Free JF03 - Eternal by Craig Russell

that it has turned into crude glass crystals.’
    Fabel nodded grimly. ‘The British firebombing of nineteen forty-three?’
    ‘That would be my guess,’ said Severts. ‘It would fit with what we know of this location. And with this form of mummification, which was a common result of the intense temperatures created by thefirestorm. It looks to me as if he took cover in some kind of quayside air-raid shelter, improvised with sandbags. There must have been an incendiary burst very close which, basically, baked and buried him.’
    Fabel’s gaze remained locked on the mummified body. Operation Gomorrah. Eight thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of incendiaries and high explosives had been dropped on Hamburg by the British by night, the Americans by day. In parts of the city the temperature of the air, out in the open, had reached more than a thousand degrees. Some forty-five thousand Hamburg citizens had burned in the flames or been roasted to death by the intense heat. He gazed at the thin features, made too fine by having the moisture sucked from the flesh beneath the skin. He had been wrong. Of course he had seen bodies like this before: old black-and-white photographs from Hamburg and from Dresden. Many had been baked into mummies without being buried: dried out within moments, exposed to blast-furnace temperatures in the airless open streets or in the air-raid shelters that had been turned into bake ovens. But Fabel had never seen one in the flesh, albeit desiccated flesh.
    ‘It’s difficult to believe this man has been dead for more than sixty years,’ he said eventually.
    Brauner grinned and slapped his broad hand on Fabel’s shoulder. ‘It’s simple biology, Jan. Decomposition requires bacteria; bacteria require oxygen. No oxygen, no bacteria, no decomposition. When we dig him out, we’ll probably find some limited putrefaction in his thorax. We all carry bacteria in our gut, and when we die they’re the first things to start work on us. Anyway, I’ll do a full forensics on thebody and then I’ll pass it on to the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf for a full autopsy. We might still be able to confirm a cause of death, which I would gamble a year’s salary on being asphyxiation. And we’ll be able to work out the rough biological age of the corpse.’
    ‘Okay,’ said Fabel. He turned to Severts and his student, Brandt. ‘I don’t see that we need to hold up the rest of your excavation. But if you find anything in your dig that relates or you think relates to the body, please let me know.’ He handed Severts his Polizei Hamburg contact card.
    ‘I will do,’ said Severts. He nodded in the direction of the corpse, who still shunned them with his turned shoulder, as if trying to return to a rudely disturbed sleep. ‘Looks like he wasn’t a murder victim after all.’
    Fabel shrugged. ‘That all depends on your point of view.’
1.50 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
    The call had come in as Fabel was making his way back to the Presidium. Werner had phoned to say that he and Maria were in the Schanzenviertel. A killer had been caught, almost literally red-handed, cleaning up the murder scene and about to dispose of the body.
    It was clear that Werner had everything in hand, but Fabel felt the need to get involved in a ‘live’ inquiry after a morning with a cold case that was almost certainly sixty years old and not a homicide. He told Werner that he would head straight over to the address he had given.
    ‘By the way, Jan,’ Werner said, ‘I think you oughtto know we’ve got a bit of a celebrity victim … Hans-Joachim Hauser.’
    Fabel recognised the name immediately. Hauser had been a reasonably prominent member of the radical Left in the 1970s: he was now a vocal environmental campaigner who had a taste for the media limelight. ‘God … that’s weird …’ Fabel spoke as much to himself as to Werner.
    ‘What is?’
    ‘Synchronicity, I suppose. You know, when something that