came from. Either in the Altonaer Volkspark Hauptfriedhof or in Flottbeker Friedhof.’

‘There were no kids?’

‘None that he ever mentioned.’

Fabel looked around von Halen’s expensive office. In one of the glass-fronted cabinets he could see a pile of glossy brochures, which he guessed were used to sell the facility to investors and commercial partners.

‘What exactly was the type of research Dr Griebel was engaged in?’ he asked. ‘Professor von Halen mentioned it but I didn’t really understand.’

‘Epigenetics.’ Kahlberg answered from behind his thick lenses. ‘It is a new and highly specialised field of genetics. It deals with how genes turn themselves on and off, and how that affects health and longevity.’

‘Someone said something about genetic memory. What is that?’

‘Ah …’ Kahlberg became what Fabel guessed was the closest he could ever get to being animated. ‘That is the very newest area of epigenetic research. It’s quite simple, really. There is increasing evidence that we can fall victim to diseases and conditions that we shouldn’t … that really belong to our ancestors.’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t sound quite simple to me.’

‘Okay, let me put it this way … There are basically two causes of illness: there are those conditions we are genetically predisposed to – that we have a congenital tendency towards. Then there are environmental causes of illness: smoking, pollution, diet, et cetera … These were always seen as quite different, but recent research has proved that we can actually inherit environmentally caused conditions.’

Fabel still did not look enlightened, so Elisabeth Marksen picked up the thread.

‘We all think we are detached from our history, but it has been discovered that we aren’t. There is a small town in northern Sweden called Överkalix. It is a very prosperous community and the quality of life and the standard of living are very high. Yet local doctors noticed that the population tended to develop health problems that were normally only ever associated with malnutrition. There were two other factors that also made Överkalix distinctive. Firstly, it lies north of the Arctic Circle and has been relatively isolated for all of its history, meaning that the population today tends
to be descended from the same families that were there one hundred or two hundred years ago. Secondly, Överkalix is unusual in the detail of its church and civic records. They record not just births and deaths, but the causes of death as well as good and bad harvests. The town became the focus of a major research project and the results showed that a century to a century and a half ago the town, which relied on agriculture, suffered several famines. Many died as a result, but among the survivors an even greater number suffered malnutrition-related medical conditions. By using contemporary medical records and comparing them to the historical ones, it became clear that the descendants of famine victims were exhibiting exactly the same health problems, although they and their parents had never gone hungry in their lives. It was proof that we were wrong to think that we pass on only those chromosomes and genes that we are born with, complete and unaltered, to our children. The fact is that what we experience, the environmental factors that surround us, can have a direct effect on our descendants.’

‘Incredible. And this theory is based exclusively on this one Swedish town?’

‘Only to start with. The research net was cast wider and a range of other examples have been found. The descendants of Holocaust survivors have proved to be susceptible to stress- and trauma-related conditions. One, two, three generations on, they are suffering the post-trauma stress symptoms of an event they did not themselves experience. To begin with this was dismissed as the result of their parents or grandparents relating details of their experiences, but it was found that the same stress indicators, including elevated cortisol in the saliva, were to be
found in descendants who had not been exposed to first-hand accounts from Holocaust survivors.’

‘I still don’t understand how it works,’ said Fabel. ‘How is this passed from one generation to the next?’

‘It depends on gender. In males the transgenerational response is sperm-mediated, in females it lies in foetal programming.’

Again, Fabel looked bemused.

‘These environmental and experiential factors that pass on are specifically those experienced by prepubescent and pubescent boys and by female foetuses in the womb. Basically the “data”, for want of a better word, is stored in the sperm that is formed in puberty. Girls are born with all their ova, so the crucial time for them is while the female is in the womb. What the expectant mother experiences during pregnancy or before is passed to the foetus which then stores the genetic memory in the forming ova.’

‘Amazing. And this is what Herr Dr Griebel was researching?’ asked Fabel.

‘There are a great many researchers working in this field worldwide. Epigenetics has become a major and growing field of exploration. You probably remember the great hopes that we all had for the Human Genome Project. It was believed that we could track down the gene for every disease and condition, but we were disappointed. An unimaginable amount of money, resources and computer time has been devoted to mapping the human genome only to find that it was not, after all, that complicated. The complexity lies in all the combinations and permutations within the genome. Epigenetics may provide the key we’ve been looking for. Herr Dr Griebel was one of only a handful of scientists
worldwide leading the way in understanding the mechanisms of genetic transference.’

Fabel sat for a moment considering what the two scientists had told him. They waited patiently, birdlike Kahlberg behind the thick screens of his spectacles, Marksen with her flushed face empty of expression, as if understanding that it took time for a layman to process the information. Fabel found the information fascinating, but it seemed useless to his inquiry. What motive could Griebel’s killer have found in the man’s work?

‘Professor von Halen said something about Dr Griebel having pet projects that he indulged him with,’ he said eventually.

Kahlberg and Marksen exchanged a knowing look.

‘If the commercial application is not immediately apparent,’ said Kahlberg, ‘then Herr Professor von Halen sees it as a diversion. The truth is that Dr Griebel was looking into the wider field of genetic inheritance. Specifically the possibility of inherited memory. Not just on the chromosomatic level, but actual memory passed from one generation to the next.’

‘Surely that’s not possible?’

‘There is evidence for it in other species. We know that in rats, for example, a danger learned by one generation is avoided by the next … we just don’t understand the mechanism behind that inherited awareness. Dr Griebel used to say that “instinct” was the most unscientific of scientific concepts. He claimed that we do things “instinctively” because we have inherited the memory of a required survival behaviour. Like the way a human baby makes a walking movement within minutes of birth, yet has to relearn the ability to walk nearly a year later – an instinct we learned somewhere in our distant
genetic past, when we lived out on the savannah and immobility was potentially fatal. Dr Griebel was fascinated by the subject. Obsessed, almost.’

‘Do you believe in inherited memory yourself?’

Kahlberg nodded. ‘I believe it is perfectly possible. Probable, even. But, as I said, it’s just that we don’t understand the mechanics of it yet. The full science is yet to be done.’

Elisabeth Marksen smiled bleakly. ‘And, without Dr Griebel, it will have to wait longer to be done.’

‘You get anything?’ Werner asked when Fabel phoned him on his cellphone from the car park of the Institute.

‘Nothing. Griebel’s work has no bearing on his death, as far as I can see. Anything there?’

‘As a matter of fact, Anna has something. She’ll explain when you get back. And Kriminaldirektor van Heiden wants you and Maria to report to him this afternoon, at three.’

Fabel frowned. ‘He asked specifically for Maria too?’

‘Very specifically.’