The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  He moved through time and space without moving. He knew he was still in his apartment, but he was also, in the exact same moment, somewhere else, sometime else.

  No. He tried to tell the angels with his mind. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to be here.

  It was the Place of Broken Stones. The place he had died. The place he had been murdered. He begged speechlessly for the angels to take him away, not to put him through it all again, but they told him it was he who decided where they should be; he who had brought them to this place.

  He saw the others.

  Suddenly, he was back in his body, but not his body that lay on the floor of his apartment, not his fifteen-year-dead body. The body he now occupied was painfully, horribly alive. He was being held down on a stone in the Place of Broken Stones. It was happening again. The others were playing their parts again.

  I don’t want to be here, he screamed silently. He looked up into the night and saw deep, deep into the universe. The same folding, unfolding, eternal geometry filled the sky. He could still see that, but was in a mortal body.

  This was where, when and how he had died.

  The angels were gone.

  Some presence, vast and dark and all-consuming had entered the Place of Broken Stones and the shockwave of its arrival had driven out the angels and any other being of light and energy. He felt it grow near, like a movement of chilled air.

  She was above him now. The Silent Goddess. Death. She looked down on him with ice eyes and he was overwhelmed by her beauty and her fearsomeness. The Silent Goddess who takes all lives, from the smallest to the greatest. The Silent Goddess who had been part of the universe since its beginning: the destroyer of worlds and stars, the feeder on energy and life. She was naked and he felt desire mingle with his terror. She had come for him.

  He felt the world beneath him shudder and crack asunder. Fire surged up through the spaces between the stones, burned his body.

  She raised her sword above him and he could see every layer of the blade’s making, the folding of steel in on itself over and over, the metal furnace hot then plunged cold.

  Please no! He begged for the life he now felt once again, the sensations in his limbs, even the sweet pain. I don’t want to be dead again.

  The sword arced diamond brilliant in the light of the flames, down and into his chest. He felt it all in unimaginable detail: he felt the blade shear through skin, bone and cartilage; sever artery, vein, capillary; slice through muscle fibre, nerve and organ. His agony was complete, filling every dimension of his being.

  He tried to scream but it drowned in a gargle of frothing blood. The Silent Goddess smiled at him, malevolently, beautifully. She leaned down towards him and assumed normal human size. She pulled the blade from his chest and a new wave of pain surged through him. He felt her cold flesh against his cooling flesh as she lay on top of him. She kissed him, her lips and tongue crimsoned with his coughed-up blood.

  Zombie died again. He died in the same way he had before. The angels came back and he thanked them, said he understood why he’d had to go through it once more.

  Just like the first time he died, Zombie became bathed in a warm, golden light. He was free of his body, free from the pain of flesh. He had become a being of no substance, just like the angels, and could see he was made up of endless, scintillating strands and spirals of pure energy. He was high above his body, looking down on it, and felt no confusion that he was looking down at it both in the Place of Broken Stones and in his own apartment.

  All of his family waited for him, the dead generations of it. The light grew in intensity and with it Zombie’s joy. He was finally going to be free. He was going to be amongst the dead, where he belonged, and free of his imprisonment amongst the living.

  Zombie, now beyond time, spent only a few seconds but also an eternity in this shining place. He had no sense of leaving it, but, as the drug wore off, he drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  When he woke back in his apartment, back in his unburied, still-moving corpse, Zombie rolled over, turned his face into the cushion he’d rested his head on, and stifled the sobs that racked his body.

  21

  Georg Schmidt knew he had something very important to do but, just at that moment, couldn’t remember what it was. Whatever it was, it was something huge and frightening and unpleasant, because he felt an inexplicable fluttering in his chest and a knot in his gut. That was what his life had become, recently: a left-luggage locker for feelings detached from their source.

  Some instinct also told him that what he had to do had something to do with the past. That in itself wasn’t strange, because the past now seemed to dominate his present, ‘then’ frequently disguising itself as ‘now’.

  Georg’s history seemed jumbled and confused and he found himself relying more and more on his notebook journal: in his mind the memories were dim, distant, vague ghosts, yet the notebook returned them sharp and clear into focus.

  But his recollections were full of contradictions and paradoxes: things he thought he remembered experiencing were, when he thought them through, really just things he must have read or heard about. Third-person memories became first person; first-person experiences were recalled as third-person accounts. Sometimes, instead of a single memory recalling an event, multiple memories conflated so that the perspective changed. For example, he remembered marching on a sunny day, the crowds around him hostile and jeering, then he remembered being in the crowd, shouting and jeering at the marchers.

  Georg Schmidt had something important to do, but couldn’t remember what it was.

  His father.

  The sudden thought of his father focused him for a moment; drew in the scattered fragments. He remembered seeing Franz Schmidt clutching at his chest and falling to the ground. More shots ringing out. People screaming. Blood bubbling on his father’s lips as he tried to say something, his dying voice inaudible above the tumult.

  Helmut Wohlmann, who had once been his father’s apprentice, who had been like a brother to Georg, his face drained of colour beneath a brown SA kepi.

