SON OF SVEN

Wednesday 4 June, 4.30 a.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

Fabel dreamed.

Hamburg’s element is water: there are more canals in Hamburg than in Amsterdam or Venice; the Aussenalster is the largest city-centre lake in Europe. It also rains throughout the year. Tonight, after a day when the air had lain over the city like a damp, stifling cloak, the heavens opened with vehemence.

As the thunderstorm outside flashed and growled its way across the city’s sky, images sparked across Fabel’s mind. Time imploded and folded in on itself. People and events separated by decades met in a place outside time. Fabel always dreamed of the same things: the untidiness of real life, the ends left loose, the stones left unturned. The unravelled ends of a dozen investigations would insinuate themselves into every corner of his sleeping brain. In this dream Fabel walked, as he had done in so many dreams before, among the murdered of fifteen years. He knew them all, each death-bleached face, in the same way most people would remember the faces of their extended family. Most of the dead, those whose killers he had caught, did not acknowledge him and passed by; but the dead eyes of those whose cases he had not solved gazed at him in bleak accusation and held out their wounds.

The crowd parted and Ursula Kastner stepped out to face Fabel. She wore the same smart, grey Chanel jacket as the last time, the only time, Fabel had seen her. Fabel stared at a tiny spot of blood that stained the jacket. The spot grew larger. A deeper red. Her bloodless, grey lips moved and formed the words ‘Why have you not caught him?’ For a moment Fabel was puzzled, in that vague, detached way one is in dreams, as to why he could not hear her voice. Was it because he had never heard it in life? Then he realised: of course, it was because her lungs had been torn out and therefore there was no breath to carry her words.

A noise woke him up. There was a rumble of thunder beyond the picture windows and the soft crackle of rain on the panes, then the urgent trilling of the phone. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello Jan. It’s Werner. You’d better get down here, Chef … there’s been another one.’

The storm continued to rage. Electrical flashes danced across the Hamburg skyline, throwing out the black silhouettes of the Fernsehturm television tower and the spire of St Michaelis like flat stage scenery. The wipers on Fabel’s BMW, switched to their fastest setting, fought to clear the windscreen of the barrage of thick viscous globs that exploded against the glass and turned street lamps and the headlights of oncoming cars into fractured stars. Fabel had picked up Werner Meyer at the Polizeipräsidium, and now Werner’s considerable bulk was squeezed into the front passenger seat, filling the car with the smell of the rain-soaked fabric of his coat.