Free JF03 - Eternal by Craig Russell Page A

you would not expect to encounter that often crops up several times in a short space of time. On the way into the Presidium today I heard Bertholdt Müller-Voigt on the radio. You know, the Environment Senator. He was giving his boss Schreiber a really rough time. And two or three nights ago he was in my brother’s restaurant at the same time as me and Susanne. If I remember rightly, Müller-Voigt and Hauser used to be very much of a double act back in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.’ Fabel paused, then added gloomily: ‘That’s all we need. A public-figure murder. Any sign of the press yet?’
    ‘Nope,’ said Werner. ‘Mind you, despite his best efforts, and unlike his chum Müller-Voigt, Hauser really was yesterday’s news.’
    Fabel sighed. ‘Not any more …’
    There was an untidy exuberance to the Schanzenviertel. It was a part of Hamburg that, like so many others in the city, was undergoing a great many changes. The Schanzenviertel lay just to the north of St Pauli and had not always enjoyed the most salubrious of reputations. The quarter still had its problems, but it had recently become the focus for more affluent incomers.
    And, of course, it was the ideal city quarter in which to live if you were a left-wing environmental campaigner. The Schanzenviertel had the credentials of Cool in exactly the right mix: it was one of the most multicultural of Hamburg’s districts and its vast range of fashionable restaurants meant that most of the world’s cuisines were represented. Its arthouse cinemas, the open-air theatre in the Sternschanzen Park and the requisite number of pavement cafés made it trendy enough to be up and coming; but it also had enough social problems, principally drug-related, not to be seen as too ‘yuppie’. It was the kind of place in which you cycled and you recycled, where you wore second-hand chic, but where, while you sat sipping your fair-trade mocha at a pavement table, you tapped away at your ultra-cool, ultra-slim, ultra-expensive titanium laptop computer.
    Hans-Joachim Hauser’s residence was on the ground floor of a solidly built 1920s apartment block in the heart of the quarter, near where Stresemannstrasse and Schanzenstrasse crossed each other. There was a clutch of police vehicles, in the Polizei Hamburg’s new silver and blue livery, parked outside and the pavement in front of the block’s entrance was ringed with red-and-white-striped crime scene tape. Fabel parked his BMW untidily behind one of the patrol cars and a uniformed officer headed determinedly over from the perimeter tape to tackle him; Fabel got out of the car and held up his oval Kriminalpolizei disc as he strode towards the building and the uniform backed off.
    Werner Meyer was waiting at the doorway of Hauser’s apartment. ‘We can’t go in yet, Jan,’ he said, gesturing to where, a little way down the hall,Maria was talking to a young, boyish-looking man in white forensics coveralls. His surgical mask hung loose around his neck and he had the hood pulled down from a thick mop of black hair above a pale bespectacled face. Fabel recognised him as Holger Brauner’s deputy, Frank Grueber, whose archaeology background he had discussed with Brauner and Severts. Grueber and Maria were clearly talking about the crime scene, but there was a relaxed informality about Grueber’s posture as they talked. Fabel noticed that Maria, in contrast, leaned back against the wall with her arms folded in front of her.
    ‘ Harry Potter and the Ice Maiden …’ Werner said dryly. ‘Is it true those two are an item?’
    ‘No idea.’ Fabel lied. Maria kept almost all of her personal life locked up tight, along with her emotions, whenever she was at work. But Fabel had been there – the only one there – as she had lain, close to death, after she had been stabbed by one of the most dangerous killers the team had ever hunted. Fabel had shared Maria’s terror in those stretched, tense minutes until the