  Now Georg remembered. That’s why he had a key on a chain around his neck.

  Unlocking the drawer, he fished out his diary, where he kept his memories stored, and read through it again. Georg Schmidt had something important to do and now he remembered what it was.

  He took the tie from his wardrobe, rolled it up into a coil, and was about to stuff it into his pocket when he checked himself. He went across to the chest of drawers and rummaged around in first one then another until he found what he was looking for. The tie, he had remembered, might need too much strength.

  He opened the clasp knife he’d taken from the drawer, ran his thumb along its cutting edge then, snapping it shut and slipping it into his pocket, picked up his chequers set and headed for the door.

  22

  It had been more than a week since Monika Krone had come back into the world. Her remains had been transferred to Butenfeld, the mortuary at the Institute for Judicial Medicine in Eppendorf, but they remained silent, refusing to yield any forensic evidence of how, where and when she had died. All the pathologist could say was that the pH of the soil in which Monika had been buried had been such that soft tissue would have decomposed within a year, and that DNA other than that captive in bone would have similarly been destroyed quickly after burial. Only one thing was confirmed: based on a comparison with a sample from Kerstin Krone, the DNA extracted from the remains’ femur was a match. A perfect match: identical twins had identical DNA.

  In the Murder Commission, the case board Fabel had set up for the Krone inquiry started to take shape. Names were connected and interconnected by pins and threads of different colours. Patterns emerged of friendships, of sexual intimacy, of rivalries and animosities, most of which had probably been forgotten at more than a decade’s distance. But there was nothing to be seen, other than an unconnected void at the heart of it all that represented Monika Krone: her presence conspicuou
s as an absence.

  Monika had been active in a lot of clubs and societies. She had been a keen swimmer and a regular at the pools of the Alster Schwimmhalle, as well as a leading member of Gothic and Romantic literature societies. Though no artist herself, Monika had had an interest in art, particularly pre-Raphaelite and art nouveau, and had even modelled for students at the University of Fine Arts in Uhlenhorst.

  The picture that emerged was of a young woman connected to many, close to none. Over the years, Fabel had seen how often the strikingly beautiful were the loneliest of people: their physical perfection setting them apart, making them unapproachable, even shunned and loathed.

  But he was not at all sure that the isolation of the comely was what he was looking at here: it was as if Monika sought acquaintance but shrank from intimacy. She was part of any number of sets of friends, sometimes the focus of them, but never seemed deeply involved. There was one in particular: an odd assortment made up from students at the university, but in very different disciplines. Others had described them as a very exclusive clique. From the descriptions of them, Fabel had at first thought they were some kind of Goths. But they had, by all accounts, been more sophisticated than that. The focus of the group had been a shared taste for classical Gothic literature.

  He didn’t think looking into the group would lead anywhere in itself, but it might cast some additional light into the corners of Monika’s last days and he took a note to get someone onto it.

  Fabel visited Kerstin, Monika’s sister, twice more. Each time was to see if he could coax out some extra detail about her twin, but again all that emerged was the picture of a closed-off, aloof young woman who had confided little in anyone.

  *

  It was a Saturday evening when Fabel took Susanne out for dinner in her favourite restaurant in Ottensen, along from the Fischmarkt and with huge picture windows that looked out across the Elbe. From their table they could see the inverted silver egg-box of the water treatment works, floodlit silver and blue on the far side of the river. As they ate and chatted, the vast, silent bulk of container ships slid by smoothly and silently causing the velvet waters beyond the window to sparkle with fractured reflections of the dock lights. Not for the first time it struck Fabel how much beauty there could be in industry. It was also one of the things he loved about Hamburg: the sense of things passing through, of connection with a much wider world. Susanne had been brought up in Munich, locked in by the fastness of Europe. Fabel had been born and brought up in Ostfriesland, on the North Sea coast, and could never imagine living more than a few kilometres from the sea.

  As they ate, Fabel discussed the case, explaining to Susanne how he still felt discomfited every time he talked to Kerstin, aware he faced the older mirror image of the victim of the murder he was investigating.

  ‘If her sister was the great beauty she appears to have been,’ Susanne arched a dark eyebrow as she lifted her wine glass to her lips, ‘then Kerstin must be very beautiful too.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve—’

  ‘Oh no you don’t . . .’ Susanne laughed. ‘Don’t say you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Okay, I’ve noticed. She is very striking. But that’s where the similarity ends. Kerstin Krone is totally different from her sister in personality.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ Susanne put her wine glass down. ‘I think this case has burrowed its way into you more than you know or admit. You’ve always said it’s your job to get to know the dead . . . that’s how you’ve always approached every case, using that little historian’s brain of yours to bring the dead back to life and understand them. But Monika Krone was your first major case and you never could crack open her personality. It’s not just her death that has remained an enigma all these years. I think you fell a little in love with this mystery woman fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Is that a professional opinion? Or personal?’

  ‘A bit of both.’

  ‘There’s only one woman I’m in love with,’ Fabel smiled.

  ‘Oh yeah? I bet it’s some dumpy, florid-faced blonde Frisian lass from your past. Probably called Femke or Swaantje or something equally fetching.’

  Fabel reached over and took Susanne’s hand in his.

  ‘I want to get married,’ he said.

  Susanne looked startled for a moment. She smiled a little nervously then said, ‘What does Swaantje have to say about it?’

  ‘I’m being serious, Susanne. I want us to get married.’

  Susanne drew a deep breath and straightened in her chair, her expression suggesting she was processing something she would never have anticipated.

  ‘Wow,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t know what to say. I mean, I really don’t . . .’

  ‘Listen, Susanne, I don’t want an answer now, I just want you to think it over. You don’t even have to answer at all, I just wanted you to know how I feel.’

  ‘But why? I mean, why now?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it for the last two years. Ever since . . . Well, you know since what. Things have changed for me. I know you have noticed that. I’m not saying that my feelings towards you have changed – it’s not that at all – it’s just that I see things differently now and I value the things that are important to me more than ever. And the two most important things in my life are you and Gabi.’

  ‘But we’ve been happy the way we are . . .’

  ‘I know. That’s not what I’m saying. If things don’t change – if you don’t want them to change – then that’s fine. But when I thought I was dying, I regretted never having asked you to marry me. I couldn’t stand the idea that I’d be dead and you wouldn’t know how I felt about you.’ Fabel shook his head. ‘I know I can be a bit buttoned-up. That I was buttoned-up. But life’s too short to leave things unsaid.’ He shrugged. ‘So I’ve said it.’

  ‘Thanks, Jan.’ She leaned across the table and kissed him. ‘I’ll need to think about it.’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t need an answer if you don’t want to give one.’ He smiled and raised his glass. ‘I just wanted you to know how I feel. In any case, if you turn me down there’s always Swaantje . . .’

  23

  He had been given his instructions in great detail: the exact day, the exact time. Jochen Hübner – Frankenstein – knew that getting the timing exactly right meant everything; not just the difference between continued imprisonment and freedom but between life and death itself. Hübner – who had never relied on anyone, who had never put his trust in anyone – found himself having faith in the stranger who had delivered the means of escape. His guardian. There was something in his guardian’s eyes that Frankenstein had recognized as the same dark hunger for revenge he himself felt.

  The guardian had promised Frankenstein freedom – from captivity and to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted. Only one thing was asked in return: that for a short time Frankenstein would serve his liberator, carry out his bidding. That he would kill those whom the guardian chose he should kill.

  Timing.

  Santa Fu – Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel prison – offered its high-security prisoners more room than other prisons. Frankenstein’s cell was modern, clean and spacious – he was housed on the floor that had the biggest cells, each with its own screened-off shower.

  It was nearly time for the doors to be opened for the morning. Frankenstein checked his watch, ridiculously small and fragile on his thick, heavy wrist: 5.56 a.m.

  At six a.m. the door would be opened for Lebenskontrolle: the morning ritual where a guard opened the door and called in ‘good morning’. A response, even a held-up hand, meant the prisoner was alive and well.

  He leaned into the door and strained to hear approaching footsteps, but could hear nothing. Most of the guards wore rubber-soled shoes and the prison rules meant they were instructed to open the cell doors quietly. You could lock a man up for the rest of his life, apparently, but it was inhuman to give him a rude awakening.

  He had to time it perfectly.
r />   As his guardian had told him to do, Frankenstein went to the wall of his cell furthest from and facing the door. He took the disposable hypodermic from under his pillow and gripped it between his teeth while he slapped a vein on his forearm to the surface. A moment’s hesitation: he looked at the vein, a dark cable beneath his pale skin. He had taken it on trust that the fluid in the hypodermic had been what his guardian had said it was.

  They would be at the door in a minute, maybe less.

  The doubt lingered. What if Hübner’s strange guardian was really a relative of one of his many female victims? What if the dark hunger for revenge Frankenstein had recognized in his guardian’s eyes was really directed at him? What if, instead of a means of escape, the syringe was full of poison?

  He heard muffled voices from along the hall. Thirty seconds.

  It didn’t matter, he decided. Frankenstein had already made up his mind that death would be just another form of escape. He jabbed the needle into the vein and felt his arm chill as he squeezed the dose into his system.

  The effects started right away, just as his guardian had said they would. Frankenstein had been instructed to conceal the hypodermic immediately after taking the dose.

  ‘You’ve got to hide it while you still can,’ his guardian had told him. ‘Under a pillow or behind a book. Somewhere that’s quick. And near – once the drug kicks in you’ll find it difficult to move. Don’t worry about it being easy to find. All that matters is they don’t find it until you’re out of the prison and in hospital. When they get to your cell, you will still be on your feet but barely conscious. That’s the way the drug works. You will look like shit – no colour in your face. If you can remember, grab hold of your left arm as if it’s really hurting you. They’ll believe you’re having a heart attack.’

  It was working just like Frankenstein had been told it would. He felt like he should be falling down, but his legs had turned into stone pillars, keeping him upright but unmoving, rooted to the ground.